International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments Conference 2022

NUS DoA is proud to co-organise and host the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments Conference (IASTE) 2022. Happening from Dec 14-17 2022, the theme of the conference is “Rupture and Tradition”, using the notion of rupture to frame the discussion around political, cultural, economic, and legal frameworks of tradition.

Tradition has multiple forms, manifestations, and influences that shape the processes used to produce, transform, preserve, and consume built environments in synch with socio-cultural and economic change. Over the past thirty years, IASTE has helped shape the discourse around the political, cultural, economic, and legal frameworks of tradition. The notion of rupture will be used to frame this ongoing discussion at the IASTE 2022 conference, to be hosted by the National University of Singapore. To describe a rupture is to describe an event that makes the difference between a before and an after. A rupture is a crack, a fissure, an impassable chasm, or a wrinkle in time. Whether understood in a temporal, physical, or topographic sense, ruptures have played an important part in the making of buildings and cultural landscapes. The pandemic year 2020 certainly provided such a moment, which may be used to reflect on the ways that “rupture,” in its multifarious forms, has shaped traditional environments. But its examination also offers an opportunity to rethink the very notion of what tradition is — as something passed on, a linear narrative, one that incorporates change rather than stagnation.

The way the “rupture” of the ongoing pandemic is restructuring how traditions are understood will certainly be at the core of IASTE 2022. Yet, instead of simply considering direct responses to this global moment, Rupture and Tradition is also interested in the slower, more long-term processes by which traditions consolidate history-altering events. Indeed, it is often through repercussions felt elsewhere, rather than the event itself, that rupture produces change, altering traditions and their forms of continuation. For example, the eruption of Tambora in the Dutch East Indies in 1815 was a cataclysmic local event, but it also had repercussions felt around the world, lowering global temperatures in subsequent years and triggering crop failures. In a similar sense, transformational events may be incorporated into traditional environments through the stories they instigate, conditions of political and economic status quo they disrupt, and popular understandings of shelter, safety, and supportive habitat they suddenly call into question.

Photo credit: Zhang Weijin

More details can be found on the IASTE website. (https://iaste.org/iaste-2022-singapore/)