Fifteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

How can we revisit and rewrite fragments of our late twentieth century architectural design history in ways that challenge the priority given to singular, outstanding, or extraordinary individuals and buildings as worthy of attention? Can the intricate, intersectional power dynamics that yielded what we still hold as “canonical” be tackled to help reframe our understanding of the late-modernist architectural production? This paper presents a selection of in-progress excerpts from an ongoing book project that explores personal, oblique, emotive forms of knowledge production in architectural theory. In this project, I experiment with a mode of storytelling that sits at the intersection of autofiction and architectural criticism. I engage in an hybrid mode of writing, weaving together accounts of events that took place as I lived and worked in Switzerland for over a decade, as a foreign woman evolving in male-driven fields, with detailed spatial and architectural descriptions. Grounded in a material-culture’s approach to design history and theory, I examine productive epistemological and sematic relationships between the things we design and make as social groups and the ways in which we interact with each other, through legal- and policy-based structures, but also, and perhaps most importantly, as we navigate space in the anodyne, everyday context of our lives. The writing evidences entanglements between spatial configurations and social values. This in turn sheds light on more global issues of socio-spatial justice, gender power dynamics and modes of exclusion grounded in popular nationalisms. This paper is presented as a performative literary reading.

Presenters

Caroline Dionne
Assistant Professor in the History and Theory of Design Practice and Curatorial Studies, Art and Design History and Theory, The New School, United States