Summer
Show
2022
Show
2022
24
November
18:00 SAST
November
18:00 SAST
Dystopian Safe Spaces
Urban Escapism. Botha, A. Unit 14. 2021
Ané Botha
BArch Hons 2021Supervisors:
Unit Leader: Thireshen Govender
Unit Leader: Jiaxin Gong
Unit Tutor: Sarah Harding
UNIT 14︎︎︎
Rogue Economies - Trade Roots: HOME
This project is interested in violence and trauma, specifically looking at domestic violence because it takes place in a seemingly safe space and deals with layers of various issues that build up to a violent event. I look for ways to escape, challenge or counteract the violence as a way of creating a safe space.
The work is not intended to solve the very real systemic issues of GBV. Instead “Dystopian Safe Spaces” presents a dystopian house, where these systemic issues are not dealt with through effective political, social and economic change, but instead, it is the responsibility of architecture to prevent GBV. The work proposes a home that makes domestic violence spatially impossible. It is satirical in that the architecture is to be blamed instead of the perpetrator and systemic issues.
This starts to challenge and problematise architectural components as Paula Meth (2003, p319) suggests we do. But this work reveals that “fixing architecture” is not sufficient because the responsibility and accountability is purely placed on the banal architecture and does not hold the human, the perpetrator accountable for their actions. Even more it portrays how absurd a house would have to be for it to counteract violence.
The work is not intended to solve the very real systemic issues of GBV. Instead “Dystopian Safe Spaces” presents a dystopian house, where these systemic issues are not dealt with through effective political, social and economic change, but instead, it is the responsibility of architecture to prevent GBV. The work proposes a home that makes domestic violence spatially impossible. It is satirical in that the architecture is to be blamed instead of the perpetrator and systemic issues.
This starts to challenge and problematise architectural components as Paula Meth (2003, p319) suggests we do. But this work reveals that “fixing architecture” is not sufficient because the responsibility and accountability is purely placed on the banal architecture and does not hold the human, the perpetrator accountable for their actions. Even more it portrays how absurd a house would have to be for it to counteract violence.
Keywords:
Dystopia, Violence, Escape, Domestic
Dystopia, Violence, Escape, Domestic
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