A Community’s Burden

Mai Okimoto
June 2022

Vacant houses sit along nearby streets. Photo by the author.

Houston Wood Preserving Works, 4910 Liberty Street. Photo by the author.

Houston Wood Preserving Works, 4910 Liberty Street. Photo by the author.

This piece was originally published in June 2022 on Cite digital magazine.

The drive down Liberty Road, jogging northeast across Houston’s Fifth Ward, is jarring and disquieting. As a collage of mismatched scenery, it stands out, even in a city like Houston that is known for its piecemeal planning. On one side sits a typical Houston residential neighborhood of single-family houses with a handful of churches and commercial venues. Yet, dated “for sale” signs accompany the vacant houses, and though seemingly quiet and peaceful, the disinvestment is evident. On the other side, a fenced-off vacant lot of overgrown vegetation stretches for nearly a half-mile long, with freight trains visible at a distance. It is an uncomfortably long and empty landscape in an urban setting less than four miles from downtown Houston.

The vacant lot, officially known as Houston Wood Preserving Works (HWPW) at 4910 Liberty Road, used to be a creosote treatment facility operated by Southern Pacific Railroad, the predecessor to the present-day Union Pacific Railroad (UPRR). Between 1911–84, railroad ties were treated with wood preservatives containing coal-tar creosote, a known carcinogen, which were used and disposed without proper waste management. Although out of operation for nearly forty years, HWPW site began to appear on the local news headlines in 2019, when a study conducted by Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) revealed a cancer cluster—a “greater-than-expected number of cancer cases that occurs within a group of people in a geographic area over a period of time”—associated with the site. A close look at HWPW and its history reveals the layers of systemic injustice that have steadily weakened a community, as well as the inconsistencies and misalignments of physical boundaries when addressing amorphous things that linger, like hazardous chemicals.

HWPW is one of the many industrial sites flanking the Houston Ship Channel that emerged and expanded during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On a map, HWPW is a large triangular parcel measuring approximately thirty-six acres in size, dividing and isolating the surrounding neighborhoods in a similar manner to UPRR’s Englewood Intermodal Yard to the south and the larger Englewood Yard to the northeast. Without the constraints of zoning ordinances, these facilities and their supporting infrastructures were built adjacent to residential neighborhoods[i]—historically Black communities like Fifth Ward—whose growth coincided with that of the industrial sites. In addition to their disruptively large footprints, these facilities’ demand for speed and efficiency spurred the construction of freeways and overpasses centered around I-10 and US59/I-69 from the 1950s, further breaking up the neighborhoods.

Areas along the Houston Ship Channel categorized as “Industrial” by the City of Houston’s land use definitions, with locations of active and inactive Hazardous Waste Management Facilities (see EPA's RCRA program). The diagram reflects data as of July 2021. Diagram by the author.

Growing side by side, the rail and shipyards, oil refineries, and their associated facilities became a source of livelihood for many living in the surrounding communities. However, they also became a source of health and environmental hazards, emitting harmful chemicals into the air and introducing toxic wastes into the ground. The areas north and south of the Houston Ship Channel are scattered with active and inactive facilities designated as Hazardous Waste Management Facilities by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)'s Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). In the Greater Fifth Ward alone, there are three federal and two state Superfund sites identified to be of “imminent and substantial endangerment to public health and safety”. The skewed concentration of the industrial facilities and their hazardous waste in historically Black, low-income neighborhoods reinforces the observation by Dr. Robert Bullard that “Black Houston was unofficially zoned for garbage” for most of the twentieth century.

For decades, neither the disruptive physical presence of these industrial sites nor their amorphous yet toxic waste were sufficiently addressed by state and local governments, let alone by the operating businesses. UPPR’s site is no exception. While residents noted the smell and voiced their health concerns for decades, the contaminants and their toxicity were only made visible when they emerged as disease symptoms in residents’ bodies—but not quite visible enough for the governing entities. Further indexing and quantification of these bodies was necessary for proper attention: in 2019 and 2020, in response to the requests by the community group IMPACT Fifth Ward, the census tracts within a two-mile radius of HWPW were finally investigated as a cancer cluster by DSHS. Of the twenty-one tracts surveyed, twelve had incidence rates that were statistically significantly greater than the state’s incidence rates for particular cancers during the period of 2000–16. The cancers identified include esophagus, lung and bronchus, liver, and larynx cancers, as well as childhood ALL (Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia).

Among the census tracts located within two-mile radius of HWPW, twelve were identified to have incidence rates statistically significantly greater than that of the state’s for certain cancers during the period of 2000-2016. Diagram by the author.

Although disputed by Union Pacific, the cancer cluster has been attributed to the long-term exposure to the polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and arsenic that have lingered in the HWPW and the surrounding residential neighborhoods. The coal-tar creosote used as wood preservative, as well as the crude oil[ii] that used to be stored at present-day Englewood Intermodal Yard, are almost entirely composed of PAHs and categorized as "carcinogenic to humans" by governmental agencies. Coal-tar creosote and crude oil were used, stored, and disposed without proper treatment, harming the workers, contaminating the surrounding soil, and leaching into the groundwater beneath the site over time. Once in the groundwater, the degradation of some of the PAHs produced arsenic[iii], another carcinogenic element.

Even after the facilities ended their operations, chemicals remained in the groundwater for decades, occupying subsurface zones as deep as sixty-five feet underground. Unconstrained by the physical and legal barriers that exist above ground, the chemical plumes spread in all directions, moving with the flows of the groundwater. As shown in the historic map of the site, the areas occupied by creosote and arsenic plumes as of 2020 represent a footprint far greater than that of the processing and waste facilities back when they were in operation. They have spread beyond UPRR’s sites and are now below privately-owned residential properties, continuing their northwesterly migration. While the contaminated groundwater is not a municipal water supply, there are concerns about chemicals resurfacing above ground as vapor or re-entering the ambient air as dust, eventually reaching residents’ bodies. The contaminants have mostly remained underground and unseen since the facility’s closure, but they persist in the people who battle—and have watched others in their community battle—cancer and related health conditions. 

Historic map of the site with locations of creosote and arsenic plumes as of 2020. Diagram by the author based on the sources included in UPPR’s RCRA Renewal Application Compliance Plan.

For decades, the contaminants have retained its presence in the groundwater, mostly dissolved in water as plume, but also more stubbornly as DNAPL (dense non-aqueous phase liquid), a form that is more dense than water and takes the form of black tar. The chemicals occupy the various subsurface zones. Diagram by the author based on the sources included in UPPR’s RCRA Renewal Application Compliance Plan.

EPA’s RCRA program requires UPRR to clean up the hazardous waste generated at the HWPW site and Englewood Intermodal Yard. Despite the chemical migration beyond UPRR’s properties, their monitoring and remediation efforts such as soil removal, concrete-capping of the ground, and installations of extraction wells for years remained within their property lines. It was only in the August 2020 renewal permit for RCRA Remedial Action Plan that UPRR included plans to install extraction wells in the neighborhoods north of the site[iv].

UPRR’s priority seems to be legal compliance instead of the residents’ and environment’s well-being. They explicitly state in their Remediation Action Plan that “it has long been recognized that there are significant challenges in achieving a response objective of groundwater restoration[..., and that] it is unlikely that any of the technologies currently available will be successful.”[v] Their attitude of perceiving the contaminants as a discrete, atemporal issue has enabled them to qualify their responsibilities as “clean-up efforts,” allowing them avoid taking accountability for the damages that have accumulated over time. Moreover, the City of Houston’s announcement to put together a buy-out plan to relocate the affected residents (a move that seems to resolve the problem by moving more vocal residents instead of addressing the problems) indirectly supports UPRR’s refusal to take accountability for the environmental and health damages caused by their hazardous waste.

The railroad company’s focus on legal compliance is also reflected in how the remediation actions implemented to satisfy the RCRA guidelines have introduced a new set of environmental risks to the neighborhood. Capping large areas of the Intermodal Yard with concrete has transformed the area of highest elevation in the neighborhood into an impermeable surface and has increased the risk of flooding in a neighborhood that sits within the (now-obsolete) 500-year floodplain and incurred significant damages during Hurricane Harvey. On top of increased flooding risks, the tar-like contaminants beneath the capped surfaces have been observed to resurface through the concrete and asphalt cracks[vi]. Given the evident mobility of the substance in question, they have likely been mixed into runoff and spread to areas beyond the HWPW site.

While it may be difficult to directly link the cancer cluster and health issues with the contaminants that originated from this particular site, the misalignment between UPRR’s legal property lines and the present location of the plumes may offer other ways to hold UPRR to take greater accountability. With the plumes having migrated beyond their property lines, it could be argued that UPRR has encroached upon the neighborhood’s residential properties for years. In addition to cleaning up the contamination, UPRR should compensate the property owners for the plume’s occupation of their properties. In daily interactions, we pay to occupy a space owned by others for a set duration, whether that is for parking, renting an apartment, or sitting at a coffee shop. Leaving unwanted goods on the properties of others is considered littering, and the legal system punishes individuals for trespassing or loitering. Why should chemical plumes be any different?

A more specific comparison of the plume may be its similarity to oil and natural gas. While oil and natural gas are identified as resources, they are similar to the plume in that they are fluid elements that exist beneath the ground. Oil and natural gas companies access the resources under private properties through legal agreements based on the framework of mineral rights. Whether by purchasing or leasing the mineral rights, they compensate landowners for accessing and extracting the minerals from their land. Considering that recovered creosote can be sold for reuse, as it has been done in the American Creosote Works, Inc. Superfund site in Winnifield, Louisiana since 2014, and that UPRR is extracting the creosote plume, it seems reasonable to hold them accountable through compensating property owners for extracting the plume that has occupied their land, as it is a commodity with value. Compensating for the waste’s occupied duration, rather than a single payment like the City’s buyout offering, empowers the residents to hold onto their homes, relocate to elsewhere if desired, and return one day.

IMPACT Fifth Ward and their allies have been critical of the proposed action plan outlined in the UPPR’s 2020 renewal permit. They continue to vocalize their concerns, holding meetings with field experts and asking both the City of Houston and state entities for more tests and monitoring. They have tirelessly continued to share their stories through the news media. Examples are included at a link at the end of this text.

Efforts led by IMPACT Fifth Ward have resulted most recently in an increased involvement by EPA, including EPA’s direct review and comments on UPRR’s Remedial Action Plan, installations of additional air monitoring system in the neighborhood, and commitment towards developing local strategies for managing the pollutions. While EPA’s involvement offers hope for long-term strategies that can help build neighborhood resilience, it is not clear if UPRR would be held accountable beyond the site remediation as to address the damages incurred, including the cancer cluster.

The history of the HWPW site and its neighboring communities reveal layers of burdens and extractions that sum over decades of exploitation and mistreatment. The physical, emotional, and financial burdens of battling cancer and fighting for justice are some of the challenges faced by the community, including flooding, employment, disinvestment, and accessibility. By understanding the plume as something that neither appeared nor will disappear immediately, greater accountability could be placed on UPRR. Moreover, this would make it possible to explore remediation efforts that imagine the neighborhood’s future far beyond plume extraction. To stay up-to-date on the issue, visit the City of Houston Health Department’s dedicated page.

Additional resources about this effort have been collected here.

[i] “Houston Land Use.” City of Houston. June 2021. Accessed August 18, 2021. https://www.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=64102e698ad043dda73ae3af49d14687

[ii] Golder Associates, Inc. “RCRA Part B Renewal Application Compliance Plan Attachment XI.D; Response Action Plan - Revision No. 5; Union Pacific Railroad; Houston Wood Preserving Works; Houston, Texas; SWR No. 31547 / IHW No. 50343.” Houston Wood Preserving Works. Union Pacific Railroad Company. August 31, 2020. https://cteh.sharefile.com/share/view/s4fbafb082afb4933ada8d131da9978f2. 4832.

[iii] Golder Associates, Inc., “RCRA,” 6.

[iv] Golder Associates, Inc., “RCRA,” 111-115.

[v] Golder Associates, Inc., “RCRA,” 10.

[vi] Golder Associates, Inc., “RCRA,” 5402-5403.

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Mai Okimoto edits for the Architecture Writing Workshop. She works as an architectural designer in Houston, Texas.

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>>Talking Places

To Learn the Word for Cherries

Jimmy Bullis
September 2024

The following was initially written from the grounds of the castles at Duino. There are two castles alongside each other in Duino—the ruins of an eleventh century Roman outpost and the well preserved fourteenth century castle where Rainer Maria Rilke was living under the patronage of the Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis when he began writing the Duino Elegies, one of the great works of 20th century literature. And so this half-essay, half-prose poem stems from the conflict of “the indescribable ‘being there’ of the poem,” as Rilke once wrote, with physically being in a place, connected by architecture and landscape, and separated only by time. To describe a place such as this directly would fall short. Nearer, maybe, is invocation, the poetic task of naming, and the invitation that words extend to conjure more than they denote. Architecture too can be an invitation. In the world building of the self there is a synchronicity possible through the creation of cultural touchstones.¹ And when those are superimposed upon the physical world or are themselves physical, our worlds can begin to merge.

1. This line of thinking stems from the work of Federico Campagna

Terrace View. Photo by the author.

To Learn The Word for Cherries

in all the world’s languages, one need only go to the terrace of the San Giusto in May and sit upon the western wall looking down towards the Adriatic, and while the beekeeper tends the apiary in the garden below, listen for the word’s ripe weight.

You know this story. And so you know what happens next. Tomorrow’s empty bus passes Miramare, glowing against the nautical twilight up the coast. The high strung lights of the ridge line, the stony beaches below passing out of time—broken rubble laden with figs, figs falling every other second, armfuls picked from the cracks by the waves, figs the size of nectarines, water clear enough beyond the sea wall to see the mass of them gathering and beating silently to life.

You follow them up the coast, pass through the gates to the double cove of the two castles that pries at this world from all others. The tower only half remaining in your own even as its stones collapse, soften and congeal, grow tentacled, swallow figs, gain the cloudy translucence of wax paper in water, assemble into a great clouded tapestry submerged from here to the edge of the world beneath this fortress that now stands only against time. On the return journey there is no gate.

In the turret, a square opening to the west where the water casts up a warm dancing light upon the lintel through the pine needles. To the east a circle framed by four equal, curved stones. A red ringed fresco, a harrowed face looking across the narrow cave to where once a companion sat and since has worn away. And the north open to the fishing village in the cliffs’ next nook, the billowing water lapping gently against the shore.

Farther, the ship building gantries beyond light a hazy warning. A ship the size of a city grows out of the trees. The nightmare of knowing gives unknowing its sails. You take after the birds. Take no note of the etchings of grief between land and water, watch in awe as the arrow survives the string and dawn cedes, once more, the day. 

***

Shallow water, rising tide, a bird borrows in you a lost page tucked in a scroll of leaves and lends this terrace of boughs. Two outcrops: elegy and reverie, the double meaning of your name, the tenor held briefly in the sea’s lungs, asking not what it means but what you will make of it. 

The wind from all directions likewise calls to you, when in the old tower swarmed with bees landing here even upon this page, hung gently in the air, gentle as the gull, for one moment and all eternity, only a name. 

Strange that in loss you first glimpse eternity. You cannot live without the dead, nor likewise the muted twilight in the mountains far afield. Nor a name in the absence of a stone fruit. Nor a voice where a grave won’t do. And so you stand where he stood, touch the stone still cool despite the sun, gaze into the empty distance beyond the sailboats and barges, shadows of fishing nets, and the failing arm of the coast, and you unlearn what you thought you knew about creation. 

You know this story. That which grows old grows new again: the fern from the stone steps, these countless wings burrowed in the nape of the cliff and the ancient castle, a millennium of death reborn in fields of jellyfish gleaming up and down the coastline, carved from the rock faces, and upon hitting the water sprouting limbs, growing milky and melding in a procession of clouds beneath the fisherman’s buoys, where from here is written every name. Where from here marks the coming of the blessèd isles. The sea of blood too has its god. But no distance and no time and no fracture ends this world. Only briefly words, and the strange hymn the waves make laden with cnidarians and cephalopods and the decaying implements of a past that yet here persists.

***

The nightingale approaches. You know better than to mistake what you cannot see as endlessness. The failing light veiled in clouds hides where ends turn over. A fig tree against the terracotta, a cherry tree against the sea, and the path between the outpost and the palace lined with flowers lit from a second sun. 

It rises downwind of the pine forests, notched between rock and water. Thistle and lichen, petal and anther. Aster hewn boulders, the whole face cloven by clover. A cursed rhyme to be of one mold irreparable and by another joined. What shades of this fresco are lost between us? What heap of broken images? Strange footholds, a nest in the mist—what must one be made of to be refined by fire? By time? None know, and still the nightingale approaches. 

It arrives. No measure has yet been taken that can mark the breadth of words. So what of endlessness. The pine bark scarred from last season’s rut, the riven stone settled, never to be reconstituted. These fragments on a shore of ruins remain fragments in this world. 

You’ll not be pulled together. You’ll not be reforged nor remade. You must become passerine, caducous, crepuscular... other entirely. Wade beyond the lunar shelf and float back to what you found here, in what was halved and half lost, the bony chapel cleaved in two, one half opening to the ocean where in these days languid swimmers reach for the outcrop with their voices skipping across the water and eventually decaying with you. The other half reaches from another world. And so you must have done, your words among the waves spilling beneath grasses and arid flowers, unwavering while the arched window to the south draws a pulsing wind in the radiant afterstorm of your arrival. 

***

It would take ten lifetimes to tire of tonight. The lights of the port rest against the final veil of haze to the north, the cargo ships ghosting the horizon, the crowds gathering in the wake of some other joy that does not belong to you. Who among them can know in that moment what they witness? It is no longer twilight when you reach the pier, but it has the feeling of endlessness. 

If ruin is a trope, we must go further to where worlds overlap. We scour the hills in search of something external upon which to place our most severe and unstructured longings. A tree or a tower, a thrush or a sound. And which for being placed on objects other than our own lives, may accompany rather than burden us who choose not to leave them entirely behind. At which point, you’ve achieved creation. At which point you’ve populated the dim path, which is no path until, gathering yourself upon it, you propel us somewhere—crumbled tower, the veiled lady of the castle, cnidarian, anthesis of ruin, and word after word after word in tow. 

This is the work of our artists and critics, and likewise our own work whether or not we intend it. We dredge our lives for ways of understanding what we see, but what we see dredges us in return. Streets and shop windows, one spinning the other through warm lights towards the water, the canal down to the pier, caravels ghosting up the coast. The mild distance flattened by time from the port of Monfalcone through Trieste and down the Istrian cape. Flattened in periplum circumscribing centuries about this coast. Forget the Cantos. They’ll not depart. The world doesn’t end. All the old masters gather upon your terrace expectantly, pleading only for you to ignore them—to finish your elegy and move on with your life. The soft pallor of your study, a dry and dusty comfort paved with books, from which you hear them laughing. Milling about the corners, gathering beneath the veranda, leaning on the wide stone railing out over the sea. The door to the underworld is not a door. It is a path lined with statues that leads to an arcade about a courtyard, a palladian stair, a warm drawing room cast with golden light beyond the piano from the terrace where one imagines endlessness while eternity passes.

