galt. issue 03: Burning

galt. publication

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Issue 03

Fall 2020

First and foremost, it is important we acknowledge the campus grounds on which this publication was founded. The University of Waterloo School of Architecture sits in Block 1 of the Haldimand Tract—land that was promised to the Six Nations under The Haldimand Treaty of 1784—which extends 10 kilometers on either side of the Grand River, from Lake Erie to its source at Dundalk, ON. We have designed, published, and disseminated our publication on the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabe, and the Haudenosaunee peoples.

It is equally important to pause and reflect on the impact that colonial infrastructures, whether built on the land or written in legislation, continue to have on Indigenous lives and activism—from the interrupted efforts of the Wet’suwet’en in the west, to the threatened livelihood of the Mi’kmaq in the east, and the on-going, Six Nations-led Land Back protests near to us. It is imperative that these efforts are not overshadowed, dismissed, or forgotten. Indigenous land repatriation and environmental consciousness are critical in addressing the pervasiveness of our profession, as designers of the built environment and as publishers of scholastic thought.

We stand in support of the like-minded student groups who dedicate themselves to fighting for racial equity and environmental justice in what is currently called Canada—namely the Indigenous Design and Planning Student Association at the University of Manitoba and Treaty Lands; Global Stories at the University of Waterloo. Please consider supporting their initiatives.

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galt. team: Editor in Chief Zaven Titizian Editors James Clarke-Hicks Kate Brownlie Chi Chi Ogbu Madeline Kim Anna Supryka Kelsey Rose Dawson Anya Chuprys Vicky Cao Cathy Li Jacob Dimla Contributing Editors Iryna Humenyuk Jade Manbodh Hyunjoo Park Graphics Elizabeth Lenny Jamie Cheung Annika Babra

A Letter From the Editor: Changing States and Stating Change We are living in the midst of multiple crises— overlapping, entangled, and systemic. For those of us concerned with the design of the built environment, and the well-being of those within it, there has been a call to acknowledge the inescapable politics of our profession. Design is never neutral.[1] Buried beneath our cities are histories of colonial violence that continue to oppress; canonized in our curricula is literature that discredits the lived experiences of those marginalized by design; embedded within our profession is a global industry that ignores the severity of climate change; and engendered by urban life is a normalcy that gives a nation’s economy precedence over its people. Although it is critical to recognize these ways in which our infrastructures are complicit in social and environmental inequity, it should be made clear that they can also be appropriated—for “a pipe can carry fresh water as well as toxic sludge.”[2] The galt. publication team has been no exception to the upheaval experienced worldwide this past year. When our efforts began in the Fall of 2019, we were focused on the climate. “Our house is on fire,” the famous words of Greta Thunberg in Davos earlier that year, still resonated in our minds. At first, the idea of a burning house stood solely for the urgency of climate change, but it soon extended to the many other socio-political systems that are on the verge of collapse—crises which are not independent of one another. We saw our publication as a way to take part in the activism that was around us and to amplify the voices of our peers. Of course, only a few months into the new year, we would need to take a moment to seriously question the efficacy of physical, printed matter as a tool for change.

On 13 March 2020, the University of Waterloo issued a statement that called for the suspension and cancellation of all in-person courses for the remainder of the term, one week later the majority of publicly accessible buildings on campus had closed.

[3] Digital meetings soon took the place of our round table discussions and we were forced to reconsider our position as an outlet for our community. We ran a short series called Watercooler Talk over the month of April which curated student responses to weekly prompts concerning the COVID-19 pandemic. Ex-

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isting exclusively on-line, this project was meant to highlight the importance of the written word in helping us deal with massive change, while also providing a communal space for our friends and peers to connect over shared experience.

Shortly thereafter, things would shift once more with a surge of vocal allyship for the lives of Black, Indigenous, and people of colour across the world.

This time, conversation and good intentions were not enough. We held ourselves accountable to three actionable commitments: an immediate revision of our publication’s constitution, the weekly sharing of a curated list of readings and media, and the inception of a supplemental zine that would be included with our third issue, entitled here & now. We stood alongside our friends and peers in demanding institutional revision.

The past year has been profoundly unsettling for many (I am compelled to count myself among them) and it undoubtedly will continue to be. Right now has become a time for action, but it has also become a time for attention; to actively listen to those who have historically been unheard, or made unable to speak—and who have been fighting these crises long before they were in our headlines.

As we move into the final stages of this publication, it is impossible not to look back on how much the project has changed. In its content is still a call for environmental action, but at its core is the unavoidable context in which it was made. Ultimately, we ask: what is the architects role in activism? The conversations we have conducted, the thinking we have done, and the work we present here attempt to address this question.

I hope the words that follow this letter inspire you as much as they did me. Thank you to everyone who chose to be involved.

—ZT [1] Jay Pitter, A Call to Courage—An Open Letter to Canadian Urbanists (Toronto: June 2020), https://canurb.org/wp-content/uploads/OpenLetter-ACallToCourage-Final-June2020.pdf [2] Winona LaDuke and Deborah Cowen, “Beyond Wiindigo Infrastructure,” South Atlantic Quarterly 119, no. 2 (April 2020): 243–268.

[3] “COVID-19 Information,” University of Waterloo, accessed August 31, 2020, https://uwaterloo.ca/coronavirus/news. org/10.1215/00382876-8177747.

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Chapter 01 TRANSLATING LANDSCAPES

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Chapter 02 REIMAGINING SYSTEMS

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Chapter 03 MATERIAL CULTURES

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Chapter 04 DESIGNING ACTIVISM iii

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TRANSLATING LANDSCAPES

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Interview: Ange Loft

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Interview: Urbonas Studio

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Climatic Attunement: Architecture that Listens

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Colour Extracted: A Story of Industrial Promise and Ruin

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Clay Shapes the Hand: Geologic Time and Human Origin are Recorded in Material

Ange is an interdisciplinary performing artist and initiator from Kahnawake Kanien’kehá:ka Territory, working in Toronto. She is an ardent collaborator, consultant, facilitator, and mentor working in storyweaving, arts based research, wearable sculpture, and Haudenosaunee history. Ange is also a vocalist with the Juno and Polaris nominated band YAMANTAKA//SONIC TITAN. Ange works within the community art and education sectors as a speaker, co-creator, and advisory member. Ange is Associate Artistic Director of Jumblies Theatre, where she directs the Talking Treaties initiative and has co-facilitated Art Fare Essentials since 2013.

Urbonas Studio is an interdisciplinary research practice that facilitates exchange amongst diverse nodes of knowledge production and artistic practice in pursuit of projects that transform civic spaces and collective imaginaries.

In collaboration with experts from different cultural and professional fields, Urbonas Studio develops practice-based research models merging a variety of materials and techniques from new media, urbanism, social science, pedagogy, and ecology. Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas have exhibited internationally including the Venice, San Paulo, Berlin, Moscow, Lyon, Gwangju Biennales, and Manifesta and Documenta exhibitions among numerous other international shows, including a solo shows at the Venice Biennale and MACBA in Barcelona. Gediminas is a professor at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Nomeda is MIT research affiliate and PhD researcher at the Norwegian University for Science and Technology (NTNU).

Joshua Wallace

Jade Manbodh

Kelsey Rose Dawson

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Encountering the Waterlands Logan Steele

in conversation with:

ANGE LOFT galt.: The Talking Treaties project, which you started in 2015, has grown to encompass an amazing variety of mediums. It began by interviewing Indigenous artists and community leaders about the land treaties that make up Toronto but has since grown to encompass thousands of participants in installations, performances, workshops, and a number of short films. As an interdisciplinary artist and performer yourself, how did you transform your initial research into larger participatory engagements?

Ange Loft: First of all, we began by training a team of photographers and movement-based artists who were familiar with our process of gathering oral histories. We came up with a set of questions to ask and taught them how to conduct our interviews.

We did two sections of interviews in that initial period—one was mostly with historians and the second was with artists. After the interviews, interesting moments in the recordings were identified and condensed into audio portions, excerpts, or audio gallery bits. All of these were then brought to a larger group to engage with.Â

I’d say my own desire was to work with people who could look at the concepts within Talking Treaties in a more artful way. I’m a theater creator, and my favourite mode of creating involves throwing people together in collaborative theatrical space and then giving them a ton of heavy, historically-accurate content, a bunch of images, and 30 minutes or so to create performance art. I like creating spaces that have the potential for extremely collaborative opportunities, where people are forced to work artistically together, using aspects of the content that we collected or generated.

I guess you could say this way of working allowed me to “explodeâ€? the interviews really fast: you talk to some people, you create the “basketâ€? for what the experience will be at the end, you throw everyone into that basket, and then theybuild something together. I find the theatrical interest is not really in the content, it’s in smashing the people together and providing the space or time restraints to make sure that their outcome looks great. Doing this type of work with hundreds of people over the years has allowed me to understand these interviews through many different peoples’ lenses and I’ve seen a lot of similar outcomes. đ&#x;Œ• I’m a large-scale image worker. I work in puppetry, I work outdoors, and I like big things moving. It’s almost like thinking backwards—I knew from the start that I would have a large beaver mascot as part of this piece. I was also thinking about this icon, the character Britannia, because it’s part of Toronto’s iconography. It’s on their coat of arms. In the initial thoughts about the Talking Treaties project, those were the two images that came first: the beaver and Britannia. These characters were part of the Talking Treaties Spectacle shows that were precursors to the film [in reference to By These Presents: “Purchasingâ€? Toronto], and many of the props in the film had actually been created four years in advance with people at Jumblies Theatre’s community art drop-ins. Many of the actors that were in that film were also part of the Talking Treaties Spectacle. So, there was continuity with performers, production team, cast, and props. I love bringing old content into new forms.

Can you speak to the manifestation of historical narratives such as the Toronto Purchase in the context of a performance piece? How do you reframe these elements in a way that will resonate with people?

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The scope of Talking Treaties encompasses The Dish With One Spoon, the Treaty of Niagara, and Treaty 13. We created a large-scale map of Treaty 13 which shows those three rivers, and we use them as a mnemonic device, to retell the story of the so-called “purchase�. A big part of the work was this cyclical game of returning to place—bringing my actors and creation team to significant locations to do explorations and filming. We shot By These Presents on the banks of Etobicoke Creek, which were actually outlined in Treaty 13 as a place that was reserved for the Mississaugas of the Credit—there’s still a water claim for those shores today.

I think the role of architecture and the role of place-based makers are really important because we actually don’t have a lot of images of Indigenous governance available within Toronto. There aren’t many places that remind us of Indigenous agency and the symbols that are significant for returning to talk. That’s been the game with Talking Treaties the whole time: how do I take content that’s super dense and make it memorable? I work with voice, sound, experimental movement, and rhythm. I think it’s important to remember things with rhythm.

When Iroquois people recited the Great Law [of Peace], an orator would rhythmically deliver it. It’s almost a song. This approach to remembering historical text is what I’ve been doing with my actors. Those kinds of memorable, rhythmic statements paired with super memorable images or new mnemonic devices, that’s the game I’m playing with Talking Treaties. đ&#x;Œ• Start in a circle. For Iroquois and Anishinaabe people, our councils are held in a circle. When we have any kind of trouble— whether internal or external issues, a Grand Council on federal, municipal, or provincial levels, or when we’re talking with our own nations—a lot of that discussion is done within the shape of a circle. The idea is you can’t be shifty or do side dealings in a circle because everyone can see you.Â

You use the phrase “return to talk� when referring to continuing conversation during decision-making. It sets up this notion of consultation not as a single, tokenistic meeting, but as an act involving both parties in ongoing, longterm dialogue. I am interested in how you envision returning to talk in when building on land with unacknowledged histories. How might we translate the different cultural “languages� we speak to arrive at something which is mutually beneficial?

Transparency is important in decision making, but so is the ability to get away from a larger council structure—to meet in your own smaller circles or family units—and then come back with a decision. That’s one major thing during consultation: time away from conversation. Decisions take time and there isn’t a lot of time in Western consultation modes. Very often what is done, especially in the city, is to have a team of people in charge of making choices for Indigenous activity—which is great—but the meetings are very short and you can only get so much done with short meetings.

From the perspective of Iroquois people, returning to talk means multiple things. First, if there was a gathering of the Grand Council [of Chiefs], they would be able to go over all the wampum belts, using them as mnemonic devices to remember all the relationships and agreements that have been made. This is returning to talk. You would want that to happen at each meeting, to be reminded of all the commitments that hold your nation together. You would want that to be clear so that everyone is on the same page for external negotiations. It should be read on a regular basis and everyone would return to talk around it, because some of those things end up changing over time There’s this other idea of “adding to the rafters�. It suggests that our laws can change and adapt, and that they’re expected to. The building can grow—the structure of the longhouse can get bigger. The ideas that are symbolically captured within the structure of the longhouse translating landscapes

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define our whole governance system. The ability to change is built into it. When we meet and work with new people, it’s anticipated that we will continue talking with them to understand their desires, and incorporate them in whatever we’re doing.

I think that idea is actually very prominent in Indigenous negotiation practices and particularly in something like the Treaty of Niagara, which is a very weird moment in history. It was when the British guaranteed—to the 24 Indigenous nations that gathered in the area—that there were places that they would continually meet to make mutual decisions. They actually marked these locations out on the wampum belt in 1764; they were places intended to be significant for continuing talk—of returning to talk—so that we could remind ourselves of our commitments.

These ideas disappeared soon after 1812, when Native people were no longer needed for military purposes and the attitudes changed drastically around Canadian Confederation—partially because this way of decision making takes too much time. When there is no more time in the modern world to do that kind of remembering, it is so clear what happens: we forget.

That’s what happened between the mid-1850s and the 1950s—maybe 1980s—there was just so much forgetting because the time wasn’t made to remember.

Canada even instituted a “treaty awareness� month and nobody has any clue what month it is or what to do during it. Within a lot of our own personal Indigenous calendars there is a time to remember: it’s built into our year’s activity. There are times where you’re supposed to teach kids and to pass things on. There’s also a system of knowledge keepers—people with huge memories, who are able to remember things. From an Iroquois perspective, a knowledge keeper was someone raised to hold onto all of these agreements in their memory, with the understanding that they would be called upon to share this knowledge at some point. We don’t really have those people in our current society to remind ourselves of disagreements and commitments. So, I’m trying to make them in Toronto by decentralizing who gets to know our public history and who gets to frame how it’s remembered. Those actors that I hired can recite every single rhythmic piece we devised together because we’ve done them so many times. One of the agreements I talk about, The Dish With One Spoon, is super easy to remember: “Keep it clean, make sure there’s enough to go around, and make sure that there’s something for the future.� It’s really basic but it’s how we learned to share between our nations. It’s a long story about whether settler folks were invited into that—they might have been—but they didn’t accept it and they didn’t pick up the responsibility of its core ideas. In any case, I can use the symbols on the wampum belt—its historical references—and the art-based research we’ve conducted to go on and on. I’ve talked about it in so many ways and made so much art about it with so many people.

I have been working with the Toronto Biennial for the past few years and shared the ideas in The Dish with them. I got a kick out of how they’ve managed to absorb some of these ideas as an institution into their daily lives. One of their staff mentioned to me that they were thinking about putting a sign in their shared kitchen which would say, “Keep it clean, make sure there’s enough to go around, and make sure that there’s something for the future.â€? You could apply those basic rules to so many aspects in your life because they’re actually just self-regulation rules. They are common understandings for how to care for the land that the general population doesn’t know—and that I didn’t really know—until I got invested in returning to talk; in thinking about and re-learning The Dish With One Spoon. đ&#x;Œ• 5

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It’s important we ask: what is the urgent change? To me, it’s for everyone to understand The Dish With One Spoon. There were lot of artists in our first set of interviews who said, “If you want to start any discussion with me or my people, we have to start with The Dish With One Spoon,� because it’s so foundational for this region—from the Great Lakes, all the way to Montreal, and down into New York.

