IIDA Perspective - Summer 2019 - 23

Photo by: (Liz Ogbu) Maria del Rio

WORKING:

RELIGION: Placing Personal Experience

By adopting a context-oriented process, designers can create places of
worship that encourage communities to build new relationships not only with
the space but also with their religious practice as well,
says Frank Mruk, director at architecture firm EAA-Emre
Arolat in New York.
Emre Arolat's Sancaklar mosque outside Istanbul,
for example, rejects traditional Islamic design cues
altogether. Instead, the humble gray stone exterior and
Frank Mruk
single-squared minaret appear almost indigenous to the
surrounding landscape as if they had been there for centuries. On the inside,
the dimly lit cave-like prayer room with a gently tiered ceiling is equal parts
meditative and modern.
"Our goal in the future is to make [places of worship] once again pristine
and incorruptible and pure-not only in a kind of philosophical way but
also in an aesthetic way," Mruk says. "In our time when we're increasingly
squeezed by management and managed by machines like cogs in the wheel,
humanity is going to need spaces that facilitate meditation, consciousness,
and personal spirituality."

To understand how design has
influenced the
way we work,
Neil Schneider,
IIDA, a design
director and
principal at
Neil Schneider
IA Interior
Architects in Chicago, suggests
flipping through the pages of
history to ancient Rome.
"In Roman times, people
gathered on stairwells, they
gathered in the city squares in large
community areas-that is where a
lot of the work happened," he says.
"Everybody would come together,
whether it was selling goods,
to talk about philosophy, or to
educate and mentor."
The environment and design
of the Roman era influenced
the way people work by forcing
them to come together. As
business has become more global
and communication more flexible,
the design of the modern-day
workplace continues to echo the
Roman design while redefining
what it means to collaborate.
"When building office
spaces today, we are looking at
large community spaces where
people can come together, where
they can share knowledge, grow,
learn from each other, and develop
an industry faster and better,"
Schneider says. "What we are
seeing in the world is flexibility,
mobility, the ability to be able to
say I can work anywhere I want
to work. People are coming into
the workplace today to be able to
share ideas, whether it's a virtual
environment or a community
environment, you are coming there
to work with others."

UNDERSTANDING: Eliminating Injustice, Intentionally
There's no such thing as neutral design.
According to Liz Ogbu, founder and principal of Studio O in Oakland, California, design can
break the normalcy of deeply entrenched social injustices such as racial and social
inequality and reveal different ways we can relate to one another. "Design-at its
height-has the power to make the invisible, visible," she says. But it has to be an
intentional act.
For designers, that first means recognizing any individual preconceived notions or
bias. "When you don't air it out, it leaves opportunities for it to seep into the process
Liz Ogbu
of design," Ogbu says.
Next, you need to learn how any injustices came to be in the first place. "What were the conditions?"
she says. "What are the people you're dealing with struggling with? And what systems need to change to
ensure the injustice doesn't perpetuate?"
For example, Ogbu is currently working on a project to convert low income housing in Charlottesville,
Virginia into mixed-income housing. Initially, some in the city believed that current residents of the
property would be opposed to its transformation into a mixed-income development because of fears of
more marginalization and possible displacement. Instead of taking this belief at face value, however, Ogbu
conducted interviews with current residents in their homes to learn about their lives and what they hoped
for as part of the change.
"Overall they were in support of the mixed-income housing. In part, because they were well aware that
their place was considered to be the 'ghetto,'" Ogbu says. "Anytime a resident shared their address, they
believed people were making assumptions about who they were."
Living in a mixed-use neighborhood could change the narrative. "Being in mixed-income could provide
access to resources that could help support their aspirations," Ogbu says. "Through creating a residentcentered design process, we were able to give residents more voice to how they want the property to work."
Choosing not to act and not to engage in situations like these is the equivalent of choosing a side-
and discouraging true understanding. "I don't want to be on the side of perpetuating harm because
I'm choosing not to act," she says. "I actually want to act. We can be part of making change and healing
wounds." ■

can say something [so powerful]-
their own agency." -Jayna Zweiman
summer 2019

perspective

IIDA Perspective - Summer 2019

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