Teaching Architectural Design in Xenophobic Times
I live in St. Louis, Missouri, and teach at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University. In the five years since Ferguson my colleagues have offered numerous design studios, seminars, and other courses, and sponsored symposiums and panels that have concentrated on the relationship of architecture and urban design to social injustices and economic disparities in the St. Louis metropolitan area. Their descriptions focus on endemic racism and its deadly impact on African Americans.
The courses, initiated with the best of intentions, revealed to students the debilitating consequences of persistent cultural and institutional racism and racial and social segregation. However, design was diminished, replaced by privileging “relationships” over outcomes. An emphasis on collaborative research displaced the individual responsibility of authorship and design. Research—posed as the collection of data, the making of charts and mapping—resulted in collaborative communication design exercises, not in developed architectural projects. The focus on research and community participation in studio courses marginalized architectural design. The architectural project became the neglected child—ignored, overlooked, or weakly developed.
Prior to 2018, my emphasis in architectural design studio courses was primarily relationships between architecture and art, for example, the design of artist’s studios, galleries, archives, institutes, museums, exhibits, and permanent and temporary installations. Sites were varied: from St. Louis, to Palm Springs, California; Milan, and Florence, Italy; Houston, and Marfa, Texas. The pedagogic intentions were two-fold: to introduce students to disciplines outside of architecture (contemporary art), and to the intrinsic architectural qualities found in well-designed spaces for art (natural light, space and volume, the space between things, and clarity of circulation).
I took a different path starting in the fall of 2018, choosing instead to work with students in a studio dedicated to the themes of architecture and memory, and continuing in the spring of 2019, with one focused on the necessity of humanitarian shelter for immigrants at the U.S. southern border.
In fall of 2018 I co-taught two studios with my colleague Professor Robert McCarter (figure 1). We shared an undergraduate studio in Florence, Italy and a graduate studio in St. Louis. From September to late October, Robert taught undergraduate students in Florence, designing a Montessori school in this city, and I taught graduate students in St. Louis, designing a Holocaust memorial in Florence. We switched classes and cities mid-semester, with Robert returning to St. Louis to work with the same graduate studio (they designed a vertical monastery in Florence’s Piazza Carmine), and I taught the Florence undergraduate studio. I asked my students to design the Holocaust Memorial in Florence, having revised the program and the site.
In each case, in one semester undergraduate and graduate students worked with two different professors, encountering two very different projects in Florence.
The timing of the fall 2018 studios coincided with daily news reports of growing xenophobic nationalism in the U.S. Leading up to the mid-term elections in November 2018, Trump’s tweet storms fueled this chauvinism by maligning immigrants, who were seeking asylum at the southern border of the U.S., as criminals and rapists. In both studios, students researched the corrosive effects of nativism and racism. I noticed disturbing parallels between Italy in the 1930s and the United States in the 2010s: dehumanizing laws, propaganda and denial of basic civil and human rights are followed by internment and deportation, and in the worst cases genocide. Before beginning design, research was crucial and necessary to give depth and content to student designs.
The Florence Studio
In May of 2018 I visited the Museo Novecento in Florence with my colleague Katharina Giraldi. The Museo Novecento is housed in a fifteenth-century building situated on Piazza Santa Maria Novella, opposite Alberti’s fifteenth-century façade for the church of the same name. The Museo Novecento’s building, initially a hospital dating from the mid-fourteenth century, was converted to a school in the late eighteenth century, and prior to its recent renovation to house the collection of the Museo Novecento in 2014, the site of the Alinari photography museum. I didn’t know Florentine fascists appropriated the museum’s building and courtyard in March of 1944 and used it to detain and intern over three hundred arrested Jews and anti-fascists prior to their deportation by train to concentration camps.
“Knowledge of the support for and complicity with fascism in Florence in the 1930s and 1940s, combined with the present xenophobia and nativist fear and the rise of anti-immigrant policies in Italy, the U.S., and other countries in Europe suggested a provocative studio project. ”
I’ve taught Washington University architecture students in Florence since 2010, but I was unaware of this history until Katharina brought it to my attention. A small plaque (figure 2) mounted high on the wall of the building’s loggia is the only recognition on the site of this history. The plaque honors the victims, most of whom died in Nazi concentration camps following internment in the building. More importantly, the plaque makes no mention of the collaboration, complicity, and active participation of Italians in the arrests and round ups in Florence and Tuscany in March of 1944.
