On Memory: Design Brigade Week 9.
Preparing to pass this project on to the City.
Meeting with Mayor Elicker
To realise this project, it is key to have support from the Mayor’s office. And so, we met with Mayor Elicker to discuss our work so far last Thursday. We presented our findings from the conversations we had with residents of New Haven, and emphasized that all preliminary ideas were directly born from what we had heard and learnt. Afterwards, we had a brief discussion and he posed some questions and concerns for us to address, emphasizing the importance of a more immediate response to the pandemic. He was very encouraging of our process and ideas, and approving of our outreach. Mayor Elicker is excited to see where this project could go in the future.
Guidebook
The production of this guidebook is a unique opportunity for us to revisit all of the work that has been poured into this project beyond the design sketches and drawings. In addition to combing through the proposals we came up with and other ideas in motion, the guidebook needed to create space for the unseen parts of the design process — various outreach processes like the meetings, presentations, and discussions with different people across the city. As such, we’ve finalized the structure into four main categories: Introduction, Research, Design, and Appendix.
Although the audience of this final deliverable remains obscure, we aim to produce a guidebook that is not top-down. Aside from scrutinizing word choice, graphic style and formatting are also up to further discussion as we put the guidebook together.
Reflections
For the four of us who have been on the project since June (Ye, Mari, Ally, and Hana), this is our final week of our internship. This project has evolved and transformed over the course of the summer, from an undefined idea of memorial to a series of options and strategies that will provide to the City based on community outreach and dialogue. We’ve taken some time to reflect on this experience as a whole.
Ye: Experimentation
The creation of the Design Brigade was to address the immediate spatial issues posed by social distancing during the pandemic. This meant that we would be faced with many unknowns and that the process would be experimental. Defining the unknowns and being on our toes would be a large part of the learning experience of this internship.
Although we had an initial brief, charting the course meant we had to contend with real world scenarios of what is available to work with, processing the feedback of all of the stakeholders of this project, and being open to chance happenings influencing the process. So as a team, we were constantly tasked with figuring out next steps. Team members had to learn on their feet and be open to taking on whichever roles that were necessary to get to the next step. This project encountered many twists and turns so it was difficult to discern which steps were towards the right direction and which were down the wrong path. A lot of our time went towards defining our immediate goals and discussing best strategies to get there. Despite what seems to be extra work and backtracking, everything we did went back into the greater understanding of this project, and every step was a learning experience.
Mari: Reassessing Architecture’s Penchant for a Top-Down Design Approach
Embarking on my path in the field of architecture, I believed all physical forms needed innovative thinking to drive creation. In hindsight, I wish that I had a better understanding of the ever present top-down approach of design-build endeavours. Working on a range of projects for large and small firms before entering grad school, I was always presented with a predetermined objective and a seemingly fixed trajectory. This is typical in commissioned work, ideas can feel reduced in meaning with limited room to explore other potentials. In many scenarios, a designer folds-in creative potentials within the set parameters, changing as much as possible without blatantly opposing a client. Rarely do people find a project that allows them to completely rethink the process of a preset objective.
Driven by the Department of Cultural Affairs’ request for greater community outreach, On Memory has very much been a reversal of the top-down approach. This summer, I was challenged to break free from deep-seated tendencies in architectural practice and questioned my own methods of working. At first, this adjustment was difficult, it is hard to remove yourself from the comforts of what you are accustomed to. As the project progressed, I found myself reflecting on how essential it is to oppose feelings of comfort in the hopes of finding greater design solutions to seemingly straightforward prompts. This is something that I will continue to reflect on and support as I move forward. Moreover, I hope the field of architecture evolves to incorporate generally overlooked or untapped perspectives into the preliminary design process. Broadly speaking, architectural practice is in dire need of reevaluation, as the next generation of designers, we must continue to push for change.
Ally: Balancing Outreach and Design Work
Before working with Design Brigade, I had never worked on a real-world public design project. It has been an eye-opening process. Because we were working with the City, our client was never just one person or institution. In our first meeting, Adriane stressed that while the City was our client, the City’s client was the people, so we had to go to the people in order to answer questions about what this memorial project should be. But the question of who “the people” are is a complicated one — an unanswerable one. No matter how many people we reached out to, they would never be representative of the entire city. Each interview or interaction we had gave us a richer picture of the city we were serving. We got an eye into so many amazing ways New Haveners are working to make this city better, and each gave us a new perspective on our project. We knew that there were so many more people out there that we could talk to, and this process could never be truly complete. We could only do what was possible with the time and resources available to involve as many voices as possible.
A big challenge for our team was how to balance this community outreach, communication, and logistical work with creative design work. Because the outreach felt so essential, we sometimes struggled to leave space for a creative process that synthesized the information we were receiving. As designers both pieces of this equation are essential. We need our design work to be informed by robust community input and we need to use our particular creative skill sets to transform that input into something new for our community partners and stakeholders. This summer was an exercise in trying to find balance between these two processes on a short timeline. Although we did not strike an absolutely perfect balance between the two, I think we learned a great deal about how powerful both outreach and creative design work are.
Hana: Leaning Into the Uncomfortable
Working on a Covid-19 memorial that coincided with this moment of nationwide racial consciousness put the systemic injustices and racisms exacerbated by the pandemic into the front lens of this project. As such, the ten weeks of this project have really been an exercise of reassessing our positionality, patterns of diversity, and inclusivity — both internally, and as members of the Design Brigade. We’ve written about this before, but it’s a takeaway that I cannot stress enough.
Early on in the project, one of our advisors told us to lean into the uncomfortable conversations. At the time, the thought simultaneously overwhelmed and humbled me, and I hurriedly scribbled his words into my notebook. Thinking back on that moment, however, I don’t think I began to grasp what our advisor meant until weeks later. I am still listening, still learning.
This is the first time I have ever done anything of this scope, but the work we’ve been doing is something I suspect I’ll carry with me for a long time. Building relationships with those we’ve had the privilege of speaking with has been an exercise in humility and self-awareness: Every conversation we’ve had has been a reminder to dissolve assumptions, to respect our shared humanity, and to acknowledge the different experiences we have each had as people.
There are things we can know, but many, many more that we have no way of understanding. Acknowledging our limitations — as designers, as Yalies, as students in a remote internship, as people — has been integral to the conversions we’ve had. As reflected by the diversity of our team (or rather, lack thereof), the homogeneity of architects has a direct impact on the power dynamics inherent in designing and existing within the built environment. Architecture cannot be neutral: Recognising the role this project can play in shaping narratives and in recalibrating systems of inequality has been another critical acknowledgement.
Next Steps
- Complete the guidebook while being intentional about the designs we include and language we use. This book will be integral in aiding the transition beyond the scope of Design Brigade.
- Work with the Department of Cultural Affairs coordinate the upcoming handoff of this project. This includes solidifying the role of the advisory committee.
- Flush out plans for the short-term tribute to the ongoing pandemic.
Additional Resources
“Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need” by Sasha Costanza-Chock
‘How Architecture Can Create Dignity For All,’ TED talk by John Cary.
