‘Altered Sites: On Psychedelic Architecture’ will explore experimental and critical approaches to architectural form through the exploration of built and/or imagined structures as sites of alterity.
The symposium uses notions of psychedelic experience and expansive consciousness to engage with site as a potentially productive form of difference, dynamism, otherness, even the new.
When Dr. Humphry Osmond suggested the term ‘psychedelic’ to Aldous Huxley in 1956, as part of their enthused discussions around the emancipatory usage of hallucinogens, he drew upon the compound etymology of the Greek psykhē [mind] and dēloun [to make visible, to reveal]. Aspects of this conjunction between an interior world and a tangible, external counterpart is at the heart of the symposium’s remit. The meeting point for such a dialogue is proposed as 'architecture', not limited to designed or constructed buildings, but also as a general principle between the structured and the unformed.
The symposium will explore how structures – in buildings, constructed objects, images, writing, creative practices – in which gestures of inversion, reversal, enfolding, involution, projection, expansion, collapse, and so on – remain present within the resultant construction.
An intellectual pioneer in the context of hallucinogenic experience, Huxley occupies a singular place in the founding of West Dean College. It was from Huxley that poet and college founder Edward James sought advice on setting up his utopian educational community as early as 1939, an organisation which continues to support traditional and experimental art and craft practices to this day. James was also inspired by Huxley’s experimentation with psychedelics in relation to his own taking teonanácatl mushrooms in Mexico in 1957.