Portfolio_4

EMILY RUOPP

COLUMBIA GSAPP

AIA NCARB

M.S. AAD PORTFOLIO

EGRUOPP@GMAIL.COM ISSUU.COM/EGRUOPP

623 W 145TH ST, APT 4 NEW YORK, NY 10031

ENERGY TOWER IN THE PARK

A STORY OF INEQUALITY & A TALE OF TWO GRIDS NYCHA LA GUARDIA HOUSING, LOWER EAST SIDE / NEW YORK, NY FALL 2020: STUDIO V - GORDON KIPPING

INTERSECTIONAL TEXTS

THE THERMOHELIODON, TRASH PEAKS, & FAVELA-BAIRRO PROJECTS TRANSSCALARITIES: THE INTERSECTIONAL DESIGN OF CLIMATE FALL 2020: HISTORY/THEORY - ANDRES JAQUE

A SELF-PORTRAIT

DRAWINGS, MODELS, AND PROSE LINES NOT SPLINES FALL 2020: VISUAL STUDIES - CHRISTOPH A. KUMPUSCH

FORTRESSES OF CULTURE

PEELING BACK THE MARBLE CURTAIN LINCOLN CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS, LINCOLN SQUARE / NEW YORK, NY SUMMER 2021: STUDIO VII - GABRIELLE PRINTZ & ROSANA ELKHATIB

THE PROTEST HANDBOOK

A HISTORICAL TAXONOMY POWER TOOLS SPRING 2021: VISUAL STUDIES - LEXI TSIEN & JELISA BLUMBERG

LATINX ARCHITECTURAL IDENTITIES

ARQUITECTONICA VS. ESTUDIO CRUZ + FONNA FORMAN (UN)MODERN: EX-CENTRIC LATIN@/X SPATIAL PRACTICES SPRING 2021: HISTORY/THEORY - LUIS CARRANZA

ENTANGLED REPORTS

GOOD OR BAD NATURES, FUTURE WILD, FEMINIST TECHNOSCIENCE, & OTHER FOUNDATIONS ENTANGLED SYMPOSIA SUMMER 2021: HISTORY/THEORY - ANDRES JAQUE + VARIOUS INSTRUCTORS

TAKING AN ALTERNATIVE PATH

UNCOVERING CONTROVERSY + SOCIETAL (UN)CONDITIONING MORNINGSIDE PARK, HARLEM / NEW YORK, NY SPRING 2021: STUDIO VI - ADA TOLLA & GIUSEPPE LIGNANO

ENERGY TOWER IN THE PARK A STORY OF INEQUALITY & A TALE OF TWO GRIDS NYCHA LA GUARDIA HOUSING, MANHATTAN / NEW YORK , NY

PROJECT INFORMATION: ACADEMIC WORK: COURSE: DATE COMPLETED: PROFESSOR:

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY ARCH 4005 - ADVANCED STUDIO V FALL 2020 GORDON KIPPING

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

ENERGY TOWER IN THE PARK CREATES AN ARCHITECTURAL ACTIVISM THAT SEEKS TO MITIGATE ISSUES OF INCOME INEQUALITY, CLIMATE VULNERABILITY, AND SOCIAL VULNERABILITY. IT ACHIEVES THIS THROUGH BUILDING ALTERATIONS THAT MAKE THE BUILDING NET-POSITIVE WHILE ALSO MOBILIZING AN UNEMPLOYED WORKFORCE TO PARTICIPATE IN THE EMERGING ECONOMY OF RENEWABLE RESOURCES AND TECHNOLOGY BUT DOING IT IN A WAY THAT PROMOTES THE MOST VULNERABLE POPULATIONS FIRST.

BY MAPPING ENERGY CONSUMPTION ACROSS SCALES, IT IS CLEAR THAT NEW YORK CITY IS NOT ONLY ONE OF THE LEADING CONTRIBUTORS TO CLIMATE CHANGE, BUT ALSO AMONG THE MOST SOCIALLY AND ECONOMICALLY UNEQUAL CITIES IN THE WORLD. IN NEW YORK CITY, 71% OF ENERGY CONSUMPTION IS FROM BUILDINGS AND MOST OF THAT CONSUMPTION IS FROM THE RESIDENTIAL SECTOR.

BY CREATING A COMPOSITE MAP THAT OVERLAPS INCOME INEQUALITY, SOCIAL VULNERABILITY, AND CLIMATE VULNERABILITY, MID-RISE PUBLIC HOUSING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WERE IDENTIFIED AS THE BEST TARGETS OF INTERVENTION. FOCUSING SPECIFICALLY ON THE LA GUARDIA HOUSING COMPLEX IN THE LOWER EAST SIDE AS THE LARGEST PUBLIC HOUSING CLUSTER, THE PROPOSAL REPLACES THE CRUMBING RED BRICK FAÇADE, POOR INSULATION, AND BLACK METAL GATES WITH A TERRACOTTA PANEL FAÇADE, MODULAR CROSS LAMINATED TIMBER (CLT) BALCONIES, PRIVATE WINTER GARDENS, A PUBLIC GREENHOUSE, PUBLIC EVENT SPACE, AND A WATER TANK FOR IRRIGATION. THE PROJECT REDUCES SOLAR HEAT GAIN, INCREASES AIR CIRCULATION, AND CREATES A NET-POSITIVE BUILDING THAT IS CONNECTED TO A MICROGRID THAT SENDS SURPLUS ENERGY BACK INTO THE MACROGRID OF CON EDISON TO CREATE EXPENDABLE INCOME FOR RESIDENTS. THE MICROGRID HAS ITS OWN ENERGY STORAGE BANK THAT WOULD WORK IN ISLAND MODE AND PROVIDE POWER DURING STORMS. WHILE IT IS RELATIVELY EASY TO CONCEIVE OF SUSTAINABLE SINGLE-FAMILY HOMES, WORKING WITH TALL BUILDINGS WITHOUT HORIZONTAL REAL ESTATE REQUIRES A RETHINKING OF THE WAY WE TYPICALLY SEE RENEWABLE TECHNOLOGY. TO ACHIEVE THIS, VERTICAL SOLAR FARMS, VERTICAL AXIS WIND TURBINES, AND INLINE HYDROPOWER TURBINES WERE EMPLOYED. THIS HYBRID MODEL IS ALSO ADVANTAGEOUS BECAUSE IT IS NOT SOLELY DEPENDENT ON ANY ONE RESOURCE, BECAUSE EACH SOURCE IS DEPENDENT ON SPECIFIC WEATHER CONDITIONS. THIS WILL MAKE THE BUILDING MORE RESILIENT TO CLIMATE BUT ALSO PROVIDE A NEW IDENTITY FOR PUBLIC HOUSING.

INTERSECTIONAL TEXTS

THE THERMOHELIODON, TRASH PEAKS, & FAVELA-BAIRRO PROJECTS TRANSSCALARITIES: THE INTERSECTIONAL DESIGN OF CLIMATE

PROJECT INFORMATION: ACADEMIC WORK: COURSE: DATE COMPLETED: PROFESSOR:

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY ARCH 4402 - HISTORY / THEORY FALL 2020 ANDRES JAQUE

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barber, Daniel A. “The Nature of the Image: Olgyay and Olgyay’s Architectural-Climatic Diagrams in the 1950s.” Public Culture, vol. 1, no. 29 (January 2017): pp. 129–164.

Barber, Daniel A. “The Termoheliodon: Climatic Architecture at the End of Calculation.” A/R/P/A Journal, issue. 01, last modified May 15, 2014, http://www.arpajournal.net/thermoheliodon/ Leatherbarrow, David, and Richard Wesley. “Performance and Style in the Work of Olgyay and Olgyay.” Arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 2 (September 2014): pp. 167-176.

Moffitt, Lisa. “Victor and Aladár Olgyay’s Thermoheliodon: Controlling Climate to Reduce Climate Control.” Arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 3, (September 2019): pp. 255–266.

Olgyay, Aladar. The Works of Architects Olgyay + Olgyay. New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1952.

Olgyay, Victor. Design with Climate: Bioclimatic Approach to Architectural Regionalism. New and Expanded Edition ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

THE THERMOHELIODON DEVICE: THE HUMAN AND BIOCLIMATIC DESIGN Like many European architects of the post-WWII modernist era, Victor and Aladar Olgyay emigrated to the United States from Hungary in 1947 and dedicated themselves to solving problems of automation, suburbanization, and data acquisition.1 However, environmental performance was lacking in the hastily built residences in the newly developed suburbs that led to summer overheating.2 As a result, two divergent methodologies emerged to control the interior environment: mechanical ventilation (site independency) and architectural regionalism (site dependency). Meteorological sciences were also shifting from ground-level to sky-level data acquisition that was facilitated by weather balloons, airplanes, and other aerial devices.3 Climate was increasingly being understood as dynamic, quantifiable, predictable, and periodic, whereas architecture was dedicated to creating an interior environment of uniformity, stasis, and control based on human thermal comfort zones.

Victor and Aladar Olgyay sympathized with the growing distrust of homogeneous buildings that were reproduced on a large scale and equally applied to every climate.4 Therefore, they dedicated their research to developing architectural design techniques that adapted to the various climate zones throughout the US. They created a dynamic data-driven device, the Thermoheliodon. It was an elaborate domed apparatus that included environmental simulation devices to emulate real-world conditions of sun, wind, and temperature of any given site.5 The key aim of the Thermoheliodon was to “create a climate-balanced building which resisted adversarial environmental factors while amplifying advantageous ones to produce a stable interior” by following the methodology of The Bioclimatic Approach.6 This approach consisted of four simple steps: (1) analyze climate data, (2) evaluate human thermal comfort, (3) develop techniques to mitigate climate and thermal comfort, and (4) design a synthesized architectural response that uses those techniques.7 The Olgyays used this approach for achieve thermal comfort at the scale of both single building designs and prototypes for large suburban masterplans for each climatic region.

However, this ideal of thermo-stability was rooted in the 1950s idea that climatic fluctuations were disruptive, ignoring the fact that variability could be desirable or even pleasurable.8 There were also other problems that were not accounted for, including microclimate differences, relative humidity, rain, snow, glare, air quality,

FOOTNOTES:

unpredictable weather conditions, and non-human comfort. The Thermoheliodon successfully sped up the research process between climate and architecture, but physical models are reductive representations and complications occur with extreme reductions in scale.

Moreover, Bauhaus principles were deeply rooted in their “Functionalist Architecture,” one of several regional branches of European Modernism.9 Their climatic analysis suggests a design method that is unconcerned with aesthetic issues, yet when they provide precedents, architectural technologies, and built solutions, their aesthetic style is clearly derived from Modernism. There is an apparent disconnect between their analysis and their aesthetics. Their influence was limited by a pervasive concern that technology and analysis must not interfere with an architect’s expressive voice. Moreover, the masterplans developed for suburban communities are seemingly just as homogeneous as the ones created by developers. Except for overall building orientation and form, the communities include the same decreased lot sizes, increased paving, and tree removal as standard suburban housing complexes.

While the Thermoheliodon device was an incomplete experiment, it has offered multi-scalar interpretations of the relationship between humans, buildings, and their environment that have led to unintended outcomes that contribute to sustainable discourse today. For example, digital simulation tools, like Ecotect Analysis, would not exist without first creating a physical simulation of the same environment. While the Thermoheliodon was intended to be used only for architectural design purposes, the device was frequently used by aerodynamics, fluid mechanics, and meteorology departments at Princeton University, thereby expanding the roles and responsibilities of an architect to include other engineering disciplines.10 Furthermore, climate change was not a factor in societal awareness in the 1950s, but the principles of bioclimatic design remain relevant for architects today who need to consider energy usage, carbon emissions, LEED credits, and Passive House techniques. While Victor and Aladar Olgyay placed human comfort at the center, their concepts can be easily applied to non-human environments and the urgency of our current climate crisis.

We must not only design with, but also for climate.