We have some very urgent issues that seem to demand fast-paced responses.

Do you have any insight on how we can balance an urgent need for change with the inherently slow, long-term discussions needed to make good decisions?

It’s been brought up many times by Indigenous people internationally as a way to counter quick thinking and bad decisions about land use. There are all kinds of really great ways to consider The Dish With One Spoon’s history and apply it to different governance decisions in Canada. For example, we could look at an approach to material management: keep it clean, make sure there’s enough to go around, and make sure that there’s something for the future— just be aware of where it goes and how much gets released.

Every single aspect of life can be viewed in this way. If we start unraveling the interconnectedness of all aspects of governance, you see that education affects landscape; landscape affects our approach to permaculture; permaculture affects the fishes; the fishes affect the health of the people; the health of the people affect the healthcare system; and so on. It’s always on the table, all of it.

So, bringing it back to the most basic Iroquois understanding, which is Thanksgiving—giving thanks—literally naming all of the objects in your world from bugs, to thunderers, to your family, and your relationships. You actually have to recall, and bring to mind, and remember.

I often feel like in Canada nobody has time for that. And when you start, suddenly you’re talking about animals and fishes and health, and that makes it too “spiritualâ€?. Those conversations shut off the general population because it makes them go, “Ugh, animals again.â€? There’s just a huge blockage in honoring the rest of the world as entities; there’s a huge blockage in our general, public perception about making choices for things other than humans; and there’s a huge blockage in acknowledging the Indigenous genius of land and resource regulations.  So, with urgency, yes: it’s important to go fast, and it’s important to deal with our current climate issues quickly. But also to take time to remember some of those really significant and super basic tenets for this area that should already be guiding all of our decisions. There are some very important local understandings that need to be on the table if we’re going to talk about long-term changes here. And who remembers those? Only the people who learn about them. đ&#x;Œ‘

w: angeloft.ca w: jumbliestheatre.org w: yamantakasonictitan.com translating landscapes

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in conversation with:

URBONAS STUDIO galt.: Your work reinterprets a static understanding of territory by examining the “swamp� as a physical, metaphorical, and political space.

Can you expand on what the swamp means to your practise and how we can learn from it?

Gediminas Urbonas: The Italian fascists had a saying, “Mussolini drenare la palude,� which, in English, translates to, “Mussolini, drain the swamp.� The roots of this rhetoric come from the 19th century, during the sanitization of the world—when landscape and terrain were being made into “useful� matter. We became fascinated with this idea of the swamp as an irritant, something that must be removed or transformed by humans—the concept became the basis of much of our work.

Our reading of the swamp is inspired partly by the sociologist Andrew Pickering—who studies the history of cybernetics, primarily Stafford Beer’s work. Pickering sees the pond as a landscape of diverse actors in constant flux and interaction. He ties the idea of complex ecological relationships in a pond to that of an adaptive brain that operates beyond the human cognitive capacity. According to Pickering’s reading of Beer, humans dealing with complex industrial processes could “plug into the pond,� meaning they could allow environmental systems to manage systems that are far too complex for humans to manage themselves. It’s quite interesting to imagine that society is not limited to humans.

When we use the swamp as an analogy, we want to bring the swamp from something that is neglected to something that is recognized—which was our goal with the Swamp Pavilion, the Swamp School, and now the Swamp Observatory—and insist on this evocative notion of the swamp as an irritant through which we can look into the complexities of the world. In the latest development of our project, the Swamp Observatory, we’re trying to argue for the swamp as an instrument that can shift the focus from the prevailing human perspective, to one of other species.

Swamps aren’t firmly water or earth, they’re something in between. They can’t be used for roads, agriculture, architecture, or waterways, which is precisely what bothers the modern mind. They are transitory, unclear, and inarticulate; that is what the swamp is to us. đ&#x;Œ• Nomeda Urbonas: In the beginning, the “swampâ€? was a discovery that, in a way, united us. It was the basis for our pavilion design at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale—a project partially occupied with the opposite of exceptionalism. We asked ourselves, in terms of national representation, what could be something that does not separate us from the others, but unites us? We found the swamp to be a very useful instrument because it’s a concept that denies borders. Even though biologically, you can somehow describe a swamp’s containment, they are generally leaking and very difficult to contain.

A swamp is something that transcends borders and cultures, it can be found everywhere. So, in that sense, it’s a good metaphor to talk about inclusivity and suggest that this is not the Lithuanian pavilion per se, but the Swamp Pavilion.

Can you tell us more about how the concept of the “swamp� created the basis for the Lithuanian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2018?

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G: When we were asked to create a national pavilion in Venice, we started by looking at the history of national representation. Our starting point was at the end of the 19th century, when the idea of the nation-state was very important for representing geopolitical power. The Biennale hosts a pavilion for all the major colonial powers: Canada, Russia, Britain, France, Germany, United States, Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, etc. These pavilions were built at the time of these empires and of imperialist politics. So for us, the idea of the Swamp Pavilion also stood for decolonization. We’re not trying to inscribe a Lithuanian pavilion into that geopolitical constellation. Instead, we hope to encourage other states to consider thinking about landscapes and animals instead of purely the traditional, political, or colonial representations of their country. đ&#x;Œ• G: Bertolt Brecht once said that the radio is a vast network of pipes that can transmit and receive messages. This was at the beginning of the 20th century, when the idea of the radio haunted the artistic and architectural mind. For instance, Russian Constructivists had this idea of the “propaganda kioskâ€?, which was always equipped with an antenna and radio transmitter. In fact, Mark Wigley devoted much of his research and significant exhibitions [see The Human Insect: Antenna Architectures 1887-2017], to the use of antennas in architecture. The early 20th century was full of this newfound excitement and awe of mass communication. What we personally found interesting was the aspect of two-way communication—the idea that when we’re transmitting these messages, we’re also listening.Â

One of the installations that emerged from these explorations was Futurity Island. You talk about pipes as tools that facilitate the reclamation of swamps around the world and tools for technological communication. You state that the pipe is a prime metaphor for human-centred ecology. The intent of this installation is to bring human and non-human actors in a more symmetrical, collaborative relationship.

Could you elaborate on your journey of translating the pipe (both as a symbol and building material) into a soundscape that destabilizes architectural space?

We can listen to what we call “distorted voices� of the planet.

Then we began looking at other references—for example, Yona Friedman and his own pipe experiments. In the 1950s, he meditated on the idea of the most economical, structural element. Instead of producing new typologies or elements, architects could grab on to the existing infrastructure. He has several designs where he utilizes pipes.Â

This also got us thinking of the Anthropocene, where the pipe has become a symbol for extraction. The question was, could we reclaim this infrastructure? Could we revert the pipe from its original use of extraction and make it listen and respond to the environment? Speaking of Futurity Island, this is where we got interested in the idea of the “ideal amphibian�. By listening to the environment, we can learn how to become an amphibian and navigate this hybrid terrain between land and water, instead of draining it. This is what we’re trying to embrace as a proposition.

Our intervention in the Mississauga industrial zone started by looking at the bioremediation techniques used to prevent toxins or pollutants from leaching into the groundwater. We were curious about how successful those techniques could be, so we worked with a local environmental agency that has been looking at the processes statistically. We wondered how we could translate that data into something that can be experienced sensorily—to transform the pipe from an extractive tool into an instrument for listening. This is one way we tried to interpret the idea of the pipe: to bring humans closer to this relationship with other species and with the environment. đ&#x;Œ• translating landscapes

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The Swamp Pavilion directly engages with the liminal nature of the unique Venetian landscape through the concept of the swamp. Following projects, such as Swamp Radio, and Futurity Island have enjoyed fruitful second lives away from the direct context of the original site. How have these projects engaged with the idea of the swamp while operating in new and specific landscapes?

G: Â It may have been that our projects were not necessarily bound to a specific site, but to a particular ecosystem. Venice is a swamp.

For centuries the city has tuned itself—its operation, expansion, and economy—to the breathing of the lagoon. Gradually, with the modernity that came from 19th century industrialism, ideas of a city attuned to natural water cycles were neglected. Now the city is drowning, and it has been since the very beginning, but it’s important we return to developing the city according to its natural fluctuations.

To have Swamp School in Venice was also important to us politically. Instead of “draining the swamp,� we’re trying to adapt to it. There were many architecture students from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning involved with the pavilion and, as a consequence, we were inspired to ask these future designers: how could we imagine an architecture that embraced the idea of decolonization? The Swamp School was really about leaking boundaries—it was not contained as most of the other national pavilions were, but rather was trying to have a presence outside its “territory�. It’s interesting to think that something we imagined in Venice can find its way to Canada, in the case of Futurity Island.

N: Futurity Island was a big step forward for us, derailing from the main road but in a very good way. For example, when we imagined building the “island� from pipes in the water we would have never thought of using blue pipes. We tried to convince the curator to look into other colours, but that was not possible so we had to live with it. Now it’s kind of great!

In Mississauga specifically there is a factory which produces those parts that kindly offered to sponsor the project. The pipes are of this high-density plastic which is used for drinking-water infrastructure. They are non-toxic and recyclable; the whole structure can go back to the factory and be remade into the pipes again. After constructing Futurity Island, we got this idea to produce a blue vinyl record to capture the project’s soundscape. So, in some ways, Futurity Island has an afterlife in this record—we don’t need to bring the pipes everywhere. We can produce a vinyl out of them.

G: We are also developing Swamp Observatory on Gotland Island in Sweden. It’s a very interesting island off the Swedish coast in the Baltic Sea that has a very thin layer of soil. It’s a rock that’s formed of organic matter, fossils, and is a very big attraction for the cement industry.

The cement is needed for the building and agricultural industry, but significant pollution is created while extracting the stone. We’re working with planners as they build a new extension to Visby, which is the capital of the island. The extension will support approximately 20,000 inhabitants, and they invited us to make a proposition that could help destabilize the way urban planners think. Again, our proposal dealt with the swamp because we believed it would be a direct contradiction to both architecture and planning. Through Swamp Observatory, planners could acquire a different perspective and suggest alternative logic to traditional urbanism. So you can see, the work we started in Venice is finding meaningful connections to other locations in the world, encouraging people—whether they’re planners, politicians, or citizens—to change their perspective. đ&#x;Œ‘ w: nugu.lt/us ig: @urbonasstudio 9

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CLIMATIC ATTUNEMENT Architecture that Listens Joshua Wallace Prior to his career in architecture, Josh pursued musical practices as a composer, performer, and youth instructor, playing an array of musical instruments.

Much of his design work has focused on various parallels between music and architecture, exploring themes on time, notation, and spatial rhythms. His recent work focuses on acoustics and architecture’s ability to facilitate novel modes of listening to and interacting with environmental phenomenon and the cultural implications that these modes can foster.

fig. 1 (above): Recording a crevasse of the Athabasca Glacier in Alberta, Canada. 2019.

Photograph by Stephanie Murray.

Our relationship with climate change is often abstracted by popular media, buzz words, and large datasets that are incompatible with a human scale of understanding. This project challenges that understanding by exploring how a changing climate can be woven into human consciousness through sound, felt viscerally, and understood in new ways.

The focus is on the unique and disappearing sounds of melting glaciers.

Within the collective imagination of global warming, receding glaciers are increasingly seen as one of the many protagonists under threat.[1] Although climate change is in fact happening everywhere, it is also happening nowhere; the average person only ever experiences climate change locally and is never able to see it in its entirety. The totality of climate change remains out of view.[2] What glaciers offer in this challenge of perception is a focal point of rapid change—a register of global temperature increase and an access point to the larger phenomena of global warming. The Athabasca Glacier in Alberta, Canada, is one example among many undergoing such rapid change.

This project began by travelling to the soundscape of the Athabasca Glacier in August 2018.

I found myself engaging the landscape in an altogether different way when navigating its rough terrain using my ears as a primary guide. The glacier’s voice can be gentle or striking. The constant drip of the terrain is punctuated by the loudness of waterfalls carving out increasingly deep crevasses. The falling water echoes in these crevasses (fig 1). These

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sounds, in tandem with the numerous memorial markers indicating where the glacier’s edges once stood, make global warming strikingly more tangible, concrete and real.

A More-Than-Human Music The development of an attunement towards climatic realities can be facilitated by augmenting interactions between humans and environmental phenomena. This project facilitates this augmentation through the design and construction of environmentally activated instruments or “listening devices”. Participants interact with the climate through these devices, creating new methods of music-making in tandem with geophonic processes.

Here, the non-human is as much an active participant as the human.

Players engaging these new devices and landscapes must listen and adapt, letting go of accepted musical norms to incorporate the climate’s sonic language into their musical sensibilities. This “letting go” may aid the necessary philosophical shift towards a new climate paradigm. I created polar spectrograms to probe the question of what a human might be letting go of when engaging this kind of sound-making. The spectrograms allowed me to visually catalogue and compare the structures of human-produced music and environmentally produced sound.

As the polar spectrograms demonstrate, human-produced music is often tonal and rhythmic.

Notes are organized within consistent boundaries

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fig. 2: Perspectival section of the Glacier Accordion inserted into the shifting ground plane of the Athabasca Glacier.

v =2.53m/d

v = 2.14m/d v = 2.28m/d

v = 2.35m/d

Pulley System with Steel Cables @ 2.5mm

+1800

-350

-350

+1800

3200

+900 -675

Elastic Sound-Reflective Textile Membrane

Turn Crank

Round Alumninum Pipe @120mm 6800

l Hz

Suspended Rope Bridge

Ice Screw

-675 +900 v = 2.57m/d

v = 2.54m/d v = 1.79m/d

v= 2.61m/d v = 2.4m/d

v = 2.11m/d v=1.75m/d

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de ta il last six ch or ds

12dB 09dB

ambient sound returns

break in sound

06dB

02dB

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and divisions, with discrete interval relationships.

However, environmentally produced sounds are often atonal and arrhythmic. They consist of an enormous range and granularity of frequencies and frequency relationships. These environmentally produced sounds are not governed by abstract time conventions; their patterns occur more frequently as dense clusters or masses of notes, rather than regularly spaced beats.

Listening into Non-Separateness The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.

—Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy, 1956.

Responsive architectures (listening devices) have the potential to produce novel auditory experiences and alternative modes of listening. One such device is the Glacier Accordion (fig 2), a light-frame scaffolding inserted into a glacier’s surface. A flutelike membrane that makes sound when in the wind is stretched between its structural members. As the glacier’s ground plane shifts, so too does the Accordion’s structure, distorting the window openings and overall form of its membrane. Humans can also alter the membrane’s form by changing the structure’s dimensions and operating turn cranks from within the accordion. In this way, the Glacier Accordion is played by both humans and the glacier.

To borrow an explanation from Timothy Morton, listening devices have the same goal as meditation. They allow users to “get used to what is already the case.”[3] It is through this visceral lens that the effects of human-caused global warming are embodied and lifted out of the conceptual world of data. With this newfound tangibility, an ability to respond may also find nourishment.[4] The mistreatment of landscapes, whether near or far, intentionally or unintentionally, is more likely to occur when “nature” is assumed to be somehow separate from “humans”. It is this myth of separation that impedes an effective response to the climate crisis. The use of listening devices aims to uncloak this myth and bring about an acknowledgement for what these words “nature” and “human” really are: necessary communication terms with practical utility, that don’t actually bear much upon

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reality. When the words “human” and “nature” are understood in terms of linguistic utility alone, the sense of separateness they impose begins to fade.

