Damage and damage control are the terms and tools through which Design Studio II encountered and analyzed our buildings, cities, environments, and the state of our world. The eight design studios approached and explicated damage in its multiple and many forms. Together, we considered environmental damage, political damage, technical damage, reputational damage, cultural damage, informational damage, and more.
Derived from the maritime military term for emergency measures taken to avoid sinking, in its media spin version damage control describes the effort taken to stay afloat in the turbulent waters of public opinion. Fittingly, media documents, public narratives, news events, and political tensions populated and animated much of the work this semester. Yet our understanding and use of damage control substantially departed from its sly and opportunistic public relations formulation. Rather than disguise or minimize damage, our work attempted to understand, articulate, expose, and critically intervene in the myriad spaces and multiple sites of damage. We did not engage damage control as a cover up but as the opposite. Together, we researched, thought, and designed damage control as an uncovering, intervening, architectural transformation.
Our research revealed that the conditions we identified through and as damage are not alien to architecture. Nor are they alien to our environment, to our political apparatuses, to our cities, or to our museums and cultural institutions. Indeed, damage might be the most common currency and condition of our time. To set about controlling damage is to acknowledge that damage is not an aberration or an exception—it is the persistent companion to our architectural histories, futures, and imaginaries. Damage is imminent to modernity, not the accident that befalls it.
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If the congressional hearing room is meant to be a spectacle, then make it a spectacle…...
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