Conference
At SMEF’s Brick Group of Institutes, conferences form a vital part of our academic vision and culture. Established in 2013 and affiliated with Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, the institution has rapidly grown to rank among India’s top 25 architecture colleges. In just over a decade, Brick has emerged as Maharashtra’s preferred destination for architectural education grounded in research-oriented pedagogy, inclusivity, and a learner-centered approach.
A International conference on
Blurred Boundaries
Rethinking Cultural Dimensions in Architecture 7th, 8th, 9th February
2025.
Our campus brings together students from diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, creating a rich environment for dialogue and exchange. This diversity, combined with our commitment to academic rigor, has positioned us to host conferences that are dynamic, relevant, and forward-looking. Over the years, our collaborations with universities across the globe have further strengthened our conference platform, enabling international participation through knowledge-sharing, competitions, research initiatives, workshops, and scholarly discourse.
Through these conferences, Brick aims to foster critical engagement, interdisciplinary thinking, and a culture of inquiry, empowering both students and faculty to connect with global perspectives and contribute meaningfully to the evolving field of architecture.
List of the conferences
Call for papers
Building on the first conference ‘In search of an Identity’, the second Blurred Boundaries conference delves into how culture, nature, and human values influence architectural design. Amidst climate change, technological shifts, and cultural disruptions, this conference engages interdisciplinary experts to rethink and redefine architecture’s role in addressing cultural dimensions for a sustainable future.
All interested academicians, researchers, practitioners, and students are invited to submit papers in the following themes. The themes have been broadly grouped as follows.
Subthemes
The Place of “knowledge and perception”
This theme focuses on the creation of knowledge.
Wisdom of “being” in the world comes by the perception of knowledge. Over the years various terms from indigenous to modern have been referred to that offer a wisdom of looking at the phenomenal world and envisioning any action of creating a habitat. Do such value based actions convey reverence, continuation of acquired knowledge of existence and create a sacred, religious, cultural, symbolic experiences of landscapes? Does memory mean only of the individual or of family, community, seasons, geography and even those aspects that are intangible? Is sustainable development inherently integrated in this wisdom? Do we need to invent techniques of drawings, documentations to capture the subtle aspects of this wisdom and how should those be represented? How does local – global dichotomy feature in this? How can this acquired or collective wisdom of humanity be envisioned for addressing contemporary global challenges related to climate, culture and people.
Keywords:
- Indigenous knowledge; perception; values; traditions; continuities
- symbolism; memory;
- context; place; environment;
- collective experience; local histories; local – global relationship;
- interpreting sustainability;
- documenting and recording
The Place of appropriate “Intervention”
This theme focuses on the idea of ‘intervention’ done by a designer.
What is the role of policies, planning and designing for conceiving appropriate intervention on cultural landscapes? How would contemporary policies of planning and designing help to address current concerns of global climate crisis and related built environment issues, information explosion and rapid changes in technology? How should intervention be conceived and applied if a designer happens to be from another context in terms of sensibilities or values or skill sets? What should infrastructural development mean for places having rich traditions of culture, sacrednes, religion or such other intangible value? What sensitivities are demanded from a professional who is compelled to respond to diversity of cultures, geographies and histories? How would sustainable development goals be envisioned and applied to intervene appropriately in a cultural landscape? How can academic institutions and professional bodies collaborate to define an appropriate intervention strategy? This theme is intended to express the mentioned concerns.
Keywords:
- defining appropriate intervention strategy;
- intervention informed by designers;
- relationship of intervention strategy to place, community, technology;
- defining sustainable intervention approaches;
- handling diversity and inclusion;
- responding to global challenges, changing aspirations and technology
Eligibility
Academicians, Professionals and Students from backgrounds of Architecture, Urban design, sociology, geography, architecture, landscape architecture Planning, Conservation, Anthropology, etc.
Abstracts will be published in the Conference proceedings book, with an ISBN number.
The selected papers will be presented during the conference under the specified themes.
A few handpicked papers will be further published in highly indexed journals (Scopus, Web of Science, UGC CARE).
E-certificates will be awarded to all authors and delegates.