Exhibition as an Atmosphere
- Urbach, Henry. “Exhibition as Atmosphere.” Log, no. 20 (2010): 11-17. Accessed January 30, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/41765361.
Exhibition as an Atmosphere by Henry Urbach talks about how important the surrounding space or “atmosphere” is to an object. Urbach starts by describing the San Francisco summer fog and how it swallows the city becoming an atmosphere. Then, the author continues by commenting on how the external elements of a displayed object affect the viewer’s experience. These elements are in the space around that object so he would like to call them the atmosphere. The architecture acts as a complement to the object just like an atmosphere but there has not been much experimenting in this area so it’s fertile terrain for research. Urbach explains how the atmosphere of an exhibition has as the object as the main event but that doesn’t exclude the other elements such as light, architecture, furniture, smells, sounds and/or the activity of people around it. The atmosphere of the object is not only what can be seen but the “vibe” around it and one of the tasks of the curator is to produce it. Finally, the author ends by showing how atmospheric exhibitions envelop the viewers and how people crave spaces of rich social experience, so an individual experience becomes a collective one.
The goal of this source is to share the idea that an atmosphere is as important as the object in display and how that relates to people’s experiences in the world. The author is the curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern art. He doesn’t exactly present facts but gives examples and describes situations for the readers to understand what he wants to communicate. He does a very good job of explaining his ideas and complementing them with relatable situations.
I really liked this text; it makes you think of the bigger picture surrounding something we want to enhance and how this bigger picture or atmosphere can have a lot of influence on how the viewer perceives the object. As an artist, it shows you that you can manipulate the environment of your piece to enhance or produce a feeling in the viewers and how important that can be in the experience of an art piece. I hadn’t really thought that much about how an atmosphere makes a difference in our perception of life, but I related to the example of the San Francisco fog and that really helped me understand the author’s point of view.
In Protest, the Power of Place
- Kimmelman, Michael. “In Protest, the Power of Place.” The New York Times. The New York Times, October 15, 2011. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/sunday-review/wall-street-protest-shows-power-of-place.html.
In “In protest, the power of place” Michael Kimmelman talks about the importance of physical space and the power it has. Kimmelman describes the Wall Street movement and how nothing can replace the power of people taking the streets to protest. He talks about how we underestimate the political power of places and how this has been demonstrated many times in history, like Aristotle and his idea of Polis. He describes the importance of the human voice and gives the example of the “Mic Checks” at Zuccotti Park. A physical space allows people to gather and discover their mutual ideas and interests, and the people’s diversity is what allows the protests to be so powerful. Kimmelman ends by saying that on the ground is where people build an architecture of consciousness.
Kimmelman is the architecture critic at The New York Times. In his article, he gives value to physical places and talks about the power they have in protests. He gives examples of different manifestations and analyzes the situation in order to give his opinion on the subject. His purpose with the text is to share with people his thoughts about the importance of physical places in protests and how when people gather, they are more powerful than anything.
I relate to Kimmelman’s text in many ways and it made me remember how I felt last year during the protests in Chile. All I wanted to do was go home and be on the streets too like all my family and friends were because the unity the manifestations produced in the Chilean people were like nothing I had ever seen before. The mass of people on the streets was so powerful that they inspired Chilean protests all around the world. No matter how the media presented the situation, the people kept taking the streets and that was something the government wasn’t able to escape from easily. The power of a physical place is so big that more than 1.2 million people gathered on October 30th to protest. People from different socio-economical backgrounds, gender, age, religion, etc. The protests united the Chilean people like nothing had ever done before.
How to build a perfect refugee camp
- Mcclelland, Mac. “How to Build a Perfect Refugee Camp.” The New York Times. The New York Times, February 13, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/magazine/how-to-build-a-perfect-refugee-camp.html.
How to build a perfect refugee camp by Mac Mcclelland talks about Kilis, a refugee camp in Turkey located next to the Syrian border. Kilis is equipped with housing containers, metal detectors, and high technological security devices, power lines, schools, many streetlights, and big playgrounds. There are no tents, trash or raw sewage like in other refugee camps and it resembles a suburban neighborhood.
Mcclelland is suspicious about Turkey’s reasons to build this unusually good equipped refugee camp on its own since the camp is not a part of the UN camps around the world. Knowing that Turkey exempted itself from any obligation to respond by signing an agreement to only take in refugees from Europe, but they ended up taking in the Syrian refugees and building this camp. Some think that it was for selfish reasons, to show the rest of the world how well they were doing and since the Syrian war wasn’t supposed to last that long it was a safe bet.
