Lila Tedesco

It has been my education at Pratt that has led me to consider art, and the ability to pursue it, a necessary human right. Art is a luxury that individuals can only pursue when their basic needs/rights have been secured, and thus I see art as the last and final indicator that adequate human rights have been fulfilled. Thus I see it as equally important to build art museums as housing, sculptures as schools. My reasoning is two-fold. One, the forum art provides for questioning the status of human. The second benefit to art-saturated architecture I witnessed in the workshop I attended to design and build a reading room for a library in Gokarna, India. The ìreading roomî was more of a sculpture that could be inhabited. It was designed by a scripting program, and the novelty of the building stood in stark contrast to the townís vernacular. What I had not expecting was for the exotic nature of the design to act as a sort of advertisement for the library. People flocked to the library to visit the reading room, and because of that, the reading room stood as an advertisement for knowledge and encourage the townís use of the library. While there is definitely a spectrum for what is aesthetically appropriate, the strategy of using architecture as a visual magnet to attract people to intangible ideas such as knowledge will become an essential component to all of my architectural work abroad.