Latent Design is a Chicago based architecture, urbanism, and interiors firm. The presentation given by Katherine Darnstadt on "Tactical Leverage" was really insightful.
Latent Design has been working on offering innovative design strategies for those budget limited projects for many years.
They have done quite a lot of excellent projects:
Fresh Moves, which is basically a mobile grocery project incorporates grocery with CTA bus system to provide fresh groceries for the community, has been a huge success. It even became a national model to study the mobile market.
"You are beautiful" in Chinatown, though the budget was unbelievably tiny, the team came up with this sign or slogan idea to try to engage more people to public areas and reactivate those areas, which turned out to be a huge success. It has become a place of interest for every Chinese tourist comes to Chinatown in Chicago.
She also introduced some other interesting projects like Boombox Chicago, a storefront temporary vender structure; Arthouse Gary, a solution to engage the building environment into building skins; Voice Over, nonlinear narrative system of the city on a linear path, etc.
And the most impressive one was "Reinvent the wheel", it is a project that redefines bus stops. They created a spot right next the bus station to provide a space for a group of students or other people within the community to show performing arts. By doing that, their goal was to activate the space and people, it turned out that even buses would stop for a couple of minutes to watch their show. "Break the routine" was how Katherine described the project, as she mentioned, it is just these small actions that could delight the moment.
I was so moved by that project and how she described her work enthusiastically. We can be easily impressed by those overwhelmingly high skyscrapers, those fancy parametric architecture, but there are also these precious moments in our daily lives that worth to be captured. I'm so glad to know that there is some architect that is focusing on social impact rather maximum profit. It is another option for architects to seize the opportunity to actually do something that delights our routinely daily lives, even it can be just a moment.
Seize the moment, how wonderful it is!
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