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Examining role of user in architecture
Experts in the design of the bathroom, cybernetics in architecture and the spatial dimensions of aging are among the speakers at “Before and Beyond: Architecture and the User,” a two-day symposium currently under way in the School of Architecture and Planning.
The event, which features presenters from the U.S., Canada and Europe, is free and open to the public. Panels began yesterday and will continue today in 301 Crosby Hall, South Campus. A complete schedule is available online.
As its title suggests, the symposium is exploring how architecture and urban design deal with matters of use.
As Omar Khan, chair of the Department of Architecture, explains: “If we define people as users of space, it frames architecture and urban design with specific functions, with very particular goals.
“But if we understand space not as something to be used, but as something that we are symbiotic with, we might come to different conclusions,” Khan says. “We don’t ‘use’ nature. Some people would say that the concept of the ‘user’ is inhumane, that it turns people into something more mechanical.”
The goal of the symposium, Khan says, is to question what the concept of the “user” means in this particular moment in time—in the early part of the 21st century—as sustainability, pervasive computing and other forces shape design.
The symposium was organized by Kenny Cupers, the School of Architecture and Planning’s 2010-11 Reyner Banham Fellow, whose research focuses on the role of the user in modern architecture and urbanism.
Teddy Cruz, the university’s 2011 Clarkson Chair in Architecture, delivered a keynote address yesterday titled “Creative Acts of Citizenship: Performing Neighborhoods.”
Today, Cruz, an architect and educator who has researched the transborder urban dynamics between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, will lead a public discussion titled “Empowering Users, Empowering Architecture?”
Other presenters include Mariana Mogilevich of Harvard University, whose talk is titled, “Opening the City: Landscape and Participation in 1960s New York,” and Barbara Penner of the University College London, whose talk is titled, “Redesigning Taboos: Ergonomics, Alexander Kira and the Bathroom.”
Jeremy Till, dean of the University of Westminster’s School of Architecture and the Built Environment, is presenting the closing keynote address, “Will the Real User Please Stand Up?” at 6 p.m.
In conjunction with the symposium, an exhibition, “In Search of the User,” is on display in the Hayes Hall Lobby through April 22. Curated by Cupers, the exhibition examines the intersection of architecture and social sciences in postwar France, and features a video triptych recounting the making of Villeneuve, a symbol of French attempts to create an alternative urban lifestyle during the 1970s.
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