Discipline: ASU Architecture Journal 08

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Discipline 08

SHIFT 2022

ARCHITECTURE JOURNAL AT ASU

We shift in space, we have shifted our gaze.

This issue of Discipline asks how the collective architectural world has responded to a shift in contemporary thinking and approaches towards design.

How have we re-imagined our space? How have we adapted to a permanent shift? What does it mean to be an architectural student today? We, as a society, have been placed in a unique, reflective position wherein we must shift our perspective on our own lived experiences starting with menial and branching out to systematic. Discipline 08 is a collection of diverse perspectives at these different scales and lenses as it relates to our social and built environment.

Letter from the Editor

Letter from the Committee

I am honored to present the eighth issue of ASU Discipline journal, Shift.

This issue reflects the process of reintegrating ourselves back into the social environment that we all longed for during the pandemic. Through this process, we look at what it means to enter into these social settings and how architecture can be informed by our change in awareness.

Discipline is a student-run digital and print journal highlighting student, faculty and local architecture projects associated with the ASU School of Architecture. A new organization, the journal has published seven issues, guiding conversations around the school’s efforts to reconstruct and redesign the curriculum to better connect academia to practice.

This issue encourages us to recognize the various ways in which we as students, designers, and people can critically observe our surroundings, practice, and perspective to redefine the world through our own lenses. We can hear in the voices and interests of all submittees the diversity of thought and boundaries of which we must reconsider. This topic is evermore impactful when thinking of our socio-political climate, battling pandemics, wars, and inequity. As we address these topics, it is absolutely important to recognize the perspective to which we come to our solutions and understand that a collaborative and communal perspective is the most powerful one in moving the cultural zeitgist forward positively.

I am very grateful to have been given this opportunity to lead this year’s team in putting together this issue. Thank you to my team of undergraduate and graduate editors. Thank you to my predecessors who I have leaned on in this process. Thank you to everyone at AIAS, our new parent organization, for funding and organizing the team. And last, thank you to Marc Neveu, Phil Horton, and Mitzvah Estevez for your mentorship and guidance.

I look forward to see how Discipline grows in future years and am beyond certain the team that follows me will lead it graciously.

Editor, Ananth Udupa

The Discipline team collaborated to bring together the ideas of professionals, faculty, and students.

The goal was to push people to think about the change that they have seen over the past year, not only surrounding the pandemic but deeper than that. How have our conversations and ideas begun to alter and adapt to our newfound consciousness of the world?

Having spoken to a range of people both in and around the Design School, we share the stories of the individuals who help drive the change. We encourage you to consider the shift that has occurred in your life, no matter how small and help guide discussions forward. The world of architecture has forever changed in the span of a year. The discipline journal pushes us to have a conversation about these subtle or great changes. The Discipline Team collaborated to hear from students, faculty, professionals, and anyone a part of the Design School in any shape or form to listen to the facets of life forming our corner of Design North and South.

We must be aware that our surroundings are not the same anymore, and the pandemic is no longer to blame. In the process of these conversations, we indirectly experienced an understanding toward each other. We have all experienced the shift like a subtle earthquake juggling the Design School; however, there was nothing said about it. We jumped through zoom meetings and hustled between classes.

We have entered our offices with morning coffee. We have done everything again to recreate our form of normalcy, but things are not the same. We are not the same. As a team, we thought to voice out these experiences with a shift to rediscover the art of architecture.

Amalia DeSardi Mac Wood Ashley Ontiveros Kaya Razzo Sophie Aprotosoaie-Kardos Rodrigo Enriquuez

INTERVIEW

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Athoub Hasan

2

Design Justice Initiative

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Andres De Locha

Christian Solorio

14

Using Architecture to Create Healing Space

Rashad Shabazz

20

Allison Edwards & Brennan Richards

22

Erick Hernandez

26

Ashley Ontiveros

30

Clara Riess

38

Sophie Aprotosoaie-Kardos

40

Ananth Udupa

42

Avery Moric

ESSAY

Selina Martinez Cycles of Plurality

Ashley Ontiveros Shift to Service

Brianna Tsatskin The Shift around Stigmas

Marc Neveu Architecture at ASU

Julia Lopez Create + Play

Rodrigo Enriquez

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Imaginaries of Humanitarian Design

Community of Care

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Shelter

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In a Change

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Untitled

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A Graft onto the Design School

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Integrating Community Voices in Practice

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Amalia DeSardi

84

Kaya Razzo

86

Biomimicry Design and Drawing

Mannu School

Natalie Severy

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The American Dream

Reflection in Shift

Ananth Udupa

58

Healing through Simple Gestures

Biomimicry

Mac Wood

56

Shadow

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Wanda Dalla Costa

The Demolition of the Kistler Building

SUBMISSION

Olivia Webb

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Elena Rocchi In Praise of the Unwritten Page

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INTER VIEW 1

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Athoub Hasan

a conversation with Rodrigo Enriquez Rodrigo Enriquez: What were your expectation coming into the Architecture Program In ASU? Athoub Hasan: I didn’t have the highest expectations. It’s interesting because I really didn’t know what to expect. While I was deciding my major I thought about it very vaguely. I thought architecture would be a hit or a miss.

I was really questioning if I should change my major, how interesting it could be…. As much as I love design, a huge reason why I question my major was because I only envisioned architecture as strictly design.

I love other aspects of work. I love a good challenge. I love interacting with people. I love history and I love pursuing different cultures.

Initially, I didn’t see that in the architecture program.

Maybe it was a good thing, I came into the program with no idea what to expect which made me very excited and very open to a new experience

Athoub Hasan, a first year International Architecture Student from Bahrain. She came into the ASU Architecture program in search for a fulfilling and enriched experience.

So far, I’ve really been enjoying what my professors have taught me, they introduced these programs and projects as challenges,

and they are helping us question ideas on a humanitarian level. Questions like: How do architects serve people and serve communities? What makes a successful building, how it serves the people versus it’s aesthetics?

So I think my perspective shifted when I started to really explore these different aspects of architecture. These were the deciding factors, and there was no way I was going to change my major because I just grew to love my work. I will say it was an eye opening experience, to think that architecture isn’t just about drawing, it isnt about just a building. It’s so much more and it’s such a huge part of society that we don’t ever think about.

I’m so happy that you found an interest in architecture! Something that I truly believe in is that architecture is all around us: every street, house, object, and even how the people get to interact. Architecture is truly beautiful, and such a powerful tool because it will have many decide factors in the world.

“ Architecture is one of the few things a society gets to leave behind, it leaves a message long after people are gone”

You see, all of these lost societies are ancient areas where we look at it, and we don’t even know how it happened. Look at, for example, the Pyramids, its such a wondrous type of architecture that people can’t even believe it came from people, “like that was made by aliens.”

The whole world is an architecture tresure hunt, there is many fascinating sites to explore ! So I am curious if the program has guided you or help you question the history of architecture In the architecture program they guide you, they don’t necessarily help you figure it out. They don’t kind of tell you the secrets of architecture,

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They kind of let you explore the secrets. They teach you different interesting bits, and as an architect you kind of choose which thing

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Athoub Hasan

So, when I first came into the program, I didn’t realize how much group work was involved in the program. Maybe we just experience this kind of community here at ASU, but every kind of project has some sort of group work.… I’ve started to experience a lot of collaboration, and I will say it sometimes it does get frustrating when you barely meet them half way. I will say, I think at the same time, it got me comfortable, talking to a crowd of people, it helped me come out of my shell. I’ve always been an extrovert, but coming into a whole new world was just another challenge, so I kind of got in my shell a little bit, and it really encouraged me to come out.

Interview

To emphasize on that idea, what made you expand on that reality? What made you shift your perspective and stay in the program, to the point where you can say “I really like this”? Was there any sort of help from the professors or motivation from classmates.

interests you the most. I feel like if they got into every single detail of architecture, we would not finish, It would be like a thousand-year program.

There is so much to learn, there is so much to question, but I really appreciate the fact that they kind of do it in a way that involves so many different styles, elements, resources, and ideas to express.

The professors don’t start a lecture like “let’s discuss Gothic architecture today.” They kind

of leave that to you, but they go more into the conceptual ideas.

In ARC 112 we’re doing modules about comparings different fundamentals, or types of elements. For example, In our modules we discussed the comparison of space vs place, which one is more important. I really enjoy when they do that, because I get to question what type of architecture I feel is the perfect representation of space.

That is a beautiful way to get introduced into architecture, everyone defines the issues of architecture differently. Everyone likes to look into the world in a variety of ways, and getting slowly introduced will help you question ideas that define you as an early architect. Honestly when you are able to find a bit of passion thats when you are hooked.

enjoyed communicating with my professors, because they are very flexible and very open to different ideas.

Having some sort of experience gave me an opportunity for my professors to notice me. I felt like the professors were very open to receiving everything from the good, the bad, the criticism, obviously, as long as it’s respectful. I think I really

“I truly believe that our professors give us the time, the opportunity, and the resources to succeed”

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Athoub Hasan

So I kind of have my art and architecture terminology settled down, where I felt like other students still were kind of figuring it out.

Interview

We already expanded on the experiences into the architecture program, but I wanted to get into the experiences within the community, within your peers and your collaborators.

There is a definite turnaround in our experiences, it was much tougher as a student who started only on zoom. And the most impressive things is the adaptability of our professors. I have a lot of respect for my TAss because they guided me and took my health and my passion serious.

“They see the drive and work ethic that a student has sometimes and I feel like that’s what motivates us”

Something I do when I go into class, I sit and talk to a couple of my friends, and in my head, I’m always thinking that we are such an ARC student. There is no way we would have been anything else from the way we talk, from the way we discuss things, from the way we even discuss history. It’s such a unique standpoint that there is no major other than architecture that’s for us. You know what I mean, I think the professors see that and they don’t want to lose that in someone.

I think what you address is such and important part of a successful Architecture community, to value and respect any kind of designer and the space for collaboration. At the end of the day, everyone that is around you is motivated to become an architect.

Thank you! It truly was a pleasure to meet with you and i appreciate taking the time to talk with me .

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Design Justice Initiative a conversation with Kaya Razzo

Kaya Razzo: Over the last few years, pandemic and political, what has the community gone through in your eyes? And how do you define healing? How has the community of DJI changed and what has DJI done to heal through this time?

“DJI is a statement from a diverse group of students, alumni and members of The Design School Design Justice Initiative comittee to the administration of The Design School at Arizona State University.” DJI asks the ASU Design School to recognize their obligation to incorporate anti-racism and acknowledge that the curriculum of design education and pedagogy are not neutral.

Julia Lopez: Diversity, equity inclusion, and belonging. Answering for me personally, I think it’s really been about more of a collaboration between students and faculty and reaching out to a greater public working with other organizations. We’ve worked a lot with music and the Culture and Access Department.

Jacqueline Hogan: From a personal aspect, DJI has been healthy for me in a way where I feel comfortable talking about these issues. I mean, people will agree, but there is some criticism coming in because, attending faculty meetings and other meetings, where we work with faculty and admin, there are always different opinions, but most of the time, it’s to create a more common good for the Design School. That kind of collaborative nature, in addition to me, just knowing that most of it are all to make the Design School a better place is just a lot easier for me to share my ideas, or at least feel like I’m making an impact and helping in a productive way.

DJI is a very big organization and one that has really grounded itself in The Design School in the last few years. Since this continued awareness progresses here at school, how has and or is space being reimagined? Physical, emotional, and or mental space.

JL: I know from just having talks, we opened up the diversity collection at the library. There have been talks about how that sort of collection can create more of a safe space within The Design School in which we all can come together.

There have been talks about creating a book club and how maybe centering some of these issues, and having that little space can become a space of belonging. I’m not sure how that will be accomplished, but there have been talks within DJI and Paola, to create more of a safe space for students, because it’s something that’s not really existing within physical spaces in the school. We really have to reimagine how do you utilize some of the unused spaces to cater to students that maybe don’t feel as welcome here.

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BR: DJI, in its inception, created a space for professors and faculty within the school to really try and address the things that DJI addresses because I was always under the impression that within the school that the professors and faculty just didn’t care about these different issues. But then, the second that they had an opportunity to speak on them, because of DJI, my narrative of the people who work in this school completely shifted, because the reality is that, I would say, 95% of the faculty in the school want to see it be a more diverse, more equitable and more inclusive space. And the reasons that it is not these things isn’t necessarily anything that anyone is doing on purpose. It’s more of just the existing protocol. The existing systems don’t allow that. I think because of DJI we’ve been able to have so many conversations with

Interview

Essentially, we’re just collaborating with other student organizations throughout HIDA trying to establish a more equitable school. We’ve worked with Montay McGilvery, who’s part of them, he’s part of the greater HIDA staff. And we’ve also gotten the chance to speak with Melita Belgrade. We are continuing to work within HIDA and with the dean. I think for me, personally, this whole kind of semester, we’ve been leaders and it has really been about collaborating for the greater good.

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Design Juustice Initiative

Brennan Richards: I think DJI was initiated as an act of healing. Obviously, the main focus is social change. From a policy standpoint, within the design school, there were changes that were called for, but I think ultimately, the goal of DJI is to make sure that every student in the design school feels welcome, feels represented, and feels like they belong. And I suppose in that way, carrying out these demands that the founders of the group created, I think, is an act of healing.

In terms of just how DJI has changed over the last two years, obviously, the first year that DJI was an organization, everything was online and it was a lot of just meetings and trying to gather people and understand who was in control of what and try and connect everyone together. Then this year has really been about establishing, like, we just established the DEI task force at the faculty level.

How do we as individuals and a collective heal in the process of re-entering physical spaces?

BR: A lot happened when we weren’t physically in school. All the events of 2020 and 2021 were a lot to process and we were all very cut off from each other, but also extremely connected because of social media and the internet. I feel like there’s a gap in processing between that space that we were in and now being in this physical space that I think everyone is kind of still processing. I don’t know necessarily all the ways that this affects us on a day-to-day basis but I do think it does affect us. I mean, there’s definitely been a cultural and political shift. It sort of happened, while we were all in isolation, but also not in isolation. So, it’s this weird, middle space that I don’t know if humanity has ever really had to navigate before.

I think we’re all just kind of moving through space and trying to find some closure and being a part of DJI has definitely helped me process all of that because I feel all of the anger and fear and pain that we all felt and witnessed; it’s a way to channel it into something that actually can make a difference, instead of feeling so futile.

JL: I found that as people, we kind of look for interaction. Not only face to face but within, like these new adaptations we’re all going through, all these new adaptations of human experience.

So, I think DJI has been really helpful to kind of articulate some of those shared goals that we all have within this design community.

JH: When we were all in isolation, it made it easier for us to focus on our immediate tasks that would have gotten in the way of being able to go outside and interact with other people. So, we were really able to buckle down and focus on school and projects like that. But being in person, although we still do that, we have all these other things that we have to focus on as well that we didn’t necessarily have to do during isolation, which I think makes people feel more comfortable with coming back. At the same time, it adds a little bit more responsibilities that we didn’t have during isolation, which can be both comforting and kind of stressful. I know for sure that being able to interact with Julia and Brennan in person has been very helpful to just end up seeing the diversity collection.

Just seeing everything through my eyes and not through a screen was extremely uplifting because I was seeing all the things actually happening instead of working on it, but not seeing it in action. I think having that in-person interaction helps with that kind of understanding absorbing and enjoying our work.

How does your work approach the idea and process of healing specifically, with DJI’s committees and community events like the food drive?