1. Daniel A. Barber, “The Termoheliodon: Climatic Architecture at the End of Calculation.” A/R/P/A Journal, issue. 01, last modified May 15, 2014, http://www.arpajournal.net/thermoheliodon/ 2. Lisa Moffitt, “Victor and Aladár Olgyay’s Thermoheliodon: Controlling Climate to Reduce Climate Control.” Arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 3, (September 2019): 256.

3. Lisa Moffitt, “Victor and Aladár Olgyay’s Thermoheliodon: Controlling Climate to Reduce Climate Control,” 259.

4. Daniel A. Barber, “The Nature of the Image: Olgyay and Olgyay’s Architectural-Climatic Diagrams in the 1950s.” Public Culture, vol. 1, no. 29 (January 2017): 141.

5. Olgyay, Victor. Design with Climate: Bioclimatic Approach to Architectural Regionalism. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015): 180.

6. Lisa Moffitt, “Victor and Aladár Olgyay’s Thermoheliodon: Controlling Climate to Reduce Climate Control.” 260.

7. Olgyay, Victor. Design with Climate: Bioclimatic Approach to Architectural Regionalism, 14.

8. Daniel A. Barber, “The Nature of the Image: Olgyay and Olgyay’s Architectural-Climatic Diagrams in the 1950s.” 141.

9. Olgyay, Aladar. The Works of Architects Olgyay + Olgyay. (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1952): 8.

10. Olgyay, Victor. Design with Climate: Bioclimatic Approach to Architectural Regionalism, 180.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anker, Peder and Nina Edwards, “Anthropocene Architecture: Design Earth’s Geostories,” The Avery Review, vol. 29, no. 1, (February 2018): pp. 1-8.

Brown, Rebecca M. and Deborah S. Hutton, A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture, United Kingdom: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2011.

Ghosn, Rania and El Hadi Jazairy, “Trash Peaks: A Terrarium of the Anthropocene,” Architectural Design, vol. 90, no. 1, (January 2020): pp. 32-37.

Ghosn, Rania and El Hadi Jazairy, “Geographies of Trash,” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 68, no. 1, (March 2014): 68-81.

Ghosn, Rania and El Hadi Jazairy, “Design Earth: About.” Accessed October 10, 2020. https://www.design-earth.org/about/ Ghosn, Rania and El Hadi Jazairy, “Design Earth: Exhibit.” Accessed October 10, 2020. https://www.design-earth.org/exhibitions/trash-peaks/ Ghosn, Rania and El Hadi Jazairy, “Design Earth: Project.” Accessed October 10, 2020. https://www.design-earth.org/projects/trash-peaks/ Governor’s Island. “The Hills.” Accessed November 15, 2020. https://www.govisland.com/the-park Lynton, Norbert, Tatlin’s Tower: Monument to Revolution, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

Wall, Ed, “Les Paysagistes: Expanding, Producing, Contested Fields of Landscape.” Architectural Design, vol. 90, no. 1, (January 2020): pp. 6-13.

TRASH PEAKS:

MONUMENTALITY AND WASTE MANAGEMENT

Producing 37,843 tons of daily waste, Seoul’s waste management systems have historically been heavily reliant on landfills.1 For the 2017 Seoul Biennale, Design Earth provided an alternative solution to Seoul’s waste management: Trash Peaks. The installation consisted of three artifacts: a carpet, a folding screen, and 3D-printed ceramic tableware. The carpet was an infographic diagram of waste streams for each project. The silk folding screen is a cultural object in Korea known as irworobongdo, literally meaning “painting of the sun, moon, and the five peaks.”2, 3 Traditionally set behind the king’s throne, the irworobongdo folding screen is a symbolic motif in royalty where the sun and moon symbolize the king and queen, while the five peaks denote a mythical place.4 The images on the screen invite a re-evaluation of the landscape and its relationship to waste. Each of the six projects were also 3D-printed into ceramics: salt-and-pepper shakers, bowls, a teapot, teacups, and chopsticks.

These elements were the tableware for a tea ceremony where visitors could discuss the projects. While massive monuments are used to convey the scale of trash, transforming each monument into a miniature object allows the projects to manifest ideas that the naked eye otherwise struggles to comprehend at a larger scale.

Instead of insisting that garbage be kept out of sight, Trash Peaks is a series of six speculative projects that make waste visible, thus creating public awareness of waste’s ecological impact: (1) The Plastisphere, (2) The E-Fungi Volcano, (3) The Janus Incinerator, (4) Towering Construction, (5) Leachate Cenotaph, (6) Methane Aviary.5 While each landform focuses on landfilling, recycling, burning, re-using, and reducing waste, they also transform a historical monument. Such historic references include: Peter Cook’s Graz Art Museum, Ancient Pyramids, Tatlin’s Tower, Boulee’s Cenotaph for Newton, and Cedric Price’s Aviary. Design Earth appropriated existing cultural symbols and rituals to unsettle preconceived notions of infrastructure and environmental practices to produce new solutions in the context of the Anthropocene.6 In other words, by using symbols of modernity that are characterized by a lack of ornamentation and dominance of pure geometric forms, Design Earth critically transforms these structures of heroism and mastery into a new symbol of postmodern waste management, a monument to awareness.

FOOTNOTES:

Trash Peaks engages geography to reveal “aesthetic and political concerns for architecture and urbanism.”7 For example, Towering Construction wraps concrete, steel, and wood waste around Mount Namsan as an ode to the original Tatlin’s Tower that was to be 1,312 ft (400 m) high. 8 Although never built, it was to be a symbol of modernity after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.9 This reference speaks to the monumental accumulation of trash that humans have acquired since the advent of modernity. Literally, there is enough trash to build Tatlin’s Tower. These monuments not only serve as a reminder of the fraught relationship between humans and the world, but now they also perform in an age of increased urban density and worldwide implementation of technology. Their proposals are “as fantastic as they are improbable.”10 Prompting architectural dreams and nightmares of monumentality, Design Earth illustrates an apocalyptic vision of the future that will result if daily habits and building infrastructure are not changed.11 In an era of the Anthropocene, Design Earth argues that a monument will symbolize an increasingly troubled relationship with the Earth and human activity.12Agreed, design must describe the invisible world hidden within the layers of the earth and make visible the process of waste management.

However, the design of each monument is only perceived holistically in section.

From the outside, they are merely pure, abstract forms that inhabitants know are municipal waste facilities but are still hidden from the processes that occur inside. This contradiction is furthered by the way the monuments are disguised by natural peaks or buried underground. The peaks physically hide half of the volume of waste, thereby perpetuating the problem of visibility.

While visualizing the outside volumes of monumental waste facilities will make visible where waste is processed, this is not enough public awareness to change the behaviors of consumers and the consequences of urban life.

1. Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, “Trash Peaks: A Terrarium of the Anthropocene,” Architectural Design, vol. 90, no. 1 (January 2020): 34.

2. Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, “Trash Peaks: A Terrarium of the Anthropocene,” 34.

3. Rebecca M. Brown and Deborah S. Hutton, A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture, (United Kingdom: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2011), 355.

4. Rebecca M. Brown and Deborah S. Hutton, A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture, 356.

5. Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, “Trash Peaks: A Terrarium of the Anthropocene,” 34 -37.

6. Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, “Trash Peaks: A Terrarium of the Anthropocene,” 33.

7. Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, “Design Earth: About.” accessed October 10, 2020, https://www.design-earth.org/about/ 8. Norbert Lynton, Tatlin’s Tower: Monument to Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 30-31.

9. Lynton, Tatlin’s Tower: Monument to Revolution, 32.

10. Peder Anker and Nina Edwards, “Anthropocene Architecture: Design Earth’s Geostories,” The Avery Review, vol. 29, no. 1 (February 2018): 5.

11. Peder Anker and Nina Edwards, “Anthropocene Architecture: Design Earth’s Geostories,” 5.

12. Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, “Trash Peaks: A Terrarium of the Anthropocene,” 33.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Attia, Sahar, Shahdan Shabka, Zeinab Shafik, and Asmaa Ibrahim, eds. Dynamics and Resilience of Informal Areas: International Perspectives. Springer, 2016.

Jáuregui, Jorge Mario. “Aterlier Metropolitano: Works.” Accessed November 16, 2020. http://www.jauregui.arq.br/ Lorenz, Aaron. “Paulo Lins’s “Cidade De Deus”: Mapping Racial and Class Difference in the “Favela”.” Afro-Hispanic Review, vol. 29, no. 2, (Fall 2010): pp. 81-96.

Machado, Rodolfo, ed. The Favela-Barrio Project: Jorge Mario Jáuregui Architects. Harvard University Graduate School of Design: Brodock Press, 2003.

Murphy, Diana, Adrian Crabbs, Cory Reynolds, and Architecture for Humanity. Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises. New York: Metropolis Books, 2006.

Nadal, D. Huertas. “Integrative Cities: When Art and Architecture Become Strategic.” The Sustainable City VII, vol. 1, no.1, (2012): pp. 181–192.

Uechi, Carolina. “Urban Interventions: Architecture as a Mechanism of Inclusion.” PhD diss., Graduate School of the University of Maryland, 2014.

FAVELA-BAIRRO PROJECTS:

AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH

Favelas, makeshift shantytowns that emerged in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro in the 1890s, have long been regarded as “fourth worlds” and a nuisance by city dwellers.1, 2 Decades of neglect and apathy by the government were followed by acknowledgment, physical removal, and social eradication until the 1990s.3 For instance, in the 1960s, the government attempted to resettle favela residents into public housing projects, such as Cidade de Deus (City of God).4 However, it failed due to poor planning, maintenance, and government investment.

Located in a western suburb of Rio, the housing projects simply turned into new favelas.5 Despite the various assistance programs implemented and foreign aid, the favelas continue to persist with violence and substandard housing.

The last decade of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of the Favela-Bairro Project, created by architect Jorge Mario Jáuregui. With the aim of integrating the “informal” favelas to the “formal” city center, the favelas were grouped into neighborhoods, or bairros.6 Consisting of over 70 small interventions built between 1994 and today, some of the projects include infrastructure, community centers, new housing, and other communal facilities.

Preceding the design phase of each intervention, Jáuregui conducted several visits to the favelas. In addition to the immediate community, Jáuregui’s team included security consultants, job trainers, new community administration, and social workers.7 This interdisciplinary team not only understood the nuances of each favela, but also trained the residents to maintain their own community.

These interventions use architecture as a tool for social reform, inclusion, and self-improvement. Ultimately, it succeeded because of an unbiased, genuine, and sensitive understanding of the favelas. Too often architects take on roles and responsibilities that are outside their area of expertise. Architecture needs to eradicate the typical trope of architect as all-knowing entity. Instead, teams should follow Jáuregui’s lead and collaborate with more consultants, experts, and community members to attain a more comprehensive understanding of the entanglements inherent in each project.

FOOTNOTES:

Moreover, each favela has a vastly different relationship to the city center in terms of location, age, internal power structure, and their degree of rehabilitation.8 Therefore, the solutions developed are specific to each community’s exigencies. For example, in Salgueiro, well known for soccer and samba, the design team created a flexible stadium that can be used as either a samba rehearsal hall or a soccer field. Salgueiro consistently wins the samba competitions during Rio’s Carnival, and now inhabitants of the city proper visit Salgueiro to take samba classes to rehearse for Carnival.9 Clearly, this transformation has enabled disenfranchised populations to participate in the life of the city center and vice versa. Jáuregui’s team embraces site specificity and does not impose a formula on favelas experiencing similar problems and does not try to solve them through formal architectural obstinance. It is one that recognizes the value of social research and the reinvestment in neighborhood identity, rather than the outmoded practice of demolition and displacement.

While the Favela-Bairros aspire to integrate the informal and the formal city in perhaps a utopian vision, there is still a clear distinction between the two.

