Friday May 1, 4pm - 6pm

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On Friday, May 1st, a panel of guest jurors will announce the Wallenberg Studios’ award winners, and engage in a conversation around their work, the studios’ endeavors, and the meaning of the Wallenberg studios within Taubman College’s undergraduate curriculum. This year’s jurors  join us from across three time zones: Hélène Frichot (University of Melbourne), Marina Otero Verzier (Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam), Ana Miljački (MIT), and John Godfrey (University of Michigan).

Please join us in this event.


Hélène FRICHOT


                       Architectural theorist and philosopher, writer and critic, Hélène Frichot is Professor of Architecture and Philosophy, and Director of the Bachelor of Design, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Australia. She is Guest Professor and the former Director of Critical Studies in Architecture, as well as Professor of Critical Studies and Gender Theory, in the School of Architecture, KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) Stockholm, Sweden, where she was based between 2012-2019. Drawing on the two disciplines in which she is trained, architecture and philosophy, her research engages a transdisciplinary field by experimenting with feminist theories and practices, specifically drawing on new materialism and the post-humanities. She is the author of How to Make Yourself a Feminist Design Power Tool (AADR 2016), Dirty Theory: Troubling Architecture (AADR 2019), and editor on a number of publications, including the upcoming Writing Architectures: Ficto-Critical Approaches (Bloomsbury 2020) co-edited with Naomi Stead.


Marina OTERO VERZIER


               Marina Otero Verzier is an architect based in Rotterdam. She is the Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut. Additionally, she will start at the new head of the MA ins Social Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven this September. As Director of Research at HNI, Otero she lead research initiatives such as ‘Automated Landscapes,’ focusing on the emerging architectures of automated labour, ‘Architecture of Appropriation,’ on squatting as spatial practice, and ‘Burn-Out: Exhaustion on a planetary scale,’ which instigates other forms of coexistence, sensibility and care for multispecies, collective bodies. In addition to her role at HNI, Otero was a member of the Artistic Team for Manifesta 13, and Curator of WORK, BODY, LEISURE, the Dutch Pavilion at the 16th Venice International Architecture Biennale in 2018. With the After Belonging Agency, she was Chief Curator of the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016. She has edited Work, Body, Leisure(2018), and co-edited Unmanned: Architecture and Security Series (2016), After Belonging (2016), Architecture of Appropriation (2019) and More than Human (forthcoming).

Ana MILJAČKI


                       Ana Miljački is a critic, curator and Associate Professor of Architecture at MIT, where she teaches history, theory and design. Miljački directs the Master of Architecture Program and the Architecture and Urbanism Group at MIT. She was part of the three-member curatorial team of the US Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. Her Un/Fair Use, exhibition with Sarah Hirschman was on view at the Center for Architecture in New York in the fall of 2015 and at Berkeley University’s Wurster Gallery in 2016. In 2018 Miljački launched the Critical Broadcasting Lab at MIT, whose work “Sharing Trainers” was included in the São Paulo Architecture Biennale in the fall of 2019. She is the author of The Optimum Imperative: Czech Architecture for the Socialist Lifestyle 1938-1968 (Routledge, 2017), and the editor of Terms of Appropriation: Modern and Architecture and Global Exchange with Amanda Reeser Lawrence (Routledge, 2018), and editor of Under the Influence symposium (Actar 2019).

John GODFREY


                       An Assistant Dean at the Rackham Graduate School, John Godfrey works with faculty to develop innovative programs of graduate study and helps develop policy and initiatives that make Michigan a global leader in graduate education. He also works closely on international graduate education issues and has helped build the University's relationships overseas. Dr. Godfrey is chair of the Wallenberg Executive Committee which since 1990 has selected recipients of the annual Wallenberg medal, awarded to individuals who have shown extraordinary commitment and courage in defending the persecuted and powerless and in protecting human rights. He helped establish the Wallenberg Fellowship for an outstanding member of the senior class to carry out an independent and self-designed year-long immersive exploration or project anywhere in the world. In 2015-16 the Wallenberg Fellowship was awarded to Bjornar Haveland (B.S. Architecture).

︎FINAL REVIEWS



DAY 1, morning:

Thursday, April 23, 10am—1pm EST



DAY 1, afternoon:

Thursday, April 23, 2pm—5pm EST

 

DAY 2, morning:

Friday, April 24, 10am—1pm EST

 
DE-COMMISSION
Matīss Groskaufmanis

Streaming Link


REVIEWERS:
Amelyn Ng (Rice University)
Daniel Jacobs
 Anya Sirota

1. Katie Bailey
2. Natsume Ono & Cayman Langton 
3. Firas Haddo & Jacob Pyles

MATRIX TO PARTS
 Peter Yi

Streaming Link


REVIEWERS:
Iker Gil (MAS Studio)
Ann Lui
Joseph Altshuler (Could Be Architecture) (10 - 11:30)

1. Cody Gilman
2. Bilal Fawaz
3. Jee Hee Lee
4. Issam Al-Harhara
5. Clayton Artz
6.  Senhao Wang

DAY 2, afternoon:

Friday, April 24, 2pm—5pm EST

 


