In my last post I provided a sweeping overview of my scholarly trajectory at Lewis and Clark to demonstrate how I decided architecture would be my niche in undergraduate academics. However, my last post was more to the point of how I would like my final project as an environmental studies major to contribute or tie into the field of architecture. Today, I’d like to take this opportunity to more clearly elucidate my scholarly path from the proposal of my ENVS concentration, to a thesis dedicated senior, highlighting how my pursuits can be seen evolving and changing through looking at the questions I’ve been asking. I’ll conclude with the big questions that now define my interest in Architecture and Environmental studies.
Let’s take a step back to ENVS 220, at the time I knew I was interested in pursuing an academic path focused in the humanities or social sciences. That same sophomore year I took a class entitled Constructing the American Landscape with Prof. Reiko Hillyer. This class exposed me to the complexities of the built environment, the history and theory of urban development, and the joy of grappling with the intellectual puzzles posed by the built environment. From this class I grew to love studying the buildings and historical processes that gave rise to urban form. To me, thinking about cities and buildings as historical texts and actually reading them, extracting meaning from them, was a stimulating and fulfilling task. I loved image analysis and the freedom of interpretation I felt when looking at a building, and furthermore I loved putting these objects or places in their appropriate historical context in order to better understand the forces that shape people’s experience of space/place.
In 220, I was busy writing my concentration. I began to focus on contemporary issues in urban planning, trying to find where the cutting edge in urban scholarship was setting its teeth, and in what direction it would advance. About the same time I was writing my concentration, I continued taking more classes in the Art department, and found myself wanting to incorporate my studies in art into my ENVS major. As a result I drove my inquiry towards an area of urban studies which seemed to satisfy both my desire to study something of salience for social change as well as with aesthetic depth and complexity. I chose to write my concentration on the topic of Aestheticization, the process through which “marginal” places are made hip by the artistic class, before being co-opted and gentrified by a mobile middle class. I specifically chose to focus on the process of aestheticization in the context of de-industrialized cities where the spatial consequences of the organizing force of neoliberalism shone in full. I was particularly interested in the formation of gated-communities and suburban enclaves in contrast to the appropriation of vacant tract housing and derelict commercial corridors in places like Portland, Lisbon, Vancouver, and Detroit. I was interested in the economic forces informing such spatial organization as well as the specific characteristics of the actors who began the initial process of aestheticization in marginal areas. I wanted to know; who are the people aestheticizing neighborhoods? How are the economic forces of neoliberalism driving the process of de-industrialization and aestheticization? How long does it take for a place to become trendy, at least, trendy enough to attract a gentrifying middle-class? Which middle-class people use their mobility to occupy a recently aestheticized place instead of moving to the suburbs, and why?
My sophomore year ended with an approved concentration and a whole lot of thinking about urban issues under my belt. However, I was left wanting. My concentration felt cool, but almost unfulfilling. I’m not exactly sure what it was that then led me to architecture, but it wasn’t far off my current path. Perhaps I wanted more specificity, that is, in specific buildings and individuals. Maybe I resonated more with the scale of architecture than of urban planning. Thinking about space in terms of the individual experience. Maybe I saw architecture as more closely related to my contemporary pursuits in Art than urban planning. For whatever reason, I headed into the summer wanting to get a feel for the realm of architecture. That summer, I had an internship with City Repair, a sort of grassroots urban planning non-profit with a mission to change lives by reclaiming public space, or as they call it, “placemaking.” City Repair captivated me with their DIY approach; painting intersections, building treehouses and cob structures, putting benches and bike racks in parking spots and planting pop-up bookshares and teahouses. I loved the theory of it all, the social dynamics and community processes. I made a map in GIS showing all of City Repair’s projects throughout their >decade long history. But in the end, it was my relationship with the architect and City Repair’s cofounder Mark Lakeman that made my experience. I fell in love with the design challenges of cob and the physical labor of wrestling with the mud and working with my hands to create sculptural forms and define space. I liked the mixture of utility and expression that I had previously found in ceramics (the “concentration” of my minor, so to speak).
I spent fall of my Junior year studying abroad in Kenya and Tanzania where among other things (such as coral reef and ungulate ecology) I studied the vernacular architectural traditions of East Africa. Before my time in E. Africa I had spent time traveling in Europe and the U.S. looking at buildings and applying what I had learned in Reiko’s class to my experiences in the field. My fall semester culminated in a large paper written about the various vernacular architectural traditions amassing in zones of peri-urban development in Tanzania. In my paper I applied very basic architectural analysis along with interviews and literature reviews to develop an argument surrounding the need for community sourced building code in the peri-urban village of Olasiti, TZ. My questions evolved to address the interplay of specific architectural traditions and regional urban morphology, along with questions regarding socio-economic inequality and tension.
The spring of my Junior year, as well as my summer and the beginning of my Senior year have been defined by my growing interest in theory. I owe my fledgling interest in theory to a series of classes and friends, chiefly among them my recent class with Prof. Jim Proctor on Environmental Theory where I was exposed to the likes of Bruno Latour, and the concept of the Anthropocene. I’ll be the first to admit my infatuation with big names in philosophy and the social sciences. The egos and personalities that produce works of mind-bending density. Mind-bending in the sense of trying to sharpen a knife by beating it against a rock, merely causing spectacular arrays of sparks to fly off all around you until you get tired, and then, instead of banging the knife around you begin to slowly scrape it against the rock in despair while realizing you’re finally accomplishing exactly that which you set out to do! Sometimes I let theory get to my head, but what a sight it is from up there and what a ride coming back down to earth!
Recently my explorations into theory have been balanced or grounded by my studies in architecture. Buildings themselves are interesting metaphors for praxis (theory and action). That is, from the ground up a building can be an expression of ideas, sometimes taking abstract forms that can only be explained vis-a-vis popular theory; however, all buildings (unless purely hypothetical!) must be very literally rooted in place. No matter how hoity-toity a building’s design is, it will be made with true-to-life materials and processes that leave lasting impacts on the face of the earth.
Which is where I find myself now. Contemplating the link between theoretical concepts (design and the anthropocene) and the “real-life” challenges of taking materials and defining meaningful, fulfilling, productive, etc. places in which people can live, work, and play. My goal, and also my first question, is to show how the concept of the anthropocene is important for architecture. How can an understanding of the anthropocene lead to better design solutions for challenges such as climate change and increasingly tempestuous socio-economic systems? As well as other, more unpredictable and unprecedented consequences of neoliberalization (that’s a place to point a finger now, if anywhere)? Can a moral imperative be extracted from the concept of the anthropocene with sufficient urgency/weight/etc. to usher in a new era of design (radically normative, utopian, etc.)? And is that something needed? If yes, by whom? Which aspects of current design should be continued, which abandoned (in the context of the anthropocene)? Who are the actors, and what are the connections between them that drive architectural production in the anthropocene? And how is architectural production linked to the establishment of the anthropocene?
And so much more! Stay tuned!