Welcome to Practicing Influence, an innovative, creative, provocation-generating seminar at PennDesign, led by Julie Beckman and Keith Kaseman.  

The perception that architects are only adept at giving form to program is challenging the architect’s ability to remain relevant in a world where engineers, graphic designers, lawyers and other professionals are filling the intellectual gap left by this narrow self-definition.  During an era of less construction, but a more focused sense of urgency around design thinking with clear urban, social, spatial, and material implications, there is an opportunity for architects to seek broader strategies for impact. Architects can have substantial impacts by constructing strategic alliances aimed to ask probing questions which define new provocations for change.   These new frameworks of influence can be equally and perhaps more effective in evolving our urban spatial fabric than the typical modes currently and typically at play.

This seminar will explore this premise through the lens of both blatant and invisible urban design urgencies currently plaguing Philadelphia.  We will use the city of Philadelphia as an engine to construct new collaborative potentials which may provoke new ways of re-thinking the city’s fabric and constructing urban imaginaries yet to be determined.