Recent demonstrations in public spaces of our cities are confirming a profound crisis of political institutions worldwide. While citizens are claiming a change in national political agendas to ask for more focus on their own everyday life concerns and less on global finances, public squares are emerging as places of political discussion. Moved by this contemporary interest, Intermediate Unit 8 have worked on redefining what constitutes a public space today, which is the role of the architect and the agency of people, and how innovation on fabrication methods might serve as fundamental tools for constructing a city of the commons.

This year the work of the unit has been located in the city of Mexico, a metropolis developed under neoliberal rules for the last two decades. The particular site for the unit work has been the massive modernist housing complex of Tlatelolco, and more specifically, the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. This urban square is well known not only for the mixed presence of Aztec, Spanish Colonial and Modernist constructions, but also for its past political life including the students’ massacre before 1968 Olympic Games. Based on a confrontation with the everyday life in the city, students have researched on the most “mundane” contemporary issues, including insecurity, informal economy, drug cartels, social segregation or cultural repression. These issues are the ones employed as alternative micro-agendas to inform the public space of today. After intense research and reflection on the realities of the city, students have proposed different material and programmatic tactics, reflecting on how traditional construction methods can be used to generate new fabrication techniques in which citizens have a more active role. Therefore, social participation and public action are considered a fundamental part in the definition of new political spaces as an endless process of contestation, negotiation and transformation.

28.9.11

W2 IMMEDIATE GOVERNANCE: WINDOWS, DOORS, AND TRANSITS

This first conceptual workshop questions the role of Morwell Street in your everyday life at the Architectural Association. Along the development of the academic year, this street gathers together not only students and staff from the AA, but also a wide range of different individuals from the city, including drug dealers, junkies, office workers, tourists, etc. Even though Morwell Street location is strategic in the relationship between the architectural environment of the school and the London context, its spatial configuration has not been reconsidered since the AA expansion, normally assumed as a banal situation. This first workshop proposes to reconsider doors, walls, windows, pavement and the public space of the street itself in order to articulate the relations between AA students and the different individuals who inhabit this particular in-between place.

Seminar “Reassessing the immediate: Doors & Windows” by Francisco Gonzalez de Canales.


Suggested Readings Robin Evans, “Figures, Doors and Passages” in Translations from drawings to building and other essays, London: AA Publications, 1997, pp. 55-91. Bruno Reichlin, “The Pros and Cons of the Horizontal Window: The Perret-Le Corbusier Controversy”, in Daidalos 13, 1984, pp. 65-78.
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