Unit Brief

Intermediate Unit 8 is a research-through-design work group that initiates a three-year cycle of investigations into the intricate relationship between contemporary urban socio-politics and innovative building construction processes and techniques. During the 2009–2010 academic year, tutors and students will focus on understanding the role of buildings’ skin in current urban politics and their relation to different forms of governance.

Alejandro de la Sota. Civil Government Building in Tarragona, 1956-61. Built under Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, its skin plays an ambiguous relation between the monolithic character of the building and a deliberate search for freedom expressed in construction terms.

Following Bruno Latour’s reflections on contemporary socio-politics, this unit will examine the assertion that the social—as it relates to contemporary cities—can no longer be conceived as the cohesive force of the community. On the contrary, it must be conceived as a loose association of individual experiences scattered across different surfaces that shape urban practices. Thus, the architectural design challenge is no longer to address issues to constituencies and social groups, but to individuals and audiences in the city. In this context, architectural elements that establish direct and reciprocal relations between constructed forms and individuals, such as the building’s skins, play an important role in the socio-political activation of our cities. Indeed, it is through seemingly insignificant material practices, such as those developed in building’s skin fabrication, that political questioning can be found today. As a result, this unit aims to address political issues in combination with fabrication processes, while considering that urban and political issues are imbedded in the related material practices.

250 cm Line Tattooed on 6 unemployed young men hired for 30$. Santiago Sierra, 2002.

The work within the unit will be framed by a specific, politically charged urban condition—namely, La Plaza de la Revolución in La Habana, Cuba, a place where city and national politics are particularly bounded to everyday experiences. This urban location embodies a richness of scales, social practices, and political conflict epitomized by the presence of the iconic Ministry of Internal Affairs. Constructed under Batista’s dictatorship, the Ministry building is an archetypical example of “colonial” modernism now turned into a national monument to Ernesto Che Guevara. As such, an extensive part of the unit’s work will take both the Plaza de la Revolución and the Ministry as the ideal platform for showcasing plural responses to democratization and political processes in Cuba.

Ministry of Internal Affairs, La Habana, Cuba