S K Y L I N E | 47 | Flipping Tables
S K Y L I N E | 47 | Flipping Tables
Chris Cornelius reflects on Thanksgiving. Plus dispatches and more.
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Today marks the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving. While Europeans had been trading with (and enslaving) Indigenous people for a century prior, English settlements had only recently caught on, beginning with Jamestown in 1607. At Plymouth, colonists arrived in 1620 and suffered through a hard winter. Over the next year, aided by the help of the Wampanoag (with whom they had recently signed a treaty), they managed to eke out a decent harvest before the snows returned.
Thanksgiving, as Chris Cornelius, founding principal of the firm Studio:Indigenous, writes for us below, is a National Day of Mourning for Indigenous people. It is one reason why the date was selected by Indigenous scholar and activist Nick Estes to mount a protest against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016. Important Native actions on Thanksgiving date took place in 1970, when members of the American Indian Movement occupied the Mayflower in protest, initiating the counter-holiday of the National Day of Mourning. Cornelius focuses on the table as an ordering device; it seems inescapable in historic images of Thanksgiving, even when an artist attempts a “historically accurate” version, as Karen Rinaldo did with The First Thanksgiving-1621. Cornelius links this to the tabletop visions of Le Corbusier, who clearly possessed colonial tendencies. (In addition to works by others, scholar Fabiola López-Duran’s Eugenics in the Garden is a recent volume that relates modernism in Latin America to early 20th century ideas of race improvement.) This leap yet again shows how historic trajectories of racial thought continue to shape the world around us.
Dispatches this week focus on how things could be different. Kevin Ritter covers a lecture on architectures that engage non-human species, Nicholas Raap plays a board game on the street near City Hall, and Dan Roche visits an exhibition of housing futures in Boston. And, of course, other bits of news, events, and things appear below.
“Care is everywhere,” Tess McCann summarized in a recent Skyline. One hope is this new paradigm eventually ripples backwards through history. Not to shatter knowledge, but to deepen it. “Thanksgiving doesn’t need to be cancelled,” Cornelius writes. In fact, when compared with last year’s rendition of the holiday in the pre-vaccine era of the pandemic, there’s a lot to be thankful for. But in the midst of whatever festivities might go on around a table, this assessment is one to keep in mind.
—Jack Murphy
It’s the Table, Stupid
Thanksgiving is a National Day of Mourning for Indigenous people in the United States. Without recalling the historical facts, let’s examine one of the images associated with this day that perpetuates the message of Thanksgiving as a day of celebratory feast: the image of Pilgrims and Indigenous people having dinner. In some depictions the Indigenous people are off to the side, as bystanders; in others they are not present at all. One of the signs that artists documenting this moment usually get wrong is the dress of the Indigenous people. It is common that the headdresses found in the Great Plains are shown instead of the clothing of the Wampanoag people.
We have been sold the image of the feast around an outdoor table as being the archetype of this November day. In this image it is the table that is the problem, as it communicates power dynamics. The table is a tool of colonization; it is there to divide and separate. Instead of joining peoples together, it heightens the differences between Indigenous people and settlers. Can a simple piece of furniture be this powerful? When it is used as an instrument of propaganda, the answer is yes.
Consider Le Corbusier’s 1920 painting Still Life, in which he uses the surface of the table as a place of collection and spatial/visual conflation. As with his architecture, items are problematically isolated from their environments, but they’re also transformed. We are not quite sure how we are to read the objects upon the table. Are we seeing them from the top? From the side? Or both? It is important to understand some of the painting and visual literacy principles Le Corbusier is “playing” with in the painting. Perhaps our eyes can deceive us, and they are not to be trusted—much like historical recollections that have existed for 400 years. We are in a time when we have to acknowledge that we can be deceived; we can be manipulated to see a day that symbolizes the slaughter of Indigenous people as a time to give thanks and celebrate with family. It can be both. Because we must decolonize our thinking, we have to rethink the way we see the table.
The complexities of history are vast and pervasive. We have to be able to see things within their larger contexts. Thanksgiving doesn’t need to be cancelled. It just needs to be rethought through what the Mashpee Wampanoag have known for the past 400 years of their 10,000+ year existence in the landscape of what we now call New England. We can start with the images of the table and the people surrounding it. We can use our day of feasting as a time to reflect upon those that inhabited this land before European settlement invasion. What would a decolonized holiday table look like? How would it change the way that people gather around, near, on, or under it? We have the ability to recalibrate the cognitive machines we inhabit—our mind and bodies—to see the world as holding multiple histories and possibilities simultaneously.
Indigenous knowledge values things like visions, dreams, and feelings. It understands that all that we see is not all that we are surrounded by. It is through this way of thinking that we can begin to recast the myth of the Pilgrim feast as a narrative which supports the settler colonial agenda of how this land was “discovered” and inhabited. Let’s not see the table as a passive fixture, but, instead, as it exists in popular Thanksgiving depictions: a device complicit in the perpetuation of settler colonialism.
—Chris Cornelius
Cornelius is a citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and Chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of New Mexico. He is the founding principal of studio:indigenous, a design practice serving Indigenous clients.
DISPATCHES
11/19—What is This? A Center for Bats?!
