Building Change

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Building Change provides a vision of a revitalized role for architecture as a critical cultural and spatial practice. It discusses the dynamic between power and building and lays out the spatial strategies those in power use to manipulate and control the physical world. These include segregation, marginalization, construction of hierachies, and the spatial transformations of mechanisms like colonialism and globalization. In the past fifty years, with the shifting of power throughout the world, the motivations behind such strategies have been vigorously challenged. Resistance has come in part through the reassertion of agency by subject peoples: through political and economic action as well as cultural production. However, the reallocation of power alone cannot erase the spatial imprint of previous attitudes. Altering the organization of space, and opening up access to those represented in it, is a long-term endeavor. Lisa Findley argues that architecture, as a primary participant in the production of space, has an important role to play in supporting these changes. The question is how, within the scope of the design and making of buildings, can this be done. To answer this question, Findley describes and analyzes four recent building projects embedded in complex historical, political, cultural and spatial circumstances: the Tjibaou Cultural Center in New Caledonia, the Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Center in Australia, The Museum of Struggle in South Africa, and the Southern Poverty Law Center in the United States. While the context of each project is unique, Findley finds that inherent in the agency of architecture itself there are numerous opportunities and strategies forarchitects to actively and effectively support the goals of social change. In these situations architects are required to imagine, invent, innovate, translate and transform, reaching deep into complicated, layered and often unfamiliar histories and beliefs. However, they are still