ReformActivismDesign - Blog

The Project Domesticated: Postmodern Retrofits to Public Housing

5/28/2017

Clinton Peabody, St. Louis, 1955

Clinton Peabody, St. Louis, 2017

"The Project Domesticated: Postmodern Retrofits for Public Housing"
Society of Architectural Historians, Glasgow, Scotland, June 8, 2017

Michael R. Allen, Senior Lecturer, Washington University in St. Louis
Susanne Cowan, Assistant Professor, Montana State University

In St. Louis, few realize that the city's two oldest public housing projects actually are preserved and still functioning for their original purpose. As HOPE VI felled the city's skyline of high-rise public housing, the St. Louis Housing Authority elected a different course for the city’s two low-rise, Wagner-Steagall era projects. However, the retention of these early projects reinforces the architectural mythology of public housing. The decision to demolish tower blocks while retaining low-rises reflected the influence of the contested physical determinist theories of Oscar Newman. Furthermore, the decision to modify the retained units adhered to postmodernist ideas that the International Style needed to be made palatable and contextual through the introduction neo-traditional building elements. The surviving low-rise projects were integrated into New Urbanist plans that erased original styles, altered the building forms and distorted historic landscape plans.

Here while the buildings could be said to be preserved, they have been stripped of the architectural features that characterized the original projects. The resulting landscapes present both the promise and ambiguity of preservation programs for public housing in an era where federal policies remain foundationally anchored to rejection of the negative image of public housing.

Call for Papers, SACRPH 2017: Social Science and the Subject(s) of Environmental Design

1/25/2017

Co-Chairs: Susanne Cowan and Anthony Raynsford
Session for the Society of American City Planning Historians (SACRPH),
Cleveland, Ohio, October 26-29, 2017

Already by the first third of the 20th century, the social sciences had penetrated deeply into the fields of architecture and urban planning, whether in form urban sociology or in the ergonomic experiments of the Bauhaus. By the 1960s, however, new and burgeoning sub-fields of experimental psychology, sociology and anthropology had begun to shape the new discipline of environmental design. In these expanded fields of social science, social scientists and environmental designers, their previously distinct roles increasingly blurred, were drawn into the often-turbulent politics of participatory design and advocacy planning. As social scientist steadily uncovered new kinds of subjectivity and the cultural diversity of perception, the subjects of social science also began to raise their own independent voices in the design processes. In recent years the rise of social practice in architecture and planning – as exemplified by such organizations as Architecture for Humanity, Public Architecture, and the Social Economic Environmental Design Network (SEED), together with such exhibitions as “Small Scale, Big Change” and “Design with the Other 90%” – has demonstrated the persistent use of social scientific claims within architecture. At the same time, a certain historical amnesia often surrounds such practices, allowing their proponents to evade the thornier political and aesthetic questions that plagued previous iterations of social-scientifically based design.

Despite the deeply intertwined histories of social science and environmental design in the twentieth century, scholars have only just begun to make sense of this often-fraught and contradictory relationship. This panel will seek to historicize the ways architects, planners and environmental designers have engaged social scientific research in their work, whether through positivist claims for a so-called public good; activist engagement on behalf of specific users; philanthropic campaigns for social improvement; or political-utopian images of a future ideal. Papers should demonstrate the continuities, shifts and breaks of social science approaches within architecture over time. For example, papers might trace larger discursive and interdisciplinary interactions within the architectural academy, or examine case studies of how particular architects, movements, or projects employed social science as a design tool. Questions may include: How did environmental designers translate social scientific data into built form? How did architects and social scientists communicate across increasingly wide disciplinary gaps? How did architects or urban planners employ tropes of social science in order to further their formal or aesthetic preferences? How did social scientific design shift between technocratic management and political activism? How might social science have served as an ideological screen for the political shapers of architectural and urban form?

