Semester 1:
“Where can we, as critical and creative designers and thinkers of architecture and design, as students and teachers, intervene to support more inclusive, humorous, speculative, and sheltering infrastructures?”
Our Infrastructural Loves - Architectural Pedagogies of Care and Support : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10464883.2022.2097509
Infrastructure fictions: http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/introduction-to-infrastructure-fiction/
see also Muf: http://muf.co.uk/portfolio/car-free-london/
Semester 2:
“If care is to become the basis of a better society and world, we need to change our contemporary hierarchies of care in the direction of radical egalitarianism. All forms of care between all categories of human and non-human should be valued, recognised and resourced equally, according to their needs or ongoing sustainability. This is what we call an ethics of promiscuous care”.
The Care Manifesto
Studio 4 will explore how architecture can provide opportunities for mutual-aid, public space and shared resources to develop a brief that creates and maintains buildings and programs that provide local support systems of care in Bordesley Green and Birmingham. Within the global context of care for future generations, we will commit to an architecture of minimal consumption in times of scarcity through mindful material choices, the re-use of existing resources, design for disassembly and the circular economy.
Texts:
The Re-Use Atlas: a designer's guide towards a circular economy The Care Manifesto - Politics of Interdependence
Possible programs:
health care, child care, cleaning, maintenance and repair services, veterinary care, intergenerational care, energy resilience (food and power), environmental care and community care
almshouses - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrlkAonM44E
Hubertus House - https://www.architectural-review.com/buildings/street-urchin-mothers-house-amsterdam-by-aldo-van-eyck
Peckham Health Project: https://www.ribaj.com/buildings/peckham-pioneer-health-centre