Paper

Living Surfaces: Defying Walls

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Abstract

The potential to program the Wall as a Living Surface, addressing the needs and demands of its users to respond to the current context for a better quality of life, can provide benefits in many aspects. By reinterpreting the questions using three critical frameworks: social, cultural, and physical, one can deconstruct the Wall as a provocation: Can a wall act as a building element and an element of play: interactive social exchange? Can new tools and technology provide alternate tactics? How can we encapsulate resilience using low-cost modular approaches incorporating human-centered design strategies? Many small-scale creative efforts to foster tangible urban change, inspired by the Tactical Urbanism1 movement, have succeeded. Cities today have become experimental grounds to test ideas using inexpensive short-term tactics as playful provocations that generate social interactions and promote critical discourse. Within this realm, design-build pedagogy in the classroom is an opportunity for students for meaningful social engagement and community building, thus expanding the role of education as a participatory practice-based design research and fabrication lab. This paper offers evidence-based outcomes as students in Tactical Urbanism class at Kennesaw State University explored ways to redefine and reconstitute the typology of Walls as a Living Surface with new programmatic opportunities defying the traditional notion of Walls separating public and private realms. Responding to the needs of Math Club's desire for a Book Nook that also creates a boundary of sorts in the outdoor greens, students explored how a Wall can act as a Living Surface, an assemblage for various functions: seating, pop-up library, and collaborative spaces. The course follows a rigorous process to achieve outcomes that can stand up to public scrutiny for a product ready for on-site installation and real-time testing by citizen-users in a public space as a testament to the project's efficacy. Teachings that engage real-life matters of grave importance allow upper-level students to practice design and making skills in the service of citizen-users within the urban realm. Pedagogically, design- build is an excellent alternative method to give students real-life experience of project scope from conception to designing to prototyping: testing scalar mock-ups to actual fabrication and deployment, whereby the students' engagement with materials, tectonics, and tools and techniques gives them design feedback that is critical to the creative process as attested by Richard Sennett in the book The Craftsman.

Keywords: Walls, Living Surfaces, Tactical Urbanism, Architectural Installation, Design-Build

How to Cite:

Karimi, Z., Kucharski, C. & Tello, A. V., (2023) “Living Surfaces: Defying Walls”, Building Technology Educators’ Society 2023(1), 350-359. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/btes.1973