Campaigning Architecture

Location: London, England

Website: www.chicago.aaschool.ac.uk

Campaigning Architecture is an international design workshop that operates across a range of scales and disciplines to explore more effective ways to make thought-provoking changes to our urban environment.

Campaigning Architecture:

The workshop will campaign architecture for strategies that engage the city like no other. Campaign strategies—from the London Cycling Campaign to provide a collective voice for the City’s cyclists; to the cross-party campaign to bring London’s air quality into compliance with World Health Organization standards; to London’s successful bid for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games—are executed as an amalgamation of military-like precision and haphazard logic.

We will mine the effectiveness of campaigning to enable architecture to successfully navigating the social, political, and economic networks that make a city tick.

The 2013 workshop will be held in London at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. Participants will work towards a collective project. The site will be pre-selected, but the design scope will be left open to be determined by the workshop participants.

The workshop will begin with a visit to the site and a series of rampant idea generation discussions, lubricated by a social event. This will be followed by a day of critiquing and editing these ideas down to a formal proposal, which will then be developed for the rest of the workshop—splitting into smaller subgroups as necessary to develop different aspects of the project.

The workshop is an excellent opportunity to enhance your design expertise and network with an international group of likeminded students and professors, all while enjoying what London has to offer.

Campaigning a Hedonistic Reactivation:

The workshop will campaign new modes of urban intervention for a hedonistic reactivation of a fatigued site in London’s East End. Workshop participants will combine the potential of design intelligence with the strategic power of propaganda in order to campaign provocative changes to our urban environment.

Campaigning the Creative Commons:

The traditional marriage between copyright law and designs that intend to create significant change is an ineffective scenario that must change. So while this project will have a specific site, we will campaign the Creative Commons to make it possible for this project to be copied, adapted, distributed, and deployed elsewhere.