Despite the physical improvements, there are still drug lords, prostitution, and poverty, but there is no room here for righteousness. Reclaiming the favelas is about respecting individual freedom and maintaining their authenticity. As planning regulations become more rigorous, it is essential to consider smaller scale mechanisms to make large scale changes. The dichotomies facing the favelas and the city center in Rio are not unlike the problems of gentrification in other cities around the world. The neglect of groups of people and the favoritism of others needs to be dismantled. Urbanism needs to include out-ofthe-box proactive strategies to control future growth in a socially sustainable way. The accomplishment of the Favela-Bairros is that it is not government that defines the success of the renewal process but rather the renewal process that defines the success of the government.10 Favela-Bairros should be a declaration to our generation to deconstruct sociopolitical entanglements and reconstruct urban opportunities.

1. Rodolfo Machado, The Favela-Barrio Project: Jorge Mario Jáuregui Architects (Harvard University Graduate School of Design: Brodock Press, 2003), 13, 16.

2. D. Huertas Nadal, “Integrative Cities: When Art and Architecture Become Strategic.” The Sustainable City VII, vol. 1, no. 1, (2012): pp. 181–192.

3. Rodolfo Machado, The Favela-Barrio Project: Jorge Mario Jáuregui Architects, 13-14.

4. Aaron Lorenz, “Paulo Lins’s “Cidade De Deus”: Mapping Racial and Class Difference in the “Favela”.” Afro-Hispanic Review, vol. 29, no. 2, (Fall 2010): 81-82.

5. Aaron Lorenz, “Paulo Lins’s “Cidade De Deus”: Mapping Racial and Class Difference in the “Favela,” 82.

6. Diana Murphy, et al eds. and Architecture for Humanity. Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises. New York: Metropolis Books, 2006.

7. Machado, The Favela-Barrio Project: Jorge Mario Jáuregui Architects, 52.

8. Machado, The Favela-Barrio Project: Jorge Mario Jáuregui Architects, 23.

9. Machado, The Favela-Barrio Project: Jorge Mario Jáuregui Architects, 29.

10. Carolina Uechi, “Urban Interventions: Architecture as a Mechanism of Inclusion.” (PhD diss., Graduate School of the University of Maryland, 2014).

A SELF-PORTRAIT DRAWINGS, MODELS, AND PROSE LINES NOT SPLINES PROJECT INFORMATION: ACADEMIC WORK: COURSE: DATE COMPLETED: PROFESSOR:

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY ARCH 4832 - VISUAL STUDIES ELECTIVE FALL 2020 CHRISTOPH A. KUMPUSCH

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

FROM LINE DIAGRAMS TO MODEL ESSAYS AND TIMED PROSE, THESE DRAWINGS QUESTION AUTHORSHIP, THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND, AND MYSTERIOUS CONTRADICTIONS.

PROSE:

THE ARCHITECTURE OF MY MIND IS BOTH FAST AND SLOW, TOPOGRAPHIC AND FLAT, LOUD AND QUIET. THE MOVEMENT IS PERFORMED WITH SHARP CORNERS AND ROUND UNEVENNESS. THE WHISTLING OF MY MIND LISTENS AT A LOW FREQUENCY PERMEATING MY CONSCIOUSNESS. I AM A CONTRADICTION AND A MYSTERY.

WHA T IS HOW

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TUR AL S

RCH T WE ELF-P ITEC M ORTR E R OWN GE T T AIT? ’ S HE T WHA S B E L O F-PO W DY T RO HOW RTRA AND O INTO LE D CAN IT? YOUR AN I OES ITS M YOUR OWN MAGE OVEM BOD CURR THAT ENT, Y PL C ENT MEAS WO OLLAPSE AY IN URE S YO RK? AND, THE UR MANA CRAF TING GEME OF YO NT O F FO UR W RM B ORK E RE ?

PRES ENTE DG RAP HIC ALLY ?

E PAINTING IS ALIVE. THE VIOLIN IS ALIVE. BUT WHO IS PLAYING THE VIOLIN? WHAT ARTIST? A VIOLINIST? NO. THE PAINTER. THE PAINTER PLAYS THE VIOLIN IN A WAY THE MUSICIAN CANNOT.

THE VIOLIN AND ITS BOW. THE INSTRUMENT IS TO A MUSICIAN AS A PAINTBRUSH IS TO A PAINTER. THE ARTIST IS INCOMPLETE WITHOUT IT. THEY ARE CONNECTED. THEY ARE DEPENDENT. THEY ARE ONE. THEY ARE ONE LINE. A SINGLE LINE CONNECTING THE TWO.

PROSE: JUAN GRIS. THE VIOLIN. THE IMPRESSION OF A STILL LIFE SHOWN AT VARYING PERSPECTIVES SUPERIMPOSED THROUGH TRANSPARENCY AND OVERLAPPING COLORS AND SHAPES. A DECONSTRUCTION O

AXES, SYMMETRY, ASYMMETRY, ORIENTATION, ROTATION, VIBRATION, STRUCTURE, TENSION, MOVEMENT, DENSITY, SOUND, MUSIC. LIGHT, SHADOW, TRANSPARENCY, VOLUME, FLATNESS, LAYERING, MULTIPLICITY, SINGULARITY, CURVILINEAR, LINEAR, SEPARATION, CONNECTION. OF A DECONSTRUCTION. A RECONSTRUCTION OF A DECONSTRUCTION. A DRAWING OF A PAINTING. A DIAGRAM OF A DIAGRAM. COLOR BLOCKING: WHITE, ORANGE, GRAY, BLACK. COMPOSITION:

MOVEMENT. VIBRATION. REVERBERATION. DISPLACEMENT OF EDGE AND LINE, COLOR AND RELIEF, THE VIOLIN VIBRATES. THE PAINTING VIBRATES. THE PAINTING IS COMING TO LIFE. T

100

10

SYMMETRY + GEOMETRY ARE

THROUGH

MIR ROR ED

TENSILE Lines wood

floating on a page are transformed into floating in air. Instruments include:

3 minutes pen and paper ink subconscious drawing

versus versus versus versus

AND

1

3 hours, wood and string, shadow, conscious model.

Light from above transcribes the lines into shadow below. As more lines are drawn and modeled, each line entangles the previous until the first and the last become indistinguishable. When lines intersect, the physical space becomes real, changing the composition unintentionally. The frame of the paper is irrelevant.

Nodes of intersection become the frame, only existing outside the frame of the camera, thereby hanging the lines in three-dimensional space.

1000

FORTRESSES OF CULTURE

PEELING BACK THE MARBLE CURTAIN LINCOLN CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS, NEW YORK , NY

PROJECT INFORMATION: ACADEMIC WORK: COURSE: DATE COMPLETED: PROFESSOR:

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY ARCH 4853 - ADVANCED STUDIO VII SUMMER 2021 GABRIELLE PRINTZ & ROSANA ELKHATIB

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

TO COUNTERACT COMMUNISM DURING THE COLD WAR, THE FORD FOUNDATION SOUGHT TO PROVIDE A SYMBOL OF NATIONAL CULTURAL MATURITY THROUGH BUILDING UP INTERNAL CULTURAL ARTS PROGRAMS SINCE 1952. THE FORD FOUNDATION SOUGHT TO PRODUCE “THE THINKING MAN” BY “ENCOURAGING COMPETENT, SERIOUS-MINDED PEOPLE” (FORD 1957 ANNUAL REPORT, PG 9). IN 1957, THE FORD FOUNDATION ESTABLISHED THE HUMANITIES AND THE ARTS GRANT PROGRAM, WHICH HAS EXPANDED GRANTS TO INCLUDE ARTS SCHOOLS, OPERA COMPANIES, AND SYMPHONY ORCHESTRAS THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES. SINCE 1957, THE FOUNDATION GRANTED A TOTAL OF $470 MILLION (ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION) FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE LINCOLN CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS AND ITS RESIDENT SUB-ORGANIZATIONS. THESE INCLUDE THE METROPOLITAN OPERA, NEW YORK CITY BALLET, NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC, NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS, JUILLIARD, AND THE SCHOOL OF AMERICAN BALLET. FORD’S TIES TO CLASSICAL ART THROUGH FINE ARTS, SYMPHONY ORCHESTRAS, OPERA COMPANIES, SHAKESPEARE PLAYS, AND PERFORMING ARTS SCHOOLS HAVE FORGED AN EXTREMELY WESTERN, COLONIAL, ELITIST, AND ARISTOCRATIC FORM OF ART THAT CONTINUES TO SEGREGATE COMMUNITIES AS “AFFLUENT” OR “BLIGHTED.” THROUGH THESE GRANTS, NOT ONLY HAS THE FORD FOUNDATION FUNDED EUROCENTRIC ART FORMS, BUT THEY ALSO PARTICIPATED IN AN URBAN RENEWAL “SLUM CLEARANCE PLAN” THAT DECIMATED OVER 16 ACRES OF A THRIVING COMMUNITY PREVIOUSLY KNOWN AS SAN JUAN HILL. OVERSEEN BY ROBERT MOSES, THE PROJECT DISPLACED OVER 7,000 LOWER-CLASS FAMILIES AND 800 LOCAL BUSINESS THAT WERE ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY BLACK AND LATINO. WHILE THIS CONTESTED HISTORY IS CONSISTENTLY IGNORED BY BOTH THE FORD FOUNDATION AND THE LINCOLN CENTER, THIS SITE INTERVENTION WILL SEEK TO REVEAL THIS HIDDEN HISTORY THROUGH THE DISPLAY OF ARCHIVAL MATERIAL IN TYPICAL RESIDENTIAL UNITS FROM BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE LINCOLN CENTER. THESE TYPOLOGIES WILL BE PLACED THROUGHOUT THE SITE TO RE-CREATE THE LOST NEIGHBORHOOD OF SAN JUAN HILL AS A FORM OF PROTEST AND PUBLIC OCCUPATION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY. BY BLOCKING VEHICULAR ACCESS, COVERING THE GRANDEUR OF THE MODERNISM, AND OPENING THE BACK SIDE OF LINCOLN CENTER TO ITS DIVIDED NEIGHBOR, THE NYCHA AMSTERDAM HOUSING PROJECTS, THIS INTERVENTION WILL SEEK TO RESTORE PUBLIC WELFARE THROUGH MUTUAL AID SUPPORT GROUPS AND EXPOSE THE VIOLENCE COMMITTED TO SAN JUAN HILL RESIDENTS.

