Accessing Design / Designing Access
Hannah Wong
Decoding the Conversation_February 2024
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Media Ecosystem of Architecture
Eva Hagberg
What’s the Matter with Canon?_September 2023
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.
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.
What Excellence?
Yen Ha
What’s the Matter with Canon?_September 2023
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.
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.
Class Talk
Zaid Kashef Alghata
A Look at the Classroom_March 2023
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?
Zaid Kashef Alghata is the Joseph F. Thomas Visiting Professor at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture and founder of House of ZKA.
Teaching, etc.
Ekin Erar, Leyuan Li
A Look at the Classroom_March 2023
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.