The Syrian refugees are very grateful to the Turkish government for taking them in such good conditions. They have a grocery store debit card system that helps facilitate the way they get food. Since the UN is not part of Kilis, Turkey has the primary role in the camp so they can make their own decisions towards the establishment.
Much money has been invested in this by the government which has caused resentment of the Turkish people. Since the war is not over and it keeps getting worse the Syrians keep coming which is creating a more long-term problem.
Given the difficulties of integrating refugees into a host country’s population and due to the fact that camps have become a long-term situation it gets harder to accommodate all the people and make them fell integrated.
Even though it’s very well equipped it’s not a home for the Syrian and many of them are hopeful that they will be able to return to their country. The camps are isolated from the community preventing the people to create a bond to the place
How to build a perfect refugee camp is an article written for the New York Times magazine. McClelland analyzes the situation going on in Kilis and recalls his visit to the camp. Using people’s statements about the place he tries to give the reader an inside vision on the camp to make the public understand his opinion better. It’s a very well written article which makes a complicated situation easier to understand.
This article made me think a lot about how complicated the global refugee situation is and how hard it is to find a solution. How can the refugees find a home in a camp and a new country where they’re not allowed to even work? Refugee camps are supposed to be a temporary place but they end up being a long term thing so people get stuck in this place where they are not integrated to the rest of the population, they can’t get a job and get out of the camp and they can’t establish a bond strong enough to make a home of the situation because they hope that it will be a temporary situation. How can the country help them find a home? Knowing that a country is not going to be able to take into society thousands of people they are forced to keep them apart in this “limbo” life. Will we be able to find a solution that benefits everyone in the future? And that helps refugees find a home in the new country?
When a budget motel is “home”, there’s little room for childhood.
- Vigeland, Tess, and Danny Hajek. “When A Budget Motel Is ‘Home,’ There’s Little Room For Childhood.” NPR. NPR, August 16, 2015. https://www.npr.org/2015/08/16/432472821/when-a-budget-motel-is-home-theres-little-room-for-childhood.
The podcast talks about San Bernadino, California and how many families and kids live in cheap motels. It’s supposed to be a temporary home, but the reality is that these motels become a refuge for them. California ranks 3rd in the percentage of kids without a home, following Kentucky and New York. These kids are exposed to conditions that are not healthy to grow up in: drugs, people with serious mental illness, sexual workers and cops. They interview Karen and her son Ian, that live in the Golden Star Inn. She says that Ian doesn’t interact with the community and that she tries to make the motel room home for him. She is hopeful they can move out soon and have a real home so that Ian can have his own space. San Bernadino is the 2nd poorest city of its size in the US and 10% of school students are homeless.
The World’s Largest Refugee Camp Looks Like A Slum/Star Wars Mashup
- Staff, NPR. “The World’s Largest Refugee Camp Looks Like A Slum/Star Wars Mashup.” NPR. NPR, January 11, 2016. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/01/11/462698276/the-worlds-largest-refugee-camp-looks-like-a-slum-from-star-wars.
This podcast is an interview with Ben Rawlence talking about his book “City of thorns” and the people who live in the refugee camp Dadaab. Dadaab is the largest camp in the world and it has more than 1 million people. It’s located in the middle of the desert in Kenya and receives people escaping the civil war in Somalia. Rawlence talks about his book and how he wants people to know what it’s like living there through the eyes of these people. He talks about how Kenia is legally obligated to offer asylum to refugees but at the same time they don’t want the Somalian people there and how this has created tension in the country. Also, there’s a complicated relationship between the UN, the refugees, and the Kenyan workers because the refugees are not allowed to work, only volunteer for very little money compared to the Kenyan.
Rawlence mentions that there is a global refugee crisis. The refugee camps are not supposed to be a destination, which they end up being, so refugees opt to make the complicated trip across the Mediterranean to get to Europe and actually be able to work there.
Rawlence thinks that in 10 or 20 years Dadaab will still be there because after all, it has become a home for some of the refugees. They have grown up there, invested around the camp and buried their loved ones.
The Indigenous Memory Code
- Malcolm, Lynne. “The Indigenous Memory Code.” ABC Radio National. Australian Broadcasting Corporation, July 7, 2016. https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/indigenous-memory-code/7553976.