$1.0 Billion

$0.5 Billion

$0

YEAR

1950 1951 1952

WOLRD EVENTS

FORD TRUSTEES MOST TYPE

CHAIRMAN Korean War 1950-52

Green Revolution 1950-70

U.S. $0 PRESIDENTS

Cold War 1947-91

Television Boom 1950-53

$10 Billion

$15 Billion

$20 Billion

10.0

20.0

30.0

40.0

1945-53

President Dwight D. Eisenhower

Cuban Revolution 1953-59

1953

1953-61

Civil Rights Movement Begins 1954

1954 1955

$5 Billion

President Harry S. Truman

(ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION)

PROGRAM GRANTS

$1.5 Billion

FORD FUND BALANCE

(ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION)

$2.0 Billion

Vietnam War 1955-75 Space Race Begins

1955

Television in

Election Campaigns

1956

1956

1957

Ghana Independence

1957

1958 Alaska & Hawaii Become US States 1959

1959 1960

Black Power Movement Begins 1960

President John F. Kennedy

1961

1961-63

1962

Cuban Missile Crisis

1962

President Lydon B. Johnson

JFK Assasinated 1963

1963

Kenyan Indepedence

1963

1963-69 War on Poverty 1964-65

1964

US Civil Rights Act Passed 1964

Malcom X Assasinated 1965

1965 Mao’s Cultural Revolution 1966-76

1966 1967 1968

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Assasinated 1968

1969

President Richard Nixon

US Lands on the Moon 1969 Stonewall Riots Gay Liberation Movement Begins

1969

1970

Chicano Moratorium

1069-74 White Flight to Suburbs 1970-73

1970

War on Drugs 1971-93

1971 1972

OPEC Oil Embargo 1973-74

1973

President Gerald Ford

1974

1974-77

The Bronx is Burning

1975-80

1975 1976 President Jimmy Carter

1977 1978

1977-81

Iranian Revolution 1978-79

1979 1980

Public Broadcasting

Boom 1980

US Crack Epidemic 1981-93

1981

HIV and AIDA Epidemic 1981-99

President Ronald Reagan

1981-89

1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989

President George H.W. Bush

Tiananmen Square Protests 1989

1989-93

1990 1991 1992 President Bill Clinton

1993

1993-2001

1994

NAFTA Drafted 1994 Nelson Mandela Elected 1994

Dot Com Boom 1995-2002

1995 1996 1997 1998 1999

2001

War on Terror 2001-Present

SHILLER CAPE RATIO OF STOCK MARKET

2000 President George W. Bush

Sept. 11 Attacks 2001

2001-2009

2002 2003

Women of Liberia Strike 2003

(ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION)

2004 2005

Hurricane Katrina 2005

2006 2007

Great Recession 2007-09

2008 President Barack Obama

2009 2009-2017

2010

Occupy Wall Street Protest 2010

2011 2012

Hurricane Sandy 2012

0.0

$2.0 Billion

$1.5 Billion

$1.0 Billion

$0.5 Billion

$0

YEAR

WOLRD EVENTS

FORD TRUSTEES MOST TYPE

CHAIRMAN

1962 1961

U.S. PRESIDENTS

$0

$5 Billion

$10 Billion

$15 Billion

$20 Billion

10.0

20.0

30.0

40.0

Cuban Missile Crisis

1962

President John F. Kennedy

Vietnam War 1955-75

Green Revolution 1950-70

Cold War 1947-91

1961-63

President Bill Clinton

2000

Dot Com Boom 1995-2002

1993-2001

PROGRAM GRANTS

(ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION)

(ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION)

FORD FUND BALANCE

1966

Mao’s Cultural Revolution 1966-76

President Lydon B. Johnson

War on Poverty 1964-65

1964

US Civil Rights Act Passed 1964 1963-69

1965

Malcom X Assasinated 1965

Green Revolution 1950-70

President Richard Nixon

1971

White Flight to Suburbs 1970-73

Mao’s Cultural Revolution 1966-76

War on Drugs 1971-93

1069-74 President Lydon B. Johnson

1967

Green Revolution 1950-70

Mao’s Cultural Revolution 1966-76 1963-69 President Richard Nixon

1972

War on Drugs 1971-93

Mao’s Cultural Revolution 1966-76

Green Revolution 1950-70

JFK Assasinated 1963

White Flight to Suburbs 1970-73

1069-74

1963

Vietnam War 1955-75

President Lydon B. Johnson

Kenyan Indepedence

1963

1963-69

1968

Cold War 1947-91

Mao’s Cultural Revolution 1966-76

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Assasinated 1968

President Bill Clinton

1999

HIV and AIDA Epidemic 1981-99

Dot Com Boom 1995-2002

1993-2001

1969

Mao’s Cultural Revolution 1966-76

Green Revolution 1950-70

President Richard Nixon

US Lands on the Moon 1969 Stonewall Riots Gay Liberation Movement Begins

1969

1069-74

1973 1960 2007

War on Drugs 1971-93

OPEC Oil Embargo 1973-74

White Flight to Suburbs 1970-73

President Dwight D. Eisenhower

Black Power Movement Begins 1960

Green Revolution 1950-70 Vietnam War 1955-75

Cold War 1947-91

1953-61 President George W. Bush

War on Terror 2001-Present

Great Recession 2007-09 2001-2009

1970

President Richard Nixon Vietnam War 1955-75

Cold War 1947-91

Mao’s Cultural Revolution 1966-76

Chicano Moratorium

1970

White Flight to Suburbs 1970-73

1069-74

2006 2001

President George W. Bush War on Terror 2001-Present

Sept. 11 Attacks 2001

Dot Com Boom 1995-2002

2001-2009

2005

Hurricane Katrina 2005

HIV and AIDA Epidemic 1981-99

1997

Dot Com Boom 1995-2002

President Bill Clinton

1998

1993-2001

1959

President Dwight D. Eisenhower Vietnam War 1955-75

Green Revolution 1950-70

Cold War 1947-91

Cuban Revolution 1953-59

Alaska & Hawaii Become US States 1959

1953-61

2004 2003 2002

Women of Liberia Strike 2003

President George W. Bush Dot Com Boom 1995-2002 War on Terror 2001-Present

2001-2009 President Bill Clinton

1996

HIV and AIDA Epidemic 1981-99

1993-2001

2008

President George W. Bush War on Terror 2001-Present

Great Recession 2007-09

2001-2009 US Crack Epidemic 1981-93

1987

HIV and AIDA Epidemic 1981-99

President Ronald Reagan

Cold War 1947-91

1981-89

President Bill Clinton

1993

War on Drugs 1971-93

1995 2010

President Barack Obama War on Terror 2001-Present

Occupy Wall Street Protest 2010

2009-2017 President George H.W. Bush

1992 2012

1993-2001

Dot Com Boom 1995-2002

War on Drugs 1971-93

US Crack Epidemic 1981-93

HIV and AIDA Epidemic 1981-99

1989-93 President Barack Obama War on Terror 2001-Present

Hurricane Sandy 2012

2009-2017 War on Drugs 1971-93

1989

Cold War 1947-91

US Crack Epidemic 1981-93

HIV and AIDA Epidemic 1981-99

Tiananmen Square Protests 1989

President George H.W. Bush

1991

1989-93

2011

President Barack Obama War on Terror 2001-Present

2009-2017

1994

President Bill Clinton

NAFTA Drafted 1994

Nelson Mandela Elected 1994

1993-2001

US Crack Epidemic 1981-93

1986

President Ronald Reagan

HIV and AIDA Epidemic 1981-99

1981-89

1988 President George H.W. Bush

1990

1989-93 President Gerald Ford

1976

Mao’s Cultural Revolution 1966-76

The Bronx is Burning

1975-80

1974-77 President Ronald Reagan

1985

US Crack Epidemic 1981-93

HIV and AIDA Epidemic 1981-99

1981-89

1975

President Gerald Ford Vietnam War 1955-75

Mao’s Cultural Revolution 1966-76

The Bronx is Burning

1975-80

1974-77

1984 President Ronald Reagan

1983 US Crack Epidemic 1981-93

HIV and AIDA Epidemic 1981-99

1981-89

1979 1978

Iranian Revolution 1978-79

President Jimmy Carter

1977

The Bronx is Burning

1975-80

1977-81

Public Broadcasting

Boom 1980

President Gerald Ford

1974 1958

SHILLER CAPE RATIO OF STOCK MARKET

1980

Mao’s Cultural Revolution 1966-76

OPEC Oil Embargo 1973-74

War on Drugs 1971-93

1974-77 President Dwight D. Eisenhower

Green Revolution 1950-70

Cuban Revolution 1953-59

Vietnam War 1955-75

1953-61

President Ronald Reagan

1981 1951

US Crack Epidemic 1981-93

War on Drugs 1971-93

Korean War 1950-52

Cold War 1947-91

HIV and AIDA Epidemic 1981-99

President Harry S. Truman

Vietnam War 1955-75

1952

Korean War 1950-52

1981-89

Television Boom 1950-53

1945-53

1957

Cuban Revolution 1953-59

President Dwight D. Eisenhower

Ghana Independence

1957

President Harry S. Truman

1953-61

Television Boom 1950-53 1945-53

1954

Civil Rights Movement Begins 1954 President Dwight D. Eisenhower

1953 1956

(ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION)

1982

Cuban Revolution 1953-59

Television Boom 1950-53

1953-61

Television in

Vietnam War 1955-75

Election Campaigns

1956

Green Revolution 1950-70 President Barack Obama

2009

War on Terror 2001-Present

1955

Vietnam War 1955-75

1950

Korean War 1950-52

Great Recession 2007-09

2009-2017 President Dwight D. Eisenhower Cuban Revolution 1953-59

Space Race Begins

1955

President Harry S. Truman Green Revolution 1950-70

Cold War 1947-91

1953-61

Television Boom 1950-53

1945-53

0.0

THE PROTEST HANDBOOK A HISTORICAL TAXONOMY POWER TOOLS PROJECT INFORMATION: ACADEMIC WORK: COURSE: DATE COMPLETED: PROFESSOR:

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY ARCH 4995 - VISUAL STUDIES ELECTIVE SPRING 2021 LEXI TSIEN & JELISA BLUMBERG

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

THE PROTEST HANDBOOK IS A TAXONOMY THAT CATALOGUES FORMS OF ACTIVISM THROUGHOUT HISTORY AND THE TOOLS THEY USED TO RESIST. THE BOOK SETS OUT TO UNDERSTAND HOW PROTEST TOOLS ARE BEING USED AND FOR WHOM DO THEY SUPPORT. IT IS AN INSPIRATION GUIDE TO FACILITATE FUTURE PROTESTS, A GUIDELINE TO CO-OPT TOOLS FOR FUTURE USE, AND A REFERENCE TO PAST ISSUES STILL OCCURRING TODAY. THROUGH CATALOGING FORMS OF ACTIVISM AND PROTEST TOOLS, IT BECOMES CLEAR HOW OBJECTS CAN BE RECLAIMED TO SUPPORT THEIR CAUSE. THEN A DISTINCTION BETWEEN CHARITIES AND MUTUAL AID GROUPS IS MADE IN ORDER TO EXPOSE HOW CHARITIES PARTICIPATE IN CORRUPTION AND A FALSE SEPARATION OF POLITICS AND INJUSTICE. INSTEAD, A MUTUAL AID NETWORK IS PREFERRED BECAUSE THEY ARE MORE ACTIVE AND CAPABLE OF PROVIDING RELIEF TO THE MOST VULNERABLE POPULATIONS. THE INDEX ANALYZES THE PROTESTS IN DIFFERENT WAYS TO NOT ONLY MAKE IT EASIER TO NAVIGATE THE VARIOUS CALCULATIONS, LIKE # OF PROTESTS, # OF PEOPLE KILLED, INJURED, AND ARRESTED DURING PROTESTS, BUT ALSO START TO DRAW CONCLUSIONS BETWEEN THEM. ADDITIONALLY, A SERIES OF SEQUELS, ADDITIONS, OR ADDENDA ARE INCLUDED TO SHOW FUTURE RESEARCH OF PROTESTS.

LATINX IDENTITY

PROJECT INFORMATION:

ARCHITECTURE & ARQUITECTONICA (UN)MODERN EX-CENTRIC LATIN@/X SPATIAL PRACTICES

PREFACE: This book seeks to understand the nuances of how Latinx architects working in the United States navigate issues of the identity, cultural appropriation (complete acceptance of U.S. culture), and counter appropriation (complete rejection of U.S. culture). There are also firms who are somewhere in between who practice acculturation (a balance of both). As you will learn, whether on the cultural appropriation side of the spectrum, like that of Arquitectonica, or on the counter appropriation side, like that of Estudio Cruz + Fonna Forman, Latinx architects struggle to assimilate into American culture and this rejection creates issues of identity. In other words, Latinx architects are damned if you do (cultural appropriation) and damned if you don’t (counter appropriation).

MODERNISM:

While modernism has historically been known for the emergence of revolutions in technology, engineering, building materials, and a desire to break away from classical architectural styles in the late 19th century, it also tends to “neatly package and organize people in comprehensible arrangements of spaces.”1 This hierarchical organization that categorizes modernity stems from the discovery and colonization of the Americas. Indeed, the implementation of the cartesian grid, the testing of abstract space, mathematics, and science, the rise in secular thought and architecture, the invention of the abstract map without men, the theory of heliocentrism, the rise of selfconsciousness, the creating of perspectival drawings, and the practice of rationality were undoubtedly due to this discovery and subsequent territorial domination.

