We Keep Us Safe
This Week in New York Architecture
Dear readers,
There’s no way to begin but with abundant and expansive compassion, love, and solidarity with you all, as we individually and collectively participate in another election in which our communities with the least political power by design have the most at stake. Wishing you and yours dignity, rest, wellness, and safety.
I’m Bz (pronounced “bees,” short for Brenda Zhang), an architectural designer and artist writing to you from Tongva land (so-called Los Angeles). Since June, I have been coordinating the Anti-Racism Design Resources, first compiled by SPACE INDUSTRIES, for the Design As Protest Collective. As a queer femme Chinese-diasporic second-generation US citizen, I want to recognize together that the violences of this moment are at once climactic and intense as well as slow and old as time. As an organizer deeply indebted to radical Black, Indigenous, brown, Trans and queer, Disabled, woman, and working class resistance in this settler colonial state, I’m guiding our focus this week toward ongoing movement work in our disciplines to carry us through this moment.
There are plenty of events to attend (or avoid—in necessary acts of self and community care), but even more, there are so many brilliant strands of collective anti-racist practice, which is certainly reason to have hope together.
Throughout this summer and fall, Black Females in Architecture, Migrant's Bureau, Design As Protest, and Failed Architecture have been collaboratively tracking statements made by Architecture & Design Organisations on BLM. What actions are architecture and design organizations willing to take? What commitments are we making? How do we hold ourselves and our practices accountable? Design As Protest organizers are creating an Anti-Racist Design Justice Index to hold us accountable to our anti-racist commitments, providing a visual way to track accountability and resources for guiding concrete actions—keep watching that space!
In the academy, we’re staging public conversations about the need for change, but after a wave of student and faculty demands across the country this summer, what do we have to show for it? What changes do we make to our curricula, and who is responsible for making them? (All of us!) Last week, Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski of WAI Think Tank released A Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education, which is “[s]imultaneously a working tool, a historically situated manifesto, a pedagogical guideline, and a speculative treatise on the future of pedagogy, [which] exclaims that because other worlds are possible, urgent, and necessary, other models of architectural education are not only possible but imperative.” As a lecturer teaching studio, it is required reading, and as a former architecture student educated in the United States, it is in many ways personal catharsis as well.
Spread from WAI’s A Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education
Relatedly, founding members of Dark Matter University, a democratic network of architects, designers, and scholars, will tonight be sharing with us at California College of the Arts how they work inside and outside of systems of architecture education to create new forms of knowledge and knowledge production, institutions, collectivity and practice, community and culture, and ultimately, design.
Meanwhile, The Settler Colonial Present, a collaboration between the Settler Colonial City Project and e-flux Architecture, addresses the absence of discourse on settler colonialism in the architectural discipline by exploring “architecture’s constitutive relationship to settler colonialism in the Americas, [with] contributions reflect[ing] on spatial violence in Anishinaabe, Karajá, Kumeyaay, Ramapough, Mapuche, Aymara, and Ohlone territories, as well as the ways in which the peoples of these lands have resisted and contested this violence.” As Andrew Herscher and Ana María León write, "Settler colonialism is therefore not simply one topic to add to the architectural curriculum—in settler colonial societies, settler colonialism arguably defines every part of the architectural curriculum, and even what counts as a curriculum itself.”
As our struggles for human rights to self-determination and wellbeing span oceans and centuries, so too does the complicity of the built environment as a tool of settler colonial and imperial states. Chicago-based architect and professor David Brown was just appointed the artistic director of the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial. His concept and title, The Available City, “asks us to consider the impact collective space can have in cities today.” Mathias Agbo, Jr. writes from Abuja, Nigeria about the intentional denial of local communities to public space in relation to the #EndSARS movement, in "Public Protests and the Urban Legacies of Colonialism and Military Dictatorship in Nigeria."
And in “Outrage: scars of sand mining,” part of the “Land” issue (October 2020) of The Architectural Review, Khai Don exposes the intersections of class, climate, and capital through global neoliberal architectural construction’s voracious appetite for sand, which has led to South East Asian communities’ land and shelter falling into the sea.
In "Power Structures: White Columns, White Marble, White Supremacy," Lyra D. Monteiro connects contemporary white supremacist rhetoric to an intentional white supremacist past: "The buildings and statues they claim as white heritage today were in fact erected to represent just that — to set in stone the white male heritage of power." And if you missed it earlier last month, Adam Nathaniel Furman writes from London about these racist, sexist, and homophobic hypocrisies within our profession in "Presenting as Progressive, Practicing through Exclusion."
Back home, Brooklyn-based artist Simone Leigh will be the US Representative at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale Di Venezia 2022 (and the first Black woman to represent the United States). Her 16-foot-tall bronze sculpture, Brick House, remains on view on the Highline at the Spur, at 30th St. and 10th Ave. until Spring 2021. In "Sustainability as Plantation Logic, Or, Who Plots an Architecture of Freedom?," K. Wayne Yang explores Simone Leigh’s work as speaking to “what is being built, and by whom, inside and underneath the architecture of the settler colonial present.”
