Architectural Humanities in the Time of Pandemic and Revolt
Amid the pandemic and mounting U.S. revolt against racial inequality, this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, now postponed, serves as a reminder of the fundamental contradiction of architecture. The exhibition’s very promising theme asks, “How Will We Live Together?” Yet posted on the Biennale website, below that question, is the list of national pavilions that will delve into it, and the ubiquitous logo of Rolex, the exhibition’s chief sponsor. At a time when to “live together” seems more dangerous yet more urgent than ever—a matter of life or death in the face of ineffective government and indifferent capitalism—apparently our salvation will be delivered by nation states and funded by luxury products. The answer seems obvious: “We won’t.”
Even academic architecture, removed from the market yet riddled with its own paradoxes, struggles to unite us. When the University of California, Berkeley, appointed Vishaan Chakrabarti as dean of the College of Environmental Design last year, for instance, he spoke less of utopian aspirations for the future of design than of how his appointment would give “jet fuel” to his firm, the Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU). While the apparent opportunism of a public-college appointment boosting private commissions cannot be ignored, Chakrabarti’s statement was, of course, true. This unseemly entanglement of academic architecture and capitalist design practice is hardly unique. Virtually all design professors have private firms, whose reputations and legitimacy are enhanced by the university. Chakrabarti, at least, is not blind to the tension between profit-seeking and creation of knowledge, writing recently that he hopes that the coronavirus crisis can “wake us out of our neoliberal fever dream,” by which he seems to mean, decouple architectural practice from projects that directly disenfranchise working and poor people. And on this point, I agree. The present crises invite us to wake up to the contradictions long fundamental to architectural practice and education.
This past semester, in a graduate seminar called The Unruly City, my students and I had an opportunity to do just this, by applying the tools of “architectural humanities” to examine inequality. In the last session before spring break—which, as at most U.S. colleges, turned out to be our final meeting in person—we gathered on the site where 10,000 laborers assembled in St. Louis during the general strike of 1877 in protest of inhumane, hazardous working conditions. The assembly occupied major streets and marched to factories, closing them down. Ultimately, they deposed the city government for a few days of commune rule. In short, the mass was a force of radical spatial redistribution, which flouted civil law to build a new, if short-lived city.
I asked my students that day where the limit on this sort of protest should be, and who should decide that (figure 1). This is a familiar question in this seminar, which I have taught five times. Typically at mid-semester, after weeks of studying urban, cultural and political theory, from voices including Giorgio Agamben, Jane Jacobs, Richard Sennett, James Baldwin, Jan Gehl, and Robin D.G. Kelley, students relate their answers to readings. Rarely do the answers seem imbricated in daily life. That changed quickly.
Figure 1: Students in The Unruly City seminar debating the regulation of public space while visiting Lafayette Square in St. Louis, Missouri. March 2020. Photograph by the author.
Since that class, the question of regulating access to public space has flashed across the world. Who gets to decide shelter in place? Which businesses are essential? What facial coverings people should wear, and should doing so be compulsory? Can people travel across state or national lines (figure 2)? The seminar’s exploration of the urban social and political order became less theoretical and more matter of fact, especially as the public (or certain publics) pushed back against new regulations (figure 3).
Figure 2. Student work by Sebastian Jin, produced for The Unruly City, spring 2020. Part of Jin’s work explored the perception of mask-wearing as a symbol of China in the United States. Courtesy of Sebastian Jin.
Figure 3. Student work by Zachary Hantak, produced for The Unruly City, spring 2020. Hantak’s project in part addressed the hoarding of consumer goods. Courtesy of Zachary Hantak.
To better allow the students to connect past and present, and theory to practice—both central aims of architectural humanities—I permitted students to shift their midterm research projects, which explore political questions related to ordering, governing, and contesting power in urban space, to the current crisis (several examples of their work illustrate this essay). In class, we related our readings to the news of the day. Our last unit, which focused on racial segregation in St. Louis’s suburbs like Ferguson, led by Colin Gordon’s excellent Citizen Brown: Race, Democracy and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs, sizzled with real-time relevance (figure 4). Two-thirds of coronavirus cases in the city have been black residents, who make up 45% of its population—and that disparity fits national patterns across major U.S. cities. Gordon writes about how “local citizenship” in St. Louis and its suburbs relies on exclusion of full citizenship for black people (figure 5). In fact, all of the themes of the seminar seem newly vital in the crisis (now crises): racial segregation, the perils of financialized real estate, the uses of policing, the agonistic power struggles to make cities just and whole, and, yes, the relationship of architects and urban designers to political regimes.
Figure 4. Student work by Kia Saint-Louis, produced for The Unruly City, spring 2020. Saint-Louis produced a series of posters examining the Black experience of COVID-19, from wearing masks to ensuring the tolerated white protests of stay-at-home advisories and orders. Courtesy of Kia Saint-Louis.
As someone who is not an architect teaching in an architecture school, I have sometimes doubted if the work of seminars like mine are more than just fun follies. Like their design professors, the students are there to build their capacity to practice. Their “real” work is in studio, not humanities seminars or history-and-theory lectures. However, as my students began to stare into their anxieties about producing design work at home without our world-class facilities, about next month’s rent, about the post-graduation job market, the space of the seminar became a place where reality could be openly discussed. One of the implicit themes of the course—architecture’s political neutrality and my frustration with it—felt like a life line.
