Additional information, email: Kearon Roy Taylor, Peter Reyner Banham Fellow
Capital is movement.
Buffalo’s history is written in speeds and stoppages of capital, encoded in the vacant lots of the East Side as much as it is in grain elevators. From its industrial boom at the terminus of the Erie Canal to the scars of Moses-era infrastructure projects, obsolescence is as much a part of the story as the heroic forms the Modernists revered. While Buffalo was left behind in changes in industrial organisation in the late 20th C., its plentiful and cheap vacant land is coming to be seen as attractive to property developers and real estate speculators. Capital, in short, disciplines architecture to function more and more like money, as a liquid asset of exchange.
As the BUREAU OF COUNTER-FUTURES, we aim to do precisely the opposite: to propose an architecture of ILLIQUIDITY.
In this studio, we will explore the possibility of an architecture against appropriation in Buffalo. What can take root in the spaces of stoppages and disjunctions left behind by capital in the city? These “leftover” spaces contain a charged chemical potential; they offer opportunities to conceive of other ways of being and caring.
“Instead of seeking to overcome capital, we should focus on what capital must always obstruct: the collective capacity to produce, care and enjoy.”
— Mark Fisher
Beginning from local context-based research finding sites of resilience as well as contradiction as crucial locations for action, the studio will be oriented towards speculative design interventions that constitute a collective
INFRASTRUCTURE OF CARE. The end-product of the studio will take the form of hybrid drawing-models, to be coordinated with the Banham Fellowship research and exhibition project ILLIQUID ASSETS.