Moreover, the raw materials taken from colonial territories, especially precious metals from Latin America, are the very commodities that propelled the European Modernist movement and consequently, the world market and globalization. These ideas of abstraction, order, power, control, and rationality were triggers of modernity, not a consequence of it.

ACADEMIC WORK: COURSE: DATE COMPLETED: PROFESSOR:

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY ARCH 4389 - HISTORY / THEORY SPRING 2021 LUIS CARRANZA

Therefore, in Modernist architecture, “the use of props is planned and the space controls the user, rather than the user controlling the space,” which, in turn, can be extended to controlling user identity.2 Modernism seeks to maintain power and control the spread of knowledge. As a result, actors are created: subject and subject-shaping. The term modernity inherently relies on the existence of an unmodern entity and therefore, relies on people with less power to call itself modern. Modernism continues the segregation of Western and “other” and thereby facilitates inequalities of knowledge and power, especially along racial lines. This duality and segregation perpetuate concepts of otherness and terms such as “The West and the Rest,” Regional Modernism, Alternative Modernism, and ex-centric identities. Throughout history, it is clear that the relationship of Modernism, knowledge, technology, territories, and corporate profit are so entangled that its architecture contains socioeconomic and political influence.

Regardless, it is important to remember that people gave them politics as a result of structural human associations. Thus, people have the power to undo them.

IDENTITY: Particularly in the United States, Latin American immigrants and people of Latin American dissent have experienced the most perverse effects of exclusion and misrepresentation. Much of this stems from the confusion between modernity and modernization. Modernity is an attitude and mental construction: rationality, invention, and abstraction. Whereas modernization is the physical manifestation of modernity to the masses: education, technology, urbanity, economy, and standardization.

The difference between the European and Latin American advent of modernity and modernization is that European modernity developed sequentially: capitalism flourished and affected the daily social experiences of everyday citizens. Whereas Latin American modernity developed simultaneously: despotism, obscurantism, and the bourgeois intellectualism flourished. While both European and Latin American modernity occurred simultaneously during the Enlightenment and Illuminism movements, the European colonization of Latin America encouraged the native elites

BERNARDO FORT-BRESCIA

LAURINDA SPEAR

THE PINK HOUSE - ORIGINAL DESIGN

THE PINK HOUSE - FINAL CONCEPT

LIFE MAGAZINE PHOTOGRAPH

to restrict raw materials, capital, and intellectual hegemony, thereby preventing the modernization of mass culture in Latin America. As a result, Latin America was characterized by the paradox of modernity without modernization until the mid-20th century. At the end of WWII, modernity was in crisis due to the “violent attacks by dark political forces that appealed to the irrationalities of the species.”3 Thus, the United States and European countries pressured Latin America to modernize in their developed capitalist image that was deemed as “successful” modernization.

As a late recipient to modernization, Latin America is often confused as a late recipient to modernity.

Consequently, struggles over identity that Latinx architects face in the context of modernism in the U.S. include: (1) the primitive outsider/outcast paradigm; (2) the stereotypical emphasis on ritual, communal values, and nostalgia to origins; (3) the falsehood that Latin America is somehow closer to nature, primitive, preindustrial, premodern, primal, and animalistic; and (4) that form and aesthetics are driven by “the fantastic,” the bold, and tropical color range. These myths are often intertwined.

For instance, the fallacy of the first paradigm, that without acceptance into U.S. culture, Latinx architects can only find meaning in nostalgia and collective identity to their past and origins, the second paradigm. This perpetuates the third and fourth paradigms, that Latinx architects remain tied to their primitive, traditional, and mythical past through the modern use of a bold color palette and surrealistic forms. Ultimately, Latinx architects face both cultural appropriations and counter appropriations in their work through confronting issues of identity, reactions to modernity, and the production of spatial experiences. As seen in the work of Arquitectonica and Estudio Cruz + Fonna Forman, these appropriations are often contested, ignored, and subverted in the architectural culture of the United States.

ARQUITECTONICA: Arquitectonica was founded by Bernardo Fort-Brescia and Laurinda Spear. It is important to note both of their familial history because it becomes apparent in the way they approach their work and the evolution of their practice. Bernardo Fort-Brescia’s grandfather, Fortunato Brescia Tassano, is an Italian-born Peruvian businessman who founded Grupo Breca, a multibillion-dollar international real estate company-turned-family conglomerate. Bernardo Fort-Brescia received his Bachelor of Arts in Architecture and Urban Planning at Princeton university and obtained his Master of Architecture degree from Harvard University. Laurinda Spear, on the other hand, was born in Miami, but of Cuban dissent. Her father,

MEDIA

GENTLEMAN’S QUARTERLY PHOTOGRAPHS

Harold Spear was a prominent cardiac surgeon, who studied pre-med at Yale and received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School. Laurinda Spear received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Brown University, Master of Architecture from Columbia University, and Master of Landscape Architecture from Florida International University. With access to a multibillion-dollar family fortune and attaining an ivy league education in both undergraduate and graduate studies, one would expect that this privilege would ease assimilation into the predominantly white architectural profession in the United States.

THE PINK HOUSE: Arquitectonica received almost immediate, but not necessarily favorable, notoriety in the architecture industry after their first project, The Pink House.

Designed for Laurinda’s parents, Harold and Suzanne Spear, the initial concept was executed by Laurinda Spear with Rem Koolhaas as a deconstructed urban house within a suburban context. The intention “was not just about sun, water, and tropical fecundity. It was about expanding horizons and the mythology of drivethrough mobility.”4 Spear and Koolhaas submitted the project to Progressive Architecture’s annual awards program. Even though it won a first-place citation and was featured in the January 1975 issue, the four person deliberation said: “It’s not the work of an architect” - Paul Rudolph; “It’s either very great or very, very bad. It’s so much at the edge of absolute disaster, yet it has such fantastic poetry.” - Eberhard Zeidler; “It is undeveloped as a building, but successful as a poetic diagram. It’s as if a mad poet has stretched it out; taken the drawings and laid them down like a child’s cutouts.” - Ivan Chermayeff; “It’s a kind of optimistic gesture in the midst of this awful middle-class suburbia.” - Peter Eisenman. 5 Harold and Suzanne Spear rejected the original plan and asked their daughter to try again. After completing her Master of Architecture at Columbia, Laurinda reworked the design with her now partner and husband, Bernardo Fort-Brescia, while Koolhaas returned to Europe to finish Delirious New York. Built in 1978, the final design was conceived as a “tropical grove which opens to a geometric landscape with palm trees spaced regularly apart in a carpet of pavers.”6 The house was conceived as a study of different planes, painted in 5 shades of pink, with each shade progressively become paler from the street to the bay. In perspectives, the further away an object is from the viewer, the lighter the color becomes. Here, the manipulation of color saturation in sequence heightens the illusionistic perspective when viewed from the street, making the house appear

INTERIOR PHOTOGRAPHS

EAST AND WEST FACADES

deeper than it actually is. The Pink House is a precise sequence: the facade, the courtyard, the pool, and the interior rooms that each frame a different view of the bay.7 However, the new design was not well received by neighbors, who collectively disapproved of the pink color. They managed to require the architect to hide the house behind a grove of fruit trees. Even the Councilman, Ralph Bowen, referred to the pink color as “inappropriate.”8 While some of the early media responses were negative, including a headline in the Miami Herald: “Neighbors See Red Over Pink House,” most subsequent reviews were enthusiastic.9 The mainstream media glorified the design by using it as a commodity to promote luxury and exclusivity for the white bachelor. The Pink House was featured in Vogue, Time Magazine, Newsweek, Life Magazine, House Beautiful, and Gentleman’s Quarterly (GQ). The Pink House became a pop icon, but an icon that exalts the male physique and exoticizes of the female body through photographic framing and erotic pool culture. In Life Magazine, a double-page spread of the legs of a white woman wearing a bikini is shown floating on a raft in the pool, but the frame does not even include her face, just her waist down. In the February 1980 issue of GQ, the porthole becomes a peephole for watching unsuspecting swimmers and is photographed at exactly the head height of the average male. The round porthole that provides a preview of the pool beyond is highlighted not only by the contrast of color of the bright pink façade to the bright blue water, but it is also located directly on axis to the building entry and must be traversed before entering the house. The color saturation of the water is also manipulated to match exactly the aquamarine sweater that the male model is wearing. This manipulation of architecture through color becomes more apparent in later photographs, where a series of images of a male model jumping into the pool shows the same bright pink color, but in reality, that wall is many shades lighter. The photography of The Pink House is curating a Miami identity that is not only sexualizing women to entice a male fantasy, but is also stereotyping Latinx architecture as brightly colored through manipulating color saturation.

Additionally, the Pink House is always photographed without context, as if portraying a dream, a fantasy world that exists outside of typical single-family homes in Miami where this home is built. The North and South facades, which are the short ends of the building, are painted white and are never photographed. Only the pink East and West facades are photographed, making it seem as if the entire exterior of the house is pink. Moreover, the failure of almost every magazine to photograph the all-white interior alludes to the fact that the only architectural feature of consequence is color, thereby perpetuating this stereotype. This manipulation of photography frames the identity of the building, and by extension the identity of Latinx Architecture as purely based on bright colors.

THE ATLANTIS

The portrayal of the Pink House is also misrepresented in film media. On Miami Vice, an American crime drama where two detectives are working undercover to combat drug trafficking and prostitution in Miami, the house becomes a celebration of hedonism, violence, sex, and drugs that becomes synonymous with Latinx identity.

Episodes often ended in an intense gun battle, dressing up violence with pretty photography. Whereas in reality, a mother and a father live there in a middle-class suburban neighborhood. Through media, Latinx architecture and by extension Latinx identity becomes commodified. It becomes a product, one that is carefully curated around the white bachelor, sex, exclusivity, and luxury.

It is clear from the initial drawings of the house that the pink color palette was an afterthought. If the house was painted as shades of blue as shown in the renderings as an extension of the water from the bay, the house would have been perceived differently. Although, it is not clear who decided to paint the house pink and why, it clearly would not have had the same recognition by the media. If the Pink House was painted Grey, is it still Latinx Architecture? Is it still Miami Modernism (MiMo)?

Color, however, is not excluded from Eurocentric and American Modernism. As shown in Dutch architect Gerrit Reitveld’s drawings of the Schroder House from 1924, often seen as an icon of Modernism, he uses a bold primary color palette: blue, red, and yellow. However, color from his drawings are a direct correlation to the color of the building components. In 1973, John Hejduck, a Czech-American architect, designed the Wall House II with a range of pastel colors: blue, green, yellow, red, and purple.

The color is used on very curvilinear forms that symbolize the self-referential escape to somewhere else on the other side of the gray dividing wall. However, when a Latinx Architect uses a bold color palette, no one can seem to look past the pinkness, the pool, and the tropical to actually focus on the architectural design and its concept.

Nonetheless, Arquitectonica is fully aware of this misrepresentation of Miami. In a New York Times article written in 1990, the writer, Patricia Leigh Brown, ends the article with a quote from Bernardo saying, ‘“What we’re trying to say is that there is a Florida,” Mr. Fort-Brescia said with his tropical chutzpah. “And if there isn’t, we’re going to create one.”’10 The mere use of “tropical chutzpah” should be sending red flags and warnings of racism to every New York Times reader, but since the NYT readers of the 1990s were predominantly white, it instead just sends the message that Miami, Arquitectonica, and Latinx architects can now be stereotyped through Tropical Modernism. This construction of Latinx identity through the lens of Western and Eurocentric modernism forces Latinx architects to “stage ‘authenticity’, and to insist on the configuration of a particular cultural image, as a means of opposing external, often dominating, alternatives.”11 Arquitectonica is clearly creating a false image of Miami, a false identity that becomes ingrained in the stereotypes that misrepresent Latinx people throughout the United States.

