MANIFESTO
The Architecture Of Activism
Gordon Kipping
We are in the midst of global upheaval fueled by climate change, a global pandemic and racial injustice among other disturbances. These disorders are inextricably linked, each reinforcing and making more extreme the other. The inaction or ineffectiveness of governments, corporations, traditional organizations and powerful individuals has led to the rise of global grassroots activism movements in response. People want change and they are organizing to show it!
The performance of architecture is the crafting of space with intentionality. Architecture produces constructed objects and spaces which choreograph our interactions with our environments and one another. Architecture can play an activist role in combating social, economic, political and environmental disorders but it has been mostly spared from the conversation and action. The Architecture Of Activism studio aims to address this absence with the design and construction of architectural interventions to effectively mediate the interaction between an activism movement and the territory within which it operates.
Grassroots activism organizations, in responding to the crises of our day, most often employ a decentralized structure, often leaderless and nonhierarchical, without a headquarters or even dedicated physical space. Individuals which may or may not have organization membership share information largely through social media – online – while action occurs as civil disobedience, protest assemblies and at the voters booth – in physical space.
Organizations, communities and individuals can and do operate on physical territory to support their actions. However, this physical territory, whether the city or the countryside, does not have architecture designed and constructed with the intent of functioning in support of a movement and its actions. This is where The Architecture Of Activism studio will operate. We will design and construct - electronically or physically, to scale or full size, in a simulated environment or in the actual territory of action – The Architecture Of Activism!
Each student will select an activist organization and a physical territory. The organization of choice should be one that you believe in or want to learn more about. As we are presumably spread around the globe, your choice of physical territory should be your current immediate context or another familiar territory. Together we will learn about numerous activist organizations and numerous places around the globe.
We will make extensive use of diagramming to understand and describe the activist organization. We will enter the world of our organization and identify their agenda and their means of achieving it. We will diagram their modes of communication and sharing of information. Diagrams describing the flows of information and the places and movement of people, both organizing and in action, will be identified. A series of diagrams fully describing the organization will result.
We will undertake a comprehensive analysis of the physical territory identified. Both the traditional urban diagrams (figure ground, land use, demographics, transportation networks, population density) and not so typical diagrams such as information flows, and any other elements deemed important to the organization and its objectives will be identified and diagrammed.
The fun starts with the overlay of the organization map and the physical territory map. With the lack of architectural consideration for The Architecture Of Activism, we can only postulate that there is a deficiency in the physical territory of apparatus acting in service of the organization. This deficiency will define each project for the semester.
Our solutions will be pragmatic. Our solutions will be at the scale of the city, furniture, handheld or other. Wherever possible, we will prototype our solutions. And if possible, we will deploy them in our territory. We are interested in the concrete contribution to solutions, The Architecture Of Activism.