14 minute read
Coleman Coker
building relationship
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Teaching architecture offers an extraordinary opportunity to understand relationships between individuals and others, and between people and their homes, places they work, communities in which they live, and how they treat their environments. Having this occasion not only to consider but to help shape these relationships is a gift and a responsibility not found in many other university programs. Yet, teaching design presents us with a set of unique complications, for architecture isn’t quite about offering systematic solutions, as, say, in the field of law with its prescribed rules of societal norms, or in medicine with its prescribed techniques that enable healing. And architecture isn’t quite art, as might be undertaken by a painter, poet, or musician. Instead, it falls in a middle-ground between prescribed skill and open-ended exploration, which makes it tough to nail down exactly what it is we do as design educators. Is our role to pass on prescribed methodologies that a student then adopts and develops, yet never should stray too far from? Or, like a finger pointing at the moon, should we try to teach students to be “artful,” which, in truth, they can only find within? A combination of both — employing the prescribed, and the freedom to create — is the balance I imagine we aim for. Within this boundary, architecture, for me, is a social art, and I try to teach it as such. I define “social” as communal or, more specifically, as a loose collective of individuals acting for the common good. And I define “art” here as artifice or artful skill.
Instead of designing buildings, landscapes, and communities, the social artist makes what Professor Michael Benedikt lucidly calls relationship. 1 Approaching architecture as spaces for which to form relationship rather than formally shape objects — what we call buildings — best provides a site where relationship between an individual and time unfolds, where vision, light and shadow, touch and memory, place and love, embodiment and spirit can find a home. The social artist shapes relationship between one and another, edifice and society, community and ecosystem. Once made, a site becomes the active middle ground, always there in the background of our lives. Seeing design this way can provide fertile territory for architecture students, offering them vivid places to explore and seductive locations to discover relationship, for others and for themselves. I’ve found this kind of exploration to be strongest when working outside the walls of academia in public places. There, students can effectively hone their design skills, discover opportunities for versatile interaction and adaptable interrelationship potential, and generate reciprocal relationships with others.
During a backyard potluck dinner, GCDL students brainstorm early design ideas with their neighborhood stakeholders. This will be the first test for what is to become a new environmental education pavilion designed and built by the students. Image courtesy of Ava Kikusaki.
The Texas coast is a microcosm of
Students get a firsthand look at petro-chemical plants along the Houston Ship Channel from the deck of the MV Sam Houston. Field research like this forms an integral part of their investigation into environmental justice issues in nearby fenceline communities. Image courtesy of Luther Yamamoto.
Learning this way requires a level of commitment and trust — which are invaluable teaching tools themselves — between student and stakeholder and offers design challenges not found in the safety of the classroom.
In this context, learning through doing transforms ideas into something tangible. Learning this way is about risk taking, teasing out the middle ground between theoria and praxis, so that learning how to become a better architect happens within the messiness of the real-world, where you can’t fake it. Working with a real-world stakeholder is thus a twopronged investigation: the first ambition is to satisfy the desires and needs of that client. Working with a stakeholder provides students opportunities to demonstrate responsibility and commitment; it shows how working toward someone else’s benefit — instead of an isolated student ego — is what being an architect is really all about. The second part of the investigation is about learning how to cope with — and use as an asset — the reality of concrete limitations: gravity, rain, heat, cold, material, temporal and fiscal restraints, and the constraints of building codes and social expectation. By meeting stakeholders’ needs and acknowledging limitations, students learn firsthand how to economically make beauty, all together practical, equitable, and meaningful. Yes, it can be untidy, but — as more than one student has told me — it can change their understanding of what architecture is and can be.
Teaching by doing — as has long been done at other institutions — led me to establish the Gulf Coast DesignLab here at the UT School of Architecture. Though I don’t call what we do “public interest design” (PID) (general labels like that can be misleading and even sound conceited), the term is sometimes used to describe one of the ways in which the DesignLab engages. PIDers rightfully point out that “architecture” serves only a small percentage (3-5%) of the public. To overcome this limit, academia and the profession need to cast a wider net, to seek and serve a “public” that has little idea what an architect is, could never afford one in the first place, and who, in the opinion of some elite designers — only whispered in dark hallways — are the nonaficionados who never read Dwell, nor have worshipped at the altar of architectural masterworks. In other words, we must serve the masses who wouldn’t appreciate what we designers do. For many academics and “highdesigners,” PID isn’t really about design at all. Much of what has been fashioned under PID’s banner has been poor design, rarely inspiring and delighting. For those critics, the pursuit of the beautiful is incidental, and for PIDers, that lack of direct ambition toward beauty is to be forgiven, since their ambition rests more on the laurels of its “higher” community-saving goals. For the architecture profession, working under the pressures of our capitalist economy, there is no money in PID work. Funding for communities in need or non-profits working for the public good to engage with architects is minimal, if it exists at all, and doesn’t even cover a junior designer’s time. Some firms of course do pro bono work as a way to bridge this gap, and more progressive AIA chapters have programs to address the shortfall, but their effects are minimal, barely reaching that other 95% who never benefit from what good design can offer.
