Community Contexts (Asynchronous Session)
Tendering a Tactile Tectonic - Discovering and Deploying Architecture’s DNA View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session John Reynolds
In a current academic architectural design culture often characterized by parametricism, cybernetics, and online reality, architectural design’s visceral and haptic dimensions have assumed an inferior position in architectural design ideation and process. The design process pursued in many undergraduate architectural programs has assumed an occularcentric modality. Rather than advance a nostalgic, anti-digitally mediated position, the design practices described here deploy haptic means to tender a design process that advances a tactile tectonic grounded in the DNA or patterns of human experience and nature. Thus, design mediates the rupture between the knowledge of matter and the knowledge of form, to achieve a cooperation of instinct (encounter with matter through making) and intelligence (abstraction separate from making) through the lens of what Alvaro Malo would call Homo faber, “a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature and half transcending it.” The origins of this tactile tectonic approach to design can be found in the work of educational theorists Friedrich Froebel, Johann Pestalozzi, and the Psychologist John Dewey’s writings on aesthetic experience. Captivated in the simultaneity of their individual and collective responses to the transformed Froebel-based design pedagogy, students discover that the patterns or design DNA sourced from human experience and nature can inform their future design speculation, decision making, and project outcomes. Transcending Architecture as Optic, the student as a new form of Homo-faber whose “corporeal imagination” advances a “supernature” interposed between human beings and nature aimed that “naturalizes” humankind and “humanizes” nature while revealing the poetics of its Making.
Reclaiming Communal Space in Kampung-kota View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Bagas Putra
The pressure of urban development in many Asian cities has affected low-income communities living in densely populated settlement struggling to obtain a decent communal space to support their community activities. In Indonesian urban context, kampung-kota as the manifestation of low-income settlement is facing paramount problems one of which is access to open green space that acts as communal and social space. Situated at the Municipality of South Jakarta, this article explores how member of the community reclaimed open green space in their neighbourhood, amidst spatial constraint and rapid urban development. The findings show that community participation, especially for leaders of the community, play a significant role in the production of communal open green space, where spatial forms can be shaped by social practices and processes.
At Home - an Ephemeral Monument to the Everyday Lives of Public Housing: Reimagining the Role and Form of Public Monuments View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lauren Meranda
The roles of a monument can be split into two categories — collective catharsis and the creation of public memory. The question lies in who decides what story gets told. As designers, we have a responsibility to respect and represent the stories of the people served by our work. Studio Brazen has been partnering with the National Public Housing Museum, a start-up museum and site of conscience located in Chicago to rethink what is worthy of being monumentalized. Home can mean many things to many people. It’s the place where you rest your head, the table where you eat family meals, it’s the place where we have difficult conversations and joyous celebrations. These memories are valuable and important. At Home is a projection-mapping installation, which acts as an ephemeral monument for the everyday lives and stories of public housing. The monument features the stories of current and former public housing residents. The installation will begin in Chicago at the future home of the National Public Housing Museum, but it is intended to travel all over the United States at sites of significance to those who live or have lived in public housing. Short three-sentence stories will continue to be collected and added to an online database. Submissions will be collected through the project website. Visitors to the website can see documentation of the projection installation(s) or can take a look at the collection of narratives as text. Through this project and presentation we are questioning, "What makes a monument?"
Women's Experience in Public Housing: The case of TOKI Uzundere View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Meltem Eranıl Demirli
Urban transformation plays a significant role both in the social context and in the physical dimension. The study has critical approach that criticize the inadequacy in one of the recent projects, TOKI Uzundere Public Housing Project 1 , and underline the need to reconstruct urban transformation projects not only physically but also socially. As a pillar of urban transformation in 2009, people living in a Kadifekal gecekondu, 2 were placed in new apartment blocks from their own home in TOKI. Particularly, with regard to the relocation, some Kadifekale residents moved from their one- or two-story houses in Kadifekale to apartment blocks on the periphery of the city. In this context, the project focuses on the differences between fiction and experience in domestic use in TOKI, conquering different gender relationships by analyzing spatial transformations women use and reproduce their own spaces. This study aims to reveal gender balance of power, current dominant cultural perceptions, stereotypes and assumptions while examining the spatial tactics of women who reveal the different potentials of the space designed by the professional. The analyzes will show how the use of certain places in public housing units or the tactics developed by the user in line with their needs and how these spaces differ from each other.
