59. Architectural Reliquary (II)
Take those ideas and make them material. Assemble philosophies, politics, cultures, and economies piece by piece.
If you're reading this, then it means that I managed to finish my second-to-last semester of grad school with my sanity intact. Almost 10,000 words later, I finished a thesis on coastal museums and their use of climate resilient architecture to protect their buildings and collections in the face of nuisance flooding, hurricanes, and sea level rise (snippets coming soon!). I have no idea how I still have the motivation to think about architectural practice and theory after this, but taking the past couple of weeks to reset has reignited my love of design in a way I hadn't expected. Where I was once keeping my head down under the strain of a backpack full of books, I've found myself looking back up and around the built environments I pass through each day.
The curve of a wall or the sliced angles of a window might evoke a certain feeling or facilitate a kind of experience. A weathered ornamental detail on a façade marking generations of survival. There are architectures of luxury, power, authority. There are architectures of stability, security. But there are also architectures of the informal, the vernacular, temporary, and timeless. Architectures of the botanical and the animal. You encounter these architectural systems by being within and around them. Feel the floors beneath your feet. Press your hands to cooling panes of glass and beams of steel. Listen to the patterns of footfalls. Follow the circulation of bodies. Inhale the spatial smells, the natural, manmade, synthetic, welcoming, repulsive, (un)holy. You might even dare to lick some concrete. Take those ideas and make them material. Assemble philosophies, politics, cultures, and economies piece by piece.
TOUCH
Over the summer, I found myself stepping off an elevator and into one of Tokyo’s most underrated museums: Archi-Depot. Part of the WHAT Museum, Archi-Depot is an open storage room filled with architectural models from Japan’s top firms. The models represent both completed and unbuilt projects from around the world, ranging from houses and apartment buildings to stores and civic complexes. Walking among the rows of shelves, you can easily spend hours looking at each meticulous construction of foam, wood, and plastic, imagining how structural elements might look in their monumental actualized form. Such an unforgettable experience.
Julia Watson's Lo—TEK: Design By Radical Indigenism explores indigenous architectural styles and design practices from around the world. This is a rich compendium of interviews, essays, and full of photographs and diagrams showing how these vernacular building practices have supported communities and shaped their relationship to the land for centuries. In a time when climate change and unsustainable practices have decimated and destabilized our world, Watson’s notion of “Lo—Tek” invites us to look at indigenous methods of land stewardship and philosophies of construction in the present and past to build a more resilient future.
Created by artist Lee Pivnik back in 2022, Symbiotic House is a creative research project that explores architectures and design practices from across South Florida. Pivnik helps us imagine a future in the face Miami's increasing climate vulnerability by turning to histories of multispecies collaboration and using art, science, and technology to reimagine built environments and home spaces as regenerative, adaptive, caring, and resilient. It's been so cool to watch this project develop over the past year with a lecture series and a conceptual retrofit design. I was lucky enough to contribute a prompt to Pivnik's series of AI-generated Miami buildings, and Symbiotic House continues to run an ongoing research group with meetings that cover topics like "Settler Vernacular," "Hurricane Hardening," and "Aquatecture."
I picked up the catalog for MoMA's show Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America for some research I was doing on Miami vernacular architecture, and it has quickly become one of my favorite architectural history books. Spanning 10 American cities, the catalog features contributions from designers, critics, artists, and architects about the legacy of anti-Black racism in the design of our public spaces, buildings, and infrastructures. Beyond bringing these underdiscussed histories to light, the creative voices in this book show how Black design traditions can catalyze new sites rooted in resistance, liberation, and cultural preservation. You can read an excerpt here and learn about some of the exhibit's participants here.
LOOK
In 1970, architect James Wines founded SITE, an environmental art and design studio that seeks to reimagine the built environment and public space through experimental aesthetic interventions. Their projects span from completed buildings to temporary public art installations and conceptual designs that feel like something out of a science fiction story. Among my favorites are their Highrise of Homes (1981), Ross's Landing (1992), and their series of BEST Products Company Buildings (1975-1984), which turned the traditional corporate showroom into surreal sites of crumbling brick, sprouting forests, and storefronts split open by balloons.
From 2014-2016, artist and architect Amanda Williams embarked on her series, Color(ed) Theory. Williams found abandoned houses slated for demolition on the South Side of Chicago and painted them bright hues that brought their ruined state back to life. Williams's color choices signal discriminatory practices like redlining and make references to products that were marketed to African-American communities from the 1960s to the 1980s (like Newport 100s, Ultrasheen, and Pink Oil Moisturizer) which remembered being in her home as a child. Williams uses these buildings to draw attention to the historic marginalization of Black neighborhoods and their ongoing cultural threats from gentrification, policing, and systemic neglect. As Williams puts it: "This was not a neighborhood beautification project…When you live in an environment where a bulldozer means something's going away and nothing else is ever coming back It doesn't mean prosperity or future or potential, it means erasure of your history. So what action can be taken to shift how you see your environment and shift how we think about the value of that environment?"
Mario Navarro is a Mexican-American artist who uses sculpture to subvert traditional architecture forms, motifs, and design heritage. His Aesthetical Irregularities (2015) left planks of wood flooring suspended in mid-air. Future Islands (2016) draw our attention to mundane support beams. You have satirical ads for Modernism, iconic buildings that are redrawn as abandoned, flooded, and deconstructed. A house extended by polyester webbing and false façades constructed out of mirrors and wood. I personally love Navarro installations of rusted scaffolding, disrupting the pristine white cube with temporary building materials we pass by and under but rarely pay attention to.
