Kripa and Mueller position architectural design as a systemic instrumentation of material ecologies, social constituencies, political policies, and ethical thought. As both researchers and designers, they embrace confrontational roles to create objects, forms, spaces, databases, and arguments that instrumentalize spatial justice. They will discuss the research motivations, methodologies, and findings from their book Fronts, and will share ways in which their findings inform their architectural and design practice.

The lecture will share original investigative mappings that document over 500 urban warfare simulation environments on military bases around the world. The research, conducted through deep-dives in military training theory, manuals, and legislative doctrine, presents in the evolution of urban warfare in response to rapidly growing urbanization, reveals these built proxies as ground-zero for the criminalization of urban informality. Kripa and Mueller will augment the lecture with other examples of journalistic, mapping, and design work that responds to the general militarization of public spaces, and the inequitable distribution of control in the built environment

Poster design: Steven Leonti @stevenleonti

Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller, co-founders of AGENCY, will discuss their research from their book, FRONTS: Military Urbanisms and the Developing World (AR+D, 2020), and share how that research has evolved through original investigative mappings that document over 500 urban warfare simulation environments on military bases around the world. The research, conducted through deep-dives in military training theory, manuals, and legislative doctrine, presents the evolution of urban warfare in response to rapidly growing urbanization, and reveals these built proxies as ground-zero for the criminalization of urban informality. Kripa and Mueller will augment the lecture with other examples of journalistic, mapping, and design work that responds to the general militarization of public spaces, and the inequitable distribution of control in the built environment.

Binational Jurisdictions

A collection of biosurveillance territories maps layering Biowatch Jurisdictions, Public Health Laboratories, and Confirmed COVID-19 Cases. U.S. authorities have long seen the US– Mexico borderland as an area particularly susceptible to biological threats and have deployed substantial resources to mitigate the biological impact of the borderland on the domestic interior. 
Image Courtesy POST-Project for Operative Spatial Technologies. (Project Team: Stephen Mueller, Research Director; Karla Padilla and Sofia Dominguez Rojo, Research Assistants)