What might emerge in place of this felt separateness? My central argument is this: when engaging a more-than-human music, non-human patterns may affect and refine our perceptions and thinking. The sense of one’s self that is isolated from its environment begins to fade, and what emerges is an awareness of the interconnectedness that was there all along. Here, sound is used as a medium to inform and nurture ecological relationships.

The rapid depletion of glaciers around the world continues, and this depletion is only one example of the myriad effects of global warming. The process of climate change is indeed everywhere, and so any landscape, whether wild or urban, protagonist or otherwise, can be viewed as an access point for listening to broader ecological phenomena. Such points of engagement could prove impactful in elevating awareness and nurturing change.

[1] Mark Carey, “The History of Ice: How Glaciers Became an Endangered Species,” Environmental History 12, no. 3 (July 2007): 497-527.

[2] Timothy Morton, “Nonlocality,” in Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 38-54.

[3] Timothy Morton, “Being Ecological,” filmed March 2018 at Radboud University, Nijmegen, NLD, video, 1:33:57, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=Yv4W4M8Z8VQ. [4] Timothy Morton, “Introduction: Not Another Information Dump,” in Being Ecological (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 3-35.

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fig. 3 (opposite): A spectogram is a visual translation of sound showing time, pitch, and volume. The original spectogram for this image has been sent through a polar coordinates filter, reforming the image into a circle.

The spectrogram now ends where it began.

Lower frequencies are towards the center, while higher frequencies are towards its outer edges. fig. 4 (above): Initial sketch of the Glacier Accordion. The glacier has deformed its structure over time. fig 5 (next page): Polar Spectrograms: A Catalog of Humanproduced Music & Environmentally Produced Sound.

Guitar Elements Composed by Josh Wallace

Ione Composed by Deep Listening Band in the Dan Harpole Cistern

Human Voice Humming Sung by Josh Wallace over Suiren by Deep Listening Band

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You Are Loved Composed by Four Tet

Canyon Wren Bird Call Field Recording by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Walking on Ice Field Recording by Anders Ă–stberg

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Glacier Calvings and Fractures Field Recording by H. Lentfer, Margerie Glacier, Alaska

Wind Over the Surface of the Ross Ice Shelf Seismic Sensor Field Recording by Julien Chaput, Antarctica

Boat through Ice Field Recording by Cedric Peyronnet

Metal Bowls in the Rain Field Recording by Josh Wallace

Bearded Seal Field Recording by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology

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Wind Howling Andree81’s YouTube channel

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COLOUR EXTRACTED A Story of Industrial Promise and Ruin Jade Manbodh is a graduate student at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. Her research focuses on the colour of post-industrial material and its relationship to the social, political, and ecological histories of the industrial ruin.

Jade is currently co-director of BRIDGE Centre for Architecture and Design and a curator of the community engagement Land Marks project which considers the relationship between the land we live on, the marks we make, and the responses we receive.

fig. 1 (above): Entry to the ruin of an old paper mill in Southwestern Ontario.

The outskirts of urban Ontario are littered with landscapes of industrial ruin. Undervalued, overlooked, and growing dull, these neglected spaces are physical scars of exploitative processes; they are typically colonized, disturbed, occupied, extracted, contaminated, and then abandoned, leaving an altered landscape of post-industrial matter in their wake. I set out to an old paper mill that was first built in the 1850’s—folly to the development of early Canadian industrialization—to investigate these landscapes.

Lingering in the discard is a spectrum of colour that shines through the mass of material chaos: yellow limestone blocks crumbling into rubble, red terra cotta tile peeking through faded graffiti, corroded copper wire shimmering in a patina of blue-green—that which is analogous to the plentiful needles of spruce.

The site’s material colour palette was evidence of transformations from industrial promise to ruination. This transformation tells stories of progress that gave shape to the physical composition of the site for more than 150 years.

In the early nineteenth century, Canada’s paper industry leveraged development with patriotic obligation, social inclusion, and financial prosperity.[1] Due to the proximity of resource and labour, paper mills were placed within colonial settlements on a source of moving water. They became the nuclei of colonial settler communities; they acted as closed

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loop ecologies of labour and resource that defined the identity of small townships.[2] As the population of the colonies grew exponentially, European influence brought with it the traditions of literacy and politics. Ontario, formerly known as the province of Upper Canada, was amid a revolution. It was moving away from Crown chauvinism and toward state independence. There was an increase in the demand of paper for educational, political, and leisure use with proprietors soon turning to the resources newly available for modern methods of production: forests of black and white spruce.

It was ten in the morning as I drove to the ruin.

I was not searching for anything in particular, but I wanted to know what the site looked like in the dead of winter. Upon arrival, I followed the worn trail down toward the river where before me laid two paths: the first was a set of human footsteps, and the second was a rabbit trail. I followed the rabbit, up from the river, through the plier cut fence, across a set of dead bushes to a woody, rough trunk. Here stood a tree with branches swaying in the wind under a partly cloudy sky. I found myself at the base of a lively spruce piercing through the blanket of February snow (fig. 2).

Iconic to Ontario, the blue-green conifer is a staple of Canada’s boreal forest. It prevails as one of the most common species of conifer due to an ability to grow in a wide variety of conditions. In

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natural, dry forests, heat from wildfires unravel small egg-shaped cones and enable their propagation through a plenitude of suddenly released seeds.

[3] However, sitting close to the river and rooted in wet soil, this spruce propagates through a process called layering.[4] Its plant tissue, xylem, is encompassed in a resin channel that penetrates through the rough outer bark. With it begins a secondary system of growth: the roots venture away from its parent trunk and are nourished in the damp, covered soil. Hidden beneath this surface is a network of sprawling assemblages between the unseen functions of growth and the physical matter those functions create.[5] What struck my attention was not the volumetric form of the tree, but rather the incredible wealth of green: waxy sage needles, deep emerald bark, weeping sickly resin, and lime torn shoots. Green pigments build the foundation of spruce material; the spectrum I saw was evidence of an encounter between the light, the viewer and the spruce’s chemical makeup.[6] As light met the spruce, all but a set of wave-

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lengths within the visual spectrum of green was absorbed, scattering the remaining wavelengths. This is what tinted the tree blue.

Seeing green, as it appears physically, is dependent on the presence of organic molecules known as chlorophyll. They are imperative to photosynthesis—creating single and double bonds between carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen—and heavily populated within the cells of needles.[7] From absorbing radiation, these chlorophyll molecules become the source of energy that allows the tree to both exist and function. Rather than perceiving the spruce as a union of its parts, I can understand it through conditional and operative entanglements; familiarity to the tree is a result of social and spatial composition interacting with light.

Extraction, of both resource and colour, is a process that speaks to the greater narrative of the industrial era. The process confronts the paradoxical discrepancy between the impure structure that forms each material and the inherent bias toward purity that the commod-

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fig. 2: Spruce tree in February, 2019.

Placed in vials, the pigments no longer reminded me of ruination. They were an opportunity to see each material without learned ontological bias.

The terracotta bricks didn’t need to be a wall. The copper wires didn’t need to conduct electricity. The black and white spruce didn’t need to be paper. It was as if each pigment created a fresh palette, and I had a collection of materials that were just beautiful moments of colour displaced, distilled, and waiting to be re-ordered (fig. 3). fig. 3: Vials of pigment foraged from material in the ruin: rose hip, fired brick, terra cotta tile, river sediment, limestone block, brick veneer, concrete, spruce needles, spruce melody wet, copper. fig. 4 (opposite): Macro of spruce pigment during the process of drying out and grinding down into fine particles.

ification of material depends on. Extraction, of both resource and colour, is an act of rearranging space. One element is removed from its origin, separated from its impurities, and refined to an elemental state of desired good.

Extraction, of both resource and colour, is a method of perceiving time. It highlights the changes made to the land. What was removed?

Where did it go? What was it replaced with?

The process of extraction was one of patience and intentionality that demanded an allowance for trial and error. After carefully separating needles from the branch, they were placed in a water bath for twenty-one hours in preparation to make pigments of material. They probably didn’t need that long, but I was curious to note changes before heating the needles to a boil. Much like a pot of broth left to simmer all day, the batch was left to steep for four hours with thorough and frequent stirs. When done, I mixed the solution with a neutral fixative to stabilize the chroma of pigment. The last step was time; I needed to wait for the water to evaporate and leave me with a dry rock of colour.

Once broken down into pigment, foraged materials are no longer confined to the epistemological form I had once perceived. Every recipe of colour is like a specification document for a building. Chroma becomes a detail that can be input into a variety of combinations that result in infinite possible environments. From the chlorophyll molecules in living green needles to the patina oxidation on old copper rods, hints of chroma in the industrial ruin are both indicative of the culture they emerge from as well as physical elements of future design.

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I see the ruin as a spectrum of pigments—the assemblage of colour transverses optic boundaries and begins on a molecular level that is intrinsically tied to a material’s makeup. Extracting these hues abolishes some of the entrenched stigmas of the industrial ruin when reducing a material to pigment; it blurs the divisions between what’s wild versus what’s human, what’s healthy versus what’s toxic, and what’s valuable versus what’s waste. The green of toxic sludge resembles that of medicinal plants. Through material ambiguity, pigmentation becomes an alternative method of site analysis that challenges the familiarity of physical and temporal materiality and the perception of space.

[1] J. A. Blyth, “The Development of the Paper Industry in Old Ontario, 1824-1867,” Ontario Historical Society 62, no. 1 (1970): 119–131.

[2] Author’s note: Cotton and linen rags underwent a process of being collected, sorted, cleansed, frayed, refined, beat, soaked, formed, pressed, dried, and printed before being sent back as newsprint. For more on this process, see Silvie Turner, “Which Paper?: A Guide to Choosing and Using Fine Papers for Artists, Craftspeople and Designers,” (New York: Lyons & Bedford, 1994).

[3] Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, “Black Spruce,” Tree Atlas, Government of Ontario, last modified October 9, 2020, accessed October 28, 2019, https://www.ontario.ca/page/ black-spruce.

[4] Walter Stanek, “Natural Layering of black spruce in northern Ontario,” The Forestry Chronicle 37, no. 3 (September 1961): 245258.

[5] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1988).

[6] Juan Serra Lluch, Color for Architects (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2019), 11-12.

[7] David Lee, Nature’s Palette: the Science of Plant Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 61.

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CLAY SHAPES THE HAND Geologic Time and Human Origin are Recorded in Material Kelsey Rose Dawson While studying abroad in Rome during her undergraduate degree, Kelsey became fascinated by ancient Greek and Roman ceramics seen in museums during her travels. This inspiration led to combine her experience as a ceramicist and architectural education for her graduate research.

Her research uses the methodology of fragmentary reconstruction, an archaeological process that gathers fragments one by one to make sense of the whole.

Ceramic fragments are often the first clue to the presence of past civilizations. Scattered shards are little more than shapeless objects within abstract space, irrational in their form, quantity, and dispersion on site. However, they hold immense power to translate ideas, customs and cultures when collected and studied in larger groupings.

The presence of clay in the earth is continuous. Its occurrence is strewn across our globe at an unimaginable spatial and temporal scale. Spread across continents and held within the earth’s crust for centuries, this mineral has existed, patiently recording geologic time. Clay makes up 5% of the mineral composition found in the earth’s crust, and yet, it is unacknowledged as a key element to life as we know it. [1] A study by Arizona State University found that volcanic vents on the ocean floor had interior chambers coated in clay.[2] Due to the naturally high heat capacity of clay, these volcanic clay wombs provided the ideal protective environment for organic molecules to evolve into all forms of life on earth.[3] The life-source origins of clay are endless. Across many cultures, the origin story of man consistently contains two elements, a breath of life and a lump of mud.

The stories of clay carrying life are as ubiquitous as the material itself. This narrative continues today, through scientific findings of ocean floor research and contemporary pop-culture references. Even the birth story of Wonder-Woman, who was gathered with a handful of mud by her mother.[4] The life-blood origin of clay is an embedded practice, and as old as the first recorded stories of ancient societies. The world’s earliest known work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, was recorded through inscribed lettering on a clay tablet. Clay is also present in the tale itself. The Goddess Aruru shapes a clay monster, Enkidu, to be a lesson giv-

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ing second-half for the unrelenting King.[5] In the mythology of ancient cultures, origin stories weave with a common thread; humans are gathered and shaped of wet earth.

The transformation from clay to flesh is common in the bible, the Qur’an, and indigenous origin stories. Ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Hindu, and Chinese cultures all tell stories of men moulded of earth and water. In these stories we find common tales of humans baked in a woman’s womb or by the sun’s touch. The transformative life-source of clay is humanity explained through the persistent themes of shaping and natality. These are the same base elements presented by philosopher Hannah Arendt. In her assessment of the human condition, the essence of being human is the freedom of conception. In our global understanding of human conception, clay is central to this narrative.

But this intimate connection to the material of our nativity is severed through contemporary means of resource harvesting. The hand that shapes the clay has been replaced by the metal claws of an excavator. The industrial-scale of mass manufacturing is abstract and mechanical. To combat the overwhelming magnitude of material extraction and processing, we must intimately re-introduce ourselves to the life-source of clay and examine this material at the scale of the hand. The harvesting process can be understood as an individual act upon the landscape when one person is responsible for the entire material life cycle of clay, from extraction through to production. This understanding chang-

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es our relationship to consumption by making tangible the knowledge and labour held within turning matter to material.[6] Material intelligence is an essential tool for an architect who wishes to build and design with materials in an aware state. It is a tool for an architect who wishes to understand the relationships materials have with each other, their extraction site, and their use over time. By engaging with ceramics, I am developing my own material intelligence. This encompasses the knowledge needed for the locating, harvesting, processing, and the making of clay and its chemical transformation to ceramic objects. The use of clay as material is self-referential to the site from which it is pulled.

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Clay is an opportunity for self-examination. In it, we can see the material of humanity. Clay is the site, the earth, and life-source.Â

15 September 2019, Cambridge, ON The clay arrives tightly sealed in a cardboard box, taped up, wrapped in plastic. It has freshly gone through the pugmill, a machine similar to a meat grinder—forcing out uniform sausages of clay. It is a beautifully consistent texture, like hard butter that has just begun to soften. There are no rocks or bits of grass. There is no trace of the ground it has been pulled from. It is easy to think of this slab of earth being quarried like marble; an ef-

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fig. 1: A vein of iron-rich red-toned clay is uncovered in Komoka, Ontario.

fig. 2: Clumps of a sandy clay deposit recall the nearby lakebeds formed by glacial movement during the last glacial period, over 14,000 years ago.

ficient mechanical process that slices into the earth and removes this chunk that now sits before you, just as it is.

But this is not the case; clay has not always been a product. Manufactured clay is a new concept, made of various materials from multiple mines shipped thousands of kilometres to a processing facility. I want to know where this stuff sits in the earth, so I can understand its place in the world, and my own.

4 October 2019, Cambridge, ON 43.344158, -80.316094 It’s 12 degrees today and overcast. Parts of Canada have snow right now. I have my recording equipment in the trunk of my car that I borrowed from the media department at the School of Architecture. The shovel I bought for $20.00 at Canadian Tire is jammed horizontally across the back seat.

I drive over to where the bike path starts, down Water Street, out by the brewing company. On the geology maps I have gathered on-line; the clay deposits line the river. Start close to the water and work my way up the hill.

I remember walking along this river 3 years earlier. As part of the design-build studio, we worked on the Six-Nations reserve in partnership with Kayanase, an ecological restoration initiative focusing on bringing back native plant species to the Grand River. An employee at Kayanase told us about clay shards that line the Grand River, centuries-old and left by Indigenous peoples who lived along it.

