I think the arena for addressing ethical practice is in the university, by teaching and modeling ethical practice in the classroom and studio. It’s hard to understand that there are architectures that produce forms of violence, racialization, and inequality around the world. These ideas should be part of a broader pedagogical understanding of the practice and the profession. There will always be a market for building prisons unless architects join in to support networks of abolition.
Who Builds Your Architecture? at the Art Institute of Chicago, 2016. Photo courtesy of AIC.
professional ethics. I think the arena for addressing ethical practice is in the university, by teaching and modeling ethical practice in the classroom and studio. It’s hard to understand that there are architectures that produce forms of violence, racialization, and inequality around the world. These ideas should be part of a broader pedagogical understanding of the practice and the profession. There will always be a market for building prisons unless architects join in to support networks of abolition. AA You’ve done a lot of work on labor in architecture, including activism around construction work. What has been your experience with the coalition Who Builds Your Architecture? What is the next focus of the fight in the wake of COVID-19? JHC For a long time Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?) was focused on forced labor on construction sites in Istanbul and Doha, yet there are plenty of cases of underpaid work here in the United States, an issue that overlaps with questions of migration. At WBYA? we’ve always been cognizant that we’re not operating as a policy group. We’re not a human-rights organization. We’re a group of educators, and our goal is to bring questions of construction work, and fair labor more broadly, into the studio and classroom. We produce materials for professional-practice courses to bring these issues into discourses that would not necessarily consider them. The most productive use of our time has been working with people such as Peggy Deamer and Phil Bernstein, as well as the Architecture Lobby, to build a more cohesive organizational network focusing on issues of architectural labor. WBYA? is still focused on labor on the jobsite, but coming out of COVID-19 we’re trying to reorganize and focus more on wider local labor concerns. Architects have worked really, really hard to not be responsible for things that happen on the construction site, but with that they also lose the ability to speak up about things like safety, wages, and labor standards. AA Absolutely. This past semester you taught an advanced studio with Mabel Wilson, as well as the seminar “Architecture, the State, and Racial Formation.” One thing that you’ve brought up several times is the role of architectural education in promoting a broader type of change in the ethical landscape of the profession. What
is your conception of the role of pedagogy in examining these issues? What new tools are students getting to better equip them to face the world of architecture? JHC I was trained both in an architecture school and in an interdisciplinary humanities program, where I got a PhD. The seminar and studio this spring were conceived of as interdisciplinary courses. Architecture is not an individual act; it’s a group act requiring cooperation — there are a lot of authors to every architecture project. That’s also how academic research is done. The seminar is intended to reach outside of architecture as a discipline to think about how architecture fits into larger structures — in this case those of the state — and into the processes of racial formation. To do this we have to go outside of the architectural canon and then bring in architecture little by little. Toward the end of the semester we were reading texts on architecture written by architects, but we also spent lots of time thinking through the political history of the United States and its long legacy of racialization, and how space relates to both. Pedagogically the goal is to situate architecture within a broad network of interests, practices, and experiences and to understand that enriching architectural education, in terms of both design and spatial literacy, requires a multidisciplinary approach. The other side of this idea is to reinforce what architects do — the power of understanding space. AA You’ve changed scales this year, from the architecture of prisons to the territories of post-plantation landscapes, in the studio. What are the connections between designing buildings for incarceration and territory as the spatialization of a state formation in the American case: the mapping, gridding, surveying, and transforming of land into an engine for production? JHC The theme connecting most of my work is the underlying question about how state sovereignty, particularly American, is manifested in space, whether through particular architectures like prisons or through techniques of mapping and marking the land. I’m interested in the failure of state sovereignty — the impossibility of sovereignty — the fact that it’s not possible to have total control over the land, in the same way that it’s not possible to have total sovereignty over your own body in space. Yet I still focus on materials and form. One of