This podcast is about the memory code the Australians Indigenous used and still use to remember hundreds of plants and animals and any important information. The Australian Indigenous is the longest continuous culture in the world and they use songlines to remember and keep track of practical knowledge and keep their stories alive through time. During this podcast, Lynne Malcolm and Lynne Kelly discuss the different memory code techniques and talk about the efficiency of them. Putting information into songs makes it much more memorable and our brain processes the information more easily. They often use exaggerations to make the story easier to memorize and the use of humor, vulgarity, and puns is very common for the same reason. Also, some songlines are used to navigate through space, they develop a sense of memory space using imagery reinforcement and associating locations to different songs.
They talk about the importance of oral communication for cultures that don’t necessarily have literacy and how this enhances social connections between people.
Terra (In)cognita
- Salloum, Jayce. “Untitled Part 4: Terra (in)Cognita.” Vimeo, August 23, 2018. https://vimeo.com/71876226.
Terra Incognita is about the inhabitants of the Kelowna area before the Europeans conquered the Americas. It tells the story of the N’Syilx’cen culture through many stories and statements from different speakers. It ties the past to the present of this region and discusses topics such as the extermination of cultures, the notion of home, land, and nation.
The uses of Sidewalk: contact
- Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities: Orig. Publ. 1961. New York:
Vintage Books, 1992.
“The uses of sidewalks: contact” talks about the importance of these public spaces in a city’s social environment and how trivial interactions between people on the sidewalks, cafés, stores, etc, creates a feeling of trust around the neighborhood that is very important for its inhabitants’ sense of safety. She poses that in a neighborhood it exists a balance between the people’s need for privacy and their need for human contact.
In neighborhoods that lack sidewalk life, people tend to either isolate themselves or involve a selective group of people in their private life. In a place with sidewalk life, some people become “public characters” in the neighborhood. They become information spots because they’re in contact with a large number of people, they spread the word around the neighborhood contributing to the feeling of togetherness. Finally, she poses that sidewalk life contributes to eliminating segregation and racial discrimination because it unites people in a public way.
This was a very interesting text to read. At first, it was hard to follow the thread because it’s written in a very formal way but later on, I got used to it and was able to fully understand what she wanted to communicate. She uses many examples and statements from other people to support her argument which helps the reader understand it better.
This text made me think of how important are the “public characters” she mentions. In my other university, there was this old couple that runs a small store where they sold pens, snacks, and rented calculators and aprons if you had forgotten yours. They were called Mr. and Mrs. Amable which also means “kindness”. Everyone knew who they were and loved them only from the small interactions we had with them once in a while and everyone knew that when they needed help with anything, from a tampon to a weird present for a family member, they should go to Mr. and Mrs. Amable. If they called you by your name it was the most flattering thing ever to know that they had learned it. They were so important to the university’s ecosystem and that relationship occurred just as Jane Jacobs explains in the text, only in a type of sidewalk life inside the university. It was so noticeable that it wasn’t a relationship in a private way because no one fully knew if they were husband and wife or brother and sister, cause no one had the confidence to ask.
Design and Order in Everyday Life
- Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. “Design and Order in Everyday Life.” Design Issues8, no. 1 (1991): 26-34. Accessed February 4, 2020. doi:10.2307/1511451.
“Design and order in everyday life” talks about the ancient notion that art exists because it helps bring order to human experience and how that might not be applicable in real life. Supposedly art helps bring order to the environment, our thoughts and feelings but when the author interviewed people, they didn’t have much to say about this. Most artworks they kept were meaningful because of the symbolic relationship the owner had with it. Objects related to memories, people, family members or friends.
Csikszentmihalyi talks about how these relationships or symbolisms towards objects may vary because of culture, age or gender and how visual stimuli may affect people differently for the same reason. Also, how associations by color or form aren’t necessarily the same in different cultures or for different people. This doesn’t mean that aesthetics doesn’t have something to do with the appreciation of art, it just means that they might be perceived differently.
This is a very well written article; the writer is very cautious in citing quotes and information obtained from other authors’ work. It’s very easy to read, and it has a flow that makes the reader want to keep reading it. This is a formal research essay and the author supports his ideas by examples, interviews and other essay quotes.
This article made me think a lot about the way we perceive art and how it’s amazing that every culture, age, gender, etc, can perceive things differently. Everyone has meaningful objects in their possession that just as the author says: they’re meaningful because of the symbolic meaning rather than the aesthetics, although this doesn’t mean that they don’t matter. But then how can artists like Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Mattise and others be so famous in the art world? Acknowledging what I mentioned before, it’s amazing that these artists were able to evoke a reaction and establish a symbolic relationship with millions of people.