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These shards are everywhere along the riverbanks but remain undocumented. Only uncovered when a new building is proposed, and a surveyor spot tests the intended areas. There is no complete archaeologic survey of the Haldimand tract. As with most of Canada, there is too much land to cover, and not enough interest. But perhaps this is as it should be, leaving lands of the past undisturbed by hands of the present.

I drag my shovel down to the bank and set up the tripod. No luck, it’s all sand. I move further inland to a grassy patch. Too many rocks, I can’t dig very deep. It seems like someone had dumped debris there a while ago; plastic and garbage fill a natural valley in the hillside. Actually, this might be someone’s home.

I find an uprooted tree, it has pulled up a large void in the earth, which allows me to see dirt from further underground. Nothing worth collecting, but the sand from near the riverbank is gone. As I wander through some tall grasses, I fall over, one boot stuck in the mud. Luckily, I am not too wet, saved by the tall and dense reeds, lining the edge of the water and providing enough resistance to keep from falling into the Grand River. I inspect my footing where I fell, and there is a patch of soft silky dirt. I dig a large hole and mark my coordinates. This dirt sticks together, it is very malleable, but cracks when bent around my finger in a quick clay-finding test I read about in a book somewhere. I do not think this is pure clay, it might be slate or shale and partial clay bits. I can rinse this with water, remove the dirt and see what is left. I make a small collection; we will see how the processing goes.

5 October 2019, Kitchener, ON 43.447444, -80.479445 The earth was hard; each shovelful only brought up a small amount of dirt. ‘That’s because it’s clay” the owner of the lot said. I have not found any clay, just sandy shale. Heavy dirt. Well compacted over the 100 years, it has sat undisturbed. I know there is clay here. I am in downtown Kitchener, the red bricks of the houses surrounding me tell me that. They are all various shades of the same colour.

Their material must come from this land.

We are still within 6 miles of the Grand River, on the Haldimand land tract. As I dig, I hear the land acknowledgment repeated at the beginning of

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University functions rattles off in my head. “Land that was promised to the Haudenosaunee of the Six Nations of the Grand River, and is within the territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee peoples.” I am thinking of land ownership.

Who owns the resources we pull from the earth of disputed lands? Whose land is it that I am digging into? Who has lived on it, off it, travelled over it?

What stories are held in this earth? Just because I have dug it up… is it mine? And what about the objects I make from this disputed dirt? The site is political, and so are its products.

I dig the hole, getting invested as it grows deeper, maybe the next heave of the shovel will unearth a deposit. I picture finding a rich vein of clay, coursing through the dark dirt, red, like the brick houses surrounding me. My hands imagine the dull thunk, feeling the texture of the earth change as I slice into its smooth buttery surface with my shovel.

I picture it soft like it comes in the bag, plunging my fingers into it, cool and smooth, grabbing handfuls and shovelling it into my garbage bags. There is an excitement that comes with digging. I can feel the anticipation of what I could find running through my body.

But this is hard work, the dirt is very heavy, and I am not finding anything. The hole is probably 3 feet deep, and I give up. I take a small sample, maybe if I dilute it through water, I can make a liquid clay slip.

10 October 2019 42.9806710, -81.4316300

rubber boots. My friend’s father leads us out across the property, chatting excitedly, happy to be painting a mental sitemap for someone new. He lists off information gathered over years of quiet observation, watching, and learning about his immediate natural surroundings. His indexical practice of cataloging the world around him has developed over a quarter-century of life on this land. He knows every inch of the property, every tree, rock, and the ecosystems that surround them. On the ground, he has marked out potential areas that may hold veins of clay. He says these sites are his best guess, found over years of watching the earth flood, dry, and crack. Observation of where trees grow easily, tall and strong, their roots dive deep into the earth with no restrictions. His analysis covers the places where roots struggle—as if the ground is dense and thick, clogging up and containing the root systems.

He leads us to one of these.

The first sign is the cracking of the earth. The mud has dried out after a thorough rain, but instead of drying evenly, it cracks into sections. This is evidence of clay. My hands get a little bit sweaty; I want to dig. We are in a patch of forest, surrounded by fields of corn and grazing grounds for some neighbouring ponies. The walnut trees soar, tallest among their fellows. We make our way down to the riverbed that has inspired this visit. It is dry now, with no running water, but we see a few remaining pools on the surface. Held as if in a bowl, the water is not absorbing into the dirt. Another sign! Clay! We start digging. The water is pooling, springing up from some underground stream coursing through the property.

I’m outside of London at a friend’s family farm.

She said she remembers playing in the creek as a child and making shapes out of the mud, “it must be clay,” she told me. It is the middle of fall, Thanksgiving weekend. The air is crisp, and the leaves are turning colours. It is one of those days when the wind sounds like an ocean, rustling through the trees and creating an acoustic background energy that amplifies the sounds of the forest. The light and sounds are the same as the Autumn Saturday mornings of my childhood. Autumn is nostalgic, full of lasts. This is the last weekend we can still dig before the ground starts to freeze. I really want to get my hands on some clay.

It’s morning, and we grab gloves, a bucket, and a bunch of shovels. We have on light jackets and

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fig. 3: Wild clay breaks off into angular chunks when dry, when wet, as in this picture, it can be tested by wrapping a roll around a finger, it should bend with no cracks.

fig. 4: Wild clay in three stages; kneaded wild clay, three shaped and unfired vessels, two pit-fired bowls.

The clay is wet but distinct; dirt that surrounds the deposit falls away when brushed. The clay only clings to itself. It is pliable and light grey in colour, changing to a yellow-brown as we get a bit deeper into the riverbed. You can see differences in depth based on the colours we are unearthing. There is a streak of red, exposing iron content.

My friend’s father is talking about the neighbourhood, how all the old farmhouses are made with yellow brick—it must be from around here.

The clay is surprising in its texture, almost perfect, you can mould it straight out of the ground, it bends around my finger. The clay will need processing to be rid of the sticks, rocks and leaves. It will need to mature, sitting peacefully in hibernation this winter, kneaded into soft spheres. The wild clay will need to be fire tested to determine its heat capacity. My best guess is earthenware, but I will need to find out at what temperature it will vitrify and go through quartz inversion – turning to ceramic.

The object and the site are one and the same when working with clay. I am conscious of pulling earth from the ground, forever marking the landscape, and changing its ecologies. What can I leave in return? I am conscious of my breath as we dig the hole. Steady and even, our lungs filter the air of the forest. My presence here also affects the ecology of the area. I am thinking about what I am bringing here, do I have any positive effects? My hands cut into the earth, but my breath gives life. With each shovelful and each quickening exhale, the carbon-dioxide feeds the trees around me.

We are excited, showing each other our handfuls. We pull it from the ground, shovels forgotten, we want to grab the clay from the earth. Comparing

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colour and porosity, watching the water fill our clay bowl, from an underground spring in the dry riverbed. Birds are chirping, and the wind is loud, whistling through the remaining leaves, sending them to the forest floor. The warmth of the sun hides the seasonal coolness from us.

We pack up the bucket, it takes the two of us to carry it back up to the house and put it in my car.

We are tired and happy. This is the beginning of the long process on the way to becoming ceramic. It is also the beginning of a personal, intimate relationship with a material as old as the earth. We have found clay—and it feels like finding gold.

[1] Siim Sepp, “Composition of the Crust.” Sandatlas, accessed October 16, 2020, https://www.sandatlas.org/composition-of-theearths-crust/.

[2] Kate Ravilious, “Was Life on Earth Born in a Clay Womb?”

The Guardian, November 2, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/ science/2005/nov/02/uk.highereducation.

[3] A. Brack, “Clay Minerals and the Origin of Life,” in Handbook of Clay Science 5, ed. Faiza Bergaya and Gerhard Lagaly, (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2013), 507–521, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-008-098258-8.00016-X. [4] Tim Beedle, “Ten Moments That Mattered: Wonder Woman Becomes War,” DC Comics, December 26, 2013, https://www.dccomics.com/blog/2013/12/26/ten-moments-that-mattered-wonderwoman-becomes-war.

[5] The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. N. K. Sandars (London: Penguin, 1998).

[6] Glenn Adamson, Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018).

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fig. 5: Wild clay pots post-firing, ready to be cleaned and polished with beeswax.

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ENCOUNTERING THE WATERLANDS Logan Steele is a recent graduate of the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. His research focuses on the action between architecture and the environment it is built into. Underpinning his thesis research was a five-week volunteer position at the Karrak Lake Research Station, which similarly forms the basis for this article.

Cold summer rain presses into the tundra and everything else. Inside the research station’s main cabin, the windows fill with condensation and water rolls down the plywood interior walls.

The building, measuring 5.5m by 6.0m, is a simple wood-framed construction with white-washed exterior plywood walls, lumber trim and a shingled roof (fig. 1). It was constructed in 1991 from materials that were dragged across the Queen Maud Gulf by snowmobile from Iqaluktuuttiaq (Cambridge Bay), Nunavut.

This cabin, along with five others overlooking Karrak Lake, comprise a small research station dedicated to the study of arctic wildlife. The unassuming structures sit alone in the arctic wetlands—hundreds of kilometres from the nearest settlement. A single series of buildings set within an otherwise unmodified natural environment is useful for understanding the dynamic that exists between all buildings and their environments. In a city or other built-up environment, the difference between building and environment is more difficult to spot. Here, non-human actors like the wind, animals and water are foregrounded, and the push and pull of their relationship to one another is pronounced.

Six photographs of this structure from the east, composited together, offer an impression of this building over the duration of five weeks. If photography frames a specific piece of reality and records it over a small fraction of time, usually only a few hundredths of a second, it rationalizes the world to a similarly graspable fragment. But, over so little time, very little is actually grasped. Of greater interest than a single slice of reality is what occurs between the elements or between the sets.[1] Pressing the exposures into the same image folds together a durational space that shows a truer ecology. Rather than a static element, this kind of photo composite reveals change; we see the force of the wind, changing seasons and traces of inhabitation (fig. 2).

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The buildings here could be understood as frames of human territory—intervals of interior habitat embedded within the arctic environment.

[2] Though the word “environment” is commonly used to define a region around us in space, the word is not actually a thing at all; it is a relationship.

The term derives from the French environnement, referring to the action of encompassing, of surrounding.[3] Understood as such, creating a work of architecture is more than creating an enclosure; it also creates an environment that surrounds and is surrounded. Architecture, like environment, is an action that affects its surroundings and is affected in return. Architectural frames, made up of walls, floors, roofs and other partitions that separate outside from inside, create difference. They form an interface that interconnects as it divides.

Inside one of the storage sheds, rows of musty red float coats line the walls. Oars, paddles and lengths of rope hang from the exposed ceiling joists. The building, dating to 1999, is appropriately known by the researchers as ‘the swamp.’ The plywood floor is saturated with water and stained black with mud. It is unclear whether the mud has been laid down from above or has soaked up from the waterlogged peat below. Beyond the large shed door, sleet taps and clatters off everything else. The shed and its jumbled, moisture-soaked contents are not only the objects, or the tools needed for navigating the lake, they are in some way the lake itself. Inside the four water-soaked walls is an entire world that is almost absorbed into a lake—nothing quite solid, but nothing liquid. It is a swamp both in title and in its bodily entanglement with water; it is becoming water.

These cabins are continually changing—their frames are pressed into by wind or water, or even animals, and being continually rebuilt. They are framed, unframed, and framed all over again. Far from a perfect shelter, they act as a sieve that filters the forces which move across them.[4] That relay

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fig. 1: The main cabin at Karrak Lake, 6 exposures taken over 5 weeks.

fig. 2: Looking through a window frame, 20 exposures taken over 5 weeks.

of forces loosens fixed boundaries and reveals the dependencies that exist between people, buildings and the environment that surrounds them together. Take, for example, the harvesting of lake ice to melt for drinking water. Without a technological means of filtration, the water must go unpolluted if it is to be consumed safely. The health of the lake

translating landscapes

and of the researchers are immediately interdependent. The researchers are also dependent on the weather. Their schedule follows the shifting migration and work ceases on days of rain or snow. Electricity from an outdated array of solar panels cuts out with the dimming skies, tying research activities to the lengthening and shortening of the day

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fig. 3: Footsteps over frozen terrain, 19 exposures taken over 6 hours.

fig. 4: Footsteps over thawing terrain, 21 exposures taken over 5 hours.

across the seasons. Even in the buildings, which are battered by wind and pulled down by decay, there is an expenditure of time devoted to maintenance rather than an expenditure of material. The materials for the building envelopes, invaluable because of high shipping costs, are recycled internally. They are never discarded, but instead downcycled into new uses so that nothing is wasted.Â

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In this way, what might appear at first to be technological failings of the station are actually the bases of entirely unexpected synchronies between the building, its inhabitants and their environment.

The people who maintain the buildings wrestle as much with the wind as the building does, and they learn to negotiate it skillfully the same way a woodworker learns the forces in the grain of a block of

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wood.[5] They begin and maintain a dialogue with their environment and become intimated with it.[6] This engagement implies a tangling together that supplants fixed perceptions and fixed identities. Over time, they become part of a long and ever-changing story of that place.

Storytelling, like the photographic composites, captures wider frames of time and space; in so doing stories reveal the interrelation of buildings, people, animals and landscapes. Like a story, a composite begins to frame together a duration of lived experience. The composites can similarly reflect a multiplicity of spaces.

Looking to the snow-laden ground over several hours of walking (fig. 3) draws together the textures of the landscape surrounding the cabins. Framed together are an entire spectrum of terrains and the forces that act on them. If the traces of drifts draw the force of the wind, the shape and sizes of rocks draw the force of the glaciers that scraped, crumbled and smoothed them.

Like the wolves, which move over the hills around the station as smears of white and grey, the cabins disappear into the squalls of snow. Against the wind, the wolves become a vector of force. The cabins exert their own obstinate force with walls quaking in the blasts of air that lift the corners of the roofs and send pulses of icy air to their interiors. And, as dusk settles, the forms of animal and architecture together are reduced to something only half-attained, mixing with the snow and the deep oceanic night.

In the spring, the blasted terrain emerges from its cover of snow (fig. 4). In this image, perspectives of many spaces overlaid together begin to speak to its complexity. Walking the thawing shores by the station, feet sink into the earth and press up steam that clings low on the ground. The footprints fill with groundwater behind.

Everywhere is water. And everywhere water exists it is different: swaths of shining clay summoned from the graves of permafrost, oily mud flats, dark turbid drainages rush over the rocky earth and spill onto rusting, iron-rich beaches of sand. Saltstained peat marks the extents of past year’s floods as boulders mark the extents of past millennia’s glaciers; scales of time differentiated by several orders of magnitude, immediate and overlapping. Crossing over it, impressions of ptarmigan feet mingle

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with the heavy, sucking prints of caribou hooves.

The muddy peat is formed from thousands of years of dying mosses and lichens set down in layers like unrolled tree-rings that contract around boots with each step. Vivid oil slicks in blue, copper and silver emerge underfoot. Looking into the composite, these wide frames of time and space are pressed together and are understood as such. No one element can be categorized separate from another. Each is entangled, and each is intimately connected to and thus affected by the other. Through them run the same forces, the same molecules of water.

The wind pulls a tide of clouds over the already saturated tundra. The coming rain pushes over the landscape, water droplets pulling back in the eddies of bodies and buildings together. A cloud of exhaled breath hurriedly turns invisible. Sod swells with water until it weeps down the hillsides into puddles and tiny streams—everything mixing and flowing from river to lake to river to ocean. The water flows north into the distant gulf, and the winds bring it all back again.[7] [1] Deleuze and Parnet suggest that what matters more than individual elements are the relations between the elements, and that sets of elements cannot be considered separate from the relationships that bind them together. See Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), xiii, 34–35.

