2020 CLASS ASSIGNMENT
How to create your response
How to create a Pixstori: https://www.pixstoriplus.com/pdfs/PSplusGettingStartedGuide5C.pdf
When you respond to the prompt (see weekly assignment) you can respond in two ways:
1. Critical Reflections: Reexamine the case-study building you studied to discuss the following: Reflect on our ways of using and experiencing the building and evaluate its success or failure as a social infrastructure.
Innovative proposition: How can you design architecture of your case-study building to completely overhaul how we live, think, behave, and engage in today's context?
2. Personal stories: You have the option to reflect on your own spaces and your own behavior during the times of contagion and explain how architecture encouraged or stymied you attempts to live a socially meaningful life.
Your Pixstori should be no longer than 2 mins. Write the text down first and edit it down to 300 words. Say only what needs to be said. Don't ramble.
Week One Assignment, Due April 4
Title: What is a Disaster
Prompt for this week's assignment
This week read the 4 short readings, hear the NPR short piece on pandemics and reflect on the following questions/prompts:
What is an epidemic or a disaster?
How is this pandemic changing the use and efficacy of the case study building you studied? How did this disaster impact how we use and interpret architectural space?
OR
How is this pandemic changing the use and efficacy of the spaces and places that constitute your world? How did this disaster impact how you use and interpret these architectural space?
Week Two Assignment, Due April 11
Title: Affordances
Prompt for this week's assignment
Both Agamben and Klein alerts us to the unexpected negative results of this pandemic. As we begin to get use to social distancing or emergency rules and regulations set by government (Agamben calls it a state of exception), we also begin to lose important social practices that make us human.
What would happen to spaces of social infrastructure if extended "states of exceptions" due to disasters make these seemingly draconian conditions normal everyday practices?
Then using James Gibson concept of "affordances" — explain how existing spaces can be rethought/remodeled/redesigned to afford additional possibilities of social interactions and engagement. Use your library or grocery store as your case study to explain how these spaces can afford "exemptions to the exception" — i.e. allow us to respect social distancing and separation while at the same time bringing us together?
Week Three Assignment, Due April 18
Title: Accessibility
Prompt for this week's assignment
During times of disasters we begin to see contradictions in our world that perhaps remain invisible and unexamined during normal times. Using this exceptional moment as an opportunity to rethink how architecture excludes differently abled people, reflect on accessibility in the built environment. Consider the term ability/disability and show how lack of access for some people were built into the physical environment of your case studies. Use a photo or a sketch of the building or its details to explain how it excluded some users.
Week Four Assignment, Due April 25
Title: Inclusivity
Prompt for this week's assignment
This week is about trying to find out how someone, who is very different from you, is experiencing the pandemic. Call up your grandparents or your colleagues who may have a different background than yours? If you are a man, call a woman, if you are young call someone older. Talk to someone whose social identity race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality may be substantially different from yours.
Where are they going? How are they adapting their life in the new world? How are they compensating for public spaces and social infrastructure? How are they experiencing their familiar spaces — homes, work, streets, cafes — differently, now that they are stuck inside their homes?
Ask them about places that they miss going to?
Ask them why they miss these spaces and what they did there?
Then find out how they are changing their lifestyles or adapting to new rules.
Week Five Assignment, Due May 2
Title: Imagining a Different World
Prompt for this week's assignment
Disasters are times of despair. They are also transformative moments when new beginnings can be imagined. Use this moment as a way to rethink social infrastructure architecture of the future. How can we build a better social world? How can architecture address positive human contact and social resilience. You may use your case study building and suggest changes to it or you make take any other public space and offer us a dream for a better future. Be a leader and a dreamer and lead us to a positive, inclusive, accessible, and joyous world beyond the pandemic.
How to create a Pixstori: https://www.pixstoriplus.com/pdfs/PSplusGettingStartedGuide5C.pdf
When you respond to the prompt (see weekly assignment) you can respond in two ways:
1. Critical Reflections: Reexamine the case-study building you studied to discuss the following: Reflect on our ways of using and experiencing the building and evaluate its success or failure as a social infrastructure.
Innovative proposition: How can you design architecture of your case-study building to completely overhaul how we live, think, behave, and engage in today's context?
2. Personal stories: You have the option to reflect on your own spaces and your own behavior during the times of contagion and explain how architecture encouraged or stymied you attempts to live a socially meaningful life.
Your Pixstori should be no longer than 2 mins. Write the text down first and edit it down to 300 words. Say only what needs to be said. Don't ramble.
Week One Assignment, Due April 4
Title: What is a Disaster
Prompt for this week's assignment
This week read the 4 short readings, hear the NPR short piece on pandemics and reflect on the following questions/prompts:
What is an epidemic or a disaster?
How is this pandemic changing the use and efficacy of the case study building you studied? How did this disaster impact how we use and interpret architectural space?
OR
How is this pandemic changing the use and efficacy of the spaces and places that constitute your world? How did this disaster impact how you use and interpret these architectural space?
Week Two Assignment, Due April 11
Title: Affordances
Prompt for this week's assignment
Both Agamben and Klein alerts us to the unexpected negative results of this pandemic. As we begin to get use to social distancing or emergency rules and regulations set by government (Agamben calls it a state of exception), we also begin to lose important social practices that make us human.
What would happen to spaces of social infrastructure if extended "states of exceptions" due to disasters make these seemingly draconian conditions normal everyday practices?
Then using James Gibson concept of "affordances" — explain how existing spaces can be rethought/remodeled/redesigned to afford additional possibilities of social interactions and engagement. Use your library or grocery store as your case study to explain how these spaces can afford "exemptions to the exception" — i.e. allow us to respect social distancing and separation while at the same time bringing us together?
Week Three Assignment, Due April 18
Title: Accessibility
Prompt for this week's assignment
During times of disasters we begin to see contradictions in our world that perhaps remain invisible and unexamined during normal times. Using this exceptional moment as an opportunity to rethink how architecture excludes differently abled people, reflect on accessibility in the built environment. Consider the term ability/disability and show how lack of access for some people were built into the physical environment of your case studies. Use a photo or a sketch of the building or its details to explain how it excluded some users.
Week Four Assignment, Due April 25
Title: Inclusivity
Prompt for this week's assignment
This week is about trying to find out how someone, who is very different from you, is experiencing the pandemic. Call up your grandparents or your colleagues who may have a different background than yours? If you are a man, call a woman, if you are young call someone older. Talk to someone whose social identity race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality may be substantially different from yours.
Where are they going? How are they adapting their life in the new world? How are they compensating for public spaces and social infrastructure? How are they experiencing their familiar spaces — homes, work, streets, cafes — differently, now that they are stuck inside their homes?
Ask them about places that they miss going to?
Ask them why they miss these spaces and what they did there?
Then find out how they are changing their lifestyles or adapting to new rules.
Week Five Assignment, Due May 2
Title: Imagining a Different World
Prompt for this week's assignment
Disasters are times of despair. They are also transformative moments when new beginnings can be imagined. Use this moment as a way to rethink social infrastructure architecture of the future. How can we build a better social world? How can architecture address positive human contact and social resilience. You may use your case study building and suggest changes to it or you make take any other public space and offer us a dream for a better future. Be a leader and a dreamer and lead us to a positive, inclusive, accessible, and joyous world beyond the pandemic.