The un-built as RESEARCH FOR ACTION is concerned with the research of the environmental, social and political frameworks that we presently inhabit to generate concrete action.
The critical and spatial distance between the un-built and the real world fosters renewed perspectives on global emergencies and anthropocentric concerns.1 It then offers alternatives to the status quo, highlighting limitations and creating alternative representations of facts, lines of inquiry or spaces of discussion. In fact, given the current inequalities and unbalances that are affecting our society and environment, the un-built as a research framework has the potential to expose and inform new actions which can ensure a more equal and just world from an environmental, social and political perspective.2 By providing tangible evidence and bringing these overlooked issues to the forefront of contemporary debates, the un-built as research is both a critical tool through which political and social inquiry is brought forward, and a possibility for a new political space of debate that overcomes pre-existing social, political, ethnics and geographic boundaries.3
Ideas can be measured against ideals, hence political action should motivate the design of the un-built. In other words, the un-built has the potential to bring forward critical and political agendas at a local and global scale, engaging with both grassroots organizations and large institutions. Through the un-built architects can ultimately propose real solutions to the injustices that are affecting our planet.
Notes
1 Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou, Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2020). DOI: 10.21627/2020fa ISBN: 9781503615045
2 See Cooking Sections, Salmon: A Red Herring (isolarii, 2020).
3 Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (New York: Zone Books, 2017).