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Jimmy Bullis studied poetry writing at the University of Virginia and architecture at Rice University. He was a touring musician for the better part of a decade and currently practices architecture in Los Angeles.

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>>Talking Places

The Hidden Recesses and the Four Gates

Orçun Yazıcı
September 2024

Ventilation building #1. Photo by Nick Somers.

I am an ant in the city of Antwerp

Curiously, impatiently, I walk through the narrow streets for hours, peering up at rows of brick facades with their small, medieval windows. I pause before a stone building adorned with crossed iron ties to prevent its collapse.

Amber. 
Stepped gable.

The thin facade veils the realm inside.
What mysteries lie beyond this weathered wall?

A temptation swells within me to ring the doorbell and beg permission to peer inside. Could it be that this edifice is no mere building—but rather a gate to Antwerp’s hidden recesses?

I am an ant in the city of Antwerp
When the facade is merely a wall, I explore the realm beyond that wall
When the facade reaches out toward the horizon, I descend into earth, perpendicular
I am an ant in the city of Antwerp
Antwerp is my building and I trace the air shafts of this building,
To access the hidden recesses

Ventilation building #2. Photo by Nick Somers.

The facade struggles to be seen independently of the rest of the building, to be trusted on its own terms. We have relied on the facade to tell us stories about the politics and culture of societies; for instance, the extent of Baroque-era ornamentation signals the wealth and status of its patronage. But a facade, concealing what lies behind, highlights a dual nature: It is both curtain and mirror, joining the city’s fabric while keeping secrets to itself. Traces of vital infrastructure are glimpsed behind the mask, as with a ventilation building’s fixed expression covering the enormous air shafts positioned above underground tunnels, exchanging polluted air for fresh air in a continuous, heaving breath. 

The facade is a hanging drapery of a theater set
Facade conceals, it is a mask
A facade is a dress: hinting, obscuring

Ventilation building #3. Photo by Nick Somers.

Ventilation building #4. Photo by Nick Somers.

Antwerp camouflages the new with the old, creating an impression of venerable antiquity and a seamless urban fabric. The city marks the hidden crossings of the River Scheldt with pairs of buildings facing one another across the water, standing above the underground tunnels that connect the left bank (Linkeroever) with the city center (Rechteroever). The famous Sint-Anna Tunnel, a prime destination for tourists, was built in the early 20th century for pedestrians and cyclists. Its entrances are located at two identical, standalone Art-Deco buildings (designed by Belgian architect Émile Van Averbeke in 1933) with facades clad in yellow brick. One is located in Sint-Jansvliet (Rechteroever), a lively public square shaded by large lush trees. This square serves as a basketball court during the week and transforms into an antique market on Sundays. The Linkeroever entrance, in contrast, is situated within a quieter residential neighborhood, distinct from the historic and bustling surroundings of the Rechteroever entrance. Beyond the ground level, these buildings are not shops nor apartments; they are vertical voids, disguised with a thin layer of facade to hide the residuals of modernity.

I embark on a journey into an unseen realm through a wood-framed glass door, where the antique musk mingles with the hum and rhythmic clatter of machinery. The gate opens and I enter one of the hidden recesses of Antwerp.

A short walk through a brightly glazed hallway leads me to the original wooden escalators, still in use after 90 years. I descend amid the mechanical thrum, and I’m walking through a tunnel, over half a kilometer long, clad in blue and white tiles.

The deeper I go, the stronger the scent gets.
Aged wood with hints of dampness.

At the end of the tunnel, this time I go up. There is a moment of deja-vu, but in reverse. The gate is closed now, time to leave the structure.

Ventilation building #5. Photo by Nick Somers.

Ventilation building #6. Photo by Nick Somers.

As I’m moving away from the gate, my imagination takes me to the 18th-century Potemkin village. The story goes that during an inspection trip by Empress Catherine II of Russia, Grigory Potemkin built fake facades all along the empress' route with the hope of impressing her—a village of illusion, rendering political and social prosperity through the facades.

My thoughts drift to the red tiled facades along Protocol Road, the airport road in Ankara, the capital of Turkey. The 15 km long highway is an important axis between the city and the airport, an introduction to Ankara that is intended to leave a lasting impression on local and foreign visitors alike. Red tiles clad the facade of every building along Protocol Road, but only the road-facing facade, to create an appealing and uniform street image. 300 years after the Potemkin myth, the facade is still trusted to convey a disguise, to create an illusion.

I soon find myself searching for traces of the hidden recesses in-between the buildings of Antwerp. One day during a visit, I stumble upon another Art-Deco building: one of the ventilation buildings of the Waasland Tunnel, which also crosses the River Scheldt. It is detached from the adjacent buildings, clad in familiar yellow brick and concrete Art-Deco elements.

I feel the coldness around the structure. My eyes travel along a long vertical window like a path to the sky, pausing occasionally on the concrete elements that disrupt its vertical continuity. Back on the ground, a dark small door crammed beneath the tower greets me like a gate to an unseen realm. I look across the river to Linkeroever and find a nearly identical ventilation building standing at the other end of the tunnel: structures not for the living, but for their mechanisms.

Ventilation buildings of Antwerp are gates to the hidden recesses: 
Dark voids we created to fulfill our expectations from our environment.

As the demands of our cities grow, their infrastructural artifacts can no longer be discreetly tucked away in the corners of existing buildings; they insist upon their own accommodation within the urban fabric. The four gates of Antwerp, structures built to mediate the imposition of the mechanical behemoth into the urban realm nearly 100 years ago, invite reflection on the ethos of integration between the infrastructure of our cities and their human denizens. 

First, the non-livings demanded space from the living; 
then the gates of Antwerp appeared.

Ventilation building #7. Photo by Nick Somers.

Ventilation building #8. Photo by Nick Somers.

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Orçun Yazıcı is a practicing architect based in Belgium.

Nick Somers is a freelance photographer based in Ghent, Belgium.

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>>Talking Places

Navigating Narratives

A Conversation with Joël León Danis, Athenea Papacostas,
and Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco

September 2024

For the fifth issue of Architecture Writing Workshop, Talking Places, the editors convened a roundtable on the intricacies of narratives and storytelling in architecture, bringing together perspectives from art and design, architectural history, and curatorial practice. 

The myriad stories of those who build, inhabit, and interact with spaces provide a more nuanced understanding of how architecture operates in real life. This perspective challenges the tendency to view architectural narratives through a singular, often detached lens. Through various mediums—from exhibitions and walking tours to oral histories—the conversation that follows offers a path to redefine how we relate to, narrate, and design the built environment.

Editors Sebastián López Cardozo and Lauren Phillips moderated the discussion with Joël León Danis, Athenea Papacostas, and Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco. (This roundtable has been edited for length and clarity.)

Sebastián López Cárdozo (SLC): Why do stories matter?

Despite being a highly effective and often preferred vehicle for transmitting information, the use of narrative in formal and academic writing is often seen as subjective and perhaps not taken as seriously. How do we address these concerns? And is there an opening for personal writing to play a larger role in communicating architectural intent and experience?

Athenea Papacostas (AP): As director of the Museum of National Housing (MUNAVI) in Mexico City, I worked with RIWA Architects to build a narrative about housing that aimed to change how people relate to their home, and place more importance on the decisions they make in their daily lives. The curation process not only considered people’s role as renters or home buyers, but also as members and caretakers of their community.

Welcome section on MUNAVI’s permanent exhibition. Photo by GLR Studio. Courtesy of Espacio Cultural Infonavit. 

I also have an ongoing project that is centered on my own spatial memory of the houses I’ve lived in, the process of leaving one for another, and how this shaped my experience of the city. This project led to an open event with a series of clay models, where I invited the visitors for a conversation. I asked them about the number of times they’ve moved, characteristics of their homes that have stood out, and their memorable experiences. The open dialogue changes the broader narrative about housing; we realize that it isn’t just about the size or location of the home, but also about the people we share the space with. It has social, economic, and emotional components—everything comes together in the domestic space.

Clay models at the performance opening on March 5, 2023 at Laguna, Mexico City. Photo by Laura Orozco.

Joël León Danis (JLD): There's a tendency in the discipline to over-academize how we talk about space—and this creates a barrier to those outside of it to engage in shaping how space is understood and described. Everyone experiences architecture and everyone has their own story to tell, and personal stories are just as valuable as any other stories we tell ourselves about buildings. They can help us reflect how architecture can better support the narratives people want to experience, versus a prescriptive or deterministic architecture that only supports a single interpretation.

With the Toronto Society of Architects (TSA), we held a Pride event this year, where thousands of people shared their experiences of queer spaces. Maybe only a handful of these stories had explicitly architectural components—and yet all the stories happened in architecture. The question is, can we use this kind of information to better understand how to design spaces—to encourage positive stories and prevent negative ones?

Attendees share their memories at the Toronto Society of Architects booth at the 2024 Pride StreetFair. Photo by Kurtis Chen.

Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco (ISO): Oral stories have been fundamental in architectural history to challenge a canon privileging a controlled, hermetic narrative that tends to erase the voices of those who actually inhabit spaces. Dominant histories privileging architectural archives often sidelined the fact that producers of space are not just architects. In the same sense that geographical constraints, policies and legal mandates produce architectures, the construction worker, domestic worker, third-generation inhabitants, draftsmen, and many more bring their own forms of experience to bear on the production of architectural space. 

It’s interesting to compare storytelling and oral histories versus histories that are only based on archival evidence. It raises questions about how that archive was constructed, who owns it, who is tasked with its preservation, and so on. As a historian, I've been working to bring oral accounts into my work to address these concerns, without, however, leaving behind the archives to compliment oral histories—it’s a balance. And, ultimately, it’s important to admit that every story comes with an author and a certain kind of position—inherent subjectivity is not something we can avoid.  

JLD: And what becomes a place’s dominant story can’t necessarily be controlled by those who created the space. A symbol of democracy in one era can become a symbol of a totalitarian regime in the next. 

There is a building in Venezuela from the tail end of the dictatorship (built late 1950s) called El Helicoide. It’s a ramped, helicoidal project that allowed people to drive up to shops. It features a Buckminster Fuller dome at the top and it’s been said that Salvador Dalí offered to adorn its interiors—it was a symbol of prosperous Venezuela. When the dictatorship fell, democracy didn’t want to touch that building.

El Helicoide was never finished, and it remained a shell of a building for about 40 years, hosting a variety of uses. Then along came the country’s current government, and it became the headquarters for the Secret Police, a place where people are incarcerated and tortured. The building has represented different values to different people at different times—so it’s important to contextualize stories we hear about it. The architecture hasn’t changed, and it is still spectacular, but now it is very strange to tell people that you love it, because its current use is so terrible. Its narrative has evolved beyond the control of the architects, who could not have imagined that the little shops they designed would be used to make cells for prisoners.

El Helicoide building in Caracas, Venezuela, designed by Pedro Neuberger, Dirk Bornhorst and Jorge Romero Gutiérrez. Photo by Damián D. Fossi Salas. 

Lauren Phillips (LP): There are many instances of architecture coming up with a solution, dropping it off in a community and assuming that people will figure out how to use and occupy that space in a “successful” way. Particularly when it comes to community-based projects, architects might construct a possibility based on their own imagined narrative. There’s an arrogance in believing that designs speak for themselves. Is there a role for narrative in communicating how spaces are to be used—almost as an architectural users’ manual?

AP: You use the word “manual,” and I love them—even the Ikea ones, they're wonderful. They help us put together our sense of how we can enable things to happen. However, they are also a cold way of communicating, especially when compared to storytelling. Storytelling and verbal communication can be much more impactful in communicating how a space’s use is envisioned. The written word is very important, but it cannot wholly replace conversations and the rapport that develops out of dialogue.

ISO: Any building is an accumulator of stories. It never stops—the plan is always accumulating different lives and different histories, sometimes antagonistic histories. So perhaps the idea of a fixed manual is too prescriptive for the many ways a building’s narrative will evolve over its lifetime. Architects are really good at pretending to design for eternity and to hang on to the illusion that the plan dictates the narrative. But I think there’s a different way of perceiving space—one that involves recentering the voices of those that are actually living in it. 

The architect Enrique Ortiz, speaking of his work with Cooperativa Palo Alto in Mexico City, said the community is his school. That is something incredibly telling and humbling, as it redefines what the architect is—more of a service provider as opposed to a canonical figure that imposes his or her ideas.

Left and Right: A street and and andador (pedestrian road) in Cooperativa Palo Alto, the first cooperative in Mexico City with 221 houses and approximately 1,400 inhabitants. 2022, Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco.

Center: The first house built collectively in Cooperativa Palo Alto mid 1970s, Courtesy of Cooperativa Palo Alto.

SLC: When we talk about the process of communicating narrative, how much does the medium matter? We all work with different media, whether we’re talking about essays, exhibitions, oral histories, or architectural design. How do different mediums affect the process of telling a story?

JLD: I don't think the medium of storytelling matters so much as far as how stories are produced, but each medium has a different power of transmitting a story. Architecture is probably one of the worst mediums of communication, in part because it lacks the kind of shared language needed for meaningful engagement. 

When we do walking tours with the TSA, we’re constantly thinking of how to build this shared language—to foster the ability to notice and read the stories embedded in buildings. Because the walking tour is a medium that lends itself well to conversation, it can be especially accessible. 

A big part of the tour guide’s job at the TSA is to help people become comfortable talking about their built environment. Understanding a building’s history and how to access it is key to this. And it doesn’t need to be intimidating— these histories can be easy to understand once you remove some of the jargon that surrounds a lot of architectural talk.

ISO: As a discipline we’ve struggled to mainstream ways of talking about architecture that go beyond aesthetic responses. It is exciting to see that starting to change, and to see storytelling as a vehicle for widening that conversation. But apart from writing, drawing and other forms of visual representation are beautiful ways to tell stories. 

I experienced this while working with Cooperativa Palo Alto, a community that lives in an intergenerational way with a high degree of nuance that is difficult to describe in words. For my own research process, I've been trying to redraw a few of their houses over time. Words can’t always communicate certain parts of the experience—in particular how the experience of a space comes into being. 

AP: The medium also depends on the audience, right? Who do you want to reach? Do you want to reach other architects? Or the people living in Cooperativa Palo Alto? Depending on who you want to reach, you might (or might not) write an essay that is overly long and technical. I also agree very much that we have a plurality of tools and forms of representation. 

It reminded me of an experiment which involved working with my own memory, the houses that I lived in, and the memory of those spaces. After I’d made models out of that process I thought, well, I should also do drawings. While I was doing the drawings, I recorded myself describing them. So I had the voice notes as well as the drawings and models. 

As an extension of the project, I asked my girlfriend to describe the first house she lived in. She closed her eyes and started describing spaces, and I started drawing. Sometimes she described the furniture, other times a detail. When she opened her eyes, she asked: “How can you draw someplace you’ve never been?” 

SLC: As a storyteller, whether you’re writing, speaking, or drawing, it seems the first component in shaping a narrative is to have a firsthand experience that you need or desire to communicate. But the intention behind that act of communication—is it meant to stand in or take the place of a firsthand experience on the part of the audience? Or should it spur them to go and have a firsthand experience of their own?

ISO: That's a very good question, and it's a difficult question. I'm working on another research project right now, related to the struggle for housing rights for elderly sex workers, where I’m trying to situate oral histories. I have struggled with it because, on the one hand, I don't want to speak on behalf of anyone—but on the other hand, I have a strong desire to communicate their histories. So there is a difficulty in trying to bring their voices into the conversation while also keeping my critical distance. 

It sounds perhaps contradictory, but bringing oral accounts involves getting closer to your interlocutors. You don't visit them only one time, but many. You spend time with them that isn’t written about. You’re building a social relationship with them. And that's really where the trust of them sharing their stories comes about. But in that process you get very close to their lives. And then, when it’s time to write (at least in my experience) I felt like I really needed to come back to the paper by distancing myself again. Because it's still important to try to maintain a certain objectivity that also allows for the introduction of counterarguments. 

In the end, there's a position—an argument that I’m trying to construct. With Cooperativa Palo Alto I realized, for example, that there can be counterpositions. At Palo Alto there were two accounts of how that space was produced: one from the people who were living there, and one from the people that had left that space, now called “the dissidents of the cooperative.” I was trying to contextualize the disagreement as well as look through other mediums such as records of legal proceedings.

My hope was to produce an article like that doesn’t just represent one version of the story told through one set of oral histories, but shows a relationship of these positions to other positions, the scope of the debate, and an understanding of a complex context. When you get so close to people, you feel a certain loyalty. But sometimes loyalty means bringing the frictions and complications to light. One can be merely an advocate, or one can ultimately allow their voices to be strengthened through a degree of struggle, of wrestling with the counternarratives. 

AP: The first temporary exhibition at MUNAVI centered on the home environment. We opened the museum to the public and invited them to contribute through their own objects. We asked people to tell the story of their objects and explain how they made them feel at home. 

Curating these objects and their stories was an emotional experience—everyone in the curatorial team related to at least one story, or two, or three. But some stories were more difficult to relate to. We had items from all over Mexico, from religious items to sports paraphernalia and books. If those contributing had written half a page about their object, we carefully selected one or two sentences for display. We wanted to represent the similarities and differences of how people live, and how they choose to make their house a home. The exhibition became a great medium for that.

Temporary exhibition, “Objetos que hacen hogar,” 2023. Photo by GLR Estudio. Courtesy of Espacio Cultural Infonavit.

JLD: Some of the stories we tell ourselves about the places we live in are not constructed on facts, and yet that doesn't make them any less valid. In the broader context of helping tell the story of a place, we have to unpack where it comes from and why it matters.

In the tours I co-lead at TSA, we often talk about the role of Georgian architecture in establishing the Britishness of Toronto. That’s an objective story—that is exactly what the British tried to do. And it doesn't stop people from feeling incredibly emotional because they didn't realize that a building they perhaps lived in or saw in their neighborhood has a whole other political layer. For people that did not fit into the story of Toronto’s Britishness, Georgian architecture tells an entirely different story—one marked by colonization and the erasure of Indigenous culture.

We also tell a lot of stories involving newly built projects, and sometimes we've had the architects come on the tours with us. What we say about buildings is not exactly what the architects might say or think about them. In some cases they are interested to hear how we interpret the building and respond positively. Other times, it’s more unsettling and we get pushback. 

Tours are a good medium for bringing together the complex and conflicting narratives we inhabit. But when we edit, curate, and tell a particular story, we’re also building our own narrative. At the end of the day there is an argument to how we do this. We make a choice about what buildings or spaces we talk about, and how we talk about them—it’s one story, a narrative among many.

