Please note: the Campaigning Architecture workshop will take a brief hiatus, so there will be no 2014 workshop.
CAMPAIGNING ARCHITECTURE
Chicago
As cities become more experimental than the institutions that attempt to design and govern them, the value that architects bring to the table lays not so much in the design of physical space, but in the visualization of the spatial politics of control, influence, and regulation of our urban environment. Campaigning Architecture decodes and makes visible this spatial politics in order to help promote strategies to enable alternative worlds.
In 2012, the workshop was based in Chicago and focused on the city’s micro and macro formations in order to reactivate architecture’s role through notions of lobbying architecture, active spectacles, performance profanities, and spatial graffiti. In 2013, the workshop was based in London and focused on the Hackney Wick / Fish Island community in London’s East End—squeezed by competing physical, economic, and political forces—to design a number of self-organizing strategies to promote key community interests while resisting property development. In 2014, the workshop returns to Chicago to build upon our research into the physical and political transformations of the city.
Participants of the Campaigning Architecture 2014 workshop will negotiate a site of spatial resistance in Chicago’s recent past. We will investigate and document why this resistance dissipated in the face of development. From this research we will produce a tactical toolkit to assist future acts of spatial resistance in order to promote supplemental and alternative design strategies.
