S K Y L I N E | 43 | Who cares?
Plus: Tamales, Pools, & Superstudios
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Let’s talk about care.
The “infrastructure bill,” part of Biden’s Build Back Better plan, still languishes in Congress. The stalemate comes, in part, because of an enduring lack of consensus about what infrastructure actually is. While folks in the academy have long argued that infrastructure can constitute anything and everything, the concept that forms of care, from broadband to paid family leave, can fall under that umbrella is new for many. Conservatives in Congress demand roads and bridges; how do educational programs and free childcare, they ask, count as infrastructure?
But let’s invert that question: how can we reframe “traditional infrastructure” as care? Would that help broaden its definition to more easily include the social safety net programs currently on the chopping block on the Hill? Could care form the foundation of our public spaces, our roads, our buildings, our bridges, our built environment? Why doesn’t it already?
Perhaps it’s because care is hard. It’s a concept that can destabilize our notions of forward momentum, of technological improvement, and progress, because it recognizes our fallibility. Asphalt will crack; glass will need cleaning; nothing gold can stay. Design and construction as care encourages designers, builders, and policymakers to practice with humility rather than hubris. To work in the cracks and creases—to work even only with an acknowledgment of their eventual presence—is a quietly revolutionary way to ground and give meaning to practice. The scale of care-full practice might not be as big as the Hoover Dam, and that’s largely the point.
Calls for care are increasing in number and volume. Justin Garrett Moore is advocating for a Department of Care in New York City; Rose Fellows recently reflected on their projects through the lens of care; today’s symposium at Pratt looks at repair on sites of extraction. I encourage you to read Shannon Mattern’s beautifully wrought piece from 2018, Maintenance and Care, where she celebrates the transformative potential of care. Mattern’s piece is a call to action for designers; an action as small as reminding your boss to include a line item for maintenance in their cost estimate can make a difference. An action as large as restructuring an entire civic data catalogue, or including free childcare in one’s definition of infrastructure, is equally significant.
Care is everywhere—conspicuously and subtly—in this week’s Dispatches and next week’s events. Xio Alvarez summarizes the first installment of UWaterloo’s Praxes of Care event; Sofia Gulaid draws a connection to how the labor of care shows up in domestic and public spaces through food vending; Gideon Fink Shapiro notes that the Green New Deal Superstudio Showcase ended with a call for maintenance budgets. Next week, social infrastructure is on the docket at the CCA, City College continues its “Architectures of Care” lecture series, and Van Alen hosts a panel on urban design for mental health. Is it fantastical to think that care could drive a broadening of infrastructure’s definition?
— Tess McCann
DISPATCHES
10/21 – Designing Relations with Land
UWaterloo kicked off their multi-year Praxes of Care series with “Designing Relations with Land” last Thursday, hosting architects BRIAN PORTER and TIFFANY SHAW-COLLINGE with MKO’MOSÉ (DR ANDREW JUDGE) moderating. Settler-colonial tendencies feel deeply entrenched in the architectural establishment (often quite literally when it comes to land) and the idea of a deeper presence of indigenous values in projects, more than surface-treatment indigenous representation, ran through both speakers’ presentations and the conversation that followed.
Starting us off, Porter threw the audience back in time, referencing Machu Pichu and Mesa Verde as projects where the architecture responds to the ecosystems of the place – the plants and sun and wind and rain but also the communal societies that lived there. He framed his own practice in terms of looking backwards while incorporating contemporary technologies, which Mko’Mosé characterized as “projecting for the future based on knowledge of the past.” If Porter’s presentation centered the ecological histories and futures of a site, Shaw-Collinge’s work and presentation offered a complimentary chapter on encountering personal and societal pasts in the present. She presented the sites of her work as places for reflection, where materiality can facilitate a reintroduction to historical forces that are still active today.
In the conversation that followed, the presenters and moderator reflected on how cutting the coattails of the European past results in a stronger environmental and multidisciplinary practice of architecture. Giving careful attention to more-than-human rights to occupancy on the land and listening to the stories of the communities present is a rare example of both a responsibility and a privilege. —Xio Alvarez
10/21: New York Reviews Architecture
Friends of NYRA gathered in at a83 in Soho to hear presentations by PAULA VILAPLANA DE MIGUEL (on psychics & New York) & ZACH MORTICE (on Candyman & public housing) and distribute the new issue. See the interactive issue preview on our website, and consider a subscription if you would like to receive one by post.
