Our cities and landscapes are pockmarked by evidence of absence. Architectural, landscape and planning practices and their histories are similarly marked; by the unbuilt and unrealised, by the demolished, by the invisible and the hidden. Gaps between buildings and unfinished estates are parallels with the spaces we have carved out of nature in order to build. Moreover, the void – the negative space enclosed by an architectural, theoretical, chronological, historiographical or geographical frame – is often as telling as the surrounding structure.

What happens to those things you can’t see: those things that have been obscured, elided, or forgotten either by time, by design, or through selective memory? Who advocates for them, and what effect do they have by being brought into the light? Where do they go, and who sees them? Absences and their associated gaps in history have prompted much recent academic research.

Approaches include: histoires croisées/crossed histories; microhistories; gender, subaltern and new imperial studies; and the recognition and recentering of First Nations peoples. Initiatives by the academy – such as the ‘history from below’ approach championed by scholars like Sergio Ferro in Architecture from Below (2024), the University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and the History Workshop, and Linda Nochlin’s pioneering work addressing the absence of women in art – and the community – such as the reclamation of local and family histories by local groups – have similarly sought to make the hidden visible, articulating the absent, and crucially, understanding why these were invisible in the first place. Oral histories have risen in popularity, championed explicitly for their ability to render the absent apparent, giving a literal and figurative voice to the formerly obscured. 

This conference invites contributions that explore the echoes within the void: to engage with the idea of absence in the built and designed environment in all its myriad forms and machinations: absences of people, structures, places, ideas, or representation, by design, neglect, or by force.  

Prof. Julie Willis, Prof. Philip Goad, Prof. Hannah Lewi, Prof. David Nichols, A/Prof. Andrew Saniga, Dr Kirsten Day, Dr Dijia Chen, Dr Nancy Ji, Dr Renee Miller-Yeaman, Dr Andrew Murray, Dr Alex Seo, Dr Soon-Tzu Speechley, Dr Katti Williams, Theo Blankley, Rosanna Verde, Jen Zielinska