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Reclaiming Belonging: The Collective Memory of Homeby Leah Hong
“Reclaiming Belonging” proposes an extension to conventional architectural representation methods that uses narrative documentation and layered, collective storytelling techniques to allow those who seek spatial agency to embed practices of place-making, home-claiming, and community-building that shape architecture into spaces of belonging.
While the architect’s tools for visualizing and thinking--such as plan, section, and isometric--can be highly useful among architects, they are not usually for visualizing the ways that users lay claim to the architecture, despite architecture being a physical imprint of collective memory shaped by its users’ identities. To create a platform for both architects and non-architects to access these hidden layers, this project proposes an extension to conventional representation methods. Through narrative documentation and layered, collective storytelling techniques, it allows those who seek spatial agency to embed practices of place-making, home-claiming, and community-building that shape architecture into spaces of belonging. This approach to spatial understanding positions the architect as a storyteller, who uses their skills to make room for other storytellers, the occupants of architecture, to amplify and memorialize their voices.
Too often, architectural work operates as a top-down imposition of design ideals instead of as a public service that collaborates with the needs of those who occupy it. This can be seen in situations such as refugee crises, which some well-meaning designers have taken as opportunities to create more humane, improved architectures for refugees. This mindset overlooks the reality that such an endeavor for a “humane” refugee camp is impossible. Refugees are forced to take shelter in camps as part of extreme displacement from their homes to the margins of societies that either cannot or will not accept them. To reside in a camp is to live while deprived of the right to belong--to be safe within one’s social, cultural, and physical identity--and the subsequent rights that come with such stability. To encourage the proliferation of camps is to condone the use of constructed space to store “undesirable” human beings apart from those who are permitted to belong, and designing “solutions” for these camps suppresses the spatial agency of those who wish to claim a home for themselves.