In one of the more telling passages of the book, Mr. Bloemaker asks, How to begin to come to some understanding of one’s place in a system, when one is a part of an area that exists in such a troubling relation to the rest of the world, a world that is itself stripped of any static, understandable character by the fact that it changes, radically, all the time? 4 Design With Company is an architectural design practice that asks a similar question of themselves and of their Midwestern context. DWC extracts architectural tactics by observing their environment in order to solidify a uniquely Midwestern architectural project. Long gone are the family-run farms and “authentic” small towns that formed our now outdated mental image of the region. Farming is big business and it can’t be left to the inefficiencies and inconsistencies of individuals. Corporations that specifically breed every stalk of corn to yield the highest volume of product possible are necessary to manage these land factories. The current connection to the land is not one of individual direct interaction. The land is still there and it looks about the same, but it functions very differently. This difference is not
and his fictional geographies as a means to produce architectural strategies. The Broom of the System supplies two such landscapes: The Great Ohio Desert (G.O.D.), a man-made area filled with black sand, intended to restore a sense of the sinister to Midwestern life; and East Corinth, a suburb in the shape of Jayne Mansfield’s curvaceous body, complete with zoning ordinances that require houses to be painted in provocative flesh tones. Residents of East Corinth don’t realize the grand ‘figure’ they live within, despite the popularity of their city with passing airplane pilots. The G.O.D. performs from within, creating a set of experiences that remind Midwesterners of a historically dependent yet contentious relationship to the land. East Corinth performs from without, only revealing its structure to those flying high above the town. These examples of landscape as ‘moral coercion’ and ‘urban plan as figure’ are literary examples of fictive landscapes and urbanisms that estrange the familiar. But, what if our real landscapes, cities and architectures can embody similar literary cache as Wallace’s fictional geographies? As an initial survey of this Midwest, DWC uses aerial landscape images as a sampling method – both in the scientific and hip hop sense of the term. They use these samples as a form of synecdoche, the linguistic classification for a figure of speech where the parts stand in for the whole. These microcosms are snapshots of an ever-evolving land pattern. In this survey, the land has a personality and motivation that is revealed through surreal juxtapositions of use, conflicting logics and interrupted cultivation patterns. These motivations can be “read” like a story and without the history of their formation, can produce new narratives from the photographic evidence.
“Long gone are the family-run farms and ‘authentic’ small towns that formed our now outdated mental image of the region.” only economic; it is social, geographic, political and psychological. Our relationship to this land has been fundamentally altered and we should reconsider the cultural consequences of such a shift. Under these conditions, DWC again found inspiration in David Foster Wallace