CAMPAIGNING ARCHITECTURE
21 June — 5 July 2013, London
Campaigning Architecture
The workshop will campaign architecture for strategies that engage the city like no other. Campaign strategies—from the London Cycling Campaign to provide a collective voice for the City’s cyclists; to the cross-party campaign to bring London’s air quality into compliance with World Health Organization standards; to London’s successful bid for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games—are executed as an amalgamation of military-like precision and haphazard logic. We will mine the effectiveness of campaigning to enable architecture to successfully navigate the social, political, and economic networks that make a city tick.
Workshop participants will work towards a collective project. The exact site and design scope will be determined by the workshop participants. The workshop will begin with a visit to several possible sites. This will be followed by a series of rampant idea generation discussions, which will critiqued and edited to shape a formal proposal. This proposal will then be developed for the rest of the workshop, with participants when necessary splitting into smaller subgroups to develop different aspects of the project.
Campaigning a Hedonistic Reactivation
The workshop will campaign new modes of urban intervention for a hedonistic reactivation of a fatigued site in London’s East End. Workshop participants will combine the potential of design intelligence with the strategic power of propaganda in order to campaign provocative changes to our urban environment.
Campaigning the Creative Commons
The traditional marriage between copyright law and designs that aim to create significant change often leads to ineffective scenarios. This must change. So while the workshop will focus on a particular site, we will also campaign the Creative Commons to make it possible for this project to be copied, adapted, distributed, and deployed elsewhere.