Boundaries
The project will address issues of context and intervention, action and Boundary and the architectural response to social issues found here in the Palouse area. On an international scope, the students will design vocational training centers for the recent disastrous earthquake in Haiti and for the many orphans created in the aftermath of the heinous genocide that took place in Rwanda at the close of the twentieth century. We invite students to use architecture to mediate between the differing physical and social situations existing in the proposed project. Students will explore the boundaries of their private obsessions given their role as public servant and architect. We will ask the students to focus on the discord between philanthropy, politics, the consequences of war and inequity.
We propose the basic question: is there a belief today in architecture’s ability to contribute to the social well-being of people and if so how can we represent it? We will explore action, Motion and repose: public realm and private territory; to find a means of connecting disparate realms, dissolving boarders, activating the space between gathering and departure in a space between; social structure bitter resentment, optimistic vision, land air and water; darkness and light.
The dominance of Commercial culture and the prospect of a single superpower heralded in with the new millennium have global consequences. Services are increasingly moved from the western city to the edge of poverty and desperation: public and private space have lost their boundaries vis-รก-vis the information highway and other technological innovations: and yet the capacity for institutions to provide generous, positive and progressive action is disappearing as such. These new conditions call into question traditional space ordering systems and architectural definitions. And foster a new territory of engagement for young designers.
The challenge is to see the present clearly and conceive new models for the future.
The project postulates the social service institution as an antidote to the physical loss of horizon in the political landscape and as a metaphor for the cotemporary society’s loss of orientation, loss of self; for the disintegrating urban and rural environments which have lost their center and have little or no moral fiber.
By investigating the space for action the students will explore the space existing in the dimension of the socio-political. Students will propose a complex of meanings; link the collective with the personal ; the public with the intimate; the immediate with the subliminal, the superficial with the sublime. As a production. The project should redefine thinking within the architectural and urban disciplines and reveal itself as a unique social experience.
Space for action and Response
Project:
To design an orphanage and vocational training center in the hill country in Rwanda or Haiti. The Rwandan government has made the offer to donate 100 acres. The scheme must take into account how to new self sustaining., educational and economically productive. We hope to achieve these goals by not only designing the physical buildings but also to use the buildings to foster a productive and comprehensive vision of a socially and economically sustained praxis. We approach the design with sociological paradigms that inform an understanding of contemporary models of cooperatives in the underdeveloped developing world.