[2] Bernard Cache, Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories, ed. Michael Speaks, trans. Anne Boyman, Writing Architecture (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995), 23–24, 44.

[3] Definition 1 (marked obsolete) in the Oxford English Dictionary. See “Environment, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, accessed October 16, 2020, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/63089?redirectedFrom=environment.

[4] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 182.

[5] Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari, A Swerve ed (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992), 10.

[6] Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (New York: Routledge, 2002), 16.

[7] This article includes several lightly edited narratives first published in Logan Steele, “Encountering the Waterlands: Stories of Environment, Animals and Architecture in the Ahiak,” (UWSpace, 2020), http://hdl.handle.net/10012/15885.

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02

REIMAGINING SYSTEMS

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Interview: Neeraj Bhatia

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Interview: Sean Lally

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Supplements for Diplomacy: Revisiting the South China Sea Marine Park

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Life on the Edge: The Archaeologist, the Oil Rig, and the Newfoundlander

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No Man’s Land: Testing Site 002: Rocky Mountain Arsenal

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From Corrugated Metal Sheds to Fields, Factories, and Workshops: An Alternative Vision for Industrial Districts of Taiwan

Neeraj Bhatia is a licensed architect and urban designer whose work resides at the intersection of politics, infrastructure, and urbanism. He is an Associate Professor at the California College of the Arts where he also directs the urbanism research lab, the Urban Works Agency. Bhatia has also held teaching positions at UC Berkeley (as the visiting Esherick Professor), UT Arlington (as the visiting Ralph Hawkins Professor), Cornell University, Rice University, and the University of Toronto. Neeraj is founder of The Open Workshop, a transcalar design-research office examining the negotiation between architecture and its territorial environment. Select distinctions include the Architectural League Young Architects Prize, Emerging Leaders Award from Design Intelligence, and the Canadian Prix de Rome. He is co-editor of books Bracket [Takes Action], The Petropolis of Tomorrow, Bracket [Goes Soft], Arium: Weather + Architecture, and co-author of Pamphlet Architecture 30: Coupling Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism and New Investigations in Collective Form. Neeraj has a Master degree in Architecture and Urbanism from MIT and a Bachelor of Environmental Studies and Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Waterloo.

Sean Lally is an architect based in Lausanne, Switzerland. His office, Sean Lally Architecture, is dedicated to engaging today’s greatest pressures; a changing climate and advances in healthcare and consumer devices that are redefining the human bodies that occupy our environments. Lally is the author of The Air from Other Planets: A Brief History of Architecture to Come. Lally has lectured worldwide and has been a visiting professor at the University of Virginia, Pratt Institute and Rice University. Lally is the recipient of the Young Architects Award from the Architectural League of New York and the Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome in Landscape Architecture. Lally is also the host of the podcast program, Night White Skies.

Kobi Logendrarajah

Zachary Coughlan

Emily Guo

Yu-Chu Su

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The Contradiction of Condominiums: Socio-Economic Marginalization in Toronto Levi Van Weerdan

in conversation with:

NEERAJ BHATIA galt.: Much of your work addresses the rapidly evolving and fluctuating conditions of both urban and ecological environments, specifically through the negotiation between architecture and the environment. Referring back to the theme of the “burning house”, could you elaborate on how you approach this sense of urgency in your work?

Neeraj Bhatia: The feeling of urgency in regards to climate change is a challenge because climate change is a very slow-moving, chronic issue. In fact, if climate change were literally a burning house, it might be easier to deal with because we know that there are immediate things we need to do when a house is burning—rab a bucket of water or call nine-one-one. If you consider the modalities within climate change—such as how our politics, economics, and cities operate in relation to the larger environment—they are simultaneously large and complex issues, whose effects are slow and abstract. We are constantly confronted with this in architecture, as architecture is a discipline that is also quite slow. But if we’re talking about rethinking systems, this isn’t just a building, this is a larger way of organizing life. What is the appropriate time and scale to gauge its success or failure?

Personally, I think what we can do as architects is to think through how we as a discipline have been complicit in these issues and where they might find themselves in urban form. For instance, the current racial movement might seem like a moment where there’s a huge amount of urgency to change systems, but we need to remember that this moment has been brewing for over 300 years. Repeated incidents have caused us to open our eyes and see (and admit) that a house is burning. I think this begs the question of how many things we can open people’s eyes to as designers. This is where it might become more concrete in our work, where we examine the space of representation between the way that we organize form, its systems of thought, and form itself. People need to realize that urban form is not neutral; it organizes and socializes particular forms of behavior. Public spaces, like parks and waterfronts, are designed for certain demographics and they are “managed” by certain authorities. They don’t actually embrace everyone, and there’s often no room for dissent in these types of spaces. So, I think we’re in a very early step of simply opening our eyes.

One of the first things we can do is consider how we can collapse time for long and slow issues.

How do we make the large-scale infrastructure processes that define our everyday life visible?

Alternatively, if we question the rituals of everyday life that are embedded in form, perhaps we can tweak those as a way to aggregate a difference in the system. Sometimes we look at these things from the top-down, in a systemic way, while in other cases it might be about remaking the system from local bottom-up transformations. This is to say, we are aware about where and when to work strategically versus tactically. Strategies might be larger-scale visions of how something works. It might be a fairly long time-scale when we have a goal to change culture, or improve the environment, or whatever it might be. That may be a process that takes 30, 40, or 50 years, but, of course, we can’t predict the politics or the economic state of the future. Tactics provide more nimble, low-risk, and quicker ways to implement change, while reassuring us that we’re working towards something larger while also providing markers of time. So, what is that relationship between small-scale interventions and large-scale change?

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If you can separate them as a designer and know what makes more sense as a tactic and what falls onto the side of strategy, it provides a way to deal with things now, but also have them gather into something bigger than their individual components. đ&#x;Œ• To speak specifically about where we could start, I think architectural education perpetuates a system where architects are just looking at the foreground, where the largest goal is notoriety, fame, and autonomy. If you think about the references you study, the projects you are asked to do, and the architects flown in to lecture about their work, a lot of it is aimed at capital “Aâ€? architecture. This is the message we’re (intentionally/unintentionally) giving students: we’re only interested in the product and it’s aesthetic merits. There are so many ways we could judge architecture and its success.

Your practice, The Open Workshop— and specifically projects like Right-ofWay—focus on “democratizing design�. The project considers both the architectural timeline as well as a local, pedestrian timescale; during construction space can be appropriated by people in the city, decisions on site are made not just by the architect, but from many different people. What is the role of architectural education in standardizing this understanding of contextual scales and the agency of the architect within them?

One of the issues with perpetuating a singular vision is that it does not take into account the untold stories behind architecture. Architects do not often talk about costs, how the client made their money, how labor was addressed and compensated, how the project altered the environment, and so on. If we don’t have a holistic discussion about the project, it signals that aesthetics is the primary goal of architecture. More importantly, it allows many problematic stories, issues, and behaviors to be suppressed and thereby these issues often persist. Unfortunately, I don’t see the current post-graduation world of architecture as one that is set up to empower people to examine their own ideas and ask how the world might change. I think it’s actually set up, for the most part, to reaffirm the status quo.

Between college and work, architects are often groomed into obedient institutional subjects. So how do you make the background appealing? And when I say “background� I’m referring to all the spaces of urbanization—logistics, infrastructure, energy harvesting, agricultural, parking lots, etc.—that increasingly organize all aspects of our lives as well as the periphery of cities, yet are rarely discussed as a project. I think the process of architecture school is a process of seeing the world differently. You never look at any building or space the same once you finish school. But can we expand that to open students’ eyes to see the background, to see how power and bias are embedded in the systems that define our lives. Once you can see, you will be more inclined to question and act on those systems. Perhaps this means more ethical choices in what you choose to design or not design; or a more holistic set of values on what a successful project entails; or redesigning the various infrastructures in the background. Your generation is inheriting a burning house and you’re realizing that to do things as we’ve always done them is not going to put out the fire. Real change is how we push back on the things we’ve been taught, the things we’ve been told we should be interested in, and the methodologies that we choose to design with.

I think we’re in a really exciting moment where architecture education itself is being questioned. Not just in the representation of diversity in the academy, but also an increasing awareness of how complicit the discipline is with regards to questions of power, race, wealth, and so forth. These topics are so obviously embedded in the discipline, but people looked the other way, primarily because those in power had no need to acknowledge them. I think we’re in a moment right now where we’re asking ourselves, “how can design change the world?� We use this question as a way to rethink systems and change them. How can we ask students to reimagining systems

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change the world if we’re only exposing them to a small set of narratives that have particular biases and power structures embedded in them? We are starting to redesign architectural education—not just who’s teaching, but the content, the types of projects that are given, the methodologies, and formats. I think this is a really important time where these questions of power in urban form and questions of how those frameworks also exist within the discipline can both be rethought simultaneously. Even seemingly radical architecture often doesn’t question the systems by which it’s formed. So, let’s do something really radical and reformat the agency of the discipline. đ&#x;Œ• How does your practice approach site research and how does that initial input inform an architectural design?

I think the first thing to think about is what we consider research in the context of architecture. Very little architectural “research� is primary research. If you think about the labor of architectural research in terms of time, a great deal of effort is spent redrawing other people’s research. This act of re-drawing however is a form of research—there is a process of editing, aggregating, and over-laying pieces of information to see relationships that might have been overlooked. There are several choices being made as an architectural researcher; you can’t look at everything in the world, so you’re coming at it with a particular lens. We are often looking for where we might have agency as designers to affect a situation.

This isn’t neutral research by any means.

When you admit to yourself that research is not neutral, the discussion shifts to consider what has been edited out of the conversation. Selection is not only a research decision, but also a design decision. These choices are reflections of our own biases and, for me, the most important thing is being self-aware of your own biases. These are not bad per se, but could be dangerous if thought of as objective.

Generally speaking, the relationship between architectural design and research is a hard thing to describe because every project has a specific context, subject, and brief, so there’s no one-size-fits-all. But I would say that these are the biases through which we consider our own work: how can we, as designers, think beyond the footprint of a building and deploy form to redistribute power? In some cases, it’s slow; in some cases, it’s asking if we can just tweak the system a little bit to redirect the conversation; and in other cases, where it seems like the conversation is already moving in a particular direction, we might be able to amplify the magnitude of change that we’re deploying in a project. I think it really depends on where in this cultural spectrum we’re able to absorb that level of difference. It’s not the same everywhere in the world and it’s not the same with every project or the scale of project that we’re looking at. đ&#x;Œ•

So much of economic inequality has to do with who owns property and who doesn’t, especially as we see cities becoming increasingly expensive. We had a symposium at the CCA (California College of the Arts) and one of the panelists was Carol Galante, who had worked for the Obama administration as the Assistant Secretary for Housing at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Multifamily Housing programs. I asked her, “if private property is at the core of economic inequality, why do we still perpetuate this system?

Why don’t we actually just think of different systems?� She had a really interesting answer: in America (and I don’t imagine it’s too different in Canada) those that could buy property, particularly in the post-war period, were typically white. Additionally, there was redlining and other discriminatory policies that prevented mortgages and assurances for people of colour,

In your opinion, as architects and designers, what is our role in addressing economic inequality and environmental fragility?

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particularly African-Americans, to buy property. In America, the fastest way to move upwards in class (within a generation) has been through property ownership. She continued: how could a system allow this for a particular demographic then turn off the switch when people of colour and other minorities finally start to amass enough wealth to play the game?

I think this is a really powerful thing to consider—economic inequality is inscribed in form.

When people talk about inequality, they often describe it simply as who has an education, jobs, etc., and who doesn’t. But in fact, it’s also a spatial issue, it’s an ownership issue, it’s a typology issue, so architects need to be at the center of this debate.

We live in a world right now where so much of our lives are defined by extra-large and extra-small systems that, for the most part, are completely abstract to us. Architecture exists in between these scales. It’s actually one of the few scales that still affirms reality for us today, without the use of mediated devices. Architecture can expose questions of inequality as a way of bringing about change.

I can speak personally to our office; we’re interested in how power is consolidated and redistributed to empower. This is tied to what I label the “silent subjects of capitalism.� Capitalism feeds on labour at the bottom and off the “unpaid work� of natural environments, both of which have had their voices suppressed. Through the exploitation of these two things, capitalism is always able to expand, seemingly infinitely. So in our work, we’re always looking for where these unheard voices are and how we as designers can provide a platform for them to be heard. For instance, giving a natural environment a voice might mean indexing and making visible its evolving conditions, so that the architectural form gives an ability for people to contextualize themselves against these larger issues.

For many people, issues like environmental fragility and economic inequality seem abstract, therefore raising questions regarding whether they are architectural issues. However, one of the first things architecture can do is make these issues tangible, visible, and real to people.

Then slowly and hopefully, we can start thinking about new typologies of land ownership, new typologies of domestic space, new ways of thinking through systems, and our relationship to the environment—all which benefits these silent subjects and gives them a voice.

I’ll end by saying we live in a simultaneously terrifying and exciting time. It is a moment of suspension. All visions of the future have been put into question. This is one of the most difficult things to overcome: how people see their future. It is precisely because the dogma of future visions has been wiped clear that we can enact more dramatic change. Now is a time where we can collectively reconceive of our world to address issues such as environmental fragility or inequality together. đ&#x;Œ‘ For further information on these topics, Neeraj Bhatia recommends...

Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015).

Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).

Neeraj Bhatia, New Investigations in Collective Form (New York: Actar, 2019).

Albert Pope, Ladders (Houston: Rice School of Architecture, 1996). w: theopenworkshop.ca ig: @theopenworkshop fb: facebook.com/theopenworkshop

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in conversation with:

SEAN LALLY galt.: Through research and design, your work is engaged in architecture’s role within changing environmental systems, specifically in relation to technological advancements. Could you discuss your approach to designing for the future?

Sean Lally: A big part of the work that I’m interested in doing—whether it’s through design and construction, or through research—is realizing that we, as individuals, live in a very small sliver of time.Â

It’s really important to try to understand the time frame of how long humans, the earth, and other species have been around; how many species have gone away, and how many new ones are coming about. When you do that you start to realize that even if you want to have a conversation about preservation or sustainability, you have to acknowledge that nothing can be static.

When you see that larger arc of time you realize that any type of work about the environment has to acknowledge change. We have to be aware that as time moves forward, not everything is going to move with it and that includes us, as individuals and even potentially as a species. This acknowledgement relieves a little bit of tension for designers and for the discipline. I think for a long time, we’ve thought that environmental responsibility and the idea of being experimental and progressive in design are separate things and that you have to pick a side.

But I don’t think that’s true. I think it stifles conversation and threatens the importance of what we can do as a discipline. Contradictions can be allowed in your work because you’re not striving to articulate any grand polemic; part of it is just a journey to better understand.

We’re not currently having conversations about sociology, economics, and other underlying aspects that inform behavior: how people use space, their expectations of space, and how that changes the architecture itself. That dovetails from a couple of different places. It comes from realizing that we don’t really talk enough about who the people are that are using the space, who we’re designing for, and why that’s so important. It also ties a lot to a crisis that is in many ways technological. đ&#x;Œ• Technologically, it’s a pressure. It’s not the problem, it’s not the solution, but it’s a pressure and that has a lot to do with how we communicate. We know this through wearables, phones, trackers, medicine, healthcare...these things are changing our bodies. I think for a long time, we saw the body as an average; we made these distinctions of what average means and they were essentially false narratives. We did things to bring people up to average, meaning if you couldn’t hear or see, we had devices that allowed you to hear or see like someone who was “averageâ€?. If you couldn’t walk, we had machinery and slopes that brought people to shared spaces.Â

Your design work transcends the scale of architecture to engage with individuals at a personal level. What are the benefits of addressing global systems through exploring the relationships between the human body and its environment?

