Fourteenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

Architecture indexes society. For better or worse, buildings and urban spaces are entangled with the power relations that enable them, the institutions that fund them, the publics that need them (or want them), and the histories that give them meaning and value. In short, there can be no architecture without aesthetic and infrastructural effects of power. But if we accept that architecture should be an expression of its public, we must also do better to broaden the scope of that public—to include voices that are marginalized or suppressed. We need a Power Shift. To Power Shift, then, is to reconfigure the scales and territories of power that define architecture’s landscape, to design public architecture—its forms and spaces, its systems and relations, its meanings and values—that reorients its agency toward social and environmental justice. To this end, this paper situates and recontextualizes graduate architecture student work produced for the 2020/21 Graduate Complex Program Studios, conducted in the wake of a reinvigorated Black Lives Matter movement and in the midst of a raging global pandemic. Drawing from critical race theory, broken world thinking, and the energy humanities, students mapped defunct systems of property, labor, and care (what the studio framed as broken world systems) in order to expose their underlying power structures and inequalities. This research then became a tool through which to reimagine urban housing as a counter-hegemonic infrastructure capable of transforming what Hop Hopkins calls “sacrifice zones’’ into collective spaces for social and environmental justice.