LOOK INSIDE: Lunch 15

LUNCH 15

LUNCH is the design research journal of the UVA School of Architecture.

Published by Applied Research and Design Publishing, an imprint of ORO Editions. Gordon Goff: Publisher

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Editors: Colleen Brennan, Leah Kahler, Chris Murphy, and Ben Small Faculty Advisors: Brad Cantrell and Sneha Patel Book Design: Colleen Brennan, Leah Kahler, Chris Murphy, and Ben Small Project Manager: Jake Anderson

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LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

Dear reader,

When the editorial team came together in late 2019 to develop the call for submissions for LUNCH Journal’s fifteenth issue, the world was a different place. That time, the “pre-pandemic,” found us ruminating on the thickness of lines, the thinness of our computers’ screens, and the tantalizing possibility of that which refuses oversim plification in pursuit of complexity. Sitting knee to knee, breathing with blissful and maskless comfort, we chattered on about vibrant bikini-crowds sweating on each other at the beach, the crushing thickness of walls in dummy crash tests videos, ogled the cushiony depth of Iceland’s moss-covered rock formations, and pondered the fortitude of braided strands. These images, we decided, were thick, and we liked it.

In the coming months, the editorial team, our contributors, and the entire rest of the world bore witness to what felt like radical, pivotal shifts in the trajectory of reality. Almost overnight, those thick crowds sweating at the beach disappeared; ushering in eighteen months of a pandemic that revealed to us the shocking thinness of our own skin. The porosity of our bodies changed everything about how we inter acted with our friends, loved ones, and neighbors. It upended the way we move through the world and how we understand the air that we breathe. Then in the summer of 2020, the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, and too many since, ignited a conversation on the long history of race-based violence in the US and around the world.

As we collectively grieved, the range of things we believed were possible became far more expansive, in ways that inspired both incredible fear, but also incredible hope. Calls for examining institu tional entanglements with white supremacy grew, and we began to see cities across the south toppling, dismantling symbols of white supremacy in court houses, schools, and public spaces. Finally in July of 2021, nearly four years after white supremacists marched on the University of Virginia’s campus, occupied downtown Charlottesville, and killed Heather Heyer, the monument at the heart of the conflict was removed.

When we began ruminating on the playful aesthetic of THICK for the fifteenth issue of LUNCH, we couldn’t have imagined what we would experience together over the next year. But our contributors offered us a beautiful breadth of ways to think through this time and its thickness and thinness as it waxed and waned. Thickness isn’t always the goal. In fact, “You need thin. Thickness all the time would be exhausting,” as Garnette Cadogan reminded us. Sometimes thinness just is. It can’t or won’t thicken, but in its own stubbornness, the strands that bind us together bend and give with flexibility and the strength of many.

Dear reader, we’ve been through it; through thicket and thin wood. But we’re still not out of the woods. Through thick and thin, slice the bread so there’s more to go around, even if it means we each get less. Neither are easy, but since when has anything worth doing been easy?

Yours through thick and thin, Ben Small, Colleen Brennan, & Leah Kahler

PLACES

MATERIALS

REPRESENTATION

RELATIONS

PLACES

DESIGNING DECOMMISSION

Plum Island, New York

Chloé Skye Nagraj

Plum Island in the Long Island Sound is, as islands go, more inaccessible than most. The famously opaque identity of the 840acre island is thanks to the Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC), operated by the Department of Agriculture since 1954 and since 2001, the Department of Homeland Security. The Montauk Monster is said to have originated here. Lyme disease truthers are adamant that the tick-borne illness was created and intentionally spread by a tick lab (the existence of which is unconfirmed) at PIADC. Clarice Starling offers Hannibal Lecter’s transfer to Plum Island in exchange for information on Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, to which he responds, “Plum Island Animal Disease Center. Sounds charming.” Its shape even mildly resembles a question mark (Fig. 1).

