In the Buddhist murals of the Dunhuang Mogao Caves, there is a type of instrument suspended in the sky of the Pure Land, which produces celestial music spontaneously without the need for human performance. These instruments are adorned with colorful ribbons and float in the air, creating ethereal melodies. This form is referred to in Buddhist scriptures as “self-playing instruments(不鼓自鸣).”The concept of “self-playing instruments” conveys the idea of expressing the echoes from the depths of the universe through the movement of objects. It emphasizes the spontaneity of nature and reflects a romantic artistic imagination and philosophical concepts that transcend human centrism. The “self-playing instruments” belong to the concept of “music and dance performer 伎乐” in the music and dance schemas in the murals which have long transcended the anthropocentric category. The concept of “伎乐” in Buddhism
encompasses not only the creators of music and dance but also the nonhuman everyday performance itself, such as singing, instrumental music, dance, and various natural sounds (the sounds of trees and birds).
In the English-speaking world, research on dance schemas in Dunhuang murals is nearly blank. This study focuses on the analysis of dance schemas in the murals, aiming to fill this gap. The research posits that dance schemas in Dunhuang murals goes beyond mere human movement forms and styles. I argue it is intricately connected with the sounds of trees and birds, lotus ponds, and Asparas, collectively forming a natural sound system within the mural scene.
Viewing dance images as part of this sound system transcends anthropocentrism in dance studies and provides insights into the in situ natural environment of Dunhuang cave. Therefore, the
murals not only depict the utopian Pure Land environment but also seamlessly integrate it with the natural surroundings of the Dunhuang cave space. The dance schemas in the murals serve as a bridge between the idealized Buddhist world and the tangible natural landscapes, creating a performative relationality between human and nature.

My paper links two instances when the “past” was put to work in twentieth-century Peru—artistic representations of Pre-Hispanic architecture and the proliferation of self-built housing in the capital city. In the first half of the twentieth century, Peruvian artists like José Sabogal heralded pre-Hispanic architecture under the umbrella of the indigenismo art movement. As Sabogal and other indigenistas glorified the Peruvian past as a source of nationalism in the present, native populations in the Andes struggled to make a living under feudal property law and migrated to Lima. In the absence of readily available housing stock, these migrants built their own homes in zones that came to be known as barriadas. By the 1950s, urban planners and politicians documented barriadas in architectural periodicals, thenational press, and several sociological reports. Although many experts saw the barriadas as a plague, government reports imply that barriadas revived the "lost" Inka value of mutual aid to the modernizing metropolis. Both Sabogal’s architectural depictions and mid-century urban discourses instrumentalized the Inka empire to essentialize indigeneity and avoid the pernicious issue of Peru’s neocolonial land tenure policy. My talk will present key objects of my in-progress dissertation to theorize the tension between representation and material politics tha conditioned post-war housing conversations in Lima.

In an epoch defined by massive ecological, geological and climatic changes, the role of landscape architects and allied disciplines becomes increasingly important. Not only do these realities re-frame the way that we conceive and design projects to deal with increasingly uncertain times, but they challenge us to find other means to have a positive impact. Our proposed talk will present design-based research on the end-of-life phases of the built environment, bringing a critical lens to the ways in which we conceive and construct the built environment and serves as a way to assert the end-of-life as an essential design consideration and point of speculation in the formulation of constructed projects.

Drawing from scholarship that provides a critical lens into the end phase of projects with reference to the built environment (Hutton 2019, DeSilvey 2017, Easterling 2014), this presentation builds upon work first supported by the Landscape Architecture Canada Foundation (2019-2021). This work explored a variety of processes that define, analyse and contrast the ways in which the built environment becomes reduced to its essential elements, returning to the earth. As an extension of the LACF-funded work, we present two small scale design test plots - design competitions - where we investigated strategies that document materials used and wastes produced and propose flexible and adaptive strategies.

We argue that undoing - the removal, demolition or transition from one material state to another - should become integral to the design disciplines of architecture and landscape architecture. Through “reassembling, this research investigates alternative approaches to consider the inevitable in the built environment, advocating for an extended designer responsibility to the territorial and temporal life cycles inherent in their built constructions. This work seeks to understand the role that a full life cycle approach can have in achieving truly sustainable built projects and landscapes.

Virtues are by definition offering a behavioural script to humans. However, in the 15th and 16th century inanimate buildings are also perceived through a moral lens and described in virtuous terms. This apparent contradiction between architecture and moral virtue will be the focus of my paper, identifying motives and strategies of describing a building as virtuous.
The virtue termed ‘magnificentia’ is often mentioned in relation to architecture. According to the Aristotelian definition of the virtue, architectural patronage is magnificent and virtuous as long as the expenditure remains within the bounds of the decorum regarding the owner, occasion and context. However,  this virtue is also often used to describe architecture itself. Frequently, owners seem to inspire authors to describe a building as virtuous. Rhetoricians seem eager to praise the house as a pars pro toto for the great deeds of the patron. Sometimes the building is even presented as an allegory of the patron, and therefore it also takes the properties of the donor.
In other instances, it is the presence of a morally exceptional human living or having visited the building that renders it magnificent and virtuous. In the descriptions of the building the building is framed so that it fits the status of the guest, but afterwards the building keeps those connotations, therefore the guest also gave the building its virtuous status.
However, there are also authors that associate certain building elements with certain virtues. Magnificentia is according to them in marble and in tall towers. In these texts the virtue moves partially from the realm of morality into the realm of aesthetics, creating an intricate web of meaning that retains elements of both.

There has always been a dark side to the display of virtue. Its troubled history in architecture stretches from the plight of greenwashing back to the tower of Babel. Ostentation comes at a cost, even if those costs are offloaded to the least fortunate in society. Such were the argumentations of the nostalgic authors of Early Stuart England, who saw in the increasing magnificence of buildings, a neglect of the hospitable duties traditionally assigned to the land-owning classes.
Such polemics aimed to direct the virtue-seeking eyes away from the symmetry, scale, and decoration of a building, towards an alternative moral semiology. Open gates, smoking chimneys, luminous kitchens, and ‘a butterie door that turneth often on its hinges’ were all highlighted as signalling the virtue of hospitality. Almost ironically, such an argument against ostentation constituted an alternative mode of virtuous display, one which was being stripped of utility as the manorial economy continued to decline in the wake of nascent capitalism.
But what material traces are left of this moral conundrum? This doctalk holds the moral panic against the architectural evidence. Through analysing the signs of hospitality across numerous country houses, this talk aims to identify trends in typological change, and discusses whether such transformations are the cause or effect of moral panic around the decline of Hospitality.

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