S K Y L I N E | 3 | A New Day in America
Week of Jan. 25
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Letter From Houston, 1-25-21
“It’s a new day in America,” according to President Joe Biden. In the biggest news of last week—and the best news in a while—last week saw the inauguration of America’s 46th president and the first woman vice president, the first Black vice president, and the first Indian-American vice president. It was a rare moment of the clouds parting.
Last Monday also marked the celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a holiday created under President Reagan in 1986 and whose existence “allowed the complicated politics of King to be defanged and defiled,” according to Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s speech during the Annual MLK Birthday Celebration at the Rothko Chapel here in Houston (recently updated by New York’s Architecture Research Office). King was more radical than we allow his memory to be. And that radicality is needed today. Taylor updated King’s remark that the moral universe that is “long but it bends towards justice” to declare that “the arc of American history is long, but it bends towards racism and inequality.” The moments of triumph are breaks in the status quo, not its regular drumbeat: “Progress is not the natural order of life in the United States,” she said.
MLK spoke about the deep connection between racism and capitalism—half a century ago, he knew one must be both antiracist and anticapitalist, as Ibram X. Kendi says now. While the first position is so important, the second might be the harder one to champion today. It should be remembered that King’s last efforts before his assassination in 1968 resulted in the occupation of Washington D.C.: He was planning the Poor People’s Campaign. The effort went ahead in the months after King’s death, with thousands camped out on the National Mall to demand economic justice. The settlement was called Resurrection City and even had a Building and Structures Committee, led University of Maryland architect John Wiebenson. The movement has new life today under the leadership of Reverend William Barber II. One current initiative is a moral and economic agenda for Biden’s first 100 days.
MLK knew that some amount of unity is needed to make progress. In a 1965 speech at Oberlin College, he said
that all mankind is tied together; all life is interrelated, and we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. [… T]his is the interrelated structure of reality.
What does this have to do with architecture?
A growing number of voices articulate how architecture is at times complicit in the oppression of people. One example is AIANY’s Criminal Justice Facilities Statement, which discourages members from designing spaces of incarceration. Ana María León has argued that architectural practice could be one of co-liberation. “Depoliticizing the discipline leads to upholding discriminatory laws, serving predatory capital, and openly discriminating against the disenfranchised—in sum, it leads to collaboration with increasingly totalitarian states,” she wrote in a text for Dimensions of Citizenship. Co-liberation is the ultimate goal, but even an initial injection of some real-world awareness would go a long way: “As long as architects design for an ‘other,’ they remain enmeshed in a discourse of alterity that prevents them from participating as active members of the community,” León wrote.
Architects rely on the capital and labor of others to make buildings. This enters architectural work into a web of relations where architects team with many partners to get things done. Extra-architectural issues arise every day. And rather than ignore these items, it increasingly makes sense to fold the bigger picture into what we call architectural discourse. In Texas, where I live, nearly half of the construction workforce is undocumented, and just over half earn poverty-level wages. What types of support are needed to keep these people safe? How might the trades invite a new generation of young people to become craft professionals out of pride and not desperation? And how does this relate to the quality of architecture that a city’s building culture is able to produce?
I’ve been thinking about these concerns lately, as the Rice Design Alliance, where I work, has been working on Who Builds Our City?, a video program that celebrates the workers who have built, are building, and will build Houston. Please tune in if you’re interested—the event is Thursday, January 28, at 7pm EST/6pm CST. It’s free and open to the public.
Questions like the ones above allow us to construct solidarity among workers. If I can connect my (hypothetical) exploitation as an architectural worker to that of a concrete subcontractor to that of an Uber driver, then maybe there’s common ground on which these diverse experiences can articulate a stronger case against our current system that doesn’t prioritize most people. As a sobering Dank Lloyd Wright meme pointed out last month, if the minimum wage had kept up with productivity since 1968, it would now be well over $20/hr—instead it remains $7.25/hr.
This is not to take away from the many valid existing internal threads within architecture, but to encourage a turn towards the broader material conditions of our time—and to see how these two concerns intersect. Rather than an architecture devoid of politics—or with a performative political icing—politics is baked into the cake from the start. Imagine an architecture that doesn’t conceptually consume the entire world, but one that holds some space to let architects exist as citizens with related interests and enough time to pursue those interests. Rather than an architecture that performs its “discipline” with inscrutable logics that increasingly few have the tolerance to decode, perhaps an architecture that recedes into the background—becomes more ambient—is better? This might enable there to be less to architecture, but more of it, in an effort for it to do more for more people.