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Joël León Danis is an architect and Executive Director of the Toronto Society of Architects. His work has been shaped by a strong interest in public policy, community building, and the critical dialogue between the architectural profession and the public.  

Athenea Papacostas is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural agent who studied architecture (UNAM), museum studies (ENCRyM), and dance (RAD). Based on the exploration of concepts such as authenticity, proximity, joy, and affect in the spaces we inhabit, her practice moves between materialities, performance, and relational art.

Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco is an architect, historian and educator whose work is interested in Latin American histories of housing rights. She is an Assistant Professor of Architecture, and Co-Director of the Architecture program at Bard College. 

Sebastián López Cardozo edits for Architecture Writing Workshop. He works as an architectural designer in Toronto and is a co-editor of Nueva Vivienda: New Housing Paradigms in Mexico (Park Books, 2022).

Lauren Phillips edits for Architecture Writing Workshop. He is a Lecturer at Huckabee College of Architecture at Texas Tech University.

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>>Talking Places

Many Houstons

On Bryan Washington’s Memorial

Lauren Phillips
September 2024

Southwest Freeway, Houston. October 27, 2020. Photo by xiefangzhang will sun.

Bryan Washington’s debut novel, Memorial, was a strange book arriving at a strange time. Published in late October of 2020, amid the isolation of a global pandemic and a crescendo of political anxiety, it told a story less about love than about the complexity of relationships; less about resolutions than about learning to live with uncertainty. Notably, it was less about things happening than the spaces between events, and the waiting, dreading, and anticipation—eager or otherwise—that surrounds them.

Memorial earned high praise for the sparse delivery and keenly realistic dialogue framing the story of Benson and Mike, two thirty-ish men, one Black, the other Japanese American, navigating a relationship in quiet crisis. The novel’s inciting incident occurs when Mike’s mother comes to visit from Japan at the same time Mike must travel to Osaka to see his estranged, and dying, father—leaving Benson in the uneasy position of hosting his boyfriend’s mother in their shared home in Houston’s Third Ward.

Washington called Memorial a “gay slacker dramedy,” told from a first-person perspective that shifts from Benson to Mike and back again—a low-stakes but visceral account of the real-life accretions of identity, culture, and the unacknowledged (and unexpressed) needs that collect on the hull of good intentions. The novel handles its themes of displacement, isolation and togetherness, desire and disappointment, with the same understated frankness with which it addresses race, working-class queerness, hookup culture, and family dynamics. Less obvious, but of critical importance to Memorial’s success, is the deftness with which Washington uses time and distance to construct a spatial lattice across the immense sprawl of Houston and its suburbs against which the events of the story are set.

Both inside and outside the worlds of architectural discourse and urban planning, the idea of “Houston-ness” is loaded with summary judgements. The notion that Houston “doesn’t have zoning,” for instance, is at once true, and often completely misunderstood, as it suggests an undifferentiated free-for-all. However, the lack of top-down, prescriptive land use has not produced urban chaos, but has rather allowed the urban fabric to crystallize into self-organized and interconnected pockets of structure.

In this sense, the metaphor of Houston as a series of tightly packed towns connected by freeways is probably more apt. To live in Houston, particularly as a transplant, is to cull, over time, those vast swaths of the city that, for whatever reason, offer little immediate value; assembling, bit by bit, one’s own curated version of Space City and the paths one carves moving through it. No two Houstons are the same.

It is tempting, and maybe not inaccurate, to think of Houston’s distinct physiology, its intricate networks of interlinked neighborhoods and districts, as a metaphor for Memorial’s emotional landscape, somehow mirroring the untidy relational dynamics of its twin protagonists with its backdrop of urban sprawl. But the city also plays an active role in setting the pace of events in response to one another, opening spaces within the narrative for critical reflection by slowing things down.

There’s an inherent sludging to moving across Houston, a kind of emotional slow-cooking (Houstonians are fond of saying that any two points within the 610 Loop are always exactly 20 minutes apart), that puts a drag on reaction time. And so, when Benson travels from the Third Ward to Montrose, or all the way out to Katy, we’ve been in the car with him, processing whatever might be waiting for us at the other end. None of us are of the same frame of mind at the end of the journey as we were when we got in the car.

Benson’s Houston (and Mike’s Osaka, to a lesser degree) is constructed for the reader through the character’s movement through the city over time. As Benson responds to an emergency call, he tells his sometimes-estranged father that he is on his way, “twenty minutes, tops,”— before remembering he doesn’t have his car. Accepting a ride from, Omar, a new sometimes-romantic interest:

We glide across the freeway like bats. Traffic is light. 

But on the other side of his stiff visit with his father, the return journey:

He takes the long way into the city. We never pull off Westheimer. Omar just cruises beside the highway, cutting through back alleys and suburbs. When we emerge from the other side, it’s already midnight, on a weekday, which means the streets are mostly empty, except for the people waiting for buses and all the folks with nowhere to go. 

Omar’s a steady driver. There’s no jolt when we hit our stoplights. He just slides into them, until we ease our way home.

There is a deftness and economy to the way Washington knits time and distance together in just a few lines, along with the subtle sensations of the body’s movement through space.

While Houston’s expanse and lack of rigid boundaries may parallel the characters’ own struggles with identity and connection—and a relationship marked by its own form of spatial disorganization—it is Washington’s treatment of time and distance that builds a distinct spatial matrix that both facilitates and impedes the narrative. 

To revisit Memorial nearly four years after its release, and as someone who turned out to be passing through Houston at the time, brings back to mind the character and canvas of a city stitched together by moments of possibility. And it brings to mind that time when, abruptly, the possibilities seemed to cease. The world of 2020 was an empty place: Benson’s Houston, as well as my own, had absconded, leaving an unsettled quietude that leaked into our cramped apartments from under the front doors. And yet, at night, the formerly clogged arteries of Houston’s freeways opened to a new world of possibility, as we raced to nowhere with the windows down…

Washington’s Memorial is more than just a story about two men navigating their relationship—it is an exploration of how we move through and make sense of our environments, and of how we construct those environments through the time we spend waiting to do something else.

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Lauren Phillips edits for Architecture Writing Workshop. He is a Lecturer at Huckabee College of Architecture at Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

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>>Talking Places

Accessing Design / Designing Access

A conversation with Hannah Wong
February 2024

The vast array of initiatives in the architectural field reveals ongoing efforts to include diverse voices in classrooms, practices, and beyond. Yet rarely do we examine the infrastructure of long-established rules and conventions based on which architects operate and design the built environment. How do these ingrained frameworks affect designers and users of diverse backgrounds? Are there alternative approaches to design that are yet to be explored?

Hannah Wong speaks with AWW guest editor Paul DeFazio about her experience as the first legally blind student at Harvard Graduate School of Design, her approach to disability as a designer, and the promise of access intimacy for pedagogy and practice.

Paul DeFazio (PD): When you’re applying to jobs, or when you applied to school, how and when do you choose to disclose your disability?

Hannah Wong (HW): Because architecture is such a visual field, being blind has some implications—and people are either going to accept that or not. If a school or an employer is going to reject me for my disability, I’d prefer to get that out of the way sooner than later so that I can be in a place that is welcoming and supportive.

PD: Your graduate application essay took a strong position on disability. Disability is generally an understudied topic in architecture schools; there are few (if any) instances where we get to learn about it.

HW: Disability in architecture is often reduced to a set of specific requirements and narrow ideas about access. The reality is that these things are not geared towards a more creative, generative understanding of architecture. As a student, one can make a project about accessibility without taking a stance on how it fits into a model based on standards and regulations.

PD: Does disability ever generate other ways of designing? For me, work often takes longer—and architecture schools are notorious for workloads far beyond any student’s capacity.

HW: It does take longer to do certain aspects of the work. And my instructors often encourage me to explore non-traditional forms of representation as a way to circumvent that, but when you’re saddled with so much work, coming up with new ways of representing architecture can feel like a luxury. So far, with the exception of model making (I don’t use the woodshop or power tools), I’ve tended to follow more traditional ways of working.

PD: There are conventions (or expectations) in architecture, whether at work or in school, that don’t work for people with disabilities. Model making is a great example of that. Another example that I often encounter is the use of lineweights in drawings. If an instructor prefers lighter lineweights over bolder ones, it can result in legibility issues.

HW: Sometimes I can't read my own drawings.

PD: I think there needs to be more flexibility built into those conventions.

HW: People with disabilities are perceived as a small minority in the field so it’s presumed that the conventions in place work for most people. What if there were alternative means of representation, or, more radically, what if there were no drawings at all? How many people might that benefit? When I make drawings using the usual conventions, I don’t make those drawings for myself. I make them for other people. By ignoring my own needs, I wonder how many other people's needs I'm also ignoring.

I’ve had professors in the past who understood that something not working for me could become a moment of learning for them; but getting from there to broader, systemic change is a whole different process.

PD: You co-founded Design.Able, a student-run group at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) that works towards supporting inclusive design practice and dismantling ableism. How would you describe the organization and what do you find is the importance of its mission and work within architecture schools?

HW: Design.Able has a double meaning: It’s about the idea that design and ability are able to come together, and it’s about understanding that disability is designable in the built environment.

One of the reasons I started the organization was because I was really lonely. People tend to congratulate those who are the first to do or achieve something, but no one wants to tell you that you might be the only one. I wanted to create a safe space where people who support disability justice could come together and create a network of support—not just for me but for other students who were feeling marginalized—and address the ways in which institutions often make students feel like they have to compromise certain parts of themselves.

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PD: What does Design.Able do to achieve that?

HW: At the GSD, there are not enough people with disabilities, so Design.Able is composed mostly of allies. At the moment, the group is very small; I don’t think we’re doing as much as we could if we had more people. Among other things, the group has hosted a symposium on disability and dance, held workshops on the accessibility of graphics standards and presentations, and invited a number of speakers, including Sara Hendren, Bojana Coklyat, Finnegan Shannon, and Mel Y. Chen.

I am especially proud of the workshops that we’ve organized on how to make print graphics accessible. People generally want to learn and do the right thing, but they often don’t know how to do that or where to start. Disability justice is not a distant, mythical goal. In the context of academic institutions (where everything is siloed, strict, and rooted in tradition), small actions like increasing the font on a presentation or giving visual descriptions to images can make for meaningful steps forward. These kinds of actions can spread and become instances where you can recognize that someone thought about accessibility.

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PD: Amanda Bagg’s work with voice-over or Christine Sun Kim’s work with captions show how shifting beyond conventions can become more than just a way to provide access to the content—it can give a project another dimension. You mentioned that you’ve been thinking about the concept of access intimacy lately. For readers unfamiliar with access intimacy, how would you define it? What does it mean to you?

HW: Access intimacy (coined by writer and educator Mia Mingus) refers to the forms of comfort experienced by an individual when their access needs are understood by another person. It’s the feeling you get when you have needs that don’t have to be verbalized for someone to understand them. Although it’s often described in relation to people with disabilities, it can be experienced by anyone. It can be found in relationships built over time, in people with differing political awareness, and so on.

PD: What’s an example that you experience in your daily life?

HW: When someone is describing a drawing or is drawing on a piece of paper to show me, they might instinctively scoot closer to get the drawing within my field of vision without me having to say anything. Even if I still can’t see the drawing, the act of scooting closer feels like a form of access intimacy because I sense that they want me to understand what they’re talking about and are thinking about my needs.

It’s important to communicate your needs—especially needs related to access—but there is a lot of emotional labor associated with doing that. Having somebody else thinking about your needs can be powerful; it creates a more supportive environment because you don’t have to always be doing that work yourself.

PD: Access intimacy as a term sounds like a big concept, and it can be, but it’s also present in the small moments and gestures, as you’ve alluded to. I would venture to say that part of the reason why we value these small victories so much is that we are often going without our access needs being met, so having them met at all makes those moments feel important.

HW: That’s certainly the case. People often don’t have their access needs met, which makes access intimacy more special. Another interesting question is about how we might go about forming access intimacy with those who don’t naturally come to it. It’s easy to have access intimacy with someone who intuitively understands your disability, but what about forming it with those who ignore your access needs or don’t have experience providing access for others?

PD: How do you think access intimacy might inform a design practice?

HW: I think asking questions is an important part of that process: As design professionals, how are we thinking about what we’re designing for other people? What kinds of questions are we asking the users, the inhabitants, whoever we might be designing for? What are we trying to interrogate and understand and what are we going to assume?

I think it’s also important to acknowledge that, even though the conversation about designing for access is expanding to include more than just regulations and standards—and incorporate concepts like access intimacy—the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was a huge win when it was instituted. The ADA generated a mobilization for disability that we had never seen in American culture, and it remains enormously impactful today. As a community, disabled people take a lot of pride in that work.

At the same time, the perception that there are minimum standards to meet—and then call it a day—can lead to a sense of complacency among designers. Standards and regulations also ignore the diversity of needs within the disability community; they imply that by instituting these very specific criteria we're going to make things more beneficial for everyone.

PD: Exactly. It’s not universal. Even in the visually-impaired (VI) community someone might need a lot of light to see, another person might be photosensitive, someone might be both, or see well at a very specific light level. It’s difficult to accommodate all of that without a lot of flexibility and ingenuity.

HW: There's also a lot to be said about those who are not represented in the standards, or, more gravely, what it means for people when those standards go directly against their needs.

PD: What disability topics are you thinking about in your work right now?

HW: One of my primary interests is circulation, thinking about how to get around spaces, how to direct people without telling them where to go. How can we build spaces that do that and that make sense conceptually?

I’m also thinking about representation—specifically the visual representation of the non-visual aspects in the built environment, and the non-visual representation of the visual aspects in the built environment. I hope to continue researching multi-sensory design techniques and explore them through my work in the future.

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Hannah Wong is an M.Arch candidate and the first legally blind student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she has founded the student collective Design.Able. She is also a project manager at Critical Design Lab.

Paul DeFazio is an M.Arch candidate at Rice School of Architecture.

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>>Decoding the Conversation

Seeing Things

Apollo and Daphne at Mestre

Shantel Blakely
February 2024

In the summer of 2022, I went to see the Splügen Brau warehouse in Mestre (in the mainland of Venice opposite the historic islands), one of several industrial buildings that often come up in an online search of the architect Angelo Mangiarotti. After a slow-moving journey along the back streets of Mestre, there I was. As I stood looking at the building, I was reminded of the myth of Apollo and Daphne and the eponymous sculpture by the Baroque sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini. As the story goes, Daphne was a forest nymph and a huntress who had chosen a celibate life. The god Eros, out of spite, caused his rival Apollo to fall in love with Daphne at first sight; Apollo gave chase. In flight, Daphne called for help. Her father, the river god Peneus, turned Daphne into a laurel tree. She survived, however encased and immobile. The transformation did not deter Apollo, who paid regular visits to Daphne, took the laurel as a personal emblem, and made this tree an evergreen whose leaves would not die. Bernini's Apollo and Daphne and Mangiarotti's Splügen Brau belong to different fields (sculpture and architecture) and different times and contexts (17th and 20th centuries), yet Bernini’s sculpture and the myth it represents provide terms through which to better understand what I saw—and just as importantly, did not see—as I faced Mangiarotti’s warehouse.

Photograph of the Splügen Brau warehouse. Giorgio Casali, Domus.

The Mangiarotti-designed warehouse sits by a canal that leads to the Venice archipelago. It was built for the beer company Splügen Brau, based a few hundred kilometers away, to provide a mainland depot where beverage cases destined for Venice could be transferred from trucks to boats. Like many of Mangiarotti's buildings, this design was a collaboration with another architect, Bruno Morassutti. The building owes much to a structural engineer as well: Aldo Favini. Its most expressive feature is a roof that hovers spectacularly above the canal. Building on his structural experimentation with prestressed concrete at Baranzate Church, Favini integrated construction method, load-bearing requirements, and architectural expression into a unified system.

Mangiarotti standing at the lower right corner of the photo, beneath the roof. Giorgio Casali, Domus.

What I was not able to see, standing by the warehouse, was the building in its original state—as I had come to know it in the photographs of Giorgio Casali. Casali was the in-house architectural photographer at Domus from 1951 to 1983 and documented the warehouse in detail in 1967. In Casali’s photos, one can see Favini’s interpretation of a trilith structure, its monumental system of beam and roof elements resting on eight slender columns (all of which sits atop a concrete plinth). Freed from structural necessity, the building’s enclosure is composed of (comparatively lightweight) corrugated, sliding metal panels. The roof overhang creates a shaded, sheltered space which extends farther out on the long axis than on the short one, and farthest of all on the canal end of the building. Seen from afar, the exposed ends of the roof system read like a slab resting on a series of beams. Casali’s close-up photos reveal a more sophisticated assemblage: Borrowing from the Hennebique method (devised to reinforce concrete against tensile forces), Favini conceived of the structure as a series of integrated, precast concrete components that could be craned into place.

Favini’s concrete structural component being craned into place. Giorgio Casali, Domus.

Details of the Hennebique method. Domus.

The resulting short-end elevation of each beam is a trapezoidal, jug-like shape, with the bottom of the beam wider than the top.

The symbolic nature of these elements, whose exposed ends read like caricaturesque representations of the beams themselves, underscores the analogy between Mangiarotti’s modern concrete building and architecture’s classical paradigm. (In classical architecture, elements like the triglyph are stone representations of the roof joists common in wood construction.) Casali’s photographs of the warehouse are also eerily reminiscent of depictions of the “primitive hut,” with its elemental structural system plainly visible.

Soane office, RA lecture drawing to illustrate the primitive hut: Perspective of a primitive hut, with flat roof, d: 20. May 1807. Sir John Soane's Museum Collection Online.

Daphne (”wrapped in thin smooth bark”; “her heart still beating” beneath it) came to mind when I considered how much of the detail revealed in Casali’s photos had become attenuated or muted in the building before me: Atop the original roof were added two additional layers, made of sheet metal and shallowly pitched; the plinth was boldly painted in yellow and white safety stripes; the enclosure was expanded to the edge of the porch on the canal side; and a new metal shed was built at the other end. These additions obscure the original design of the warehouse, but it continues to be used in the same way as when it was built. Certain features have remained, like the pale pink paint on the columns, now more faint than before, and the exposed, jug-like ends of the beams which are still visible along the roof's edge. With nothing more to go on than a distant view in an online navigation software, the features that remain visible or unchanged are what enabled me to identify (and find) the building in the first place. The timelessness of its elements blurs the distinction between function and decoration, allowing the building to remain and live in spirit—like Daphne, the nymph-become-tree.

Splügen Brau warehouse at Mestre. Photograph by author, July 2022.

