DESIGN AS CULTURAL REACTION: INTERPRETING THE EPHEMERA DOCUMENTS AS ELEMENTS OF SOCIAL PRODUCTION DURING THE THAMES FROST FAIRS.

Environmental factors like air, water, clime, nature, or land can push space to show how it is a complex phenomenon as a society can produce or transform spaces to meet their demands in response to unexpected happenings. Societies driven by environmental, climate, or exterior forces could re-produce new spaces or return to the previous spaces when these forces disappear. Even though people are recently recovering from the global pandemic, scientists believe that the climate crisis will be the next external force waiting for humanity. This paper examines how people react and respond to unexpected exterior forces and happenings when designing their urban life or architecture. As climatic change is expected as the ensuing global force after the pandemic, this paper takes the 16th-19th century Great Frost of London as an example to research urban and architectural assembly instead of this unexpected happening. It discovers that numerous visual documents are recorded that Londoners transformed the Thames River into Thames Frost Fair, and it disappeared when the frost was gone. However, all souvenirs and ephemeral documents as the memory of Frost Fairs still exist. As Lefebvre believes that every society produces its own space, this study aims to reveal that design is only sometimes planned; it sometimes happens even under difficult and impermanent circumstances, depending on the society. Furthermore, it discovers that the term ephemera is not limited by these documents in the case of Frost Fair as architecture and urban space can be ephemera themselves since space was the fundamental source of those, as mentioned earlier ephemeral memorial document. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]