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On designing new vernaculars.
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On teaching and the impossibility of sovereignty.
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On subverting objects of exclusion.
You cannot give millions and millions of people homes and shelters. It’s just not possible. It’s not any single architect’s job either. What we can do is try to make an intervention around shared knowledge. If people accept it, it will become common knowledge, it will become a practice, and it will be integrated into the whole system of vernacular construction.
Museum of Independence, Dhaka, 1997, Marina Tabassum Architects. Photograph by City Syntax.
a plaza for bringing people together during the Independence Day celebration and other public events. Bangladesh experienced a lot of sacrifice and sadness during the nine-month war, in 1971, when many lives were lost. That sadness is expressed in the museum below grade, taken into the ground. Since it’s placed in the park we went for a nonbuilding approach and transformed the roof into a rare open space. The commonality between the two projects is that they bring people together to celebrate and commemorate. VR You started to talk about how Bangladesh, as the youngest independent nation in the subcontinent, has a slightly different trajectory in its architectural history. You pointed out a growing movement among younger architects to engage more with communities and the people they build with and for. In a sense this is akin to the methods anthropologists use, which is to say we are learning from, we’re not here to impose, and we are creating a kind of a common knowledge that is shared. It would be interesting to hear a little bit about those sorts of movements, which seem to have more momentum in Bangladesh than elsewhere in the subcontinent. Bangladesh is fascinating because it is a country that starts with this very grand architectural tradition—such as the Parliament complex by Louis Kahn and Muzharul Islam (MArch ’61) — and now it’s at the vanguard of architecture as a cultural practice. How do you see a national architecture culture developing between these two tendencies? MT It’s quite fascinating how younger generations of architects are leading community projects. In Bangladesh some of the schools, specifically BRAC University, send students to a village for a semester. The students are from the cities and often have spent their formative years living a sort of cushioned life. I think working in the villages gives them a new sensibility that stays with them. Then when they graduate they may not go into an office but return to the villages and embed themselves where they work. You cannot do this kind of architecture if you’re not rooted at the site. It’s particularly unique here in the sense that we host one million refugees, and there are many architects who work in refugee camps through various humanitarian agencies, as well as independently. There are a lot of challenges: materials, politics, the tension between the government and the aid agencies. And you have to build very quickly because it’s a humanitarian crisis — an emergency situation. Yet within that short period of time, with all the different challenges and restrictions, they create uniquely beautiful architecture. They are there working with the people, but they are not compromising on the aspect of design. It also comes back to the question of Kahn and his presence. I have been fascinated by Kahn’s work, his use of light, his spaces. I don’t think anyone who has studied architecture in Bangladesh can claim that they haven’t been moved by the spaces Kahn has built. Even if you create architecture in a refugee camp, you do not forget these values. So I wouldn’t say that these are two different things; there’s a certain kind of symmetry between the two.
Fall 2023
VR That’s beautiful. In the South Asian context you see a lot of so-called slums and really degraded forms of housing. You also see the refugee camps, which of course have very different legal and policy logics. But in some formal ways they look similar. I know you’ve been engaged in the spectrum of rethinking shelter for those populations. What lessons have come from working in these mobile environments, on the one hand, and in the camps, which have many more external constraints imposed on them, on the other? MT We talk about that quite a lot. The thing is, when we work in the Ganges Delta or even in the slums, situations can be even worse than in a refugee camp because there you have humanitarian agencies and an enormous amount of people actually catering to needs. They’re definitely living in tiny little huts or small shelters, but there are roads and there is a water system. Their issues are more about the experience of trauma and this indefinite transitory state in which they are living. Yet in terms of physical structure there is much more than what you see in the slums, where nobody looks after them and they don’t get any aid. They don’t have any fuel to cook with, sanitation is their responsibility, water supply is their responsibility, and even electricity is their responsibility. So the situation in slums is much more about physical challenges. But we work with the community in both cases. When we are working with slum-dwellers there is much more hope. They want their houses to be just so, with certain colors. In the refugee camp they just want a safe space to sleep. VR You bring so much thought to the architecture by actually engaging with what exactly it is that people need. What is your experience of teaching in the West? I’m curious about how you see the advanced design studio pedagogy and its value based on your experience in Asia. How do you bring the two worlds together, and where might that lead us? MT I’ve been teaching for quite some time now. How I’ve thought about it is: What can I bring from Bangladesh to teaching in North America, or even in Europe? What can I bring that others