Summer 2020 Research Projects
Project Director & Lead Instructor: Gustavo Leclerc
Students: UHI 2019-20
As COVID-19 cancelled plans to travel and enact spatial interventions with partners in Mexico City, students adapted with a series of proposals for self-initiated interdisciplinary research. Independently or in small groups, they produced work that melded yet-unexplored interests with the core themes and principles of UHI.
La Lotería
Author: Ethan Ma
“Four Manifestos” puts avant-gardist architecture manifestos in dialogue with letters written by architecture students demanding more equitable practices from their institutions following the Black Lives Matter protests in summer 2020. A combination of physical modeling and textual manipulation call into question ideas of authorship, the malleability of the past, and visions for the future of the architecture world.
Four Manifestos
Author: Cassie Hoeprich (Akana Jayewardene, Tiffany Orozco, Lili Raygoza)
Prompted by a call to create a dynamic, digital eCodex, inspired and informed by ancient and contemporary Mesoamerican codices, this project represents a phenomenological approach to the aspects of spatial translation, “space-making” and the construction of identity, via corporeal-temporal-spatial orientation.
The resulting product is entitled eCodex: Los Angeles Trans-Culturation. It is a body of work composed of symbols and stories that reflect the performative placemaking that defines the immigrant and indigenous diaspora as it manifests in Los Angeles’s Westlake / MacArthur Park neighborhood.
eCodex: Los Angeles Trans-Culturation
Authors: Jenn Peterson Ruiz and Artin Sahakian
As the world grows increasingly urban, so grows the imperative to fully comprehend the spaces that make up our socio-cultural collective. Architects and their allies have an ethical duty and professional responsibility to protect the public’s health, safety and welfare, while also creating spaces and places that exude life and community. The complexity of these spaces calls for intellectual and professional alliances to be formed within the education of the architect to better place ourselves within present-day society and not merely be of service, but to act with the knowledge and understanding of our power to reshape society itself.
Thus, we are defining cross-disciplinary collaboration as an acknowledgement of strengths and inevitable engagement of pursuits to achieving progress within the built environment. Meaningful engagement with the challenges of cross-disciplinary collaboration becomes essential for successfully leveraging architectural design to affect social justice. Individuals with expertise across a range of disciplines should be understood as stakeholders across all scopes of a project, including initiation, planning, implementation, and reflection. This necessitates a dissolution of existing dichotomies between expert and community, designer and user.
Socio-Spatial Agency
Impact of Culture Hubs - Lviv & Kyiv, Ukraine
Roya Chagnon and Andres Gonzalez
Recognizing the creative power youth have, and the value of exposing youth to planning and design processes, we created a curriculum for participatory design with K-12 students. It includes a 75 -page guide compiling research and instructions for activities that can be done in the classroom or virtually. Additionally, we designed a toolbox that includes all the supplies necessary for each student which can be easily distributed during the pandemic.
By including youth in these processes, planners and designers can make more informed, equitable decisions, and can help break cycles of inequity by empowering youth (especially youth of color) to participate in the decisions being made in their community.
Environmental Design at a Distance: A Youth-Centered Approach to Participatory Design
Authors: Cristina Vázquez and Clayton McKee
The Mediterranean Sea has been a means of contact between Africa, Asia, and Europe throughout the history of humanity. This importance continued throughout the 20th and 21st centuries as migratory traffic increased from Africa to Europe, where immigrants hope to discover more opportunities and a better life. This project seeks to explore the diasporic connections between north and sub-Saharan Africa as represented in literature and media. These maps seek to show the conflicting narratives that exist in France and Spain surrounding immigrant populations and so-called “pure-blood” Europeans, highlighting the systemic blocks between immigrant and host society, while simultaneously demonstrating the changes immigrants go through in order to conform, or at the very least survive, in a new locale.