Global Design New York University: Karissa Rosenfield

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Participant HHF on Ruta del Peregrino

The Crosses Lookout Point, Las cruces / Elemental – Courtesy of Elemental

"Each year, approximately two million Mexican residents take part in the religious phenomenon Ruta del Peregrino (Pilgrim’s Route) – a 117 kilometer pilgrimage through the mountain range of Jalisco ... In an effort to provide the historical route with better conditions, nine architecture firms and design offices collaborated to build seven architectural landmarks that provide shelter, services and outlook points for the pilgrims."

Read full article on Arch Daily, by Karissa Rosenfield

MISSION

Global warming effects pose new challenges to the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design communities. The immediate response has been a turn toward a host of energy-saving technologies. What has rarely been addressed, however, is the problem of scale. How can the designer make sure that global solutions do not come at the expense of local traditions, cultures, and environments? By placing human rational, emotional, technological, and social needs at the center of our environmental concerns, we propose a new GLOBAL [Global Local Open Border Architecture and Landscape] design initiative.

We seek a Global yet still Local design that can Open the sociopolitical Borders that all too often separate Architecture from its Landscape. The overreaching aim is to develop a language of design that can create proximity between individual responsibility and the current global environmental crisis. We see environmental problems as a crisis of human alienation from the natural world, and our initiative will explore ways in which design can reformat the unfortunate separation. In our plea for proximity between the individual and the global we will explore, in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a design that is "as close to the beyond as to things near" when we evoke "our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere."