11.24.2006

Dispersion : Family, Identity, and the Delocalization of Home

Home connotes a single geographical space. City, region, and country are often called upon to describe the condition of Home. Associations tied to place are privileged and often dominate meanings of Home. Additionally, the idea of Home is coupled with the idea of family. Home is the territory where family is defined.
The geographic fragmentation of family is a common contemporary condition. The dispersed family often requires a reinterpretation of Home. My thesis proposes to investigate the meaning of Home as the territory in which the group identity of the geographically dispersed family is constructed.
In this investigation, I will draw upon personal ideas of Home and family. Although personally relevant, conditions of fragmentation, asynchronicity, plurality, and dispersion are also representative of a general post-modern reality. In assessing an alternate nature of Home, I will consider globalizing trends including increased personal mobility and electronic communication, multiple sites of habitation, and wider social and infrastructural networks. As local spatial conditions dissolve or become blurred, temporal coordinates are elevated to emphasize and anchor the meaning of Home.

11.21.2006

The Program: Bay Area Youth Artists for Humanity

The goal of this thesis, Making Space for Art in Architecture, is the development of a unique program, which supports a new form of artist community in the city of Oakland, California. This program, tentatively named Bay Area Youth Artists for Humanity (BayAFH), is a non-profit arts center which employs Bay Area high school students and practicing artists to produce artwork on commission and for gallery exhibitions. The program is modeled on Artists for Humanity, highly-successful non-profit that began in 1991. The program’s youth artists learn about art by making objects and images that are their own rather than through didactic classroom exercises. The program posits that all its participants are artists, and that the line traditionally drawn between student and teacher will be blurred into a more meaningful relationship between youth artists and mentor artists. The classroom environment will be dissolved into the studio, a flexible workspace that allows artists to express themselves freely. That the studio is the epicenter of learning might seem obvious and be taken for granted by students and professors in a graduate architecture program. However, for high school students who often feel disenfranchised and voiceless within the confines of classroom, the provision of a space in which they can be themselves, learning and making in an environment where they feel comfortable can be life-changing. Understanding the space of the artist at multiple scales of experience is essential to the development of the program and the architecture that which support it.
While the education and empowerment of Oakland’s youth through art-making is the primary goal of this program, this process is impossible without the involvement of dedicated and experienced artists who are willing to share the skills and knowledge with the youth. Mentor artists from diverse fields of practice will be welcomed to the program. The program will provide a personal studio space to each artist in exchange for their service as mentors to the youth studio. Studios will be offered in painting and drawing, photography, sculpture, graphic design, furniture and architecture. Students in all studios will have opportunity to work on both personal projects and group commissioned projects. The mentor’s responsibility is not to tell the youth artist what to make, but to guide them towards the achievement of their vision, providing new methods for making and challenging the youth to constantly expand their abilities and understandings of art. This is a reciprocal relationship. Within this open and egalitarian environment, everyone has something to learn from everyone else around them. There are no tests or exams to determine who is eligible to gain from this program and to evaluate who is better than who. A show of genuine commitment and zeal towards making and learning in this environment is all that is necessary to participate. This program walks the line between art as a medium for social change and art for arts sake. It holds the premise that individual artist has the right and perhaps the duty to express themselves as such, but that the work of the artist is most meaningful when it is part of the shaping of a collective spirit or vision amongst these diverse individuals.
This thesis will propose a design for a permanent home for BayAFH . This will be an epicenter for a larger community that provides physical space for participating artists to come together. This is an architecture at the service of artists, and the design establish a more dynamic and reciprocal relationship between architectural form and arts practice, education and exhibition. In architectural education and practice, program is generally understood as a system of square-footage allotments given over to the particular functions of the building. Formal envelopes are developed into which these functional requirements are slotted in. Given the emphasis on the program and participants, this architectural project will attempt to serve the needs of the participants rather than impose the designer’s conception of what is artistic space. Nevertheless the program suggests a variety of spaces to be composed by the architect, including a large open studio floor, between five and ten individual studios, machine and sculpture workshops, administrative office space, a large gallery that accommodates a variety of art forms and can be used for parties and functions, and a gallery store that provides a direct, commercial outlet for the program’s products.
The open studio floor is the physical and ideological heart of the program. This is where the core relationships between the artists are established. Rather than assigning specific desk spaces to individual students, each youth artist will be provided with a kit of parts to assemble on the open studio floor, allowing them to shape the environment around them and establish amongst themselves the relationships between public and private, individual and collective. This may oftentimes be a contentious process, but learning to work together and share space, material and ideas is a vital part of the artist’s education. For artists involved in the architectural and furniture design studios, projects would often be focused on adding to and improving the building’s spaces and facilities. All of the program’s participants would be included in continual efforts to reconceive the relationship between artists and their space within the framework of the BayAFH facility.
Materials and surfaces will be provided to the program’s youth artists. The styles, subjects, and ideas behind the art will be their own. In return, their work will be exhibited in the gallery space of the arts center and in outside exhibitions arranged by the program. An important part of the learning experience is for these young artists to be involved with the organization, installation and promotion of the gallery exhibitions and openings, so that they engaged not only in the production of art, but also its social and business components. In order to empower Oakland’s youth through art, they must be able to express themselves through both physical artifacts and a social involvement with each other, their mentors, and the community. From personal experience, I can say that what I learned the most from my time at AFH was how to talk to and work with other people that were very different than me. Art is a medium through which people from diverse ages, races, religions, neighborhoods and interests can come together to create, to learn, to teach and to collaborate. Perhaps this vision is naïve and idealistic, given the difficult constraints of our time and place. However, I know from experience that it is possible to achieve, and look forward to both expanding the realm of possibility and finding practical solutions for implementation of the program in the near future.

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