BLUE BRISE-SOLEIL

EXTERIOR PHOTOGRAPHS

THE ATLANTIS CONDOMINIUM: This misrepresentation of identity did not stop with the Pink House. Built in 1982, the Atlantis Building is a 96-Unit, 20-story slab condominium apartment building on Biscayne Bay in Downtown Miami. The Atlantis is characterized by a bold, blue brise-solei on one side and colorful geometric extrusions that penetrate an all-glass façade on the other side. Most notably, a 37-foot long cube cut-out creates a “sky court” for building residents.12 Under Miami’s zoning regulations, Arquitectonica was able to add the apartments that were cut out to the top of the building, where they command a better view and higher prices. The sky court has three features: a blue whirlpool, a red spiral staircase, and a yellow wavy wall with one red cantilevered balcony.13 Instead of pastel colors like that in the Pink House, here the color palette is primary colors: blue, red, and yellow. On Arquitectonica’s website they claim, “this building, more than any other, called attention to the provocative, photographic nature” of their work.14 Indeed, the design is provocative and consequently became another focal point for mainstream media. The Atlantis building is shown at the end of the introduction clip to every Miami Vice episode. It was also featured several times in the blockbuster movie, Scarface. As a result of national notoriety, it “represented a crucial turning point for the city at large. Suddenly, Miami appeared to have a culture that went beyond retirement plans and palm trees, a culture that was edgy and slightly dangerous, with fast cars, cocaine cowboys, cigarette boats, and outrageous architecture.”15 Yet this national recognition is curating a false identity that is manifesting as stereotypes of Latinx people, architecture, and culture. The true Latinx identity is hidden behind the facade that Arquitectonica and mass media has created.

In 1980, the Atlantis won the Progressive Architecture award and praised by Frank Gehry for its “sculptural quality and surrealistic imagery.”16 Although it was praised, the criticism points to the surrealistic, the fantastic, and whimsical qualities that became synonymous with Latinx architecture. Wolk Von Eckart from Time Magazine in 1984 claimed that “Arquitectonica is building on the spirit of daring and experimentation . . . The building shows a frisky Latin bravado . . . It looks like something put together by a gifted child with an oversized Lego toy set . . . If the team has done nothing more, it has shown developers that new ideas can pay and that people will buy modern if it has more to offer than modernity.”17 As mentioned before, bold color and geometric forms are not excluded from Eurocentric and American Modernism. In 1956, Eero Saarinen,

SLS BRICKELL

COMMISSIONED ART

LOCAL VS. GENTRIFIED GRAFITTI

a Finnish-American architect, completed the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. The design similarities of the Atlantis building to the GM Technical Center are uncanny. They both exhibit a large rectangular all-glass façade with punches of blue, red, and yellow features. However, Eero Saarinen’s design was seen as the new identity for American Corporate Modernism and was proclaimed as an “Industrial Versailles” because it exudes the same sense of order, grandeur, and “rigorous conformity to an austere, geometric aesthetic of Miesian forms.”18 Why is the work of Arquitectonica characterized as a “savage expression,” as having “abusive color harmonies,” as being “controversial,” “exuberant,” “surrealist,” “noisy modernism,” “whimsical,” and “audacious,” when this exact same style of architecture is seen as “austere,” “impressive,” “mature,” and “sincere” when designed by a white architect? The hypocrisy of Modernism’s assertion of formal innovation, bold color palette, and stylistic expression is applauded for white architects, yet highly criticized for Latinx architects. This contradiction can potentially force Latinx architects to restrict their expressive voice in their architectural content to avoid racial bias.

SLS LUX BRICKELL HOTEL: Over the next four decades, Arquitectonica grew into a world-renowned international design firm. Despite having regional offices in New York City, Los Angeles, Lima, Madrid, Paris, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Manila, Dubai, and Sao Paulo, their headquarters have remained in Miami.19 While Arquitectonica has continued to be identified with “a renaissance in Miami’s urban landscape” through geometry, pattern, and color, their work has become increasing more corporate, glassy, luxurious, and a tool for urban renewal and gentrification.20 Built in 2018, the SLS Lux Brickell Hotel and Residences is located in Downtown Miami and is comprised of 3 mixed-use towers on top of a parking podium. Each tower contains 450 luxury condos, 84 hotel rooms, 12 penthouse residences on the top 3 floors, private elevators, and rooftop pool terraces. There is also a ground floor restaurant, cocktail lounge, parking structure for 1000 cars, Equinox fitness center, SoulCycle studio, a tennis court, a spa, and the first Capital One Cafe.21 Not only the architectural design, but also the “public” amenities and programming have become emblematic of social inequality.

The developer, the Related Group, was founded by Jorge Perez, an ArgentineAmerican billionaire, who also founded the Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM).

As such, Perez sought to decorate the SLS Lux Brickell with the creations of world-renowned artists to showcase art worthy of being displayed in museums for “public” consumption. One of the artists, Fernando Botero, is a Columbian artist

SLS PROMOTIONAL PHOTOGRAPHS

who created the Male Torso. Exactly as the name describes, this 10-foot tall bronze statue sets the tone for your stay, an experience curated around the exaltation of the male ego. When a Colombian artist plants his signature “Boterismo” art in front of a luxury skyscraper in Miami, the Latinx identity then becomes blurred with promoting white male privilege and indulgence.

However, the podium facade is most identified by a brightly colored “mural” at the entrance, which is contrasted with the background of all glass and white slab towers.

The SLS Lux Complex is located 18 minutes from Wynwood, a formerly abandoned suburb with warehouses and industrial buildings that the local community would tag as a territorialization of their space. During the 1990s, the local government implemented the Graffiti Task Force to eradicate graffiti. Now, Wynwood has seen a massive trend of gentrification and graffiti muralism from almost exclusively European artists, none actually from Miami. The mural on the SLS façade is designed by Fabian Burgos, an Argentine artist, who attempted to relate to this historical tradition of Miami graffiti street art. Fabian Burgos also created an almost identical mural in 2009 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. When an artist essentially copies their work from an Argentine context and places it across the façade of a luxury skyscraper in Miami, the Latinx struggle of living under racist conditions in the United States for generations is essentially ignored and subverted in favor of advertising American capitalism and gentrification which is synonymous with white male privilege – the entity responsible for Latinx subversion.

When public art speaks to the identity of a community, how can an Argentine copy speak to the nuances of Latinx identity within the context of the United States? When capitalist culture commissions public art from Latin American artists who have never lived in the

United States or experienced Latinx racism in the United States, it commodifies Latinx identity and perpetuating those stereotypical tropes. The entitlement of space for white people has historically excluded people of color, which leads to mass gentrification when white architects and developers translate their designs to communities that are predominantly people of color. Likewise, the innovative designs flowing from the struggles of spatial entitlement by black and brown people do not necessarily translate well to other communities outside of that struggle or who have unique struggles that are different than their own.

The architecture not only plays into Latinx stereotypes of muralism, but also the photography sexualizes Latinx women to entice a male fantasy. In over 80 images that portray people, only two images in the entire photo gallery portray men. All other subjects are young women. Through the use of voluptuous Latinas, the SLS has fabricated a story, a delusion. Not unlike pornography, the photographer intentionally does not portray the existence of the male figure so that men can imagine themselves in this fantasy. The male perspective becomes the camera frame. When looking at each of these photographs in isolation, it is difficult to see how they participate in sexism, but once seen side by side, it is impossible to ignore how their rendition of luxury and exclusivity is eroticized through the portrayal of Latinas. As a result, architecture has the potential to operate as media itself. This is the architecture for the bachelor, the architecture of the ultimate sexualized experience, the architecture of hedonism. When defined through Instagram architecture, Latinx identity becomes an erotic fantasy where the male gaze is welcomed and encouraged.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Arquitectonica Architecture. “Arquitectonica Firm - Global Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Interior Design and Planning Firm.” Accessed March 22, 2021. https://arquitectonica.com/architecture/firm/.

Brown, Patricia Leigh. “Having a Wonderful Time in Miami.” The New York Times, October 25, 1990. https://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/25/garden/having-a-wonderful-time-in-miami.html Doblado, Juan Carlos. Arquitectura Peruana Contemporanea: Escritos y Conversaciones. Peru: Arquidea Ediciones, 1990.

Eckardt, Wolk Von. “Design: Jazzing Up the Functional.” Time Magazine, July 23, 1984. http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,952469-2,00.html Fort-Brescia, Bernardo and Laurinda Spear. “Arquitectonica: Firm.” Accessed March 07, 2021. https://arquitectonica.com/architecture/firm/ Futagawa, Yukio. “Arquitectonica: Interview with Bernardo Fort-Brescia and Laurinda Spear.” Global Architecture Document: Tokyo, vol. 7, no. 1, (August 1983): pp. 4-12.

Garcia Canclini, Selections from Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

Gordon, Alastair. “On Pinkness: The Pink House and its Secret Spatial Heart.” The Miami Rail, April 12, 2018. https://miamirail.org/architecture/on-pinkness-the-pink-house-and-its-secret-spatial-heart/ Muschamp, Herbert. “Art/Architecture: A Latin Jolt to the Skyline.” The New York Times, October 20, 2002. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/20/arts/art-architecture-a-latin-jolt-to-the-skyline.html?searchResultPosition=3 Quijano, Anibal. “Paradoxes of Modernity in Latin America,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 3, no. 2, (Winter, 1989): pp. 147-177.

Ramirez, Mari Carmen. “Beyond ‘the Fantastic’: Framing Identity in US Exhibitions of Latin American Art” in Gerardo Mosquera, ed. Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996.

Rojas, James. “The Enacted Environment of East Los Angeles,” in Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology, Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Voyce, Arthur, Albert Bush-Brown, and David John Watkin. “Western architecture”. Encyclopedia Britannica, April 13, 2018. https://www.britannica.com/art/Western-architecture.

CONCLUSION: Ultimately, Arquitectonica’s sensibilities about modernism and space reflect the identities that were formed in the context of spatial reclamation of the postwar era, which was heavily influenced by Modernism, Le Corbusier, and U.S. Capitalism.

They themselves claim to be “humble followers of modernism.”22 Despite their complete appropriation of American culture, Arquitectonica has received undue criticism that is clearly not derived from their lack of social status, their lack of modernist design aesthetics, their lack of ivy league education, nor their lack of experience. Therefore, the only thing left to speculate as to why they have continuously received biased criticism from their peers must simply be the color of their skin and the Latinx identity inherent in their company name. Even with every privileged advantage to assimilate into white culture in America, they are rejected. Obviously, their white counterparts have had no such prejudiced critique simply based on a color palette or curvilinear forms. Even through their privilege, Arquitectonica has faced adversity just because of their heritage. So why then, does Arquitectonica continue to produce work that exalts white culture at the expense of their own? Is it simply that they do not know anything else? Are they not aware of how white culture and media coopts their work for their own gain and indulgence? Or, are they aware and simply do not care how the cooptation of their work curates a Latinx identity that stereotypes their own people? Since they have had an infinite amount of expendable income since their conception, they have always held the privilege to refuse work without fear of bankruptcy. They

ENDNOTES:

cannot use financial survival of the firm as an excuse. No doubt, Arquitectonica is a capitalist entity that builds for luxury, elitism, privatization, and exclusivity.

As displayed through hundreds of their built projects, they curate a materialistic Latinx identity that completely culturally appropriates American consumerism and male domination. This concept of white male domination over Latinas is not new, but rather a remnant of colonialism that remained buried under societal conditioning. This is not to say that Latinx identity or Latinx architecture should not include luxury or indulgence, but it should not participate in acts of gentrification at the expense and displacement of their own people, it should not use Latinas as pawns for the exaltation of white male domination, and it should not be used as a prop to promote white luxury and white indulgence. Miami has transformed into a luxury urban oasis, not because of drug money and criminal activity that was stereotyped in Miami Vice and Scarface, but because of capitalism and corporate greed. Furthermore, modernism and modernization are not inherently evil, but we need to be aware of how they can facilitate segregation, colonialism, otherness, domination, privilege, power, and authority over people of color. It is a social construct. Although these systems were not built to uplift people of color, it does not mean that we must stop navigating them. In fact, there is power in working within the system to illuminate forgotten, stolen, and hidden histories – we just need to be aware of them.