JH: Most of it is done through changes within the system in the school. I know for sure that we’re working towards maybe changing the critiques process for project reviews, to make it less intimidating and more constructive, where the critics actually understanding what the project assignment is. In terms of creating the DEIB committee, there will be different approaches to healing and ways that the faculty and admin can also improve the situations within the school.

BR: The review culture within some programs of this school was very toxic, and I think the process of healing in those contexts is making sure that people don’t feel discouraged and disrespected personally during reviews.

I think another layer that we’ve we’re continuing to work on is transparency with a budget in the school. I think the cost of education really causes a lot of pain and anger towards the school, the faculty and the staff. The more that we dive into the budget, and emphasize DISCIPLINE SPRING 2022

transparency at the school level, and the director level, department level, and eventually we’re aiming for the provost level, we can foster better learning environments. Everyone’s just operating with what they can do and what’s available to them. I think that in itself is healing, to know that everyone is just doing their best with what they have and continuing to have powerful conversations about how the school can improve.

JL: Within all of our committees, one of the shared goals is to really include more diverse voices to represent that this community is not just one culture, one race: we’re all different, we all come from different backgrounds. Including more black, indigenous, bipoc, Latinx, LGBTQ voices is really important in the process of healing. I’m for what my culture, our cultures, can bring to a common ground within architecture and design.

“This community is not just one culture, one race: we’re all different, we all come from different backgrounds.”

Coming from one of those backgrounds, and coming to Design School, and just learning about white, cis male-identifying designers made me wish I could learn more about Latinx and indigenous designers, which I ultimately explored outside of the Design School.

DJI was sparked by community coalition; how does this grassroots approach relate to healing?

How does action relate to healing?

JL: For the last few years, there’s been all this kind of social change within not only design but the country in general. You see people engaging in powerful action. So, I think the process of healing within DJI is asking how do we match this fortifying energy in all these movements, and elevate it and innovate ways of creating to show up for each other. I think all these movements have really built healing into our direct action.

The fact that their presence and necessity has to be essential to how we sustain ourselves, and how we create new ways of being along the way.

“So, I think the process of healing within DJI is asking how do we match this fortifying energy in all these movements, and elevate it and innovate ways of creating to show up for each other.”

JH: Direct Action, what Julia said, I think is really important, because for students, sometimes it can feel like you can’t really do much to change the system and you can’t convince faculty and admin that there’s an actual problem that needs to be resolved within a certain amount of time when we’re still here. Having that direct action is healing in a sense that we know that we can actually make an impact and change something in a way that is beneficial for not only us, but future students. It will improve pretty much ARCHITECTURE JOURNAL AT ASU

everything if we’re the ones starting it and if we know that we’re actually helping out and using our voices and collaborating; that makes a huge change, which inevitably heals us in a way.

Hopefully, all of the goals and challenges that we set for ourselves will ultimately heal but in the same sense, us actually working on it feels really gratifying.

BR: At the end of the original DJ I letter, the final statement before the signing was: “The cocreation of a process to redesign our design education to be anti-racist, pedagogically, curricularly, and culturally, is vital for The Design School at Arizona State University to uphold equitable standards of education.”

I think they kind of captured that everyone needs to come together and it needs to be everyone because this isn’t something that one group of people can do individually. There needs to be action because, also stated in the letter, “over the past three years, the school is committed to transformation through the redesign process. However, these actions have not been enough.”

I think people cannot be complacent, and we should hold ourselves to not being complacent.

I think that’s where the action part of healing comes in because you can post rationalize everything in your mind to do all of that but ultimately, you need to do something if you’d like to see something change.

Interview

it opened up that conversation. There are a million other instances of conversations we’ve had over the last year that was only possible because of DJI opening up that space.

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Design Justice Initiative

professors and staff that we wouldn’t have been able to have otherwise. Being able to talk to my program head about the budget within the program is not a conversation that I ever really thought was on the table, but because of DJI,

Wanda Dalla Costa a conversation with Ananth Udupa

Ananth Udupa: For this issue, we are asking the question how we as architects and a greater society can heal in the process of reintegrating into physical space, so I wanted to first ask you how you define healing Wanda Dalla Costa: Healing to me… Well that’s a loaded question, I think healing is a very big word, and I think, from an indigenous point of view, it means being in balance. It means that balance in many ways balance in our our daily lives, balance

individually. I think, for me, balance means mental, spiritual, emotional, and physical. So when I think of those four together and if those are in balance, that would be a path to healing for me.

Within that event, not only is there the physical act of dancing. There’s sensory stimulation from the drummers in the singers, there’s socialization happening as we all sit around and giggle and talk and laugh outside of that activity, and then beyond that, there’s this beautiful space where the the vendors come in and make a living from the people that are at this power and to me that circle has come to represent many things or a best practice on how to live collectively.

Wanda Dalla Costa is a practicing architect and professor who has been co-designing with North American indigenous communities for nearly two decades. Her teaching and research focuses include indigenous place-keeping, culturally responsive design, sustainable housing, and climate resiliency in architecture. Dalla Costa currently teaches at Arizona State University as Institute Professor and Associate Professor in The Design School and the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment. She is a member of Saddle Lake Cree Nation and the first First Nations woman architect in Canada.

[1] She is founding principal and owner of the firm, Redquill Architecture Inc., which is based in Phoenix, Arizona. She was one of eighteen indigenous architects representing Canada in the Venice Architecture Biennale 2018.

If we can take that same sort of concentric rings of a Powwow and think of them as necessary

elements for everyday life so that you have visual stimulation and a connection with life ways with the dancing, the sensory connection to the things around us, socialization and the economic activities that allow us to you know continue these ways; I think that’s kind of a perfect healing space or gathering space and what is important is that there’s so many different components.

And I should also say on the outside of that the final ring, often if we’re out on the reservation, we actually sleep in teepees all the way around that Powwow circle. So, it’s also a residence, which means you’re outside with nature. You have everything - there’s nothing lacking, really.

Scaling down to the pandemic, how has space been reimagined during and after the pandemic in the context of the school, ASU, and in the broader culture of collectivism or community?

I think during the pandemic what I realized, spatially, is that I had a very small radius of the things I needed. You know, we live in a quiet suburb because we have kids and I realized I just needed the park for space. I needed, well I had the luxury of getting groceries delivered to my house for sustenance to the house. So, in a sense, we were quite privileged because we also could work from home and we had this very small radius but we I realized this is a privilege and not everyone was able to do what we did.

The learning for me is this sort of simplification of our lifestyles that happened during right, many of us sort of changed. I stopped going to the gym and I never went back. I took away many things out of my life, and so there was this simplification to our lifestyles. But that, I think, was really profound because we all found out what we really needed in this world and we learned to come together around a much DISCIPLINE SPRING 2022

ARCHITECTURE JOURNAL AT ASU

smaller radius, with a much smaller group of people, with you know much less activities.

So, the business and the distractions that we normally experience on a daily basis were gone.

And I think it led to all of us having extra time to think and to reflect, contemplating.

Now, that moment of rethinking is on everyone’s mind. Do we go back to the office? Do I homeschool my kid because I found that I could? There were learning lessons that came out of it, and I think to grow as human beings, we have to pay attention to what happens in our life and to be cognizant of how we adjust.

“I think to grow as human beings, we have to pay attention to these things that happen in our life and to be cognizant of how we adjust.”

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Wanda Dalla Costa

For indigenous people, we connect collectively a lot and I usually give a very simple example of a yearly pow gathering.

Interview

Speaking on native urbanity, I think it’s extremely important to think and design based on how people experience the environment. So,, how do you think we as individuals and a greater collective heal in space and have you experienced in space when that has happened.

I’m remembering a lecture you did with Selina Martinez, a while ago, who is also writing in this issue about her work with an idea. In the lecture you were talking about place keeping, the importance of co-creation and the idea of dreaming futures. You mentioned the reevaluation of how we exist together in and out of architecture. So, if we define shift as as a process and not a dichotomy of you know prior and past, how can architecture adapt to periods of limbo?

I think there’s so many things happening in terms of architecture right now, I think the field is changing. We are realizing that it’s not sustainable to create designs that come from another climate, from another biome, from another place that has different materials to build. Our work should be very hyper-localized as architects, and my mind immediately goes to the vernacular intelligence in the local people of the region, people who have grown up here for hundreds of years and have learned how to live in the climate.

“I think we need to start cultivating homegrown solutions that react to the people of this place, the meaning that exists here, the bio climatic response to all architecture.”

So, if there was a change to be made as we become more restrictive, sure we can get shapes and we can get inspiration, we can get innovative ideas from around the world. But I think we need to start cultivating homegrown solutions that react to the people of this place, the meaning that exists here, the bio climatic response to all architecture.

could actually criticize when someone is doing non-responsive, non-relatable architecture and the whole public world could comment on that. I think we would get very different results and so that’s why we measure.

But I think there’s also a story that comes out of our architecture because we go through this long process. People ask what we are connecting to; there’s so much data that we are bringing together when we do architecture and I’ve started to categorize it. We’re just at the very preliminary phase of trying to integrate all of these very deep meanings into our architecture and to codify and categorize them. But I think there’s something here and I don’t know exactly what it is and what those categories would be.

But we find all these things that come up in the

This is my architectural process where we do place-based research first before we go into community and then we go through this community lead teaching phas and only after that do we start designing. When we finish, not only do we get a building, but we’re measuring

I’m hoping that that is a result of the shift that is happening in architecture; I’m not sure this international, I call it, homogeneity that people are trying to emulate what’s happening internationally is a viable or sustainable pathway. I think there are other pathways that we need to explore. So, the shift would be becoming more localized and seeing what’s in your home community before you start looking for alternatives.

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the impact of our work, so I hold myself accountable. How does the Community define success, how is this project defining success, and how did we connect to that success? I don’t think architects do a very good job or architectural schools at a feedback loop.

“How does the Community define success, how is this project defining success, and how did we connect to that success?”

The feedback loop is missing. So, imagine yelp for architecture, where we could actually criticize and there was a platform where you

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And I think this is not the only culture, like many old cultures in the world carry the same knowledge as we carry so those are the cultures that need to start this movement.

I think what you just said is very powerful statement and leaves me very optimistic to see what all of us know moving forward. Thank you so much for your time.

I know you are leading a studio with Claudio Vekstein this semester and there is an emphasis on Arizona and regional dialectics. Do you think that there are steps in our architecture program that you feel should be pushed more?

My perspective in architecture came from a disconnect I saw between the users that were utilizing architecture and what was being glorified and who was teaching architecture.

I found it very form based and less able to connect to meaning in a place. My whole career has been about pushing the buttons and trying to productively disrupt architecture both process and product.

community that I wasn’t taught in architecture school. It makes me think if I was going to connect a redesign architecture pedagogy and redesign architecture school could any of these factors be included as part of our discourse, could we also include measurement, how do we measure, how do we know that we’re successful as architects. These are really big ideas that are starting to emerge. I think that’s where I’d like to see us change - more data gets inputted and we measure the outcomes - and I think we’re not the only ones pushing on it.

Interview

will not come back and other things you know will come back stronger. So, I think there’s been a tremendous amount of change, I actually think mostly for the good.

Wanda Dalla Costa

Right now, we’re all kind of starting to get back into the world after this two year hiatus, but I think it’ll be in a much different way, I think all of us have made enough concessions with with the limitations that faced us that some things

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Christian Solorio a conversation with Mac Wood

Mac Wood: Can you share with us, why architecture?

Christian is a registered architect, problem solver and servant leader who has embedded community engagement and advocacy into his career. He is able to leverage his skills as a designer and connections within the community to provide cross-sector design solutions to make a positive impact in underserved and underrepresented neighborhoods. As the leader of the housing studio at A|R|T, Christian ensures that every project provides innovation in affordable housing design with a human, community, and planet-focused approach. Christian has become a subject matter expert in affordable housing with experience throughout the spectrum of affordability from Permanent Supportive Housing and Transitional Housing to Affordable Rental and Homeownership project types. Christian is the first architect to serve in the Arizona State legislature in over 40 years. As a State Representative, he is an advocate for the AEC community and seeks to empower the industry to be better able to tackle our most pressing issues including the housing crisis, promoting smart growth and economic development and tackling climate change head on. In addition, Christian works towards supporting public education, expanding access to quality healthcare and ensuring that government is working for the people.

So, as I was growing up, I knew that I wanted to do something that was in that spirit of giving

I was in high school around the time of proposition 300, a lot of Arpaio raids and what ended up culminating in SB 1070. So through that process, I started knocking on doors for politicians who I thought could help advance the agendas of folks in my community. And that’s when I really started to see the disparity of the area that I grew up in and the community that I grew up in and the other communities and how the built environment was completely different in those two areas.

So I started asking myself; “Why are our parks worse? Why are our sidewalks worse? Why do we have less trees?, Why is this place so unsafe?” And then, I was in several programs that were around architecture and design and I was exposed to it. And through that process, I fell in love with its power to uplift communities and change communities.

I physically wanted to make my community and communities like the one I grew up in with working class folks and folks who were experiencing poverty a better physical place to live. And that’s what I got to do in my career, I specialized in affordable housing, and I get to work with all sorts of vulnerable communities.

How do we as individuals and a collective heal in the process of reentering physical spaces?

I think a lot of this has to do with listening and understanding. There are a lot of the folks that we work with and serve who have experienced all sorts of trauma. Sometimes it’s very blatant, we work on a housing project that’s serving homeless veterans. And then you’re able to do research on PTSD and PTSI and other mental and behavioral health issues that are associated with serving in the military. And then we’re able to design to that. Sometimes it’s not as clear when we work with the general population until you look in the data that you see how it is best to design spaces for these folks to heal in.

An example I can use is, designing shelter facilities, which I’ve worked on and looking at the data and statistics that matches the

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“Sometimes it’s not as clear when we work with the general population until you look in the data that you see how it is best to design spaces for these folks to heal in.” facilities that are being provided. One of the things that we noted when we were digging into this subject was that the LGBTQ+ community is over represented in the homeless population and if you look at the restroom facilities at these shelter congregate living scenarios, the restroom facilities aren’t reflective of this. Of people who have more fluid gender identities

Interview

There was a point in my life where my family of six lived with another family of six in a threebedroom apartment. So that’s twelve folks in one apartment. There was another point where we moved out from there and were crammed in a 400 square foot apartment. There was a time where we moved to Mexico with my mother and my siblings, and my dad was working in the U.S. and kind of kept bouncing around all over the place for the first eight or so years of my life until I landed in Phoenix. We were struggling a lot and needed help, but my mom was always a very strong advocate of giving back and instilling that idea with me and my siblings. So, no matter how much we were struggling, we would go volunteer at the food pantries, we would donate the hammy-downs my brother used and I used and then we would donate them to folks down when we would go visit my grandma in Mexico.

and that spirit of helping those who struggle.

I then started getting civically engaged within my community.

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Christian Solario

Christian Solorio: A lifetime’s worth of things that led me to become an architect but t starts from where I was born and my upbringing. I was in California and I was born in poverty, my mother was a house cleaner and my dad was a dishwasher, so we did not have a lot of money growing up. Because of that we had to live in precarious, less than ideal living situations to raise a family.

We all have been through a great deal of shift in the last two years. As an architect and now also a politician, what has that shift been like professionally? And in what ways with your new role have you had to heal or work through the adversity you continuously face as both/and architect, politician?

Without the last two years, I don’t think I would have slowed down enough to reflect and see how I can really truly make a bigger impact.

I think everything was moving so fast paced before the pandemic and we were kind of just set in our ways as far as the way we approach work, community engagement, you name it. It was all kind of set in our ways and then, when the pandemic happened, there was just what felt like endless months of just being alone and reflecting who I was as a person, what the work that I was doing, what the impact it had.

