Unmaking the Bed
Drawing from the content of the seminar, Making the Bed, this studio seeks to unmake the premises upon which a good architecture is one that normalizes, standardizes, and sanitizes the spaces we inhabit. Starting from this premise, the interstice found between the two typologies that assure such a precondition—the hospital and the home—is a heterotopic place. This recognition serves as a tool to problematize the role architects play in the mediation between the discipline and the systems that govern its production. To achieve this, the studio proposes the analysis of a city by individuating the strategies that, informed by medical discourses, were deployed as the actual technique of its realization. The site for this analysis is the city of New Orleans.
Students were encouraged to respond to this collective site by questioning the architectural types that have, historically, allowed for a reading of domestic life as separate as possible of sickness, death, strangers, nature and the other (i.e. the hospital, the cemetery, the garden, the hotel, and the townhouse). Then, by taking these types as a given, students had to “project” strategies that rethink their established arrangements of space and the expected interaction these have in our everyday life. Therefore, each project is first a collective effort seeking to answer the premise of the studio and then an individual contribution that puts forward a personal architectural agenda.