As current events make clear, we’re all breathing the same air on Spaceship Earth. MLK again directs us from Oberlin in 1965, when he said that “we must all learn to live together as brothers—or we will all perish together as fools. This is the great issue facing us today.” He continues with encouragement, saying that we “still have a long, long way to go, but at least we’ve made a creative beginning.” It sounds like something a studio professor would say to wrap up a final review. But it rings true in today’s America—“bruised but whole,” as poet Amanda Gorman proclaimed last Wednesday—where there is so much to be done and all of us here to do it.
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Dispatches
1/14 - At Pratt, the writer and theorist SANFORD KWINTER postponed the first class of “Design, Knowledge, Context” for a week to make way for a vaccination appointment. Serious engagement with theory will be just as urgent in a week. - Matthew Allen
1/19 - “What happens when tech goes down to the countryside?” began XIAOWEI WANG as he transported attendees to rural China in their talk Blockchain Chicken Farms and Taobao Villages for GSAPP’s Lectures in Urban Planning Series. WANG showed what they hoped would be “more of an ethnographic account” of new forms of governance supplying globalized e-commerce demands. On the recent popularity of the topic of the countryside WANG said “many architects still like this notion of the rural being backwards…it becomes like a zoo…it’s very dehumanizing.” - Nicholas Raap
1/19 - ADAM CARUSO and PETER ST. JOHN founded their firm in 1990 with a crusade to resist the "corrosive forces of the late capitalist market," said CARUSO at the beginning of his lecture at the University of Manitoba. He critiqued narratives of historic cities that appear in a “social and formal state of grace” but in actuality serve to “sustain and advance vested powers.” In the second part, CARUSO shared two projects that feature brick: DAMIEN HIRST’S Newport Street Gallery in London (2004-15), and the Bremer Landesbank Headquarters in Bremen (2011-16). Their brick arch entry in Bremen is "self-bearing, so it was built with timber falseworks." He said that this authenticity of construction is “one of the privileges of working in Europe." The project showcases the skills and sensibilities for which Caruso St. John is best known.
After seeing these works, I wondered about if the firm had outgrown its initial mission. There are quick hypocrisies: Building a private financial institution and a gallery with a nearly unlimited budget for the wealthiest artist in the world hardly reflects the starting aims of challenging the financial status quo. Perhaps they “sold out,” but to dismiss the work for lack of ideological soundness is too shallow. One mode of resistance lies in the methods of construction, but this is a luxe exception, as it relies on willing clients with big budgets who support conditions in which the expenditure of material and labor can defy contemporary standards of return on investment. Another line of reasoning is the work's aesthetics, which celebrate the sturdiness of brick instead of the spectacle of glass. For me, what is most convincing is the intuitive lure of bearing witness to architectural ambitions: I can’t deny that I want to see that self-bearing brick for myself, to study the drawings, and to marvel at how the tectonics play with color. A work that conjures such motivation and wonder clearly holds value. Seeing these two aspects—the intellectual and the material—in conflict makes the projects richer. To turn away from such complexities and contradictions would be a disservice to the practice of architecture today. - Tiffany Xu
1/22 - “Timing is everything”, said ED MAZRIA, the AIA’s 2021 Gold Medalist, at Columbia University’s GSAPP as he emphasized the need to “speed up” our rate of carbon reduction. “The target date 2050 doesn’t work anymore,” MAZRIA stated soberly. “We need to aim for 2030, phasing out all carbon emissions by 2040.”
Mazria argued that architects—and especially architecture schools—need to “step it up” to become agents of positive change if we are to limit global warming to no more than 1.5° C. His non-profit research and advocacy organization, Architecture 2030, has developed design tools, building codes, procurement policies, and financial incentives to support a range of necessary, industry-wide changes. On the design side, Mazria expressed confidence in the tools that architects use to manage carbon budgets, while also acknowledging that terms like “carbon budgets” are murky. “Everyone talks about them but no one really knows what they are.” He advocated for energy and material analyses to become embedded in architecture design studios, not as “adjunct” or ancillary pursuits.
