Through an investigative design workshop on urban furniture, designer and ‘placemaker’ Rawan Kashkoush raises questions on the human relationship with urban space in Amman. This workshop looks at seating as a physical form of petitions to return public space to people, to turn ‘space’ into ‘place’. It requires participants to explore, collect, and research instances of society’s interactions with the public arena, and to design contextually relevant urban furniture for Amman’s cityscape.
Sidewalks in Amman are arguably the largest form of public space the city has, however they currently act as transition zones for the unloading and reloading of vehicles and green insertion points; the human relationship with the sidewalk has become imperceptible.
Participants will be asked to collect short videos and photographs of the city as points of discourse on current society’s interaction with the public arena and whether these behaviors align with embodied cultural characteristics. The articles collected will form examples of what can be read from the narrative of the city as cultural signage. Finally, they will be viewed as opportunities for intervention, as participants will be asked to engage in design explorations of contextually specific modular seating for Amman.
The result will be a thesis of collective urban furniture analysis and redesign, subsequently the creation of a map of a city peppered with shared intimate encounters between citizen and space. An architecture of community.
Participants will be given the opportunity to have the intention, aesthetic and local relevance of their work critiqued by a panel at the end of the workshop.
This workshop is open to both young and experienced designers, architects, and those interested in discourse on urban theories.
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Program:
Saturday, 29th November - 11:00am to 2:00pm
- Introduction to Placemaking
- Documentary by urbanist William Whyte – ‘The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces’ – 1hr
- Summary of Whyte’s guidelines for analysis of public space as tools for reasoning
- Assignment Overview:
a. Existing Urban Furniture Successes and Failures
b. Analysis of collected footage
Saturday, 6th December - 1:00pm to 5:00pm
-Discussion on collected articles
-Presentation: Variations of Urban Furniture
Preliminary Design Thoughts
Saturday, 13th December - 11:00am to 5:00pm
- Pin-up – Peer to Peer Critique
- Finalization of Design Exploration
- Panel Critique