Architecture has long been subject to economic power that conscripts, denies, enslaves, and destroys. From the slave-built brick classicism of the University of Virginia to the High Line-adjacent Whitney Museum by Renzo Piano, funded by a board that until recently included a tear gas manufacturer, architects often had to countenance inequality to advance their designs. And for all the freedom that its integration into academe has afforded it the last hundred years or so, architecture in universities has, historically, also mostly been quiet about its relationship to unjust systems, or has papered over it with superficial discourses of “inclusion” and “social practice” that all too often, if inadvertently, further legitimize division.
Figure 5. Student work by Kristie Houghton, produced for The Unruly City, spring 2020. Houghton examined how disparate upbringings in the U.S. leads to divided responses to the totems of urban order, including police cars. Courtesy of Kristie Houghton.
Recently, progress has been made, especially as disciplinary insights from the humanities, catalyzed by the Great Recession, have infused architecture with a more thorough understanding of its own political constitution. Writing about architecture’s failure to acknowledge its reciprocal relationship with capitalism back in 2007, Craig L. Wilkins highlighted the power of denial. The field’s “stock response to any public attempt to engage this failure is based on an uncritical acceptance of its own dependency on economic factors as the unavoidable and unproblematic foundation of architecture.”[1] But the economic crash that soon followed shattered certainties about architecture to the core (figure 6). While many practitioners abandoned the field, architecture schools learned to develop a critical stance toward power structures, and began to focus more on issues like the human right to shelter.
Figure 6. Student work by Congwei Cao, produced for The Unruly City, spring 2020. Students designed political posters that could be posted in urban public spaces (a form of COVID-19 “assembly”). Cao researched the post-2008 subprime mortgage crisis, and created work that also addressed the present political crisis. Courtesy of Congwei Cao.
A decade later, the novel coronavirus and, more recently, the popular uprising against racial injustice provoked by the murder of George Floyd, have struck a pedagogical world more engaged with “non-figurative” architecture than ever before. Non-figurative design engages political and economic structures. Recent studios at my institution have, for instance, investigated food production chains, hydrological infrastructure and politics, gentrification, and other points of entries where designers are able, at least in the classroom, to choose paths out of complicity.
Tragically, the university itself may soon fail us, forcing the field to retreat. In the Chronicle of Higher Education Paul Friga urges universities to resist sweeping austerity measures. That counsel apparently is not resonating among panicked administrators, who are imposing university-wide wage and hiring freezes, firing adjunct faculty, and consolidating courses, with little input from various faculties, or regard for their pedagogical needs or capacities to weather the storm. In this context, architecture—professional and academic—must agitate for the field’s protection. In a Places Journal roundtable on the pandemic crisis, Patricia Morton worries that architecture will fall victim to efforts to pare down the resources universities put behind design education. Architectural humanities faces a particularly steep challenge. The word “essential” has become a cudgel to justify eliminating anything that seems like a nuisance or a luxury. In architecture, I worry that means my seminar, and me: anything or anyone (at least un-tenured) who questions the field’s culpability.
“The pandemic presents architectural education with an opportunity: not to secure lucrative commissions, but a once-in-a-lifetime chance to spend an abnormal fall semester digging into questions and values.”
Even without disfiguring budget cuts, fall semester is not going to be “normal” for architecture, no matter if we stay all-online, return to campus with social-distancing measures, or try some magical hybrid like “HyFlex.” Our capacity for design education, rooted in the atelier and studio traditions, is altered. My larger concern, though, is that in the rush to adapt and economize, we resist the temptation to reduce curricula to formal skills. As the pandemic wreaks havoc on the poor, people of color, slum dwellers, and other marginal and vulnerable populations around the world, it’s more crucial than ever to give students, and the field, space to explore architecture, past and present, as a mirror of wealth, power, and statecraft, but also as a starting point for a strong, focused inquiry into how design has failed society, and how it has unique capacity to reconcile urgent political goals with tangible design intervention. What can (and should) architecture achieve? Wealth, health, and happiness? If it can’t advance these goals even under normal circumstances, why defend the status quo? Most importantly, how can architecture do better?
The pandemic presents architectural education with an opportunity: not to secure lucrative commissions, but a once-in-a-lifetime chance to spend an abnormal fall semester digging into questions and values. Unlike studio, we can do this fairly well remotely and asynchronously—and with urgency. Instead of trying to teach studio on Zoom, we can learn about architecture and the body, investigate political systems and nationalisms, and consider how architects have been complicit in building the broken world—how they have resisted injustices. We can read up, dig in, and lean in to reassess of our endeavor. Soon enough, perhaps next spring, we will resume usual in-person instruction. When we do so, we should return with new groundings, new questions, and new intentions.
According to Arturo Escobar, writing in 2018, architecture’s implicit embrace of capital “is the result of deeply entrenched ways of being, knowing and doing. To reclaim design for other world-making purposes requires creating a new, effective awareness of design’s embeddedness.” That awareness, to me, is “essential,” not least for my students, as they develop professional identities and praxis in the age of coronavirus and racial reckoning. After all, how we live together remains the most important question in architecture.
NOTE
[1] Craig L. Wilkins, The Aesthetics of Equity (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 116.