LISTEN
If you’re ever looking for bite-sizes stories about sites and cities, I can’t recommend Monocle’s podcast The Urbanist enough. Their Tall Stories series is a particular favorite of mine. Each episode is a short history about an iconic building or piece of public infrastructure that has shaped a city’s identity, reflects on the cultural and political histories that shaped its design, and how the architect’s legacy lives on. Among the 300+ episodes they have in their back catalog, I’d suggest Houston’s Memorial Park, Oscar Niemeyer’s decaying project in Tripoli, and Montreal’s Habitat 67.
Paola Antonelli and Aice Rawsthorn’s podcast Design Emergency features interviews with architects and designers who are using their creative practices to make the world a better place. A recent gem I listened to was an interview with Somali-Italian architect Omar Degan about architecture and fragility. Degan’s work, primarily in the Horn of Africa, centers on post-conflict, emergency architecture that uses culturally-minded structures to address social problems. Going above and beyond design guidelines from organizations like the U.N. and UNICEF, Degan talks about emphasizing research and conversation to build what the community needs, rather than operating in a state of architectural disconnect, building with a right to dignity, beauty, and cultural pride in the face of destruction.
Race, Space & Architecture is a project that seeks to address the role of injustice, capitalism, and racial hierarchy in the spaces we build. They offer an open-access curriculum, contributed academic reflections, and resources for reflecting on the role of design in marginalization and imaging more just worlds. I’ve been especially grateful for their ‘Soundings’ series, where their collaborators perform readings from and in response to their curriculum. As a student who has spent too much time reading things on my screen, this lets me engage with critical thought without hurting my eyes. A few highlights: Divya Patel reading Tracy Shildrick’s essay “Lessons From Grenfell,” Mohsin Ali reading excerpts of Homi Bhabha’s Location of Culture, and Malak Al-Faraj reading Mohammed El-Kurd’s “Sheikh Jarrah is Burning.”
LICK
Since 2019, Jerald Cooper has been running Hood Midcentury Modern, a curated Instagram archive that highlights the presence of Black culture in Modern architectural traditions. You can find homes, commercial buildings, public spaces, iconic images from pop culture, and archival footage. It's a multisensory feast showcasing Black Modernism at its finest. Cooper also gets submissions from his community of followers, showcasing lesser known architectural and design histories that need greater celebration and preservation. I'd recommend pairing your scroll with a profile about the man behind this brilliant account.
KoozArch is an online publication and design research studio that explores world-making, architecture as a tool for critical thought, and seeks out the potentials for social action that lie in un-built imaginaries. If you're craving a rabbit hole to dive down into, I'd highly suggest looking through their published essays, case studies, and interviews written by practicing architects, architecture students, scholars, and interdisciplinary artists and designers. Not sure where to start? Lindsey Wikstrom on revaluating our use of timber, a profile of Berlin's Floating University, Joanne Choueiri on junk tectonics, and Shonali Shetty on decolonizing womb constructs.
“In native Hawaiian culture, there is no distinction between architecture and the environment.” So opens a video essay by Dominic Leong and Dr. Sean Connelly, cofounders of the public stewardship nonprofit Hawai’i Nonlinear, for the Ambasz Institute’s ‘Built Ecologies’ series. Both architects discuss the need for reclaiming Indigenous heritage sites (many of which have been destroyed by military forts on the islands) and prioritizing native knowledges to foster better land relations. As Connelly and Leong lead us around paved streets, manicured resorts, and along concrete sea walls, they remind us that “the island is the greatest building you could imagine.”
CLICK
In 1989, American architect Denise Scott Brown published an essay called "Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture." In it, she laments on how her experience as a designer and academic shifted with her marriage to Robert Venturi, leaving her to be frequently uncredited on projects the duo worked on together, excluded from client meetings, and passed over for job interviews since she was seen as just the "architect's wife. " Brown's complaints still resonate today, since progress and inclusion in the industry remains slow-going. But I'm also interested in Brown's rejection of this hyper-masculine individualism, focusing her attention, instead, on the power of thoughtful and equal collaboration where "joint work feeds us both."
As Israel’s bombing of Gaza continues intensifies with no end in sight, it’s been difficult not to feel so hopeless when centuries-old sites and architectural marvels are decimated, infrastructures obliterated, and people left to dig through the rubble of their homes. For The Nation, architecture critic Kate Wagner urges architects to resist becoming complicit in this settler-colonial project as Israel’s leaders continue to discuss plans for colonizing the region by pushing Palestinian survivors into northern Sinai. “By all indications, Israel’s ruling class will not see Gaza as a site of human tragedy,” she writes, “but rather as a prize of war, an investment, and a tabula rasa for architectural production—a completion of its settler colonialist project.” Designers have a moral obligation to say no to the promise of great profits, to refuse building settlements on mass graves, and to join the fight for Palestinian liberation.
I always love to end these newsletters with a poem and who better to conclude this series than experimental architect and artist Madeline Gins. With her husband Shusaku Arakawa, Gins turned to architectural forms to imagine new ways of being, transforming the body through constructions of space and language. You can read some excerpts from her series “Transformatory Power” and pieces of her cybernetic poetry. Curious about what she actually built with Arakawa? Check out photos of the Site of Reversible Destiny and the Bioscleave House. Pair it with this essay about the Gins and Arakawa’s individual design practices and how they collaborated together.
I've just come across your Substack and love it so much—I'm very interested in design, architecture, and climate as well, and you've assembled such good list of invigorating and inspiring projects. Amanda Williams and Mario Navarro are both new to me and so intrigruing.
I also love Watson's Lo—TEK; so many indigenous design practices that can inform present-day practice and all the problems of contemporary life (unsustainable building practices, energy-inefficient architecture, starchitect culture…)