The Building Technology Educators’ Society serves the community of academics and professionals who are involved most directly with the construction and structure of the built environment. The mission of BTES is to promote and publish the best pedagogic practices, relevant research, scholarship, and other creative activity to facilitate student learning, advance innovation, and enhance the status of building technology disciplines in the profession at large.
This is an open access conference proceedings which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author.
2027 BUILDING TECHNOLOGY EDUCATORS’ SOCIETY CONFERENCE
Call for Submissions
North Dakota State University | Fargo North Dakota | May 24-27, 2027
Tectonics and Stereotomy
Fundamental Architectural Dialectic
The 2027 Building Technology Educators’ Society Conference Committee calls for paper and poster submissions to be presented within a broad range of topics that examine and emphasize innovative approaches to material exploration, computational design, and various fabrication processes in attempt to expand the vocabulary and spatial implications in buildings, engineering, art, and landscape. The general theme is tectonics and stereotomy.
About the Theme
This conference will focus on ways in which tectonics and stereotomy and various supporting actions or activities are contemplated, explored, and defined in all areas of architecture and multiple building technologies. This conference invites exploration and rethinking of Semper’s model.
Tectonics and stereotomy represent a fundamental architectural dialectic, contrasting the "lightness" of assembled, frame-based, and articulated components [tectonic] with the "heaviness" of massive, carved, and compressive, earth-bound, or stacked units [stereotomic]. Originating from the Semperian theory, tectonics emphasizes the joint, while stereotomy focuses on the cutting of solid material.
Tectonics | Stereotomy
Architect Gottfried Semper, who was one of the most important theorists of the nineteenth century, created the following perspective on artistic activity in the field of architecture; textiles (weaving and enclosure), ceramics (molding and surface), tectonics (carpentry and joinery), and stereotomy (masonry and mass). This conference hopes to revisit those activities not only in historic measures but also in how education, perception, assignments, tools, and software propel us into the future.
Did we drift from crafting buildings perhaps entirely as actions of stereotomy to buildings executed as tectonic explorations? Were there ever any buildings executed as a study in the properties of stereotomy? Were there ever any buildings executed entirely as a tectonic exploration? If the pyramid of Giza is a performance in stereotomy does that make the Luxor Hotel and Casio in Las Vegas a tectonic construction? What is stereotomy and tectonics today if not perceived as typology? Can they be separated? Are they interlinked? Was it always a question of a hybrid?
Additive | Deductive
When we look at the range of the selected fields that Semper proposes it is not only about these materials, but how they work together within their selected fields and how they work outside of their domains. At a different level and dimension, similar to that of the Eames’ film - Powers of Ten, what are the governing principles that are used when combining the materials in homogeneous manner versus hybrid manner? What benefits the material and/or final product – additive or deductive reasoning? Is there a combination of the two, or can both be used simultaneously in a project? What is craft today, or more specifically, what are today’s crafting techniques of joinery and structure, and how do they relate to the idea of permanence?
Past | Future
This session examines tectonics and stereotomy across cultures, geographies, and histories, foregrounding construction techniques as culturally embedded practices rather than neutral technologies. It encourages critical reflection on authorship, appropriation, continuity, and innovation, and asks how cultural knowledge embedded in material practices can inform future architectural education and production. While Semper’s categories emerged from a nineteenth-century European perspective, this session invites a broader, more plural understanding of material intelligence.
How have different cultures developed distinct approaches to mass, joinery, enclosure, and surface in response to climate, resources, belief systems, labor structures, and social organization? What can contemporary architects learn from Indigenous, vernacular, and non-Western construction traditions—both historical and ongoing—that challenge dominant narratives of progress, efficiency, and permanence? How do the objectives in this conference define the pedagogical education of the architect in the past and in the future? How will the new emerging tools, in computer software and 3D printing, not only within academia but also in the execution of buildings, define or redefine education in a field that is in constant flux and evolution? How are past approaches defined, redefined, eliminated, or perhaps combined? We are not only designing/building for today but also building for the future. How is this communicated and emphasized to the students?
Lightness | Heaviness
This session extends the discourse on tectonics and stereotomy to the scale of landscape and urban territory. While Semper’s model centers on building materials and craft, contemporary practice increasingly positions land itself as a constructed medium in which architecture, landscape, infrastructure, and building technology are deeply intertwined. Buildings participate in the making of landscape through the technologies that shape them, the materials from which they are formed, and the ways they are carved into, embedded within, terraced across, or suspended above terrain.
Within this expanded field, heaviness and lightness operate not as opposites but as relational material strategies shaping how landscapes and buildings perform, endure, and adapt. Heaviness emerges through mass, compression, durability, and ecological anchoring in building forms, earthworks, retaining systems, embankments, excavations, and geological manipulations. Lightness appears through adaptability, reduced embodied carbon, minimal intervention, planted systems, tensile structures, shading devices, adaptable infrastructures, and suspended assemblies, where porosity, reversibility, and responsiveness define performance. Contributors are invited to explore how material systems and construction techniques generate architectural form while producing topographic, ecological, and energetic relationships between building and site. Landscape thus becomes a negotiation between ground and canopy, permanence and change, inertia and suspension.
Guidelines for Authors:
BTES 2027 welcomes both paper and poster submissions. Authors wishing to present a paper or poster should submit an abstract of no more than 500 words through Open Publishing at UMass. Based upon the keywords, papers will be tracked into one of the seven peer-reviewed session topics. Papers will be reviewed in a two-stage process; preliminary notification of abstracts and final notification of full paper. Abstracts will be double-blind peer reviewed.
Abstract submissions of no more than 500 words, excluding references and bibliography, are welcome. Images are not permitted in the abstract. Abstract should be submitted as a single Microsoft Word file or similar DOC/X file using minimal formatting. All submissions must be written in English.
Abstracts for papers and posters are due October 5th, 2026. Authors will be notified of preliminary acceptance mid-November 2026.
See full Call for Submissions for complete guidelines. See information in submission portal for specific abstract submission instructions.
TIMELINE
Submission Portal Open | Monday September 14th, 2026
Abstract Submission Deadline | Monday October 5th, 2026
Preliminary Notification to Authors | Mid–November 2026
Full Papers and Posters Due | Monday January 4th, 2027
Notification of Paper and Poster Acceptance | Mid–February 2027
Final Revised Papers and Posters Due | Monday March 22nd, 2027
Conference Dates | May 24th–27th, 2027