Transcultures and Communities: exercises to validate and design a set of tales on migrations
Comunicación presentada en 5th International Conference of the Association of Architectural Educators, University of Westminster, 24-26 April 2019. ; Literary studies' main object of study is the dynamics and devices involved in textual stories. Traditionally, architecture studies design spaces for experiences. It corresponds to sociology studies to reveal the interrelations between humans and their environment. Finally, geopolitical studies classically focus on political powers linked to the geographical space. In this context, this paper presents a multidisciplinary set of exercises that took place during the first semester of the academic year 2018/19, in which these four disciplines shared objectives and methods in relation with a common topic: migrations in the mid-20th Century. These exercises are based on literary narratives and non-literary texts about migration, border-crossing and transcultural identities compiled in the volume Journeys. How travelling fruit, ideas and buildings rearrange our environment (published by the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 2010), acknowledging the value of non-human migrants through topics and stories by establishing complex connections between them. The work presented in this paper describes how students are capable of implementing procedures learnt from other fields of knowledge (e.g. such as storyboards, sociograms or image tagging) for developing a traditional architectural design project. The educational challenge is presented by the definition of methodologies and the identification of statements. The research developed in this contribution focuses on different degrees of integration and rootedness of modern migrations caused by climatic, cultural, labour or economic reasons. Is it a suitable topic for the four disciplines involved? It certainly provides an opportunity to speculate with non-humans, goods and knowledge beyond anthropocentric discourse. In particular, the subject allows us to compare migrants and remittances i.e. non-monetary transfers such as consumer goods, customs and technologies.
