Abstract

CCA March Research Lab Fall 2011 Instructor: Neal Schwartz 9.7.11

The city should bring together the micro architectural and macro planning scales, the everyday realm and the urban, inside and outside, work and non-work, the everyday realm and the urban, the durable and the ephemeral, and so forth; it must be situated between the perceived and the lived. [Borden, Rendell, Kerr, and Pivaro p. 20] Recently my thoughts of finding ways in which I could activate some form of resistance within marginalized communities against gentrification, ethni-cleasing, capitalist agenda,and other structures of perceived power, fueled a thesis of trigger happy, militant, and possibly nave assumptions. By engaging my interests through the lens of the essay, Things, Flows, Filters, and Tactics, my thinking of marginality and affluence has begun to collapse. My initial interests of resistance, spatial autonomy, cultural emission, and bottom up development remain intact but now must reconcile with urban conditions of space, time, scale, representation, and the human subject. I am now summoned to define marginality and its inherent forms of social practice, both internal and external. The term marginality is often loosely used as a classification of under-privileged communities of color and noncolor.While my interests in marginality lie within class difference, neglecting other forms of marginalia concerning gender, race, sexuality, and faith would be antithetical to finding some kind of meaning. However, my focus has shifted to the physical boundary between marginal and affluent populations and the social practices internally,across, within, and around this unique urban condition. The boundary of North Oakland and South Berkeley on Market Avenue, the boundary between Hunter's Point and the Dogpatch district, Magnolia Projects and the French Quarters in New Orleans, or the favelas and high rise development in Rio de Janeiro are only a few cases that physically manifest this condition. While people make places and places make people, what could be the result of a place and people produced by a heterogeneous, ethni-social diverse body of inputs? I anticipate this [as Lefebvre mentions it] space to come as a driver into thesis work being productive or grounding theoretical findings into a material reality. My interests have shifted to the knowing of time and space. What is the knowing via the resident knowing the [U]rban purported by familiarity against the knowing of a place via the long time inhabitant in which diverse levels of citizen activism exists. What are the conflicts that arise between populations of different knowing transforming the spaces around them both productively or destructively simultaneously. Is there a medium between the two and what does this look and feel like? By engaging my interests in spatial autonomy and cultural emission, I hope to seek ways in which architecture liberated from program, but controlled and experienced at freewill, can celebrate this boundary's cultural and socio-economic differences. Maybe this is some passive do-gooder way of resisting this boundary's movement, but the potential that exists at his condition is overwhelming. While exploring monuments commemorating sites of war and death commissioned by former Yugoslavian president Josib Broz as documented in Jan Kemp's Spomenik: The End of History as precedence, my intentions are also to celebrate an evolutionary boundary: a site of history, life, death, and movement. Exploding the idea of looking like how do we shatter the representations of both spaces, the palace versus the project, and expose meaning at this condition where the two face each other. A space where our minds don't often process these images so proximate but rather isolated and dislocated. I am after the meaning of experiencing both at one locale physically, flesh and blood.