New Urban Living Rooms.

ABOUT

After almost two years in pandemic confinement, experiencing our domestic spaces intensely, we have discovered new spatial categories and places to relate to each other. For example, during the liberation parentheses, wherein many cities we were allowed to meet with few people and only in open spaces, our living rooms have gone out the streets. This way businesses such as cafes or bars have taken their tables to the outside massively, to allow that extension of our houses and their lounges in public spaces. But there has been no thought concerning the design of these new meeting spaces and thus several questions are raised:

What are their new needs?

How can they offer us welcoming and healthy environments at the same time?

How do we understand the new communication technologies applied to these spaces?

How are these new living rooms integrated into the urban space?

How do they incorporate nature?

What type of gathering rituals can be triggered?

The goal of this workshop will be to rethink and design this new type of urban lounge that has emerged after the pandemic, going beyond a place for consumption or commercial exploitation such as cafes with tables and chairs. The design will surely have to consider a type of furniture but now it becomes a new design opportunity that generates an urban totem or attractor defining or symbolizing this hybrid space between the living room and the street.

AGENDA

The Workshop begins with two online sessions starting 2 weeks prior to face-to-face sessions to be held in Belgrade, Serbia.

The online sessions provide guidance about the topic and opportunity to start the work through research on similar spaces, their new needs, and urban conditions for these “new urban living rooms”.

The face-to-face Sessions will be focused on design process and creating drawings and first collages and finishing with simulation/performance of the design proposals in class using recycled domestic objects.

In between Morning and Afternoon face-to-face Session an informal open-air holistic exercise will be organized for interested participants as a way of promotion of new urban rituals.
Production work will be divided in teams 2-3 people.
Prior to the start of the Program the teams will be formed, and sites chosen.

Workshop outputs will include:
– 1 DIN A1 poster (presentation with graphic info about the designs and images/collages)
– short 2-minute video (simulation of the interactions in each team proposal for the new urban living rooms, using recycled and adapted common domestic objects).

MODERATOR

Manuel Collado Arpia is an architect and lecturer in architecture at University of Alcalá de Henares (UAH) in Madrid. Since 2018 principal and founder of the design studio manholo.com

PROGRAM

ORGANIZATION

Organization and Realization

STRAND – Sustainable Urban Society Association, Serbia

Partners

Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory (IFDT)

Mejkers spejs, Center for the Promotion of Science (CPN)