And more importantly, it really started pushing me out of my comfort zone in coming to the realization that I could do more outside of just the profession of architecture.

“It really started pushing me out of my comfort zone in coming to the realization that I could do more outside of just the profession of architecture.”

And that was really the big shift in me. I had spent over a decade in my life dedicated to this career in the name of improving my community.

When I was elected to the school board in 2018, I started serving on nonprofit boards and I started serving on planning committees and stuff like that. As I did I really started to notice how folks who have my lived experience are just not represented at the table at all. I just felt

so much weight and burden from having that lived experience and from not being able to get anything done because I was so outnumbered.

All these decisions were still getting made and passed that were impacting my community which I just didn’t agree with.

“I started to notice how folks who have my lived experience are not represented at the table at all.”

That’s the issue I ultimately chose to dive into through the pandemic. I have since then really put a focus on professional development, capacity building and empowering folks who are A, designers in architecture and the way they can get involved, and B, young, because a lot of these decisions that are being made are being made on our behalf. These are longrange, long-term planning decisions made by people who, to be frank, aren’t going to be here much longer.

We need to see that the table has young folks and folks who are even younger than me. I would do anything I can to get you all elevated and your voices elevated at these decision-making spaces and tables. We need them because you all are the ones that are inheriting the world based on these decisions that are being made.

In my opinion, it’s not fair and it’s not right that you don’t have access to the tables where these decisions are being made.

Your work environment has been redefined. Those you work with and how you work is being challenged. Therefore, how have you reimagined space and collaboration?

I think one of the things that came to light in the pandemic was how digital meetings expanded access to certain opportunities that weren’t

available. There are a lot of folks who just don’t have the time or maybe transportation to community events and the transition really allowed access.

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During the pandemic, I started attending a few meetings of our organization that I could attend because I didn’t have to make a 45 minute drive to attend a 30 minute meeting and then make another 45 minute drive. That just wasn’t feasible in the way that it was before the pandemic.

So that really allowed me to branch out into new silos that I wasn’t being present in.

One of the things that came to light was the consequence of the digital divide, was that not everyone in our community has access to the internet. It never crossed my mind that the internet was not as universal as the access to public transportation; access to education. I thought it was just something everyone had. It became really apparent that some of our students and some of our community members didn’t have access to the internet. They were being blocked out because they didn’t have that option to meet in person during the pandemic. So now, I strongly advocate for madating access to internet in affordable housing projects.

There are statewide policies or guidelines called the Qualified Allocation Plan that designates how all affordable housing in the state is built and I have personally worked on which empowers residents of these communities. So, mandating that we have free internet access at those facilities, at least in some locations allow for people to not get their internet cut off because they can’t afford it, their children can still attend school and not have to sit outside a Tacobell or a McDonalds. They can still be in the safety of the apartment complex or the housing complex that they live in.

It started redefining the way we treat public spaces in those kinds of facilities as well because we wanted to help create these working nooks.

Because we have some families that are really big like mine and you just don’t have enough space in a small three bedroom apartment with six people in it. How are you going to do your classes when you have three siblings and they’re also trying to talk over each other?

So we created more of these nooks in these awkward spaces... Hey, we can put a chair and a little table here and some outlets. If you’re in a crazy unit and you need some space or a quieter space, you can use it. We started creating work from home pods within our projects, so just carving up some of the public space that we had in there so folks can get a quiet place to take a meeting, to do some classes, whatever it is.

“We started changing the way we advocated. We were making sure it wasn’t just our architecture firm that was designing this way.

Every project in the state no matter who the architect was would be responding to the change in how our users and residents were living.”

If we define shift as a process and not a dichotomy of prior and post, how can architecture adapt to periods of limbo? And how do you see policy and architecture working together during periods of limbo?

Policy is hard to control because it is so slow moving. It takes coalition building. It takes education. It takes lobbying. It takes a lot of stuff to get that done. But in the meantime, that doesn’t mean that we can’t shift the culture of the work that we’re doing because the policy doesn’t match the work that needs to be done.

There is nothing written in code that’s forcing everyone else to change, but as a culture and as a group, we took it upon ourselves to, in waiting, make that shift within our industry and within our society and within the business of architecture.

I feel that, through my civic engagement, I’ve

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really learned the power of my voice as just one person and how we can be empowered and make change. We just have to take it seriously and organize and then we can get there and bridge that gap between the way that we operate our individual practices and trains of thought and making it a more holistic approach. Because, you know, in your career, to say you’re going to touch even one percent of the total buildings that are going to be built in your lifetime, I don’t think is hard to state. So, it’s in that policy that you make those bigger, broader changes where your work makes a bigger impact.

Interview

of healing, as opposed to retraumatizing them.

That’s why it’s important when I’m doing the work that I do, that we listen, that we understand the data and that we let that lead the design for the project. So these folks can stabilize themselves and be on a path towards recovery, stability and ultimately happiness.

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Christian Solario

and when you’re talking about folks who experience trauma, a lot of these people have suffered a lot because of their gender identity, from almost being disowned by their families or bullying or other things that they carry with them. We need to provide facilities that make them feel safe and lead them towards a path

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Rashad Shabazz

The Demolition of the Kistler Building

This “fine specimen of architecture” was built in 1898 by Civil War veteran Joseph Kistler, who’s son’s marriage to Mary Irean Duggen was enough of a social event to make the “Brides of the Summer Season” section of the Minneapolis Tribune in 1929. The patriarch of these minor socialites, Joseph, was able to acquire a loan to build the structure at 637 Olson Memorial Boulevard. For much of its life it served several industrial and social purposes—meeting place for local clubs like the elk and stockpiling building materials and or grains piped in the vast prairies to the south. As the twentieth century overtook the 19th in the endless march of time, the community that surround the Kistler building shifted. European immigrants—mostly Irish and Scandinavian—gave way to Jews fleeing rising anti-Semitism in Europe and a slow but steady trickle of Black southerners who, also like their Jewish brethren, came to Minneapolis as refugees. And as the community shifted, how the building was understood and utilized, changed too.

By the 1920s, the Black population in the area was on the rise and Jewish neighbors were leaving. But Black people were not moving into their neighborhood on their own accord; they were bring pushed there by mob law and a new tool buried in the deed of homes which prevented them from renting or owning in other parts of the city.

One of the more grotesque episodes of mob violence happened in December 1909, in the Lake Harriette section of Minneapolis.

It involved a Black family, the Malone’s, who

were forced to sell their tiny bungalow at 4441 Zenith Avenue. The modest post War home had a wooden porch with a C-shaped curve along the wall that resembled a luggage handle. In the Minneapolis Tribune image, the broken window tells the story of the racist attacks that forced them to sell. Shortly after they purchased the home, white residents in the neighborhood, organized a midnight sally against the family.

Broken windows, rocks and bricks hurled with anti-Black epithets, forced the family into the basement. After vowing not to sell, the pressure from the unrelenting mob, hell-bent on keeping their white enclave white, forced their hand.

Such actions befell other Black families who tried to move into white neighborhoods. But mob action was only one tactic that carved up the city’s racial geography along what W.E.B DuBois called the “color-line.” Racially restrictive covenants, written into the deed of homes that barred Black and other people of color began to appear one year after the Malone’s were forced out of their home.

Minneapolis’s first racially restricted home was located at 3228 36th Avenue South and was likely written into the home by real estate developer Edmund G. Walton. The deed read: “The said party of the of the second part hereby agrees that the premises hereby conveyed shall not at any time be conveyed, mortgaged or leased to any person or persons of Chinese, Japanese, Moorish, Turkish, Negroes, Mongolian or African blood or descent. Said restrictions and covenants shall run with the land and any breach of any or either thereof shall work a forfeiture of title, which may be enforced by re-entry.”

restrictive covenants. Their research shows in vivid and often painful detail how covenants cut Blacks off from vast amounts of housing and pushed them North and South.

The twin forces of white mob violence and racially restrictive covenants created the conditions that made the neighborhood around the Kistler building Black, which by 1926 resulted in the building becoming a hub for the music traveling up the Mississippi River from the Crescent City in the early years of the new century: jazz.

Known for late night jam sessions, that brought musicians from all over the city, the Cleft club was the center of music on the Black Near North Side. It’s reputation as a place to jam also brought white people who wanted to listen. The mix of illegal booze, jazz, and white women in a club with Black male musicians, brought the city’s “purity squad,” made up of prohibition agents determined on stopping people from drinking. But it wasn’t the illicit liquid that was the concern, but rather the potential for Black men and white women to meet, mingle, and have sex that concerned them. During the 1930s the club was regularly raided with white women arrested on prostitution charges and Black men as johns.

In 1942, 89 people were arrested by the morals force on suspicion of gambling and prostitution.

Their names were printed in the Minneapolis Tribune.

Between 1910 and the middle 1950s, restrictive covenants kept Black people out of white neighborhoods like Lake Calhoun and blocked their movement into lake Harriet and other parts of the city. They were ubiquitous, blanketing various parts of the city, leaving a racist landscape in its wake. Over five thousand covenants have been found by the diligent researchers at the Mapping Prejudice project that is uncovering how racism shaped the city’s geography. Since 2016, this team of geographers, historians, digital humanists, and community activists have been mapping Minneapolis’ racist past, with an eye on racially

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By midcentury, the Kistler building was seen as a troubled place. Despite it being a valuable cultural location, where some the best musicians in the country played, it fell to the wrecking ball in 1957. The land where it stood, was eventually gobbled up by the federal government and an express way was pushed through, as would be the case in Black communities all over the country.

The squat square Kistler building with is beautiful arched windows that allowed the morning and evening light to pierce its structure was demolished not because it’s use value had diminished or because it fell into disrepair.

It was reduced to rubble because the city feared the cool cats who jammed there, the liquor which quenched the thirst of those latenight sessions, and the mix of Black men and white women who came to listen were morally reprehensible and an affront to the city’s politics of segregation. This is what drew the racist ire of police and paved the way for the destruction of Minneapolis’ first jazz venue.

________

Don Morrison, “Wreckers Write Finis to Clef Club.”

2 “Brides of the Summer Season.”

3 “Malone May Get His Price.”

4 Mapping prejudice, https://mappingprejudice.umn. edu 5 89 Arrested in Clef Club Morals Raid.”

Essay

t the corner of Lyndale Avenue, the musical spine of Black North Minneapolis, was a “squat square” three-story building, donned with beautiful archway windows, that was the most iconic “turbulent” musical venues in the city’s history. It was called the Kistler building.

Some of the most well-known figures in the swing era of the twenties like Benny Goodman, Gene Kupa, Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, and later Dizzy Gillespie along with Minneapolis musicians, played in a club on the second floor called the Cleft club. Nevertheless, it was reduced to rubble in 1957. Why? Because as the neighborhood changed from white to Black, and Black music took up residence in the Kistler, the city saw the music and the people who loved it as signs of moral degeneration.

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Rashad Shabazz

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Selina Martinez

n a world filled with infinite diversity, the variety of ‘ways of being’ in this shared environment we call earth provides an ecosystem of immense wisdom rooted in ancestrality and vast potentials for a plurality of futures. The “pluriverse, a world where many worlds fit,”1 recognizes the reality of a multiplicity of truths creating meaning and validation of divergent worldviews.

Emergence stories are vivid examples of the ‘pluriverse’ and are typically ingrained with high relationality to a specified people, environment, land, cosmology, and value system configured in layers or references to be interpreted and passed down generationally. Revealing interconnections between both tangible and intangible aspects of a people’s worldview by orienting story narrative around themes regarding the past, present, and future.

My specific worldview and lived experience has provided a lens for exploring a plurality of opportunities in relation to my identity and architectural design practice prompting cycles of balance, symbiosis, regeneration, and reciprocity. The following is a living narrative of those manifestations and revelations.

BALANCE As a student, it took time to find empowerment in connecting my identity to my pursuit to participate in the architectural field. An evolving tension grew between myself and the dominant narratives I came across in architectural histories, education and spatial expressions. As an Indigenous Xicana woman, I noticed a lack of reflection of my own identity in architectural dialogues. This triggered an inflection point to self initiate a trajectory to pursue and develop better resolution that prioritized the plurality of my identity in regards to my architectural practice.

The opportunity to define an independent project during my masters program at the ASU Design School was the initial seed for connecting my Yaqui culture to a self led architectural exploration called Bachia (meaning seed). Although the weight of the project was objectively speculative, it provided a moment to curate a project with intents to facilitate dialogue around Yaqui plant and food knowledge.

Keystone species within ecosystems often have a big impact on their environment when

their populations thrive, evolve, expand, or diminish. Cultural keystone species in relation, are specific species innately interconnected in a cultures life-ways, food-ways, ceremony, and world views and often contextualize the roots of indigeneity through nature. Bachia became a study into how cultural keystone species can influence, inform, and direct design on a multiplicity of levels within existing infrastructure in the Yaqui Guadalupe community. The project prioritized an architectural response that focused on the survival of Yaqui communities, culture, and knowledge around health/food sovereignty to develop a vision that responded to the demands, needs, and hopes of the next generation of Yaqui’s to come.

Although the Sonoran Desert creates a sense of relationality to the Yaqui homelands in Mexico, the prevalent disconnect from the ecosystem that provides the vital Yaqui cultural keystone species became an obvious gap to access greater depth of our culture over time. Bachia, initiated a rebalancing of my own understanding of Yaqui ancestral ‘ways of being’ not previously presented to me growing up or prevalent in family dialogues in Arizona Yaqui communities.

Recognizing my desire to continue this exploration beyond the final semester of my masters program required acknowledging the necessity to take a step back to engage the community through broader themes before expecting community buy-in or alignment to a specified vision.

SYMBIOSIS Not long after graduating from the architectural masters program, I applied for the NDN Collective Radical Imagination Artist 2021 grant. The opportunity to define a new project intent through a process that was no longer constrained by academic frameworks renewed my momentum. The language I integrated into the grant application included aspects of: reclaiming autonomy, disrupting dominant narratives, and design visualization to imagine indigenous futurity. October 2020, I was awarded the grant and found myself once again in a moment of freedom to self direct a project connected to my identity and evolve my skill set in ways that could benefit my architectural practice and my relationship to Yoemia.

The ongoing project, named Juebenaria (meaning plural), aims to establish a more

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mutually beneficial relationship with a wider Yaqui audience. With a goal to develop an evolving collection of lived experiences to illustrate the varied identities of Yoeme people.

During the first year of funding the team and I have been able to accomplish the following: Rio Yaqui outreach to our homelands to provide essential care packages for Yoeme communities during the challenging time of the covid pandemic. Established a platform/ infrastructure for the project including online documentation and social media presence.

Content development for these platforms in regards to history including - our emergence story, digital Yaqui community mapping, and ongoing historical timeline. Created opportunities for four tribal members (those who have never visited) to reconnect to the Yaqui homelands in Mexico through a cultural historical tour with the Yaqui Pride Project. At the same time, capturing 3D laser scan data of significant sites and locations curated into a 3D digital Yaqui museum. Due to the impact of covid it became difficult to set up engagements with the community to establish ‘visioning workshops’ initially planned. Regardless, the project prioritized social media engagement to secure an online Yaqui audience increasing engagement with the evolving educational content. January 2022, Juebenaria provided two $2500 scholarships to Yaqui Creatives and had 14 individuals apply.