The Gulf Coast DesignLab tries to bridge this gap with one foot in the public realm — working with those who would otherwise never encounter an architect — and the other foot planted firmly in design that aspires to be beautiful and fitting. Whether we accomplish this or not is for others to decide, but the pursuit of good design meant to serve the public good is instilled in the students. It is the ethical foundation from which they are asked to work, learning about an architect’s responsibilities and what that can mean to a client, to the neighborhood, community, and environment of which they are a part. Making something aesthetically appealing that will be used for decades becomes a point of pride for many students, instilling in them what being a citizen architect is all about, and what it means to make the world just a little bit better for others.
But, why teach design and community engagement on the Gulf Coast? After all, a coast is no more than a thin strip of land, specific to its own particularities, bound to ocean. Yet, it is dynamic and constantly shifting, both literally and figuratively, unpredictable and uncanny. With more intensity than many landbound places, our Texas coast openly displays the uneasy bargain that’s been struck between people and “nature.” The Texas coast is a microcosm of what’s happening worldwide, and because of that, it provides an ideal laboratory to explore the larger concerns our students will inevitably face, regardless of where they settle. These concerns are unfolding around the globe in the form of ever-increasing climate disasters, the sixth extinction, forced migration, failing crops, water shortages, and climate refugees. These global-sized concerns, all observed on the Texas coast, are embodied in ever-increasing industrial growth — much of it petrochemical — that affects unique coastal flora and fauna. It affects the livelihood of shrimpers, oyster farmers, commercial fishers, and ranchers. It impacts home- and land owners, sports anglers and beach goers. It causes illness and jeopardizes personal health, especially for low-income neighborhoods. Finding healthy places to live and work is getting harder and harder. Add increased hurricane intensity and ever-more intense, more frequent rain events. It is both fascinating and confounding to see how all these factors intermingle and coalesce in tenuous day-today relationship. The question I ask myself is: Are we preparing our students for this? As future practitioners, wherever they end up, our students will face these “hyper-object” events, and will be put to the test.2 My hope is that DesignLab’s efforts offer a response in some small way.
Our work has taken us from Port Isabel to Port Arthur; these past several years have been in the Galveston Bay/Houston area. This is a rapidly growing megalopolis sometimes referred to as “Anthropocene City.” 3 It has earned that moniker by being home to about 42% of our nation’s petrochemical production. What is produced there helps feed global warming, making Houston hotter and more vulnerable to hurricanes and rain deluge. Our nation’s rapidly growing fourth-largest city gobbles up more surrounding land daily, littering about unsustainable, auto-dependent subdivisions, which require more expressways and more petroleum products, resulting in more pollution, more unhealthy places to live… on and on, creating an ouroboric relationship, a city constantly feeding on itself. For designers and planners, Houston is a complex laboratory in which to plumb the depths of unchecked urban sprawl, unsustainable transportation, social inequity, unhealthy environmental conditions, and ecological devastation. In the early ‘80s, Dr. Robert Bullard — who calls Houston home and is widely hailed as the father
Middle-school students from the Houston area gather in an outdoor classroom built by GCDL students in the spring of 2018. They’re discussing what they just experienced on a kayak trip in Galveston’s West Bay, hosted by Artist Boat, a Galveston area non-profit that works with Houston area public schools to promote stewardship through increased ecological literacy. Image courtesy of Mary Warwick. of the environmental justice movement— and his students from Texas Southern University mapped the relationship between the city’s garbage dumps and minority neighborhoods on behalf of a class-action lawsuit, Bean V. Southwestern Waste Management Corp.4 In their landmark study, they clearly documented that Houston planners had systematically placed waste landfills in or close to communities of color. Once made public, Houston changed its practices, but other health-harming practices continue. Environmental racism and ecological devastation are ongoing. Just visit the mostly Latinx fence-line neighborhoods of Manchester and Galena Park that back up to the Houston Ship Channel. Once meandering along Buffalo Bayou, now dredged and widened, the channel welcomes ocean-going ships that dock next to its petro-chemical plants. Toxic-waste air- and water releases and chemical fires — which are illegal in most states — happen there often. Cancer rates, particularly for childhood cancer and leukemia, in those neighborhoods are staggeringly above national average. Governmental failure, both local and national, and corporate callousness are to blame, putting the health and well-being of many Houstonians in harm’s way. And there seems to be no stopping it. Houston is fertile ground for exploring complex design issues, especially for students who will face many of these problems.
