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Epic Birmingham

Part 2 Project 2020
Hicham Ouahabi
Birmingham City University | UK
Considering Black Lives Matter movement, the current architecture seems disinterested, disable, or rejected in battlefront confrontations of dissent, could it act as an infiltrated agent working with and against opposite ideological agendas? Using Epic theatre by Bertolt Brecht as a methodology. The project is considered as an architectural artefacts that transcend beyond resolving problems but rather rendering them visible, substituting its pragmatic nature for a design that forms an estrangement effect, that is, moments of revelation which will transform their users in critical observers of architecture and reality.

I propose Epic Birmingham, that functions as double (secret) agent, acting as a cultural institution, also as a space that sanction agonistic encounters between the individual and establishment.

The platform starts as a unified structure, it then unfolds and becomes exposed where the section of the theatre becomes the section of the street. Therefore, the street itself becomes a “forum”: henceforth the gap between the interior and the public forum is eliminated, creating a moment of “estrangement” , where the space of politics becomes interiorised within the street resulting in the section of the street to act as antidote to the agonism in public life, re-establishing a relationship between citizens and society.


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2020
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