Lunch

LUNCH 14 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 www.appliedresearchanddesign.com info@appliedresearchanddesign.com Copyright © 2020 LUNCH and the University of Virginia.

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Editors: Sam Johnson, Hutch Landfair, Sherry Ng, and Taryn Wiens Faculty Advisors: Brad Cantrell and Sneha Patel Book Design: Sam Johnson, Hutch Landfair, Sherry Ng, and Taryn Wiens Project Manager: Jake Anderson 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 First Edition ISBN: 978-1-951541-16-3 Color Separations and Printing: ORO Group Ltd. Printed in China.

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EDGES WILDS METRICS CULTURE FRONTIER The old “frontier”—that line drawn in the sand—should we let it go the way of a ghost town? At first, we dismissed “frontier” as too cliche for the LUNCH 14 theme, too loaded with a racist and misogynist history, too U.S.-centric, too trite. And yet, like a burr on a wool shirt, the frontier as an idea is embedded in design.

Just when we think we’ve moved past those beguiling binaries of yore, we find ourselves still drawing upon that romantic promise of an easy us-to-them or old-to-new. Designing is often considered synonymous with creating. But we have other tools too: deconstructing, reorienting, adapting. Before jumping straight to world-building, designers might attempt to dismantle existing constructs of harm. In order to dismantle something, you first have to see it. This is an aspect of our inherited frontier condition that is difficult to shake: to tear our eyes away from always looking forward, and begin, instead, to look around.

That’s right: we’re taking that blinding frontier optimism and turning it back on itself, like a mirror to the sun at high noon.

Futile? Maybe. But it seems worth a little sweat and a LUNCH issue to get this damn frontier burr off of us, and into the ground to grow something new.

We divide our task (we know, more frontiers) into four sections: Edges explores the form and possibilities of the edge itself, and unravels the hard binary condition of the frontier. Wilds flips the narrative around, picking apart established categorizations of “wild” and “tame” to unpack their separate-ness. Metrics examines the strengths, foibles, and potentials of our tools, our methods of observation and quantification; if the map creates the frontier, then to alter the map (or the way we draw it) is to transform the frontier. And finally, Culture takes on the “us” and “them” of the frontier, shifting our perception from a binary divide to a rhizomatic network, where the meeting of cultures does not mean appropriation, erasure and dominance but a hope for generative complexity.

Ultimately, these sections all grow from the same hope: that we can use the frontier’s own story to de-center its power. As designers, we situate every project as responding to, pushing against, or advocating for something—our own frontiers. Instead of marching recklessly forward, trampling our path, we need to take time to consider our position and surroundings. If we stop and listen, we might find others doing the same thing.

Thanks for saddling up and riding with us. We sure do hope you enjoy.

The LUNCH 14 Editors Sam Johnson Hutch Landfair Sherry Ng Taryn Wiens

edges 01

11

37

Interview: Novel Ecosystems

71

Settlement Park

75

Toward Care: Lively Not Novel

Various Works

Richard Hobbs, Joy Zedler, Peter Del Tredici, Alex Felson

Rodrigo Valenzuela

Interview: Barriers to Boundaries Rozana Montiel

27

55

Urbanism on the Edge

Sara Jacobs

81

A Language for Living Things

87

Breaking the Karman Line

93

Wasteland for the Extraterrestrial

Jonah Susskind

On the Boundary of Being Leigh Miller

Margaret Baldwin

Mary Velez

Erin McLean

Jeffrey Nesbit

45

Design and the Border Question Leah Kahler

Table of Contents

105

On the Possibility of Radical Mourning at the National Zoo Madelyn Hoagland-Hanson

c 115

Interview: Authoring Owens Lake

u

l

t

u

r

e

167

Reciprocity

177

The Nepali Village as Labor Frontier

183

Rethinking Authenticity

191

Hip-hop Architecture in China

199

What’s My Name

221

Frontier At Home

Office of Living Things

Alexander Robinson

127

Rest Ops

Laura Diamond

Katie Stranix, JT Bachman

133

Digital Speculations

142

Encountering Maps

149

The Cybernetic Environment as a New Frontier

Weaam Alabdullah

Perry Kulper

Alex Wong

Kevan Klosterwill

Sekou Cooke

Zihao Zhang, Shurui Zhang

157

Landscape Probes and Curious Methods Karen Lutsky, Sean Burkholder, Nicholas Rajkovich

Shiqiao Li

Already There Rodrigo Valenzuela

VALENZUELA 4

(left, top to bottom)— Rodrigo Valenzuela, Sense of Place No. 12, 2016; toner, acrylic, and chalk on canvas; 34”x45”.

