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Does your family fit into the standard family home?
What will you do if you live to 100?
Do you know how you were conceived?
Do you own, rent, or subscribe to your housing?
How many people are you willing to share a kitchen with?
Are you a conscious consumer?
Do you need a side hustle to make a living wage?
Are you prepared to share your workplace with a robot?
These are some of the many questions that emerge from A Section of Now: Social Norms and Rituals as Sites for Architectural Intervention, our new book and companion exhibition (on view through 1 May 2022) stemming from the one-year investigation Catching Up With Life with which we explore architecture’s ability (or lack of) to evolve in dialogue with society.
A Section of Now urges architecture to begin to contend with and address our changed and changing social norms. The publication serves as a meditation on new behaviours, rituals, and values and their spatial implications, and seeks to catalyze urban and architectural interventions that accommodate, influence, and in some cases, pre-empt our new lived realities. Authors address a range of topics that expand understandings of our shifting societal relationships—Jen Schradie examines safety of digital spaces, Ann Neumann reflects on how normative life trajectories affect the elderly, and Nina Power focuses on the many selves each of us puts forward—while architects share new conceptions of the “design brief”: Sam Jacob presents a framework for spaces for blended families, Karla Rothstein proposes a space for voluntary euthenasia, and Mario Gooden questions the role of contested monuments, among many others. Bringing together analytical essays about the contemporary moment and the direction in which society is moving, projective texts that outline new architectural types to address societal needs and aspirations, alongside television series, photography, and architecture and design projects, A Section of Now outlines a new relationship between the spaces in which we live and the ways we live within them.
A Section of Now is edited by Giovanna Borasi and co-published with Spector Books, with a selection of photographs curated by Melissa Harris and of TV series by Andrea Bellavita, and with texts by Agency—Agency, Mario Gooden, Helen Hester, Sam Jacob, Andrés Jaque, Joanne McNeil, Ann Neumann, Nina Power, Anna Puigjaner, Karla Rothstein, Hilary Sample, Jen Schradie, SO–IL, Traumnovelle, and Sumayya Vally.
Other contributors include: 2050+ and -orama; Christopher Anderson; Nicolas Asfouri, Assemble Studio; Center for Spatial Technologies; Certain Measures; Dan Chen; Sam Chermayeff Office; Benson Chien and Samantha Ingallina; Aaron M. Cohen; Thaddé Comar; Common Accounts; Coop Himmelb(l)au; Estudio Teddy Cruz+Fonna Forman and Kotti+Co; Degelo Architekten and Gamperle AG; Cynthia Deng and Arta Perezic; Jamie Diamond; DOGMA and New Academy; Elena Dorfman; Expanded Design; Lucas Foglia; Maison Edouard François; The Future Market; Salwan Georges; Ginger Design Studio; Paul Graham; Michelle Groskopf; Max Hampshire, Paul Kolling, and Paul Seidler; Ai Hasegawa; Go Hasegawa+Associates; Het Nieuwe Instituut; HOME-OFFICE; Marisa Morán Jahn and Rafi Segal; Dafydd Jones; Valérian Mazataud; June14 Meyer-Grohbrügge & Chermayeff; Anaïs Langlais-Schmidt; LATENT Productions and Columbia University GSAPP DeathLAB; Jesse LeCavalier; Lucy McRae; Mueller Sigrist Architekten; Christinne Muschi; N H D M; Ewa Nowak; Brittany M. Powell; Alice Proujansky; Kamila Rudnicka; Nadia Sablin; Klemens Schillinger; Michael Schmelling; Jack Self; Space Popular; Giulia Spadafora; Special Projects; Marie-Claire Springham; Stefan Marx; OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen; Other Architects; Pollard Thomas Edwards; Republic of Estonia; reWork; Something Fantastic; StrongArm Technologies; Takahashi Ippei Office; Teple Misto; terra0; Bryan Thomas; Elisabeth Ubbe; UNSense; Jonas Voigt, Philipp Schmitt, and Stephan Bogner; Aubrey Wade; Christoph Wagner Architekten; Nick Waplington; Williamson Williamson; Hardy Wilson; Yangying Ye.
The book is designed by Folder Studio, and is also published in French as Une portion du présent : les normes et rituels sociaux comme sites d’intervention architecturale.
The CCA’s one-year investigation Catching Up with Life (2021-2022) has manifested in the lecture series An Extended Family, which focuses on architecture’s relation to the changing organization of family in society; a collaboration with e-flux architecture on new spatialities of labour and inequalities, titled Workplace; a thematic web issue A Social Reset concerning the question of alignment (or misalignment) between societal transformations and architectural transformations; a three-part short documentary series, starting with What It Takes to Make a Home in 2019, on the unhoused, followed by When We Live Alone, that explores the ways in which we live alone together in contemporary cities (public release April 2022), and concluding with a third, on the elderly, currently in production and to be released in 2023. These formats are in addition to the exhibition and its companion book, A Section of Now: Social Norms and Rituals as Sites for Architectural Intervention. We will soon launch Ownership, a social media pilot project, to explore how notions of ownership are constructed through legal and bureaucratic mechanisms.
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