10/22: Liz Gálvez and Estefanía Barajas on the kitchen, the garden, the cook and the city
At a lunchtime lecture over tamales, the 2021 winners of the Houston Design Research grant, Rice Architecture Visiting Critic LIZ GÁLVEZ and graduate student ESTAFANÍA BARAJAS presented their ongoing work grounding food equity in urban space.
In The Transgressive Kitchen, Liz Gálvez examines the kitchen as not only a space of domesticity but a productive space that feeds into larger urban systems. In her previous project, An (Im)material Cookbook, she methodically cooked up bricks in the kitchen—literally putting domestic labor into buildings and challenging the gender norms therein. Gálvez’s 2021 work continues challenging this opposition between the domestic and the public realm. She explained how her protagonist(s), las senoras de los tamales, cook in private single-family kitchens but use urban public spaces for their operations. She exalts the food vendors as they both shape and react to changes in urban form, akin to the way AbdouMaliq Simone encourages us to understand people as infrastructure in African cities.
Following the flows of cooking knowledge from Mexico to immigrant kitchens in the US, and tracing tamale production by home-cooks from garden to kitchen to city, Gálvez’s work reminds me of Esther Polak’s project Nomadic Milk; both map the unseen labor that supports the city. Gálvez emphasized how Houston’s suburban fabric and traditional kitchen design are at odds with the communal and connected nature of cooking and vending. Responding to a question about the design of the kitchen itself, she encouraged the audience to pivot from “efficiency” to “care” to support the preservation and production of food, culture and livelihoods.
Estefanía Barajas’ work Tables in Deserts and Swamps examines how food education can address the root of food insecurity in Houston, a city with an uneven distribution of green space and the highest number of fast food restaurants. Carefully mapping out the day of someone working two jobs versus the opening hours of each grocery store, Barajas asked “what’s for dinner?” questioning the accessibility and affordability of wholesome food. Instead of the traditional “food desert,” she spoke using Dara Cooper’s term “food apartheid,” acknowledging the systemic and spatial nature of these disparities and centering the environmental impact of mass food production.
After spending the summer visiting and interacting with a number of agriculture and education initiatives in Houston, Barajas said she learned the ways people used the simplest of building blocks: “shade + tables + storage” to cultivate food, community, and education. Barajas, who earlier this year won the New Orleans Edible Planter Box Design Competition, is designing a multi-scalar structure for Houston schools to serve as a vertical farm, outdoor classroom, and distribution center. Her work aims to build at the intersection of architecture and agriculture and challenges both fields to integrate environmental systems and to set the scene for a new culture of care. —Sofia Gulaid
10/23: Aqua-Infrastructure
The symposium used the urban pool as an entryway to explore the entanglements and politics of earth and human-made infrastructure. By looking at the history and current practices of privatizing and excavating land and piping and holding water in New York City, speakers exposed the contradictions inherent in the bliss of a pool. As sites where we take our shoes off, reach for the much-needed sun and escape gravity, their infrastructural effects (positive, neutral, and negative) are unevenly felt and experienced. While the symposium spoke to “pools”, speakers were pointing to contradictions that certainly apply to other infrastructures - both aqua and non.
MARTA GUTMAN (Professor of Architectural and Urban History at the Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York) and KAROLINA CZECZEK (Only If— Architecture) both spoke to the social, political and economic history that prompted the construction of pools in New York City including social reform, hygiene, increased leisure time and eventually an embodied desire to cool off and for safety programs through swimming education. They explored the architectural manifestation of different campaigns, like the WPA era pools as public good and the Lindsay era pools at scale. MARK FOCHT (Deputy Commissioner at NYC Parks and Rec) followed up and reminded us how design details like locker rooms in these pools were a result of those political campaigns, and they have real impacts on whether pool users have pleasant or unpleasant experiences. While he used lockers as an example, he was telling us about how ideas behind infrastructure come to matter intimately with people.
