Place Acts - UWM School of Architecture

Place Acts - UWM SARUP 09/26/16 - 10/28/16

Place Acts is an exhibit that suggests a way to see, interpret and transform the world around us. This project grew out of lessons learnt from 20 years of research, teaching and community engagement. The message is simple: Architecture is not a product, not just a form, and not a singular creative act of some endowed designer. This exhibit urges us to see our environment as dynamic and perspectival; a contingent and emergent process. It challenges the notion that buildings and landscapes generate a sense of permanence and stability of meaning because of their corporeal and material presence in the world around us. The exhibit, Place Acts, argues for a world that can be limited not only by physical borders but also by much less explicit temporal and socially constructed boundaries.

Place acts focus on embodiment—that is, on the mutually constitutive relationship between place, activities and the human body—underscoring the notion that a physical environment cannot exist without the human inhabitants who experience it in their everyday lives, and its meaning is dependent upon the larger political and economic contexts within which these individuals operate in any specific location. The dynamism of placemaking has been and remains most evident in urban public spaces and urban neighborhoods, where the greatest numbers of people are exposed to spatial change. Place is always a process fraught with political, ideological, economic, and symbolic conflicts—but only because of the people who are engaged in it. By foregrounding the political possibilities of place, we hope to illuminate both its emancipatory and its oppressive possibilities. We see “place” as an active agent that can transform everyday practices and precipitate equitable social change.

Coordinator: Arijit Sen

Designer: Tommy Yang et al.