Between History and Design 2025 : Between History and Design: Asian American and Diasporic Architecture in the Twentieth Century

The call invites papers that examine the architectural history of Asian American designers and communities in the twentieth century. Accepted papers will be presented at the symposium held in the fall of 2025 at the University of California, Berkeley. This event will be held in conjunction with the exhibition “Modern Vernacular: Asian American Architects and the Built Environment of Postwar Northern California--A View through the Environmental Design Archives” hosted at the campus’s Environmental Design Library at the College of Environmental Design.

Recent intellectual engagement with Asian American and Asian diasporic buildings and landscapes has brought to critical relief their previously obfuscated roles in shaping the built environment in the United States and the broader diasporic sphere. The 2022 Society of Architectural Historians-Cooper Hewitt collaborative study on AAPI designers and architects and the 2024 SAH issue on AAPI architectural histories have introduced new theoretical sensitivities and methodological alternatives for challenging the Euro-American canon of architecture history. Building on this growing field, the symposium invites submissions that dive into the spatial history of Asian American communities. We seek papers that engage with the intertwined relationship between Asian American identities and the built environment in all their constitutive affinities, historical multitudes, and cultural capaciousness—between history and design as an ongoing conversation about becoming, unraveling, doing, and undoing. At the broadest level, we ask how these might intersect with, flow into, rub up alongside, deform, and undermine received architectural histories and methodologies.

Informed by the curatorial ethos of the exhibition, possible paper themes include:

Biography as Method: What are the methodological possibilities—and limitations—of turning to the individual lives and practices of Asian diasporic designers? We invite papers that perform critical examinations of the professional identity of the architect and its surrounding pedagogical as well as cultural infrastructure, informed by histories of racialized labor, as well as investigations of life histories and intersections with and illuminations of historical forces of race and migration in the US, and even interrogations of national bounded ideas of “Asian American architecture.”

In the Archive: What are the possibilities and limitations of archives like EDA for the study of Asian American architecture? We also invite papers on related subjects, such as historic preservation, now and then.

Architectural Modernism and Asian American History: The history of architectural modernism has systematically been studied in isolation from that of Asian Americans, despite the significant cultural practices generated by the latter in the 20th and 21st centuries. The symposium invites papers investigating this overlooked historical intersection as a way to expand how architectural history is articulated, spatialized, and narrativized. What stylistic influences may be present? What kind of projects are undertaken?

Living in the Built Environment: The symposium also seeks papers that explore Asian American and diasporic communities’ reception, resistance, and reinterpretation of sets of practices and values around the built environment and everyday living—modernist or otherwise. How did discriminatory zoning regulations such as redlining and Alien Land Laws shape the injurious contentiousness of the everyday space occupied and lived by Asian American communities? And through what creative, activist practices did they rise to contest these injurious spatial regulations? Papers on the vernacular architecture/environment will be considered.

We invite abstracts from architects, artists, and scholars at all stages of their careers, institutionally affiliated or independent. The deadline for proposals is July 1st. Selected participants will be informed no later than August 1st. Please submit your abstract and relevant visuals (optional) using the web link provided on this page. For any questions, please contact Nathan Shui at [email protected] and copy Elizabeth Fair at [email protected].