REGENERATION Continuing the intent of Bachia and Juebenaria to directly collaborate with stakeholders of the specific Yaqui community of the Town of Guadalupe in Arizona, I reached out to Mayor Valerie Molina to share news that I was hired to co-teach a 4th/6th year spring 2022 architectural studio at the ASU Design School. With her insight the direction of the studio transformed into an architectural project calling for a speculative response to a Request for Proposal publicly announced by the Town of Guadalupe during the summer 2021 that extensively details the town’s desires for new developments in the community.

In addition, René Corella, my co-teacher, and I collaborated to curate a studio experience that went beyond the status quo of traditional architecture studios. The objectives became: (1) a simulated design practice, (2) participation with community stakeholders as contributors

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Essay

Cycles of Plurality

to projects, (3) architectural response to an existing ecological issue, (4) lens of regional ancestrality/futurity, and (5) seed, facilitate, and deliver a conversation. Asking the studio to contemplate the heaviness of architecture and the impact it has on not only its inhabitants but the natural world. How can we use architecture today to learn about yesterday, so it addresses tomorrow?

Essay

Currently still in progress, the studio is facilitating projects that respond to the needs of the Town of Guadalupe through a plurality of architectural explorations that consider ancestrality, current realities, and potential futures. Integrating architectural students into this conversation enhances awareness of an urban indigenous community adjacent to Tempe, establishes new relationships with stakeholders engaged in the design process as citizen experts, incorporates 3D scanning technology for technical data collection, and exposes real world architectural implications/processes for pitching a proposal in response to a RFP. RECIPROCITY Pursuing these opportunities stems from an intention to give energy to projects that go beyond my generation. To find multiple ways to establish tangible and intangible reciprocity for my Yaqui community. To create channels of access and empowerment to ensure visibility of suppressed identities and worldviews in architectural and technical careers. To make attaining design skill sets more approachable and relatable. All by utilizing visualization and design tools to attract the next generation to take control of their own futures(s). Thus, embedding diverse interpretations, reference points, narratives, and worldviews into evolving design practices adding to the ever growing plurality of the architecture field. “We design our world, and our world designs us back.”2

Selina Martinex

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Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds.

Duke University Press.

2 Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds.

Duke University Press.

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Ashley Ontiveros

Shift to Service

Every upper-level student reflects fondly on the early days of their college careers. They still remember the late nights carving out layers of butter board with dulled xacto blades and creating eccentric hats with flimsy chipboard.

They remember all of the frustrations and peaks in design. The feeling of sore hands becomes nostalgic as they watch every incoming class experience the same fundamental memories within the program. Each group of students reminded us of our sweet past.

The pandemic brought a shift. At the end of March 2020, students didn’t return from what appeared to be just another spring break. The year passed without any hope, which left us to worry about our future and our lives.

What would come next?

In Fall of 2020, we desire normalcy, but what is normal anymore? All hope was not lost. Both returning and incoming students glimpsed Design School culture through Rocchi’s animated video lectures, lively zoom critiques, and, of course, the endearing casual conversations with all of our professors.

The words and support from our professors granted us a sense of understanding and compassion across a screen. We may have lost the personal face-to-face discussions, and the feeling of working on a project surrounded by the comforting silence of collaboration. Yet, we may have rekindled the spirit in the Design School.

Over the last month, we talked to people who stayed behind during the pandemic; working in the abandoned buildings, trying their best to preserve the spirit of the Design School in the same way that we held together our imperfect models while positioning the tape and waiting for the glue to dry. We talked to our coordinators and front desk receptionist, our

librarian helpers, our advising receivers, and our shop managers. In this, we heard how they kept the Design School on their shoulders to illuminate us with the history and perspective of our second home.

HABITS The pandemic changed the way we go about our day. It reshaped the way we think about architecture and design as the fear of contamination drove us to consider the spaces we inhabited. Designers now think about the functionality of space in a medical sense - listing hand sanitizers, marking tapes, and rearranging spaces further apart. After a long year of being confined to our rooms and homes, we were forced to notice every detail of our space; the lighting, the airflow, the way the sound may spread throughout a house details that might have been overlooked prior to the pandemic. These are all elements we will subconsciously consider when looking for new spaces and things designers must keep in mind for the future.

Upon returning to the Design School for the first time in a while - or for others, the first time ever - we knew that our experiences would be altered to protect and prepare for whatever the pandemic threw at us next. Social distancing signs and mask stations seemed to follow us wherever we went, but most of us never even thought twice about them or the people who maintained the signs and refilled the masks.

Our new routines of constantly sanitizing our hands and vigorously wiping down surfaces soon became habitual and second nature to us.

A few years ago, the thought of taking an appointment or having class over Zoom would have been a foreign concept. Now, whether it is for safety or even just for convenience, Zoom is a part of our daily lives. We have grown accustomed to our online meetings and nearly everyone knows the in’s and out’s of zoom. The advising team helps schedule our appointments on zoom, so in-person meetings became less and less frequent. The advising became lonelier, but the team still encouraged in-person meetings. As soon as students flooded into the buildings after the reopening, the advising team told us that there was great joy. Students filled the blank heartily.

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INTRICACY Our design school holds much history. Although it’s not brought up often, they are things in the design school corners and walls that sit in the back of our minds and make us question what was going through the designer’s mind?

You may have passed through the study room on the second floor of Design North and wondered about its purpose. That space used to be Charlie’s Cafe. Most people are familiar with this space, but what about Dead Square? You may or may not have heard this term bouncing between graduate students as you walk throughout the building. Kalani remembers it was an exhibition place, with windows and doors on the inside for professors to look at as well. Well, these windows became the very reason we have a Dead Square now. If you haven’t seen it, I encourage you to spend a few minutes out there and look around.

The cold interior and harsh exterior along with the outskirt location of the design building doesn’t attract very many admirers nor does it give in to curb appeal. It is hard to explain how this concrete building with rust-colored metal accents can be the second home to some of the most brilliant people on campus. Regardless of its strange and brutish aesthetic, we wouldn’t trade anything for the experiences and memories. As Winston Churchill once said, “We shape our buildings and our buildings shape us.” Everyone who has ever walked through our doors has left with a fragment of the design school, and a fragment of themselves has built it too.

FUNCTION If we had to choose one thing, the best part of the design building is how people decide to make use of the space. You could walk into any other building on campus and find students in chairs at tables but not in the Design School.

We surprise spaces. We sleep in the library, folded in the lounge chairs soundly. We sketch plans on the floor of the bridge; meet on the second floor patios, and eat lunch on the edges of the Design School ramp. The way we occupy these volumes and areas is always changing.

The desks in Design North used to be for individual students and had partitions around them. However, Jesus shared with us that the shop had a summer project, not only to replace these desks with larger ones but also weld

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new steel legs for desks. They may not be the most luxurious tables, but they have large flat surfaces and can be rearranged to facilitate our productions. This was the same thing in Design South, one desk was suited for one student, but as our architecture family grew so did our need to expand and adapt the space. This brings up the question of whether or not the Design School felt a little too overcrowded. The number of students increased but the building’s square footage did not.

TODAY After listening to these voices scattered in every area and within every department of the Design School, something is shocking that they all shared. Having worked in the building through the pandemic, these voices waited in anticipation as the number of days until the reopening of the school ticked down. Students circulate in and out of the building and up and down the stairs; they gather in groups to discuss the latest news and enjoy each other’s presence; they line up across the halls to pin up their work, having waited a whole year for these tangible experiences. Although we spend most of our time there, few people have traversed every inch of both buildings. It may be cliche but the saying stands, we only miss what we have once had and lost. Being back on campus, especially in our studios, it becomes clear how much the pandemic has affected us. Slowly and surely, we are going back to our old but longed-for ways, cautious as we put trust in our classmates.

In a way, the spirit of the school has not yet reached its full potential as it had before we all deserted the building. Some classes continue to meet over zoom, many of our interactions remain online and the big blue button to join the Zoom meeting becomes even more tempting.

There are many ways to praise how technology has once again made our lives easier as well as safer, but this comes with the side effect that students don’t discover the building or huddle together in the studios as they had done in the past.

We encourage this sense of rediscovering or exploring the Design buildings, in the end, it is the students who make up its existence.

We appreciate it in all its totality from its small charms to its large open spaces as we create memories that will last a lifetime.

Submission

CHEMATIC Design North and Design South are two seemingly normal structures connected by a bridge. For many students and staff members, they act as a second home. It is within these walls that we spend most of our college life: creating, learning, sharing, and celebrating. Like a home, it is filled with memories that connect the people who occupy it. These memories define the Design School buildings and give students the opportunity to create a community of people who share the same passions.

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Ashley Ontiveras

S

Kaitlyn

Jesus

S: What was it like working in a building through a pandemic and how has it changed since the school reopened?

A: Could I also ask if you worked here during the pandemic?

M: Mary Morgan.

A: So I just wanted to show you-Have you seen the call to the discipline?

M: I have not, no.

A: Basically, right now we’re trying to focus on shifts in the design school. I would say my assignment is to voice out the little voices.

How long have you been working here?

M: I’ve been working here for about a year.

March is when I first got the job.

A: Were you working during the pandemic?

M: Yeah. I would say in the middle of it because I started my freshman year living in the dorms, but I couldn’t go to class or do anything. Then, in the second semester of last year, I thought, “I need a job.” I saw an opening at the Design School and I said, “I can do that!”

I remember that the front door was closed all the time, and it was a really weird time to start here because for office duties, it’s usually like seeing people walk in and talk to me like with you and I. So, I was here doing different office tasks that the front desk usually wouldn’t do. Even starting college was weird during covid because seeing no one on campus, walking to work every morning, and just finding a complete ghost town.

I’m very thankful for this job because it kind of boosted me into the college experience a little bit because it got me up in the morning and walk somewhere.

And most thanks to Sophie AprotosoaieKardos

We were still here, and at the shop, we went around, replacing the feet of all desks and fixing and doing personal projects around the school.

A: You mean the desks on the second floor and up (of the Design North)?

J: Yes. All of those desks have steel toes now because they were wood before. There were close to a thousand that needed to be replaced because they were breaking and causing tables to be tilted. That’s just one example of what we did while working here during the pandemic.

We also did some furniture, and years ago, the green panels and countertops and doors, we built here in the shop. Again, we organized the new tables. Any exercise of that nature that could be done here, it was done in the shop.

Submission

Mary

J: I did, and since I was isolated from the staff, I worked here every day. We actually cycled turns to come in during the work days - should one of us become sick.

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A large project we have right now is to empty out a room and reconstruct some of the bookshelves in the office at the Design South because the way we were told to construct them back then was to stay in that room.

However, now they don’t come out in one piece, and they were put in the deepest area of Design South. We are 80% done with the project, but we can be ready to assemble it all.

Ashley Ontiveras

K: Um, definitely there have been measures implemented to like the spread of covid. But they are not as stringent now, unfortunately.

Um, but at the beginning of the pandemic, there would be regular cleaning. And that didn’t always exist before and there were more social distancing protocols throughout the building.

We give special thanks to Kalani, Mary, Jesus, Joyce, and Kaitlyn who gave us time to have a conservation with them and give us the content to write a reflection for the journal.

Shops have always done minor or modifying projects around the Design School.

Kalani A: Would you know what the dead space, square, on the second floor was used for ?

K: Yeah! Dead Square was a sort of exhibition space, but now it’s nothing. I think that’s because the staff windows faced toward the Dead Square, so maybe some changes had to be made.

A: I could have never imagined that because ever since I came into the Design School, I saw that dead square. It’s funny that we called it that.

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Brianna Tsatskin

The Shift Around Stigmas

The first time I recall being severely depressed was in high school. Over the span of four years, grandmother suffered a severe stroke that she would never recover from, my grandfather passed away and I was arrested for shoplifting.

My grandparents were the only set that my entire family had any relationship with and were the strongest glue of us all. In some ways, we fell apart after that. And while I was once a straight-A student, when I was arrested for shoplifting, my ultimate punishment was that my parents would not support me going to school anywhere out of state. As dramatic as this may seem, it was just another crushing blow and all of these compounded to me not caring any longer about my studies or myself. I began cutting class to the point that I almost didn’t graduate and yet, I somehow managed to make it to Arizona State University in the fall of 2010.

plagued me from high school. I had a transcript of A’s and E’s, with little in between. The classes that I felt I could easily excel in, I did. And those that I struggled in and when my perfectionism crept in, I quit altogether. Once again, I was left with the possibility that I would barely graduate as my final grade in my capstone course wavered the entire semester. But somehow, I did. And with what felt like luck, I was accepted into the 3+ program in Summer 2014.

I was beyond thrilled to be back in The Design School, continuing the dream that had started in high school. But what started again as a strong semester, quickly devolved into one in which I felt I could barely continue. My need for perfectionism dwarfed my desire to show up to class and as I approached the final project of the semester, it was suggested that I take an Incomplete in my courses so that I could continue onto the fall semester, which I ended up doing.

My only plan and goal was to study architecture and I enrolled in the studio and all of the other required courses that semester. As many architecture students can relate, it is something that I was passionate about for a very long time and was excited to finally have my opportunity to start fresh. The first day of studio, we met in the Neeb Hall auditorium. Back then, The Design School had the milestone program and we were told that of the several hundred or so of us, only 80 of us would make it in. This began what was then for me a toxic relationship with architecture. It felt as though the all-nighter and suffering for your art was glorified, and part of the so-called “studio culture”. My need to be perfect in everything I did manifested in me not turning in assignments that I thought were inadequate, which led to me cutting class altogether and eventually failing that semester.

With my tender mental state, I did not last more than a month or so into that semester until I disappeared entirely. I stopped checking emails, texts, and because I lived with my boyfriend (now husband, Brad) but was too ashamed to tell him or anyone, I continued the entire time to lie about how I was doing in my studies until it all came crashing down with a knock at the door. I wasn’t home for this knock, but Brad was. It was ASU police saying that because I had been completely MIA for the past several weeks, a professor had requested a well-check out of concern. When I returned home from my hiding away at local libraries, or wherever I was that day to pretend I was at school, Brad was gobsmacked but mostly hurt that I felt that I could not tell him, my boyfriend of three years at that point, that I was failing in my studies and stopped attending school entirely. I promised to return to school that spring but eventually, I could no longer receive financial aid due to my academic standing and thus couldn’t afford to enroll in classes. So eventually, I was removed from the program entirely.

It was at that time that I became aware of the 3+ program. I decided that I would switch to another field that I was very interested in and was just taking root at ASU, the School of Sustainability, with the intent of returning to architecture for my master’s. The rest of my undergraduate studies were marked by the same pattern that had

I should add some context to my experience with my mental health support at that time.

In my first year, in what was some sort of ASU 101 class, we were explicitly told to not pursue withdrawals at any time as they would reflect poorly on our transcript to anyone reviewing them. And so I had no idea about medical

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Essay

hen I was asked to write a piece for the Discipline journal, I was extremely flattered. I wasn’t sure what direction to go in, but I was asked to tell my story. And my story is one of my journey with mental illness and how that has intertwined over the past twelve years with my academic pursuits.

