Studio Africa: Mangue Negotiations

The Illinois School of Architecture is committed to developing students with an informed worldview through global and local engagement.1 These opportunities form students with a truly global and social perspective on architecture and the built environment, a critical quality of tomorrow’s design professionals. According to the master’s program main objective, students should learn to analyze complex environments and propose innovative design solutions to the world’s most urgent problems. This paper will focus on an academic exercise that challenged traditional mapping methodologies and embraced science and big data towards more creative collaborative processes. Within the aesthetics of remote collaboration, this experiment on map-making inverted the technicality of drawing, challenging the participants to map, model, and represent an expanded worldwide view of the man¬grove ecosystem. The study of coastal cities has been traditionally conditioned to a Eurocentric vision of space, where the importance of the metropolis and its infrastructure is imposed over the singularities of the people’s relationship with landscape and nature. Coastal cities in the West Africa and The Caribbean are potential laboratories of climate adaption for building and social space. However, its study and analysis have not called upon cross-disciplinary approaches to develop conceptual and methodological frameworks between natural, cultural and social scientists. “The mangrove is in fact a sensitive figure in our collective consciousness; it is in our nature, a cradle, a source of life, of birth and rebirth.”2 —Patrick Chamoiseau

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Teach.2021.15

Volume Editors
Jonathan A. Scelsa & Jørgen Johan Tandberg

ISBN
978-1-944214-38-8