If Daphne in the myth is symbolic of the building’s gradual encasement as described above, Bernini's rendition of the myth in sculpture reveals something else: When comparing Casali’s photos of Splügen Brau to the building in the flesh, it is immediately evident that the open space around the building has been lost. Casali’s images rely not only on the building for their impact and legibility, but also, like Bernini’s two-figured freestanding sculpture, on the availability of open space around it; the photographer’s own movement, as he shifts from one vantage point to another, is recorded in the photographs. The images reveal Casali’s use of open space as he walks a short distance away and peers up at the building, as he (probably) proceeds to walk farther away and turn back to shoot it again, and finally, as he crosses the canal and views it through fronds of grass. In his close-up shots, one can picture Casali standing on the building's plinth as he captures the connection between column and wall. Some of his close-up photos dissolve into patterns so abstract that they are hard to identify as one part or another.

Photograph of the Splügen Brau warehouse. Giorgio Casali, Domus.

Casali's photographs underscore the wealth of space Mangiarotti had at his disposal, and the role this played in the experience of the building; as if the architect anticipated and welcomed an ambulatory perceiving viewer, rewarding attention with gradually revealed information. In this respect the warehouse also has qualities in common with Baroque architecture (with its characteristic many-centered spaces exemplified in Bernini's own Sant'Andrea al Quirinale). Much like these distant works, Splügen Brau lends itself to being understood as a totality by way of the viewer's displacement in space.

In Bernini’s sculpture, details of the Apollo and Daphne myth are revealed as the viewer revolves around the object: Apollo is mid-stride, weight on his right foot; he has just reached Daphne and his left arm reaches forward and around her while Daphne, her feet elevated a few inches above the ground, is not quite running, nor standing. Daphne’s head is turned to the right and tilted back, her torso bent back while her arms reach up and forward. Bernini's frozen narrative allows a viewer to see the situation from Apollo's side, and—by moving around the work to the other side—from Daphne's. Apollo’s facial expression is calm, his gestures gentle, his limbs graceful. Daphne's forehead, too, has a youthful serenity, but as Apollo embraces her, the branches emerge from her hands, the roots shoot from her toes, the bark wraps her legs. Her downturned eyes show no sign of what is happening to her but the horror is there in her mouth, which prepares for a scream.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne. Photograph by author at Palazzo Borghese, Rome, June 2022.

As the spectator continues to revolve around the sculpture, a series of physical details are disclosed seemingly on a spiraling line, from Apollo’s right arm trailing gently behind him to Daphne's outstretched right arm reaching in front of her. Shards of bark around Daphne may serve as supports, but they are ingeniously part of the story as well, much more integrated and discreet than the stumps of wood that prop up many classical sculptures. There are no parts of Apollo and Daphne that the viewer is not meant to notice. Similarly on the Splügen Brau warehouse—as Casali captured it—each elevation has a distinctive face.

In the space around the Splügen Brau warehouse, fences cut the land into portions now filled by new buildings, including a factory in the field where Casali once regarded the depot from across the canal. At this point, one can neither view the warehouse from a distance nor walk around it. But just as the god paid tribute to the laurel tree, the owner keeps the building in use. The warehouse sits in a carapace of piecemeal additions that conceal its parts and mute its expressions just as the bark enclosed the nymph within a tree. Luckily for us, it still circulates as freely as ever in photographs.

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Shantel Blakely is an architectural historian, architect, and educator. She is an Assistant Professor at the Rice University School of Architecture.

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>>Decoding the Conversation

Eavesdropping on Architecture, or “I’ll Have What They’re Having”

John McMorrough
February 2024

In architecture, talk is powerful. In studios, at final reviews, over napkin sketches with clients, or in front of a screen with co-workers, these fleeting exchanges are a repository of architecture’s possible truths—before drawings, before models, and before buildings. In their reproduction in recording and text, but especially in the pervasive conditioning of social media, the fidelity of these exchanges is elusive, and it is hard to apprehend the original intentions ex-situ. Following Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, their capture changes their character. Through the artifice of its reproduction, the timbre of expression comes to the recipient with resonances far removed from their original utterance. At best, one is eavesdropping on conversations only partially heard.

“Conversation in Deli,” Rob Reiner, When Harry Met Sally, 1989.

A notorious overheard conversation from cinema history is helpful here. In “When Harry Met Sally” (1989), a somewhat distinctive delicatessen conversation about the possibility of platonic love between a man (Harry) and a woman (Sally) culminates with a vigorous demonstration of “faking it” (a well-rehearsed simulation by Sally). The incident illustrates how familiar intimacy can become public spectacle (and is there a better way to characterize the radical escalation of architecture from notion to edifice?). However, even more aperçu is the culmination of the scene, when a woman at a nearby table, coming to the conversation late—and being aware only of its conclusion—says to her waiter, “I’ll have what she’s having.”

Like the woman in the deli, we often find ourselves as distant followers of these architectural conversations, hearing only the highest pitch of proclamations that make it through the aether. With only partial information, we decide if we agree with what is offered, and, if we will also have what they’re having. The menu of recent offerings is an array of ideological flavors, all of which come in recurrent conceptual combinations. In identifying across courses the major ingredients of seriousness and play (which, like sweet and sour, seem best in combination), the resulting taste profiles have some recurring notes: a flavor of the ordinary, but only as reconstructed; a suspicion of irony, but an underlying appreciation of its uses; and a hunger for the real, as stewed in the reduction of the digital. The consistency within variety speaks to a common gastronomy of practices at this juncture, a collapse of old dualities into new frothy mixtures.

If, as eavesdroppers on these architectural exchanges, we are the proverbial lady at the next table, then who are Sally or Harry? At this point, the analogy completes and confounds us, for we are each the actor, the observer, and the audience, as architectural talk is for, with, and by architects. Such a limited audience is not lamentable; rather, what must be understood is that the passion of the bull session, among those who know and care, constitutes the fire that fuels the discipline. As long as the talk is fresh, count me in; I will continue to have more of what they’re having.

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John McMorrough is an architect who writes about the relationship between contemporary culture and design methodology, with treatments of architecture extended practices (as buildings, but also work in complementary media such as installations, films, and other structured narratives). John is a partner of studioAPT and a professor of architecture at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan.

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>> Decoding the Conversation

More is More

HdM’s Website Overhaul

Francis Aguillard
February 2024

Along with a bizarre mix of product spec sheets, ArchDaily posts, Gmail, house sets, and maybe the project page of one or two design firms, a recent mainstay in my tabs has been Herzog & de Meuron’s (HdM) new website, unveiled in early 2023. If their previous website was esoteric, poetic, and frenetic, this one is direct, soothing, and amenable.

HdM’s former website deserves as much attention as the new one; even as recently as 2019, it had all the energy and UX flair (and not devoid of the usual impracticality) of a trendy academic firm. A clean white background and simple Swiss typeface filled with project windows at the command of a mouse click—each one layered atop another in chaotic fashion. Many architects and designers remember the site fondly. It created a visual display that re-presented how we experienced the internet—always halfway between focus and pandemonium, vaguely aware of the wake of information behind us, creating mental collages as idiosyncratic as each one of us. Or perhaps we loved that HdM, a large, established, and well-oiled firm, could keep all the youthful energy of a start-up in their website.  

Former Herzog & de Meuron website. Screenshot by author.

Now decidedly more professional, HdM has approached their revamped website as a public and professional good that seems to prioritize ease of navigation and a certain degree of simplicity over eccentricity and experimentation. Perhaps the transition from esoteric and lofty to more straightforward and practical mirrors a general trend within architectural communication and design, favoring plain, no-nonsense language and messaging.

This shift in language proves most effective in the website section that addresses sustainability—I’d implore you to spend some time with it. Given HdM’s long-standing commitment to building rehabilitation, responsible urbanism, and local material usage, the statement reads as one of the few serious ones posted today, defining sustainability as more than just material usage or operational and embodied carbon.

Similar to its previous incarnation, the site has nearly every project HdM has ever done (619 at last count) cataloged chronologically. #001 dates back to 1978, a simple attic conversion in Riehen, Switzerland; #036, 1986, cladding for a house in Fischingen, Germany; #119, 1994, the Central Signal Box in Basel; #226 the Bird’s Nest; #305 TriBeCa’s 56 Leonard Street—and so on and so forth.

#001, Attic Conversion (1978). Elevation. Herzog & de Meuron.

Once one navigates the genealogical tour de force and selects a specific project, an unprecedented amount of material is available for viewing: finished photographs, construction photos, overall plans, models, detail sections, low-res 35mm design process photos, etc. The abundance of images is one of the site’s biggest departures from the previous iteration. In 2019, we were lucky to get four images of a project. Now, HdM has opened the floodgates, welcoming us into their world and process.

If the old website had all the eroticism of that Hinge match whose Instagram only displays elusive pictures with the occasional toned body part eliding the frame, the new website has embraced its identity as a silver fox who has a lot to teach you, if only you would be a good boy and sit down and listen.

#160, Laban Dance Center (2003). Studying a 1:2 model of the shell of the building. Herzog & de Meuron.

#160, Laban Dance Center (2003). Design process & prototyping. Herzog & de Meuron.

HdM’s “more is more” approach situates their brand temporally while collectively framing the act of architecture. We see employees throughout the firm’s history actively participating in the design process, the public enjoying the spaces, and the workers who built them. The celebration of the construction worker in project after project and image after image is perhaps one of the most refreshing aspects of HdM’s new website. Whether consciously or not, architects often distance themselves from the workers who construct their buildings, but HdM brings the laborer back into frame. 

#319, Naturbad Riehen (2014). Construction photo. Herzog & de Meuron.

In an increasingly atomized and siloed world, architects have the chance to engage people across many media, from public meetings for civic projects, to educational lectures, and, yes, even websites. Most people who don’t work in the design or building industry get only glimpses of what is involved in making a building—some people might enjoy peeking through the scaffolds and fences that obscure buildings under construction, or even looking at renders pasted on those very same scaffolds, showing what’s to come. But it might take architects speaking more clearly—and critics keeping them on their toes—for a more transparent and less exclusive understanding of our discipline’s tools and what can be done. HdM’s new website prompts us to reconsider what it means for architects to commit to making buildings—the tangible and the intangible aspects—as public as possible.

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Francis Aguillard is an architectural and urban designer currently working for Henning Larsen in New York. Previously, he worked for Waggonner & Ball in New Orleans, his hometown, on water management and resiliency projects and BMW Mini Living in Munich. He is a Fulbright-LSE scholar; his research focused on urban canal living in London.

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>>Decoding the Conversation

This Land Is Not My Land

Mark Jarzombek and Vikramaditya Prakash
September 2023

The state of land acknowledgment in the United States today is in a crisis. Though many large institutions now readily have such acknowledgments—a step in the right direction—they do not get to the heart of the matter and typically lack meaningful calls for action. Land acknowledgments do nothing to address private property—despite the fact that American colonialism is closely rooted in it—and do almost nothing to educate the public about local Native American claims, politics, and culture. The Office of (Un)Certainty Research (OUR), a design research practice established by the authors, proposes a way to address this dilemma and implicate colonial property ownership through physical intervention.

There can be no disputing the basic fact: all land in the Americas is defined by the break brought on by the era of colonial settlement that, once integrated into the policies of the nation-state, moved across the landscape at different speeds and with various energies and acts of violence. In Massachusetts, for example, the Enfranchisement Act of 1869 granted full citizenship rights to Indigenous peoples. But there was a downside to this act; it eliminated the collective land holdings of tribal communities. Before then, local Native American communities—despite a series of armed conflicts dating back to King Philip's War (1675-1676), despite instances of enslavement and deportation to the Bahamas, and despite widespread forced religious conversions, often accompanied by significant territorial restrictions—still retained thousands of acres guaranteed by treaty. Under the new act, tribal lands held collectively were divided and sold. This was only one of several mechanisms, some “legal” and some not, by which land in Massachusetts disappropriated Native American communities from ancestral land. The residue of these actions remain in our educational system. In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, nowhere along a public student’s educational trajectory is there a single lesson that points to the history of the Massachusetts people—even though a Massachusetts sachem (chief) appears on the state flag—nor to the fact that there are still Native American communities in the state.

The story of land in Massachusetts—including the story of silencing—is, of course, part of a sprawling history of the property-ification that rarely rises to the surface of national consciousness. The Museum at Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis states on its website that it traces “the story of the Native Americans, explorers, pioneers, and rebels who made America possible.”¹ The enduring myth of individual achievement being what “made America possible” neatly sidesteps the less-comfortable, but just as fundamental, role played by the ideology of private land ownership. If we think of an ideology as a collection of overarching ideas that are assumed to be quasi-natural by a particular group, then private property certainly functions as a comprehensive ideology. Despite the complicated history of property rights in Europe (going back as it does to the Romans), the basic, modern equation between land ownership and the right to be political took shape in England in the 16th and 17th centuries on the very eve of the colonization of the Americas. After the formation of the United States, without royal property to worry about (much less lingering feudal rights), transforming land into property had a clarity in relationship to nation-building that had not previously existed anywhere in the world. Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln all worked as surveyors early in their careers. And property was of course, essential to the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

If transforming land into property opened up social and economic opportunities for the newcomers, it was designed to put Indigenous populations into weakened positions. And this remains systemic to our contemporary situation. Kyle Whyte, an environmental justice scholar at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, reminds us that “colonialism and land dispossession are present factors that increase vulnerability and create economic challenges for tribes.”²

The critical issue, however, is that Native land—then and now—was and is of a different cultural order than land as understood by arriving settlers. This was not unknown to government officials. For example, in 1889 a Congressional study of the Native American land purchases in Oklahoma noted that the Cherokees, who during the 1830s and 1840s were forcibly moved from areas in the Carolinas and Georgia to what is now Oklahoma, objected to the sale of the land on which they had been settled. One officer noted that “[w]hen it comes to the Indian[,] putting a price on his land he is at a loss, for he has never considered it a matter of speculation. The idea of ‘Mother Earth’ to him (Indian) is almost a literal expression.”³

Today, in some corners of the U.S., Native communities have started to buy back pieces of land, in some instances receiving land as a gift or by repatriation from the government.⁴ But as important as these efforts are, they do not address the basic problem that all land is marked by the historic rupture precipitated by the nation-state. Which begs the question: When did land shift from being part of Mother Earth to become “property”? The answer might lie in some archive or with a map, but it might also lie somewhere in the root systems of the plants and trees that were chopped down to make way for crops, roads, and buildings. This basic truth applies to every piece of “property” in the Americas, to one’s neighbor’s as well as one’s own. 

In the last few years, large institutions have begun to do their part in this conversation by making “acknowledgments.” In places like Australia and New Zealand, oral land acknowledgments at the beginning of public events are now a long-standing tradition. On the West Coast of the United States, they are increasingly commonplace. On the East Coast they are more recent. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), for instance, an acknowledgment that its land was unceded territory was drafted in 2020—the belatedness of this acknowledgment a reflection of MIT’s long-term, scandalous indifference. A working group of students, staff, and faculty at MIT suggested, however, that the acknowledgment not be made official until more serious work has been done to “encourage an active, rather than a passive, commitment to Indigenous people, communities, and Nations.”⁵ The reason for their action is obvious. A recent headline in The Atlantic said it well: “‘Land Acknowledgments’ Are Just Moral Exhibitionism.” They relieve the speaker and the audience of the responsibility to think about Indigenous peoples, at least until the next public event. The author of the article, Graeme Wood, adds that “[i]t is like a receipt provided by a highway robber, noting all the jewels and gold coins he has stolen.”⁶

Indeed, land acknowledgments do not address the need for cultural repair. They also do not address the equally pressing question about the reality of land.⁷ And they completely sidestep the question: Can we—individually—do something? After all, there are currently over 80 million landowners, individuals and land-owning corporations in the United States.⁸

The 1 BY 1 Design Project

O(U)R proposes the 1BY1: Land Acknowledgement Design Challenge. The concept is that beyond a verbal or written acknowledgment, every property owner is invited to physically acknowledge that the land they call property is disappropriated. (The predecessorial historicity of property is not something that can be denied.)

One-foot Square Mirror, Mark Jarzombek, Submission for 1BY1 Design Challenge. Courtesy of O(U)R.

Property owners design and produce a 1 meter by 1 meter physical “acknowledgment” on their property, open and visible to the public. As homeowners research the history of their property, they become micro-historians increasingly knowledgeable about local history. The project envisions a world where, as the challenge takes root across a community, people will walk around the neighborhood and talk to each other about the various contributions, mapping out a community spirit that accepts and respects the presence of the land’s deep history. (The name of the challenge, 1BY1, references not just the scale of the intervention—one meter by one meter, one arm’s length by one arm’s length, etc.—but also the additive nature of the enterprise: one property after another.)

Coast Salish Retable, Jennifer Danison, Submission for 1BY1 Design Challenge. Courtesy of O(U)R.

The challenge aims to make evident that the settler colonial structure of property does not obliterate the layer of Mother Earth. It is stamped onto it. But how should one express the fact that land has two histories, one suppressed under the other?

The project is certainly utopian. But sometimes, it only takes a few seeds to start a movement. Indeed, the challenge has now been picked up by several participants who have come from various walks of life. One person picked a place where soil brought by dinner guests can be deposited. Over time, the mound will grow into something much larger. Another designed a type of altar. Jennifer Danison, an artist, made a structure from organic material found on a beach; Robert Cowherd, an architect in Cambridge, worked with his community to not only propose an installation but to even suggest a change in Cambridge’s legal system:

WHEREAS Indigenous land rights pre-date subsequent claims; now therefore be it

ORDERED That every parcel registered in the City of Cambridge shall erect a ground marker acknowledging Indigenous land rights and the conditions by which subsequent rights and governance provisions shall comply.

An excellent idea.

Coast Salish Retable, Jennifer Danison, Submission for 1BY1 Design Challenge. Courtesy of O(U)R.

Seven Sacred Directions Indigenous Land Maker, Robert Cowherd, Submission for 1BY1 Design Challenge. Courtesy of O(U)R.

O(U)R has run workshops with the North American Indian Center of Boston as well as in local schools. Participants are generally willing to create a physical marker for the land they reside on, a first step toward accepting the basic fact that the land they live on was, and still is, Native land.

One of the many lessons we learned is that it is harder than one thinks to convince people to engage in this challenge. It is easier to read out an acknowledgment than to do something in public on one’s own property. What will the neighbors be saying? Most propertied Americans hardly think of the land their house was built on except when it comes time to mow the lawn or rake the leaves. This blind spot in our collective consciousness is itself a construct of our naturalized, settler-colonial mentality.

1. “Homepage,” The Gateway Arch, accessed June, 2023, https://www.gatewayarch.com.

2. Lizzie Wade, “Native tribes have lost 99% of their land in the United States,” Science.org (Oct. 28, 2021): https://www.science.org.

3. “Chief Mayes to U.S. Commission, December 28, 1889,” Correspondence of 1898 between the United States Commission and Cherokee National Authorities (Washington D.C. 1890), 126.

4. The U.S. holds approximately 56 million acres of land in trust for various Native American tribes and individuals, according to the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management.

5. “Report of the Indigenous Working Group.” (December 2022): 

   https://reif.mit.edu/sites/default/files/Indigenous_Working_Group_Report.pdf

6. Graeme Wood, “‘Land Acknowledgments’ Are Just Moral Exhibitionism,” The Atlantic, November 28, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com.

