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
01 PERFORMING BODIES
spatialities | neuroscience | cognition | movement | behavior
This track invites papers that investigate how bodies perform, perceive, and produce architecture through spatial encounter. We seek interdisciplinary research connecting spatialities with neuroscience and cognition to understand how movement, proxemics, and perception shape architectural experience. Contributions may examine how environments choreograph behavior, influence decision-making, support health, or activate agency. Using experimental methods, embodied metrics, or speculative design, authors are encouraged to explore the reciprocal dynamics between space and bodies. Particular interest is given to frameworks that reveal how architecture operates as an active mediator of movement, behavior, and cognitive performance across scales and contexts.
02 PERFORMATIVE BUILDINGS
responsive | adaptive | materiality | kinetic | resilient | anticipatory
This track reframes architecture as an active participant in environmental and social systems. Performative Buildings explores how buildings operate as responsive, adaptive processes that choreograph climate, use, and interaction. We welcome work that interrogates material, spatial, and cultural performances, and advances new ways of measuring what exceeds conventional metrics—foregrounding architecture’s capacity to act, transform, and produce effects across ecological and societal contexts.
03 PERFORMATIVE ECOLOGIES
landscapes | water | ecosystems | time | energies + infrastructures
Performative Ecologies examines the dynamic relationships between human experience, built form, and natural systems. This track invites work that understands architecture as an ակտիվ mediator within ecological processes—shaping and being shaped by climate, landscapes, and more-than-human actors. Contributions may explore how design engages environmental flows, material cycles, and sensory experience across scales. Emphasis is placed on approaches that move beyond static sustainability toward adaptive, regenerative, and relational frameworks for understanding architecture’s ecological performance.
04 CULTURAL PERFORMERS
History | anthropology | sociology | ritual
This topic invites papers that examine architecture as a cultural performance shaped through history, anthropology, sociology, and ritual. We seek contributions that explore how built environments both emerge from and structure collective practices, beliefs, and social relationships over time. Papers may investigate ritualized uses of space, everyday performances, vernacular traditions, or institutional settings to reveal how architecture encodes cultural values and power. Emphasis is placed on how behaviors are learned, repeated, adapted, and contested through spatial practices. We welcome critical, comparative, and interdisciplinary approaches that illuminate architecture’s role as an active participant in cultural continuity, transformation, and social meaning.
05 PERFORMATIVE PEDAGOGIES // PRACTICES
teaching | methodologies | participatory | A.I. | profession | making | futures
This track examines pedagogy and practice as performative, evolving processes that shape how architecture is taught, learned, and enacted. Performative Pedagogies and Practices invites contributions that position teaching and practice as active, experimental, and performative modes of architectural inquiry. We welcome work that explores how knowledge is produced through making, acting, and engaging diverse publics, while speculating on future practices that are adaptive, responsive, and socially embedded. Submissions may address new frameworks for learning, modes of practice, and the evolving role of architecture in shaping collective futures.
06 OPEN
This track will include topics not directly addressed in the categories above but offer interesting perspectives on the broad conference theme and emerging challenges.