Conflicting Spaces: Exploring Consciousness and Reaction Through Architecture

Conflicting Spaces is the title of the final, two-week design project given to beginning studio students at the School of Architecture and Engineering Technology at Florida A&M University during the summer of 2020. All students involved in the project were Black. It is important to make this distinction, as they were asked to choose a current social topic, and seven out of eight participants selected the Black Lives Matters movement. This project intends to open up the conversation and allow students to question the roles architecture has played in the realities of our BIPOC and underrepresented communities. This assignment was divided into two main phases. The first phase was titled SPACE(s) & SELF. Its focus is on introspection. They are to ask: can architecture be conscious? Students were given the task of designing two 15’ x 15’ spaces, each one meant to be inhabited by an individual. The spaces were required to be opposite, conflicting, and/or contradictory in nature from one another. The second phase of the project was titled SPACE(s) & SITE. They were to answer the question: How can architecture react? They would place their designed spaces in a blank site and create a composition that would reflect on the possible dynamics between the spaces with one another, with the site, and with users. Conflicting Spaces was more than a final studio project, it became a cathartic conversation on the conflictive realities our Black student population face in their everyday. It demonstrates the importance of architecture as a political act and how in academia, we have failed multiple times in listening and giving voice to our BIPOC students. It sets conflict in the forefront, challenging everyone to question, reflect and act in changing the biases and exclusionary discourses that Architecture has been complicit of for far too long.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.109.65

Volume Editors

ISBN
978-1-944214-37-1