The Politics of Embodiment

At Tuesday’s installment of the Center for Architecture’s New Practices lecture series, Bryony Roberts spoke about her involvement with the WIP (Work in Progress | Women in Practice) Collective, which is organized around designing inclusive public spaces. Her colorful and programmatically varied installations often introduce domestic elements like soft textiles and an informal sensibility to the “hard, pale spaces of modernism” that characterize our cities, critic Alexandra Lange noted. The 2021 Outside the Lines installation at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta was a particular highlight. Attentive to the experiences of neurodivergent, disabled, and mentally ill people, the project incorporated wayfinding strategies and citrus-tinged moiré to create variable conditions for privacy and sociality. Modest in scale, the folly was ambitious, offering a fleeting (and highly photogenic) glimpse of an alternative approach to public space in the city.