In a lecture titled “Architecture for the Collective,” JOYCE HWANG, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies of Architecture at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, and Founder of Ants of the Prairie, asked us to consider the bats. Speaking in a hybrid format at the Cooper Union, Hwang encouraged architects to think beyond traditional conceptions of a building’s user, designing instead for a wide base of occupants, including non-human animals. Hwang champions design for less glamorous animals—species that are labeled “pests” or ignored outright, like rats and bats, species she charmingly refers to as “middle species.”
The works that Hwang explored included a hanging canopy for bats, and a 22-foot-tall “bee tower” designed by her students in Buffalo’s Silo City. Of course, architecture alone will not save endangered bats. Animals build their homes just fine without the aid of licensed architectural professionals. But Hwang was quick to point out that her designs are not necessarily “for” non-human species; instead, they’re designed with human users in mind. Her projects pique our curiosity and encourage us to think about the ways that we might better care for each other and the ecosystems we live in.
—Kevin Ritter
11/20—Out of the Cloud, Into the Streets!
On a brisk Saturday morning, a group gathered to do battle in the cutthroat world of New York real estate at Lawfully Evil, Architecturally Considered, the eleventh situation hosted by FAILED ARCHITECTURE (FA), an organization founded in 2011 that explores how to reconnect architecture to with the real world. (This happens mostly through their website, where KATE WAGNER recently joined as Editor-at-large.) FA’s event was also the group’s first situation—an IRL meet-up—in the United States. Occupying a patch of sidewalk opposite the Woolworth Building, FA’s event unfolded over the board game New York 1901, which has a 6.8/10 rating from boardgamegeek.com. The game was utilized as a tool for critiquing architecture through discussing its mechanisms, dynamics, and aesthetics.
Organizer CHRISTIN HU framed the event through the lawful/evil alignment—a system common in role-playing games—that denotes “someone who strictly abides by rules and hierarchy set up by society, but harms and acts without regard for others.” She asked participants to think about how real estate development processes were reflected and transformed in the game. Players brainstormed modifications like introducing a market (you cannot normally trade property in this game), considering the labor and resources needed to build a building, and imagining the contemporary equivalent with aspects like air rights. (It’s notable that the game is dated to the same year that the state’s tenement law was passed.) Lots were acquired, towers constructed and demolished for bigger ones, and soon the blocks of lower Manhattan were split between the four players’ real estate empires. More than just fun, the exercise allowed the participants to engage these “serious” questions in an atypical way: through game play.
—Nicholas Raap
11/22—The Future of Affordable Housing in Boston and Beyond
“Who are the authors of our urban spaces? How does the culture of private property shape the design and aesthetic attributes of cities? In a traditional architecture education, these questions are often an epilogue, or even an aside, to multi-year training in form, aesthetics, and canon. But what if we flipped this order?”
These are some of the questions students explored in a four-week-long intensive workshop sponsored by Digital Ready in collaboration with YouthBuildBoston last July. Directors JOHN DAVID WAGNER and NADYELI QUIROZ from Office of Collaborative Design created and led the workshop which invited Black, Latinx, and Asian American students from Boston public high schools to participate in a new type of immersive design education program. The workshop’s final project is featured in the Imaginations of Home exhibition at the Boston Society of Architects (BSA). It Takes a Village, the workshop’s final project, is featured the Imaginations of Home exhibition at the Boston Society of Architects. The show runs through December 31.
—Dan Roche
IN THE NEWS
...As seen above in Léa-Catherine Szacka’s tweet, people were rightfully angered by the closing “manel” (that is, a panel consisting entirely of men) at the 2021 Venice Biennale.
…An op-ed by Marianela D’Aprile continues to be popular, as it asks an important question: “Who cares if a building is advancing a theoretical architectural idea if that idea looks bad?”
…Renderings of Farshid Moussavi’s Ismaili Center in Houston were released last week after years of speculation.
…A conversation between Francesca Hughes and Lesley Lokko about architectural education in The Architectural Review, excerpted from their November issue, is straight fire emoji.
…In Metropolis, Mimi Zeiger calls Herzog & de Meuron’s new M+ Museum “less a flashy cultural arts hub and more a repository for a city, and a region, in the throes of history.”
CLICKERS THAT CLICKED ON SKYLINE 46
It was a close race between the Bloomberg story on the Standard Hotel’s potential foreclosure and Marianela D’Aprile’s article on prison architecture in Jacobin.
DATELINE
The week ahead…
Wednesday, 12/1
Archaeology of the Future with Tsuyoshi Tane
10:00 PM | SCI-Arc
Thursday, 12/2
Black Atlantic Speaker Series with Ibrahim Mahama
5:00 PM | Africa Futures Institute
FF—Distance Edition: W Architecture & Landscape Architecture with Barbara Wilkes, Christopher Hawthorne
6:00PM | The Architectural League of New York
Intent to Impact: Approaches to Community-Based Design with George Aye, Shalini Agrawal, Seb Choe, Peter Robinson
6:00 PM | American Institute of Architects New York, New York Coalition of Black Architects | National Organization of Minority Architects
MIT Lecture with Nida Sinnokrot
6:00 PM | MIT
rAADio: Sites of Entanglement with Matt Shaw, Benjamin Akhavan, Pabla Amigo, Angel Castillo, Joel McCullough, Andrés Jaque
6:00 PM | Columbia University GSAPP
IN THE MEME TIME…
Godspeed to everyone working hard ahead of final review season!
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
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