Rodrigo Valenzuela, Sense of Place No. 18, 2016; toner, acrylic, and chalk on canvas, 34”x45”.

Rodrigo Valenzuela, Sense of Place No. 4, 2016; toner, acrylic, and chalk on canvas, 54.5”x 71”. (above)— Rodrigo Valenzuela, Sense of Place No. 27, 2017; acrylic, toner, and chalk on canvas, 79”x118”.

All courtesy of the artist, Galerie Lisa Kandlhofer, and Upfor.

BORDERS TO BOUNDARIES An Interview with Rozana Montiel Conducted by the LUNCH Editorial Board

Rozana Montiel is an architect based in Mexico City.

Her work focuses on architectural design, artistic reconceptualizations of space, and the public domain. The studio works with a wide variety of projects in different scales and layers that range from the city to the micro-object.

LUNCH Journal: What role do barriers and boundaries play in your work?

Rozana Montiel: There’s always this idea of boundaries and barriers in my work. A boundary is a very thin line and it’s unclear whether it’s a limit. It’s neither positive or negative. I learned that boundaries are more open than barriers, that boundaries make you have a dialogue or interact in some way. Barriers are really something that divides while boundaries are more open. That’s why in my work, I change barriers into boundaries—sometimes I also call them horizons or ecotones. I like to change barriers and resignify them. For me, boundaries are more permeable.

RM: And that’s also the ecotone. The ecotone is this space in between two other spaces—if this is A and this is B, the ecotone has A and B, plus its own C. I like the spaces in between that are permeable, where many things happen. They’re richer than the other two. It’s difficult to say “this is it”—just a hard line—instead, I think it’s something to make wider and more open.

LUNCH: If I can extrapolate on your work a bit, it seems often the boundary is a question and the ecotone is the conversation that results from that. A boundary might be identifying a place where a question can arise and then a lot of your work seems to answer or mitigate that question, or give agency to people, so they’re able to answer that question within their own spaces.

RM: Yes. You start with first recognizing these barriers—walls, fences, frames—and then you can open them up into boundaries.

Then you can create a new thing that can be an ecotone or it could be these in between spaces or new horizons. The horizon has a bigger perspective.

LUNCH: With Común-Unidad2 you do that with the notion of public and private. Before, in that place, everything was either public or private, and then you created this space that’s kind of both and neither at the same time. What other dichotomies do you work with?

Fig. 01 (previous spread)—Jaime Navarro. Fresnillo Playground. | Fig. 02 (left)—Sandra Pereznieto. Comun-Únidad.

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LUNCH: It relates a lot to “frontier”—part of the reason we chose that theme is to challenge this narrative of the hard line—where either you’re on this side or you’re on that side. To open that up and create more porosity.

RM: I always play with this idea of exterior and interior, what’s public and private, what’s natural and artificial, and interweave them, maybe not recognizing where the limit is.

In Comun-Únidad (Common Unity) what happens is that they have very small apartments, so they don’t have a place to be within their homes. If you’re a family of five or six people living there, you want to have your own space. Once you get out to the patio, it’s like you continue to have this space that can be yours, but it’s collective at the same time. You can do a lot of things in the public space, even work.

Then your own apartment becomes bigger just with the idea that you have more space outside where you can do all these things that you usually do in an interior space.

RM: Yes, it totally changes. And one of the things that changes it are children. What do children want to do? They want to go outside and play. Now they have this place to play and their mothers are there watching them. Then the mothers start talking with each other. I think that children gather people and have a big impact in changing the social fabric. That’s also why we always try to put playgrounds in these spaces.

I’m very interested in even these really small tactics, this pet architecture, where you open a window and you completely change the social fabric. For example, Xalpa [the housing complex where

14

Fig. 03 (right)—Sandra Pereznieto. Comun-Únidad.

LUNCH: And you have this condition where, before, everybody was doing these activities indoors and can’t see or hear each other, and now they’re doing these same activities but witnessing each other, even if they’re not participating directly in each other’s activities. Do you think that changes the social fabric of the place?

