Architecture in Spaces of Crisis
The Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning awards the Wallenberg Scholarships each year in honor of Raoul Wallenberg, B.S.Arch.’35. Wallenberg is credited with single-handedly rescuing over 100,000 Jews from Nazi persecution in Budapest, Hungary, during World War II. The traveling scholarship, established by the Bernard L. Maas Foundation in 1986, acts as a reminder of Wallenberg’s courage and humanitarianism and is aimed at reflecting his ideals. The award gives undergraduate students the opportunity to broaden their study of architecture to include work in distant locations. The Wallenberg Studio honors the legacy of one of Taubman College’s most important alumni through an overall studio theme focused on a broad humanitarian concern, explored through propositions put forward by studio section faculty. Each year we ask: what is architecture’s relationship to the humanitarian; how does architecture take up a position in the world?
The 2016 Wallenberg Studio topic, REFUGE, was offered against the backdrop of the contemporary refugee crisis, as hundreds of thousands of individuals and families from the Middle East seek refuge in Western Europe, North America, and elsewhere. This crisis has received the ongoing attention of the media and activists but is one of many dire refugee situations historically and globally. The most obvious work of the architect in global issues of natural disaster, conflict, war, and oppression, is the provision of long- and short-term shelter. Architects such as Shigeru Ban, Charles Lai and Takehiko Suzuki as well as larger organizations and corporations such as Habitat for Humanity and IKEA, have designed temporary housing for earthquakes, floods, and displacement due to war, violence, or other capitalist-driven events that remake the established urban fabric in a very short amount of time. Many architects and activists, such as Eyal Weizman and Ai Weiwei, are working within the discipline of architecture and are contributing directly to global issues by dealing with more generally, constructed space.
Given the seemingly similar circumstances of global politics and education today and in the 1960s-70s, THE RADICAL AND THE PREPOSTEROUS: MIND THE GAP considered the discipline of architecture and engaged in discussions that assume the architect is responsible for all constructed space. This assumption drastically changes the definition of the role of the architect in global discourse and how the architect is educated in the 21st century. To launch these conversations we relied on Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, as referenced by the 2015 Wallenberg Medalist and Russian-American journalist, author and activist Masha Gessen. Conversations of architectural education drew upon Radical Pedagogies, the most recent work of professor of History and Theory of Architecture and director of the program in Media and Modernity, Beatriz Colomina.
Reliance on these two conversations, in conjunction with the introduction of work by Ai Weiwei, Rem Koolhaas, Noam Chomsky, Eyal Weizman and others, served to prompt students to develop deep and meaningful proposals and projects that addressed the all-studio prompt, REFUGE.
[Image produced in the studio, courtesy Dawn Gilpin.]
I. WALLENBERG STUDIO
The following readings offer background to and grounding for the Wallenberg Studios.
Raoul Wallenberg: the Heroic Life And Mysterious Disappearance of the Man Who Saved Thousands of Hungarian Jews From the Holocaust.
MacLehose
2015 Wallenberg Medal Presentation and Lecture
University of Michigan
The Man Without a Face: the Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin
Riverhead
2014 Wallenberg Medal Presentation and Lecture
University of Michigan
General Ethics
Blackwell
The Conscience of the Eye: the Design and Social Life of Cities
Knopf
Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias
Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité
II. THE RADICAL
These books, articles, and lecture speak to the RADICAL element of the 2016 studio.
Radical Pedagogies: Architecture Education in a Time of Disciplinary Instability
2014 Lecture Series, Learning Environments, KTH School of Architecture
Radical Pedagogies: Radical Pedagogies
Princeton University School of Architecture
Clip, Stamp, Fold: the Radical Architecture of Little Magazine 196x to 197x
Actar
The Universitas Project: Solutions for a Post-technological Society
Museum of Modern Art
Fundamentals: 14th International Architecture Exhibition
Marsilio
The Irrational Exuberance of Rem Koolhaas
Places Journal
The architect’s career embodies the inevitable contradictions in trying to marry art and capitalism, radicalism and pragmatism, icon-making and city-making.
III. THE PREPOSTEROUS
The book, conversation, and film listed here support the PREPOSTEROUS element of the 2016 studio.
The Origins of Totalitarianism
Harcourt, Brace & World
Constitutionally Speaking
PBS NewsHour
Hannah Arendt
Zeitgeist Films
IV: MIND THE GAP
The film and lectures in this section address the political potential of art and architecture covered in the 2016 studio.
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
MPI Home Video
Noam Chomsky 1997 On Propaganda
Forensis: Architecture at the Threshold of Detectability
The New How Lecture Series, Princeton University School of Architecture
Eyal Weizman: Forensic Architecture