my current projects traces the history of materials accumulating at the border: maps and monuments as well as fencing and electronic surveillance equipment. What are they actually like? What is the material of the monument doing? When did it go from stone to cast iron? Why is it in the shape of an obelisk? When did fencing arrive? What is the history of that fencing material, from World War II advanced air defense bases and the landing strips that launched napalm attacks in Vietnam to the border between the United States and Mexico? How does surveillance equipment produce images of migrants, and how do those images feed into discourses on migration? I am researching the links between the continual failure of sovereignty and its material manifestation, and how those links circulate through political narratives. AA That’s a very interesting way to put it. It’s also interesting how material landscapes produce failure, like when the Jeffersonian grid runs up against mundane things like hills and rivers, and other real-world conditions that resist the inscription of ideas. You spoke about how one part of your book is about
drawing the spaces of black sites and producing documentation. What are some other ways to understand how abstract ideas, such as those as executed by a bureaucracy, are attempting (and failing) to generate a spatial reality? JHC For every bill passed in the Senate, for every policy proposal and speech the Mayor of New York or the President gives, there’s a rich narrative embedded. But architects can help understand what is actually being proposed — how it will look and function as an everyday lived experience. I did a book with photographer Chad Ress, who took the American Recovery Act and photographed what the money was actually funding. There is power in these big landscape-style photographs that show what government funding can and cannot do. And so, for me, it’s through drawing, photography, modeling, and other standard tools of architectural representation that we can understand space in new ways. And, most importantly, we can also rework given narratives. There is real power in understanding different modes of visibility and different modes of aesthetic presence.
Chat Travieso and Keller Easterling Keller Easterling—architect, writer, and the Enid Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture at Yale—spoke with artist, urbanist, and designer Chat Travieso (MArch ’10), Fall 2023 Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor. Constructs You both look at ways in which infrastructure and the built environment act on people and spaces — or active form, to use Keller’s term. Chat, you’ve published the article “A Nation of Walls” in Places Journal, about segregation walls and infrastructures of division. You’ve also done work with interventions that have positive effects on the environment, such as amenities for seating and for playing music. How do you make sure that the effects that you’re trying to produce as a designer are positive? Keller, what examples of active form have you seen that ricochet correctly?
Detention cells at black sites in Lithuania and Romania. Drawings by Lindsey Wikstrom and Jordan H. Carver from Spaces of Disappearance: The Architecture of Extraordinary Rendition.
Chat Travieso I see urban interventions as both direct responses to everyday needs and poetic gestures. The work I do as an independent artist and designer, as well as with Yeju Choi for Yeju & Chat, is very much invested in working with what’s already happening on the ground. It’s meant to uplift existing efforts, not start from scratch. People are already adapting their built environments to everyday needs. There are already social bonds and relations, and the work is designed to reinforce those and learn from them at the same time. I also see the work as a catalyst for larger actions. The temporary nature of this approach can be disappointing, however: it activates the space and people are excited, and then it goes away. So what is the afterlife of the intervention? Can it spur changes in policy? Can it exist at another site? In my research work I try to investigate the histories and policies that have shaped the built environment in order to start thinking more expansively about alternative futures and systems. Of course, Keller, having been your student, my thinking has been greatly influenced by your work.
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Keller Easterling We are talking about the design of things as well as of an interplay between things — how things might engage in a design ecology. It does not take away from anything the discipline already does but allows it to be effective in an additional register. It suggests interdependencies, or chain reactions, between things. The protocols for interactions are themselves infrastructures as worthy of funding as those of concrete and conduit. This is a moment when we’re rethinking the kind of infrastructures that build communities — that put together spatial, financial, social, or decommodifying protocols. It’s a prudent investment of our resources, it seems to me, since these kinds of interplay redouble any resource that’s given to them because they are alive. One seed, when planted, produces ten seeds. Capital doesn’t understand this. These are community economies, which create a superabundance of value beyond any financial registration value. I guess I am looking for entanglements that enrich the situation. Constructs One thing you both do so well is build theory from very specific examples. What is your research methodology? And what new projects will you be taking on? CT My research process tends to be circuitous and multipronged — guided by conversations, connections, and relationships that blossom and multiply over time. “A Nation of Walls,” my project exploring the history of segregation walls that you mentioned earlier, is a good example of this. I’m originally from Miami, and in 2016 I read N.D.B. Connolly’s book A World More Concrete, about the history of real estate and Jim Crow in South Florida. Connolly describes several race
