Since 2023, third year FIU architecture students have engaged in a collaborative exercise together with the Miami-Dade Public Library System, that considers the unique role libraries have in neighborhoods. Libraries serve all people; they are a public resource that goes to great lengths to be truly accessible. Their ethos and mission challenge students to weigh the public and political dimensions of architecture. Within the neighborhoods of Brickell, Westchester and Little River in Miami, students of the Fall 2024 semester, reflected on the library as an urban focal points that support learning, play and encounters among people. Students in the previous year Fall 2023 also engaged with the current Little River library, as well as those of Lemon City, Overtown, Allapattah, Edison and the Virrick Park libraries. Their projects, while inspired by utopian concepts, were determined through viable, pragmatic and achievable measures.
Students are provoked to contemplate what does it mean to be a good architect, and find within the discipline an opportunity to design in dialogue with people, a commitment to respectful listening and observation, and sensitivity to pre-existences. The course argues that the good architect is not subservient to capital, but exercises a political mandate which is: 1. to make places more plural, more accessible, more durable, and more just; 2. to repair and take care of what is common including nature, and 3. to listen to people, acknowledge pre-existences, celebrate and value the diversity of our cities. Rather than simplify the contradictions and challenges or real urban conditions, students embraced the city´s complexity, experimenting, mixing, contaminating and integrating, and sought to offer greater voice and space to the ambitions of everyday citizens.