1. James Rojas, “The Enacted Environment of East Los Angeles,” in Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 227.

2. Rojas, “The Enacted Environment of East Los Angeles,” in Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology, 227.

3. Anibal Quijano, “Paradoxes of Modernity in Latin America,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, no. 2 (Winter 1989): 148.

4. Alastair Gordon, “On Pinkness: The Pink House and its Secret Spatial Heart.” The Miami Rail, April 12, 2018, https://miamirail.org/architecture/on-pinkness-the-pink-house-and-its-secret-spatial-heart/ 5. Gordon, “On Pinkness: The Pink House and its Secret Spatial Heart.”

6. “Arquitectonica Firm - Global Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Interior Design and Planning Firm.” accessed March 22, 2021, https://arquitectonica.com/architecture/firm/.

7. “Arquitectonica Firm - Global Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Interior Design and Planning Firm.”

8. Gordon, “On Pinkness: The Pink House and its Secret Spatial Heart.”

9. Gordon, “On Pinkness: The Pink House and its Secret Spatial Heart.”

10. Patricia Leigh Brown, “Having a Wonderful Time in Miami,” The New York Times, October 25, 1990, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/25/garden/having-a-wonderful-time-in-miami.html 11. Mari Carmen Ramirez, “Beyond ‘the Fantastic’: Framing Identity in US Exhibitions of Latin American Art” in Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), 240.

12. “Arquitectonica Firm - Global Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Interior Design and Planning Firm.”

13. “Arquitectonica Firm - Global Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Interior Design and Planning Firm.”

14. “Arquitectonica Firm - Global Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Interior Design and Planning Firm.”

15. Gordon, “On Pinkness: The Pink House and its Secret Spatial Heart.”

16. “Arquitectonica Firm - Global Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Interior Design and Planning Firm.”

17. Wolk Von Eckardt, “Design: Jazzing Up the Functional,” Time Magazine, July 23, 1984, http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,952469-2,00.html 18. Arthur Voyce et al., “Western architecture”. Encyclopedia Britannica, April, 13, 2018, https://www.britannica.com/art/Western-architecture.

19. “Arquitectonica Firm - Global Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Interior Design and Planning Firm.”

20. “Arquitectonica Firm - Global Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Interior Design and Planning Firm.”

21. “Arquitectonica Firm - Global Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Interior Design and Planning Firm.”

22. “Arquitectonica Firm - Global Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Interior Design and Planning Firm.”

ENTANGLED REPORTS

NATURES, WILDS, TECHNOSCIENCE, & FOUNDATIONS ENTANGLED SYMPOSIA

INSTRUCTORS:

Antonio Torres and Michael F. Loverich

FUTURE WILD:

PROJECT INFORMATION: ACADEMIC WORK: COURSE: DATE COMPLETED: PROFESSOR:

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY ARCH 4490 - HISTORY / THEORY SUMMER 2021 ANDRES JAQUE + VARIOUS INSTRUCTORS

LECTURERS:

Shubhendu Sharma, Shih Cheih Huang, Andrew Holder, and Benjamin Freyinger

AESTHETICIZATION AND COLONIZING OF FORESTSCAPES

In Shubhendu Sharma’s presentation on Forestscaping, he discusses how current monocultural farmland and manicured gardens can turn back into wild forests. His forest regeneration process consists of researching native species, seed collection, growing seedlings, removing nonnative species, introducing soil nutrition, transplanting mature seedlings, and maintaining water retention through mulch until the forest grows enough to protect the topsoil itself with foliage.

Rather contradictorily, he also discussed current projects known as “Forest Interaction Zones,” which include forest trails, gathering points for leisure, forest vantage points, meditative zones, personal reading spaces, working spaces, and art exhibitions. However, when human intervention returns, this density creates access and programming issues since wild forest ground cover is 30 times as dense as manicured gardens and monocultural forests. While Sharma’s intent to restore native forestscapes is admirable, it is not clear how the Forest Interaction Zones are any different from modern day parks and gardens. Unless we as a species change our mindset to how we think about forestscapes, humans will continue to design forests for their own self-interest. Humans will continue to cut down trees to facilitate views in the forest vantage points, aestheticize forests to facilitate leisure and meditation, manicure lawns and pathways to enable observation of art exhibits, and polluting the soil with pesticides to prevent the growth of invasive species. With human intervention for the facilitation of human occupation, forests will continue to fall prey to the colonial mindset of aesthetics, domination, and control. Instead of simply changing the plant species to native and making forests denser, human intervention in recovering forestscapes should be limited until humans change their mindset from working within wilds, to working with and for wilds.

Shih Cheih Huang’ work, on the other hand, is motivated by the urban wild of Taiwan consisting of neon lights, toys, night markets, and small trinkets. His gigantic moving art installations, often are inspired by bioluminescent organisms, are geared toward curating experiences for exploration from everyday household objects, such as plastic bags, electronics, and food containers. While his work is extremely visually intriguing, Shih Cheih Huang’s underlying intentions are unclear. Does he intend to draw awareness to unseen creatures that are affected

by human exploitation? Or, does he simply wish to draw curiosity about the deep ocean? Does he intentionally reuse household items that have already been used to give them a new afterlife other than a landfill? Or, does he use newly bought household items for the use of his installations thereby perpetuating landfill growth? Are these sculptures a comment on sustainable practices or simply a mechanical exercise of manipulating plastic bags, lights, and fans?

Without this clarification, there is something immoral in enjoying solace in such visual escapism when most of the life-forms recreated are soon to be extinct due to human exploitation. Even though it is not a one-to-one representation of bioluminescent organisms, the aestheticism of ocean wilds, which use bioluminescence as a defense mechanism against predators, exploits their glowing beauty for the pleasure of human solace.

Andrew Holder and Benjamin Freyinger (LADG) combine the two approaches discussed above by representing English Picturesque Landscape archival books about natural wilds in the setting of urban, mostly interior, exhibitions. The lumps (hills) and clumps (a collection of tightly knit objects) are inspired by wilds, but never designed within wilds. Similar to the first two presentations, LADG focuses on the aesthetics of wilds. They not only chose books in an archive where the authors focused on aesthetics, either drawings or counting things they saw, LADG’s physical exhibitions are also purely visual and aesthetic, re-representing what LADG visually perceived in the archive – the drawings, the lists, and the books themselves. Here, aestheticism is a reductive re-representation of living ecologies and wilds. LADG’s mentality that “the currency of architecture is the image,” is a concept that perpetuates the colonial mindset of aestheticization and Instagram architecture. Alternatively, we must question who is benefiting from the visual valuation of architecture and ecologies. Art exhibitions, in a way, are a type of storytelling, but we should challenge which and whose story we should tell. The books exhibited were written and drawn from the colonial perspective that reduces landscapes down to what is “beautiful” to the viewer, most notably white, straight, men. The intent of Future Wild should not be to aestheticize or to achieve the spectacular, but to recover wilds from centuries of colonialism, modernization, and environmental exploitation.

INSTRUCTOR:

LECTURERS:

Narea Cavillo

GOOD OR BAD NATURES:

Kristina Lyons and William Logan

CONTROL AND THE PICTURESQUE

In The Lessons of a Hideous Forest, William Logan is an arborist who discovered that Forest Kills Landfill, now turned hideous forest, was not designed to look good, but rather repair the damage done by modern society. Western cultures have created a reductively aesthetic concept of nature as good or bad. “Bad” natures are ugly, cannot be controlled, are poisonous to humans, and attract pests, weeds, and other unvalued species, whereas “good” natures are picturesque, can be controlled, can be consumed by humans, and house valued animals. However, we must “change our thinking: Ask not just what these landscapes look like, but also what they are doing.”1 Through the process of phoenix regeneration, trees grow, fall, decay, drip acid water, and regrow. Meanwhile, the vines suffocate everything on site to facilitate this regeneration. Likewise, weeds grow as a result of disturbed topsoil so that they can nurture the soil for other species to grow. Therefore, the intent of Forest Kills is not to be spectacular or “look good,” but to “stay alive, year by year, century by century, until at last it had recycled even the nylon stocking.”2 While it is not clear if this has the potential to speed up the recycling process of organic and manufacturing material, the use of native and invasive plant species certainly has the potential to recover lands overcome by landfills.

Similarly in Chemical Warfare in Colombia, Kristina Lyons renders visible the territory as a victim of the country’s social armed conflict by reconstructing the socio-environmental memory of the war. Through this research, she discovers that Colombian farmers who are victims of militarized aerial fumigation have become aware that they have also mistreated the soils, trees, and water sources through monocultural farming techniques that degrade soils and lead to deforestation for new farmland. They are “entering into another logic not to destroy, but instead to recover.”3 Here, reparations

do not consist of unfulfilled monetary compensation from bureaucratic denial, but rather by the regeneration of farmland back into a forest.

Moreover, in Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners & Life Politics, Kristina Lyons focuses on the cultivation of life amidst death, violence, and chemical warfare. The polluted soil literally and figuratively embodies the war on drugs. This creates a clear causal relationship between humans and soil.

She also makes an interesting and clear distinction between the research conducted with Soil Scientists (“studying up”) and Rural Communities (“studying down”).4 Soil Scientists work in the safety of an urban laboratory with stated-funded resources that ally with capitalist industries, whereas Rural Communities operate within the immediate militarization of glyphosate using experimental approaches to transform and resist the workings of the State and the Soil Scientists. But, is there a way that the Soil Scientists and the Rural Communities can work together? While Kristina Lyons has in many ways acted as a liaison between the two, this dialectic division must be bridged comprehensively throughout regions affected by aerial fumigation. This difference between specialized expertise and the local community is not unlike the challenges that architects face. Architecture and soil scientists must do more than keep the local community at arm’s length. This begs the question: Who is benefiting from the valuation of architecture or a plant species? Our thinking must transition from how we can know more to how we can know differently. Whether working as an arborist, an anthropologist, or an architect, we are habituated to think one way or the other – black or white, right or wrong, good or bad, beautiful or ugly. We must unlearn conditioned colonial practices of pro- or anti- in favor of alter- and trans-.

FOOTNOTES:

1. William Logan, “The Lesson of a Hideous Forest,” The New York Times, July 20, 2019.

2. William Logan, “The Lesson of a Hideous Forest,” 2019.

3. Kristina Lyons, “Chemical Warfare in Colombia: Evidentiary Ecologies and Senti-actuando Practices of Justice,” Social Studies of Science, vol. 78, no. 3 (2020): 422.

4. Kristina Lyons, Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners & Life Politics, (London: Duke University Press), 6.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Logan, William. “The Lessons of a Hideous Forest.” The New York Times, July, 20, 2019.

Lyons, Kristina. “Chemical Warfare in Colombia: Evidentiary Ecologies and Senti-actuando Practices of Justice.” Social Studies of Science, vol. 48, no. 3, (2018): 414-437.

Lyons, Kristina. Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners & Life Politics. London: Duke University Press, 2020.

INSTRUCTOR:

LECTURERS:

Ani Liu

FEMINIST TECHNOSCIENCE:

Michelle Millar Fisher, Amber Winick, Ariana Sopher, Martha Poggioli, Gabriella Nelson, Zoe Greggs, Mathilde Cohen, and Corinne Botz

PRIVATIZATION, INTERIORITY, AND INTERSECTIONALITY

Design and advocacy of motherhood, reproduction, and gender equity is complex, but it is crucial to see motherhood as a shared experience between all humans. Whether through museum exhibitions, geometric explorations of pessary designs, cataloguing of intravaginal devices, story banking of personal experiences, documentation of breast pumping spaces, or legal advocacy for reproductive justice, the history and design of reproductive technologies is vast and complicated. Between breast pumps, monitoring devices, maternity clothing, medical innovations, and lactation spaces, design impacts both the physical and emotional aspects motherhood. While being born is a universal human experience, the designs that shape it are not.

