DESIGN AS REACTION: RE-EVALUATING THE ARCHITECTURAL AND URBAN DOCUMENTS BY CONSI

Abstract

Covid-19 shows that space is a complex phenomenon that online platforms can replace since society can produce or transform spaces to meet their demands in response to unexpected happenings. Societies pushed by environmental, climate, or exterior forces could re-produce new spaces or return to the previous spaces when these forces disappear. Even though people are recently recovering from the global pandemic, scientists believe that the climate crisis will be the next external force waiting for humanity. This paper is generated by wondering how people react and respond to unexpected exterior forces and happenings in terms of designing their urban life or architecture. As climatic change is expected as the ensuing global force after the pandemic, this paper takes the 16th-19th century Great Frost of London as an example to research urban and architectural assembly as opposed to this unexpected happening. It discovers that numerous visual documents are recorded that Londoners transformed the Thames River into Thames Frost Fair, and it disappeared when the frost was gone. However, all souvenirs and ephemeral documents as the memory of Frost Fairs still exist. As Lefebvre believes that every society produces its own space, this study aims to reveal design is not always planned; it sometimes happens even under difficult and impermanent circumstances, depending on the society. Furthermore, it discovers that the term ephemera is not limited by these documents in the case of Frost Fair as architecture and urban space can be ephemera themselves since space was the fundamental source of those, as mentioned earlier ephemeral memorial document.