What we have now, through wearables and through healthcare, is people split yet again through social-economic class, religion, and age. Different demographics have access to dif37

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ferent things and that’s splintering communities and what public space means. For a long time, we thought that if you just get everybody to a public space, it would be shared. But now, even if people can all occupy the same physical space, it’s possible that they’re not going to be occupying the same technical space. Depending on what your access is to the network, virtual reality, or data—people experience the same geographic space differently. We need to start having conversations about the complex relationships our bodies have with space. They’re not simply things about ergonomics, but rather what people are sensing and what they have access to in terms of nutrition, technology, and all these factors changing individuals and communities. These can’t be seen as secondary or tertiary conditions that would come at a later point in time.

I think a lot of this has to do with how we represent. Architects, at the end of the day, need to find mechanisms for representation so we can articulate design decisions. It’s easiest to do that when it’s geometry. Anything other than that becomes very complicated, and we need to find other ways of talking about the qualities of space, the bodies in space, and the implications of these things. đ&#x;Œ• Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense under George W Bush, said: “as we know, there are known knowns‌ there are known unknowns‌ but there are also unknown unknowns.â€? In other words, there are things we know, there are things we know that we don’t know, and there are things we don’t know we don’t know. It seems sort of mind-bending to think like that, but we’re in a time where saying something like that just seems so obvious. Â

What led you to explore “architecture’s future� in your work? How can aspiring designers and architects widen their own perspectives on what architecture can be?

This idea of trying to look at architecture’s future is important to me because I think this is an amazing time to be alive as a designer. As an architect, there are so many unknowns and variables at play: we have a responsibility to stitch together various plausible, potential futures.

Similar to science fiction, the role of the architect isn’t to predict the future, it’s simply to bring that plausible future to the foreground so we could understand it. In doing so, we raise questions and plausible scenarios, which helps us overcome some of the anxiety.

It allows us to talk about things that we don’t understand. I think as architects, we’re not experts at anything but novices at a lot of things. What we are experts at is stitching similar and disparate things together and being able to see possible scenarios, the opportunities and pitfalls. Where could things be better? Where are their liabilities on the horizon that people outside the discipline aren’t considering? The architect is the generalist in the humanities that can actually pull them together and see what the possibility might be. I think we have a responsibility to do that. We’re good at it and we can provide futures. We’ll build some of them, and many will not be built, but it seems like a worthy thing for someone to spend their time doing.

And so we do. đ&#x;Œ‘ For further information on these topics, Sean Lally recommends...

Donna J. Harraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (London: Duke University Press, 2016).

Alex Irvine, “Artificial Intelligence and Climate Change Converge,� interview by Amy Brady, Burning Worlds, Chicago Review of Books, March 17, 2020.

Neal Stephenson, “Innovation Starvation,� World Policy Institute, September 27, 2011.

w: seanlally.net ig: @sean.lally reimagining systems

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SUPPLEMENTS FOR DIPLOMACY Revisiting the South China Sea Marine Park Kobi Logendrarajah is a recent graduate student from the University of Waterloo School of Architecture.

He is interested in using narratives to speculate on potential futures regarding geopolitical disputes.

He hopes to continue his explorations on territorial conflicts— specifically the tools and actors involved in these disputes.

Call for Regional Cooperation With its reputation of diverse fisheries, latent oil reserves, and strategic economic position in global trade, the South China Sea has historically been a site of contention between states. Today, we find this contention in the intersection of multiple claims between regional powers: China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan.

Each state attempts to build a case to justify their claim to the sea by using a “spatial toolkit” that brings attention to the built form. We see civilian occupied islands like Pag-asa Island, which is owned by the Philippines, and militarized artificial islands like Fiery Cross Reef, constructed by China. As a result of this territorial dispute, an evident gap has formed in the management of resources, leading to the neglect of the region’s ecosystem and maritime security. State-centric practices such as dredging, and overfishing have threatened the longevity of the region’s marine species and habitats.

Supplements for Diplomacy reframes the agency of built form in the South China Sea. It calls for the transformation of the disputed region into an international marine protected area. This proposal calls to organize state and non-state actors in a collective body that acknowledges the region’s economic dependency on its ecosystem and biodiversity. By using this proposal as a framework to bridge environmental objectives with state incentives, this project illustrates the implementation of the marine protected area’s planning, governance, and infrastructure. Supplements for Diplomacy presents a scalable model that can transition existing occupied islands

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into environments that serve as spawning grounds for endangered marine species. It relies on the incremental phasing of infrastructure that aims to monitor, build ecological resilience, and establish a sustainable economy through tourism and revenue from long-term conservation of fish stocks.

States and Fragile Environments The lack of regional coordination among countries in the dispute has led to three environmentally pressing issues. First, the unregulated fishing in the South China Sea has encouraged extreme levels of overfishing in the region to the point where the region’s fisheries are on the brink of collapse.[1] Along with the depleting fish stocks, the activity of illegal poachers has deteriorated the health of the coral reefs. The extraction process of giant clams has left these reefs scarred and sterile, unable to serve as critical spawning grounds for marine species.[2] Finally, the construction of artificial islands, which involves extensive land reclamation techniques, has also contributed to the declining health of coral reefs. The dredging process involves the use of a cutter-suction dredger to drill into the seabed, producing loose sediment. This sediment is then suctioned and displaced through a floating pipe which deposits the material on top of an existing coral reef, serving as a platform for new islands.[3] This failure to consider the natural world is a symptom of many underlying insecurities developing nations face as they strive to “catch up” to the Global North. This is exacerbated when they are

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also caught in the tug-of-war between the emerging and incumbent hegemon—the ongoing rivalry between China and the United States. By reprogramming the current infrastructure, this project challenges the status quo by offering new tools that represent the needs of all actors including the marine species and their environment. It acknowledges the dependency between states and their respective natural environment while advocating for the long-term investment of natural reserves. Territory

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is no longer seen as a strategic token exploited by the state, rather it consists of large fluctuating systems like nutrient flows and tidal patterns.

Reframing the Agency of Built Form Supplements for Diplomacy is a multi-phased program that uses the common threat of regional environmental insecurity as a catalyst for cooperation among disputing states. It aims to address three environmentally harmful practices and pro-

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fig. 1: Regional map of territorial claims in the South China Sea.

fig. 2: Complete timeline of illustrated marine park framework.

vide alternative solutions that fall under the mandate of the marine park program. By acknowledging the economic realities and insecurities of the developing nations in the region, this proposal provides an economic incentive-based framework that hinges on the long-term health of the natural environment. As a pilot site for this proposal, this project looks at Thitu Reefs. This atoll resides in international waters, making it a potential low hanging fruit for cooperation. The limited scope will help provide a succinct mock-up of the proposal, with the intention of future regional scaling among the other landforms in the disputed sea.

Phase 1 deals with establishing an initial data-sensing infrastructure that aims to collect relevant information on the natural environment. This lays the foundation for future phases, where this data can inform planning and predict environmental patterns. The data is collected from three monitoring devices that observe coral reef habitats, sediment quality, and fish population. Through this process, an interface between state and non-state actors is created. They give us a better understanding of the activity of fish stocks, coral reefs, weather patterns, and nutrient flows. In terms of the allocation of labour and efforts, this data collection process can involve both state and non-state research

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organizations. The information collected from the atoll can be shared among other data collection nodes in the region, such as ports and coastguards.

This begins to inform a greater data network between countries, since Thitu Reefs acts as an intermediate point in the sea. As the atoll plugs into this existing network of data collection, the quality of monitoring fish migration, nutrient flows, and tidal patterns become much more precise.

Phase 2 advocates for an ecological resiliency plan for the atoll. This will provide the foundations for a passive feedback loop that increases the immunity of the atoll ecosystem and its ability to recover from both natural and human influences.

By leveraging the region’s existing ecosystem, this phase aims to harness the natural affinities between mangroves, seagrass, and coral reefs.[4] This is realized through the nutrient cycling between these three organisms. To establish this natural cycle, the tools from the previous phase must be modified.

The coral reef monitoring device is transformed into an artificial coral reef, where it can provide the conditions to nurture at-risk coral polyps and eventually serve as vital breakwaters for the atoll.

The sediment quality monitoring device is transformed into an environmentally sensitive sediment accumulation device. Learning from data collected

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in Phase 1, this can inform the geotextile perimeter as it is set up along the predicted path of travelling sediment. The accumulated sediment can create natural sandbars and spits, making it the perfect foil for dredging. The fish monitoring device is transformed into a multitrophic fish farm that leverages the nutrient fixing quality of mangroves into a beneficial recycling of nitrate.[5] At-risk fish stocks can be fostered in these integrated farms as the conditions of these species are heavily regulated and controlled.

Phase 3a provides states with the opportunity to see a return on their investment. This phase deals with the processing of the atoll’s resources. The artificial coral reefs can become a point of attraction for tourism and research. The newly reclaimed land produced by the geotextiles in Phase 2 can create space for tourism and mangrove processing facilities. Lastly, the multitrophic fish farms can produce fish products that can be sold both to regional and global markets. The environmental impacts from these new economic opportunities can be regulated and studied by the initial data collection infrastructure laid out in Phase 1. Therefore, these new activities can be modified Phase 3b works in conjunction with Phase 3a where it provides a marketplace for the harvested

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exports. This final phase not only centralizes the atoll’s products for the market but also creates a space where fishermen can congregate and sell their catch. The market acknowledges the existing informal trading and bartering practices in the South China Sea and aims to legitimize these activities by providing spatial resources.[6] Apart from its revenue, the market also becomes another platform where economies between disputing countries are intertwined. The exchange of multiple currencies creates an organic economic reliance between countries. This is partly due to the diversity of users at the market, ranging from military personnel to tourists. As for the market’s layout, space planning is determined by the production capabilities of the atoll. The quantity of vendor stalls can either grow or contract depending on the yield from the products grown on the atoll. Therefore, the form of the market is strictly dependent on these natural flows, specifically the amount of nitrate in the atoll environment as it dictates the growth of fish, mangroves, and coral reef. Apart from its spatial arrangement, the informal market can adapt to accommodate a variety of programs including hawker centres, drying racks for salted fish, market stalls, and covered storage rooms. Also, with the use of mobile trading barges, the mobility of the fisher-

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fig. 3 (opposite): Phase 3b, mobile market barges.

men increases as they are not required to anchor.

The form of these barges takes cues from fish markets in the region, from its wayfinding systems to its fish processing equipment.

Speculating Future Territories The ambition of this project stops at Thitu Reefs, but one can easily imagine if it were scaled across the other disputed landforms in the South China Sea. The tools used to facilitate the marine park has created a roadmap for an informal market to be realized. However, one can also imagine how the narrative might change if a different combination of tools were used. This can result in interesting end products for other islands in the disputed sea.

The large artificial islands constructed by China can be reformatted as wind farms, taking advantage of the openness of the sea. Continuing this speculative exercise, the marine park program can expand to consist of a large collection of islands. This network of constellations can inform new regional opportunities, ones that seem more attractive than the political stagnation we are currently facing.

With this newly reprogrammed archipelago, the agency of the architect can help produce new tools and governance structures that expand how we delineate territory, or rather how we view territory. Territory cannot be represented through static maps that represent information solely pertaining to state interests. It must include processes that operate beyond the human scale, such as the natural flows informed by the agency of marine species, weather patterns, and nutrient cycles. This helps us view territory as a multi-dimensional relationship between the human and natural environment. Unable to capture its state in one specific still, we must think of territory as an ever-changing condition. It’s a game of balancing between inputs and outputs. As a final thought, this project to adds to the evolving definition of territory; Supplements for Diplomacy sees territory as a return to equilibrium.

[3] Howard Chew, “Giant Clam Poaching Wipes Out Reefs in South China Sea.” National Geographic, last modified July 12, 2016, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/06/south-chinasea-coral-reef-destruction/.

[4] Greg Guannel, Katie Arkema, Peter Ruggiero, and Gregory Verutes, “The Power of Three: Coral Reefs, Seagrasses and Mangroves Protect Coastal Regions and Increase Their Resilience.”

Plos One 11, no. 7 (July 2016). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0158094.

[5] Doris Soto, Integrated Mariculture: A Global Review (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2009) 7389.

[6] Zhang Hongzhou, “China’s ‘Dark Fishing Fleets’ Cast a Black Shadow Over the South China Sea.” The News Lens International Edition, last modified January 28, 2019, https://international. thenewslens.com/article/112819.

[1] Gregory Poling, “Illuminating the South China Sea’s Dark Fishing Fleets.” Stephenson Ocean Security Project, last modified January 9, 2019, https://ocean.csis.org/spotlights/illuminating-thesouth-china-seas-dark-fishing-fleets/.

[2] Victor Robert Lee, “Satellite Imagery Shows Ecocide in the South China Sea.” The Diplomat, last modified January 22, 2016, https://thediplomat.com/2016/01/satellite-images-show-ecocidein-the-south-china-sea/.

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Exchange of Regional Foreign Currency Fish Processing

Export Advertising/ Wayfinding

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LIFE ON THE EDGE The Archaeologist, the Oil Rig, and the Newfoundlander Zachary Coughlan is a recent master’s graduate from Carleton University’s Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism. His research speculates on the future heritage of extractive industries and how society might reconcile with their environmentally destructive nature.

He hopes to continue his investigation into how economic and political conditions contribute to placemaking, cultural narratives, and the built environment.

fig. 1 (above): L’Anse aux Meadows. fig. 2 (opposite): The material pantry of the offshore oil rig.

On the island of Newfoundland, the sea is the protagonist in a complex cultural narrative. The intimate relationship between Newfoundland’s residents and the ocean around them reveals itself through industry, leisure, architecture, and infrastructure. The coastal edge of the island is the stage on which this engagement takes place. A historical dependency on the sea resulted in a littoral settlement pattern on the island, marked by the numerous cultures that once called Newfoundland their home. Today, Newfoundland maintains its deep-seated connection to the ocean with offshore petroleum drilling and exploration, rather than traditional industries, such as fisheries.

The coastline is a transient border that will become increasingly unpredictable given current climate change predictions. Climate science forecasts that portions of Newfoundland could experience a dramatic increase in sea-level by the year 2100. This rise in sea-level will be accompanied by increased wave energy, storm surge, and coastal erosion.[1] This project reimagines the coastal edge of Newfoundland in the year 2101—a year beyond the predictions of our current climate science. In this future, cultural artifacts of coastal Newfoundland are increasingly threatened by rising seas; a threat largely created by the global extraction and burning of fossil fuels. At this juncture, one begins to recognize the inherent ironies of an island so dependent on its coastline for identity yet tethered to the economies of oil extraction.

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This project’s narrative describes the UNESCO world heritage site of L’Anse aux Meadows, as it may be observed in the year 2101. Located on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, the L’Anse aux Meadows archaeological site is the only confirmed evidence of Viking settlement in North America. The Norse settlement is one of the most culturally significant archaeological digs in Newfoundland while also being among the most threatened sites in the province. The physical geography of the site creates a condition of vulnerability in the context of coastal climate change. The low lying, gently sloping topography of L’Anse aux Meadows consists of unconsolidated marine sediment and marsh land, giving little defense to the unpredictability of the encroaching seascape.