What we do know is this: the facilities are to be moved to a site in Manhattan, Kansas, in 2022, at which point the island may be sold to the highest bidder and redeveloped, maintained as a “mothball” site by the government, or, as environmental groups are advocating, be preserved as a refuge.1 There is widespread contamination from PIADC and military activity on the island, the true extents of which are unknown. The island is, because of its relative isolation from humans over the past 122 years, incredibly biodiverse. While the story of Plum Island seems unique, it is quintessentially American; it is a story that is typically told beginning with the genocide of Indigenous people and settlement by colonizers, one that is deeply tied to military power and government secrecy. With the decommissioning of the island potentially set for 2022, the island’s future is up in the air.

This moment of transition can be an opportunity to reckon with the overlapping, opaque, and seemingly contradictory stories embedded in the landscape of Plum Island.

On the conversion of the former plutonium factory, Rocky Flats, into a wildlife preserve, Shiloh Krupar writes, “ambiguity is what must be explored to contest routinized recitations of evidence and established truths.” How can ambiguity be more deeply explored through the decommissioning of Formerly Used Defense Sites [FUDS]2 like Plum Island? If decommission were to be treated as design, how might a process that makes space for ambiguity inform the often-indeterminate futures of these landscapes? Might this positioning enable us3 to better mitigate the social impact of the entangled histories so common to these sites? There are hundreds of thousands of military and industrial sites where these questions are worth asking; Plum Island is one character within this larger national narrative.

MYTH AND HISTORY

In order to reframe decommission as design, site analysis must accommodate the unruly ways of knowing that complicate opaque landscapes. Unruliness, here, is knowing in spite of a prescribed site narrative or history; knowing in spite of inaccessibility; knowing in spite of forced removal; knowing as a radical act of

Fig. 1 Plum Island, New York.

interpretation. Such a relational framework is absent from the myriad environmental, historic, and economic assessments undertaken during decommissioning by the FUDS program. In the case of Plum Island, the resulting conflicts over future land use and development articulate the need for a relational understanding of site history that makes room for unruliness.

The Harbor Hill Moraine created Plum Island approximately 22,000 years ago. Thick layers of sand and gravel make up the bulk of the island, with outwash channels forming flat and fertile areas. A subsequent advance of the glacier deposited silt, sand, gravel, and glacial till to create the hilly topography of the northern end of the island, where forests and scrublands thrive. Over time, erosion carried fine sand particles to the southern end of the island, where freshwater swales, marshes, and wetlands formed as a result.4 These varied types of outwash and glacial till created a diverse array of soils and habitats. The island has been valued by humans for millennia, due in no small part to the biodiversity stemming from its geologic formation.

The island was first known by the name Manittuwond, “the island to which we go to plant corn.”5 It was an important fishing site for Algonquian peoples of the Corchaug, Manganese, Montaukett, Shinnecock, and Pequot tribes due to the high velocity of water flowing through the narrow and deep Plum Gut.

Plum Island has long resided in the minds of imperialists and colonizers. Adriaen Block, the Dutch trader, included Plum Island in his 1614 map documenting his last voyage of the Americas, the first to represent Long Island cartographically. The data collected on this trip was used to create Willem Janszoon and Joan Blaeu’s famous 1635 map Nova Belgica et Anglia Nova, which indicates Plum Island as land occupied by Matouwac/Metoac/Montaukett peoples of the Algonquian nation. Dutch colonial maps such as this laid the groundwork for the colonization that would occur later in the century (Fig. 2).

Between 1637 and 1639, Indigenous peoples used the island as a refuge for women and children as well as a safe place to grow and harvest food during the bloody Pequot War, when 800 Pequot people were killed or imprisoned. Declaring victory in 1638, colonizers declared the Pequot tribe extinct.6 Samuel Willis III, son of the governor of Connecticut at the time, lay claim to the island in 1652, purchasing it from Wyandanch of the Montaukett tribe for a coat, a barrel of biscuits, and 100 fishhooks.7 The island was used primarily for agriculture through the late eighteenth century.

