● ▲ Un-earthing A-ttending
designed with Katie Colford at Yale University (2021)
This project was presented as a film and website. It interrogates the architect’s role in maintaining the health, safety, and welfare of the Sunset Park community in Brooklyn, NY—particularly that of middle school children. We focused on two regimes of maintenance: environmental infrastructure and care infrastructure.
www.unearthingwork.net
Our current economy treats health, safety, and welfare as something to be calculated, outsourced, taxonomized. As this abstraction induces harm—harm that is often invisible, we designed communal acts of disruption to reveal regimes of imperceptibility, asking, How can architects respond to the harm inflicted on health, safety, and welfare in Sunset Park?
We set up three tempos—at three different time scales and frequencies—to speculate on environmental and care infrastructure for the Sunset Park community:
Tempo 1
Allegro
—
The Physical Body
The first tempo involved bearing witness to past harms in two ways: materialize ecological damage at the scale of the climate; and substantiate unjust relationships between tenant and landlord through building violations.
Tempo 2
Andante —
The Social Body
The second tempo bore witness to the future: amplify bodega infrastructure to serve communal relationships of care; encourage the work and imagination of students to amplify their agency in building a just future.
Tempo 3
Allegretto — Physical and Social Body
And lastly, the third tempo was cultivating care by repositioning architecture as professionally and ethically accountable to maintain health, safety, and welfare at every stage of life—even after death. This project memorializes through unearthing the physical and social body while attending to imagination and growth.