7. For a full discussion of how the history of the local Native American community is misrepresented in the cultural landscape, see: Mark Jarzombek, “The ‘Indianized’ Landscape of Massachusetts,” Places (February 2021): https://placesjournal.org.

8. In 1978 there were 60-77 million landowners (individuals and corporations.) I am extrapolating but I am assuming there are well over 80 million. Gene Wunderlich, Facts about US Landownership (U.S. Department of Agriculture Economics, Statistics, and Cooperatives Service Agriculture Information Bulletin No. 422), v. The homeownership rate in the United States is about 65. https://www.statista.com/statistics/184902/homeownership-rate-in-the-us-since-2003.

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Mark Jarzombek is Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at MIT. He is a co-founder of the Global Architecture History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC), and together with Vikramāditya Prakash and Francis D.K. Ching, a co-author of the textbook A Global History of Architecture (Wiley Press, 2006). His most recent book is Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

Vikramāditya Prakash is a professor of architecture at the University of Washington in Seattle, with adjunct appointments in landscape architecture, urban design and planning. His books include Chandigarh's Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India (University of Washington Press, 2001), A Global History of Architecture (with Francis DK Ching & Mark Jarzombek, John Wiley, 2017). He has served as chair and associate dean and is co-principal investigator (with Mark M. Jarzombek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) of the Mellon Foundation funded Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC).

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>>What’s the Matter with Canon?

The Media Ecosystem of Architecture

A Conversation with Eva Hagberg
September 2023

How do buildings become architecture? Narrative-making and the role of the press are inextricably intertwined with the production of architectural culture, and, by extension, what is consumed, discussed, remembered, and eventually taught. Editor Mai Okimoto speaks with Eva Hagberg about writing, publicity, and the politics of self-promotion.

Mai Okimoto (MO): Tell us about your book, When Eero Met His Match!

Eva Hagberg (EH): It's a hybrid biography and personal narrative. It had its origins in my dissertation for Visual and Narrative Culture at the University of California, Berkeley. The book aims to interrogate—and ultimately undo—academics' reliance on the press as a neutral archive. Historians have this idea that if somebody is in a magazine, it's because they deserve to be there by merit. My book demonstrates that this is often not true. It reveals that architectural media is produced in an ecosystem that contains an important element at its core: the publicist.

I use long-time New York Times art critic and the first architectural publicist, Aline Louchheim Saarinen, as a case study, arguing that she professionalized the role of architectural publicist while also being the wife to her client, Eero Saarinen. I shed light on her role in Saarinen’s work and its public narrative, as well as how the relationship shaped her own work. Then I place that story and framework against the backdrop of my own work as a publicist; while I’m not married to any of my clients, I learned a great deal from Aline. The book takes two strands: 1) the interrogation of my own work and how I learned my methods, and 2) Aline’s trajectory and ways of working, and how she came to influence the production of architectural culture. The book is juicy. It's been called a “beach read,” which is great to hear considering it’s an academic text.

MO: Were there any themes that emerged or discoveries made as the project developed into the hybrid form of biographical research and personal account?

EH: One of the main arguments I make is about the iterative relationship between design and narrative. A design propels a narrative forward, which then propels a design forward, and so on. My book has the same iterative relationship to itself: An autobiographical, memoir-like chapter informs the ideas I explore in the next chapter. That scholarly chapter then sets the stage for the next chapter. With many academic books, you can read a chapter on its own, or read the chapters in any order of your choosing. This book is an argument against that, because each chapter sets you up for the one that you're going to read next. The iterative relationship of the chapters forms an interplay of arguments; historicizing arguments and looking at them in context. I was interested in this process of layering different arguments on top of each other.

As for what I learned while I was writing it, I think I always learn from what I'm writing. I never really know what I'm going to say until I write it down. Writing for me is a very intense, generative process.

The front cover of When Eero Met His Match: Aline Louchheim Saarinen and the Making of an Architect. Photo by AWW.

MO: You mentioned earlier that your book has been called a “beach read.” As you make evident by the writing process which you’ve just outlined, every part of it is intentional and deliberate. I think readers often have this misled assumption that if something is easy to watch or easy to read, it must have been easy to make.

EH: There is this very pernicious idea that personal writing is somehow this freeflow of words and ideas that just comes out of your brain, whereas academic writing is careful, rigorous, and thoughtful. The chapters that are personal were as carefully and meticulously constructed as the chapters that are academic.

It was important for me to delve into the ways in which women hide behind this semblance of spontaneity or being oversharers, which is actually a meticulous and controlled performance. Aline was very personal in her letters to people, and often pretended that she didn't know where things were, and was chaotic in her presentation. I would say that I'm writing very much in the tradition that she started, which is disarming her reader, disarming her interlocutor into thinking that they're getting a very personal take. Ultimately, Aline manipulates her interlocutors into believing what she wants them to believe and into doing what she wants them to do.

I am also always interested in exploring how to undo this knee-jerk reaction against memoirs—particularly against memoirs written by women, where the praise is often focused on the bravery of the author sharing her story. When someone like Karl Ove Knausgård writes My Struggle, technically a novel but very much based on his life, he is lauded for the qualities of his prose. It’s important to note that my book is constructed as a coherent whole through the careful deployment of different tools. One of those tools is biography, another tool is analyses and theory, and another tool is writing about myself.

My great struggle is that people read my writing and say, it's so easy to read that it must have been so easy to write—but that’s why it took ten years.

MO: How does a narrative around the built work come together and eventually become the work’s identity? Could you talk about how you approach the relationship between narrative-making and history, or narrative-making and knowledge?

EH: There are really good theorists on narrative. From a literary standpoint, I'm very influenced by Hayden White and the discursive turn. It’s a moment in the practice of history where new ideas about the role of narrative and the role of coherent storytelling really came to the forefront. Narrative is often constructed by somebody whose job is to do that—and I show this in the book.

I'm interested in the idea (which many architects seem to believe) that buildings tell stories inherently—that if you just look at a building, you'll know what it's about or you'll figure it out—or that their narratives appear out of ether and get adopted on their own. But stories are co-created, and there are originating moments. I use Saarinen’s TWA Terminal (1962, Trans World Airlines Flight Center, New York) as an example of this kind of co-creation. There’s a moment in the Time magazine profile of Saarinen where he tells an anecdote about having been inspired by a breakfast grapefruit, which is a very legible analogy that I argue was constructed by Aline. Later, a writer described it as a soaring bird, and Aline picked up on the soaring bird imagery and made it prevalent in the press. In my research for the book, I traced the construction and adoption of that narrative. Analogy and metaphor are important elements in constructing narratives about buildings.

When Santiago Calatrava unveiled his proposal for the World Trade Center Transportation Hub (2016, New York), he referred to it as a bird in flight, while others compared it to a stegosaurus. In any case, it was immediately anthropomorphized, and the analogies became central to the way people talked about it. With the aid of its newly adopted narrative, the project became more legible and understandable to the general public, making it one of the landmarks in the redevelopment of post-9/11 Lower Manhattan.

Answering how buildings come to have, or exhibit meaning, is very complicated. I think it’s a question that somebody could devote a career to. My book is an attempt to say: Here is one way to approach that question; here is one mechanism and I'm going to trace that mechanism with exacting specificity with the hope that it shows at least one method.

MO: I’m curious about your thoughts on the limited presence of the press in architecture academia and education.

EH: Architects are not taught to take the press seriously. This is funny because, eventually, they want to get published—and they have a profound misunderstanding of how getting published works. As a publicist, I've encountered architects with completely unrealistic ideas about what's going to happen to their project. I think it's unfortunate that the importance of media literacy and architectural press, and how to navigate them, are not taught in architecture schools. There is a great deal of education about how to speak to the press that is necessary.

I think the downside of architectural education is that architecture is reified as a difficult field. When I was in school, I was often reminded by peers and faculty that architecture is the hardest major. “Three quarters of you are going to drop out,” I was once told. There was this sense that if you are sticking to architecture despite all of its challenges, you must be hardcore or smart. I don’t disagree that architecture school is hard, but it's not any harder than learning to write really well. I've spent twenty years getting incrementally better at writing, and that has certainly taken a tremendous amount of effort and thought. Architects don't take the press seriously because they're taught not to take anything auxiliary to architecture very seriously. I think it's a great tragedy.

Aline and Eero Saarinen at a party, ca. 1954. Aline and Eero Saarinen papers, 1906-1977. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

MO: What kind of conversations do you think need to be happening in architecture schools about the press? What should students learn about it?

EH: Students should understand that there is a robust media ecosystem that has been in place for a long time. It is one of the mechanisms behind how architectural culture is produced. Projects do not find a home on the page of a magazine simply because of merit. The canonical buildings are not the best buildings, just as buildings on the cover of magazines are not the best buildings. They are the buildings by architects who have the best publicists and cozy up to the right editors. Of course the projects are good, but I would want students to understand that they shouldn’t simply keep their heads down and do the best work that they can, and hope that the press will find them. That's just not how it works.

I want students to understand that they can interrogate the fame of architects they look up to. They don't have to admire an architect just because they're super famous.

MO: Do you think there have been changes over the years in how architects with their own practices approach narrative-making and publicity of their work? If there are changes, are they affecting how the audience is engaging with the contemporary works?

EH: I think there's been a huge proliferation of media. In the 1950s, there were publications like Architectural Forum, Pencil Points (later Progressive Architecture), and Architectural Record. And now there are both no magazines (there are of course lots) and too many magazines. We also have to talk about Instagram and the rise of the internet. On the one hand, there's been a proliferation of media outlets. At the same time, there has been a flattening of style, flattening of tone, flattening of voice, flattening of the way in which people engage with the content being published. Every firm hires the same five to ten PR firms to guide them. I've been closely following how some PR firms run multiple designers’ social media accounts. Their voices appear very personal, but they're actually all written by a social media account executive who's not even in the architect’s office. We all know there is this layer of falsity and manipulation, and yet we participate in this ecosystem very knowingly and very openly.

What you are all doing at AWW sounds like it's an attempt to bring some seriousness back into the discourse, for want of a better term. Publications like the New York Review of Architecture are doing really incredible, powerful, thought-provoking work. So on the one hand that there is this flattening of the discourse, on the other hand, there's also this opportunity for much more depth and engagement. People are starting to bring politics and history and social justice and labor into their conversations about architecture, which when I was starting out, we didn't really talk about. We were much more invested in the idea that you could have a purely formalist analysis.

In the past twenty years that I have been in the field, there’s been a tremendous change. As a historian, I've learned that every era is on the cusp of disaster and profound change. In the fifties, everybody was writing to each other saying that there is no more good writing and that all the good writing happened before their time. Now, the complaints are the same, which is reassuring in some ways.

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Eva Hagberg is the author of When Eero Met His Match and How to Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship. She holds a PhD in Visual and Narrative Culture from the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in Los Angeles.

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>>What’s the Matter with Canon?

What Excellence?

A Conversation with Yen Ha
September 2023

What lies behind the vast landscape of awards, publications, and mass media that confer "excellence” in architecture? It is in the midst of this landscape that our architectural tastes and opinions evolve. Architect, artist, and writer Yen Ha speaks to this question and more. Over a series of email exchanges with editor Mai Okimoto, Ha shares how her perception of "greatness" or "excellence" in architecture has transformed over the course of her career, from her days as a student to now as educator and architect.

Mai Okimoto (MO): You've worked as both an educator and practitioner of architecture for over two decades now. How has your understanding and engagement with the idea of the architectural canon changed since the time you were a student?

Yen Ha (YH): As students, we rely heavily on our professors to introduce us to works of canon, and I don’t know if it has changed一but certainly when I was a student in the 90s, I don't remember ever questioning their knowledge or inherent biases一which means I understood canon to be the works of men, predominantly white men. It has taken me three decades of practicing and teaching architecture to unravel the assumptions that I learned as a student. The exposure that we now have to different points of view, thanks to the wonderful wide, wide world of the internet, as well as an increasing sense of civic, social, and environmental responsibility means we are well-positioned to wonder and question what great architecture is, and who decides what’s included. It’s hard to break habits, and to constantly reexamine what the majority views as accepted standards of excellence, but I think it’s right that we continue to press the question. It’s possible we will confirm that, yes, Ronchamp is a brilliant piece of architecture; but it’s also possible we will wonder why we don’t celebrate the work of Charlotte Perriand, who worked with Le Corbusier, and who has rarely been included in the discourse around architectural canon of that time.

MO: Have there been specific occasions when you experienced the unraveling of what you learned in school一coming to an understanding of inherent bias, or a shift in the way you engage with architectural work? Besides providing a narrow understanding of what is considered "great architecture," I'm curious if the structure of your education influenced how you approached architectural practice early in your career.

YH: In my early twenties, during the pre-Google Maps era, I was walking with a friend through the narrow streets of Bilbao looking for Calatrava’s Zubizuri bridge. Maybe we were tired and hungry by the time we stumbled across it, but my first glimpse astounded me. I couldn’t believe how he had designed a structure to cross a river that felt like it was made of light and air. It felt to me like the culmination of what we had been taught in school一form following function in the most elegant of solutions. 

Like many young architects, I went into practice focused on the relationship of form to function, and on how to make beautiful things that served their purpose. But practicing architecture made me keenly aware of the people who would be interacting with my work. I started to ask questions about who the architecture served, who determined that, and even who was assigning that value. These questions presented themselves in the books I was reading, in the art I was seeing一with everything I encountered, everywhere I went.

The idea of judging art or architecture solely on its form seemed limited. I wanted to know how people experienced the work and what they felt as they entered the spaces. I wondered if the client needs were satisfied and if the project’s materiality considered local context or global impact. I wanted all of these considerations to be true and relevant criteria by which to judge “great architecture.”

Illustration by Irina Rouby Apelbaum for Architecture Writing Workshop.

MO: What comes to your mind when you hear canon, then and now?

YH: When I was younger, canon used to suggest some sort of irrevocable truth一but I see it now as an evolving body of work that we should all contribute to defining. I have more recently come to understand canon, then, as something determined by someone else, someone who is not me: a minority, or immigrant, or woman. I am waiting for the time when architecture becomes made up of even more diverse voices and identities so that we can redefine canon in a way that encompasses everyone.

MO: How do you see this process of expansion and diversification unfolding in classrooms? Has the role of the educator shifted, in this respect? And what agency are students exercising to challenge and change the culture?

YH: It seems to me that what’s happening within cultural discourse broadly一in literature, movies, or art一is that we are beginning to address context in the framework of canon. In order to define, or redefine, “great architecture,” we have to determine what “great” means, and for who and by whom. I agree that teaching and learning feel like they should be a collaboration and conversation that involve both the educator and student. What I hope to contribute is the experience of a practicing architect, and a much broader base of knowledge. While I would never want to present myself as an ultimate authority on what is “great,” I can explain, instead, what might make a particular building great and for whom, and I can share a wide range of factors for consideration. In the end, though, it is the role of the learner to understand that greatness is not defined by one voice or experience, but reflects a cumulative understanding.

MO: Are there aspects of architectural work that the Western canon has overlooked in the past, but that you think are important to consider when evaluating the work’s significance in the discourse?

YH: I feel that the modern Western canon has lost sight of some of the harmonious components of building that are important to other cultures. We don’t seem to value the role of the environment or natural conditions in our cities, relying too much on man-made systems. I wonder, too, about the Western canon’s emphasis on overall form, that form follows function, and less on the individual experience. I’m supremely interested in how a space is actually experienced, and whether or not it feels accessible to the broadest range of peoples.

MO: Do you think it is important that we continue to have the idea of canon一not necessarily the Western canon, but a body of work that is collectively understood as “great architecture”一as an education tool?

YH: I do think it’s important to have canon! For one, it makes our jobs as professors a little easier to be able to call upon a body of work and knowledge that we know succeeds in meeting criteria for “greatness”; but more than that canon allows all of us, teachers and students, to have a common understanding of the elements of architecture that work, that withstand time, that touch the most people.

While we think of canon as the standard by which we judge greatness, we also have to remember that canon is not immutable. I think we’re in a moment where it needs to be vigorously reexamined and redefined by the broadest range of people, and for the widest spectrum of humans, so that we can have a body of work that more accurately reflects our collective experience.

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Yen Ha is an architect, artist and writer. Born in Saigon, she lives in New York City, where she co-founded the architecture firm, Front Studio. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon and L’École d’Architecture in Paris, she has taught at Washington University in St. Louis and Rice University.

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>>What’s the Matter with Canon?

What’s in a Name?

A Conversation with Ajay Manthripragada,
Alex Oetzel, and Letícia Wouk Almino
September 2023

For Architecture Writing Workshop’s third issue, What’s the Matter With Canon?, the editors convened a roundtable to explore how the changing perceptions of the architectural canon shape the modes of comprehending, organizing, and representing architectural knowledge.

How does a cultural product from the past, as is the canon, remain relevant to the myriad cultures and values around the globe—and the buildings they produce? Architecture’s inherited canon is variably understood as a defined set of architectural works and as knowledge that is (re)assessed and selected to be passed on to future generations. Depending on who you ask, the canon is either dismissed altogether—its legacy ignored—or, increasingly, reexamined through the lens of how we produce and organize contemporary architectural knowledge.

Editors Pouya Khadem and Mai Okimoto moderated the following discussion on architecture’s canon with Ajay Manthripragada, Alex Oetzel, and Letícia Wouk Almino. Discussants draw on experiences from their studies, teaching, and practice. (This roundtable has been edited for length and content.)

Mai Okimoto (MO): What is canon? Does it refer to buildings—or can it be used to describe ideas? Are works described as canonical synonymous with great work? Is this term still relevant to our field today?

Ajay Manthripragada (AM): It's a big question. I'm interested in the way you're phrasing the term "canon" without the article "the." You're saying "canon," as opposed to "the canon" or "the canonical." I'm wondering if that indicates something about an interest in its redefinition or rethinking.

By definition, the canon is a Western construct. The origin of the idea—that there's a body of works to which everyone refers and agrees upon their excellence—is derived from the concept of the canonization of saints in the Catholic tradition. In an academic context, whether it's literature, art, or architecture, the canon became construed as a body of creative works. For me, that's important to acknowledge because it has a different relationship to authority.

Letícia Wouk Almino (LWA): It’s a complicated term—and increasingly less relevant. I find it difficult to use the term at all. It’s a word that is not easily dissociated from its classic definition as a particular set of Western works. With a greater diversity of people teaching at institutions and bringing in voices from all over the globe, we're transitioning away from the singular way of thinking about architecture. One way in which this is happening is through the language we use to discuss architecture—through a new set of terms to address the complexity of perspectives and modes of practice.

Alex Oetzel (AO): I don’t think the shift in attitude toward the canon, on its own, is novel. The discipline has always been dealing with cultural transformations and changes in values. What matters is how the changes are happening, who has influence, and what are the tangible outcomes...