Plum Island’s military history began in 1775, during the Revolutionary War. The island was used for recreation during the mid to late

nineteenth century (Fig. 3) until 1898, when the Army Corps of Engineers bought 150 acres to establish Fort Terry (Fig. 4). In 1901, they bought the rest of Plum Island to defend Gardiners Bay and the Long Island Sound: from this point on, Plum Island has been largely inaccessible to private citizens. In 1952, the Army transitioned Plum Island to be used by the Chemical Corps to research germ warfare, as well as by the USDA to establish the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, a foot and mouth disease research lab (Fig. 5). The germ warfare operation was presumably shut down two years after it was announced. Unexploded ordnance, acid, and buried fuel have been uncovered and removed from Fort Terry as recently as 2005.8

With the establishment of many Environmental Protection Agency acts through the 1970s and 1980s, the ramifications of this research on the landscape began to be acknowledged in the early 1990s. The facility’s largely unregulated waste management practices and groundwater contamination first came to light in 1993, when the EPA cited the Research Center $250,000 to determine how extensive of a cleanup would be needed. And yet, the largely undeveloped island is designated as a critical natural resource area by the Fish and Wildlife Service. It is home to regionally rare plant species and over 200 bird species, including the federally endangered Piping Plover (Fig. 6).

Fig. 2

Detail of Willem Janszoon Blaeu (Dutch, 1571–1638), Nova Belgica et Anglia Nova, ca. 1630.

Fig. 3

Lighthouse keepers at Plum Island, 1870s. Collection of Southold Historical Society Southold, NY.

After September 11, Plum Island was transferred to the Department of Homeland Security, as part of its chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear countermeasures division. In 2009, it was announced that the Plum Island research facilities would be moved to Manhattan, Kansas, in 2022, opening the door for speculation as to the island’s future. Due to the upcoming closure, real estate developers, including Donald Trump, have expressed interest in the site, offering visions of golf courses, luxury waterfront properties, and mixeduse development. Environmental groups, community organizers, politicians, and preservationists have banded together to halt the sale of the island, forming the Preserve Plum Island Coalition. In December 2019, the US Senate passed a bill stating that the sale of Plum Island would be put on hold for one year until 2021.

Like many former military sites, the opacity of Plum Island has given rise to a web of mythologies. What is known, unknown, and speculative blend together depending on who you ask. Landscapes like Plum Island are known in spite of—sometimes, because of—their opacity.

Fig. 4 (above)

New York Tribune, Training Camp at Fort Terry, 1916.

Fig. 5 (bottom)

Dr. Charles Allen, Breeding Habitats of Fish Hawks on Plum Island, 1892. Courtesy of The Auk.

Fig. 6 (opposite) Entangled narratives at Plum Island Animal Disease Center: scientific research, contamination, and conspiracy.

During the 1980s, the industry entered a free fall due to inefficient mills, international competition, and falling demand. Steel is still a large part of life in Northwest Indiana, but it no longer employs the same numbers it used to. People have transitioned to service jobs or other light industry. The communities of Gary and East Chicago never truly recovered from this drop in employment. When the center of a community vanishes, it has to evolve or die. Currently, Gary is still limping along, with vacant buildings dotting every street and smoke continuing to rise over the mills. It may be 50 or 100 years from now, but someday these industrial landscapes will need to transform. The steel industry will never return to what it was, and no amount of bargaining or empty promises will change that.

Now is the time to begin looking to what this land could be for future generations. The creativity, engineering prowess, determination, and hard work that went into not only building the mills, but making them the largest in the world in a matter of around 20 years is difficult to fully comprehend. The people and these companies transformed the landscape around them into a massive machine. This transformation came at an enormous cost, one that residents continue to bear. I am one of those residents contending with the histories of this case study in American industrialism and burnout.

