​Through these works I am exploring the integration of cultural representation in architectural form as a critique against the generic design agenda often employed by new developments in the mist of gentrification. I try to imagine a city where cultural iconography alters architectural form as a critic of the generic. Where hyper-density is also envisioned through a positive and productive lens without urban decay.
Being from Brooklyn, New York I witness these stresses of Gentrification displacing the cultural identify of many communities every day. When the people are replaced culture is also displaced resulting in a formal, urban and cultural decay. At the corner of Flatbush avenue and Canton street we witnessed a cultural Imprint left by generations of Caribbean immigrants. Today it is lost and displaced. The “Little Caribbean” city we knew, represented by the vibrant cultural iconography of the Flatbush Canton Market, now resides on Clarendon road and East 22nd Street as a high rise luxury apartment complex is in progress to take its place.
Instead my work looks at architectural development and form through a cultural lens. It uses Cultural iconography as a formal challenge to architecture is a position against new developments that are populating gentrifying communities and replacing its cultural imprint with the generic. These works aim to create a visually and cultural sustainable but also resilient model for developing cities, a city is re-imagined with a culture as form. It suggests that people of lower social-economic class can be included in a developing urban city without their displacement or a loss of their cultural identity. As a result, giving the generic city cultural value and transforming it back to the non-generic.
I use collage, assembles and portraits to pieces together a story of the culture of Flatbush and the cultural identity of Caribbean heritage in the community. I use this as a method to show how I want my work to contrast with the construction of the new urban context and I propose a development that uses social context as a building block and challenges the displacement of culture and people by gentrifying developments.
Using the found elements, an inclusive formal combination is created to incorporate all elements and facade typologies for architectural preservation and a new geometry/massing for the proposed development (a housing development as the case study). After Formal Facade components and Cultural Iconography/ Artifacts are identified. we can begin to overlay the two. Using the cultural imagery/ iconography we can overlay it on new massing composites to begin to imagine a building type/design/ configuration through a cultural lens. The geometry then becomes distorted and manipulated according to the graphic imagery of the overlaid content. Here is where we begin to test how cultural iconography can alter architectural form, where the edges of lines, color. and visuals become a physically repositioned to the overlaid components to alter the geometry of the form.
These works document cultural iconography as a formal challenge to architecture is a position against new developments that are populating gentrifying communities and replacing its cultural imprint with the generic. Aiming to create a visually and cultural sustainable but also resilient model for developing cities, a city is re-imagined with a cultural overlay. It suggests that people of lower social-economic class can be included in a generic city without their displacement or a loss of their cultural identity. As a result, giving the generic city cultural value and transforming it back to the non-generic.