would not be able to? In most cases what I found is that architecture is expanding its horizons. Quite often we don’t see the issue of marginalization and displacement. The studio I taught at Toronto was about displacement. There is so much movement that’s going on, be it people moving for opportunity or victims of conflict seeking safety. How do you design for transition? I call this the “architecture of transition” because more and more people live in indefinite transitory states. Where does planning strategy come in? How do you design for an emergency situation? I still teach a housing studio at TU Delft that addresses issues of marginalization and slums, and how this invisible population can be given adequate housing, not just through design but also at the policy level. I taught a studio at Harvard GSD on a $2,000 home project. At the time we were working on a resort in the Ganges Delta. There was a group of women who were saving to build houses, and their budget was $2,000. This was a collaborative process where the students went to the site and engaged with the community. They talked to them and designed
the houses based on the discussions, and every single dollar had to be accounted for. I think they understood the value of money from the process. VR Wonderful. I will be interested to see the brief for your studio at Yale this Fall. MT We didn’t talk about anthropology, but the fact is that before we work with communities we quite often go in with certain expectations. But then we work there and see that it’s not what we had anticipated. It is so important for architects to have an understanding of the methodology used by anthropologists in their work, with the notion of respect, of just being there to understand. VR I’m glad you brought that up, and it’s been embedded throughout this conversation. This is something that an NGO or a policymaker will not necessarily understand because they may not be thinking in relational terms. In your current work there is an emphasis on different kinds of displaced populations
and their needs, including climate and political refugees but also tourists who are a sort of voluntarily displaced population and who wield a lot of economic power in our world today. I was thinking about your Panigram Eco Resort and Spa (2018), located in the largest mangrove forest in the world. It manages to navigate this complex ecology as well as the needs of the local people while still being open to guests. So this resort project, the mosque, and the refugee camps all demonstrate a methodology of listening. This is how you learn about issues of displacement, how things are evolving and changing, and what relations are in play. In that sense you are already doing anthropology. MT Good to know. Thank you. But it did not happen easily. We learned through trial and error. VR Knowledge creation is a slow and painful process.
Jordan H. Carver and AJ Artemel AJ Artemel (MArch ’14), director of communications at the Yale School of Architecture and a member of Citygroup, spoke to writer, educator, and designer Jordan H. Carver, currently the KPF Visiting Scholar and critic at the Yale School of Architecture, about the importance of rendering the spaces of disappearance visible. AJ Artemel You’ve done a lot of investigation into black sites employed in the “War on Terror,” published in your book Spaces of Disappearance: The Architecture of Extraordinary Rendition (2018). How did you get into that line of research? Jordan H. Carver It came from being shocked by the spectacle and politics of the United States opening secret prisons around the world and torturing people in them. Once I dug into reports from the media and human-rights organizations I developed a more comprehensive understanding of it. There was a spatial strategy to shipping prisoners around the world, so the initial idea was to understand the interrogation and torture of suspected terrorists as a form of spatial organization. But there is also a larger question of state sovereignty and how the United States formulated its authority across the world, not just in Guantanamo Bay or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but also in places like Syria and Egypt and Israel, and in international waters. What is state sovereignty and how is it produced? And what spaces are produced to establish claims of sovereignty? The other goal was to draw it — to make it visible — because these sites were black: they were rendered invisible through a lack of imagery, through secrecy and redaction. So the project was to comb through reports and leaked documents and Wikileaks and translate that source
material into architectural representation. The book has three big sections, one of which is comprised entirely of drawings based on textual evidence and presented as evidentiary documents. AA The question for architects might be one of complicity: translating abstract policy or bureaucracy into hard walls and barbed wire. What do you think about recent efforts to organize against designing prisons? Do you think the discipline has learned to take a clearer ethical stance? JHC I’m not sure I would use the term complicity. The architects that design prisons or, in the case of black sites, the modular cells that could be shipped to Guantanamo Bay and around the world — that’s what they do, it’s their business. It’s not that their work gets twisted into something undesirable and they don’t speak up. These firms specialize in making prisons. I’m all for trying to amend ethical guidelines for the AIA and other professional organizations, as well as university programs, that would restrict members from building prisons and execution chambers, like ADPSR [Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility] is doing, or calling on members of design organizations to refuse to build something like the border wall. I don’t think the AIA is going to take that on, and I’m not sure the AIA has proven to be a valuable partner in adjudicating
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