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Brianna Tsatskin

W

ARCHITECTURE JOURNAL AT ASU

I was again accepted and returned to the 3+ program with new skills and meager confidence the summer of 2018. I continued therapy but as I again began to crumble from my mental

For those that are unaware, the use of antidepressants in someone with bipolar disorder can lead to mania, and in my case, full-blown psychosis. A few weeks into beginning the antidepressants, on what was supposed to be a mental retreat to California with Brad’s grandmother and boyfriend, I quickly descended into my first documented experience with mania. Over the course of the week, I went from rapid speech and grand delusions to a night I wish I could forget. I tell some of this difficult part of the story because it is one that I once unabashedly shared with many, including in front of entire classes of ASU students, whether it was desired or not. One evening, due to things that I felt I was literally seeing and hearing, I tried to escape, naked, from Brad’s grandmother’s house. The funny thing with the brain and psychosis, you are quite literally out of your mind and yet everything I did, I can remember as if it was yesterday, no matter how much I wish I could forget. I remember crying in an empty tub over terrible things I thought I had done, that had never really happened. I remember pushing and shoving to get out of the house and feeling threatened. I remember being taken away in handcuffs by police and admitted into what I thought was some grand facility where I would meet Hilary Clinton. And then, all I remember is waking up in a hospital room with tubes in my arms to my parents standing beside me. It was then, that I was finally at the age of 25, diagnosed as bipolar.

If that psychotic episode was my descent, 2019 was rock bottom. Over the course of the year, I experienced the most literal highs and lows of my life all while everyone tried to help me get my bipolar episodes under control. My highs: I won over $5K in grants through ASU and affiliated

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organizations to pursue my mental health initiative, titled Upside Effects. My elevator pitch was that I was working to reduce the stigma of mental health in the design and arts communities. I did extensive research on the common connection between mental illness and some of the greats in the fields, Vincent Van Gogh, Robin Williams, Heath Ledger, Kanye West, Kate Spade and countless others.

I interviewed professionals and practiced my presentation with every ASU professor that was kind enough to listen. And my proudest achievement, was winning the in the health category of ASU’s Change the World. I thought I was unstoppable.

But with bipolar episodes, what goes up almost always comes down, and that I did with two back-to-back involuntary hospitalizations and being committed to a psychiatric facility (or as most call it, a psych ward) for over a week. It is often said by those with bipolar disorder, that while mania is scariest to everyone else not experiencing it, it is one of the best feelings in the world. It wasn’t my depressive episodes where I threatened suicide that landed me in the hospital, but my manic/psychotic episodes where I literally thought I was god. Again, those weeks in and out of the psychiatric facilities are ones I wish I could forget but remember clear as day, apart from the times that I had to be sedated I was so severely experiencing psychosis. I am still working with trauma from what I experienced and the ramifications that followed. These parts, for privacy of myself but mostly of others, I won’t go into detail but I will list some of the some of the more taboo symptoms, as I think we shy away from the sometimes ugly truths of mental illness too much. During manic episodes, some may experience: feelings of euphoria or being invincible, being obsessed with and completely absorbed in an activity, racing thoughts and rapid speech, delusions, hallucinations, and impulsive behavior including buying sprees and hypersexuality. None of this is shameful, it is just a cruel reality of living with mental illness when not under control.

Needless to say, I again removed myself from the program indefinitely until I could “get healthy.” I spent the remainder of 2019 stopping and starting different medications and working through some of this trauma. But some silver linings began to appear, I became engaged and resumed working that fall, at Jones Studio.

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Many who know me, have heard how highly I speak of Jones Studio. But this isn’t just out of admiration for the fifteen designers that work there and the powerfully meaningful work that they produce. It is out of a true affection for the Jones Studio family (as they call themselves) and everything they brought to me. I was given a safe space to work through getting my health to a better place and rebuilding my confidence not just as a professional but as a person. I am thankful for the opportunities that I was given and continue to receive from my time spent there. After two years, last spring, I found myself in the familiar place of again applying to return to the M. Arch 3+ program at ASU. And elatedly, I was welcomed to return to the place that had become a home, The Design School.

I wish I could tie a neat bow on my story with mental illness, bipolar disorder and my circuitous academic pursuits. But I can’t. March 30th was World Bipolar Day and at the very same time, I was experiencing a hypomanic episode, preceded and followed by depressive episodes, the likes of which I hadn’t seen for over a year. Even now, as I write this, I am still taking some time away from classes to recover.

But things are different this time around. While there is currently no “cure” for any of the mental illnesses I have described, stability is possible with the help of what I call my support team: my psychiatrist, my therapist, my family and friends.

Brad and I got married and I successfully finished my first semester of the M. Arch program, while concurrently pursuing my Master’s of Science in Biomimicry. And, I joined the AIAS National Task Force on Mental Health.

I am no longer ashamed to say I take medications, actively seek therapy, share how I am feeling or tell my story. Some have advised me against sharing some of what I have written - for leaving it all out for professors, professionals, potential employers and the world to see. But over the course of the past four years of unflinching honesty, I have had countless people, some close and others not as much, share with me their own journeys with mental health. I have been asked for recommendations for therapists, mental health facilities and encouraged others to seek help when they needed it. I am not a doctor, but I am a survivor, and that is something from which I wish to contribute.

Essay

Between 2015-2018, I worked two jobs averaging 12-14 hour days the entire time to make this goal a reality. Brad’s family owned a millwork shop in Tempe and I saw that as my opportunity to learn AutoCAD and build a portfolio. So, I worked there from 6am-12pm followed by my job as an intern at Tate Studio Architects, in Cave Creek. I spent almost two hours of my day commuting between jobs, leaving at 5am in the morning and returning at sometimes 10pm at night. All this time, internally, I was a mess. I was riddled with anxiety but too ashamed to let anyone see even though both places treated me like family, my insecurities ran that deep. By spring 2018, I had paid off my debt and received the three glowing letters of recommendation that I needed to reapply from coworkers that had become family. And yet, once again, my fears and anxieties about perfectionism got the best of me. It was three days before the application deadline and I hadn’t touched my portfolio when I finally decided I needed help. One of my closest friends had begun therapy and so I asked her for the name of her therapist and went to see her that day. My psychologist, who had worked as a counselor at ASU years past, told me two things. One, with her assistance, to apply for medical withdrawals in all of my past courses from my last time in the program. And two, come hell or high water, submit my application.

demons of anxiety and depression, I finally followed my therapist’s advice and began antidepressants at the end of that term. But this time, things felt different. I confided in a professor my internal struggles and was not met with the consternation that I feared, but some of the kindest compassion that I had ever received. I had the full-hearted support to take the time away from school that I needed with the goal of returning next spring once I had fully “recovered.” And here is where my journey from the road of acceptance of anxiety/depression took a sharp turn into my discovery of bipolar disorder.

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Brianna Tsatskin

withdrawals, something my severe depressive episodes would have certainly qualified for, at that time. Secondly, my family’s knowledge or rather acknowledgement of mental illness at that time was nonexistent. Unfortunately, no one saw what now seem like obvious signs of anxiety, depression and overall distress. I even managed to hide my removal from the program for many months afterwards from friends and family out of my shame at what felt like personal failings. But, through all of this, I remained determined to finish what I had started, and began the process of paying back the $10K in outstanding tuition entirely on my own, rebuilding my design portfolio and doing everything I could to build relationships in the profession that I thought would return me to the program.

I am proud of how far I have come since my first experiences with mental distress in adolescence and I hope that you may have learned something from my story. If not about mental illness or bipolar disorder, about what is possible when you reduce stigmas and seek help. That is the shift in conversation around mental health that I am looking for and I am hopeful that I will continue to see it in the years to come.

Bipolar disorder, formerly called manic depression, is a mental health condition that causes extreme mood swings that include emotional highs (mania or hypomania) and lows (depression). When you become depressed, you may feel sad or hopeless and lose interest or pleasure in most activities. When your mood shifts to mania or hypomania (less extreme than mania), you may feel euphoric, full of energy or unusually irritable. These mood swings can affect sleep, energy, activity, judgment, behavior and the ability to think clearly.

Episodes of mood swings may occur rarely or multiple times a year. While most people will experience some emotional symptoms between episodes, some may not experience any.

Although bipolar disorder is a lifelong condition, you can manage your mood swings and other symptoms by following a treatment plan. In most cases, bipolar disorder is treated with medications and psychological counseling (psychotherapy).

Mania: Mania and hypomania are two distinct types of episodes, but they have the same symptoms. Mania is more severe than hypomania and causes more noticeable problems at work, school and social activities, as well as relationship difficulties. Mania may also trigger a break from reality (psychosis) and require hospitalization.

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Both a manic and a hypomanic episode include three or more of these symptoms: Abnormally upbeat, jumpy or wired, Increased activity, energy or agitation, Exaggerated sense of well-being and self-confidence (euphoria), Decreased need for sleep, Unusual talkativeness, Racing thoughts, Distractibility, Poor decision-making — for example, going on buying sprees, taking sexual risks or making foolish investments Psychosis: Sometimes, a person with severe episodes of mania or depression may experience psychotic symptoms, such as hallucinations or delusions. The psychotic symptoms tend to match the person’s extreme mood. For example: People having psychotic symptoms during a manic episode may have the unrealistic belief that they are famous, have a lot of money, or have special powers; People having psychotic symptoms during a depressive episode may falsely believe they are financially ruined and penniless, have committed a crime, or have an unrecognized serious illness.

Incomplete: A mark of “I” (incomplete) is given by the instructor when you are otherwise doing acceptable work but are unable to complete the course because of illness or other conditions beyond your control. You are required to arrange with the instructor for the completion of the course requirements.

Medical Withdrawal: A medical or compassionate withdrawal request may be made in extraordinary cases in which serious illness or injury (medical) or another significant personal situation (compassionate) prevents a student from continuing his or her classes, and incompletes or other arrangements with the instructors are not possible.

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Brianna Tsatskin

Bipolar Disorder: Bipolar disorder is a brain disorder that causes changes in a person’s mood, energy, and ability to function. There are three types of bipolar disorder. All three types involve clear changes in mood, energy, and activity levels.

Essay

DEFINITIONS & RESOURCES:

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Marc Neveu, PhD

Architecture at ASU

ASU is a comprehensive public research university, measured not by whom we exclude, but rather by whom we include and how they succeed; advancing research and discovery of public value; and assuming fundamental responsibility for the economic, social, cultural and overall health of the communities it serves.

To be radically inclusive means that we cannot teach the way we were taught. We need to rethink how we organize studio, how we schedule classes, how we use technology, and how we build the culture of our school. There is the often-repeated story of a dean standing in front of a first-year class who asks the students to “look to your left, look to your right.” The dean then continues to say, “they will not be here when you graduate.” We have shifted this message of failure, to be one of success. In the first-year lecture, students are again asked to look to their colleagues, but are now asked to help them to be there when they graduate.

Over the previous three years, we have scaled back and then eliminated the milestone that existed after the first-year. Like many architecture programs, we reduced an incoming class of two-hundred or so students down to a more “manageable” forty-five students.

This was decided not on merit or potential, but rather as a quota system based on gpa.

The milestone caused unnecessary anxiety, unproductive tension amongst students, and was not the best predictor of student success.

Three years ago, we did not have a single undergraduate continue on to the graduate program, for example. IN AY21/22, we have over 300 students in the first-year and have drastically increased our fall to spring retention rate over previous years. Historically, students would drop out over the winter break, knowing they would not make it past the milestone.

While we do not expect all of our students to

matriculate into our graduate program, we do know the decision to continue will be made after a few more years of experience.

Our students are not the same as we were.

Many work 20 or 30 hours a week. Some have families to support. Technology has changed the way in which we use the studio. Our new curriculum accepts these differences. Rather than a culture of critique, we have built success into the studio. The power dynamic has also been shifted. It was not uncommon for the professor to be seen as the critic and the client, yielding all of the power. Historically, each student was asked to solely propose a unique solution, to be discussed in a therapy-like 20-minute session, two or three days a week.

As we all know, this is not the way practice, or the world, works. Rather than expecting studio culture to happen after hours our new studio curricula has been designed for collaboration.

Our students learn from each other, as much as from the faculty.

Submission

he Architecture program at ASU sits within the Design School (TDS), which sits within the Herberger Institute for the Design and Arts (HIDA). Our program is a “4+2,” meaning the undergraduate degree leads to a nonprofessional degree and the two-year graduate MArch is our accredited degree. In the past three years we have grown from around 350 students and will have over 1000 in the next academic year. This growth is the result of a complete redesign of the program to align more closely with the mission of ASU:

We have decoupled the non-professional undergraduate degree from the professional graduate degree. Each will leverage the mission of ASU in different ways. And, the design of each is by nature unique. Teaching to scale in the undergraduate program has required that we rethink many of our assumptions about what a studio should be. And, yes, the pandemic has played a role in all of this. We often bemoan the loss of “studio culture.” We are nostalgic for the days in which we stayed up all night in our studios. For some, there was a sense of comradery and a feeling of connection. What is not talked about is the unhealthy habits related to food, sleep, and drug use, that “studio culture” supported. Presenting to a hostile row of critics coming off a row of no-doze fueled all-nighters is not a recipe for success. But that was, for many, our red badge of courage. The graduate curriculum has been reconfigured to encourage students to take architecture plus an additional credential in another related field of study – construction management, sustainability, real estate development, urban planning, or other. Studios are all integrated, but at different levels of complexity.

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Marc Neveuu

T

Though there has been a lot of change, it has been an amazing few years to be a part of a program with such incredible students, faculty, and staff!

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Julia Lopez

Create + Play

As the project was weeks from being completed in March of 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic forced Arizona State University to halt all inperson classes and activities. Due to this, the final stages of the installation were never completed and those involved were never able to see the final result. So with heavy hearts, our team packed all of our parts into storage with an uncertain future.

to finish what we started. Since then, our group of 5 has become a group of 3, but we were determined to continue the legacy of everyone involved in our process.

On November 13, 2021, Create + Play would be able to see its project in full fruition at the Mesa Prototyping Festival and be allowed to become part of the community that it was designed for.

What would this entail in a post-covid world?

How would we as students and designers reengage with the Mesa community and would we be able to have the same impact as with the original project? As designers, the ability to adapt and improvise solutions when faced with changing environments is critical.

We as a team found that people need people.

They long for interaction, not only face to face but with new adaptations of human experience.

Having the ability to finish our project, meant that we were able to experiment more with what type of experience our design build would bring people. we would be able to define how people engage with their environment, their community. As a team we had wished to continue to work with the original students from Porter Elementary but due to time passing, this would no longer be possible. In order to honor their contribution to this project we found a

After 20 months, we were given the opportunity

way to integrate their voices through the use of sound and motion sensors, which brought about an entirely new experience for users. As the day of the Prototyping Festival went on, people would interact with the stories of these kids and this would bring up new conversations among complete strangers as they would reminisce on when they were younger. Kids would be kids and would often drag their parents with them through the installation, enabling interaction within multiple generations even if it was for a moment. This was our greatest reward.

With this being said, the process of working side by side with a group of students at Porter Elementary that have such bright futures and immeasurable talents is what the team members of Create + Play will always be grateful for. This experience made it clear how possible it is to integrate alternative methods to connect with humanity on levels beyond face to face contact. Although the team, leaders and students were thrilled to present the final installation to The Mesa Prototyping Festival, everyone involved will always remember the persistence and sincerity that was put into the concept. The sentimental emotions associated with Create + Play will be felt by each team member and will serve as a reminder that play was a way to find an equalizer. When we play we don’t care about the color of our skin or the shape of our eyes. We all play and in turn we all create.

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Submission

REATE + PLAY aims to continue the conversation between design and built, academia and community, theory and practice and learning and playing. The team collaborated with Amber Amaya’s 6th grade classroom at Porter Elementary in Mesa, Arizona. Through a series of activities and collaboration with these students, the final design was devised to be showcased at the Mesa Prototyping Festival. The focus for the design was on experimentation with how a kit of parts can result in a structure that encourages users of all ages and backgrounds to relate back to the playful emotions they felt as a child. Community identity, opportunity for playing and movement, material safety, and the optimization of cognitive health were integrated within the final installation through various strategies, which were intended to be enjoyed by all individuals.

