PROJECT C5 by Ivan Kucina together with Daša Spasojević and Predrag Milić and with the students from the Faculty of Architecture University of Belgrade: Dušana Nikolić, Ivana Mandić, Jelena Marković, Emilija Josipović, Natalija Ostojić, Olivera Petrović, Mirjana Utvić, Dušan Milanović, Dimitrije Udicki, Filip Biočanin, Aleksandar Suhanov and David Bilobrk
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Friday, May 10, 2013
Thursday, April 4, 2013
School of Urban Practices
Drawing
on the evolving body of trans-disciplinary urban knowledge, urban research, and
urban activism, School of Urban Practices will conduct advanced
educational work that redefines design, architecture and urbanism as a field of
transformative activity. Selected students will seek the ways how to improve everyday
environment of the devastated urban neighborhoods whether through public
policy, mediation, urban planning and architecture design, or any other forms
of design that involves citizens from the very beginning of the project. By working continually on the site for the public
interest and by exchanging aspirations with local community entrepreneurs,
School of Urban Practices will develop innovative strategies and projects based
on critical engagement with contemporary issues of urban commons.
Project C5
Project C5 by the School of Urban Practices for Urban Incubator transforms ruined basement and courtyard of the
building at the street Crnogorska 5 into a common space for the residents. Although designing such a small task
may seem an easy work, it is becoming complex by the many different interests
that need to be balanced. Original participatory
design method that is applied redirects creative process into
negotiation, not only between students and residents but among the students
themselves, among the residents themselves and then between architects and the
residents on one side, and official institutions on the other. Participation
is strengthening relationship between the residents and ensuring awareness to
the mutual dependence and solidarity that is necessary to building the commons
and to maintaining its future. Agreements
about the project will be made through combination of parallel and successive dialogs, articulated in a way that
allows participants to question each other and, in the next step, to questions
the decisions of the previous ones. Architects that are engaged do not impose their visions, and instead they create a platform for idea exchange in order to carry the design process toward
the common agreement. The very existence
of the possibility for agreement gives a sufficient reason for the common space
to thrive.
Participatory design method applied in this designing
process has seven steps:
The first - students interview residents using the
special questionnaire in order to create group profile. The questionnaire is not
reduced to just answers to questions about the contents of the basement and
courtyard, but interviewers sought to detect what people couldn't or didn't know how to articulate – such as unfulfilled wishes, motivations, triggers and
symbolic capital. The creative interpretation of the answers is just as important as the
answers themselves.
The second – group
profile that is created on the basis of the questioner isn't either a sum of the attributes of
the interviewees, or their general opinion, or their lowest common denominator,
but a unique, complex personality that has the most vital and usually the most contradictory
attributes which the interviewers deem the most important for defining the
elements of the project.
The third – mental mapping of the immediate
environment goes in parallel to the creation of the group profile. The reason why it is important to do these two
things simultaneously is that the issue of mapping and what is mapped mainly
has to do with the places that are relevant to the residents. Following the
aspiration of the residents, students are notifying their own sensations,
memories and thoughts.
The fourth – program scenario is formed by pushing the group profile thru the imaginary territory of the individual mental maps in order to
identify its reactions. These reactions compiled into stories that are loaded with activities, meanings and senses are the basic elements of the program of the becoming
space. Scenarios identify perceptions, thoughts,
activities and anything else that an environment can cause to the personality
which resembles the group profile. Basic
elements of the program are appearing by extracting the keywords from the
scenario and by formulating their relationships within discourses such as social
exchange, flexibility, economic viability and environmental sustainability.
The fifth – series of individual
3D cardboard models will be made in order to shape the basic elements of the
program, but not to establish either their final size or form, or their final
position. Such makeshift models are used only as a medium to seek agreement
about the project among the students and then between the students and the
residents. The group formed by students and residents will jointly taking part
in a workshop, rethinking, suggesting, adding and rejecting, enlarging and
shrinking, moving and fixing the elements of the model.
The sixth – common project
proposal that compromises the best parts from transformed 3D cardboard models will
be presented to the residents in a form of computer renderings and drawings during a series
of public discussion where everyone can express the opinion about what is good in the project and what is not. In order to
accommodate different opinions project proposal will be transformed until
residents agree
about the structure of their new common space. Results from
the previous projects show that the residents are keen to agree on a simple and
sustainable draft proposal.
The seventh - final
project proposal will be presented to the public, the media and the official
institutions as an outcome of an agreement between the residents and the architects
engaged in the process of improving common environment. Achieving the status of a role model in Savamala will subsidize project
realization even before
the executive drawings are submitted to the officials in order to gain the
building permission.
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
Thursday, March 28, 2013
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