Mazria made the case in his chart-intensive and acronym-laden lecture that the built environment is both cause and cure of the climate crisis. - Louise Harpman
Events!
1/25 | Monday
Nathalie DeVries, MVRDV: Multiplicity in Design as an Attitude
2:30pm | UT Austin
Lecture with Sofía von Ellrichshausen and Mauricio Pezo, "From A to B"
3:00pm | UCLA
THE PAUL S. BYARD MEMORIAL LECTURE: CECILIA PUGA AND PAULA VELASCO
6:00pm | GSAPP
Amale Andraos: Water Works
7:00pm | University Of Houston
William Gibson + Cory Doctorow: Agency
7:00pm | Strand Books | $23-42
1/26 | Tuesday
JIBADE-KHALIL HUFFMAN - LUNCHTIME ARTIST TALK
12:30am | Pratt
Lesley Lokko et al: Leaning In
1:00pm | Architecture Foundation
Andrea Love: Fusion
1:00pm | GSD
Dr. Irit Katz (Lectures in Planning Series)
1:15pm | GSAPP
Bahia Shehab & Haytham Nawar: Masters of Arabic Letters
3:00pm | Letterform Archive
Jeanne Gang: The Jeffrey Fine (C'76, MArch'78) and Andrea Katz Lecture
6:30pm | University Of Pennsylvania
JULIA WATSON: DESIGN BY RADICAL INDIGENISM
6:30pm | Cooper
Into the Crafts Abyss: Warped Bead Weaving
7:00pm | MAD
1/27 | Wednesday
CAC Live: Tiffany in Chicago
12:00am | Chicago Architecture Center | $8
American Roundtable: “Appalachia Rising,” West Virginia
12:00am | Architectural League
Re-centering the Margins: Justice and Equity in Historic Preservation
1:00pm | University Of Maryland
Re-Centering the Margins: Justice and Equity in Historic Preservation
1:00pm | University Of Maryland
Paul Ramirez Jonas, Justin Garrett Moore, Zena Howard: THE FUTURE OF MONUMENTALITY
1:00pm | High Line + Next City | $10
Association for Community Design: Emergent Grounds in Design Education
4:30pm | EGDE
Sue Mobley: Designing Dissenting Histories
5:00pm | University Of Pennsylvania
Renia Ehrenfeucht with Kristi Cheramie and Tijs Van Maasakkers: Baumer Conversations
5:30pm | OSU
Bryony Roberts et al: Mobility + Cultural Agency: Moving People by Creative Practice
6:00pm | AIANY
Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris: Equitable, sustainable transportation in cities
7:30pm | University Of Cincinnati
Architecture in the time of Anti-Space with Steven Peterson
8:00pm | ICAA
Richard Rothstein: The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
10:00pm | Sci-ARC
1/28 | Thursday
Ada Tolla, Ben Busche, Carlo Ratti, Ronnie Markussen: Prefabrication in the Public Realm
12:00am | GSAPP
Annette Gigon: Modeling of the Earth's Crust
12:30am | TU Delft
OMMX: Lecture
1:00pm | University Of Brighton
Bryan Lee Jr., Dr. Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszák, Rebecca Belmore, Mayor Marvin Rees: ALTERNATIVES TO MONUMENTALITY
1:00pm | High Line + Next City | $10
KOSMOS Architects: Docu-dramas
2:00pm | CCA
In Memory Of: Designing Contemporary Memorials with Spencer Bailey
4:00pm | OHNY | $5
PUBLIC ART FUND TALKS: STAN DOUGLAS
5:00pm | Cooper
Shelby Green: Deconstructing 'Collective Memory' in Public Spaces
6:30pm | GSAPP
Who Builds Our City?
7:00pm | Rice Design Alliance
1/29 | Friday
ADDRESSING SYSTEMIC RACISM IN REAL ESTATE
1:00pm | GSAPP
1/30 | Saturday
How to reward and punish
10:00am | CCA
The World Around Summit 2021: Architecture’s Now, Near, and Next
10:00am (-> All Day) | Guggenheim
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Made it to the end reward!
Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk (1963/1967), dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as installed outside the Rothko Chapel in Houston.
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