On Mapping
- Hall, Peter. “On Mapping.” YouTube. TEDx, March 24, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ov0Q68JFwk.
Peter hall talks about different kinds of maps and how humans organize the world through them. He mentions the difference between a map and mapping, a more artistic, simple and organized way of putting ideas on a piece of paper. He mentions how the subway map is distorted to only show what people need to know on the underground and not how the stations are located on the outside of the city.
He quotes James Corner: “Mapping: digging, finding and exposing on one hand and relating, connecting and structuring on the other.
He talks about how different cultures have different ways of mapping their lands for example and how mapping can be extended not only to show a physic place but any relationship between different points we want to establish. Finally, he encourages people to go out and start mapping since the more mapping, the more the boundaries are extended and the more people experiment with representation of things.
Just re-Do it: tactical formlessness and everyday consumption
12. Hunt, Jamer. “Just Re-Do It: Tactical Formlessness and Everyday Consumption.” In Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life, 56–71, n.d.
In this text, Jamer Hunt talks about design and the notion of “The everyday”. He poses that the practices of design create environments therefore they have to be in contact with the ordinary. Hunt talks about the concept of the everyday and how it’s very fluid and constantly changing.
Hunt poses that in everyday practices there are tactics and strategies. These lasts would be a construction or design that imposes power over others and tactics are performative actions that defy these strategies. He gives examples of designers that are now trying to impact people’s social life and making the everyday less ordinary. Finally, he ends by saying that design and the everyday are very intertwined and that these designs come and go so fast that we end up in a way “consuming the everyday.
This text was written by Jamer Hunt in 2003 and has many citations and references to other publications and it’s written in a formal way. However, it was extremely hard to read and the ideas were very confusing.
I was surprised to read what he said in the last part of the text about how nothing possesses a shorter memory than product design. I thought about how nowadays our lives are based on consuming these products and how each day a new thing comes out and we keep and keep buying things. Permanency is not a thing anymore and most of these products are made to last a short time. In the past, it was the opposite, you bought a product and it lasted a lifetime and I wonder if someday we will go back to that practice and reduce consumerism and pollution due to the situation of our planet.
A different kind of ethnography
13. Culhane, Dara, and Denielle Elliott. “Imagining: an Introduction.” In A Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies, 1–18. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017.
This chapter is about the definition of an ethnography and the new kind of methods the authors propose to make it more holistic. Dara Culhane talks about human relations and how an ethnography is a methodology for collaborative knowledge-making and also, about the relationship between ethnographers and research participants. She mentions how we articulate artistic practices with an ethnographic methodology in the process of research for a new design and how normal research methods can be strengthened by the use of images and sound recordings. She talks bout the methods conventionally considered for ethnographic research (participant observation, interviewing and analysis of information) and how this new kind of ethnography they propose would also be based on how we acquire knowledge through imagination and creativity.
This chapter of the book is very well written. It explains the ideas very clearly and shows various examples to show information. The author gives her opinion and shows her research in a holistic way to show people her way of thinking.
I agree with what the author says in this book, if an ethnography is a way to immerse ourselves into the lives of people in order to get to know their culture, space, and interactions, I think it should totally involve creativity and imagination. These two concepts are as much part of our lives as any interaction or habit we may have in our everyday life. Also, it’s so interesting how different cultures have completely different ways of imagining or creating things, it’s a much more personal and intimate way of getting immersed in another culture.
Observing Physical traces
14. Zeisel, John, and John Zeisel. “Observing Physical Traces.” In Inquiry by Design: Tools for Environment-Behaviour Research, 89–133. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1986.
The first episode we had to read is about observing physical traces in a space to infer how that environment got to be the way it is. Zeisel talks about how observing these traces is an imageable process where observers can infer information in an unobtrusive way. Traces often do not disappear quickly and are accumulative and it’s an easy research method to use. Zeisel discusses the different ways of recording the information: annotated diagrams, photographs, drawings, acknowledging quantity and he mentions how choosing what to observe has to depend on what we want to do with the information we gather. We can look for traces that reflect what people do in settings, like erosions, leftovers, and missing traces. We can also look for information that reflects how a place has adapted to its use like props, separations, or connections. Also, traces that account for displays of self, like personalization of the space, identification or group membership signs. Public messages in the space, like official messages, unofficial or illegitimate ones. And finally, we can look for traces that clarify the context or a specific context that clarifies the traces.