MONTIEL

Common Unity is located]—before there were 7,000 inhabitants and there were different patios around the housing units. When it was first built, you could cross through. These patios were common space.

This was in the ‘80s, but around the 2000s, they started putting in walls to divide them into blocks. They thought that in building these walls, they would feel more secure. And that’s why we call it Common Unity because it was one, and then it was separated, and we tried to restore it to generate this community.

LUNCH: It’s interesting, the reason that we put up barriers is for this idea of security, but then in taking them down find that we’re actually more secure. We fight ourselves in a way when we do that.

RM: When I got to Xalpa I was fascinated, because everything was gated. Even an empty, one square meter lot. And it was much less secure than how it is now because thieves, or whoever wanted to do something, would hide behind those gates. When the gates were taken out, the community’s space became much bigger and more secure because now it has light at night from being open—you can see everywhere. If you go to the other sectors that are not rehabilitated, you feel scared and don’t want to go in. I have taken people there and they were really afraid. Once you compare it to the other ones, you feel you’re very safe. You can go to Common Unity and feel a change in the atmosphere.

It was similar in the Fresnillo playground.3 The colors of the housing units were really aggressive; this purple or this yellow mustard—very intense. There was no place to play. And you felt very unsecure.

Well that’s a very unsecure area, but you felt worse being there with these. We changed the colors and put these rodapié. Sometimes in the facade you paint one color [above head height] and you paint another [along the base] and we call it the rodapié in Spanish. Well, we changed them to earthen colors and you feel that you’re in another place completely. Again, very simple tactics can completely change the idea of being in a very aggressive space—they can be pretty powerful.

LUNCH: You make these physical adjustments, but I’m really interested in how you shift the story or shift perspective of a place. You’re in the exact same place, almost nothing has changed, but the way people see it or the way people interact with it, it’s completely different. That’s what’s so interesting about frontier for us is that frontier isn’t anything concrete. It’s just a story but it has all this power in being a story. How do you take that story and switch it to make it a different space?

Fig. 04 (right)­—Sandra Pereznieto. Fresnillo Playground.

EDGES

15

It’s the wall that divides and then it’s a roof that unites.

Just by raising it up you have a completely new idea. I really like these simple answers and how they can be so powerful in transmitting a bigger idea.

MONTIEL

16

DESIGN AND THE BORDER QUESTION Made Collective’s Otra Nation Leah Kahler

In 2017, the Trump White House issued the Executive Order 13767, otherwise known as “Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements” to formalize the barrier between the United States and Mexico. For the most part, proposals followed expected schemes: towering constructions of concrete and steel taking on all the harshest tactics for the creation of a highly politicized boundary. Images circulated of modular walls or fences (Fig. 2) intended to stop or slow down border crossings by migrants and refugees, even providing surveillance opportunities via raised platforms and heightened views for Border Patrol officers like the wall proposed by San Diego Project Management, PSC (Fig. 3).

There was one notable outlier in the body of RFP responses, however. Made Collective, a group of anonymous architects, engineers, planners, and policy makers from the U.S. and Mexico, submitted plans for “Otra Nation,” a co-national open border state located within 20 kilometers of the current political boundary. Where other proposals called for a concrete border or fence, Otra Nation is anchored along a hyperloop transit system, carrying cargo and people along the historic line of demarcation (Figs. 1, 4 & 5).

The Otra Nation proposal1 is based on a series of political and infrastructural projects that create a self-governing territory represented by both the U.S. and Mexican governments. Residents retain their original citizenships in addition to taking on Otra Nation status.

Made Collective’s co-nation is provocative at two levels: discursive and strategic. First, their proposal boldly situates designers in the discourse surrounding the question of the borderwall. This move of design activism is preferable to the alternatives in which the geospatial problem would be left addressed by politicians and construction companies without empathetic design-thinking methods.

Second, embedded in the content of Otra Nation is an unfortunate self-defeating reification of the nationstate model of the territory.

The border, as it is conceived by the existing model, is the spatial manifestation of a codified system of categorization, one that clearly delineates the U.S. from Mexico, citizen from alien, migrant from native. Otra Nation’s deployment of a biometric I.D. system and hyperloop transit rail reveals a troubling reliance on this binary paradigm of neoliberal citizenship, the very political milieu that predicates the construction of a border wall in the first place.

