[Pro]active architecture - Citizenship | Society | Economy Studio
The studio serves as an experimental urban laboratory for the critique and rethinking of the processes of change that physical environments and spaces undergo, through an examination of three dimensions: citizenship, society, and economy. In this context, the studio seeks to experiment with architecture as a civic act. In this sense, architecture is perceived, interpreted, analyzed, and formulated through civic action, which allows citizens to regenerate their relationships and connections with the physical, social, and political environment in which they live and operate.
The studio will focus on the role of architecture as an agent of cultural and social change in complex spaces: border spaces, temporary spaces, unstable spaces, forbidden spaces, and spaces that are created and formed out of political and ethno-national conflicts. Just as the relationship between architecture and the environment provides a basis for the formal and aesthetic formulation of public spaces and social and cultural structures, it is also the site of conflicts, inequality, violence, and various types of exclusion. Therefore, diagnosing situations, barriers, and spaces of potential, and analyzing them, are central to the pedagogical process that students will adopt as they contend with the challenge of architecture and the spaces of citizenship it creates and enables.
Investigation, analysis, and intervention in these spaces will be based on the application and activation of practical, research-based, design-planning, and pedagogical tools that stem from the uniqueness and specificity of that space. The work process in the studio is based on a research-design methodology, integrating and linking conceptual-theoretical development with the planning of architectural space—two processes that feed each other in the formulation of research questions and in the development of the project. The projects develop through an investigation of concepts such as: border and security, forbidden space and autonomous space, destruction and ruin, history and memory, housing and industry, and their reformulation in the specific context of the sphere of action.
The theoretical-planning process that the students advance is based on identifying and mapping the various forces that shape space, and on the attempt at a challenging and innovative reading of those forces. This process seeks to mediate between the interfaces of the top-down forces and institutions, and the bottom-up socio-economic and cultural forces. It aims to identify and analyze the intricate relationships between the different systems and to locate the potential space for action. In the gaps between the top-down and bottom-up forces, architecture will be perceived, interpreted, and will act as a civic act.