Please send abstracts to Susanne Cowan and Anthony Raynsford by Feb 7, 2017.
Susanne.cowan@montana.edu, anthony.raynsford@sjsu.edu

Teaching Design with People in Mind

4/27/2016

Teaching Design with People in Mind:
Social Factors at the College of Environmental Design, 1960s-1990

Exhibit Curators: Raymond Lifchez, Caitlin DeClercq, Ayda Melika

The Social Factors program, an innovative curriculum developed in the College of Environmental Design in the 1960s, introduced social science methods to teach the design of buildings and environments more responsive to human needs. Previous curricula and teaching focused on the aesthetic and technical aspects of architecture and landscape architecture.

This exhibit highlights the innovative approaches to design education that allowed students to translate socio-cultural values into physical forms. Social Factors faculty and students articulated a series of techniques to understand and define user needs, coordinate the contributions of practitioners from various allied disciplines to create integrated designs, and finally, evaluate the fit between people and the places they inhabit. Four aspects of the social factors curriculum will be explored:

Rethinking studios: teaching architecture as a social art
Ethnography and environment: teaching a sociological perspective of design
Learning in the field: user needs in landscape architecture
Community design centers: engagement beyond the classroom

While highlighting the fertile years of the Social Factors program in the 1960s-1980s, the exhibit also conveys its long-term impact on scholars, designers, and students at (and beyond) Berkeley today.

Curators: Raymond Lifchez, Caitlin DeClercq, Ayda Melika
Exhibit Team: Chris Marino, Cailin Trimble, Jason Miller, Miguel Nieto
Sponsor: Environmental Design Archives
March 1, 2016 to May 27, 2016
Hours: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/libraries/environmental-design-library

Designing Your Future: Expanding Horizons for Girls in Architecture

4/20/2016

On April 9, 2016, the School of Architecture participated in Montana State University's Expanding Your Horizon's program which introduces Middle School girls around Montana to career opportunities in STEM fields. Students from the American Insatiate of Architecture Students (AIAS) led four groups of ten girls in designing buildings from blocks.

The students involved included: Elizabeth Seidel, Sarah Burke, Wes Ditmeyer, Haley Teske, Ashley Cope, Michaela Leibel, Katie O’Neill, Joseph Bryan and Thomas Femrite.

Graduate students Elizabeth Seidel and Sarah Burke gave introductory explanations of architectural drawing conventions like the floor plan, and design tools like the grid, with assistance from Architecture Faculty Members, Susanne Cowan and Chere LeClair.

With anticipation, we watched to see how the girls became completely absorbed, using the block modules to realize their visions for all sorts of buildings like riding stadiums, swimming pools, skyscrapers, and houses. Many creatively tweaked the grid to develop unique angles and irregular forms.

Many of the girls had driven more than four hours to come to the one day event, showing their enthusiasm for science fields. Several girls plan to study stem fields like medicine, and a few were considering studying architecture. The theme "design your future" was meant to empower girls to imagine and pursue opportunities in technical fields like architecture.

The School of Architecture has about 40% female students, and about 30% female faculty.

Photos by Ashley Cope. Courtesy of Montana State University School of Architecture. The images feature MSU School of Architecture faculty and students including Susanne Cowan, Chere LeClair, Elizabeth Seidel, Sarah Burke, Wes Ditmeyer, Haley Teske, Michaela Leibel, Katie O’Neill, Joseph Bryan and Thomas Femrite.

DVDs Available World Wide

3/7/2016

RAD is proud to have its film Design as a Social Act in 30 university libraries in 17 states and 5 countries. See if a copy is available at a school near you.
http://www.reformactivismdesign.com/library-dvd-availability.html

Self-reflection through Environmental Autobiography

1/25/2016

Last week, I learned more about the development of Environmental Autobiography back in the 60s from its designer Clare Cooper Marcus. After removing the sweet cat shaped kettle warmer to pour us hot tea, Clare sat in her rocking chair and with a smile began to reflect on her teaching years. Her living room is still as bright and welcoming as it was four years ago when Susanne Cowan and I first visited to film her for the documentary Design as a Social Act. This time, Caitlin DeClercq and I interviewed her for the upcoming exhibit we are co-curating on Teaching Design with People in Mind. When we asked Clare about some student drawings we had found in her folder at the Environmental Design Archives, she began to tell us the story of crafting the environmental autobiography assignment. Through deep self-reflections, Clare had realized there are profound affective ties between physical environments we experience and our psychological development. For example, her childhood spatial experiences such as living in the countryside after they were evacuated from London during World War Two and the solace she found in nature during a time of national disruption had influenced her adult life, career choices and her design work. Conscious of how uncovering those personal environmental experiences could shape our spatial values, Clare developed environmental autobiography as a teaching tool to help students became aware of their values and biases influencing their design. Latter, she developed variations of this approach for research leading to great books such as House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home. Over the years, many professionals in various fields have adopted what Clare started here at Berkeley five decades ago!