REMEMBERING HER HOMECOMING

From the North Atlantic to Leigh Street

Nastassja Swift

The mobility and displacement of the Black body, from port to holding cell, to ward and out, is a history that is embedded in our communities socially, culturally, and geographically. Evoking feelings of pain, otherness, power, and triumph, “Remembering Her Homecoming” is a collaborative performance in Richmond, Virginia, that remembers and reflects on the Black women who have roamed these spaces before us, and how their stories affect those of the present and tomorrow. Dancing and singing through some of Richmond’s racially historical spaces, the performers give a face to our ancestral mothers while becoming a portal for their journey, and shaping an experience of storytelling and history.

In the summer of 2018, I led a collaborative workshop and public performance that consisted of masked Black women and girls who traced the ancestral footprints of the arrival of the Black body in the city of Richmond, Virginia. As a Black female artist working and learning within what was once the center of slave trading in the region, my work explores the journey of the Black female in Richmond, and how that journey has contributed to the stories and history of Black girlhood in the city. Operating similarly to a women’s march, the mobile, 3.5 mile outdoor performance began in Shockoe Bottom (the site of the importation of slaves into Richmond, and one of the largest sources of slave trade in America); stopped along the Untold RVA 11:11 Portal, the African Burial Ground and Devil’s Half Acre (Lumpkin’s Slave Jail); and concluded in the Jackson Ward neighborhood (once one of the largest Black communities in Richmond).

NARRATIVE, WALKING TOGETHER, & DESIGN AS PROVOCATION

An Interview with Garnette Cadogan, Elgin Cleckley, and the LUNCH 15 Editorial Board

LK: First Question: THICK or THIN?

GC: I say thick and thin. And I say thick and thin thinking alongside the sociologists. Here’s why. In thin, I think of the sociological theory of third spaces and the one of weak ties. Both suggest that we need people whose names you don’t know, with whom you have incidental relationships. For example, you walk past the same man every Thursday afternoon with his dog. The dog has a funny looking stride and a gait that is also cute. You stop. You have an exchange about the funny gait—600 times—and hardly anything much more than that. But that interaction is so absolutely crucial in terms of developing attachment to the neighborhood, in terms of civic vibrancy, even a sense of belonging. It’s one of the things that is so important to civic participation, neighborhood activity and belonging, a sense of home. In other words, it helps transform a space into a place.

A lot of these incidental relationships are ones in which you have an exchange when you go into the elevator when you go into a building, a two- or three-minute talk with the doorman, or the doorman’s friend, or the bartender who you always pass in the morning, or if you’re headed home at night and he’s shutting down, and there’s another exchange with a smile. These weak ties are absolutely crucial, and these thin ways of knowing are so important because if we had to go through life with only thick ways of knowing, we would be beleaguered, exhausted, drained. We all have people who we absolutely love, but when their phone call is coming in, we say, “I don’t want to talk to you right now.” Not because we’ve lost affection, but because we know “I only have the bandwidth right now for a ten-minute talk. I would have to stay on the phone with you for two and a half hours when you call.”

So those are weak ties, but they’re also important to what are called third space. Third spaces are in the most intimate of

settings; they are also the home, the barber shop, the coffee shop, the park bench, or a foodcart, or a pop-up lending library in a neighborhood. Third spaces, theorized by Ray Oldenburg,1 are so crucial. Many third spaces are thin relationships. In other words, third spaces are crucial because they come up with their own network between communities and neighborhoods, within cities, within towns, that give you a sense of place but also a sense of civic attachment and belonging and a sense of civic health. They are absolutely crucial to the commons. Public spaces become public spaces in their interactions; it’s in their interrelationship of both thin and thick ties. So you actually need public spaces that have a mix of thin and thick ties because some people, if you get to know them enough, you don’t want to know them anymore. You get to know them just enough not to fight, not to bicker over the new skyscraper to be erected that would make the playground go away. Thin relationships are really good for coalitions but really bad for Thanksgiving dinner.

And of course, the reason for thick is that we need these deep, interrelated connections, in which you’re richly and deeply and sometimes exhaustively known. If anything, it gives you that real sense of being known, that sense of home, that sense of attachment, being seen in your full complexity and multiplicity. They’re key in developing a rich sense of self, one that is also connected to other selves. So, yes to thin, and yes to thick. No to thin if it’s the context of home. Yes to thin if it’s the context of public space where incidental yet meaningful relationships are important.

