To Learn the Word for Cherries
Jimmy Bullis
To Learn The Word for Cherries_September 2024
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.
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.
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.
The Hidden Recesses and the Four Gates
Orçun Yazıcı
The Hidden Recesses and the Four Gates_September 2024
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.
Orçun Yazıcı is a practicing architect based in Belgium.
Nick Somers is a freelance photographer based in Ghent, Belgium.
Navigating Narratives
Joël León Danis, Athenea Papacostas, and Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco
Navigating Narratives_September 2024
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.
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.
Many Houstons
Lauren Phillips
Many Houstons_September 2024
On Bryan Washington’s Memorial
Lauren Phillips
September 2024
Southwest Freeway, Houston. October 27, 2020. Photo by xiefangzhang will sun.