“Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places. In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations. Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or Edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”

—Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble

Refuge/Resist: Re-fuse

Architecture has always been an act of some resistance. Simply with the act of building, one resists the force of gravity, the vicissitudes of exposure, as well as the psychic inertia of the present. By building, one imagines possibility and houses hope. Our studio will pursue architecture as an act of optimism and posit a place of refuge that refuses to accept the status quo.

Taking Care

At this time of increasing food insecurity, we will begin with the design of a food bank. We will look to a number of models where a food bank becomes a nexus for providing other services to precarious populations. Additionally, we will ask each student to pose another program supporting the need to provide refuge (personal or political) and the means to resist the current trajectory of the world. The built area of the design project will be 15-20,000 square feet and it will be embedded in a riverfront landscape that serves as a bulwark against sea level rise. This will be a place of dignity and abundance that resists environmental and social entropy with sustenance and connection.

Taking Place

Our site will be along the Duwamish River in the neighborhood of South Park, Seattle, Washington. Once an important fishing ground, the Duwamish has long been a polluted blight, declared a superfund in 2001. Our site is now part of an ongoing holistic effort to clean the water, restore adjacent sites and bolster public infrastructure, services, and access to green space. The current food bank in South Park is looking for a new home and is slated to move to this location in the near future.

Taking Note

We will travel to Seattle to visit the site and meet with local groups involved in the restoration of food and environmental security. Students will work in pairs on the main design problem.