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FOUNDATION 502
M ARCH
[4]
Annette Fierro ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
Andrew Saunders ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
Jonathan Scelsa LECTURER
Joshua Freese LECTURER
- MArch from Rice University (1984) - BS in Civil Engineering from Rice University (1980) - Author of The Glass State: The Technology of the Spectacle/ Paris 1981-1998 (MIT Press, 2003) - Lectured at Cornell University, Columbia University, and Penn as well as for the Institute of French Culture and Technology
- Principal of Andrew Saunders Architecture + Design (2004) - Received an M.Arch from Harvard GSD with Distinction for work of clearly exceptional merit. (2004) - B.Arch from Fay Jones School of Architecture, University of Arkansas (1998) - Winner of The Robert S. Brown ‘52 Fellows Program (2013)
- Prior to the founding of OP – Architecture Landscape - Worked as a designer and project manager in several high profile international offices - received his Master of Architecture in Urban Design with Distinction from Harvard University - He was the recipient of several prizes and grants including the Urban Design Thesis Prize
- Partner of Sp[a]de (2012) - Graduated with a Bachelor of Design in Architectural Studies from Florida International University and an MArch from Penn's School of Design - Previously was a designer at Interface Studio Architects, HWKN in NY, UN Studio in Amsterdam, and OMA in Rotterdam
[5]
[6]
[7]
Marcelo Lopez-Dinardi LECTURER
Danielle Willems LECTURER
Eduardo Rega LECTURER
-E dited the architecture journal Polimorfo, which he also co-founded. -P artner of A(n) Office based in New York and Detroit - Awarded several times by the AIA. - He was selected to represent the US Pavilion in the 2016 edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale with A(n) Office.
- Co-Founder of Mæta Design (2008) - Visiting Professor at Pratt University, Brooklyn NY - Earned a MArch from Columbia University, GSAPP (2007)
- Editor, & Art Director of the Editorial Project and Investigation system “From Spam to Maps” - Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design at Columbia University - MArch from Polytechnic University of Madrid, ETSAM - BArch, University of Las Palmas, Spain
FOUNDATION 502
FOUNDATION 502
[3]
M ARCH
Annette Fierro, Coordinator
FOUNDATION 502 FACULTY [1] [2]
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As architects, we find a uniquely fertile field of creative possibilities in the Carnival: an ideal conceptual framework for rethinking the urban environment, challenging the future of cities and expanding architecture’s cultural project. The carnival offers a testing ground for the radical abandonment of the Status Quo, it is an instrument of interconnection, a rehearsal of Utopia. Its protagonists acquire the power to participate in the formation of a new world. With its origin in the Roman Catholic Pre-Lenten festivities, the carnival is a liberation from restrictions and pressures of social order. Distinctions between actors and spectators are dissolved in the carnival, it responds to its own laws, it disrupts hierarchies and has maximum transformative potential. The carnival is also a form of action capable of revealing contradictions and unmasking truths. The carnival is the realm of freedom, a privileged space for critique and a laboratory for the elaboration of an alternative world. In order to expand, while problematizing, the limits of the field, architecture needs to be carnivalized. As it has been shown in recent, and not that recent, demonstrations and protestivals around the world such as Quebec City’s Carnival against Capital, Global Days of Action, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Reclaim The Streets and the Global Street Party, just to name a few, the carnival has proved to be a successful modus operandi to reclaim people’s right to an alternative world and, by extension, to the city. Following Lefebvre’s principles, the carnival can give response to human being’s anthropological needs for play, sexuality, physical activities such as sport, creative activity, art and knowledge in forms that are not satisfied by conventional commercial and cultural infrastructures. However, a Carnivalesque infrastructure of détournement, ready to receive and provoke counter-spectacles, could only exist in the geographical interstices of quotidian urban practice, infiltrated within the facilities of institutionalized modern spectacle. It is in these visible spaces of neoliberal globalization where discrepancy is currently made evident through the mentioned carnivals and protestivals. Pertinent programming possibilities would therefore be related to art, culture and leisure: A Regional Performance Center for greater Philadelphia. Considering its strategic location, as cultural entities of the city grow northward, our site’s position at the riverfront privilege it to become both an ideal site of artistic empowerment for Philadelphia’s art collectives, and a spot for public engagement of many imaginable sorts. Within the conjunction between the program and site, could we anticipate or even prepare for what might happen in the cracks of this spectacle? Can the actual cracks of carnival be architecturally designed?