To represent the broad spectrum of reproduction, the contributors to the Designing Motherhood exhibition uncover its sociopolitical entanglements through themes of temporality, trauma, autonomy, empowerment, empathy, vulnerability, inclusion, gender, race, class, and access. Mainstream media portrayals of prenatal and postpartum motherhood are often ascribed to heterosexual white women of middle- or upper-class socioeconomic status. However, motherhood is intersectional. Pregnancies are not limited to women. It is crucial to incorporate people who are transgender, intersex, genderqueer, and nonbinary into experiences of pregnant people. Likewise, motherhood is not limited to biological birth. Motherhood must also include adoptive mothers, nonbiological mothers in same-sex relationships, and maternal figures caring for children whose biological mother is dead, absent, or incarcerated. Moreover, reproductive health is not a static closed entity, but a metamorphic experience. The fluidity and fluctuation of lactation, menstruation, and ovulation must be incorporated in the use of objects and spaces. For instance, the temporal and periodic insertion of pessaries to support pelvic organ prolapse and the removal of pessaries to have penetrative sex must be included in its design for user autonomy without the need for highly specialized urogynecologists.

These transformations confront issues on interiority (within the human body) and exteriority (outside of the human body), including but not limited to: the extraction of internal breastmilk to the external container of the breast pump, the internal process of menstruation and the external disposal of blood, the internal pelvic organs that descend to an external position outside of the vagina, the internal placement of a pessary to its external removal, and the internal growth of a baby in a womb to the external projection of a baby belly. These transformations expose the interior to the exterior, the private to the public. This condition of exteriority becomes the site of confrontation within the public realm. Often the

external expression of motherhood and reproductive health is seen as invasive, leading to societal privatization.

This exteriority makes visible what would otherwise be an invisible condition, most notably invisible to men. This total privatization of reproductive health leads to a drastic unawareness of reproductive knowledge about one’s own body. For example, many women often suffer from prolapse without even knowing it, or knowing there are technologies, like pessaries, to mediate the condition. Moreover, total privatization generates a culture of taboo topics that are “inappropriate” to discuss in public, thereby leading to isolation and mental health issues. If gender-based inequalities remain hidden, how will they ever create enough awareness to enact change?

While total privatization is problematic, total publicization is not necessarily the solution either. Often women perform acts of code switching between public and private. For example, women often visually manipulate their clothing to disguise the protrusion of a baby bump in the early stages of pregnancies in case of a miscarriage so that the pain of loss is not exacerbated by publicity. Women also disguise pregnancies to prevent being targeted for theft, violence, or gender discrimination, particularly in professional environments where pregnancies and parental leave reinforce the gender pay gap. On the other hand, women often intentionally expose their bump in events of celebration. While privatization can be beneficial to enable safety and comfort, we must also be aware of the repercussions that total privatization can have on a social consciousness that perpetuates inequalities enacted along gender, race, and class lines. The absence of an ongoing conversation about judgement, stigma, and reproductive needs prevents a dialogue about what it means to be a worker and a mother.

The underlying question throughout the Feminist Technoscience symposium was: Why should persons who are not mothers care about these inequalities?

The answer is simple. These are not just women’s issues. They are human issues. They matter to all of us. Birth is the way we all arrive in this world, and everyone will repeat, rethink, and/or reject the process of reproduction. In doing so, people interact, either consciously or subconsciously, with the designs of reproductive products, tools, systems, and societal norms. Indeed, we must repeatedly educate both women and men on reproductive health and advocate for gender equality, we must rethink the technologies and designs that reinforce systemic injustice, and we must reject societal gendering that continues to aestheticize, exploit, and stereotype bodies, language, and space.

INSTRUCTORS:

Gabrielle Printz, Rosana Elkhatib, and Virginia Black

LECTURERS:

Ceyenne Doroshow, Malcolm Rio, and Dean Spade

OTHER FOUNDATIONS: PHILANTHROCAPITALISM AND MUTUAL AID While charities and private foundations are often celebrated for their support for those in need, these institutions are often the very entities that cause inequalities which creates this need. Private foundations and the billionaires who make them up lobby for an economy of injustice, while simultaneously marketing themselves as saviors, as solutions to the problems that they are continuously causing. The causing, however, never gets the same publicity and notoriety as the saving does. Private Foundations also help rich donors pay less income, estate, and capital gains tax. It helps billionaires change the world in their own self-interest while simultaneously saving money through tax breaks.

Private foundations, such as the Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, Gates, and Getty foundations, present their grants as a gift, but it is actually wealth stolen through the accumulation of profit on low wage labor and tax that would otherwise go to low-wage workers. These are not gifts, but a money laundering scheme with a savior image. They are a distraction from the injustices on which they built their fortunes that allow them to dictate public influence through private means.

This is not to say that the private sector is inherently “bad.” However, when the private sector is controlled through capitalism, these private foundations are therefore inherently capitalistic. As a result, private foundations not only perpetuate material wealth inequalities along race, gender, and class lines, they also enact those same inequalities in an immaterial social consciousness by means of a meritocracy. This, in turn, leads to social judgment, stigma, division, and abandonment. Social judgment creates a condition where only the “best and brightest” are “deserving,” ignoring those who are often the most vulnerable.

Indeed, private foundations are creatures of capitalism, where they change the world but only if it supports the market economy. The highest paid employees of these foundations are those tasked with managing the growth of the fund, experts that make money from money. In fact, in the Ford Foundation’s 2018 990-PF financial form, the top four most paid employees are financial advisors whose compensation range from $1.3 - $2.5 million dollars annually each.

Obviously, doing good and doing well are not mutually exclusive. However, it is simply too much wealth and power for one entity to have over public life. They are shaping society without our consent. Compared to public officials, private philanthropists can have the equal or same amount of impact of someone in office, without having to campaign to get elected, and they are not term limited.

However, just as we cannot count on the heroes of American entrepreneurship and inherited wealth to ameliorate the ill effects of late capitalism, we also cannot count on public officials whose pockets are lined with private foundation

money to enact tax reform and build new social infrastructures. Instead, we must challenge assumptions of what social change looks like. Social change does not come from charismatic leaders, corporate media coverage, elected officials, courts, or legislatures, but rather millions of people that are local, networked, and autonomous. Projects grounded in local knowledges are better at responding to their own vulnerabilities than gigantic institutions that operate at arm’s length.

Moreover, inequalities and vulnerabilities are intersectional. They are not limited to the poor and not all support can be financial. Some struggles are political and humanitarian, where donations would not make a difference.

You cannot fight political insurgence and militarized forces with grants and donations. Therefore, mutual aid groups are preferred. Mutual Aid is not charity. Mutual Aid includes community solidarity, long-term active participation, political education, conflict resolution skills, and consensus-based decision making. Whereas, charities, nonprofit organizations, and government aid include community control, passive assistance, political division, dependency on police resolution, and majority rule-based decision making. In addition, we often bring learned behaviors of dominance with us and mutual aid can be an opportunity to unlearn habits of conditioning, biases, control, societal norms, stigmas, etc. In that way, mutual aid is as much a collective solidarity as it is an individual rebirth. But, how do we scale up mutual aid? It is both about sharing knowledge, solidarity, and resources at larger scales but also about maintaining small, local groups where the people who are making decisions are the ones that are being directly affected. It is not about creating bigger groups, but about creating more groups.

Ultimately, charities and private foundations participate in corruption and a false separation of politics and injustice. Therefore, we must decolonize philanthropy. We must renegotiate our attachments to land, wealth, and private property, especially those that were stolen. We must depart from expertise-based social services that are inherently coercive, hierarchical, and authoritarian because they strengthen the legitimacy of the capitalist and the colonialist. Architects are among the developer class, the specialists that operate through and with philanthropic foundations. While no one is pure in a colonized world, architects must not see contradictions as impediments and become consumed by frustration, ambivalence, and despair. Instead, architects must acknowledge and heighten these contradictions and injustices.

Architects who inhabit colonial institutions, who hold jobs within them, or who benefit from them must be the most critical and the most proactive.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Spade, Dean. “Solidarity Not Charity: Mutual Aid for Mobilizations and Survival.” Social Text 142, vol. 38, no. 1, (March 2020): 131-151.

TAKING AN ALTERNATIVE PATH UNCOVERING CONTROVERSY + SOCIETAL (UN)CONDITIONING MORNINGSIDE PARK, HARLEM / NEW YORK , NY

PROJECT INFORMATION: ACADEMIC WORK: COURSE: DATE COMPLETED: PROFESSOR:

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY ARCH 4006 - ADVANCED STUDIO VI SPRING 2021 ADA TOLLA & GIUSEPPE LIGNANO

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

I UNCOVER THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF RACISM IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY’S PROPOSED “GYM CROW” BUILDING IN MORNINGSIDE PARK BY CREATING A NEW EXPERIENTIAL CIRCULATION PATH THAT IS DIFFERENTIATED FROM THE VERY STRAIGHT, DIRECT, STAIR PATHS THAT CURRENTLY CUT THROUGH THIS CONTENTIOUS SITE. AS A WOODWORKER, I CHALLENGE WOOD’S MATERIAL PROPERTIES THROUGH EACH OF THE FIVE INTERVENTIONS. USING THE DIASPORA OF DIFFERENT WOOD SPECIES, THE MATERIAL EXPLORATIONS INCLUDE LAMINATING WOOD VENEERS, CURVING WOOD, FLOATING ON WATER, FLAMMABILITY, FIRE-RESISTANCE, AND CONCEPTS OF SOLIDITY, GRAVITY, WEIGHT, FLEXIBILITY, TEMPORALITY, AND SURFACE. THIS PROJECT EXPOSES HOW THE SCARS FROM DRILLING AND DYNAMITE ACTIVITY, THE MASSIVE CHANGE IN ELEVATION THAT SYMBOLIZES THE SOCIOECONOMIC DIFFERENCES BETWEEN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY AND HARLEM, THE DANGER OF ABANDONING A CONSTRUCTION SITE, AND THE USE OF GATES, FENCES, AND BOUNDARIES TO DIVIDE AND CONTROL COMMUNITIES OF COLOR CAN LEAVE A VOID, AN IMPRINT, THAT PERSISTS THROUGH TIME AND SPACE. THROUGH THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE FRAGMENTED GYM, THE ROCK SLIDE, THE DYNAMITE FUNICULAR, THE FLEXIBLE RAFT, AND THE ROLLING FIRE PITS, PARK-GOERS ARE ENCOURAGED TO CREATE A NEW SELFDIRECTED PATH, BUT HOPEFULLY ONE THAT IS CHANGED THROUGH A CHANGE IN PERSPECTIVE, A CHANGE IN SPEED, A CHANGE IN STRUGGLE.

MORNINGSIDE PARK ACCESS

SETTING THE SPEED

SPEED UP

THE FRAGMENTED GYM

THE ROCK SLIDE

WIND

EARTH

RISE UP

THE DYNAMITE FUNICU

GRAVITY

ULAR

SLOW DOWN

RESET THE SPEED

THE FLEXIBLE RAFT

THE FIRE PITS

WATER

FIRE

OBJECT 1 - SURVEY DRAWINGS

OBJECT 2 - SURVEY DRAWINGS

OBJECT 2/3 - SURVEY DRAWINGS

OBJECT 3 - SURVEY DRAWINGS

OBJECT 4 - SURVEY DRAWINGS

EMILY RUOPP

COLUMBIA GSAPP

AIA NCARB

M.S. AAD PORTFOLIO

EGRUOPP@GMAIL.COM ISSUU.COM/EGRUOPP

623 W 145TH ST, APT 4 NEW YORK, NY 10031