What does Savannah have in common with Hong Kong, Cartagena, Venice and Mumbai? As a port city, it has long been connected to global trade networks that have existed as long as the oldest human civilizations. Consider a lowly piece of Savannah pavement – a remarkable cobblestone etched with Chinese characters that began its life as a tombstone in China in 1798, became ballast in a ship in the 19th century, and ended up in Savannah as a cobblestone. The story of Savannah’s Chinese cobblestone aptly illustrates the global forces that have directly shaped cities throughout history and around the world.
The cobblestone is the perfect symbol for the 9th Savannah Symposium (Feb. 5 - 7): “The Architecture of Trade.” Since its inception in 1999, the biennial event, presented by Savannah College of Art and Design’s architectural history department, has attracted almost 400 speakers from over 30 countries worldwide, bringing together historians, anthropologists, economists, and sociologists with architects, planners, designers and preservationists to connect history to issues that are relevant today.
Issues of trade increasingly dominate the news as the forces of globalization, shifting economics, and even the spread of diseases and political radicalism define our lives. Exploring the complex relationship between trade, architecture and cities, “The Architecture of Trade” is particularly timely given Savannah’s rising profile as the nation’s fastest growing port, now the fourth busiest after Los Angeles, Long Beach and New York City.
The 9th symposium will bring 50 speakers from around the United States and from Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Germany, Israel, Italy, and South Africa to Savannah, which shares the history and experiences of other trade centers, but is also an anomaly. Like other port cities around the world, Savannah is preparing for the arrival of the gigantic “post-Panamax” cargo ships in the coming years that will dwarf the current freighters. Yet Savannah also boasts one of the best preserved historic waterfronts, with most of its 19th-century warehouses intact, along with the unique network of masonry retaining walls, terraced lanes (called Factors Walk), and iron bridges.
The symposium leads off with a walking tour of this most extraordinary urban landscape. Also opening the event is the keynote lecture, “Cities of Incense and Myrrh,” given by Dr. Nasser Rabbat, director of the Aga Khan Program in Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thematic paper sessions will follow on subjects ranging from the impacts of vast trade networks in past centuries to how trade shapes the built environments of today. The symposium closes with the keynote lecture, “How Capitalism Shaped the Built Environment,” given by Dr. Joyce Appleby, professor emerita of history at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The Savannah Symposium showcases the role SCAD plays in supporting scholarship and contributing to the broader understanding of our world. The lectures, receptions and tours provide valuable opportunities for students, faculty and community members to interact with leading academics and practitioners. Beyond the events, representative papers from the 3rd and 6th symposia have been published as books edited by the department’s faculty – Commemoration in America: Essays on Monuments, Memorialization and Memory, edited by David Gobel and Daves Rossell (University of Virginia Press, 2013), and World Heritage and National Registers: Stewardship in Perspective, edited by Thomas Gensheimer and Celeste Lovette Guichard (Transaction Publishers, 2014). Papers from the 8th symposium will be published in late 2015 in Modernities Across Time and Space: Architecture and History in Context, edited by Patrick Haughey (Cambridge Scholars Publishing).
We invite you to participate. Keynote lectures are free and open to the public, while paper sessions and tours require conference registration.
Robin B. Williams has chaired the SCAD architectural history department since its founding in 1996. He specializes in the history of the built environment of the modern period in Europe and North America. He earned his B.A. at the University of Toronto and his M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. Since joining SCAD in 1993, Williams has made Savannah the focus of his research, directing the award-winning online Virtual Historic Savannah Project from 1996 to 2005 and is the lead author of a new architectural guidebook, Buildings of Savannah (2015). Read more by Robin here.
