Family Dinner
Family Dinner / 2019
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
with Samantha Vasseur and Edward Wang
photo credit: Shikun Zhu (Philip)
Framed as a conversation on subversive in architecture, Family Dinner is a symposium which brought together historians, activists, academics and design practitioners (architects, landscape architects and urban planners) who have outlined a distinctively subversive dimension within their work.
The symposium is framed by events that engage conventional symposium formats but, in keeping with a provocative approach, subvert them. They will question conventional discussion formats: opening keynote as performative show, academic panel as dinner performance, a “speed-dating” breakfast, an archiving event, an installation in collaboration with Women in Design, etc.
Dinner in the Family was a non-conventional public discussion which brought together 5-6 designers who identify a subversive dimension within their work to discuss publicly around a dinner table set up within the enclosure produced by Petra Blaisse’s curtains. David Eskenazi, Laida Aguirre, Andrew Holder, Victor Jones, Jaffer Kolb and Ellie Abrons each proposed a dish that captured their conception of subversive aesthetics before joining the table as guests. The dishes elicited fresh descriptions of subversiveness through a non-conventional vocabulary: juicy vs. dry, soft vs. hard, shell vs. core.