Lexi Tsien
Co-founder, Soft-Firm
Power Tools Chinatown
This multi-day workshop leverages collective and DIY-knowledge-building as a representational technique and a tool of power. Students will explore, document, and collaboratively map everyday life in New York City’s Chinatown. The majority of the built environment is not celebrated in architectural culture. Purposefully exploring programmatic misfits, margins, and in-betweens of architecture while valorizing urban form, informality, and everyday spatial practices allows us to operate critically from a different center. We’ll begin with the premise that a site, street, or storefront is more than a geometric abstraction or geolocation but an aesthetic, sociopolitical, and programmatic provocation. If our ability to read and represent a site is intrinsic to our ability to design, this course asks how we might invent and adapt our own tools. During this workshop we’ll visit Columbus Park, Wing on Wo, Citygroup and Wu’s Wonton King – culminating in an informal review and shareout.