AM: Figures in other disciplines (literature for instance) have been unabashed about defining the canon by definitively selecting a group of works. It tends to be more nebulous in architecture—the canon is implied and rehearsed over many iterations and repetitions of certain examples in academia, and, for my set of interests, in the discipline of formal analysis. There's a kind of reciprocity between the definition of the canon and formal analysis. They support each other.

I agree with Letícia—we don't have to use the word, but I appreciate aspects of what it represents because it allows us to collectively have a conversation about what we value.

LWA: I am also a disciple of formal analysis. It was preached to me, and that's how I and a lot of people learned architecture, following a lineage of academics who have also been taught this way. Naturally, you would be narrowly limited to a specific subset of buildings that can be formally analyzed; there are only certain schools of thought that allow you to talk about architecture in this way. The more I think about your question, the more I realize that the problem of the canon is a question about architecture education. If we change the conversation, we'll be open to discussing different types of buildings that don't fit within the rules of formal analysis.

AM: I agree; these are important points. As we expand the references, we also need to completely reconsider the tools by which we look at them. There is a body of representational strategies that we can leverage, adapt, and change as we look at other aspects of architecture. However, I've come to see a flaw in the argument: Why do we need to draw them at all? Why draw a plan of a building conceived outside the logic of a plan? 

AO: I think our attitudes towards the relationship between canon and education are most visible in classrooms. I recently taught a studio at Ohio State University (OSU) about high-rise hotels. Before moving to the design phase, I prepared a list of over one hundred precedents of skyscrapers across history for the students to study the formal typology and its history. We started in Chicago where the first skyscrapers were built, but I encouraged them to branch out. The quantity of towers meant each building analysis had to be very quick, and encouraged a non-hierarchical study of the typology’s historic range and collective characteristics, rather than in-depth formal analyses of specific buildings.

MO: To Alex’s point, there’s value in rethinking how we approach precedents. We have access to more information compared to fifty years ago when architectural knowledge came from fewer sources such as print publications. It’s also interesting to think about formal analysis and how it lends itself to books and exhibitions. I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are on the changing nature of media and how that's shaping the way we're recognizing certain works.

LWA: This ties back to what Ajay mentioned about formal analysis as a tool of representation. It has its limits: it only works for buildings that have been drawn or documented. For me, this is quite exclusionary. The types of buildings that have been published are the ones that architecture institutions have historically favored through funding and resources—and are often buildings by architects who are savvy about self-promotion. In order to move away from the narrow scope of the canon, we need to diversify the ways in which information is passed down. In other words, we need educators who can develop new methodologies to confront the ever-expanding landscape of information and introduce students to varied perspectives. The unfortunate default is to reference parts of history that are the subject of easily-accessible, published materials.

AM: It is not a new idea that the expanded set of references cannot be understood autonomously as material realities in the world without understanding their deeper cultural and ritualistic significance. Therein lies a very fundamental problem in our premise: Looking at the architectural complexities of these buildings and gaining a deep knowledge of their cultural significance (particularly in the context of a design studio with its limited timeframes) substantially increases the risk of having misrepresentations, misunderstandings, and misinformation. They cannot be reduced to an elevation from which we then borrow. I don’t have an answer to the problem, but perhaps we have to open up to other forms of representation that are completely outside of the conventional drawings and models.

AO: I recently encountered Audrey Bennett’s essay, describing the history of the golden ratio from its origins in Africa to its use by the Bauhaus. The golden ratio (that celebrated, geometrically-derived divine proportion) was presented in my early architectural education as a Western (specifically ancient Greek) invention. According to Bennett, its origins are much older and applied throughout different cultures and regions from informal Sub-Saharan communities to Napoleonic Italy. Her analysis of the golden ratio is an example that shows how each generation’s understanding of the canon is heavily influenced by how their predecessors conceived and shared knowledge; possibly reduced or misremembered. Perhaps through rethinking the tools and framework of our studies, we might begin to notice forms that are shared across cultures and see ideas that are lost or misremembered by previous generations.

I’ve found myself feeling the time and curriculum constraints of what you can cover in a semester-long studio. Besides the logistic constraints, there are also limits to my own knowledge and subjectivity as an instructor. There are acts of exclusion and emphasis that happen as a result of limits of my body, mind, and time.

Pouya Khadem (PK): Even if studio resources and timeframes were to expand, is there ever a point at which everything can be comprehensively and, let’s say “democratically” studied? Is there any realistic circumstance under which no building is excluded from study?

AM: Is selecting which buildings to teach an exclusionary act? Yes, but I don't think that's necessarily a problem in itself. The methods by which we adjudicate need to change, evolve, and expand, but judgment is a part of discourse and pedagogy. The way that I've been addressing this in my seminars is to encourage students to bring projects to the table and argue for their excellence. These works can be from any source as long as the students can make the case for their close study. This opens up possibilities for authorship and criteria. The idea that there can be a body of counter-canonical works that also can be theorized (in this case according to the students' arguments) is very interesting to me.

PK: There are many useful things that we’ve inherited from this methodological framework we call the canon, and of course, we’re not talking about entirely throwing that knowledge away. Like any heritage, however, the canon and the way it is broadly understood carry the cultural values and assumptions of a certain time and place.

AM: The canon is a cultural inscription, but it claims to be otherwise. It claims that a work's greatness is inherent, independent of personal opinion. But, of course, that is impossible. The matter of assessment is always someone's opinion, and this is a paradoxical condition of the canonical. It claims to be dispassionate but by definition, it isn't. In this same paradoxical tension, I find some educational value. If we accept that the canon is a false construct, then we can keep defining it, redefining it, and using it to our advantage as an educational and cultural tool.

LWA: I continue to find a problem with referencing the term or even referencing architecture knowledge as a set of works that we need to talk about. It would be more productive to reframe the canon just as one element of architectural history. We keep returning to certain buildings and architects because they were influential to a certain subset of architects. When I teach, we discuss who these people were because architecture history is not just about the buildings. It's necessary to teach the good, bad, and ugly about the influential people of the past. Instead of canon, which implies a set of works divorced from history, it's more helpful to think about the conditions, cultures, and the influence of the people behind those works as irreducible from a specific moment in history. We're shifting away from seeing the architecture scene as an aggregation of singular works by singular geniuses. We don't all have to have the same set of references or foundational principles. Why do we need to discuss the canon as something more than a moment in history?

AO: It's worthwhile to think about a work of architecture as a point of reference—one of many—that brings us to the approximation of all the narratives built around it, its circumstances, and the people who were involved in the process of realizing it.

MO: We have been exploring the shifts in how the canon is taught and discussed. Does this shift ultimately manifest in the built environment—for example, via students that go on to work at architecture firms? Or are these kinds of changes merely happening within academia?

AM: I would answer this in relation to Letícia's points about letting the term go—implying the canon itself is going to be relegated to history. In that imagination, it would still continue to influence what we see in the world, even as a historical fact against which we work. There will always be a specter of it because it was so instrumental in the development of what we understand as a discipline. I'm on the same page as Letícia and Alex, that we should no longer think of it as a body of works to which everyone has to refer. Hopefully, the result will be a more diverse and richer reality in terms of what constitutes great architecture and who produces it.

AO: In my own work, I listen to clients and users describe their preferred way of living and then study ways to translate or materialize their needs using architectural modes of representation. For me, it's important to include them in the design process. This experience is particularly rewarding because it places me face to face with stakeholders who are not coming from years of architecture education that calibrate their references, and can freely engage in conversations about architecture from different perspectives. They don’t have nor need to have extensive knowledge of architecture.

LWA: There needs to be a fundamental shift in the way that we evaluate what is a good work of architecture. Within the tradition of formal analysis, there's almost no need for the building to be built in the first place to be considered good. How do we continue to talk about what is a good work of architecture beyond the narrow conversation around what is a formally good building? What is it like to live in a building? Who are the users? I hope we can develop a framework that allows us to talk with rigor about these topics in academia. It will change how non-architects perceive the built environment, and the conversations happening in architecture schools will become more accessible and relevant to them.

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Ajay Manthripragada is the 2023-24 Lily Auchincloss Rome Prize Fellow in Architecture at the American Academy in Rome. Prior, he was Design Critic in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Alex Oetzel is an architect and educator, typically located in Ohio. She works (more or less) at Moody Nolan and Ohio State University while serving on the AIA Ohio Board of Directors. She enjoys writing for the New York Review of Architecture, attending summer school with the Architecture Lobby, and celebratory donuts.

Letícia Wouk Almino is an architect, artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. She has taught architectural studio and drawing courses at Barnard College and Pratt Institute. Her artwork has been exhibited at 411 Gallery, Pratt SoA Gallery, and at the Center for Architecture.

Pouya Khadem edits for the Architecture Writing Workshop. He works as an architectural designer in Houston.

Mai Okimoto edits for the Architecture Writing Workshop. She works as an architectural designer in Houston.

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>>What’s the Matter with Canon?

Your Way to Work

Reflections of a Commute

Sebastián López Cardozo and Lauren Phillips
March 2023

The commute to your nine-to-five is an hour long and takes you from tram to subway to bus. You’re up at seven thirty, with the kettle going while you get dressed and pack your bag, gulp the coffee and grab a bite of whatever you find on the way out the door. The clock hits eight.

File taxes, finish article draft, do laundry... You type useful reminders on your phone as you wait for the tram. Fitter, happier, more productive… The cold gets to you, you close the notes app and pocket your device. It’s a long day ahead at work—I hope I will find the energy to do these things in the evening. Your job does not involve writing, but along with all the other things that consume your evening, you find time for it. You quickly take out your phone again: Useful, helpful, or full of insight… Is that why you write? No, that’s not it… To your east, the tramway tracks swell and recede with the land beneath it. You wonder when you will see the tram peek above the horizon. 

Traffic and weather, escalators, and screens vie for your attention during the hour-long trek: You run, you stand, you sit. You like the job, and the commute is worth it, but you want something more. You want time for reflection—but perhaps more truthfully, you want meaning, and your commute is the one bit of unscripted time during your day where you can focus on whatever brings you that feeling, your evenings having been largely resigned to food preparation and general exhaustion. What if I did nothing—just sit with my thoughts… Of course you saw Manoush Zomorodi’s TED Talk on boredom and creativity, and you want to believe it’s true; but part of you thinks: If you stop moving, the wheels fall off. 

Your bag is packed with tools for every occasion: A print journal or book for those times when you have poor signal and a predictable stretch; an e-reader pre-loaded with the day’s newspaper, good for most occasions; and a pair of earbuds for chaotic jostlings when you need your eyes free and a podcast might come in handy. Within a matter of minutes you’re on the tram. You try to gauge the journey and decide what tool might work best. Did I leave on time? Are there any transit disruptions? Is it raining, windy, or clear? 

You arrive at the subway station. By now, you’ve made your selection. Once underground, it’s going to be difficult to get a signal, so hopefully you’ve saved a podcast episode ahead of time. If you’ve done a good job plotting your course, the subway will be the time where you get the longest and most stable chunk. If you’ve nailed it, you’ll get about thirty minutes when you’ll forget you’re on the train, on this commute, on your way to work. Other than momentary glances at the subway map to keep an eye out for your stop, the battle for your attention is settled.

Illustration by Irina Rouby Apelbaum for Architecture Writing Workshop.

Finally, you arrive at your stop, where you will transfer onto a bus, the final part of your commute. Now in the midst of the city’s bustling traffic and rush hour, there is no doubt about it: You will be standing on a packed bus for the next fifteen minutes. But you’ve prepared for this. Today it’s print: Herzog, a Bellow book. You’re already a good way into it, and so getting your attention back, even on the bus, will not be too difficult. It will all come down to physics: You shift your bag so that the bulk of it is in front of you, avoiding bumping into other passengers to your side or behind you, you rest your elbow on your bag, with the book held closely against your face. Your other hand clutches the grab bar tightly, and you stand with your feet at an open angle, in case of abrupt turns or breaking. 

The difficult part is turning the page, but you’ve done this before: You hold the book half closed, the pinky gives some stability to the back of the book, and your thumb pushes down on the page, then slides and passes the page onto the index, and finally all fingers get back to their position on the next page.

You arrive at your stop and realize you’re seven minutes early. You linger near the building’s entrance. The sun is barely showing through the clouds, and the wind blows with strength. These seven minutes belong to you, and you spend them contemplating a passage you just read in Herzog: 

Elbows on his papers, Moses stared at half-painted walls, discolored ceilings, filthy windows. Something had come over him. He used to be able to keep going, but now he worked at about two per cent of efficiency, handled every piece of paper five or ten times and misplaced everything. It was too much! He was going under.

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Sebastián López Cardozo edits for Architecture Writing Workshop. He works as an architectural designer in Toronto and is a frequent contributor at the New York Review of Architecture.

Lauren Phillips edits for Architecture Writing Workshop. He is a Lecturer at Huckabee College of Architecture at Texas Tech.

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>>Who Gets to Write?

Empty

Learning Space in the COVID Era

Leonid Furmansky
March 2023

Just as there is rarely a definitive, singular answer to the problems we address in our field, there is nothing straightforward or predictable about how and when we develop our architectural knowledge and skills. Learning could take place through our instructors’ sketches and conversations at reviews, or through study models and informal peer feedback exchanged over evening snacks. We often take for granted the classroom spaces where these personal interactions take place. 

Architecture schools catalog the chaotic detritus of studio learning: tables covered with scrap material and orphaned model parts, walls of red-lined pin-ups, the burnt smell from laser cutters—alongside pristine final models and drawings from previous semesters. The COVID-19 pandemic turned studio culture on its head, as institutions scrambled to adjust to a new reality of social distancing and virtual learning.

During the Fall semester of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, photographer Leonid Furmansky passed through the University of Houston Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design (by John Burgee and Philip Johnson, 1982), a building that sees nearly 1,000 students today. He captured the unimaginable: a pristine and empty architecture school.

The University of Houston Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design. Photo by Leonid Furmansky.

The University of Houston Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design.
Photo by Leonid Furmansky.

The University of Houston Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design. Photo by Leonid Furmansky.

The University of Houston Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design. Photo by Leonid Furmansky.

The University of Houston Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design. Photo by Leonid Furmansky.

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Leonid Furmansky is a Texas-based Landscape and Architectural photographer. He is driven to document structures that represent the way we live. Leonid's work has been published in the New York Times, Architectural Newspaper, Divisare, Texas Architect, Dwell, and ArchDaily. Leonid spends his free time documenting rural and overcrowded cities and experimenting with film photography.

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>>A Look at the Classroom

Class Talk

A Conversation with Zaid Kashef Alghata
March 2023

About two years ago, Zaid Kashef Alghata, a Bahraini-Iraqi designer and educator working in the United States, told me that, in his opinion, 2020 marked a turning point in architectural education. The events that unfolded in 2020—the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police—heightened and illuminated stark social and economic divisions in the U.S. and beyond, creating ripples across educational institutions. This interview serves as a way to check in and have a conversation about the state of architectural education. I spoke with Kashef Alghata about the politics of research funding, the value of extra-institutional teaching and mentoring, and more.

Sebastián López Cardozo (SLC): Broadly speaking, what has been your recent experience of architecture’s educational landscape?

Zaid Kashef Alghata (ZKA): I am happy to see that institutions are increasingly asking questions like: What minority voices have been ignored? What kind of knowledge is missing? Unfortunately, there is a disconnect between institutional efforts to elevate the voices and discourse of underrepresented communities and the economic reality that underpins these efforts: All across the United States, the humanities are seeing a decline in enrollment while STEM degrees are on the rise. Architecture uncomfortably straddles these two realms, and its internal funding qualms might be representative of that discomfort.

What I’m seeing on the ground is that there are plenty of funding opportunities for minority-focused projects in architecture, but most of them amount to very small grants—between $500 and $3,000 on average. Underenrollment complicates that further. Students at architecture schools are sidelining courses that don’t provide job-ready skills—and this often includes courses with a minority focus. This is difficult to come to terms with as an educator, but it isn't our students’ fault; it’s the context they're living in—a bleak economic outlook coupled with the ever-increasing cost of living and debt. 

SLC: Right—and that has a deep effect on how you direct your research…

ZKA: When you want to teach issues that haven't been widely discussed, you're required to first do the difficult research—pinning down primary sources, recording, measuring, archiving, all things which require time and funds not readily available. It's not the same as teaching a class on Palladio—there are many publications and countless courses have been taught on the topic. 

SLC: Despite those difficulties, you’ve been teaching courses on understudied topics. I would be interested in hearing how you’ve approached that and what insights have emerged from the experience.

ZKA: Last semester, I taught a class on Braddock, a town nine miles out of Pittsburgh, where one of the earliest Bessemer steel plants opened in the U.S. in 1873. Braddock used to be prosperous, but the pollution from the plant led to white flight, while segregation and redlining restricted the Black community’s mobility. At the plant, there was what I think was called the "dead man's job," which encompassed jobs that directly and negatively affected the worker's health. These jobs were disproportionately given to Black workers, aggravating an already inequitable situation. Today, Braddock’s social infrastructure is practically nonexistent; it faces food insecurity and high poverty rates, among other issues.

Our seminar asked students to put together short films that engaged underrepresented histories of Braddock. (Visualizing things that they found problematic about these histories was a way to induce conversations.) One of my students confronted an institution they are a part of, which has historically left out Black voices. The soundtrack they created used a mix of popular Black musicians and a documentary on rappers in Braddock, titled “Braddocc Mon Valley.” The school’s retention and archiving regulations meant that they were able to embed the perspective of local artists within the institutional archive. 

How do you utilize existing structures to infiltrate institutions and foster necessary conversations? It's not easy to navigate these complex and layered landscapes. I think there is always a balancing act between the logistical part of the job, and the content explored. The question is how far can you really go?

SLC: Before coming back to teach in the U.S., you did some workshops and courses in Bahrain?

ZKA: Yes, at the University of Bahrain and King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals in Saudi Arabia. Several others took place in classroom spaces I rented out. In that sense, the workshops weren’t really part of any curriculum and were completely independent.

Kashef Alghata during desk crits with his workshop students at a café in Bahrain, July 2018.

SLC: How did this experience affect how you view teaching now?

ZKA: The workshops were exciting to run—they gave me absolute freedom to tailor the workshops to students’ needs. To accommodate students balancing various obligations, I created a flexible course schedule. It was interesting to see that operating outside an institution created a safer space for students of all backgrounds. They were all accepting and supportive of each other. It provided me with evidence that working outside of established structures could be a productive way to create new forms of community.

SLC: After some years of working as an instructor and a designer, you went back to school for a postgraduate degree. Did this have a significant impact on your pedagogical approach?