Bronx-based artist Abigail DeVille’s “Light of Freedom” is also on view, at Madison Square Park, from October 27, 2020 – January 31, 2020. The outdoor sculpture was commissioned to address the question of how public art can respond in civic space to this critical time. DeVille says of her work, “I want to make something that could honor their lives and question what it means to be a New Yorker, past, present, and future.”
And still a cause for celebration, a record-breaking 1,700+ people attended the 48th NOMA Conference, "Spatial Shifts: Reclaiming Our Cities," which happened earlier this month and showcased movement-building across disciplines, industries, institutions, and communities. Most notably, 2020 saw the milestone of 500 licensed Black woman architects in the United States (out of a total of over 115,000).
Finally, if you have the means to give, please support Walter Wallace Jr.’s family, the Philadelphia Bail Fund, Black Lives Matter Philadelphia, and justice for Walter Wallace Jr. and all people who have had their lives stolen by white supremacist police brutality. Here is a list of bail funds across the country, the Okra Project's therapy fund for Black Trans people, the Loveland Foundation’s therapy fund for Black women and girls, JSTOR's open access Institutionalized Racism syllabus, and an image scrubber for anonymizing photographs taken at protests. For those of us able to vote, here is the ballot in New York, as well as general voting information by state. For resources about self and community care in New York, here is a safety checklist for November. We keep us safe.
Events.
11/2 | MONDAY
Mestizo Robotics with Paula Gaetano Adi
12:30pm | Yale School of Architecture | Free
Michelle Joan Wilkinson: Black Pillars: Notes on Precarious Resilience
5:00pm | Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design | Free
Tactical Urbanism
6:30pm | Museum of Design Atlanta | Free
Tod Williams and Billie Tsien
6:30pm | Yale School of Architecture | Free
Liu Jiakun in conversation with Doreen Heng Liu
7:30pm | New Jersey Institute of Technology | Free
An Evening with Dark Matter University
9:00pm | California College of the Arts | Free
11/3 | TUESDAY
Meg Onli, "Colored People Time"
7:00pm | The Cooper Union | Free
The 2020 Election
All day | The United States
11/4 | WEDNESDAY
Anti-Racist Design Praxis with Justin Garrett Moore, Jelisa Blumberg, Lexi Tsien & Curry Hackett
4:00pm | Dark Matter University | Free
Eyal Weizman with Curtis Roth
5:30pm | Ohio State University | Free
Watershed Management
6:00pm | New York Institute of Technology | Free
Modernizing The Modern
6:00pm | The National Arts Club | Free
Less Separate, Still Unequal: Cities, Suburbs, and the Unfinished Struggle for Racial Justice, Thomas J. Sugrue
7:00pm | Rice University School of Architecture | Free
Hong Kong GSD Symposium 2020: After Graduation: How to Craft A Practice?
8:30pm | Harvard Graduate School of Design | Free
Gabriela Etchegaray
9:00pm | USC School of Architecture | Free
11/5 | THURSDAY
Everyday Ecologies: Maria Villalobos, Cassie Fennell, Heather McMillen, Denise Hoffman Brandt
6:00pm | Spitzer School of Architecture | Free
Lighting Injustice
6:00pm | The School Of Constructed Environments At Parsons School Of Design | Free
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi: Insurgent Domesticities
6:30pm | The Cooper Union | Free
Creative Collaboration—A Strategy For Impactful Change with Abby Hamlin
6:30pm | Yale School of Architecture | Free
Eddie Opara in conversation with Eric Chang
7:00pm | MIT Architecture | Free
First Friday – Distance Edition: Rael San Fratello
7:00pm | The Architectural League of New York | General Public: $5, Members: Free
Michael Maltzan
9:00pm | USC School of Architecture | Free
11/6 | FRIDAY
Future Cities’ Material Flows: Implications of Design, Production & Waste
12:00pm | Yale School of Architecture | Free
Queer Infrastructures: Design Strategies that Decolonize with Gordon Brent Brochu-Ingram
1:00pm | University of California, Berkeley College of Environmental Design | Free
2020 Deans’ Roundtable
6:00pm | AIA New York | Free
Why Not Us? w/ SCI-Arc Student Union
8:00pm | Materials and Applications | Free
11/7 | SATURDAY
Hour 18: Starting an Architecture Office w/ Tei Carpenter
1:00pm | Office Hours | Free; BIPOC Space
To see the complete list, go to nyra.nyc/events
If you would would like to write up an event for us - do it! See an example writeup here. Most write ups are incorporated into the column ‘SKYLINE,’ some become larger articles. All correspondents receive $30 and their name in the paper. Ask to cover an event: editor@nyra.nyc.
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