In the last several years, a crisis of capitalist development has redefined our understanding of cities in terms of international policy making, political constituencies and individual and collective political expressions in the urban realm. Inter Unit 8 has been experimenting with possible new scenarios for this political readjustment at a global scale, departing from its most basic expressions in the city. As a result, students have constructed innovative political arguments by experimenting with the relationship between everyday material activities–such as waiting for a bus, dancing, chatting in the streets, or wheeling and dealing in the city squares–and a particular material organization. In these common everyday practices, students have found the materials from which to reconstruct the political experience in the city. Manifested in public and constructed as a physical material expression, these everyday practices acquire a political value — understanding the political as what Hannah Arendt described as action in public — and redefine new models of the interaction between the individual and the collective in the public arena.

29.11.09

6th Workshop

W10 Skins as Urban Mediators between Politics and Individuals
30-04 Dec
Students will be required to establish a political argument to define a skin proposal for the Ministry of Internal Affairs in relation to the Plaza de la Revolución.

Readings
Alejandro Zaera-Polo: “The Politics of the Envelope: A Political Critique of Materialism”, Volume 17 pp. 76-105.
Ellen Lupton, Skin: Surface, Substance, and Design, Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.

Posted by at
Labels:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)
Design and research work of Intermediate Unit 8 Architectural Association School of Architecture London UK