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.

20.10.09

3rd Workshop

W5-7 Top-Down and Bottom-Up


Top-Down and Bottom-Up are design strategies that express two fundamentally different political attitudes toward governance and representation. Bottom-Up strategies suggest that a politically loaded envelope is constructed by summing up different reactions from a multitude of individuals. Top-Down strategies suggest that a system of rules has to be set a priori; in this kind of approach, individuals can be already imbedded into the structure of the system or can activate this system politically by appropriating its rules. The aim of this workshop is to explore and compare these two strategies by designing two installations—one Top-Down and the other Bottom-Up. Each group of students will submit proposals, and the best entry will be built and showcased for public review.





Readings
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York: Penguin Press, 2004.
Mary McLeod, “Everyday and “other” spaces” in Architecture and Feminism, Princeton Architectural Press, 1996, pp.1-37.

References
Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, 1982.
Peter Eisenman, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, 1998-2005.


Groups

G.1. Gary-Kayuan-Olivia

G.2. Amir-Karl-Merve-Uliana

G.3. Lyza-Max-Stavros

G.4. Costa-Maud-Yong
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Design and research work of Intermediate Unit 8 Architectural Association School of Architecture London UK