From market stalls to the hammer, protest placards to festivals, the third edition of 30 Objects in 30 Days brings together a wonderful collection of individuals and objects as part of LFA 2022. We are asking 30 key figures in the industry to nominate an 'object' that they feel best represents this year’s festival theme of ‘act’ and ‘architecture’ and share a video explaining why. For Barbara's selection she has chosen the fireless cooker. Barbara Penner is Professor in Architectural Humanities at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

Media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i10wkTQ7dgk&ab_channel=LondonFestivalofArchitecture
Organizers: London Festival of Architecture
Working Group Affiliation: Insurgent Domesticities

Objects for Thriving (2022) fleshes out the complexity of lived worlds in ordinary domestic objects. It focuses on the capacity of such objects to behave as affective mediators and repositories of experiences and events. A Butterfly sewing machine, a granite pestle and mortar set, and household talismans and altars, are equally ordinary and extraordinary. The setting for each object—within a domestic space–changes the nature of how these are perceived. They are involved in identity formations, ritual continuity, meaning making. As instruments embodying histories (personal, social, cultural), they are ordinary forms of heritage which continue to evolve and to matter in the everyday. They are instruments for living, or what we term ‘objects for thriving.’

The short documentary is an observational and essayistic document where research findings take on an unusual and organic form of discovery and semi-enactment, made in tandem with the participants who revisit the objects which they deem important. The meaning(s) in video-documentation are ‘emic’; they are not predetermined but emanate from the encounters between filmed subjects and the filmmaker. These ideas of memory and heritage are thus co-created by the relationships between the filmed subject, the filmmakers and the difference audiences. It empowers participant identification and builds audience empathy. The objects enmesh protocols, systems and technologies of survival, belief and ideologies. The title—Objects for Thriving—alludes to the roles these objects play in giving independence, identity and expression to the elders who are their custodians

Media: https://www.lilianchee.com/film-objectsforthriving

The world is what it is -- but no one knows what that is, and we all see different worlds. Designer and art historian Annapurna Garimella joins Amit Varma in episode 257 of The Seen and the Unseen to describe her passage of seeing, remembering, reflecting.

Organizers: The Seen and Unseen
Media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSjLonaPwHU&ab_channel=TheSeenandtheUnseen

In 1936, the City of Atlanta was the first U.S. city to open federally-financed and locally-administered public housing developments to low-income families in need of safe and sanitary housing (Techwood Homes).  For the city's Black residents, and later, other marginalized groups, these developments provided political opportunity to assemble, mobilize, and make claims on the State in ways that were otherwise inaccessible. Over time, tenant associations served as conduits for working-class political interests centered in spatial justice – the very politics of planning that were used to segregate and marginalize developments and residents served as an organizing logic around spatial justice issues. However, in 2013, demolition began on one of the city's last public housing developments for low-income families, nearly two decades after Techwood Homes was demolished for the 1996 Olympics. This talk examines the historical role of public housing in working-class politics and how the loss of tenant associations in the city has deepened contemporary inequities. 

Organized by: Cornell AAP (Architecture Art Planning)
Media: https://aap.cornell.edu/news-events/akira-drake-rodriguez-diverging-space-deviants-politics-atlantas-public-housing

When we think of feminist architecture the first thing that springs to mind is the exceptional work of Zaha Hadid. But feminist architecture starts off on a much more basic need - female public toilets. The amazing Professor Barbara Penner from the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL has researched the history and lack of female public toilets in cities like London. She shares how we should rethink architecture in a feminist light and what will look like. Barbara also discussed what COVID19 will mean for the future of architecture and building design in metropolitan cities.

Organizers: The Know Show Podcast

CSSD Working Group Affiliation: Insurgent Domesticities

Nothing Even Matters tells a tale at the critical intersection of historical analysis and theoretical speculation as a way to interrogate how modes of architectural production are operative parts of the same project that has historically, and continues to mutate, to produce varying ideas about racial difference. These alignments are not merely material, they constitute a discursive system, an aesthetic and sociotechnical mode of operation that orders the world in particular ways. Simultaneously anonymous and outstanding, this talk engages Mitchell-Lama housing—a strategically crafty and impactful experiment in a long line of housing schemes hatched in New York, enacted in 1955, targeting middle-income black families. Recognized as an alternative program, complicating post-war histories of housing, Nothing Even Matters shares Ife Salema Vanable’s ongoing study of Mitchell-Lama housing, charting its hybridity, the simultaneous ambiguity and specificity with which the terms of its production have been managed (“middle-income,” “family,” “household), the ways that its objects (high-rise residential towers) aesthetically deviate from and challenge expectations for how black bodies are to be physically and materially housed, and the varied sanctioned, unauthorized, ingenious, pleasurable, sensuous, and particularly quotidian forms of occupancy black bodies have waged behind and beyond their facades.

Media: https://arch.umd.edu/events/under-construction-lecture-ife-salema-vanable