Yasmeen Amer, Emma Bittner, Natalie Kuehl, and Liam Kolstad, “Wasteland Salon”
Mentor: Sarah Aziz, Architecture

Wasteland Salon, MOOCH Series, and the Pleasure Palace are three projects that explore designed situations and collaborations from a position invested in finding and foregrounding value systems that exist outside of the status quo. These leveraged opportunities emerged from the margins of the Enlightenment ideals that have historically defined architecture’s aesthetic categories and forms of subjectivity. As research assistants, we were tasked with finding holes in bureaucratic systems to create cultural events and objects that deinstitutionalize the rhetoric of architecture by flattening hierarchies, removing barriers, and challenging existing value systems. Both Wasteland Salon and The Pleasure Palace positioned the COVID-19 global pandemic and the question of invasive species not as disasters, but as displays of the majesty of nature and life. These malevolent conditions have always been a part of nature, and these projects used them to a benevolent end. Prototypes of these projects yielded a series of wear-able machines that operated as parameters for social distancing, a dress made from living grass, and an inflatable costume. These prototypes explored how humans can relate to one another, the built world, and nature despite the hostile and unpredictable circumstances that humanity and the environment produce. For MOOCH Series, we sleuthed and mooched information from cultural institutions across the nation and compiled our findings into an interactive spreadsheet which was disseminated widely; by consolidating free lectures and content from universities and galleries, we made knowledge acquisition accessible, inclusive, and just. These studies questioned traditional design strategies and cultivated new guidelines for understanding architecture and the built environment in relation to human interactions, especially in the digital age that COVID-19 has demanded. This challenged both us as designers and the public to interact with these built machines and online databases to rethink how physical barriers reimage the accessibility of knowledge and exchange.