ARCH 442: UG4 / Winter 2020 / Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning / The University of Michigan

UG4 faculty: Dawn Gilpin, Matiss Groskaufmanis, Mireille Roddier (coord.), Jon Rule, Craig Wilkins, Peter Yi from the margins

The 2020 Raoul Wallenberg Studios

Faith Ringgold Woman on a Bridge #1 of 5: Tar Beach 1988

This is an intervention. A message from that space in the margin that is a site of creativity and power, that inclusive space where we recover ourselves, where we move in solidarity to erase the category colonized/colonizer. Marginality as a site of resistance. Enter that space. Let us meet there. Enter that space. We greet you as liberators.

I am located in the margin. I make a definite distinction between that marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures and that marginality one chooses as site of resistance—as location of radical openness and possibility.

bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness” in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, No. 36 (1989): 23.

Resistance, at root, I think, must mean more than resistance against war. It is a resistance against all kinds of things that are like war. Because living in modern society, one … is robbed

permanently of humanness, the capacity of being oneself. … So perhaps, first of all, resistance means opposition to being invaded, occupied, assaulted, and destroyed by the system. The purpose of resistance, here, is to seek the healing of yourself in order to be able to see clearly. This may sound as though it falls short of a positive act of resistance. Nevertheless, it is very basic.

I think that communities of resistance should be places where people can return to themselves more easily, where the conditions are such that they can heal themselves and recover their wholeness.

Thích Nhât Hạnh, “Communities of Resistance,” In The raft is not the shore (Orbis, 1975)

How do we explore the meaning of Resistance in the context of architectural education?

Raoul Wallenberg was trained as an architect at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1935. He is remembered for his anti-Nazi acts of resistance during World War II, which ended with his arrest in 1945. Many have speculated on the influence of his architectural education on his actions and tactical thinking.

Resistances exist dualistically with defined Occupations. What occupying forces threaten today’s collective wellbeing, from the most visible to the least often identified? Is the aim of a resistance to

annihilate an occupation, or to start with rendering it visible? Can we operate in the margins architecturally, without the risk of disclosing them as center stage? We are to understand margins,

undergrounds, alleyways, shadows, backstages, pochés, spaces of disinvestment, irregulated spaces, etc, as sites of creativity and power, such as enabling freedom of action, of being, of becoming.

In 1944, stationed as a Swedish diplomat in Budapest, Raoul Wallenberg bribed German, Hungarian and Russian officers and authorities; he faked signatures and distributed thousands of fake Swedish passports to Hungarian and German Jews, identifying them as Swedish citizens and protecting them from inevitable deportation; he rented dozens of buildings throughout Budapest and disguised them as Swedish public institutions benefiting from diplomatic immunity. Transformed into safe houses, these buildings protected thousands. Wallenberg’s actions combined saved over a hundred thousand lives.

If the dominant order reinforces existing and oppressive hierarchies that benefit a restricted ruling minority, how can the margins offer a shelter from these power structures?

A space whose rules are written by the communities who define and inhabit it?

DE—COMMISSIONThis studio is based on a premise that both architecture and the economy at large are geared towards the production and consumption of “more” at an unsustainable rate. There is an insatiable appetite for more products, services, and experiences, but also more design, more floor area, more performance, and more added value. At the same time, the degradation of the environment (be it air, soil or water) is constantly reminding us of the potentially fatal side effects of this expansion- and performance- driven development.

In search for alternatives, students will explore decommissioning as an architecture practice. Rooted in the fringe ideology ofde-growth, the studio will experiment with forms of architectural production that seeks to slow down the destructive economic processes through strategic erosion of built form. By identifying clashes between intentions and value, meaning and utility, each decommissioning project will be de-veloped as a counter-proposal to a fully operational building, reconsidering the question of what makes architecture useful.

Throughout the weeks we will investigate concepts such as obsolescence, subtraction, and deconstruction. Designs will engage with multiple scales, ranging from spatial prosthetics to full dismantlement. Each de-commissioning plan will attempt to destabilize the authority of expansion-driven developments by producing new meanings, programs, and narratives, and perhaps suggesting unconsidered possibilities for things to become less than the sum of their parts.

Matīss Groskaufmanis, ARCH 442 – Architectural Design IV (UG4). Mon, Wed, Fri 1:00-5:00pm 3100 A&AB

Securing Shelter:Design for domestic inclusion

As urban centers grow, new pressures are being applied to the social and demographic fabric of cities. Housing development tends to cater to market trends and is driven by economic demands that have and will continue to exclude. As a result, housing that is affordable tends to be built on low cost land at the periphery and is marginalized from opportunities that cities provide. This demographic segregation based on public policy and real estate markets are what render our cities as homogenous spaces, devoid of social diversity. The one size fits all nuclear family, which dominated housing design of the 20th century, is disappearing. This paradigmatic shift has asked us as architects to begin to envision housing for post-familial needs. However, within this flurry of excitement to provide new ideas for collective living, we are still slow to respond to the basic need of shelter for those suffering from homelessness, disabilities, mental-illness and addiction.

In response to the need a more inclusive housing strategy, this studio will explore the development of alternative forms of housing in our cities for marginalized communities. We will concern ourselves with the design of shelter that is adaptable to the flexible and intertwined network of familial relationships, challenged economics and culture aspirations of all of our urban residents. We will question the quotidian notions of what constitutes domestic space which often reveal tight allotments of square footage and compartmentalization of spaces with inherent naming conventions that imply single use, inflexible scenarios of inhabitation. Through design and architecture, we will respond to the seemingly simple statement that we all need shelter, but what is it?

University of Michigan Taubman College ARCH442|Wallenberg Studio Winter 2020

Jonathan RuleMon + Wed + Fri 1-5pm

“It is the first and most important, the moral element of architecture. Around it were grouped the three other elements: the roof, the enclosure, and the mound, the protecting negation or defenders of the hearth’s flame against the three hostile elements of nature.”

Gottfried Semper, ‘The Four Elements of Architecture’

Star Apartments, Michael Maltzan, 2014

WALLENBERG:FROM THE MARGINS

Arch 442 - Winter 2020 - Taubman College - Meeting Times: Mon, Wed, Fri, (1:00 pm - 5:00 pm)

Yona Friedman, Centre Georges Pompidou extension

We will treat research and design as the same. We will strive to not only understand the sensorial experience of built form, but also the social relationships physical space engenders. Over the semester, we will constantly flicker back and forth between the margins and the center in increasing frequency until we arrive at the design proposal. Although the studio will ultimately make architectural propoals, we will not be focused as much on the single building as we will be on building parts, and their positioning within and reconfiguration of both visible and invisible structures.

The studio will study supportive housing as a point of departure for understanding housing as not just a means to an end, but also how collectivity may provide shared resources that in turn empower the individual. Such types include housing for the homeless, SRO’s, and senior communities.Furthermore, we will not just be content with staying in the margins, but explore how this position becomes a place of action to rethink how to live in the center. Toward that goal, we will also study the underlying tectonic, social, and economic structures that regulate the center in search of opportunistic moments of engagement.

Instructor: De Peter Yi

Throughout the twentieth century, architects have used mass housing as a testing ground for giving agency to new publics. Today, the dense processes of privatization have transformed housing into a mass template, repeated ad nauseam under the pretense that one model of living fits all. In response, architecture can operate from marginalized points of society to distill latent models that critique and reconfigure the ubiquitous yet rarely questioned structures that organize our quotidian lives.

Ken Isaacs, Beach Matrix, c. 1967