I [<3] BUILDINGS looks at the current social conversations society has today on diversity and representation and asks what these conversations have done, are doing, and could do within the realm of western urban architecture. In this epoch of social revelation, groups like indigenous peoples, people of colour, gender minorities and queers alike ask of our society, as well as the city: How do we make sense of a once oppressive space? where do we find ourselves represented? how do we build for equality? along with other liberal inquiries. We look at the city through the lenses of these ideological questions in order to help society reflect and build a ‘better’, more ‘liberating’ city; however, our built environment is always either consciously or unconsciously a reflection of society. It can be deemed that architecture and people share the same DNA structure as both continually adapt and acclimatise to each other’s ‘changes’. In this thinking, we should not solely look at architecture as a systemic cause that affects ‘us’ as we certainly affect ‘it’. I <3 BUILDINGS seeks a narrative in which architecture reflects on the intentions of these questions, and looks back through these ideological lenses, to critique itself by speculating on the causes and effects of this new societal aspiration. This thesis researches and uses post-modern and post-structuralist philosophical inquiry to investigate the social and political incentives of ‘representation’. This research then manifests itself in the design of a ‘girly’ office tower to expose our current postmodern condition and the late-capitalist mentality that our society is facing—a society so infatuated with representation, that it has been reduced to an image that is manipulated as advertising.
not in Alma, moved and emailed, fz