Because government and corporations have yet to address these quality-of-life concerns, anxious individuals have pulled together to form outspoken neighborhood groups and determined non-profits. Though their missions vary, each strives to make their city a healthier
and more sustainable place to live. For the Gulf Coast DesignLab, these David-versus-Goliath organizations are the conduits that allow us to cut across traditional academic boundaries and build relationships between students and the public. As engaged designers, this takes the form of students working with a community client much in the same way an architect would in real-world practice. In our case, however, the design process goes one step further; the students build what they design. Developing years-long relationships with non-profit partners, we have been drawn to those focused on public schools in the Houston/Galveston area. Our stakeholders typically offer middle- and high-school kids the chance to get out of the classroom and into the landscape — hiking, kayaking, collecting specimens, sketching, and water-coloring. They learn what coastal ecology looks, feels, sounds, smells, and tastes like, increasing their ecological literacy and gaining a sense of stewardship. All this helps them better understand who they are and how they fit into their greater surroundings. Our DesignLab students contribute to this outreach by doing what architects do best, designing meaningful buildings that inspire.
None of our architecture students are seasoned builders and teaching them building skills is by no means the goal here. Making them better designers is the goal. Constructing what they have designed shows them how to work within specific time frames and unbending budgets, how to respect the needs and desires of their stakeholder over their own ambition, and how to better understand composition and proportion. They must test their abilities to make something beautiful while considering appropriate and durable material choices or, as Vitruvius described, to make firmness, commodity, and delight. DesignLab students have designed and built outdoor classrooms, observation areas, kayak storage facilities, and gathering places for middle and high school students to learn from marine biologists, ecologists, scientists, master naturalists, nature interpreters, and artists. The structures our DesignLab students have fashioned over our program’s nine years are places to catch welcoming breezes; retreats from the sun; and places to sketch, observe, rest, imagine, and contemplate. The general public also benefits, since it also has access to most of these places.
A third relationship the Gulf Coast DesignLab gives our students is a deeper understanding of the place in which they are working. This understanding goes far beyond what students typically learn about “place” when looking out their classroom window. Immersion in the landscape happens in two ways: first, through boots-on-the-ground intelligence, in the form of walks and kayak trips, guided by those with firsthand knowledge of the coastal environment. Whether in town or coastal prairie, experts in their field give talks and demonstrations about where the students are and what they’re seeing. It’s no longer “just grass” or “just wetland,” but newly-realized interdependent ecologies with ebbs and flows — productive, sustaining, and beautiful. This method helps students to understand how what they make can fit comfortably into the local ecology, and how what they are doing is not just a formal object-making exercise or another design problem to be solved — but is providing active work, fully embedded and dependent upon the place in which it plays a part. This type of immersion occurs second through a service-learning project meant to repair and nourish damaged landscape. These projects have included planting native prairie grasses in over-ranched areas; removing trash from wildlife refuges; sinking bagged oyster shells in bay waters to reestablish oyster habitat and help cleanse the water and reduce erosion; planting live oak saplings in areas cut down for generations-long farming. These projects provide the opportunity for students to build relationships with the places in which they’ll work.
This is engaged activism, students working with their hearts and hands — and their best design ideas — while practicing ethical responsibility toward others. I’ve found that most architecture students want to make a better world for others. They recognize architecture’s failures when it only serves the few and they want to do something about it. Their idealism drives them to commitments to make change. I am optimistic they will do just that. My hope for these budding architects — these social artists — is that they take what they’ve learned and shape their own understanding of how to build relationship around it, for their future endeavors and for the future of others.
Houston, TX and the disproportionate role it plays in contributing to planetary climate change. Scranton describes meeting Timothy Morton, the Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University, for a boat tour of the Houston Ship Channel where they discuss the ironies and paradoxes of the city.
ontology philosopher Graham Harman was an early user of the term, but it was The Ecological Thought later popularized by Timothy Morton, first in his 2012 book, Hyperobject: (Harvard University Press), and more extensively explored in his 2013 book Philosophy and Ecology at the End of the World (University of Minnesota Press).
Architecture Beyond Experience (San Francisco: Applied Research 1 Michael Benedikt, and Design, 2020). 2 Hyperobjects are objects (or events) so massive in scale and duration that they become hard for us to conceive in our understanding of spacetime: things like global warming, world monetary systems, plate tectonics, plastics, all are hyperobjects. We can name them but have difficulty in grasping them in any meaningful way. Object-oriented
