Unseen Characters II
Other Ways of Knowing Buildings
SuperStudio 3
David Capener, Lecturer in Architecture
Dr Martina Murphy, Associate Head of School
“What architectural supports have to be in place for each of us to exercise a certain freedom of movement, one that is necessary in order to exercise the right to public assembly”?
Judith Butler
This semester the Unseen Characters studio will explore the concept of The Public House.
Peter Cook / Crab Studio — Kiosk
This will lead us to a number of questions: What kinds of architectures and infrastructures might facilitate and sustain the production and performance of public space? Who are the unseen characters in public space? Who gets to be seen? And, what infrastructures and architectures have to be in place to facilitate the production and performance of public space.
To help us answer the question of what kinds of architectures and infrastructures might facilitate and sustain the performance of public space, we will be rethinking what it is we mean when we talk about public space. But as we begin to think about what it is we mean when we talk about public space, we will quickly discover something much more interesting and much more important: Public space does not exist it is produced.
Matrix Collective — Feminist Postcard 2
STUDIO RESEARCH STATEMENT
Research Questions and Theme
How is public space produced? It is performed. This is the theme that we will be exploring in this semester: Unseen characters and the performance of public space.
That public space is produced is a centuries old story. The Greek agora, often written about in architectural history books as the model for public space was inaccessible to most women, slaves or foreigners. A public square but only for certain kinds of public. A public space coded by legislation, laws and cultural and societal norms. Who is permitted to perform public space is therefore a matter of who is deemed seeable and who is deemed unseeable — the unseen. It is a matter of the production of the conditions that are needed for public space — the contestation of the right to perform public space.
Description and Methods
As we begin to explore these themes, we will see that to describe space as either public or private is to reduce it to a binary that is incapable of accounting for the richness and complexity of spatial production. When we think like this, we can no longer understand space as simple binary oppositions all too common in architectural discourse: public / private; inner / outer; urban / suburban, rather the city becomes a “matter of entanglements between small objects and bodies, discourses and power.” Nor can the complexity of spatial production be captured by traditional forms of architectural representation that reduce the multiplicity of forces at work down to a single concept or category, such as public or private space. When this happens the question must always be: who do these representations favour? In whose service are they working? Who gets to be seen? Who remains unseen? We must remember that "there exists no privileged vantage-point from which to attain panopticity in representations of the city.”i When we move our idea of so-called public space from the abstract to the concrete and performed our cities can become "a breathing, dancing example of what a liberated public space might look like.
As we explore these themes, we will discover that what public space is is much less important than what public space does — if we want public space then we are going to have to understand how to do public space.
Architecture plays a significant role in this conversation: “More than ever we need forms of political opposition that are rich in alternatives, concrete in propositions and attached to everyday projects.” As theorist Judith Butler writes, “material environments are part of the action,” the question for us as designers is how do we help shape material environments that contribute to the performance of public space. She asks, “what architectural supports have to be in place for each of us to exercise a certain freedom of movement, one that is necessary in order to exercise the right to public assembly”?
This semester we will consider architectural supports as facilitative infrastructure that produce different kinds of public spaces. We will understand infrastructure by going back to the meaning of its Latin root: Infra meaning ‘below’ and structure meaning ‘the arrangement of and relations between the parts or elements of something complex’. So we will take infrastructure to mean the complex structures, networks and forces that often operate below the surface of perception.
How might these infrastructures produce a new kind of public house for Belfast?
Findings and Disseminations
Design a public house for Belfast.
Our site is one of Belfast’s most important buildings, the former headquarters of the Unite Union, the grade B+ listed, Transport House (102 High Street, Belfast).
Using the theme of the public house as our starting point our brief will be to make proposals to adapt and reuse the existing building. The parameters for this are as follows:
No waste. Anything that you remove from the building must be reused either somewhere else in the building or as part of an urban intervention in the city.
Take a position. The building is listed. You do not need to follow the rules of the listing. However, you must justify any changes that you make.
STUDIO RULES
RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for a while.
RULE TWO: General duties of a student — pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.
RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher — pull everything out of your students.
RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.
RULE FIVE: Be self-disciplined — this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
RULE SIX: Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.
RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.
RULE EIGHT: Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.
RULE NINE: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
RULE TEN: “We’re breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.” (John Cage)
HINTS: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everything — it might come in handy later.
The list, is the work of the celebrated artist and educator Sister Corita Kent and was created as part of a project for a class she taught in 1967-1968. It was subsequently appropriated as the official art department rules at the college of LA’s Immaculate Heart Convent It was commonly popularized by John Cage, whom the tenth rule cites directly.
Creative Black Country — Desi Pub Project
For more information on this SuperStudio, please contact David Capener