Mixtape Talks: Habitat & Care

Comforting habitats, domestic pleasure, housing equality, urban wellbeing, and the right to decent shelter: is this too much to ask in 2020?

The current pandemic brings forth the need of rethinking how more than half of the global population inhabiting urban environments must often cohabitate a hostile housing space.

What is the role of the architect in caring about housing habitats beyond the mere provision of normative domestic spaces? What kinds of material qualities should we enhance to shape an architecture that generates productive spaces for its inhabitants?

In this Mixtape Talk, we aim to set up an open conversation around ideas related to the design of collective housing, and the role they play in providing valid habitats both on the domestic and urban scale. We are borrowing the term ‘care’ to load it with a more material sense, one that brings the material, physical, and inevitably permanent nature of architecture as a potential tool to enhance the practice of everyday life in our contemporary cities.

THE PARTICIPANTS:

Umberto Napolitano - LAN Architects

Anette Spiro – Professor of Architecture & Construction, ETH

Peg Rawes – Philosopher & Art Historian, The Bartlett UCL

+ Student Think Hub formed by Lorenzo Uribe, Barbara Hernandez, Ilona Liechtenstein, Paula Sofia Martinez, Asmaa Maged Abdelzher Soliman Elbaz, Franka Ducic, Francesca Norrington, and Aline Schmidt.

Curated by IE A&D professors Tomohisa Miyauchi & Marcela Aragüez

ABOUT THE MIXTAPE TALKS

The Mixtape Talks evoke the practice of homemade song compilations as a metaphor for our current crave for unexpected intellectual conversation springing from interdisciplinary encounters in professional and social environments that are currently restricted.

In the aim of satisfying this craving, the Mixtape Talks bring together trios of guests from the fields of architecture and design practice, theory, and related side disciplines to fuel conversations around candent topics on the built and produced environment.

Throughout a series of three conversations in Spring 2021, we aim to emphasize the importance of discursive critical knowledge at IE School of Architecture & Design, mixing up theory and practice, student and faculty participation, online and onsite* presence, and diverse contexts, people and places.

Information and instructions on how to connect will be sent directly to registrants’ email soon!

Poster designed by, Federica Caso and Anurag Phalke, 4th-year students of the IE Bachelor in Design.

*Due to COVID-19 restrictions, onsite attendance is reserved for students and professors only.