Ayda Melika

Can design solve social problems?

3/25/2015

People often ask me if design can solve social problems. Or more often I hear architects claim they can and I have to bite my tongue. So here are my thoughts:

Design is a Social Act: Most architectural designs inherently address social issues intentionally or not.
Design Matters: Architecture has positive and negative impacts on people and communities.
Design Cannot Solve Social Problems: On its own architecture cannot eliminate structural problems in society.

This may sounds pessimistic, and is certainly not what architecture students or professionals want to hear. Since the 19th century, when engineers and contractors threatened encroachment on their claim to primacy in building design, the architectural profession has distinguished itself by its ability to integrate artistic creativity and technical knowledge with a broad sense of social and environmental responsibilities. Much of the early modernist movement was based on the ideal that design could solve social problems. The failures of Utopian visions and experimental theories in the 1960s, which backfired either because of inherent flaws or poor execution due to the structural constraints of the society at the time, led post-structuralist architect theorists to throw off the idea that architects have any social responsibility in design at all. In recent years the pendulum seems to be swinging back to a very idealistic social mission for architecture.

While I embrace and want to further the sense of social responsibility and sensitivity of architects, it is just as important to temper the dangerously self-righteous sense of heroism, the mistaken belief that design alone can solve problems like poverty or injustice. Socially sensitive architectural design can solve physical problems that have social consequences, like improving poor quality housing or unsafe streets. Design may also be able to mitigate the symptoms or experiences of problems like segregation, crime, stigma, or disinvestment by altering the patterns of the built environment or changing its perception visually. But design cannot solve economic decline, poverty, racism, or discrimination; these problems are structural, defined by our fears, beliefs, values, policies, economic practices and laws.

Understanding the limits of what design can achieve need not discourage young idealistic designers who want to make change. It only challenges them to understand the true causes of the problems they are addressing and look for long-term solutions that combine design with structural reform rather than quick formal fixes. I would challenge the next generation of designers to fight for reform in the built environment and to take risks: making bold proposals for change that acknowledge of the complexity of issues while challenging the status quo.

The Legacy of Public Housing and White Flight

1/31/2015

Hold That Thought: Cities Episode #1 Design as a Social Act

This podcast produced by students from Washington University in St. Louis explores the problems of modernist planning and postwar sprawl and how social oriented design can address the legacies of failures in public housing projects and rust belt cities. This interview from 2011 was part of an engaging 10 part series for Hold That Thought podcast examining contemporary issues in urbanism.

https://thought.artsci.wustl.edu/topics/cities

Freedom of Art: Youth Activism Art Show, Yogyakarta, Indonesia

1/30/2015

Wandering through the streets of Yogyakarta one night, my friend Anne and I stumbled upon an inspiring art fair, Delayota Art #9: Towards Prosperity, celebrating the burgeoning freedom in Indonesia under President Joko Widodo, newly elected in July 2014. We were approached by a local high-school student, Sonya, who gave us a tour of the art, produced by three local high schools, illustrating their vision for the future of Indonesia. This art depicted the students’ optimism for the opportunities for prosperity and religious acceptance, and their gratitude for the growing freedom of speech and political expression. For several decades freedom of speech and other human rights issues had been a suppressed, and even during a visit in December, an international delegation visiting Indonesia raised concerns about the current state of media freedom. I was moved by how earnestly the student’s used their art to engage their own citizenship and their pride and enthusiasm in expressing their opinions. What will the future of Indonesia be? I hope these young people will get to realize their visions of prosperity, freedom and justice.

"Refromasi, Bebas, Berkreasi!": "Reform, Freedom, Creativity"

"Sejahtera: "Prosperous"