After several conversations with friends and colleagues in Italy and very cursory research, I discovered the Florentine complicity with Italian fascism is largely unknown; it has been erased and forgotten. Knowledge of the support for and complicity with fascism in Florence in the 1930s and 1940s, combined with the present xenophobia and nativist fear and the rise of anti-immigrant policies in Italy, the U.S., and other countries in Europe suggested a provocative studio project.
After having worked with my graduate students in St. Louis I reduced the complexity of the program for the Holocaust memorial, and the expansive and ill-defined sites, which included not only the Museo Novecento site, but also Piazza Santa Maria Novella, and Giovanni Michelucci’s Santa Maria Novella railroad station (figures 3, 4). I realized that the studio project was too difficult for undergraduate students to accomplish resolved projects in a half-semester. The project was now situated only within the courtyard and loggia of the Museo Novecento building, a site with clearly defined boundaries. More importantly, this was a more poignant setting, as it was the site of internment in 1944.
The projects designed by the undergraduate students in Florence benefitted from the tighter spatial and dimensional parameters of the Museo Novecento site. The “friction” of these parameters accelerated the proposal and study of initial concepts, yielding more time for development. The student’s research and readings revealed Italy’s role in the repression of their fellow citizens, beginning with the passage of restrictive legislation stripping Italian Jews of their civil and human rights in the 1930s, followed by seizures of property, internment and ultimately in the 1940s the genocide of the Holocaust.
Reducing the scope of the project also opened up more time to conduct research, not only on the Holocaust, but also other designs for Holocaust memorials in Italy. Students made frequent visits to the Museo Novecento (a 20-minute walk from our Florence studio), visited the Great Synagogue in Florence, and the Shoah Memorial of Milan (Memoriale della Shoah di Milano), a visit that was profoundly and emotionally moving for everyone.
M. Pia Masnini Jarach, the docent who guided our visit to the Memoriale della Shoah in Milan, underscored the role of history and memory, and our responsibility to be alert to racism and to the manipulation of fear and facts today. Indifference to the racism and persecution of their fellow Italian citizens, and to laws approved by the Italian government and signed by the king sanctioned increasingly severe restrictions on Italian Jews, and set the stage for the genocide in Italy that occurred after September 1943.
Each student determined the content of their memorial design: as a memorial dedicated to the specific circumstances of the March 1944 arrests, detentions and deportations; as a memorial to Jewish victims of the Shoah in Italy; or as a memorial to all Holocaust victims. All projects shared a common goal and intention: to remember the victims and to implicate those responsible for their victimization and suffering.
The Museo Novecento hosted an exhibit of the students’ projects, opening on the Day of Remembrance, January 27 (figures 5, 6, 7). It was installed in the same space occupied by interned Italian Jews and anti-fascists in 1944. The exhibit will travel to other venues in Italy in 2020.
“While working with my students in Florence, the parallels between the xenophobia and racism of the past and the present were vividly evident—daily—in Italy, Europe and the U.S. In a following post, I will describe how this experience led to a design studio in the spring of 2019 dealing with the contemporary social situation and humanitarian crisis at our southern border. ”
Students incorporated a variety of solutions in their designs for the Holocaust Memorial and attempted to portray the emotional state of those arrested and interned in tandem with representations of their perpetrators. Our visit to the Milan Shoah Museum—specifically the emotional impact of experiencing the tight dimensions of the cattle cars used to transport Holocaust victims and M. Pia Masnini Jarach’s visceral description of the fear and despair of those arrested and deported—influenced many of the designs (figure 8). The volume and dimensions of the claustrophobic cattle cars were appropriated and transformed through the use of different materials and positions within the courtyard of the Museo Novecento.
The identification and location of the final destinations of victims ranged from the literal (in one project as a re-creation of the Auschwitz tower) to the abstract (angular elements alluding to the infamous “stairway of death” at Mauthausen) and as markings (rail lines embedded in the courtyard ground). To depict the individuality of victims, students typically listed names of victims, victim’s objects left behind, and representations of clothing and confiscated artifacts. The perpetrators and the complicity of Italians are represented in various ways—as images, text, and by naming the numerous concentration camps within Italy (figures 9-20).
While working with my students in Florence, the parallels between the xenophobia and racism of the past and the present were vividly evident—daily—in Italy, Europe and the U.S. Following with future post, I will describe how this experience led to a design studio in the spring of 2019 dealing with the contemporary social situation and humanitarian crisis at our southern border.
The spring 2019 studio proposed designs of facilities for the care and well-being of families attempting to immigrate and settle in the United States. We chose to address the problem with architecture. Instead of fantasizing a future of open borders, we instead asked how can architecture heal, shelter and give refuge to those in need?
