School of Architecture

This paper aims to explore the impacts of employing the Louvre Museum's 'universal' brand on France and UAE's national identity construction processes. The text looks into brand's role in accommodating forms of cultural exchange between these two countries, and the use of museum's collections as cultural capital by the UAE in establishing legitimacy for the new Arab identity and its national aspirations. Such cultural exchange programs expose the hardship of creating and maintaining a 'natural dialogue' between the two ends. While Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi explores the 'shared themes' that aims to connect humanity, within a 'universal' museum format that showcases borrowed global artworks; Louvre Museum in Paris reflects a 'certain' idea of the world with its comprehensive collections of acquired items. The problem lies in their difference at forming of the 'universality' that insists on decontextualization as this causes a reduction of self's capacity to both speak and be heard like pointed out by Spivak. Text questions the relevance of a universal museum and cultural exchanges that allow the 'other' to gain universal recognition in establishing an authentic identity. These two museums in that sense, are critical to compare and reveal the fabricated need for cultural dependency on the 'West' that is happening through the cultural exchange programs. It further highlights the embracement of othering as these exchanges are becoming an economic strategy instead of a cultural one for countries looking to gain acceptance and set a critical precedent within the region and world.

The article discusses the importance of audio walks designed by  Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller in creating restorative environments that enables attachment to the local sites. Attention is given to the new urban technologies’ role in creating different temporalities by overlaying dynamic and rich multimedia information to the everyday spaces to understand how digital literacy can form a new conditions of urban literacy. How is the users' experience of the space changed when it is augmented with multimedia information? What are the ways to determine the temporality of the local sites by image, sound, motion, interaction, and duration, and how this can help to increase attachment to the local sites? During the days we live in digital worlds of isolations, these questions aims to discuss the significance of augmented reality applications to alter the perception of vernacular scales surround us. Through the paper, topics regarding the domestication of virtual space and performative memory-making by audio walks are reviewed according to their importance as part of an ongoing cultural and aesthetic renewal of the city spaces.

During the days people live in digital and conditioned worlds of isolation, people’s relation to their physical surroundings became limited and their engagements with the social spaces grew into be constrained. Impacted by the pandemics and air pollution as a result of rapid urbanization, urban lives are now threatening people’s well-being and forcing space-oriented studies to focus on proposing new ways of designing. This paper aims to look into applications of meteorological architecture that form an ephemeral relationship between body and environment. As the logic goes to link anthropogenic drivers of climate change by their impact on social lives in urban spaces, designers now have the tools to establish a robust design language that can increase the use of outdoor spaces by informing the design by atmospheric data. By recognizing particles, waves, chemical interactions of energy that continually surrounds us as ‘new materials’ instead of just ‘air’; Jade Eco Park designed by Philippe Rahm Architects and Urban Sun by Studio Roosegaarde are analyzed to indicate that meteorological architecture has the capacity to build spaces by energy like heat, humidity, and light that can organize the public life responsively.
Through this paper, Jade Eco Park Masterplan and Urban Sun will be reviewed in the ways they form a lively and healthy public life in and around these gradients of energies and question what qualifies architectural space and how the relationship of the human body with these spaces change when moving through the gradients of energy nested within their environment.