NICOLAS KEMPER and A.L. HU presented their research on the construction of private pools, which was a refreshing reality check. Contested public pools hold the preoccupation of many (including me) while private pools are quietly, hidden behind walls, filling our land and skies. As a swimmer, who has had a number of feet hit my face as I accommodate other swimmers' paces at my crowded local YMCA pool, I see the appeal in the developer rendered pools in the sky, void of people. And yet, their research shows that even these private infrastructures come with their management and cost burdens on pool owners and managers. To close the session, we were left with a hopeful flashback to the Kickstarter era of the Plus Pool, with a presentation by OANA STANESCU. She graciously walked us through her experience using public will and design to shift the conversation on how pools become - from how water is sourced and where they are. By exploring the process of pool design, Stanescu showed us that commitment by a collection of people can transform aqua-infrastructure.
Much of the conversation centered around public vs. private and eventually came to how we value water. Commissioner Focht said, “all water is public, but the vessel is private.” He offers a helpful framing, water itself doesn’t have boundaries - it transcends human-made barriers all the time. But by attempting to control it through pipes and infrastructure, there is an attempt to privatize it. Building off his understanding, I would encourage us to think of water not just as public but as life. If we begin to understand water, not just as a human right, but also as an agent to itself that gives us the basis of life, we might begin to understand pools and their infrastructure differently. —Michelle Mueller Gámez
10/28: Green New Deal Superstudio Showcase
The Landscape Architecture Foundation hosted a virtual event to critically reflect on the Green New Deal Superstudio, which ran from August 2020 to June 2021 and attracted participants from 93 universities and several professional firms. All 670 projects are published online; 55 “curated projects” were selected by a panel of 25 reviewer-curators.Rather than group projects by typology, the curators organized them into six “action”categories that admittedly overlap: Adapt, Cultivate, Empower, Energize, Remediate, Retrofit.
KATE ORFF, kicking off the review, noted that while the submissions included an expected wealth of urban reforestation, agricultural, and coastal adaptation projects, they emphasized people and labor more explicitly than typical landscape projects. The human element, everyone seemed to agree, was crucial to the Green New Deal’s core values of “jobs, justice and decarbonization” and to making landscape architecture relevant to communities. As KRISTINA HILL noted, landscape architects and planners have to focus on people and their communities—including access to housing and employment—“otherwise we are promoting displacement and gentrification.” She added that landscape architecture, via the national parks program, had historically played a role in displacing Indigenous peoples.
KOFI BOONE spoke of building community support to overcome political resistance to the Green New Deal, while ROBERTO RIVERA said landscape architects and other designers could excel as public “storytellers” and “interpreters of complexity” by bridging data visualization with “humanity beyond statistics.” MICHAEL JOHNSON lauded the 22 projects submitted by professionals, but said he hoped to see more firms throw their weight behind the Green New Deal, and that practitioners should aim to intervene at “the intersection of policy and design.”
Asked how municipal parks departments fit into all the grand plans, Orff said that New York City parks, for example, lack the budget to hire trained gardeners. The Green New Deal, she said, should include funding not just for new projects, but also “support for skilled maintenance.” —Gideon Fink Shapiro
OPINION
Dan Roche on Boston’s Seaport District
I remember visiting a zoning board of appeal meeting in 2015 with my neighbors at City Hall when a principal architect from OMA and his lawyer fumbled through a presentation about how their (private) alternative use for the site would fulfill its public demand. After an impassioned presentation by the architect about the building’s Deleuzian folds, a ZBA member scratched his head and replied: “So what you’re saying is that you’re gonna turn the pahk (park) into a jewelry store.” The lawyer whispered something into the architect’s ear, who then replied, “no comment.”
That moment in the dimly lit room in Boston City Hall watching a principal from OMA present 88 Seaport, I recalled reading Rem Koolhaas’ Generic City just a few months earlier as an undergraduate in architecture school. Rem wrote the manifesto for neoliberal capital’s domination of the city and his progeny was performing it right before my eyes.