ZKA: One of the most important lessons that I took from my postgraduate degree is that I came to understand experience as a form of knowledge. I can probably trace this shift in my thinking to a conversation I had with Sylvia Lavin, Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University. We were discussing my thesis—I wanted to focus on Bahrain—and I said: Going to Bahrain for thesis is classified as experience, whereas if I go to Rome, it's knowledge. So how do I bring Bahrain into the discourse? I can't remember the response verbatim, so I'll paraphrase it: 

Some experiences may provide knowledge, but we may not recognize them as such. To understand the knowledge we possess, we should examine our life history and determine if it forms a unique data set that is not just personal experience but also influenced by geopolitical factors. Our intellectual, conceptual, and geographical journeys may accumulate to create specific knowledge we can identify. When we consider our homeland in relation to knowledge, we may feel uncertain about what we know because it does not fit our expectations of what is currently valued in our field. The definition of knowledge is complex, and there are distinctions between information, wisdom, and knowledge. Knowledge can be seen as inchoate, which means it exists outside the conventions of our field. However, this unconventional knowledge has the potential to produce new ideas and offer an exciting approach to a more inclusive discourse.

So, it's important for me to express this idea in my teaching and mentoring. I tell my students that while there is a great deal of theory and technique to master in architecture school, at the heart of it, they already possess an untaught set of knowledge and skills that will allow them to contribute to the discourse in meaningful ways which shouldn’t be ignored. One of my duties as an educator is to equip students with technical skills so they can go on to incorporate their individual knowledge into the discipline. 

I am constantly amazed by the way students can harness their individual power to bring needed change to our field. The truth is that educators or staff in precarious situations are less likely to speak up and demand change, although that is slowly beginning to shift. We must all ask of ourselves: How do we best contribute to building a healthy, rigorous, and inclusive educational system in architecture?

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Zaid Kashef Alghata is the Joseph F. Thomas Visiting Professor at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture and founder of House of ZKA.

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>>A Look at the Classroom

Teaching, etc.

An Annotated Conversation Between Emerging Educators

Ekin Erar and Leyuan Li

Annotations by Mai Okimoto and Pouya Khadem

March 2023

What does it mean for writing to be a collaborative and discursive process? 

The following text gathers a series of email exchanges between two friends, Ekin Erar and Leyuan Li—both emerging educators at U.S. architecture schools. During the Fall 2022 semester, they shared updates of their professional lives along with candid reflections of their respective teaching roles, providing a glimpse into the daily scenes in architecture academia.

As an annotated written conversation, the piece explored the slower temporality of the written medium. Through shared observations with Ekin and Li, editors Mai Okimoto and Pouya Khadem became indirect participants to their dialogue—perhaps traceable in its shifting tones. The editors’ notes developed independently to connect the text to recent events, disciplinary discussions, and policy landscapes. They read the conversation through themes of the position of adjunct faculty, architectural pedagogy, the predicaments of architectural academics, and the business of the architecture academy.

This conversation has been edited for length and content. The annotations reflect only the views and opinions of the editors, not of the participating authors.

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Date: Oct. 18, 2022
From: Ekin Erar

Hi Li,

How’s your semester going? It's your last semester in Houston—must be bittersweet but also, exciting?

I just finished drafting the syllabus for my upcoming elective. How’s yours going? It’s a bit intimidating, writing a syllabus is like devising a pedagogical prompt: There’s pressure to decide what’s worth teaching for an entire semester, and to figure out how to integrate your proposal with the school’s overall discourse. 

I visited the university’s Human Ecology department today because I wanted to familiarize myself with their resources (my seminar has a sewing component to it). They have great facilities and a strong textile department—it would be amazing to share technology and machinery between departments. The professor who gave me the tour said she couldn’t recall any collaborations between our two departments. Could be a good opportunity.

Tell me about yourself.

Ekin

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Date: Oct 22, 2022
From: Leyuan Li

Hi Ekin,

Great to hear from you! I hope your semester has been going well.

The past few days have been hectic. I stayed up until 7:00 this morning to finish applying for a research grant in Hong Kong. Now that I have some time, I’m going over what I want to teach next semester. I love my cohort and my students, but I’m excited about what’s ahead.  [1]

I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted. I’m swamped with work, teaching two studios in order to satisfy the conditions for maintaining my visa status: A first-year studio from 9:00 to noon, and a second-year studio from 1:00 to 5:00 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Reviewing 32 projects in one day is intense. [2]

Most days I only manage to speak with half of the students, so I spend my Tuesdays and Thursdays responding to email questions from the other half—in addition to preparing for the next day’s classes. Virtual communication holdovers from the pandemic can be convenient, but they add pressure to make myself available outside of class to the students who didn't get an in-person critique. I enjoy working with the students, but I end up having less time for my own design and research even though I am aware how important that is for my career. And so I just stay up…Maybe this profession is not for me? I don't know. [3]

Tell me more about your seminar.

Love you,
Li

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Date: Oct 24, 2022
From: Ekin

Hello!!

My seminar prompt is based on the project I worked on with a friend—we had submitted it to a biennale and it was selected as a finalist. While I was happy that the work was recognized, it wasn’t going to get built.

Receiving awards and recognitions can feel like pure luck sometimes, like winning the lottery. I often think about the self-exploitation that we put ourselves through in the hopes for winning commissions. Competition entries require so much free work that I’ve become fundamentally against the ones you have to pay to enter. I’m glad that I get to build a version of this competition entry at the university now as an exhibition, otherwise it was going to be another shelved project. xx

Teaching two studios is absolutely bananas. I can’t believe you are going through with it! I have no idea how anyone can critique 32 projects in a day. Do you do group desk crits? I’ve found it helpful to ask the students to critique each other’s works with me so that they practice thinking critically about their own projects.

How are things going with your work visa? I am a little worried about my status for next year, with no clear plans yet. Hopefully, renewing my visa will not be too complicated. [4]

<3
EE

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Date: Nov 01, 2022
From: Li

Hi Ekin,

Yes—just as it's the case for competition entries, submitting essays/abstracts and applying for grants often needs to happen in the spare time. It often seems to be the only way to get ahead. [5] This year I’ve already applied and submitted to multiple conferences, biennales, and grants. I was lucky enough to have a few of my applications accepted, one of which is an installation at a biennale in Shenzhen that I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. The exhibition opens in less than a month, and I’ve been super busy. I’m still finalizing the design and trying to get in touch with contractors.

Speaking of my work visa, I’m glad that some universities are willing to sponsor visas for their employees with short-term teaching posts. However, the application process has been quite rocky. A few days ago, I received a notification from the government immigration department to submit additional evidence of my current legal status—letters from current supervisors, old paychecks, etc. I feel like I have to constantly prove to the immigration officer that I am a good, well-behaved foreigner. [6]

Best,
Li

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Date: Nov 04, 2022
From: Li

Ekin,

I meant to ask you, how’s your exhibition prep going? How are you feeling?

A few days ago, I had some interesting conversations with my colleagues about the importance of students' involvement in academic mechanics, such as the faculty hiring process or studio review jury. When I was interviewing for fellowships earlier this year, a few schools included students in the interview process, giving them opportunities to voice their opinions and concerns. I think it’s great that this change is taking place; the student body generally seems to have stronger voices and involvement in the administration’s decision-making processes than we had when we were students. xx  Is the mechanism of academia slowly changing, or are students better represented by student government or organizations? I am so happy to see that students are keen on proactively working with university administrators in shaping a more inclusive, diverse, and equal learning environment. Despite many student initiatives, I personally haven’t come across as many faculty collectives, at least not for the adjuncts. [7]

Anyway, just some random thoughts.

Li

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Date: Nov 15, 2022
From: Ekin

Hello friend!

Sorry I’m late to respond. The exhibition is supposed to go up by next week so I have been running around trying to finish the construction. I’ve retrofitted the entry to the hallway—smaller budget, smaller project.

Preparation of Paperspace exhibition installation, Fall 2022, Cornell AAP.

I am sorry to hear about the visa struggle, I totally relate. Despite obtaining legal status to live and work in the U.S., I couldn’t leave the country for the past few years because of immigration restrictions—it can get exhausting to navigate the layers of conditions that one needs to maintain in order to live, work, and travel freely, especially without easy access to administrative, financial, and legal resources.

I’m also thinking about job applications, considering that I don’t have a position secured for next year yet. I worry that every time I get a new position, it will feel like I am starting over in an unfamiliar place, having to deal with the same stress of visas, finances, etc. In the past year, I’ve spent a good chunk from my savings just to stay afloat—moving expenses pile up. I don’t want to have to go through it every year. [8]

My school started a mentor program for fellows. In a recent session, we talked about the review format for studio work—and I realized that reviews can be what makes architecture school challenging for some students. While the review system provides students with the opportunity to practice discussing their work and receive valuable feedback, it also perpetuates a competitive environment. They feel the pressure to perform in front of each other and a group of "jurors"—the word on its own establishes an insurmountable hierarchy. [9]  And the jurors also feel the need to give a strong performance. There is so much pressure to say the right thing at the right time.

Miss you tons,
Ekin

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Date: Nov. 27, 2022
From: Li

Hi Ekin,

Final reviews are coming up in a few days, and my anxiety has been building over the past week. As someone who has always enjoyed giving feedback to friends and students on their work, I don’t know where my anxiety comes from. Is it fear of speaking in front of a large audience? Or is it my concern over how I’m perceived and evaluated by the others? 

A few weeks ago, I attended a midterm review of a second-year studio covering housing and basic principles of design. It’s their first time designing a house, (which is likely what drew many of them to architecture in the first place). Loaded phrases like environmental activism, architectural autonomy, and hierarchy came up in the critique, and I couldn’t help but notice some students looked confused and discouraged. While I think discussing the external forces in tandem with architecture is valuable for students in upper-level studios, this instance made me question whether foundational studios need to concentrate on elementals before anything else.

I agree about the pressure for faculty to perform. It’s not uncommon in an architecture school review to see a juror steer the conversation away from the students’ work—and interesting discussions can surface (even if the students may not think so)—but sometimes it becomes a reviewer’s monologue. I’ve started trying out walk-through reviews, where reviewers move around and talk to students individually. The conversation format seems more relaxing, while remaining productive for both the students and the faculty. xx  

You know architecture is charged with struggles, contradictions, and tensions—it’s unpolished, chaotic, and ever-changing. This is all amplified in the studio, where the lifespan of an architectural project lasts for a semester of sixteen weeks. Within this limited time, students are expected to come up with the polished imagery of a resolved project. 

On the one hand, I want to make visible the unfinished and the unresolved, foregrounding them as a critical part of learning. On the other hand, I understand the intentions behind the pursuit of beautiful images that will come out of the final reviews—they will not only be promoted as the student’s work, but also evaluated as our own. I feel like a salesman.

What instructor wouldn't want to post these polished, curated images on Instagram? In many cases, the desire to publicly express pride for the students and their work (often stemming from a shared sense of co-authorship) becomes inextricable from external pressures to constantly self-advertise. Like the insurance companies that bombard potential customers with calls and emails, we make post after post on social media of beautiful model photos and renders, or the papers we’ve written, presenting ourselves as the future visionary builder. I feel the pressure to post my own design work as if the failure to keep up with others is a form of creative impotence. Where is all of this stress coming from? [10] 

And so here I am, guiding my students over the finish line for final reviews. I find myself wanting to prove my competence by being one of the most beautifully curated studios, while still giving students the freedom to explore. I’m still learning how to let go of the pressure. 

Good luck with your final review, Ekin! 

Warmly,
Li

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Date: Dec. 24, 2022
From: Ekin

Hi! Sorry I didn’t get to respond to you sooner. I was juggling exhibition disassembly and studio finals. My first finals are over, finally. It was a stressful experience to say the least, but very rewarding to see the students’ work come together. 

When I was a student, I saw everything from my own perspective and wasn’t really aware that my work could become a piece in my instructor’s teaching portfolio. I think now that I am teaching my own classes, I try to see how students’ work can collectively fit in a broader research agenda of my own. xx

Happy holidays! 
EE

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Date: Dec. 29, 2022
From: Li

Hi, Ekin! 

I agree about the change in perspective. I’ve noticed that a dedicated instructor has the potential to make the whole studio thrive, not just a few students. When an instructor invests time and energy—and fosters a supportive environment—students’ strengths and weaknesses become less of a factor in the studio’s outcome. 

Students’ interactions with their peers also have a huge influence on their studio experience. I’ve been trying to foster peer collaboration, or at least, to have conversations about collaboration with my students—that they should always learn from each other and seek help from one another. The students—first-year and second-year undergraduates—seemed to embrace the spirit, but there would be a doubt, or lack of confidence towards their classmates’ feedback, and they end up returning to their instructors—whom they perceive to be the authority figure. xx As instructors, how can we help students develop critical thinking through collaboration?

Speaking of collaboration, I recently tried to collaborate with a few tenure-track faculty. We’ve talked about this before, but the tenure-track faculty seems to deal with a different set of pressures on their career journey from what we face. My understanding is that tenure track faculty have requirements to meet that at times make them prioritize individual work over collaboration.  [11] This isn’t to say there’s no collaboration; I have seen many successful collaborations emerging in institutions, including a cross-disciplinary studio collective composed of faculty and students. The goal is always to cooperate.

Happy New Year! I’m sad that I won't be able to celebrate with you this year. I hope to scoop you next year in your new home.

Yours,
Li

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Date: Jan. 24, 2023
From: Ekin

Hi Li!

Happy new year! I’m back for a new school year and it’s already very busy, although a few exciting things are happening. Firstly, congrats! Your lecture series line-up looks great. So happy to see so many of our talented peers lecturing—I’m sure the students will enjoy it. I’m also looking forward to your upcoming lecture. 

I’m going through editing the final documentation of the exhibition—it was months of preparation and construction for a two week long exhibition, but now that it’s finished, I think it was totally worth the effort. 

I hope you are settling in at your new position. It is quite a challenge to adjust to a new place while teaching. School requires so much brain power that you have no time left to yourself to reflect and relax, which I’ve learned is a big part of settling into a new home and city. 

All the best, 
EE

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Date: Jan. 03, 2023
From: Li

Hi Ekin,

Glad to hear from you!

We just kicked off the lecture series, the first one was a great turnout. I am so glad that the college has been supportive of a lecture series that foregrounds young practitioners from minority communities.

Looking forward to the final documentation of your installation! I wanted to show you some images of the biennale installation—it has been quite an experience, but I’m happy that the installation has been actively engaging the domestic farming communities in China. 

Setting up Balchen installation, Shenzhen Biennale 2022.

The show is going on, and will continue. I am so excited about your current projects and seminar, and looking forward to the challenges and adventures ahead of us. 

Good luck with the semester. See you on Zoom soon!

Warmly,
Li

1. Advancing in the architecture academic career requires gaining recognition for works that are independent from teaching (as reflected in qualifications and application materials on teaching job listings). While it encourages academics to engage with their interests beyond the classroom, the need to gain recognition—and in extension the production of work to-be-evaluated, whether in the form of buildings, publications, or exhibitions—puts educators on a path of continuous grind, juggling teaching and additional school responsibilities with individual work. This echoes Byung-Chul Han’s concept of the  achievement society (2015), in which “the achievement-subject gives itself over to… the free constraint of maximizing achievement. Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation” (Han 2015, 11), and 24 hours is simply not enough to achieve it all.

2.  In the U.S., having a full-time working status is a must for international educators who do not have permanent residence and are on employer-sponsored visas (see H1-B (worker visa) or J-1 (scholar visa) criteria on USCIS website). In a field where developing personal projects is a crucial part of career evaluation, international educators face legal constraints to working less than full-time.

3. Citing Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s work, Jonathan Crary in 24/7 Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013) observes the ways in which technologies in contemporary capitalism have contributed to the merger of private and professional time—the merger of work and consumption—rewarding those who are constantly engaged, communicating, or processing within some telematic milieu (Crary 2013, 15). Not only have the digital technologies reshaped our attention, they have also curated an environment that encourages the achievement subject (borrowing Han’s term) to continue their self-exploitation.

4. Adjunct faculty without long-term job security—a condition that Alexandra Bradner has coined as “gig academy”—is a persistent problem in the broad academic field. Marianela D’Aprile summarizes this concept in Common Edge: “Non-tenured faculty in every discipline, and especially in the humanities, have increasingly numerous responsibilities and decreasing salaries, and it’s ever-more common for them to be offered short-term contracts with no job security beyond one or two semesters.” For visa holders, the fixed-term employment of adjunct faculty positions means they may need to update their visa status each time, involving legal fees, months of processing time, and the possibility of rejection by the USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.) The selection process for the American H1-B work visa operates on a lottery system—a worker who meets all legal criteria may face rejection—while other work visas like the O-1 visa are awarded based on qualitative criteria.

5. In the piece "The Architect as Entrepreneurial Self" (2015), Andreas Rumpfhuber discusses how Hans Hollein's Mobile Office (1969) anticipates contemporary aspects of the architects’ “daily grind,” capturing the architects’ immaterial labor of producing “the informational and cultural content of the commodity” (Rumpfhuber 2015, 41). He argues that the entrepreneurial self emerges from the acceptance of “the prerequisite to expose oneself to the gaze of the other,“ and a reality in which living and working become one and the same.

6. A Google search of “adjunct faculty h1-b” will return mixed results, with some links to university pages showing they do not sponsor visas for those working in temporary or part-time positions. Despite the advocacy and commitment by many academic institutions towards greater diversity and transparency among the faculty population (in addition to the student population), they often don’t have the institutional framework in place to support foreign individuals entering the academic field. In contrast to the statistics of student demographics that are promoted on university websites, data on staff and faculty population tend to not be readily available.

7. Are there cross-institution organizations or initiatives for architecture faculty like there are for professionals in practice? If they exist, how active are they at individual institutions?

Preparation of Paperspace exhibition installation, Fall 2022, Cornell AAP.

8. For many, pursuing an academic career means pursuing one’s passion, but financial security is not always guaranteed. While complete information on the specifics of an institutions’ compensation system is often hard to come by, it is not uncommon to read about episodes of adjunct faculty in various academic fields juggling multiple jobs to pay their bills. A 2022 report published by American Association of University Professors (AAUP) reveals that part-time faculty members (of universities, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges) earned an average of $3,850 per course, and 65% of schools provided no health-care benefits to those adjunct professors.

9.  In her Log 48 article, ”Not-Habits” (2020), Ana Miljački reflects on the norms (or the habits) that are ingrained in architecture education, asking what it would take to challenge the institutional norms that have “been deeply codified in our timetables, grading sheets, review protocols, hierarchies, and values” (Miljački 2020, 107). As part of an experimental design studio entitled Collective Architecture Studio, she and her students challenged the conventional “juridical call of the presentation format” of final reviews, identifying and removing the “hierarchies commonly inherent in final juries: specific authorship, privileged expertise, and the finality of our proposals” (Miljački 2020, 116). Miljački notes the reviewers’ receptivity towards adjusting their remarks and roles in response to the different format, as well as the valuable conversation that it sparked around the students’ work—suggesting that disciplinary change could begin to take place from inside the classroom.

