Feminist Spatial Practices: Web Platform Launch Event

feministspatialpractices.com—a">span>—a global collective of architects, artists, designers, and scholars—is launching a new interactive online platform that celebrates the diverse ways that people practice feminism in the built environment. The platform offers an interactive new media visualization and a searchable index of 600+ global feminist practices in art, design, architecture, and activism. The experimental design of the platform enables visitors to discover relationships between practices, publications, exhibitions, and protest movements across time, with themes such as “experimental pedagogies,” “alternative materialities,” and “spaces for non-conforming bodies.” The entries for the archive have been collectively produced with input from community members around the world, growing from an earlier ">span> published on e-flux Architecture and created for the Chronograms project supported by the Jencks Foundation.

At the launch event, members of Feminist Spatial Practices will introduce the interactive archive, and guest speakers featured within the platform—Marisa Morán Jahn, A.L. Hu, Diana Agrest, and Jerome Haferd—will share their work on intersectional gender equity in the built environment. Fluffy poofs, created during a ,">span>, will transform the space at e-flux into an environment that invites multiple embodied forms of participation.

The platform will be viewable on the Feminist Spatial Practices ">span> after October 8.

For more information, contact [email protected].

Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to [email protected]. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

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Marisa Morán Jahn is an artist of Ecuadorian/Chinese descent whose work “exemplifies the possibilities of art as social practice” (ArtForum) and explores “civic spaces and the radical art of play” (Chicago Tribune). Working across drawing, public art, and architectural-urban scales, Jahn directly engages new immigrant families and low-wage workers in her practice. Her projects have appeared at Tribeca Film Festival, United Nations, Obama’s White House, Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Guggenheim Museum, and been covered by international media (The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Univision Global, BBC, CNN). Jahn is a Senior Researcher at MIT (her alma mater) and the Director of Integrated Design at Parsons/The New School. With architect Rafi Segal, she is the author of Design and Solidarity (Columbia University Press); co-founder of Carehaus, the first care-based co-housing project in the US; and involved as a collaborating artist on other architecture-urbanism projects. She is represented by Sapar Contemporary.

A.L. Hu (they/them) is a transgenderqueer Taiwanese American architect, artist, and facilitator. Their practice synthesizes organizing for racial, class, and gender justice with design to queer the architect’s role in facilitating accessible spaces. They founded Queeries, a design-queering initiative for and by LGBTQIA+ spatial designers.

Diana Agrest is an architect, theoretician, author, educator, and filmmaker internationally renowned for her pioneering approach to architecture and urbanism developed in practice, theory, and pedagogy. She founded in 1979, and is principal of, Agrest and Gandelsonas Architects in New York, and develops individual projects as well. Since 1970, Agrest has been involved in the design and building of award-winning projects from urban design and master plans to sculpture parks, civic and residential buildings, exhibitions, single-family houses and interiors globally. She is the Irwin S. Chain Distinguished Professor at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union. She has taught at Princeton, Yale, and Columbia and was a Fellow of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. Her books include: Architecture of Nature | Nature of Architecture (2019); The Sex of Architecture, ed. Agrest, Conway, Weisman (1996);Agrest and Gandelsonas: Works, with Mario Gandelsonas (1995); Architecture from Without: Theoretical Framings for a Critical Practice (1991), and others. She has written, produced, and directed the feature documentary film The Making of an Avant-Garde: The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies 1967–1984, which premiered at MoMA in 2013.

Jerome W Haferd is a licensed architect, public artist, and educator based in Harlem, NYC. He is assistant professor of architecture at City College’s Spitzer School of Architecture. Haferd is principal of award-winning studio Jerome Haferd Architecture and co-founder of BRANDT : HAFERD Architecture. He is also a core initiator of Dark Matter U (DMU), a BIPOC-led network geared towards new models of design pedagogy and practice. Haferd received the 2022 #BlackVisionaries award as part of a DMU cohort. He is co-director for the Mellon-funded Place Memory and Culture Incubator at Spitzer School of Architecture, beginning in Fall 2023. Haferd’s research and practice critically engages built environment projects in both urban and rural contexts, often looking to marginalized histories to unlock a new imaginary for architecture, design, and cultural infrastructure.