Spacial Synergy (Asynchronous Session)
Answering JFK's Call with a Modern Masterpiece: Marcel Breuer's Robert C. Weaver Federal Building in Washington DC View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Stephanie Travis
The first building designed under the 1962 Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture was for the newly formed U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in Washington, DC. The report had a clear mandate: to create architecture that would reflect the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability of the American Government. This paper examines Marcel Breuer’s design for HUD’s new office building, in relation to the guiding principles. It asks the questions: Does the design of this building achieve its goal in translating the values as stated in the report into physical form? If so, how do the four beliefs influence the design; specifically, how does each standard manifest three-dimensionally to create a structure that conveys these ideals? And, do these aspects connect to create a cohesive language that serves as a symbol for a dynamic, evolving government?
Design in the Shadows?: Advocacy and Creativity for the Nocturnal Commons View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nick Dunn
Urbanisation continues to provide habitat for more and more of the planet’s human population. Accompanying this process are the energy, transport, and service infrastructures that support urban life. Enmeshed in these networks is artificial illumination and its unintended consequences. Light pollution, for instance, accounts for a growing global carbon footprint, yet more efficient artificial lighting methods using LEDs have resulted in increasingly higher levels of brightness at night (Pawson & Bader, 2014). This is altering natural cycles of light and dark, directly impacting on the circadian rhythms of our bodies and having disastrous effects upon other species and their ecosystems. Where is design in addressing such poor performance? This issue of critical importance has been referred to by some scientists as the ‘hidden global challenge’ (Davies & Smyth, 2018) but the public awareness and understanding of it is negligible. The growing problem of how we perceive darkness and the attempts to manage it, typically through artificial illumination, requires new design strategies to create viable alternatives to current pathways (Dunn, 2019). How can we advocate for the ‘nocturnal commons’ (Gandy, 2017) when the majority of society does not even know what is disappearing or understand the implications? This paper, therefore, presents a new framing for design as advocacy through creativity to raise awareness of these complex issues and address them. In doing so, it calls for the important and urgent need for design to commit, act, and engage others in the future of our planet, its people, and non-human species.
Settler Built Environment: Innocence in Ruins View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yulia Gilich
On May 14, 2018, residents and visitors of Tel Aviv celebrated Israel’s victory in the Eurovision Song Contest at an open-air party; the United States moved its embassy to Jerusalem; and the Israeli military killed 60 and injured over 2700 Palestinians in Gaza. Israel’s dominant visual regime frames the three events of May 14 as separate, accidental, and disparate, although they all occurred on the same day within a 30-mile radius. The simultaneity and proximity of these events allow me to illuminate how they are politically entangled, and are a result of what happened 70 years prior, on May 14, 1948, which marked the establishment of Israel and the concurrent and ongoing dispossession of Palestinians. May 14 serves as an entry point for the investigation of what I call “geographies of settler innocence.” Israel utilizes settler innocence as the primary organizing principle of space production. I perform a visual analysis of the geographies of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Gaza to analyze how settler innocence is embedded in the built environment of Israel to rebuild and reimagine Palestine as a national home to Jewish immigrants. The very physical landscape of Palestine has been transformed to ground Zionist meanings, identities, and histories. It is precisely in the built environment that settler innocence is cemented and I will focus on the built environment of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Sderot, the closes Israeli city to the border with Gaza, and what those spaces reveal about geographies of settler innocence.
Does Participatory Architecture Work?
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Leon Cruickshank, David Perez, Rosendy Galabo
Participatory Architecture (PA) stands for the democratisation of architectural design processes. Architects employ designerly engagements to build power-balanced relationships with communities, where everyone can design. This paper explores previous and ongoing PA projects with focus on uncovering hidden challenges and optimal conditions to inform current approaches. PA emerges in the 1960s as a reaction to the Modern Architecture, which has disconnected contemporary architecture from laypeople’s needs and situations. Evidence can be found in the spatial appropriations after Le Corbusier’s intervention in Pessac (Bordeaux), the Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens (London), and the Yamasaki’s Pruitt-Igoe (St. Louis). This has led to architectural designs that, in many cases, exclude consultation with their end-users. Since that, activists, sociologists, architects, urban planners, and anthropologists have been encouraging citizenship participation in architecture. Previous experiences, such as Fathy’s New Gourna Village (Luxor) and the “Tondo” competition (Manila), reflect that promoters’, architects’ and the communities’ aspirations need to be crafted based on dialogues. Otherwise those physical transformations would not fulfil their inhabitants’ needs. In this regard, the architect might adopt a mediating role. Good current practices can be found in Latin America, such as Aravena’s Elemental (Chile), and Ecosistema Urbano’s Asulab (Asunción). In Europe it resonates Cirugeda’s Recetas Urbanas (Sevilla), Concordet’s Ensemble à Claveau (Bordeaux), Hands-on-Bristol, and Assemble’s Granby Four Streets (Liverpool). The paper reviews these strategies that push the boundaries of participation in architecture. This aligns with an emergent society eager to participate which underscores the need for holistic research to envision PA future practices.
Lingering in Public Space: Interrogative Design, Challenging Attitudes Towards Homelessness Through Spatial Design Practice
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Adrienne Bennie
Homelessness is an important social concept in art and design practice, it examines the way space is treated in relation to the body, public and private space. This paper investigates spatial design as a form of ‘interrogative design’, applied to the issue of homelessness in London. In this paper, I discuss how the ghettoising of the homeless has consequences for how private domestic activities take place within full public view. As a spatial designer, concerned with domestic space, as a work in progress the research conducts an anonymised inventory of these private domestic rituals ⎼ necessarily carried out in public ⎼ through drawings, maps, and photographs of traces of inhabitation. Interrogative design responds to the high level of ethical alertness that it creates. It is understanding the urgency of an issue as an everyday ethical condition and with this in mind, I invite the public to shift their perception of homelessness and the area between public and private spaces. Finally, this paper discusses the role of a spatial designer or artist in highlighting such a complex issue, it further offers a critical and conceptual perspective of the vulnerability of the homeless to the coronavirus pandemic.