EYES ON SKYLINE
(Most clicked links from Skyline 42)
Last week, readers were intrigued by the Praxes of Care event series (which Xio Alvarez and Laura Kim both covered in Dispatches) and SOM’s UAE mission.
IN THE NEWS
…Thomas Heatherwick’s escapade in unhinged fenestration caught the eye of critic Eva Hagberg
…The world’s largest 3D-printed neighborhood will be built in Austin and comes courtesy of ICON, Lennar, and BIG
… Democratized architectural education is looking like a real possibility, with the reopening of a formerly shuttered HBCU as a free design school and Dezeen’s Courses page featuring over 100 undergrad and graduate-level classes
…The Munch Museum opened in Oslo, marking another high-profile addition to the capital city’s starchitect-studded urbanscape
… A disposable paper razor and square bubble wrap sheets won this years Good Design Awards
Playgrounds!
Join NYRA and Urban Omnibus next Wednesday at Head Hi or on Zoom to discuss the legacy of adventure playgrounds: nyra.nyc/rsvp
DATELINE
The week ahead…
Monday, 11/1
Story As Future Survival with Lucy McRae
1:30 PM | University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture
SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE FROM THE GROUND UP with Dorothy Lazard, Leslie Bowling Dyer, Walter Hood
2:00 PM | California College of the Arts
Lecture with Heather Roberge
6:30 PM | Yale School of Architecture
Wednesday, 11/3
Present Past, Future Perfect with Ivi Diamantopoulou, Jaffer Kolb
12:00 PM | Rice University
The Memory and Spirit of Architecture with Dan Qun
5:00 PM | Cornell Architecture Art Planning
Baumer Series: Maki Kawaguchi
5:30 PM | Ohio State University Knowlton School of Architecture
Kenneth Frampton Endowed Lecture: PRODUCTORA with Wonne Ickx, Hilary Sample
6:00 PM | GSAPP
Digital Feudalism and Surveillance Capitalism Virtual and Political Urban Borders with Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, Dong-Sei Kim
6:00 PM | New York Institute of Technology
Book Talk: The Future of Modular Architecture with David Wallance
6:00 PM | AIA New York
Carl M. Sapers Ethics in Practice Lecture: Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life with Eric Klinenberg
6:30 PM | Harvard GSD
Queer Morphologies & Digital Spirits with Andrew Thomas Huang
9:00 PM | SCI-Arc
Thursday, 11/4
Architectures of Care Lecture Series: Archives for Forgetfulness with Huda Tayob
6:00 PM | City College of New York Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture
First Friday: Ants of the Prairie with Joyce Hwang
6:00 PM | The Architectural League of New York
What’s Next for Basement Apartments After Hurricane Ida? with NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development Basement Apartment Conversion Pilot Program
6:00 PM | AIANY, Civic Leadership Program, nycoba|NOMA
Defiant Optimism with Tod Williams & Billie Tsien
6:00 PM | MIT
Restorative Cities: Designing Cities to Support Mental Health and Wellbeing with Jenny Roe, Layla McCay
6:30 PM | Van Alen Institute
Lecture with Todd Saunders
6:30 PM | Yale School of Architecture
SPECULATING FUTURES THROUGH OMNI-SPECIALIZED DESIGN with Ari Melenciano
8:00 PM | CCA Architecture Division
CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST with Germane Barnes
8:30 PM | UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design
Friday, 11/5
Rethinking Concrete Construction with Philippe Block
12:00 PM | Rice University
Meadows Fellowship Symposium: Plant Potential with Sanford Kwinter, Mae-ling Lokko, Ron Finley, Oliver Kellhammer, Eduardo “Roth” Neira
2:00 PM | University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture
Beyond ‘Slave Food’: Re-Organizing the Perceptions and Potential of African American Foodways with Michael W. Twitty
6:00 PM | Harvard GSD
Four desk editors run NYRA: Alex Klimoski, Phillip Denny, Carolyn Bailey & Nicolas Kemper (who also serves as the publisher). They rotate duties each month.
To pitch us an article or ask us a question, write to us at: editor@nyra.nyc.
For their support, we would like to thank the Graham Foundation and our issue sponsors, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, Thomas Phifer, and Stickbulb.
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