[a]FA Damascus Dialogues

[applied] Foreign Affairs will collaborate with the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Damascus and the Damascus based Studio Reparametrize (as part of their ongoing project Recoding Post-War-Syria/Zamalka).  Five students in the Master of Architecture program will be selected from each institution to participate in the lab.

 Acupunctural interventions as the seeds for community building:

The eastern suburbs of Damascus are our primary focus, using the neighborhood of Zamalka as a prototypical site for our project and, potentially, for an extended study. The lab asks if spatial interventions at a small scale, strategically dispersed, can instigate community building. By occupying existing building fabric in various states of disrepair and ruin, the interventions link together a network of public rooms that attempt to bring community life back to the street.

How can we use the extant building fabric to provide an armature for spatial possibilities? Can the adaptive re-use of partially destroyed structures allow for an alternative urbanism, one that incorporates existing resources (e.g. structural grids and infrastructures) but also taps into memory and identity? Would such an urbanism run counter to expected, developer-driven, top-down master planning that aims to make room for new construction?

How can one support the rehabilitation of a post-war urban community? It is easy to imagine rebuilding a structure, a home, a school, a hospital, but it is much more difficult to imagine the processes and networks that allow for a community to rebuild itself. Where does one start? Small, surgical interventions that radiate into their direct and wider context are faster to implement and require fewer resources to fund. Depending on their assembly and deployment, members of the community can also participate in their conception and implementation. Can a set of acupunctural interventions start to catalyze community building through participation and communication between various stakeholders?

Can an acupunctural urban strategy start with the act of play – a motivation for gathering – as the initial focus? Can the act of play, something that the war was not able to eradicate, be at the center of each intervention, sparking a range of other potential acts? There are children on the streets that are younger than the war itself and as such have known nothing other than the ravages that their communities have experienced. But play extends to others and is therefore multi-generational. From the table, to the playground, to the courtyard can the interventions begin to weave together a community through multi-generational play and gathering?

Can the lessons learned and applied in one neighborhood be transferred to other parts of the city and country?  Can a site-specific, contextual strategy be prototypical and vice versa? The variables of context will always suggest diversity and different results.  

 

[a]FA teaching in Vienna: Baerbel Mueller, Gregorio Lubroth

 

Lab Dates:

January 2020 - June 2020 / since March 13th meetings, lectures, and workshops via ZOOM !

June 28 - July 12 2020 /  field lab in Beirut, Lebanon  / due to the Covid-19 pandemic field lab will be postponed

 

 

 

 

Comments

No application possible, the project team has been selected 

since March 13th meetings, lectures, and workshops via ZOOM !

due to the Covid-19 pandemic field lab will be postponed