a Mixed Worldview | Thesis
Abstract
This study aims to explore the intersection of aesthetics, phenomenology, and racial identity in architecture through the lens of the mixed-race experience. Aesthetics, as defined by bell hooks, “is more than a philosophy or theory of art and beauty; it is a way of inhabiting space, a particular location, a way of looking and becoming.” By deriving aesthetics as a vital tool for expressing identity, belonging, and subjectivity in spatial form and by foregrounding multiracial identity as a phenomenological condition, this research proposes an architectural practice that translates complex, shifting identities into spatial experiences—expanding architectural race theory and the study of aesthetics and racial phenomena toward a more inclusive, reflective, and transformative design discourse.
Studio Prompt
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Multi-Racial Phenomenology
A condition of fluidity and ambiguity shaped significantly by its context. It simultaneously holds a multifaceted, multicultural perspective as it navigates the interstitial spaces of understanding and belonging. It is critically self-aware of its being and the complex, contradictory, and both-and values that make up its state.
Works Cited
1. Prophetic Aesthetic, “A prophetic aesthetic calls us to talk about what it means to raise generations of architects with a multicultural sensibility who will think about architecture not just as a profession but who will think about spaces that everyday people inhabit and about our accountability toward making those spaces wonderful and inhabitable space.” Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. 1995. bell hooks.
2. “Perhaps it is the sense of place that gives us the belief that passionate things, in some essence, endure.” Some Notes on River Country. 1944. Eudora Welty.