︎ANNOUNCEMENT OF FINALISTS

Friday, April 24, 7pm  Link

Each of the six studios explored the 2020 theme: “From the Margins.” While responses varied from one studio to the next, the aim has been to create a framework for lively debate and exchange across all six studios:

2020 Theme: From the Margins
by Mireille Roddier

Each winter term, the Taubman College seniors in architecture collectively reflect upon a common studio theme, inspired by the life and actions of Raoul Wallenberg. To follow the example of Raoul Wallenberg, who, as citizen of a neutral country, utilized his training in architectural thinking at the service of preventing Nazi crimes, we can use our expertise as environmental designers to address humanitarian issues and address questions of social and spatial justice. This year, we will collectively ponder over the following set of questions:

Raoul Wallenberg is remembered today as a hero of what we call the Resistance. World-War II resistances existed in opposition to defined collaborations with Nazi and Fascist forces. Unless one is acutely aware of the impact and/or instrumentalization of their work, neutral stances will always risk accountability as “collaborative” practices. How do we explore the meaning of Resistance in the context of architectural education?

Just as architecture and urban design can both resist or contribute to oppressive forms of power, they can also equally resist or contribute to scores of other afflictions such as economic segregation, environmental disaster, etc. To those who are suspicious of architects’ capacity to be socially responsible,1 or skeptical of  architecture’s capacity to ameliorate the social fabric of our society, let’s call to mind the first tenet of professional practice: “do no harm!”

Many an architect and cultural critics have called out the potentially devastating power of architecture and urban design, when one is not paying careful attention to the consequences of their interventions. Architecture and urbanism are tools of power and instruments of control. For the Situationist Raoul Vaneigem, “urbanism is all that will be needed to preserve the status quo without recourse to the indelicacy of machine guns.” 2

When the motivations behind the power in question reveal dubious ethical practices, architects are forced to take a position. “Collaboration has always an alternative - refusal!” posits Eyal Weizman before suggesting that architects be trialed for their complicity.3 Reinhold Martin advocates for a similar reluctance to taking on commissions unconcerned by their impact. For Martin, architects should aspire to a utopian realism and borrow from Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville’s “anonymous modest clerk who, when asked literally to reproduce what the ’60s would later call ‘the system,’ simply and politely refused, declaring “I would prefer not to.” 4

When addressing socio-political questions, two dominant and independent forms of political agency come to the forefront. The first addresses the politics of representation and inclusion within the dominant hegemony. Who has been excluded or marginalized? Whose perspectives are missing from the construction of dominant discourse? And yet, isn’t the enticement of a voice within an unchecked power system an invitation to collaborate in strengthening that system’s dominion?

Unless we consider the failures of the established order to be limited to its exclusionary politics, a second mode appears, which concerns the politics of overthrowing the dominant hegemony. What alternative worlds can be imagined and realized that would challenge and replace the status quo?

Both of these positions solicit the imaginations of architects: the latter as world-makers invested in total design—design as physical environment but also as configuration of social and cultural infrastructures to which we map our lives; the former as script-writers for lifestyles, whose work begins and ends with the concept of representation—the prescriptive representation of new forms to be, the world itself as an indexical representation of our value system. By changing representations, we transform the world.

And yet, attempts to remediate the dominant system’s failures, or intents to revolutionize it, respectively demand either belief in that system or alternative sources of power — neither of which are readily available to the most disenfranchised populations. A third form of resistance thereby arises, as formulated by bell hooks in her essay “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.” In it she argues that exclusion from dominant discourses and structures can generate a powerful capacity for openness and resistance. Existence in a context of repression, hooks argues, can enable the invention of “spaces of radical openness,” which she identifies as spaces of resistance, or margins.5 Utilizing bell hooks’s essay, we are to investigate margins, undergrounds, alleyways, shadows, backstages, pochés, spaces of disinvestment, irregulated spaces, etc, as sites of creativity and power, as spaces that hold the capacity to foster freedom of action, of being, of becoming. Accordingly, we will be challenged with this final quandary:

Can we operate in the margins architecturally, without the risk of disclosing them as center stage? If the dominant order reinforces oppressive hierarchies that benefit a restricted ruling minority, how can the margins offer a shelter from these power structures? A space whose rules are written by the communities who define and inhabit it? A space of autonomy and potential emancipation from the colonizing order?

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—
1 Margaret Crawford, “Can architects be socially responsible?” in: Diane Ghirardo, ed., Out of Site: A Social Criticism of Architecture (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1990), 27–45.

2 Raoul Vaneigem, "Comments against Urbanism," October 79 (Winter 1997): 123-128. Originally printed as and translated from “Commentaires contre l’urbanisme,” Internationale situationniste nº6 (August 1961): 33-37

3 Eyal Weizman, “Architectural Tribunal” In Rem Koolhaas, ed. Content (Köln: Taschen, 2004), 63.

4 Reinhold Martin, “Critical of What? Toward a Utopian Realism,” Harvard Design Magazine, 22 (Spring/Summer 2005): 109.

5 bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” in Yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics (New York: Routledge, 2015), 149.