Rebecca Medeiros_Assignment3b

The responsibility of an architect is to observe, listen, and respond to the needs of people within a society, culture, or region. Each group of people has a variety of characteristics, traditions, behaviors, values, and beliefs that make them unique and specific to that place. It is through the eyes of the architect to become one with the rural or cityscape including its history, traditions, people, social activities, and behavioral conditions. What is a need within a neighborhood or community? What are the conditions of a space and why? What are routines and traditions of everyday people that could be improved or highlighted? A variety of questions can be created in terms of discovering the essence and nation of a people in a specific place. A piece of architecture, whether new, old, or a combination of the two, needs to respond to the people, the user and audience of the intervention.

What does responding to the people mean? Does the community participate in the design process? If the people are deeply rooted in the place and resist change, then the job of an architect becomes very challenging. There becomes a struggle between creating an imitation of exactly the surroundings or an interpreting the meanings, traditions, and cultures to create a new intervention. Stating that an architect needs to respond to a people and culture does not necessarily mean that the process and methodology to make this possible is known or developed. In the process of researching, it is my goal to discover when in time this responsiveness and participatory architecture took place and the architecture that this approach created, as well as learning how people respond to an architect and a new piece of architecture. An architect needs to adapt to the people but how will the people adapt once the architect is gone and the construction is over? Caring for the people and what they care about is essential in learning how to design in a way that will accentuate people, highlight their culture, allow them to thrive, and improve their well-being.

Questions:

Audience Specific-User

Architecture as a listener of people

-People, Culture (social activity, behavioral conditions).

-For the user, and the people who create society.

-Integrate architecture with chaos, vibrancy of city.

-Integrate architecture and people.

-Participatory architecture- community effort, architect as “cultivator,” look at needs and traditions of people.

-Surrounding elements-cityscape, materials, form, scale, etc.

1. How can an architect evaluate and embrace culture in a way that does not misrepresent, devalue, or create stereotypes among the inhabitants?

2. Can a new architecture “listen” and respond to an existing culture and be built in a way that is in relation and dialogue to its people and situation?

References

Harris, Steven, Â , and Deborah Berke. 1997. Architecture of the everyday /. New York, N.Y.: Princeton Architectural Press.

George Baird, Douglas Kelbaugh, Rahul Mehrotra, 2005. Everyday Urbanism: Margaret Crawford vs. Michawl Speaks. New York: Distributed Arts Press.

Jencks, Charles. 1973. Modern movements in architecture. Anchor Books ed. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books.

Jencks, Charles and Karl Kropf. 2006. Theories and manifestoes of contemporary architecture. 2nd ed. Chichester, England ;Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Academy.

Kwon, Miwon. 2004. One place after another:Site-specific art and locational identity. 1st MIT Press paperback edition ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Sasaki, Yoji. 1989. Peter walker, landscape as art [Pītā Wōkā, āto toshite no randosukēpu /[editor-in-charge, Yoji Sasaki]]. Tokyo, Japan: Process Architecture Pub. Co.