Given the non-renewable nature of fossil fuels and the trajectory of alternative energy sources, this project investigates a future in which the offshore oil rigs of Newfoundland are rendered obsolete. If left hidden offshore and away from the public gaze, these superstructures would be left to rust on the pillars that fasten them to the ocean floor.

Instead, this project proposes that the topside (the portion of the rig above sea level) be released from its concrete base and towed to a location observable from L’Anse aux Meadows. These predominantly steel structures can then be slowly disassembled in an adjacent bay within the boundaries of the UNESCO archaeological site. Components of the oil rigs are then hauled onto the landscape to form protective barriers for the threatened World Heri-

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tage Site and fortify areas of future archaeological interest against the rising sea. In this sense, these reconstituted oil rigs become monumental scrapyards, material salvage pantries, and a dynamic anti/ counter monument that commemorates land lost to the sea while preserving fragile artifacts of global significance. As the rig components metastasize on the landscape at L’Anse aux Meadows, they become future heritage sites and objects of archaeological interest.

This project is a reimagined future of the UNESCO landscape at L’Anse aux Meadows, which is now demarcated and buttressed by fragments of repurposed oil rigs. A viewing pavilion atop a hill near the existing UNESCO visitors center frames key views of the material scrapyard, the seascape, and the oil rigs that have been dragged across the

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coastal landscape. The new onshore oil rigs, or what is left of them, are connected by a series of walking paths and catwalks that allow visitors to meander through these decommissioned structures, creating a space for reflection on a history of extreme resource exploitation. This new layer of protective oil-artifact speculates on the future heritage of Newfoundland as its residents grapple with the implications of difficult histories, identities, and industries in the year 2101. The framework of this proposal evokes a dialogue of anti and counter memory in a back-and-forth between water, land, and the future cultural heritage of Newfoundland.

[1] T. S. James et al., Relative Sea-level Projections in Canada and the Adjacent Mainland United States (Natural Resources Canada, 2014), 72, https://doi:10.4095/295574.

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fig. 3(opposite): The rigs’ arrival. fig. 4 (below): Patterns of excavation at L’Anse aux Meadows. fig. 5 (pg. 49): Future archaeologies 1. fig. 6 (pg. 50): Future archaeologies 2.

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NO MAN’S LAND Testing Site 002: Rocky Mountain Arsenal[1] Emily Guo is a recent master’s graduate from the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. Her work explores new complex relationships between the human and the animal under the pressures of the Anthropocene.

In Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto the concept of the cyborg is defined as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.”[2] She argues that by constructing a fiction to map our social and bodily reality, we are able to identify what she calls “fruitful couplings”.[3] This project identifies one such coupling: the accidental animal refuge found in a defunct military testing site in Denver, Colorado.

Today, the loss of natural habitat is the primary threat against 85 percent of all threatened species.

[4] As these habitats become scarce, animals have turned to less conventional territory, namely the military landscape. The inherent character of this landscape—one that is off-limits and protected— offers security against urban expansion. The relationship between the military artefact(machine) and wildlife(organism) creates new ecological connections, in effect becoming a cyborg landscape.

These new, cybernetic landscapes tell the story of a post-human future and challenge us to rethink our understanding of non-human agency in the Anthropocene. While there are many such sites around the world, this proposal focuses on Denver’s Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge.

The refuge was previously the site of a chemical weapons and pesticide manufacturer which has, over time, leeched over 160 contaminants into its soil—including asbestos, cyanide, and freon—rendering the land unprofitable for human development.[5] Yet the lack of human activity has led to the nesting of bald eagles just one year after its closure in 1986.[6] It has since, despite the heavy pollution, been designated a wildlife refuge, kick-starting remediation initiatives and a bison rewilding program.[7] However, this design does not rely solely on the existing systems put in place by the U.S. government to ensure the continued protection of these lands. Instead, it argues for guerrilla-esque

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intervention that uses human engagement through a ‘voluntourism’ program, while supporting the continued occupation of the site by wildlife. In this proposal, the animals are the primary stakeholders.

In contrast to the typical methodology of restoration ecology, the design objectives proposed here are more aggressive. The primary goal is not to “cleanse” the land of contaminants, but to acknowledge the role of these pollutants in allowing wildlife to return. Human activity is restricted to that of the tourist—becoming a visitor, not an inhabitant.

Due to its proximity to the city of Denver, these interventions aim to take full advantage of public engagement through the implementation of programs that operate alongside the existing refuge program. There are three proposed interventions at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal: SOIL, SALT, and HUMAN. [1] Emily Guo, “No Man’s Land: The American military landscape as the new American park” (UWSpace, 2018), http://hdl.handle.net/10012/13014.

[2] Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century,” in The Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2000), 291.

[3] Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 292.

[4] World Wildlife Fund, Living Planet Report 2016 (Gland: WWF International, 2016): 20.

[5] Natural Resource Trustees for the State of Colorado, “Site Description,” in Natural Resource Damage Assessment for the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, Commerce City, Colorado, (Colorado, 2007), 2-8, https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/sites/default/files/HM_RMAAssess-Plan-Chapter-2-Site-Description.pdf.

[6] “About the Refuge,” Rocky Mountain Arsenal, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, accessed January 28, 2018, https://www.fws.gov/ refuge/Rocky_Mountain_Arsenal/about.html.

[7] “U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to Establish Pilot Bison Project At Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge,” The Mountain-Prairie Region, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, accessed January 28, 2018, https://www.fws.gov/mountain-prairie/pressrel/07-01.htm.

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SOIL

Cheatgrass /Bromus tectorum/

Red Three-awn /Aristida purpurea/

This intervention focuses on the chemical pollution left on the site.

Its material is a mixture of soil and compost that has been crowd-sourced from surrounding neighbourhoods through a collection program set up at the refuge.

External nutrition is introduced into the damaged soils and stimulates growth.

A

Legend

①

B

A) compost/soil mound 0.25m

C ②

B) Prairie dog mound C) Grassland D) Chemical Pollution

D

③

1) 2m:Topsoil Thick alkaline, humus 2) 0.5m : Subsoil Clay +Calcium 3) 0.5m : Parent Material

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SALT

Cottonwood Tree/ Populus sect. Aigeiros

This intervention aims to give supplemental nutrients and minerals that are often difficult to naturally find on polluted sites.

The presence of a salt lick attracts a variety of species that seek out its nutrients.

A B

Legend

C ①

A) Salt lick B) Textured concrete pedestal 0.5m

D E

②

C) Bird blind D) Grassland E) Chemical Pollution

Cheatgrass Bromus tectorum/

1) 2m:Topsoil Thick alkaline, humus 2) 0.5m : Subsoil Clay +Calcium 3) 0.5m : Parent Material

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Red Three-awn Aristida purpurea/

③

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HUMAN

Western Wheatgrass/ Pascopyrum smithii/

This intervention provides protection and gathering points for human visitors in the form of viewing decks and bird blinds.

They can be placed in conjunction with the other interventions to encourage a concentration of species.

A

B

Legend ① A) Look-out point B) Textured concrete C) Grassland

C ② ③

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1) 2m:Topsoil Thick alkaline, humus 2) 0.5m : Subsoil Clay +Calcium 3) 0.5m : Parent Material

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FROM CORRUGATED METAL SHEDS TO FIELDS, FACTORIES, AND WORKSHOPS An Alternative Vision for Industrial Districts in Taiwan Yu-Chu Su received his Bachelor of Architectural Studies at the University of Waterloo’s School of Architecture in 2018 and is currently enrolled in the school’s M.Arch program.

His areas of research touch on the political, economic, and social agency of architecture, vernacular architecture, and urban design.

Traditional, labour-intensive manufacturing industries are declining in Taiwan. From 1986 to 2016, manufacturing’s share of the island’s GDP dropped from 39 to 31 percent—including the growth of high-tech sectors.[1] At the same time, post-industrial work such as producer services have gradually increased, especially in major urban centers like Taipei. Driven by the need for capital accumulation, cities are pushing warehouse and factory construction out of urban centers and into the peripheries, redeveloping the former industrial lands into more profitable, homogeneous, high-rise real estate. The result is a massive displacement of workers and the exacerbation of inequality between working classes.

The corrugated metal shed, a common industrial typology in Taiwan, is a site experiencing economic transition. This project specifically looks at the Wenzhai Zun* industrial district—a corrugated metal shed enclave located just outside of Taipei’s city center—to investigate the role of architecture in a rising middle class economy. My research focuses on the programmatic possibilities of an alternative industrial district, the formal strategies of how it should take place, and the process of transformation which challenges the notion of the tabula rasa. This project proposes an alternative vision to existing industrial districts in Taiwan. From a political and economic point of view, it addresses the problems of ecology, geopolitics, and societal well-being by the organization of labor powers and means of production.

Program First and foremost, this project operates on the understanding that Taiwan’s corrugated metal sheds should adapt to changing economic conditions. Economic output is crucial to Taiwan’s political sustainability because of the unique political context in which it is situated.

In his book Taiwan and Chinese Nationalism, Dr. Christopher Hughes describes the Taiwanese context as a “post-nationalist identity in an intermediate state.”[2] It respectively characterizes the island’s domestic and international realities.

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Hughes argues that because Taiwan’s sovereignty is incongruent with the Chinese nation in which it is located, its identity is best described as “post-nationalist.” And because it is neither a recognized, independent nation-state, nor does it function as a province of a unified China, its status is defined as an “intermediate state.” More importantly, it is emphasized that while Taiwan’s post-nationalist identity has largely been the result of democratization domestically, its survival in the intermediate state is only possible through its contributions to the world economy. In short, the autonomy of Taiwan’s political body has not been the result of an international principle of self-determination, but has only been accommodated because the island has made itself an indispensable part of a global economy.

Thus, it becomes clear that because economic output is critical to the autonomy of Taiwan’s political body, corrugated metal warehouses and factories must adapt. The question is rather how should its industry adapt as traditional manufacturing grows increasingly less viable?

The obvious answer would of course be a tran-

sition towards innovation and knowledge industries, but as we have seen in the developed economies of the West, post-industrialization creates its own sets of challenges. David Harvey notably points out the exacerbation of inequality caused by the consolidation of workers with the skill sets that fit into a knowledge economy, while leaving behind the others.[3] As such, this project takes a more radical approach to enable the innovation economy that Taiwan needs. In my proposal, I draw on Peter Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories, and Workshops to imagine a new type of industrial district where labor is organized beyond existing Post-Fordist modes of production—where residential, agricultural, industrial, and post-industrial life can happen in proximity to each other—to create not only a viable economy but also a more equal society.[4] This approach not only mitigates the problem of gentrification but it also builds on a more holistic approach to imagining the future of our cities. It includes localized agricultural productions to increase food security and a shared ownership system to alleviate the inequali-

Recreational/Agricultural

Recreational

Commercial

Light Industrial

Industrial

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fig. 1 (opposite): New developments in Wenzhai Zun, New Taipei City Government, New Taipei City, Taiwan.

fig. 2: Proposed typical section.

ty found in different working classes. Furthermore, an innovation economy is also realized in the mixused nature of this proposal. As argued by Cedric Price through projects like Potteries Thinkbelt and Fun Palace—leisure, communication, and interaction are all critical parts of the production of culture, knowledge, and innovation.

Form

fig. 3: Typical street plan.

With the programs established, the next question is how should the fields, factories, and workshops take shape? Architecture alone simply does not have the scope to engineer a complex economic and social framework that is required at this scale.

As such, the design aspect of this thesis takes a more systematic approach.

Firstly, I introduced additional cross-streets to the site to increase its infrastructural connection to the rest of the city. While the singular north-south running streets of Wenzhai Zun have served the homogeneous functions of manufacturing very well, I believe that for a truly holistic vision of the new industrial district, the urban fabric of the site needs to allow for a greater porosity with the city context (fig. 3). Secondly, I designated three different typologies of streets based on their primary functions— industrial, commercial, and residential. In this de-

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sign the larger urban plan intersects each type of street at critical nodes to provide for a cross-pollination of uses while allowing individual functions to flourish based on their individual needs. Thirdly, by introducing a set of zoning requirements, I attempt to guide the densification of individual sheds by individual landowners in order to accommodate for a variety of programs. Given the diversity of programmatic needs of a highly intensified mixuse vision, and by allowing for individual buildings to respond to each of its unique requirements, this strategy avoids the monotony and homogeneity found in modernist planning practices.

Process In terms of the process of transformation, this project again sits in contrast to the dogmas of modernist planning practices by imagining the gradual transition of the site through individual building lots as opposed to the reconstruction of the entire site via a tabula rasa. The approach to redevelop the entire site through homogeneous land speculation in a single act creates problematic implications. Unless there is a guarantee for the site’s existing businesses to relocate together, dispersion is detrimental to the existing networks of communities and business partnership which exist within the district

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today. Therefore, I have approached this project with consideration for an incremental transformation process.

In the urban plan, existing urban fabrics and building lots are left largely untouched. The proposed street typologies and anticipated densification are designed into and placed over the existing network of streets, laneways, and building footprints. By setting the boundaries of possibilities and by incentivizing individual landowners to densify their sites, Wenzhai Zun can transform overtime into the mixed-use fields, factories, and workshops. It is an approach that takes into consideration the site’s existing sociocultural systems and allows individual parts to change within the larger context. Through this method, the project takes advantage of the existing liberal economic framework in which Taiwan operates, but in its final realization the framework is instead utilized to prioritize occupants as opposed to capital interests. In the end, the vision of an alternative to typical land development is realized without revolutionizing the local liberal economic framework—which itself would be a monumental ambition, beyond the practice of architecture and urban designs.

In conclusion, this project has speculated on ways in which architecture can adapt to changing economies while simultaneously responding to local sociocultural systems. While this research is situated in the Taiwanese context, it should also be noted that the problematic side effects of deindustrialization are a global phenomenon. From the

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emerging economies of East Asia to the developed economies of the West, many regions around the world share the experience of short-sighted land speculation. Wenzhai Zun therefore serves to contribute to the discussion of architecture’s role in the future of our cities. Ultimately, the objective of this project has been to find ways through which architecture can foster alternative modes of living, playing, and working within existing systems. *Wenzhai Zun is an informal name for the industrial district which spans across the Taishan and Xinzhuang districts in New Taipei City, Taiwan. The name was Romanized using pinyin by the author.

[1] Council for Economic Planning and Development, Taiwan Statistical Data Book, 2002 (Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China: Council for Economic Planning and Development, 2002); and Council for Economic Planning and Development, Taiwan Statistical Data Book, 2019 (Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China: Council for Economic Planning and Development, 2019).

[2] Christopher Hughes, Taiwan and Chinese Nationalism: National Identity and Status in International Society (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 1997), 162.

[3] David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 151.

[4] Petr Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow (London: Allen & Unwin, 1974).

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fig. 4: Typical industrial street perspectives.

THE CONTRADICTION OF CONDOMINIUMS Socio-Economic Marginalization in Toronto Levi van Weerdan is a master’s student at the University of Waterloo, School of Architecture. His research focuses on projecting how the legal and economic model of the condominium will impact the future of the city of Toronto.

His professional experience ranges from small-scale residential design to urban metabolism gives him an intimate interest in cities as complex networks of actors and artifacts.

