Alphabet — props for sociospatial improvisation.

How can public space encourage intercultural exchange?

Designer ● 1 week

Design Research ● Spatial Design ● Product Design

Overview

Alphabet is an urban installation enabling playful engagement with bilingualism and the heterogeneity of languaging. The project's key goal is to develop strategies that acknowledge and endorse cultural diversity in public space with experimental urban props.

Alphabet was developed with Aurore Paluel-Marmont, Hannah McDonald, Marie El-Nawar, and Leah Bell in the Fall of 2007. We came together by individual volition within our common context at the School of Architecture at McGill Univeristy in Montreal, Canada. Within this team of five, my contribution centered on defining a strategic conceptual narrative that could be communicated visually.

Alphabet was developed and completed in a week. It won the first prize of the Canadian Center of Architecture’s Interuniversity Charrette.

visual summary — 1 minute

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Overview Project Statement

Specific architectural languaging can emphasize commonality to outweigh difference.

Project Statement

The Pluriversal Language of Space

Languages draw apart as much as they bring together. Belonging in a group fundamentally stems from speaking a certain language. And individuals acknowledge those who speak languages different than their own in peculiar ways.

Côte-des-Neiges is a Montreal neighborhood characterized by its diverse immigrant communities. Can public space be designed to foster a sense of inclusion and play around belonging through language?

The proposed answer is a frisky and denotative approach to the Roman alphabet, common to Montreal’s two official languages, French and English. Large three-dimensional letters freely stand on the street. These giant typographic props are an invitation for intercultural play. Made of foam, they are too hefty for one person to carry along by light enough to be lifted by two, thus providing an opportunity for dialogue, amusement, and expression.

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