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Julia Lopez

C

Rodrigo Enriquez

Biomimicry

B

iomimicry is the innovation of concepts inspired by the luxuries of nature. In addition, by emulating nature’s design we seek new sustainable solutions. Solutions that help develop new living spaces to reduce enviornmental impact.

We govern how architecture will influence the natural enviornment in a minimal way. We look for every kind of advantage to propose constructive, sustainable, and attractive logic.

The impact of our design can help find solutions for carbon emissions, cleaner resources, abundance of materials, or even impact on the site.

Submission

This study space is designed to absorb as much of the natural elements allowed in Arizona.

It provided an attractive solutions for harsh climate conditions, management of natural light, and ventilation. It replicates prefurated leaves in attempt to cut the amount of sun omitted, and a system that collects water similarly to local arizona plants. It creates a comfortable, light filled ambiance while ensuring the person a calm stay.

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Rodrigo Enriquez

This study space was directly designed from the Creosote Bush, a local Arizona plant that releases a euphoric smell after a rainy day. It absorbes as much of the morning sun and secures the most resources from local habitations. Moreover, its ability to be self sustainable grants it long life.

The small study space adopts sustainable programs such as green roofing, water collection, resource and sun absorbtion in order to allow a comfortable stay under the arizona heat.

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Mac Wood

Reflection in Shift

I remember when the first ‘stay-at-home’ order was announced, I was outside with some friends and thought about what that meant and what was happening around the globe. I was still unaware about the magnitude of this surge of a new virus. I thought to myself, two weeks, that sounds like a nice break from work, but didn’t think that two weeks would extend into what felt like and ended up being years. When everyone was forced to reside in their houses, I immediately noticed the stress it would put on my household with my roommates. We were all forced to adapt to work in a small house, simultaneously participating in zoom meetings.

However, I do acknowledge how lucky of a position I was in, to be able to work from home in a safe environment where I had access to WiFi and technology. During this turbulent period, I was working as a designer for a design-build firm in Oregon. I was forced to quickly adapt to keep the design process moving forward while never leaving my new office: the living room.

This entailed zoom meetings, more effective communication, and patience.

When the stay-at-home order continued longer than expected, I was compelled to think of different ways to get clients engaged and interested. We started looking into remote designing from the beginning, something that proved to be very difficult with many hurtles. We investigated new options of ‘preset designs’ to sell to construction companies, along the same lines as a modular home. My work slowed down and I had to be a self-advocate more than ever at this time. The firm was forced to rethink their values and focus on the ones that still seemed pertinent. Luckily, I was able to keep my job as a designer, but I know plenty of people who were not as fortunate. Seeing these effects and experiencing them myself reshaped the way I see my values and how I see the world.

I think things were moving at such a fast pace that we got stuck in these systematic ways, yet we didn’t have time to slow down and question

some of the fundamental practices we see in society.

The pandemic provided that avenue for us to slow down and reflect. I acknowledge this is a privileged view on the pandemic and understand the magnitude of loss and grief it has caused. I think trying to see some positive aspects that came with the pandemic while not forgetting the hardships is one way to learn from this experience. We were forced to stay in the confines of our homes, yet we discovered new ways to create or keep connections with friends and family. We uncovered lost passions and developed new ones. It showed us as employees and employers, we can have productive work environments from home while also taking care of ourselves and our home lives.

Submission

am a student in my first year of the 3+ Master of Architecture program, so I do not have any projects that pertain to shift directly. However, I do have my own personal experience that has led me to where I am today. Shift is not always a tangible idea, it can be a physical shift in the way we go about our days, but it can also be a change in mindset and how we see things that once seemed ordinary.

I think this experience, this shift, that has been created by the pandemic will have lasting effects on society. It will be visible in cultural history as well as architectural history. We are starting to see this in architecture, in how we design and how we view space. Through talking to professionals, I learned that architecture is starting to consider things like the technological essentials for modern life in low-income communities. This was notably observed when looking at the wealth divide between students.

Having to go somewhere like a fast-food chain to get internet access is not feasible, especially when looking at families with more than one child. Spaces are seen differently now and with thoughts about personal space and hygiene, through a different lens.

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I only have my personal experience, but I see the process of shifting informing architecture in ways of questioning the normality of design.

This large-scale change has made us slow down and have time to challenge what we know as normalcy. It has forced us to adapt to the changing physical and social environment.

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Ananth Udupa

Mannu School

This project takes these notions put forth by the pedagogy and translates them into a Sonoran perspective, specifically through a found object: the jumping cholla. Decoding the structural makeup of this skeleton helped me understand and define the liminal space within the proposed site. I documented local rock/ earth quarries and wood distribution centers, rooting the project in materials used by the native O’odham tribe which ancestrally sat on the proposed site. The O’odham bands are now broken up into 4 federally recognized tribes: the Tohono O’odham Nation, the Gila River Indian Community, the Ak-Chin Indian Community, and the Salt River (Pima Maricopa) Indian community, some of which are documented in this map to visualize the relationship between the knowledge systems presented today and native contemporaneity within space.

The site itself spans two lots on a residential wash, creating an isosceles triangle and accumulating to just over 230,000 sq ft. Wind patterns and solstices were noted in the process to develop passive systems and design moves which will be detailed later. One major note is the seasonal flooding of the space derived from topographic patterns and vegetation.

The site follows a simple programmatic path, beginning with the administrative space through shaded walkways to classroom, dining, garden, and exhibition spaces. Walkways were inspired by the tensile structure of a tree branch, with a fabric shade structure. The buildings are meant to be simple, with a combination of rammed earth and glass placed strategically to evade harsh southern and summer heat without compromising light. Rammed earth allows for thermal massing which creates passive interior cooling systems and promotes longevity, akin to adobe and other clay structures found in native traditions. The concrete sub-structure is topped with a 4” mud flooring to reconnect to the ground, taking notes from Francis Kere’s work in Gando and also Tagore’s Shantiniketan in Bengal.

Submission

annu school is a preschool proposal that connects the space for a child to the Sonoran desert through indigenous knowledge. The program followed a Reggio Emilia pedagogy which emphasizes processbased learning through arts and crafts and environment as a third teacher. The post-WWII schooling methodology was developed in Italy and incorporated central piazzas and programmatically overlapping spaces where children can interact and play.

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The classrooms provide open space and a blank slate for children to visualize their dreams and artwork fully. Taking from Arawaka and Gins design of the Reversible Destiny Lofts, the patterning derived from the wind paths was used to create mounds on the floor curved at the scale of a child’s foot to increase grip strength and acupuncture. Shifting back to the struc-

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ture, the buildings primarily use a cold, flat roofing system with an interlocked wood joist and insulation system to promote lightness and also airflow through the system. I wanted to add an outdoor space to connect the two classroom spaces, introducing fluidity and again hinting towards a Shantiniketan education system.

Another pillar of native tradition was the hornos or earth ovens. Three hornos are placed in between the garden and the kitchen to practice native food preparation methods, effectively rooting the Reggio Emilia pedagogy in the desert.

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Submission

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Ananth Udupa

The next point of criticality was in the garden and dining area. The O’odham culture emphasized a diverse, native agricultural cultivation system and this process was extremely important in developing this preschool design, as food and dining also serve as pillars for the Reggio Emilia Pedagogy. Beyond this, ideas of counternarratives in ethnic spaces from African American houses to barrio gardens in the Southwest-inspired the horticulture space for this project. The patterning from the jumping cholla was used to create small plots of land for children to participate in native farming cycles.

Plants like tepary beans, melon, mesquite bean pods, agave, and squash would be planted in these spaces.

Because Reggio Emilia emphasizes art, I wanted to create an exhibition and presentation space. Located on top of the wash, the materiality articulates a shift in space as the building moves onto the wash.

The roof facade again implements the cholla cactus pattern. Also, a lowered performance area was placed in the center of the building and aligns with the O’odham design of classrooms of stepping down into the ground.

Submission

The outdoor play space was also extremely important in the process of developing this project. Cholla patterning was revisited and reinterpreted to create a shaded play space.

The two playspaces function as a derivative of the O’odham ball courts which were ellipsoid mounds, creating hubs for play. This play with topography was used to create privacy in the outdoor space, as well as incorporate concepts of play and curiosity into the environment itself. Native trees and shrubs surround these plants to create a sense of security and safety.

This project begins my personal journey of experimenting with architecture beyond the built environment and towards the interaction between place and space as a generative practice of community and culture. We must observe through art, literature, and history how to design inclusively and inspire others to feel free within the spaces we create.

Ananth Udupa

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Natalie Severy

mergency shelters in refugee camps are both material and social responses to humanitarian crises. The ways that the success and failures of emergency shelters have been measured in the past have mostly focused on the potential of specific shelters to improve quality of life and to decrease human suffering during times of encampment. Improving quality of life and the ability to decrease human suffering are both very valid ways to measure the impact of a product. How is the emergency shelter as a particular product marketed? How does the media and language used have the potential to stabilize collective ideas of what it means to be a refugee and what they deserve, both in terms of the housing they are given and in the kinds of futures prescribed for them?

What is a Sociotechnical Imaginary?

While societies regularly develop imaginaries of how life should be or might be in the future, what distinguishes a sociotechnical imaginary from other kinds of imaginaries is the attention to the relationship between the social and the material innovations of technological products in constructing diverse and desirable futures.

A sociotechnical imaginary is a narrative that tries to explain the relationships between material and technical developments, like emergency shelters, and cultural positioning.

These two things combined are often a part of larger social movements - like “humanitarian aid”. These narratives can construct a collective identity of what is considered good and evil, concepts associated with defining justice and human-to-human relationships.

This way of thinking situates technology as interdependent within a progressively integrated material, moral, and social landscape not unlike the futures typically encountered in science fiction. Outside of science fiction, there are few functional models that exist for engaging technology in future forecasting.

While it could be said that professional designers, such as architects, are focused on bringing products and environments into existence, there is often a lack of clarity around the social effects of their material and formal innovations. Emergency shelters, for example, provide much needed housing for displaced populations but often these material solutions are disconnected from larger social issues

such as the militarization of borders, lack of human or social capital, and public perception and policy.

In what way are desirable futures “institutionally stabilized, publicly performed” by each of these three major actors?

It is important to focus on the discourse, or the language used by the three actors involved in the development of one emergency shelter.

These three actors are a private design group called Better Shelter, who partnered with the IKEA Foundation, and the UNHCR. Together these three entities helped design and develop the emergency shelter named Better Shelter.

In 2010, the UNHCR paired with Better Shelter design group the IKEA foundation to collaborate, develop, and fund an innovative sheltering option for refugee camps that is easy to pack, ship, and assemble. This sheltering option is known as the Better Shelter. It combines the production and shipping logistics developed by IKEA with material innovations such as a rigid structure, impermeable walls, and lockable doors. It packs in two flat boxes, and it was designed without a specific context in mine. This shelter first came to my attention when I was researching the role of social entrepreneurs and how the IKEA foundation has steadily become more involved in providing infrastructure upgrades like housing and solar power in refugee camps.

Thinking about products and how they have latent social information in them is meaningful. It provides insight into how shared understanding of what has been done in the past and what is promised for the future, or might be rejected, based on learned ideas of right and wrong.

Looking at emergency shelters with sociotechnical imaginaries contrasts with how innovative products have previously been studied. Rather than focusing on how successful a product is, like the ability of a shelter to reduce suffering, or to provide safety to women and children, what we are looking at instead is how the cultural positioning and the goals of individual designers like the IKEA foundation and organizations such as the UNHCR can mobilize into material solutions which contain their ideas of desirable futures which may or may not align with real needs of refugees.

What priorities have Better Shelter identified for design development of their emergency shelter?

What are the moments of shared agreement or tension in the imagined futures for refugees

by Better Shelter, the IKEA foundation, and the UNHCR?

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As a research project, we used discourse analysis to look at the repeated and specific language used in press releases and internal documents of the Better Shelter, the IKEA Foundation and the UNHCR. The first thing we found was how language is used by Better Shelter and the IKEA foundation to market their product exclusively for families and children, evoking strong feelings of the necessity to protect these vulnerable groups with the Better Shelter. Repeated references to families and children is an effective method of soliciting sympathy for the suffering of the other. It is effective because many of us can relate, those of us with children cannot fathom walking, away from genocide with our children on our backs only to arrive and be forced to live in tents on the ground. At least the Better Shelter is like a home.

We also found repeated and specific use of the ideas of safety and security, but again, only for families. Adequate shelter is an undeniable concept tied to a sense of home, to being safe, being secure. These concepts are carefully crafted in the media documents of the IKEA foundation and Better Shelter to be relatable across cultures or demographics. In doing so, these two organizations target particular visions of what is possible for the future of these refugee families. When IKEA and Better Shelter frames its shelter as a response to “children’s lives [being] turned upside down” and wanting

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children” or “How we’re helping kids get “to make sure children have the chance to have their childhoods back” they are constructing an imaginary that associates the designed technological and architectural, material product as a solution to a larger social issue of a families’ emergency need for long term shelter.

Another finding during our research: The IKEA Foundation and Better Shelter also reference safety and dignity throughout their press releases, where dignity is a by-product of safety provided by the Better Shelter. It is the material innovation of the Better Shelter by which a refugee might live a more dignified life. Both IKEA and Better Shelter use “safety and dignity” together often, to stabilize their constructed version of a sense of home for refugee families.

Linking these concepts together also produces a rhetorical intention and indicates a value system. With a safer Better Shelter, your life will be more dignified than if you were in a more traditional emergency shelter.

Which brings us to the comparison between the Better Shelter and the product that the Swedish designers consistently push against – the UNHCR tent. According to the ideas and worldviews of the design teams who developed the innovative Better Shelter, it is in fact Better Than a Tent. This rhetoric is constantly repeated with phrases like it is “safer and more dignified than a tent” to having “an expected lifespan six times that of standard tents and at 17.5 square meters are much more spacious.” and “Unlike a tent, the shelters have lockable doors”. As a neoliberal position in the market, the intention is to remove the competition for, as the IKEA foundation states, “If you compare life in the tents and life in these shelters, it’s a thousand times better” But the real point of comparison for this research project is the difference between worldviews and value systems of the IKEA

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Submission

Imaginaries of Humanitarian Design

According to the UNHCR, social progress is more nuanced and less internally vested in profiteering. Their long-term goals are to “continue modernizing working methods and implementing sustainable solutions to settlement and shelter problems that improve the wellbeing and dignity of refugees in a changing world” (UNHCR 2019). Unlike the market positioning of the Better Shelter and the IKEA Foundation that promotes the use of one product or compare products in a way that prioritizes one over another, such as the Better Shelter being “a thousand times better” than a tent (Wainwright 2017). Rather, the UNHCR sees innovations in material architectural products are part of a much larger social strategy.

Better Shelter and IKEA see their product not

The Better Shelter and the IKEA foundation are both actors in architecture of displacement, engaging in neoliberal market strategies, promoting the “best product” that can “do everything” with little attention given to the complexities of life and sheltering needs in different contexts.

The sociotechnical imaginary of the UNHCR, in contrast, is not embedded in one material product but rather is housed in a palette of material sheltering options and social innovations focused on attending to emergency sheltering needs in different locations, with context specific strategies.

When addressing sociotechnical imaginaries in designed products, it is not necessary to be exclusive to one vision or require imaginaries to be homogeneous. Rather “multiple imaginaries can coexist within a society in tension or in a productive dialectical relationship.