Fig. 01 (previous spread)—Cameron Sinclair. Made Collective, “Otra Nation,” Hyperloop. | Fig. 02 (left)—Penna Group.10

47 EDGES

Entry to the borderstate is based on “Otra I.D.,” that would deploy an encrypted E-residency smart chip for identification and grant free movement between boundaries of the United States and Mexico for chip-holders. The proposal leans heavily on bioregionalism, eliminating all traces of the border’s impediments and effectively reuniting constricted watersheds and wildlife habitats.

What is the role of designers in the contemporary border debate?

How should design professionals engage with the border as socio-physical construction?

What are the implications of formally spatializing a borderculture?

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These questions arose well before the sense of urgency brought by the Trump presidency. In 2006, the New York Times asked designers to redesign the wall, spurring conversations about intersections of politics, ethics, and the fora in which we are meant to yield our spatial skills.2 Ricardo Scofidio, of Diller+Scofidio, rejected the charge saying, “It’s a silly thing to design a conundrum. You might as well leave it to security and engineers.” 3 Others rejected this shrug, taking on the charge with care and concern. Designers from James Corner (with solar powered fencing) to Enrique Norten (with an international highway system) have thrown their hats into the ring.

Ronald Rael, chair of the Architecture Department at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, has taken on this topic substantially in his teaching and a 2017 publication entitled Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary.4 The book outlines a set of radical proposals for the borderwall, ranging from the whimsy (a Teeter Totter Wall and a Wall y Ball), to emotionally poignant (A Confession Wall), even substantial-looking barriers designed with built-in tools for self-destruction.

KAHLER

Fig. 03 (bottom left)–San Diego Project Management.11 | Fig. 04 (bottom right)–Cameron Sinclair. Made Collective, “Otra Nation,” Map.12

I. DISCOURSES OF THE DESIGNER AND THE BORDER “PROBLEM” The Otra Nation submission to the Trump RFP begs some truly critical questions about the border as a socio-spatial design problem:

A LANGUAGE FOR LIVING THINGS Mary Velez

This is a love story between plants and people. It is told by two women with two versions of the truth, and whose tales offer paths that stretch into the future. A language for living things seeks to find a middle ground between their tales, and propose an alternative way of perceiving and responding to living matter.

One version of the story is about Eve. Eve is tricked by a snake into eating a piece of fruit from a forbidden tree, thus disobeying God’s commands. Because Eve listened to an animal and ate of the earth, she and Adam are expelled from the Garden of Eden, and humanity is condemned to suffering and toil.

Another version of the story is about Skywoman. She is of the Iroquois people, whose land we now call New York, Maine, Vermont, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Working with frogs and birds, Skywoman made the earth by collecting mud along a turtle’s back.1 Her version is echoed by the beliefs of the Yolngu, a group of Australian Indigenous peoples. Their ancestors are creeks, mounds, patterns of the sea’s surface and precious minerals buried within the Earth’s skin.2 These truths give us a glimpse of a way of being that does not make distinctions between us and living things.

Through both stories, we learn expectations for how to communicate with living things. Our expectations are culturally specific and rely upon the generational knowledge of our peers, ancestors, and gods.

One story encourages alienation, while one encourages intimacy. One

The infinite cycles of maintenance, extraction, consumption, and production have stilted the language we share with living things.

Today, Euro-Western cultures communicate with plants in a distant and specific manner that is focused on solutions, results, and products that prioritize human needs and desires. Driverless tractors and crop-dusting airplanes, elaborately mowed baseball diamonds and jewel-like suburban oases reveal the contexts of our conversations.3

Fig. 01 (Previous Spread)—Mary Velez, Comparative Axons.5 Fig. 03 (Above)—Mary Velez, Ways of Knowing.7

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provides a cautionary tale, and one provides the tools for language.

Plants and other living matter lead subterranean and aerial lives that escape our senses of hearing, seeing, and touching. They live on different physical scales and different time scales. To communicate with them demands time, patience, and attention. Our contemporary age of instant satisfaction and 90-hour work weeks, noise cancelling headphones, and same-day shipping obliviates the concept of connecting with those who do not easily facilitate conversation. In order to communicate with plants, we design short cuts; technologies that allow us to talk to plants and act on them—but do not allow us to listen to their response.