10. While image has always been an invaluable component of architecture, academic individuals and institutions are under increasing pressure to produce and publicize “beautiful” images in high frequency, in order to establish their presence to their audience—prospective students, future hires, peer institutions and colleagues, etc. When these images come from students' work, do semester-long projects become something more than a part of an individual student’s educational journey?

11. As the myth of the "lone architectural genius" is increasingly put into question and institutions embrace the ethos of collaboration, what does the corresponding shift look like for the broader academic field and among faculty members? Classroom experiments such as Collective Architecture Studio's (discussed earlier in annotation 10) are important catalysts for broader disciplinary change—they can affect how students engage with others in the classroom, how they understand their work is evaluated, and even the work they produce. What groundbreaking experiments and ideas might we see emerge from classrooms (and beyond) when collaboration is fully sanctioned and encouraged by institutions?

Preparation of Balchen installation, Shenzhen Biennale 2022.

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Crary, Jonathan. 24/7 : Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep / Jonathan Crary. London ;: Verso, 2013.

Han, Byung-Chul, and Erik Butler. The Burnout Society. Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford, California: Stanford Briefs, an imprint of Stanford University Press, 2015.

Miljački, Ana. “Not-Habits.” Log 48 (2020): 107-116.

Rumpfhuber, Andreas. “The architect as entrepreneurial self: Hans Hollein’s TV performance “Mobile Office” (1969).” in The Architect as Worker: Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design. Edited by Peggy Deamer. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

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Ekin Erar is an architect and designer, currently serving as a Design Teaching Fellow at Cornell AAP. Her work brings together image construction, material research, and analysis and recreation of assembly processes, through which she explores the relationship between the real and the represented.

Leyuan Li is a Chinese architect and educator whose professional and academic work focuses on interior and urban realms in the articulation of spaces and societies. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Colorado Denver.

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>>A Look At Classroom

The Right to Read

Matthew Allen
January 2023

Consider that the Bill of Rights is a written document. “Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble...” There’s a tempo to reading. Do you find yourself absorbed in quiet contemplation? On a lazy afternoon it might go unnoticed, but cramped on a crowded commute, the active effort required to focus attention and sustain an inner dialog is inescapable. These moments of hard-won private reverie are crucial to public life. It’s not only that abstractions like democracy and freedom depend on concrete practices carried out in a chaotic public sphere—the practices create the public realm. Just as locally negotiated systems of shared cattle grazing created “the commons” as it was traditionally manifest, our ways of carving out space for reading set up contemplation as a public good, a shared resource.

The value of a thriving attentional commons (to use Matthew Crawford’s term) has been recognized by progressive reformers since the advent of modernity. Take, for example, a proto-modernist slogan neatly lettered above the bed in a relatively minimalist Arts and Crafts bedroom designed in 1897: “Seven hours to work, to soothing slumber seven, ten to the world allot and all to heaven.” What is “the world” in this scenario? Through a process of elimination, we can infer that it’s not work, not sleep, and not spiritual transcendence. The philosopher Hannah Arendt often spoke of “the world” as the realm of highest human achievement, populated first of all by works of art and literature, which she distinguished sharply from entertainment. I find it hard even to imagine having ten hours a day to devote to “the life of the mind” (the title of Arendt’s last book) or “arts and letters” (a thoroughly anachronistic concept), and so it’s difficult for me to gauge the contours of a thriving attentional landscape. It’s not simply that there’s not enough time to ingest information. A feeling of information overload already percolated in medieval monastic libraries, and a technological solution—encyclopedias—developed during the same period. The problem seems to be elsewhere: in the habits and habitats that provide us with the mental and physical resources to read and make use of that reading. Even if the quality of information and access to it has grown, the quality of attention at our disposal has been actively undermined. Social media is an obvious culprit, with legions of programmers tapping the techniques of behavioral psychology to capture every micron of attention. The attention economy is among the wildest frontiers of capitalist development.

Photograph of a bedroom by Liberty’s, 1897 in Interior Design of the 20th Century by Anne Massey
(Thames and Hudson, 1990), 16.

Thus the question of who can read—who has the time and attentional resources—has become one of the most consequential conundrums of our present era. The complexity only mounts in specialized disciplines like architecture. Following revolutions in linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy, architecture since, say, 1960 spent several decades as a highly erudite field—a field premised on reading and writing. The creation of PhD programs established a class of academic architects as professional readers, and, at the same time, the intrigues of French intellectual life in its poststructuralist heyday rendered difficult concepts as popular spectacle. Reading was edgy. All this was directly correlated with how design was conceptualized. Buildings could be subject to “close reading,” and a good project would have a tight “logic” and present a clear “argument.” On the insights of deconstruction a whole theoretical edifice was built featuring the slippery mechanics of language. Its focus on openness and indeterminacy encouraged the average architect to play along. (There’s no wrong answer in the absence of Truth and Authority.) If, since then, architects are reading less and bringing to it a different quality of attention, this also means that the foundation has shifted beneath a broad swath of basic disciplinary concepts. Maybe architectural theory as it was once understood has already collapsed.

Media theory can help us sort through the wreckage and rebuild. Marshall McLuhan wrote about hot media and cool media: the former provide lots of information but offer low participation (like reading a book or watching a film) while the latter have low information bandwidth but demand high levels of participation (like a group chat or a discussion seminar). McLuhan’s contemporary, Walter Ong, followed with an extensive comparison of literary cultures versus oral cultures. Perhaps humanity has gone from orality (in archaic cultures) to literacy (for the past few thousand years) to secondary orality (with the cool media of the electronic age) and most recently to secondary literacy (how we read text on our phones). Something of the return of certain features of oral culture—which is premised on communal, participatory sociality—was vividly prefigured by Superstudio’s collages of “nomads” (really: disaffected western youth) lounging on the Supersurface. The next step is to jettison the romantic yearning for a simpler form of life and try instead to learn from contemporary oral cultures. How do you organize a fruitful discussion? What are the parts of a good story? What guides the listener (or reader) along the way? Storytelling encompasses all sorts of practices: chatting things over to make sense of the world around us, project presentations and jury discussions, but also oration and demagoguery. (As with any other technology, the potentials of storytelling can be used to good or bad effect. Just think of the impact of the microphone on politics in the twentieth century.) The realm of the live-and-in-person has affordances and techniques that can counter trends toward exclusive expertise with an imaginary of public abundance.

Which brings us back to the attentional commons. Attention is usually seen as a resource to be extracted or a means of extracting some resource. Advertisers are vying for your eyeballs; reading is a means of gaining some proprietary knowledge. A Gestalt shift is required. Conceptualizing a right to read is not about reading more, but imagining a world in which reading thrives—and the most important result might be that space is made for collective life of a more deliberate, open, and satisfying variety.

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Matthew Allen teaches theory and history at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Flowcharting: From Abstractionism to Algorithmics in Art and Architecture.

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>>Who Gets to Write?

A Neighborhood Within

Re. Buildings

Mai Okimoto
January 2023

The ubiquitous low-rise office buildings that line Houston’s sprawling network of commercial corridors are a case study in an architecture of economic efficiency. Catering to diverse tenants, this typology has for decades offered flexibility and scalability—though often at the cost of overly sterile designs that say little about the tenants and their cultures. One is left with the impression that profit maximization inevitably locks this typology into the production of formulaic spaces with little formal variety, steering clear of untested or unnecessary spatial explorations.

Typical of Houston’s low-rise office buildings of this era, Corporate Plaza’s north and west façades are clad in mirrored glass. Less common are its east and south façades, which feature brutalist-like vertical bands that resemble pilasters.

7001 Corporate Drive in Houston’s Chinatown is a modest three-story office building that diverges from its typological cohort. At first glance, Corporate Plaza (built in 1980) does not appear to stand out from other buildings of the same typology. A closer inspection, however, reveals a calibration of density and scale that considers the tenants’ spatial needs, as well as moments shaped by feng shui, the traditional Chinese practice of arranging objects and space to be in harmony with their environment¹. Contrary to what one might infer from its name, Corporate Plaza is a conglomeration of tightly packed rental office units with a level of intimacy more common among apartment complexes.

Except for the pair of stone lions guarding the front entrance and the large red signage reading ​華埠大厦 (”Chinatown Building”), the exterior of Corporate Plaza looks like a typical low-rise office or institutional building constructed in the second half of 20th century throughout the U.S.—the kind of unremarkable commercial remnant that one drives past without a second look. Yet past the lions, the building’s interior reveals another identity—one that resonates more closely with the sense of locality or community that comes through its other name: “Chinatown Building.” Its surprisingly compact scale and incorporation of oblique relationships are present from the entrance—the presence of a neighborhood further articulated by the display of disparate signages and artifacts of the tenants.

Within the vestibule, objects such as bilingual newspapers, tenant directory monitors, and a whiteboard for handwritten announcements bridge the building’s interior and exterior.

Behind the entrance doors, visitors step into a tall, narrow vestibule, where they are greeted by stands of Chinese and bilingual newspapers and a row of monitors displaying the tenant directory. With a slight turn (a move intended to dispel negative qi, which is thought to travel along straight lines) and a ceiling drop, the vestibule compresses into a dimly lit, narrow corridor. Cutting diagonally through the building and functioning as its spine, the corridor, connects the front and secondary entrances, and orients the building along its northeast-southwest axis. At the center of the diagonal spine is an atrium with a skylight, providing a natural light source into the building’s deep interior, as well as an opening for the qi to flow through the building.

The diagonal spine of the corridor expands into an atrium, which offers pockets of spaces partitioned by the circulation core and framed by greens.

The atrium, warmly lit through the skylight and fully enclosed on the upper levels by glazing on all four sides, feels small for an office building of this scale. Looking around, company names and phone numbers are laminated onto the windows here and there; the mix of English, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean signs advertising law firms, travel agencies, and financial services offer glimpses of the buzz of activity taking place behind closed blinds. The garden and a running fountain—elements considered to bring prosperity and luck in feng shui—together with rows of mailboxes suggest an inner courtyard of an apartment complex, rather than an office atrium. 

Compact office units form a dense mass around the open atrium, creating two contrasting spaces on the building’s upper levels.

At the atrium’s center are a pair of elevators enclosed in a decorated shell and a switchback staircase clad in white painted metal. The vertical circulation elements anchor catwalks that cross the atrium on the upper levels, echoing the diagonal spine running northeast to southwest on the ground floor. On the second level, the diagonal is carried from the building’s center to its periphery by the atrium catwalk, which transitions into a double-loaded corridor inside the mass of the building. The circulation diagonal is contained within a square; the double-loaded corridor makes a turn at the intersection to continue tracing the square offset from the building’s edge. Moving from center to periphery, the open and spacious atrium quickly disappears from sight. The identical doors of private offices appear one after the other on each side of the hallway and crowd the field of view. 

Most of the rentable area consists of spaces ranging from 700 sq.ft. to 1,600 sq.ft. with the smallest leases starting at 300 sq.ft. While there are several larger suites, the interior parceling was likely designed with the businesses of recent immigrants in mind, often operating with a small workforce hailing from countries where population densities can exceed that of the U.S. by a factor of ten or more².

While private, the building is not anonymous, and has an atmosphere of a neighborhood or a community that is often observed in domestic spaces and smaller stores. In addition to elements that express the tenants’ presence, factors like the guiding design principles introduced by feng shui and the general disposition towards higher density and smaller scale have made Corporate Plaza into a low-rise office building that subverts typological expectations and is more than the capital returns of its real estate. It provides a space of community with a decidedly humane scale and composition.

1. Beyond its widely-popularized use in home interior decor, feng shui principles may be used to determine the orientation and configuration of buildings. Its practitioners seek to achieve a positive flow of qi, the Daoist concept of life energy, in order to invite good fortune and ward off bad luck.

2.  One study indicates that per capita office space in Asia averages 100 sq.ft. compared to 140 sq.ft. in the Americas.

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Mai Okimoto edits for the Architecture Writing Workshop. She works as an architectural designer in Houston.

While each month will have a dedicated theme, we also want to read about and share the beautiful, ugly, nice, terrible, weird, cool buildings/spaces that we have come across. Who gets to write? Who wants to write? Write to us (architecturewritingworkshop@gmail.com) if there is a building/space that you want to share. Write as much or as little as you’d like—we only ask that you have visited the place. 

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>>Who Gets to Write?

On the Economics of Writing (About Architecture)

Stefan Novakovic
January 2023

I: Writing for a Living

I started writing for a living by accident: It was in 2015, my last month of college as an unexceptional English major with no plans after graduation, that I decided to write about cities and began my research. My brother, an architect, pointed me toward Urban Toronto, a niche news site covering the city’s development industry. I saw their call for interns. Saddled with student loans, moving to New York City for an unpaid internship was out of the question. But if this was less prestigious (and less competitive), it was closer to home—my parents’ home in Toronto, anyway, where I would be living after graduation. I gave it a shot.

I was thrilled. For three days a week, I wrote about urban development. The other four days, I worked a minimum-wage job in the gift shop at the Libeskind-designed Royal Ontario Museum, where even the floors were slanted. I preferred the writing. And so I learned as much as I could. I bought all the books on urbanism, architecture, and Toronto that I could find. At the end of the summer, the publishers at Urban Toronto offered me their assistant editor position, $1,500 a month. It wasn’t much, but more than I was making at the gift shop. I said yes.

Back at my desk, still shaking with excitement, I ran the numbers. $18,000 a year was less than minimum wage, and legally, I wouldn’t have a “job”—I’d have a full-time gig, with all the responsibilities of a permanent position and all the rights of a freelancer: a real journalist.

Urban Toronto had been founded as an online discussion forum—citizen journalism for architecture geeks in the early 2000s. By the time I joined, the website had been bought by a publishing company and had a mandate to produce daily news about development proposals or construction projects across the city. 

This meant sifting through thousands of pages of public records, zoning applications, renderings, architectural drawings and urban planning rationales; I learned about architecture through the civic bureaucracy. Over two-and-a-half years, I attended about 50 community meetings and dozens of housing protests and organizing events. I would often write two or three posts a day at a twelve-hour turnaround. 

In 2017 I began my first job in traditional architectural publishing, working as the assistant editor at Canadian Architect magazine and its sister publications, Canadian Interiors and Buildings. At $35,000 per year, my “job” was, legally speaking, another full-time freelance gig. The magazines were legacy print publications dating back to the mid-twentieth century, and had been part of Conrad Black’s media empire. By 2017, they were run by an independent publisher on a shoestring budget.

Although I did little serious writing—to get any meaningful writing opportunities, I wrote ad hoc print articles with no extra pay—my two years with Canadian Architect helped me learn the business—how press releases and publicists shaped the media landscape, and how magazines prioritized coverage. Reviews of new projects were the backbone of trade magazines; for a building or a book review to be published, it had to be pitched. The kind of on-the-ground, public record journalism I had learned at Urban Toronto was anathema.

After Canadian Architect, I became the web editor at Azure, a magazine that covers architecture and design internationally. For the first time, I had a real job with dental insurance—and enough money to pay the rent. Today, as Azure’s senior editor, I’m able to carve out more room to write and publish what interests me. With a monthly allocation for freelancers, I read and consider numerous pitches from writers with interesting ideas. 

II: The Business of Writing

Success is often as much a function of industry savvy and shrewd networking as it is original thinking and good writing. Every magazine is delivering a product to a consumer. Publications like Architectural Record, The Architect’s Newspaper, Metropolis, Architect and Canadian Architect are considered “trade” or business-to-business (B2B) publications. Their advertising is aimed specifically at architects and designers—product specifiers. Instead of sneakers and Snickers bars, you’ll see bathroom fixtures, windows and doors, office furniture, lighting, high-end kitchens, etc. This economic reality shapes the nature of a magazine’s content and how they present it.

If more mainstream consumer media give you tips for renovating your kitchen, trade magazines give you tips for renovating other people’s kitchens. Only, when you’re writing for a professional audience, they are never “tips”—they’re examples of new and emerging trends or design philosophies. The tone differs, and so does the perspective. 

When advertisers are looking to sell door handles and ceiling baffles to industry insiders, they don’t want to see their audience insulted—or even challenged. So the mandate for trade magazines often errs on the side of celebrating design rather than critiquing it. (Twenty years ago, when many trade magazines were still filled with ads for Cadillacs and credit cards, there was less concern about losing revenue through criticism.) While there may still be room for intelligent, critical writing in these publications—The Architect’s Newspaper does a particularly good job—it’s not their bread and butter.

While trade magazines offer occasional opportunities for serious critical writing towards more established writers, it’s a hard door to open, if it budges at all. Let’s say a writer has an idea to review a new public space in their neighborhood that really works (or doesn’t), or they want to investigate whether the buttons they push at a crosswalk actually do anything. Maybe there’s a compelling building in their city with a story that hasn’t been told. Pitches like these are more likely to be published by “consumer-facing” design media, like Curbed or Bloomberg CityLab, than by B2B publications. 

Alternatively, a writer wanting to critique aspects of architectural practice or discuss the ideas of Manfredo Tafuri, for example, will likely find a better reception in subscription-funded or non-profit publications like Failed Architecture, Common Edge, and the New York Review of Architecture (NYRA). For a new writer, the best place to start these days might be the New York Review of Architecture; in particular, NYRA’s weekly Skyline newsletter offers a great opportunity to write a short piece or “dispatch” about a recent lecture or event. Unlike trade magazines, these publications don’t rely on advertising revenue, and unlike more mainstream design media like Curbed and CityLab, they don’t rely on a mass audience. This means they can serve a smaller, but highly dedicated readership, and produce critical, irreverent, and creative journalism that engages with theory, materialism and global flows of capital.

III: Writing and Class 

Architectural writing rarely provides a decent living on its own. Very few people work in the field full-time, and those of us who do are almost invariably burdened by a volume of “content” and administration that makes thoughtful, meaningful work difficult. (In David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, in-house magazine journalists self-identified their work as a quintessential example of useless “box ticking.”) And while it’s easy to romanticize its quixotic nature, architectural writing faces the same existential crisis as journalism writ large: It just plain sucks.

When a career path is no longer financially viable, it becomes a job for rich people and limits the talent pool. That’s what happened to journalism. But to make matters worse, architectural writing relies heavily on what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu described as “social and cultural capital.” If you know how to speak the language of the publishing industry—often gatekept through jargon learned in elite schools—then success can look easy, especially if you’re not worried about money. But if you’re working a demanding, full-time job (or more than one), when will you find time to write? And if you didn’t go to a prestigious school or live in a major city, opportunities to get your work published can feel especially scarce. 

I’m still here because I believe in the power and beauty of writing. It is a privilege—and a thrill like no other—to be able to share thoughts with the world, and to see them come alive. That’s worth embracing, too. And as hard as it is, it doesn’t take much to start: Each day, I try to write a good sentence. And then I look for the next one. 

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Stefan Novakovic is a writer and editor living in Toronto. You can reach him at stefan.b.novakovic@gmail.com

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>>Who Gets to Write?