So how these imaginaries overlap is quite simple. the long-term goals of the UNHCR are to “continue modernizing working methods and implementing sustainable solutions to settlement and shelter problems that improve the wellbeing and dignity of refugees in a changing world” (UNHCR 2019). In specific locations, the UNHCR acknowledges the Better Shelter is an appropriate selection for transitional refugee housing. In specific locations, Better Shelter is an upgrade from the UNHCR tent. In situations that are rapidly evolving or where weather threatens the comfort and safety of refugees, the rigid, waterproof and stab-proof exterior panels do

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provide significant protection for vulnerable people like women and children. The value of the Better Shelter can also be measured by the fact that the UNHCR has long term plans to invest in the Better Shelter, “to strengthen refugees’ resilience to humanitarian crises and the impact of their displacement: continue supporting the deployment of the new version of the ‘[Better Shelter]” (UNHCR 2019).

But as I started out this presentation: The Better Shelter, as part of an imaginary, cannot be defined only by its structure and promise to improve quality of life. An essential take away to this presentation is that the promise to do future good is a durable and dominant idea because it encodes what is possible with technology in a co-productive relationship with larger social issues.

However, for these theories to have any traction there needs to be recognition of power differentials and nuanced understanding of values. The sociotechnical imaginaries of the IKEA Foundation and Better Shelter are that safety, happiness, and dignity are portable.

They are goods that can be packed and shipped flat and consumed by refugees. The Better Shelter and the IKEA foundation are clearly committed to social entrepreneurship through its foundation which is aligned with its core technology and business strategies, which is not inherently negative. All three actors are concerned with social progress. However there is a clear difference in the position of the Better Shelter and the IKEA foundation as a forprofit, and private company who are applying market strategies to build capacity for use, and thus market dominance, of its humanitarian “solution”. IKEA’s rhetoric would have us believe it is utopia delivered, with a manual, in two boxes.

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The sociotechnical imaginary of the UNHCR, in contrast, is not embedded in one material product but rather is housed in a palette of material sheltering options and social innovations focused on attending to emergency sheltering needs in different locations, with context specific strategies.

I think that Humanitarian design should be more aligned with human rights, not humanitarian aid.

The bigger picture idea is the rhetoric used by the IKEA foundation and the Better Shelter profit some, as within a neoliberal framework the refugees are the consumers. A more equitable, human rights solution would be to focus on the abolition of refugee camps all together. But thankfully, that is not a problem to be fixed with design.

Submission

Our findings also indicated that the UNHCR is invested in providing a palette of sheltering options as a larger strategy to improve overall quality of life, where quality of life is not just measured by the ability of one product to improve conditions for families and children but is also measured by metrics like access to health care, cash allowances, education opportunities, and long-term plans for reintegration into host countries when possible. Housing is only one of the many options developed by the UNHCR to help refugees build capacity and be a part of constructing their own futures.

as temporary but as a replacement for the home - a point that puts these imaginaries into conflict with the stated temporary use of the shelter by the UNHCR. The designers envision the shelters as permanent upgrades through the narrative of home with statements such as “The tents offer little comfort or warmth and [...] [tents are] far from the ideal solution to a permanent home” (Girardeau 2017) and “It feels more like a house” (Peters 2015). These narratives of safety, home, and dignity become methods of construction of sociotechnical imaginaries which link design innovation as a crucial, necessary tool for building a brighter future - in this case, how life will improve for refugees.

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foundation and the Better Shelter and the positioning of the UNHCR. Our analysis shows that the UNHCR is focused on both immediate and long-term sheltering, independence, and capacity building for refugees. The do not limit who a refugee is, as indicated in their language which is more inclusive to include a variety of people. The UNHCR does not construct narratives that promote the use of one product but rather are interested in “Investing in R&D to innovate our shelter solutions and in modernizing our working methods to implement sustainable solutions to settlement and shelter problems” (UNHCR 2019). As world leaders in assessing and deploying humanitarian aid, the UNHCR manages to negotiate the functional relationship of social and material innovations into workable solutions to improve quality of life for refugees. Their solutions are often context specific and include strategies to involve refugees in the construction of their own home.

Olivia Webb

Submission

Shadow

Olivia Webb

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Andres De Locha

Using Architecture to Create Healing Spaces

One of my biggest drivers is creating healing spaces through architecture. I have been a very art-oriented person since I was young, that is what led me into architecture and design in the first place. During my undergrad in interior design at ASU, one of my studio projects was in healthcare, and the basis of the design was to use our own experiences as patients to develop a project that would focus on healing through the use of biophilic design. It sparked an immense interest in me, since it was my first time learning about it, and how deeply rooted in psychology architecture and design could be. That studio was led by Sonja Bochart, a designer with over 25 years of experience in the healthcare field, emphasizing in biophilic building design and how that can be used to help the healing process.

Sonja recommended us to read the book “Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being” by Esther M. Sternberg. It was my first time reading about healing spaces and how buildings can be built as a healing mechanism for people. Sternberg talks about physiological descriptions of the senses and describes how a sense works and interacts with other systems in the body and how senses influence well-being. Though people have long linked pleasing environments with healing, it wasn’t until recent advances in neuroscience and immunology that scientists could finally establish associations between the brain and the immune system. Now armed with scientific data, there is new evidence that healing spaces, as well as positive experiences, can indeed improve health. One of the ways you can improve quality of life in buildings that has been researched in these past years is by means of biophilia.

Biophilia is defined as the innate human instinct to connect with nature and other living beings.

The concept of biophilic design consists of bringing in natural elements, textures, and patterns to connect it to the built environment to benefit its users. Biophilic design has come up a lot recently in not only healthcare architectural projects, but also in other types of projects like work environments and residential, so how do

these two elements, biophilia and design, come together and work for the process of healing?

Using architecture to help the process of healing is one of the most powerful tools an architect can have. Biophilic design can reduce stress, improve cognitive function and creativity, improve our well-being and healing.

So, we, the current generation of architects and designers, are extremely responsible on how we can improve the quality of life for the future generations to come.

There was a shift after the pandemic in how everybody lived their lives and how their space configurations changed according to their physical and psychological needs. Everyone paid attention on how to improve their quality of life by changing the space they spent most of their day in. There was a huge surge on the demand for houseplants (6% increase in annual revenue in 2020) and people started to bring in those natural elements into their house to alleviate their well-being as a way for therapy and stress relief. On the other hand, people who were not improving their space to better their mental health were having a harder time than others during the height of the pandemic, struggling with stress, anxiety, and fear of the future. Limiting contact to the outside, whether that be with nature or people, negatively affects the mental health of the general population, as evidenced in previous studies. Such limitations have various possible consequences; confinement is likely to increase feelings of stress among individuals by limiting both access to public and open spaces and contact with people outside the home. Confinement also led to greater social exclusion, loneliness, reduced social support, and an increase in alcohol and substance use, all of which are key risk factors for poor mental health and suicidal behavior. That is why this is important to me, being close to people in my life that have dealt and are dealing with some type of depression has open my eyes into how I can help those people heal with my knowledge and research on the topic.

Moving forward, housing projects need to be re-thought out and re-adapted with environmental psychology in mind, especially for those individuals that need to be connected with nature and/or other individuals to improve their mental health. One of my educational projects that I got to use my knowledge on the

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Submission

rchitecture is a form of creative expression and perspective. It evokes an emotional response from an audience. But how does it help heal?

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topic was in the spring semester studio of 2021, led by Katherine Dudzik Smith. I designed a multi-family housing project that emphasized in bringing the community together and explore the benefits of creating residential environments that would help to alleviate loneliness and social isolation amidst the pandemic.

I approached my design through the lens of environmental psychology and biophilic design, exploring the parameters of biology and social connectivity as means to forge connections with residents, neighbors, and passersby. The project aspires to serve as a prototype for future housing projects that make importance in social inclusion, connection, and well-being.

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SITE PLAN The massing of the units are facing each other so that most of the circulation would happen internally between units to make those connections with neighbors and the community outside. Also, by having the circulation between the units internally, it gave me a chance to make use of the large, open space in the center for a center courtyard where the community can get together for many activities. It can function as a place for events, markets, or any social setting that brings in the community from outside throughout the year. This also helps the residents to socialize with other people in the area, that they might not have the chance to do so otherwise, to alleviate isolation and loneliness due to the pandemic.

This project means a lot for me since I feel like most people, all over the world, can relate to it. We spent most of our time indoors either on lockdown or quarantining for about a year, so we experienced something that none of us had experienced before, isolation and feeling of loneliness that in some cases led to depression.

The pandemic is going to shift the future of the architecture field and how we approach the design of spaces and how we can improve those spaces by developing new and fresh ideas for the future with psychological health in mind. As the new generation of architects and designers come up, we will be responsible for how the future of the field thinks like and using our architectural knowledge to create those healing spaces for the public is something that we should all be passionate about.

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Submission

Each unit in this project has a patio and a porch or balcony with floor to ceiling windows as a median between public and private spaces to help those isolated to come outside and enjoy the community gatherings occurring right outside of their apartment. This was done to blur the barriers between inside and outside and open the eyes of the residents to be encouraged to come out of their shell and enjoy what the community has to offer.

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RESOURCES Alcock, I., M.P. White, B.W. Wheeler, L.E. Fleming, & M.H. Depledge. (2014). Longitudinal Effects on Mental Health of Moving to Greener and Less Green Urban Areas.

Environmental Science & Technology, 48 (2), 1247-1255.

Alexandra Health (2013). Creating a Healing Environment. A Healing Space: Creating Biodiversity at Khoo Teck Puat Hospital. Singapore: 10-19. Web. June 2014: Balling, J.D., & Falk, J. H. (1982). Development of Visual Preference for Natural Environments. Environment and Behavior, 14 (1), 5-28.

Barton, J. & J. Pretty (2010). What Is the Best Dose of Nature and Green Exercise for Improving Mental Health.

Environmental Science & Technology, 44, 3947–3955.

Frumkin, H. (2008). Nature Contact and Human Health: Building the Evidence Base. In: S.F. Kellert, J.H. Heerwagen, & M.L. Mador (Eds.). Biophilic Design (115-116).

Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Fuller, R.A., K.N. Irvine, P. Devine-Wright, P.H. Warren, & K.J. Gaston (2007). Psychological Benefits of Greenspace Increase with Biodiversity. Biology Letters 3 (4), 390-394.

Hartig, T., G.W. Evans, L.D. Jamner, D.S. Davis, & T. Gärling (2003). Tracking Restoration in Natural and Urban Field Settings. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 23, 109–123.

Joye, Y. (2007). Architectural Lessons From Environmental Psychology: The Case of Biophilic Architecture.

Review of General Psychology, 11 (4), 305-328.

Kaplan, R., S. Kaplan & R.L. Ryan (1998). With People in Mind: Design and Management of Everyday Nature.

Washington: Island Press. 1-6, 67107.

Kawachi, I., Berkman, L.F. Social ties and mental health. J Urban Health 78, 458–467 (2001). https://doi. org/10.1093/jurban/78.3.458 Lawson, B., Bassanino, M., Phiri, M., & Worthington, J. (2003). Intentions, practices, and aspirations: Understanding learning in design. Design Studies, 24(4), 327-339.

Levin, D. M. (Ed.). (1993). Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Univ of California Press.

Lorant, V., Smith, P., Van den Broeck, K. et al. Psychological distress associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and suppression measures during the first wave in Belgium. BMC Psychiatry 21, 112 (2021). https://doi. org/10.1186/s12888-021-03109-1 Pallasmaa, J. 2. (2005). Lived space: Embodied experience and sensory thought. Encounters: Architectural Essays.

Ruso, B., & K. Atzwanger (2003). Measuring Immediate Behavioural Responses to the Environment. The Michigan Psychologist, 4, p. 12.

Ryan, C.O., W.D. Browning, J.O. Clancy, S.L. Andrews, & N.B. Kallianpurkar (2014). Biophilic Design Patterns: Emerging Nature-Based Parameters for Health and Well-Being in the Built Environment. Archnet International Journal of Architectural Research, 8 (2), 62-76.

Sternberg, E. (2009). Healing spaces: The science of place and wellbeing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Terrapin Bright Green (2012). The Economics of Biophilia. New York: Terrapin Bright Green llc. pp40.

SECTIONAL VIEW In this iteration of how the center courtyard could be used, there is a market of handmade artisan artifacts sold and made by local indigenous tribes, sharing a little bit of their culture along the way for people around the neighborhood.

Allison Edwards, Brennan Richards

Community of Care

While in Puerto Rico the people that we spoke to expressed a desire to acknowledge the past of the place for what it is while moving forward.

This concept of a new critical identity for the site is what we wanted to accomplish with this building, expressed through a paradigm shift in the built environment and a shift in the typology of our program, a community center. This paradigm shift needs to be sensitive to both the old and the new, a yin and yang of forces that may be seen as contrary but actually become complementary. This new harmony requires an interchange of information. Executing this concept on the built environment involved a strategy of using the existing site while connecting to a mass on the adjacent site with a bridge extending above the road.

Our site is the existing Martin Brumbaugh elementary school in Puerta de Tierra, San Juan. Like 2 out of 5 buildings in Puerto Rico, the school is abandoned. The existing building and flow of traffic have a rigid relationship to the area; the ground plane has a drastic slope in every direction. The school and surrounding community contain traces of the pre-American invasion Spanish culture in the language and the built environment.

Creating a community center requires navigating a number of vulnerable moments and interactions. In the hands of the designer these experiences must be treated with respect and dignity. This is something that was taken into consideration when we were designing our community wellness spaces. For example, to change the narrative of receiving food from the food bank, we placed this space centrally in the project. This space was given the feel of a grocery store to enable community members to feel more comfortable accessing this resource. These small paradigm shifts allow the spaces to be more empathetic to their users.

existing

40% removal

added mass

open for foot traffic

adjust to traffic and views

overhang for shading

COMMUNITY OF CARE

PARADIGM SHIFT

redefining community services using phenomenal and proximal relationships

These diagrams explain our massing strategy, specifically what was removed and added, the circulation on the ground plane, the north facing facade, and the north facing overhangs. What was specifically removed from the existing building was 40% of the basement and first floor, as well as one bay from the second floor.

The space that was created by the resulting overhang serves as a flexible gathering space for the community.

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We divided the given program into three main categories; community exploration in dark blue, community wellness in green, and co-living in light blue. To bring a community of care to the forefront of our design the program focusing on wellness engages the boundary condition with the surrounding community. The community exploration spaces stay within the existing building to interchange the ideas of the previous identity of the community and the new identity. Having explorative spaces that are flexible allows for the community’s needs both critical and experiential, to be met.

Co-living spaces take up the third floor to maintain a level of privacy and security.

Engaging an identity and a place that we did not belong to in the traditional sense was a delicate matter. Imposing our own ideas of what this community is or is not would not have been successful in this project. We needed to shift our perception of service to a community away from set ideas, to create a new space that was truly capable of engaging and serving a community. We hope this place serves as a turning point to a paradigm shift for this community to realize itself in its most authentic form.

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was inspired by the falling water seen and heard in the caves and rainforest that we visited on the island.

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The colorful wrap that surrounds the building serves as a conceptual and physical representation of the unification of the existing building and the added expansion. The system of the wrap is composed of waves of hollow metal pipes secured to the new and existing facades; inter-connected to the roof drainage system. The water collected on the roof is distributed to different locations along the building to collect and use rainwater. Water flows from the roof to the pipe facade and then falls to a garden below or a perforated ground plane, to then be cleaned and stored for emergency use. This idea of water collection

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Submission

e had the incredible opportunity in the Fall of 2021 to travel to the island of Puerto Rico. The experiences we had gave us an understanding of the people and the place that we would not have gained otherwise.

