Roughness The Arc

In recent years, there’s been a preoccupation with roughness in architecture; in tools, in textures, and in materiality—potentially as a response to the indistinct disenchantment with the ubiquity of ‘smooth’ digital imagery. The discipline is beginning to think about using things the way that they were not intended to be used, and therefore having to stay within certain rule sets and certain prescriptive forms of practice.
Episode 2: ‘Roughness’ speaks to activist, art and architectural historian, and SCI-Arc Teaching Fellow Liz Hirsch about what it means to sleep rough in Los Angeles, where homelessness has exploded and has become one of the most critical issues facing the population of the city. Then the episode looks at a recent exhibition in the SCI-Arc Gallery by design faculty Mira Henry, called Rough Coat, whose installation demands for the reexamination of what we think about certain ordinary architectural materials while also profoundly challenging what we consider to be architecture. Finally, we will consider the idea of roughness in the culture of BDSM, where it becomes a form of empowerment and also way of inflicting pleasure rather than pain.