Architecture of Performance: Bodies / Buildings / Behaviors

April 7-10, 2027,  New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

Hosted by: TULANE UNIVERSITY  School of Architecture & the Built Environment with  UNIVERSITY OF LOUISIANA LAFAYETTE  School of Architecture & Design

Architecture of Performance:
Bodies / Buildings / Behaviors

• Bodies: waters, human experience, movement, and agency.
• Buildings: form, materiality, and design practice.
• Behaviors: systems, environments, ecologies, and societies.

DESCRIPTION

How can architecture be understood as an ecological performance rather than an object?
How might buildings operate as environmental actors within broader ecologies?
How can design research integrate environmental metrics with social and spatial agency?

The Architecture of Performance: Bodies / Buildings / Behaviors explores architecture not as a static object, but as an active performance shaped through embodied experience, material systems, ecologies and collective action. This conference invites researchers, designers, and scholars to examine how architecture operates dynamically to mediate relationships among human and more-than-human bodies, constructed forms, and the environmental and social systems in which they are embedded.

Organized around the interrelated lenses of Bodies, Buildings, and Behaviors, the conference foregrounds architecture as a temporal, relational, and agentive practice. BODIES considers water, movement, sensation, health, and agency, asking how architecture choreographs lived experience across human actors. BUILDINGS focus on form, materiality, and design practice, framing buildings as performative apparatuses that modulate energy, climate, and matter over time. BEHAVIORS expands the scale to systems, ecologies, and societies, investigating how architectural interventions shape environmental processes, innovative pedagogies, social practices, and patterns of use. The call for papers is interested in proposals that measure the unmeasurable and establish metrics beyond performance optimization.  These modes of analyses offer multiscalar examinations of environmental conditions and tools that affect their cultural, political, and spatial implications.

By bringing together theoretical inquiry, empirical research, and design-based experimentation, the conference seeks to advance new frameworks for understanding architectural performance — ones that acknowledge complexity, interdependence, and responsibility in an era of environmental and social urgency.