Beyond Pruitt-Igoe 4.08.09 From the Architects Newspaper Blog covered by Julia Galef
"The University of Pennsylvania School of Design sought to bring social equity back into architectural discourse last weekend with a conference called “Unspoken Borders: The Ecologies of Inequality,” hosted by the Black Student Alliance. Architects have been skittish about addressing large-scale social issues ever since the profession’s notorious Pruitt-Igoe-style failures in the 1960’s, said presenter Craig Wilkins. Since then, he added, the predominant attitude among architects has been, “‘We’re not doing that again. They got mad at us the last time we did that!’”
"Amidst the discussion of what designers can do about social inequities, a related question emerged: should design education address the root causes of those inequities? “There’s no lack of design-build studios going out to poor neighborhoods to build houses, but there’s no discussion [in architecture school] of why those neighborhoods exist,” said architect Kian Goh. But isn’t there a trade-off between expertise and generalism? Some participants thought so, and urban designer Felipe Correa countered: “It is important that we not overextend the net, that we bring it back to what we know how to do best,” he argued. “Allow sociologists to deal with the sociology.”
Visit http://blog.archpaper.com/wordpress/2009/04/08/beyond-pruitt-igoe/#more-2081 for complete article.
COMMENTS?
Design between architecture’s practice and academy for areas in need.
Image by Dwight Cendrowski
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment