> Costs of Architecture Network

Summer 2026 Workshops

Call for Papers


The Costs of Architecture Network is pleased to announce a call for papers for a series of online workshops that will take place during the Summer of 2026. This year, we invite submissions for two types of sessions: open and themed sessions.

The Costs of Architecture Network is a forum for scholars to discuss questions related to costs in the history of architecture and the built environment. Our summer paper workshops provide a forum for works in progress (chapters, articles, etc.) on these topics. By costs, we refer to the monetary costs of building in a literal sense, including quantification of building processes, as well as to an open and expanding consideration of costs that includes themes of political economy. Works might consider cost-related aspects of built environment production such as waged or unwaged labor and materials, but also topics such as land, real estate, commerce, financialization, specification, and risk.

  • For our open sessions, we invite proposals from scholars at all stages of their career from architectural history and allied fields, including doctoral students, that speak to the broader themes of the network. Proposed papers may be single or co-authored. We welcome work focusing on any time period or geographic area.

  • For our thematic sessions, we invite proposals related to questions of representing cost and profit in planning practices throughout their professionalization since the late nineteenth century, and before. Planning processes address a tension between economic, social, or environmental cost as necessarily negative and projections of growth as a function of profit. Redlining constructed race as a question of insurance risk, for example, while environmental impact statements after 1969 priced environmental degradation. Submissions may investigate the representation of costs beyond the scale of the building or the medium of the plan, to historicize documents used consistently in planning practices, such as phasing plans, zoning regulations, graphs, flow charts, and land use maps.

If you are interested in workshopping a paper, please fill out our Google Form. Submission requirements include:

  • The title of the proposed paper
  • An abstract (250 words max.) that describes the paper, specifies the nature of its engagement with the costs of architecture, and briefly describes the framework—methodological, theoretical, historiographic, contextual, etc.—which the paper engages
  • A bibliography of 3–5 key secondary sources 
  • An indication of the nature of your paper (article, dissertation chapter, etc.)
  • A short biography of up to 200 words for each author

The deadline for proposals is February 13, 2026. We will notify applicants by mid-March. Papers should be works in progress and ideally range from 5,000 to 7,000 words. Accepted presenters are asked to submit their papers at least two weeks before their workshop date for pre-circulation. These workshops will tentatively be hosted throughout July-August 2026.

If you have further questions, please email costs.of.architecture@gmail.com.