Puerto Rico is a place of constant shift; always realizing itself more and more. The identities of the people and the place are truly a palimpsest; what prevails over all is the beauty of the place and the care that people have for each other.

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Allison Edwards 7 Brennan Richards

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Submission Allison Edwards & Brennan Richards

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Submissions Allison Edwards & Brennan Richards

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Erick Hernandez

Shelter

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Submission

hen it comes to healing, comfort is a great factor which can impact how fast you can heal. The environment in which a person in need of healing factors into how comfortable that person may be. We can spend time doing the things that bring us the most peace in the spaces that bring us the most comfort. For my collage the many users of the same dwelling spend their time doing what brings them the most peace of mind, healing mentally as well as physically for some. When entering physical space, it is important to find the places which give us the most comfort so that we can begin the process of healing.

Erick Hernandez

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Ashley Ontiveros

In a Change

The first time walking into the studio after a year of zoom classes threw me for a loop.

The wave of memories in each corner of the Design School brought me a deep nostalgia even though I was standing right there.

But, in the cold room filled with many steel desks, I realized that I sat in a new wave of thinking. The post-pandemic times shifted into our studios, and there had been something that permanently changed how I entered and sat in that studio.

With the multi-housing project, I couldn’t ignore how my personal experience, jumping into zoom or rolling out of bed to sit at my desk, shaped the core of my daily life. I voiced out these minor details because the time in isolation changed the very concept of our room spaces. The space where we dreamed became our kitchens and our beds’ temporary desks. It wasn’t only the bedrooms that design needed rethinking, but multipurpose homes didn’t appear the same if social distancing was in demand. All of our gathering spaces became empty, so would we rethink new individual spaces or advocate for gathering spaces more after the long wait to come together?

We designed The X Complex as part of a post-pandemic housing project for all types of artists. My studio partner and I thought about

how artists need specific spaces to create art or film their videos. The key idea we elaborated on was the idea of space after the pandemic, and the pandemic caused a permanent shift in our lives, which my partner and I confronted in our design.

Although the little details aren’t visible from the outside, we crafted our 3D model with the creation of each step designed by the moment.

The moment of walking in and glancing at whoever was cooking in the kitchen. The moment while walking from the elevator and seeing a piece of the sky beyond the facing walls. The moment of passing by a conversation happening in front of the gym. It was a social design to think about these moments that only architecture could capture.

Submission

hift in thinking, shift in studio, shift into normalcy.

It was not the design process of the X Complex alone that made me rethink the shift happening in my reality. One Sunday afternoon, my studio partner and I walked into the studio to work on our physical models, and we found other studio classmates. We blasted some music and talked while hot gluing some pieces. It must have appeared normal from a third-person perspective, but for us, it was slowly becoming familiar with what we missed about working in a studio. Although we kept our masks on, there was something different about the room.

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Ashley Ontiveras

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That something didn’t impede us from coming together, working together, and adapting to the changes that we couldn’t possibly reverse.

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Clara Riess

Untitled

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Submission

ike a macabre dream, the photo frames a dark, startling, and over accentuated intersection between old and new. A reminder that isolation from our familiar buildings did not stop the decay of time.

Clara Riess

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Sophie Aprotosoaie-Kardos

A Graft Onto The Design School

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n fall 2021, the Design Fundamentals III Studio was tasked with exploring the ASU campus and designing a project that could be grafted onto one of the buildings, in the same way, that one grafts two plants together and ends up with a beautiful new species. The aim of this project was to look at how you can start with an existing building and create an addition and how that has so much potential to change the mood, aesthetic, and purpose of the building.

Throughout the project, we learned that in order to begin we had to know everything about the existing building.

Submission

How does it function?

What design style does it follow?

Who inhabits the space?

How big is it?

These are all questions that the students spent hours and days trying to answer.

Next, we had to consider how we wanted the addition to interact with the building.

Would it flow smoothly together as one?

Should it contrast in material, style, and size?

What would be the purpose of this new area?

Is there anything that should change?

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Sophie Aprotosoaie-Kardos

Depending on the site, students answered these questions for themselves, learning throughout the process that it is essential to study what existed and create many different iterations then decide which most closely meets their goal and perfect it.

Enclosed between the large and looming buildings of the Design School, the graft brings peace of mind to those who are unable to find a sense of calm as they walk up the long ramp to class. A place to explore and cast out the never-ending thoughts of one’s daily struggles and stresses while climbing and traversing the sinuous structure.

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Ananth Udupa

Integrating Community Voices in Practice

This past summer, I was part of a NSF funded team of researchers in San Juan, Puerto Rico for a collaborative internship experience on resilient and nature-based solutions for climate crises. For this project and location, we focused on flooding, especially in response to recent flooding and disasters in Puerto Rico.

We spent the first weeks understanding the issue in San Juan, meeting with local networks for climate resilience research, and locating a place for our project to live in regards to impact.

Flooding is a complex and dynamic issue, which does not stem from natural phenomena.

It emerges from multiple social, ecological, and technological factors that must be understood together in order to adequately address the risks it poses to citizens. Where and how we build, how we maintain our infrastructure, our location in the floodplain, and the relationships we have within our communities and with authorities create a web of interdependencies that inform flood risk.

Puerto Nuevo is a region where flooding has caused significant infrastructural damage and losses in property. Puerto Nuevo is a unique site because it has coastal, urban, and riverine flooding because of its downstream location. In planning, the community does not have accessible green space, successful stormwater infrastructure, among many other factors. The community has been historically underrepresented in decisionmaking processes around flooding. Our project documented resident experiences to encourage community engagement within Puerto Nuevo and usher more informed and participatory watershed-scale flood management moving forward.

We had a diverse set of interests when approaching the interviews. The team had ecology, architecture, and planning backgrounds so the questions followed suit asking about lived experiences with flooding, access to and the importance of green infrastructure, opinions on pending government responses to flooding, and designed (physical) and social responses to flooding the community. We also noted vacant lots and abandoned houses for a visioning aspect for the output of the project. The findings of the research project were analyzed and visualized in a report used to inform the community of broader river channelization and flood management initiatives. The report will also be used by community action groups as a case-study reference for future federal flood management projects.

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Submission

ow do we define the process of architecture and who do we design for?

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ARCHITECTURE JOURNAL AT ASU

Lab Group: Mandy Kuhn, PhD, Arizona State University Theresa O’neil, MA, California State Long Beach Daniela Garcia Moreno, BA, Cornell University Sanjana Roy, BA, Middleburry College Ananth Udupa, BSD, Arizona State University Special Acknowledgments to: Dr. Nancy Grimm, Arizona State University Dr. Tischa Muñoz-Erickson, US Forest Service

________ 1 Coastal flooding poses a large threat to San Juan as it faces both hurricanes and tropical storms common in the Caribbean. This flood threat is exacerbated by rising sea levels as a result of climate change.

2 Urban flooding is a common occurrence due to consistent, heavy rainfall and increased pavements, requiring stormwater infrastructure to manage urban runoff. Clogged drains, broken pipes, and under-maintained pump equipment have been major causes of flooding in the city. Additionally, many lowlying areas in the watershed are former mangrove forests and wetlands that were filled to create land for development and are highly susceptible to flooding.

3 San Juan is largely nested within the Río Piedras watershed, a river that has been manipulated over time through cutting off meanders and straightening its path, leading to increased flood risk. Stormwater runoff that cannot be absorbed into the ground also adds to the river water level.

4 There is a large river channelization project proposed by the US Army Corp of Engineers (USACE) that has been in talks for the past 2 decades that will have a significant impact on the Puerto Nuevo neighborhood of San Juan. Yet, community organizations such as la Alianza por la Cuenca del Río Piedras (Alianza) have identified a severe lack of engagement around the project - last documented community engagement was 1993.

Map of Vacant lots in Puerto Nuevo (Top), Two prospective sites for community space or Naturebased solutions (Bottom)

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Submission

Research and lived experience is instrumental in design. Listening to community voices, engaging their programmatic, aesthetic, ecological and cultural perspectives increases depth in our own projects and strengthens peoples’ connection to the land itself. This experience helped me introduce community voices in my own design process, and I feel it is essential for all of us moving forward, as diverse climatic disasters become more frequent.

This work was supported by the Resilient Urban Latin America (RULA) International Research Experience for Students (IRES) Fellowship, in partnership with the Alianza por la Cuenca del Río Piedras.

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Ananth Udupa

I arrived in San Juan with little to no clue on what research needed to be done, aside from a broad interest in architectural responses to crises and the community knowledgeto-action pipeline: something I had little to no experience with. This project gave me a framework for executing qualitative research with communities. It inspired questions on what is home as I confronted the lived experiences of the community we interviewed. There was an emphasis on impermanence, as many members fled in times of flooding, but still a deep connection to the land, community, and resilience. I also noticed how so many perceptions of home were shaped by greater forces like policy and aid. In retrospect, the stories I heard clearly spelled out how architecture must represent and inform a greater context.

Avery Moric

Healing Through Simple Gestures

The journey to Teshima can be described as a pilgrimage of sorts. To reach the island of Teshima one must embark on a day’s long journey across Japan traveling on trains, ferries, and cars towards the Inland Sea of Japan. This only brings one to the harbor on the island; a further trek by foot or by bicycle is required to get to the museum itself. As one gets closer to the site the surrounding hills begin to tease the traveler by revealing glimpses of the museum’s stark white form amongst the trees.

The hills eventually give way to the museum itself, revealing a large organic dome with a pair of complementary elliptical openings. Mirroring these openings the museum itself is paired with another more modest dome that serves as a cafe and shop adjacent to it. Stepping inside the museum the traveler is immediately greeted with nothing.

The interior of the museum is completely empty, no columns, no light fixtures, and not even a door to enter the space. The interior is closer to

a gesture than it is to a room, or for that matter it’s hard to even describe the space inside as a room. It is a single uniform mass that envelops the visitors within. It’s only when one begins walking inside the museum that the art within reveals itself. Tiny holes the size of pin pricks are scattered across the polished smooth floor.

From these holes water droplets emerge, some remain where they are while some immediately bead away and glide across the space. These little droplets collide with each other and begin to create larger beads of water, as these beads grow and grow, they reach a critical mass where they are too big to remain together and then split. This constant loop of droplets growing together then splitting off is never ending and occurring all throughout the museum.

Taking time to sit amongst these drops and observe them, it can be seen that they act closer to people moving around a city than water on a floor. These beads of water become personified as one traces their movements from where they emerged to where they rest.

Never has an inanimate object seemed so lifelike. These are not highly advanced robots or computer simulations imitating life, these are two of the most fundamental and simple things on the planet, just water and a surface. Yet this simple dance between water droplets and a stone surface feels relatable, why?

Submission

hidden sanctuary is nestled in the dense brush. Its bright white shell contrasts the surrounding nature, yet its form could be mistaken for an ancient monument. It is a space that challenges and contradicts its surroundings while appearing completely natural amongst it. It is a place hidden from the world yet has the power to attract people from across the globe. It is a place where personified droplets of water race across the floor, colliding and splitting from each other as if they have agendas, places to go, things to see. This sanctuary is not an ancient relic or a place of worship, but rather the Teshima Art Museum.

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Avery Moric

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Perhaps they seem this way because one has lost their minds looking at beads of water on the floor for hours or perhaps we see ourselves in the droplets. Little entities scurrying around the rat race that is life itself. How different do people running around a city or a college campus look from a similar perspective? And

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what is this connection that one as an observer feels with these droplets? Is it because of the incredible architecture housing this experience

by Ryue Nishizawa, or is it because artist Rei Naito crafted these routes for the water? These are the questions I asked myself when I visited Teshima in 2017.

Submission

Five years since my visit, I still think about that experience and those questions. That raw, paradoxical depiction of life remains fresh in my mind as I and many others begin to return to spaces and patterns we had grown accustomed to prior to the Spring of 2020. This return to normalcy has to be seen as an opportunity for a change to happen within architecture, an opportunity to remedy the faults of the past and to lean into the ever changing future. Hopefully the water and stone on Teshima island can be seen as a beacon leading to an alternate way of thinking, designing, and inhabiting architecture.

A new form of architecture that heals and inspires through elegant connections and responsive design. A new way of designing that makes evident these simple beauties that surround us. A new way of thinking that prioritizes healing through exploration and imagination in our spaces.

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Avery Moric

These spaces that will follow the example of Teshima should not be limited to remote islands, they should be in every city and campus, no matter how big or small. Architecture should take this opportunity of immense change to become a physical and mental rock that individuals can rely on, an escape from deadlines, constant information streams, existential woes. A place where peopleare welcomed to come and heal, and if that can be done with something as simple as water and stone.

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Amalia DeSardi

The American Dream

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he single family home, suburban grid and car centric society are a glimpse of architectural responses derived from The Second Industrial Revolution in the late 19th Century. These responses are rooted in values around commodification, domestication, individualism and “the selling of “The American Dream”. These values were a catalyst for the horizontal sprawl and suburbia.

As we root these values sets into present day society, we need to question do these individualist and car centric values sets still hold true today?

Submission

I therefore challenge and desire to reshape the suburban grid, rooted in the context of Los Angeles, California. Through small, community, grassroots efforts, we as a collective, can begin to break down physical barriers and property lines to allow communal spaces to be shared.

The soft infrastructure, of a customizable pergola system, is to act as a physical and metaphorical framework which not only holds space to gather but weaves the once individualistic community back together.

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Amalia DeSardi

The Framework

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Kaya Razzo

Biomimicry Design and Drawings

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n the Fall 2021 semester in Design Fundamentals lll, the sudents were asked to use their research from their first assignment to create a study space for people. The students designed these spaces on Hayden Lawn at Arizona State University using the concepts of how desert plants survive to create a space from these concepts which did not use any electricity or artificial heating/cooling. From this, students had to figure out how to keep these pods temperate and lit during the daytime hours.

Floor Plan

Water Harvesting and Brise Soleli 1/4" = 1'-0"

Submission

The second concept that was used was Brise Soleli. Brise Soleli is a feature of a building that reduces the amount of heat within a building by deflecting sunlight. This study space has a covering wrapping around it that takes away direct sunlight from the interior of this space, also allowing for a unique pattern of light reflected inside the space.

The space that I created used two concepts.

The first concept used was water harvesting.

Water harvesting is the collection and storage of rain which is then collected into a tank in order to use later.

Elevation

Water Harvesting and Brise Soleli 1/4" = 1'-0"

Kaya Razzo

The roof of this study space was created using a 90 degree angle slope to allow water to run into this storage space. The storge space is a glass box allowing there to be a waterfall feature in this space when it rains, otherwise, water is stored underground.

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Elena Rocchi, PhD

In Praise of the Unwritten Page

Submission

Draw and write in the space then send it to me

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“toutes les paroles s’ effacer devant la sensation.” Stéphane Mallarmé 1

“All the words should fade away before the sensation.” Letter to Henri Cazalis, 30 October 1864, Stéphane Mallarmé: Oeuvres complétes, vol. 1, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 663.

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Elena Rocchi

Figure 1.Fred Forest, “150 cm2 of Newspaper” (Le Monde, 12 January 1972, p.13)

Special thanks to: Athoub Hasan Brennan Richards Julia Lopez Jacqueline Hogan Wanda Dalla Costa Christian Solorio Rashad Shabazz Selina Martinez Ashley Ontiveros Brianna Tsatskin

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