Before and Beyond: Architecture and the User

"Before and Beyond" is a two-day international symposium exploring the question of how architecture and urban design deal with matters of use. Rapid urbanization and the development of mass culture over the past century have only exacerbated the fascination with architecture's "dark side:" the unknowable universe of its consumption and everyday use. If there is one figure that has functioned as the principal way of addressing both what informs and succeeds the controllable process of architectural production, it is that of the user. This innocuous category has been crucial to a number of emerging paradigms, from participatory planning and post-occupancy studies to populism, programming, and interaction design. Despite its centrality, it remains unclear how exactly the notion of the user has shaped the stakes of architecture across the modern and the postmodern. With contemporary concerns of sustainability in a growing urban world, user-centered design delivers new promises for architecture's social agency, from urban interventions in the favelas of Caracas to the renovation of public housing in the suburbs of Paris. Against the prevailing idea that such agendas threaten to usurp the discipline's formal potentials, this symposium asks instead how the user has been a critical source of invention over the past century, prompting us to reconfigure the processes and premises of design. Wednesday 6 and Thursday 7 April 2011 Website: user.kennycupers.net Crosby Hall Room 301 Department of Architecture 3435 Main Street Buffalo, NY 14214-3087 Phone: 716-829-3486