a society of rooms

Now, in the midst of a tragic pandemic, concurrently inspired by a renewed and growing movement pressing toward social justice, we need to ask: How do we build a healthy society? Certainly, we have much we can do as citizens. But what can we do as professionals? It's especially critical in this moment, when one could argue that the profession of architecture, as it has been practiced, is rapidly becoming obsolete ... if it isn't already. With so much shifting around us, what should be our role? What value can we add?

Our program brief for "a society of rooms" will be a community facility in downtown Atlanta. The building's first purpose will be for education, but it will not be aligned with a university, school, or other institution. We can safely assume that the community's needs will shift over time, so, while we will be asked to propose a series of spaces for one constellation of activities, we will also need to provide a measure of flexibility, allowing the rooms to accommodate other uses as they emerge.

Radical Good Trouble

We will focus our inquiry on the historic Paschal’s site at 830 Martin Luther King Drive. “The restaurant was the unofficial headquarters for the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s. Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders frequently convened here for strategy sessions, planning their protest marches, sit-ins, and voter registration drives.”

In order to make proposals for what is to come, we must first understand what exists today and the history of what was there before. Our challenge will be to fully reconcile the current conditions of the site while also recognizing its complicated and rich past. Through our reading of the site and surroundings, we will offer design solutions that not only build upon its cultural and social history but also look to the future to script the next chapter. Our efforts will reframe this site through the inherently optimistic acts of making and building. We will ask if it is possible to heal the physical and emotional wounds of a place through architecture. Simultaneously, we will seek to balance the external forces of unintended consequences, unpredictability, and contingency.

GREEN NEW DEAL SUPERSTUDIO

The overlapping problems of economic injustice, climate change and global ecological collapse remain with us and are even more urgent. It is time for architects and urban designers to re-engage the city.

With participating universities across the country, the GREEN NEW DEAL SUPERSTUDIO, sponsored by the Landscape Architecture Foundation, will curate a national collection of proposals to translate and make spatially visible the scale, scope and pace of transformations in a national vision for a Green New Deal.

Three teams will prepare radically practical urban design proposals with the public domain as a framework for proposed future private buildings and gardens all following the theme – Land+Water+City.

FABRICATED HOMESCAPES: Prototypes of Urban Domesticity in Los Angeles

This studio is a space of questioning and experimentation, to reframe our ideas about housing and its urban role and to refresh obsolete paradigms. Here and through the agency of architecture, students will design dense mix-use prototypes that creatively speculate with contemporary forms of domesticity and urbanity able to reinstate lost urban values. Research will be carried to learn about the status quo, ground discussions and dissect relevant precedents. Projects will experiment with the definition of home and city, unit and system; with public-private adjacencies; with modularity and aggregation strategies; with new materialities and construction logics; with use and propriety models and domestic economies; to support their explorations on how to design, build and live more responsibly.