The SUPERFRONT team has set up the installation of the Past Forward exhibit this monday at the gallery with the Weeksville Heritage Center and the students from Boys and Girls High School .
The opening will be this thursday between 6 and 8 pm.
Posts Tagged: urbanism
27
May 09
SUPERFRONT exhibiting urban research by local High School students
Past Forward Exhibit Opening Thursday, June 11 2009, 6-8pm at SUPERFRONT
photo courtesy of Weeksville Heritage Center
Past Forward Program is a partnership between Weeksville Heritage Center and Boys and Girls High School. 30 students were chosen from their senior class to participate in exploring literary and historical accounts of their community through readings and writing exercises. Over 10 weeks students came together to work with a preservation educator to further delve into the field by exploring the social and building history of Weeksville and Bedford Stuyvesant.
29
Dec 08
White House Urbanism: White House Redux competition entry
White House Urbanism: Radical Democracy vs the Presidential Palace
This project considers the White House as a generator of effects – effects that can be traced on the urban scale of democratic process.
Painting the Presidential Palace white laid the first architectural grounds for its erasure as palace. In the place of the function of palace, the White House enacts a dissemination of executive authority.
In this white architecture (not even a building so much as a notion of a building), bleached of specificity and abstracted from luxury, the executive function of government can define its own territories. These territories include the diplomatic functions under the wing of the first lady, as well as the military apparatus that headquarters itself outside the boundaries of Washington. In this sense, the presidential palace as White House produces effects that extend the place of Presidential decision-making beyond the urban boundaries of Washington (as the Pentagon shifts to Virginia), while simultaneously complicating the agency of presidential decision-making beyond the singular personhood of the President. The White House, both opaque and transparent, visited by thousands daily and deeply submerged in privacy, produces terms of executive authority in American democracy.
What to make of it, then? Tear it down! Build a Palace of the People! Perhaps. But let’s learn from the undeniable political success of the existing architecture.
Is this even architecture? Is it not an object? What’s really acting here, and what is registering the act? What is phenomena and what is agency, here?
It might be worthwhile to note that the architecture of extension that the White House achieves so successfully is embedded in the L’Enfant plan of DC, itself.
BORDER:
Locking Federal Public institutional growth within the territories of L’Enfant’s plan.
CONTAIN:
Surrounding the White House with non-governmental organizations and other quasi-public institutions, including local public institutions. Embedding non-governmental organizations in the political arena has
been successful in combating corruption in 3rd world nations.
DIVIDE:
Divide the functions of Presidential Palace from Oval Office.