The second episode is about observing environmental behavior in these spaces. Observing behavior is an empathetic and direct method that allows researchers to be as intrusive or non-intrusive as they wish. The position of the researcher may also change, they can choose to be outsiders or participants in the researched environment which can alter the behavior of people in the environment. Devices suited for recording behavior information include notations, precoded checklists, maps, photographs, and videotapes. When discussing what to observe, Zeisel talks about observing the actors of the place, the act performed, significant others present in the space, their relationships with the actors, their context and elements that can affect those relationships, like walls, screens, objects, and symbols. Zeisel poses that the designer can use this information to have control over the behavioral side effects of their decisions.
These two chapters of the book “In inquiry by design: Tools for environmental behavior research” written by Zeisel are filled with a lot of information but at the same time it has a very well organized structure that allows you to easily understand what he wants to communicate. He gives multiple examples to illustrate what he means with an idea and he has a lot of diagrams and lists that allow you to have a structure of the text. He quotes a lot of other authors and research projects and gives examples of them to prove his point. Even though the text is very long, it’s easy to read and it flows as you do.
I really liked this text because it made me think of how well we can get to know an environment just by observing it and using Zeisel’s tools. I hadn’t thought of how many details there are to observe in a place and how we can notice certain key things to get better information about the place. I’m definitely using his method for researching my neighborhood this semester and I’ll keep it in mind for all my future design projects.
The Social Infrastructure
15. Klinenberg, Eric, and Eric Klinenberg. “The Social Infrastructure.” and “Observing Environmental Behaviour.” In Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life, 4–24. New York: Crown, 2019.
In this chapter of the book Palaces for the people, Klinenberg talks about how social infrastructures can affect people’s lives in every way. He talks about how similar poor neighborhoods had very different death rates during the Chicago heatwave and how that relates to the social interactions people had within the neighborhood. Klinenberg discusses how societies are becoming more fragmented and conflicted and how class segregation is on the rise. According to his logic and research, we need to rebuild these infrastructures and the best way to do that is by building places where people can interact and gather. He poses that when hard infrastructure fails, it’s the softer social infrastructure that determines our fate. These social infrastructures can alleviate contemporary problems like social isolation, crime, education, health, and climate change.
This is the first chapter of Klinenberg’s book Palaces for the people. The chapter offers the author’s point of view and reflections about social infrastructure. He had done extensive research to write this book and he shows examples through the chapter. It’s very easy to read and he explains his thoughts in a very rational way.
This chapter made me think about the text by Jane Jacobs, which Klinenberg ends up mentioning. They both talk about how the foundation or infrastructure of society is the ties between people and how we have to get back to that practice in order to solve our society’s problems. It makes me think about how in capitalist societies people don’t trust each other. The upper class holds all the power and the rest of the people suffer the consequences of their actions. No one wants to work with the people to find solutions to public problems and that feeling of mistrust grows until no one believes anymore that the people in power will help. We can see this happening all over the world right now, like for example in Chile.
In whose Public Space?
16. Madanipour, Ali, and Ali Madanipour. In Whose Public Space?; International Case Studies in Urban Design and Development, 1–15. Taylor & Francis Group, 2010.
BYOR: New life for public spaces
17. Kay, Jane Holtz. “NEW LIFE FOR PUBLIC SPACES.” Landscape Architecture 79, no. 6 (1989): 32-35. Accessed February 18, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/44670159.
This article talks about the importance of public spaces and how they have progressively disappeared but apparently they are slowly coming back to us. People are aware of the importance of public spaces but these are not being integrated into our urban network. They talk about how the redesigning of Copley Sq is a symbol that a common interest has arisen to create more spaces for the people. The author mentions how only one-third of New York’s public spaces were actually accessible for the people and how architects are more interested in creating modern architecture than actual public spaces and how this needs to change.
This article was written by Jane Holtz in 1989. It’s an article for the Landscape architecture magazine and she quotes other authors’ work to support her point of view and comments on the current situation.
I thought it would be interesting to read something from 30 years ago and see how we have evolved in the subject of public spaces. At the time, it seemed like they were just starting to realize that public spaces are important for the city’s public life and how much it can affect people’s view of the city. Nowadays we have more public spaces but surprisingly still have a long way to go in this subject.
