Project Description
This studio's objective focused on highlighting the transition of immigrant living in the United States and how it is impacting the current urban built landscapes. This design studio's collaborative research emphasized the importance of providing an equitable built environment for communities that are often underprivileged and racialized in the Midwest cities. This SURF proposal plans to extend this ongoing research to promote more equitable and inclusive architectural practices within the academic and professional realm. This project is for undergraduate students with a mindset toward shifting community and professional norms. As part of this research, we will review some secondary sources that provide more insights into how immigrants view and seek justice in their current built environment. We will visit photographs, videos, and sketches from the current studio visits to investigate, analyze and compare the physical characters of different immigrant spaces to find some significant common patterns. The next phase would represent these built environment patterns through analytic diagrams and drawings and create some physical installations. The final phase would be to combine these drawings and installations into an exhibit that visualizes, analyze, and evaluate these unique spatialities created by new immigrant communities of different ethnic origins in their distinct urban contexts and present these research results to the broader communities through the exhibit.
Tasks and Responsibilites
Students will conduct research to understand the cultural landscape of immigrant communities and outreach to develop resources and projects with the goal of making architectural education more equitable and inclusive.
1) Students will collect precedents of immigrant place-making ideas, approaches, and community engagement projects, preferably from the Midwest cities in the United States.
2) They will document the physical characteristics and the common patterns of these immigrant spaces by making drawings, diagrams, and physical installations.
3) They will compile their understandings of everyday immigrant spaces and documentation of spaces into an exhibit at SARUP. This exhibit has the possibility to become a traveling exhibit to other institutional spaces and to these communities as well.