EC: I think when you asked the question, I was laughing because we have this need

somehow to have absolutes—this or that— when everything is unknown. It’s kind of a humorous thing. I don’t know the answer. We’re fighting inside of us, where we want to have absolutes, but there are so many things that we can’t understand.

I did this with the word. I put thin inside of thick (Fig 1). That one piece there is one of a thousand layers. For instance, when I was a student here at UVA, I understood about that much, [gestures to a fraction of the stack] but now maybe I understand that much of it [gestures to a larger fraction of the stack].

I was talking to Garnette about that when I moved into this house. I moved in here, walked around, and went “Ok there’s a thin layer to what I see, and there’s a real thickness to what this place is.”

The more research I did, the more I learned about what this house is, where it is. All of a sudden, this is Nicholas Lewis’ plantation, it’s Meriwether’s from King George III—oh wait, this is where the corn and tobacco fields were. The more research you do, the more you find out. Perhaps we are here in this moment because we are fighting to have absolutes in a space of uncertainty that is our lived experience.

BS: I read your diagram first as “THINK.”

EC: Exactly, right. That’s exactly it. Because yes, think about it. Think about what was here; think about who was here. Think about what was here. Monticello is amazing right now because you can take a self-guided tour. Without a tour guide, you find yourself filling in the blanks. It’s actually kind of magical. As you’re there, you just start thinking differently. Ok what

“Thin relationships are really good for coalitions but really bad for Thanksgiving dinner.”

would it have been like? What would this space have been like? It operates so differently than when someone is telling you what you should think or prompting you towards what to think.

LK: That’s something that we were hoping to talk with you two about— precisely this role of narrative. In the worst cases, narrative can be didactic and top-down, inherently erasive or omitting some part of the truth. But we’re interested in how you see the relationship between narrative and the built environment. We’re speaking to you as an essayist and an architect. How do you two work together as an essayist interested in the built environment and an architect interested in narrative?

EC: Garnette, can I just talk about when we lived together?

GC: Yes! We need to make that podcast!

EC: We used to live in a house together. The first moment I realized that Garnette and I would get along together was when I realized that we both walk and explore. I do it as a questioning device, and Garnette has some amazing essays on it.

GC: I’ll start by saying some things

about Elgin. He has an essayist’s soul. I’m teaching a class now, and I think people thought I would come and write a bunch of essays. I think people are surprised by how much design I’m asking of them. A lot of that came about because of the things Elgin has taught me. If you walked into a room and decided you didn’t like where something was put, then you’ve gone and thought about design. If you’ve gone in and said “I’m going to sit in that chair because that one hurts my back and because that one is too high,” then you’ve begun to think about design in a way that’s very much oriented towards narrative. “This chair is preferable to that chair because of reasons having to do with comfort or having to do with accessibility, or having to do with relationships.” I’ll sit there because I want to see Garnette’s face when I’m talking to him. Or, like most people, “I don’t want to see Garnette’s face in this case, so give me a chair that’s a little bit higher and I don’t have to look at him.”

Elgin has been very insistent that we can’t see the built environment as this schematic thing and then narrative as occupying some other space. Both design and written prose are very much interested in and focused on making sense of the world. We ask “How do we belong? How do we move through the world? How do we see our place in it, but also how do we see ourselves in relation to others?” He’s always insisted that design is always in the service of people, should be in the service of people. The built environment is an environment, meaning it tries to inscribe itself in our imagination, as we give it meaning through movements, and giving over emotions to it. And all of this is very much about narrative. Questions of belonging, hope, the future, memory, the past, likes or dislikes, affections and frustrations, present sensibilities.

To think of past-future-present and the interrelationship between each other is

Fig. 1 Sketch by Elgin Cleckley during Interview with LUNCH 15.