The Seattle Design Festival comes downtown every year to celebrate “how design improves the quality of our lives and our community.” This year the Seattle Architecture Lobby will be conducting a Hostile Architecture Tour to explore who has the power to design, who doesn’t, and which communities are affected by design choices. Through a ten-stop tour we will examine design as the result of deliberate processes that serve some and not others. We will also discuss our role as designers with power and complicity in those processes which shape our city.

This tour will be a cursory look at vehicles of inclusion and exclusion embedded in the architecture around Pioneer Square and the Chinatown-International District. We’re indebted to and building on the efforts of many (mostly non-architect) groups who have been working on the issues we aim to discuss. We intend to add an explicitly architectural perspective and facilitate a discussion around organized architectural labor’s potential to aid the work of community groups.

Join us under the bear and Tsonoqua totems, on the north side of Occidental square, September 8th and 9th, at 12pm and 3pm. Tours will last one hour. Accessibility: We will be walking for approximately one mile on paved sidewalks with 200 feet of elevation gain, ending at the Panama Hotel & Tea House.