While there is rising concern and commentary over the quality and longevity of the many condominium towers being built across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA)—especially when considering the future of the city—it is equally important to discuss the social and political landscapes that are emerging from this new built form. Condominium towers are not only a novel form of housing in the city but provide an infrastructure for unprecedented social forms and conditions to emerge. Cities are organisms that continuously evolve and adapt to new cultural, political, and social contexts. Populations are always in flux, and with shifting populations come frontiers of social and economic change, leading to the evolution of typologies and the construction of new city forms.[1] Economic and demographic shifts have changed the fabric of downtown Toronto more radically than any other city in North America. Districts such as the Yonge Street Corridor, King-Spadina, and City Place are now densely built up with glass and concrete condominium towers. In 2019, over 75 percent of all new homes built in Central Toronto were high density condominium apartments.[2] This novel form of city building embodies generations of suburban socio-cultural values translated to the unprecedented densities of the new city.[3] This new spatial matrix of concrete towers being built today is not just the city of the present; these towers will likely stand in the city for 60 years or more, continuing to project the implicit socio-economic values that formed

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them onto the societies that take shape within them. When considering the economic and political origins of these towers, it becomes clear that they will not evolve and adapt to become living components of the infrastructure of the city.[4] Rather, the anachronistic notions of suburban living that they embody within the new framework of high-density urban settlement will cause the towers to become instruments of social and economic marginalization. Only by considering how condominiums came to be one of the most prevalent housing types in Toronto, can we understand the challenges and opportunities that they present.

The condominium towers that now make up much of Toronto are unequivocally a product of the neo-liberal turn following the World Wars.

Like many cities throughout North America after the Second World War, Toronto was experiencing immense growth. Rather than being concentrated near the downtown core, as in other periods of expansion, this rapid post-war growth of the city stretched into sprawling suburban neighborhoods.

[5] The reason for this exodus from the city core was two-fold. First, during this time the federal government was actively encouraging private homeownership through the promotion of long-term mortgages. Home ownership was considered to be the most stable way to create a sustained consumer liquidity and power the growing industrial economy.[6] In an increasingly financialized, post-war world, home mortgages also became an attractive

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way for individuals to build private capital. In 1946, the federal government founded the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation to help young buyers secure home mortgages. The second, more cultural cause for this turn was the power of “The American Dream”. The white picket fence model of the home was widely propagated by the Hoover Administration during the Great Depression. Though certainly more prevalent south of the Canadian– American border, the idea of privately owned land as the realm of one’s highest liberty took strong cultural root. This led to an unprecedented boom in the construction of free-standing ranch-style homes on expansive suburban lots. Planned subdivisions like Don Mills became case studies for idealized city living with its winding traffic calmed roads and countless cul-de-sacs.[7] Each house on its grassy 60-foot lot became the domain of the individual. The home (property) came to represent one’s ability to control their own life and to accumulate wealth. It became an integral part of civic identity.

As the city was expanding outwards towards a loose translation of the garden city, it was being offset with a novel form of high-density housing based on the European modernist towers in the park.[8] These concrete high-rise buildings consisted exclusively of rental apartments that shared a common structure, utilities, and amenities. A single corporation owned and managed the whole building. By the mid-1960’s, however, there was an ongoing housing shortage in Toronto that the modernist towers and vast fields of bungalows were unable to alleviate.

In 1967, the Government of Ontario took steps to remedy this housing shortage by introducing legislation that was believed to incentivize developers to build housing more rapidly. This Legislation, known as the Ontario Condominium Act, 1967, (OCA) sought to combine the suburban appeal of free-hold housing with the quick and cost-efficient construction of apartment towers.[9] The OCA made the ownership of an apartment dependent on obligatory membership and participation in a Condominium Corporation. The Corporation, in turn, was responsible for maintaining the shared tower structure and utilities of the units.[10] In this new combination of private ownership and density, buyers were incentivized to purchase condo apartments. Simultaneously, developers were incentiv-

reimagining systems

ized to build them, free from long-term commitments of owning and operating the building as a rental property. The condominium structure, therefore, meant short-term commitment and quick returns for developers. While the OCA seemed like a simple solution, creating many privately owned properties within a shared structure raised many big legal questions over the nature of property ownership. To create the legal possibility for condominiums, the OCA effectively had to erase the line between two traditionally separate modes of legal land title, upending centuries of common-law practice.

English-Canadian property law and its contingent attitudes towards private ownership are derived from the English common-law tradition.[11] Historically, common-law land titles were divided into a set of eight discrete types; fee simple, life estate, lease, easement, covenant, mortgage, liens, and profits à prendre. These eight classes of land title were limited by the legal doctrine of numerus clausus (limited list), meaning that property transactions could not blend obligations from different classes of title. This guaranteed individuals the freedom and certainty to buy, sell, and use property without the threat of unexpected, exploitative or personal obligations.[12] Although seemingly straightforward, numerus clausus guaranteed sole agency, or absolute liberty, by an individual owner over their property that they had title to. This was especially important in fee simple (and mortgage) titles which have become a hallmark of our liberal-democratic society. By blending the fee simple ownership of private units with the collective corporate management of a shared structure and amenities, a covenant obligation, the OCA upended the principle of numerus clausus in order to appeal to the market and consumer demands. Through this framing of private property within a space governed, not by a public, but by a collection of private owners, the fee simple ownership of the unit was placed within the obligations of covenant.[13, 14, 15] Under the OCA, this covenant is governed, if only nominally, by a structured democracy of unit owners, complete with budgets, by-laws and elections for the board.

[16] What the OCA instituted, therefore, are vertical communities, whose management and internal social behaviors are dependent on democracy

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which is exclusive. Democratic participation was made dependent on, and covenant-obligatory to, the ownership of private property.

To stay effective and resilient, democracies require constant engagement of a stable polity. Herein is the heart of the paradox of the condominium towers. Although decades in the making, the conditions that catalyzed the condominium boom in Toronto since the 2000’s are not conditions that promote the development of stable and politically invested communities.

From 1967 until 2000, relatively few condominiums were built. It was not until the turn of the century that private developers recognized the opportunity within this unique form of property ownership. In the 80’s, trends in globalization and financialization saw the rise of the world’s economic cities.[17] The rise of financial centers created enormous real-estate pressure in these cities, spurring rampant housing speculation and the international commodification of places to live. In 2005, the real estate pressure in Toronto was compounded by the creation of the Green Belt which served to accelerate forces of densification within the city.[18] Furthermore, the publication of the Creative City Planning Framework promoted “the availability of affordable, funky downtown housing and loft units” in the downtown core.[19] Pushed out of the suburbs by rapidly rising house prices, young people seeking to buy into the market were prime customers. In what Richard Florida labeled as the “creative class”—the first-time buyer under the age of 35—developers found a market to truly capitalize on an opportunity that the OCA created half century ago.[20] It is significant that over two thirds of all new condominiums built downtown are studio or single bedroom.[21] To maintain accessibility to the firsttime buyer market against sky-rocketing land and development prices, unit sizes continue to become progressively smaller. This is locking significant portions of housing downtown to a single use and demographic – young singles and couples. As this population matures and these restrictive units can no longer sustain their naturally evolving lifestyles, it will become one of their top priorities to move.

Much of the downtown population will be forced to leverage equity accumulated in the condo to

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find a new home – one not bound within a framework of restrictive condominium covenant. Toronto will therefore arrive at a condition where dense swaths of the downtown core are locked in a typology predicated through the OCA, on a structure of democratic engagement that much of its inhabiting society is largely unaware of and has very little interest in participating in for any amount of time or consistency.[22] Without a stable and invested polity (people that actually want to make a home in the condominium) all value systems informing how these new urban environments are governed and maintained will be reduced to real-estate value and economic expediency.[23] If left to their own ends, current policies and legislations that were engineered to perpetuate laissez-faire sentiments of suburban property ownership in a new and radical urban context, will discourage urban social evolution. This will lead to the complete financialization of property in much of the down-town core. Reduced to the open market, trends of real-estate investment will alienate land ownership, leading to a resurgence in absentee landlord-ism within the towers. This absentee-ism will occur at a greater density in the middle of Toronto and will cause the sclerosis of urban society and political engagement in the city core.

Each contemporary society and economy generate needs and desires for new and evolving urban geographies to promote the life of a city. As architects and planners concerned with the design, order, and organization of these new urban landscapes, we must constantly question the relationships between policy, built-form, and the societal forms that they promote, to address the city’s short-comings and cultivate the opportunities it provides.

[1] Neil Smith, “Gentrification and Uneven Development,” Economic Geography 58, no. 2, (Worcester, MA: 1982), 151.

[2] CMHC, “Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation,” Housing Market Information Portal, Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, accessed April 8, 2020, https://www03.cmhc-schl. gc.ca/hmip-pimh/en/TableMapChart/Table?TableId=1.1.4.6&GeographyId=2270&GeographyTypeId=3&DisplayAs=Table&GeograghyName=Toronto#Profile/2270/3/Toronto.

[3] Hans Ibelings, Rise and Sprawl: The Condominiumization of Toronto (Montreal: The Architect Observer, 2016), 28-30 [4] Brian Webb and Steven Webber, “The implications of condominium neighbourhoods,” Cities 61, (2017), 53.

[5] Paul Mitchell Hess and Andre Sorensen, “Compact, concurrent, and contiguous: smart growth and 50 years of residential plan-

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ning in the Toronto region,” Urban Geography 36, no. 1 (2014), 128.

[6] Keller Easterling, “Subdivision Products,” in Organization Space; Landscapes, Houses and Highways in America (Massachusetts: 1999), 134-136.

[7] John Sewell, “Don Mills,” The Shape of the City: Toronto Struggles with Modern Planning (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 96.

[8] E.R.A., Mayor’s Tower Renewal; Opportunities Book, (Toronto: City of Toronto, 2008), 23.

[9] R. C. Risk, “Condominiums and Canada,” The University of Toronto Law Journal 18, no. 1 (1968): 2.

[10] Risk, “Condominiums of Canada,” 24-25.

[11] Cathy Sherry, “Lessons in Personal Freedom and Functional Land Markets: What Strata and Community Land Title can Learn from Traditional Doctrines of Property,” UNSW Law Journal 36, no.

1. (2013): 283-295.

[12] Sherry, “Lessons in Personal Freedom,” 290.

[13] Government of Ontario, Condominium Act, (1998): s.11 (1).

[14] Ontario, Condominium Act, s. 11(2).

[15] Sherry, “Lessons in Personal Freedom,” 296.

[16] Ontario, Condominium Act, s. 51(2).

[17] Jack Self, “Shadow States v1.0.” Fulcrum, video, 11:16, November, 2012, https://vimeo.com/53737831.

[18] Ute Lehrer and Thorben Wieditz. “Condominium Development and Gentrification: The Relationship between Policies, Building Activities and Socio-Economic Development in Toronto.”

Canadian Journal of Urban Research 18, (2009): 93.

[19] ICF Consulting, Toronto competes: An assessment of Toronto’s global competitiveness, (Toronto: Economic Development Office, 2000), 67-69.

[20] Lehrer, “Condominium Development and Gentrification,” 85.

[21] Webb, “The implications of condominium neighbourhoods,” 52.

[22] Evan MacKenzie, Privatopia: Home Owners Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 131.

[23] Webb, “The implications of condominium neighbourhoods.” 54.

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03

MATERIAL CULTURES

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Interview: Kiel Moe

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Interview: Joshua G. Stein

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Building the Paper Economy: Finding Spatial and Cultural Agency through Recycled Paper

Kiel Moe is a registered practicing architect and Gerald Sheff Chair of Architecture at McGill University. He was previously Associate Professor of Architecture & Energy in the Department of Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design where he also served as a Co-Director of the MDes degree program in the Advanced Studies Program, Co-Coordinator of the Energy & Environments MDes concentration, and Director of the Energy, Environments, and Design research unit at the GSD.

Joshua G. Stein is the founder of Radical Craft, a Los Angeles-based studio that advances an experimental art and design practice saturated in history, archaeology and craft. Stein is author of Trajan’s Hollow, which examines the role of craft and reproduction in the era of digital scanning and fabrication, and is a co-editor of Dingbat 2.0, the first-full-length publication on the iconic Los Angeles apartment building type. He has been awarded multiple grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the AIA Upjohn research award, and the 2010-11 Rome Prize Fellowship in Architecture. He is Professor of Architecture at Woodbury University where he directs the Institute of Material Ecologies (T-IME).

Jesse Bird

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The Re-Amortization Act: Material Metabolisms and Cultural Memory

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On Disassembling

Alex Robinson

Nathanael Scheffler

in conversation with:

KIEL MOE galt.: You are a writer, practicing architect, and educator. How do these streams of your career feed into each other?

Kiel Moe: They all directly overlap. When I’m putting a roof on a building, I have some clarity about the thesis for the next book.

When I’m doing research on some topic, I have some clarity about a design project. It’s all very circular, and I don’t see that as unusual. I think these are all absolutely necessary forms of cognitive feedback reinforcement. It’s more puzzling to me how somebody just thinks as a designer, scholar, or some kind of other singular activity. Teaching, researching, designing, and building is wrapped up as a single type of committed practice for me. In my mind, it’s impossible to think through architecture any other way. đ&#x;Œ•

Your work diverts from the typical methodologies of sustainable design, such as energy efficiency or conservation, and towards thermodynamic concepts. Can you elaborate on the concept of energy literacy redefining our relationship with materials and sustainability?

When architects and engineers talk about energy, I know they’re referring to a certain set of ideas about fuel and fuel efficiency.

They call it energy efficiency but they are talking about fuel efficiency. Energy efficiency is nonsensical quackery because energy is always and only 100 percent efficient. That’s the first law of thermodynamics—you can’t create or destroy energy. What people should talk about is exergy efficiency, but they never name that. There’s a whole different set of processes and math associated with exergy calculations. There’s great confusion and the worst part is that they confuse and conflate fuel and energy. Operational fuels account for only about 20 percent of a building’s ecology over its duration, so it’s not an indicator of the most significant environmental impacts. It has, though, locked us into the logic and processes of hydrocarbon capital. There’s never a coherent ecological view of what a building is. If 20 percent of the building’s energy is operational fuels, then 80 percent is the energy required for natural resources which we are extracting, transporting, processing, maintaining, and so on. Architects fundamentally understand materials a bit better than they do energy, so the reality that the energetics of architecture are so tied to the material dynamics of architecture is a good thing. The irony is that if architects worked on the thing that they understand better (materials), they would better exercise the energetics of architecture. When architects talk about materials, they never get into all the real content of what materials are, nor the critical lessons about world systems and planetary urbanization. The conundrum is that architects want to address issues like climate change, but with their methods and confused vocabulary, they’ve removed themselves from any possibility of engaging in it on a significant level. đ&#x;Œ•

By having a deeper understanding of material properties and leveraging regional industries, what are some opportunities in creating a new palette of possibilities within architecture?

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Buildings aren’t built with materials anymore; they’re assembled out of products. They have as many corporate properties as they do thermal or structural, and that’s the most significant transformation of architecture in the last 50 years. The expectation you must download Revit families of some corporation’s interpretation of a brick demonstrates this political-economic shift. burning

Architects have been trained to design buildings as objects, but they’re not objects. That’s just the naive empiricism that architects maintain. They’re planetary processes: the building is just one step in a much larger set of processes. In this regard, designing forestry practices and working with foresters are super interesting and complicated, and no architects are doing it. If we don’t design with this mindset, then we’re not going to be in the conversation on all the key ecological, political, and social issues of the century. My work focuses on material so that we have more access to the actual social and political relations of building. It just happens that ecology gives us the most robust method for mapping out what these materials are.

Where do they come from and what happens to them along the way? Who’s interacting and benefiting from them? Who’s degrading some other person or place on account of that flow?

These questions are important to being able to map out the social and political dynamics of those material flows. đ&#x;Œ• Fundamentally, I do think that architects need to slow the fuck On the topic of globalization, the madown, stop building so much garbage, and actually understand terial supply chain, and issues regardwhat they’re doing. When I build, I’m building a 30 or 50 square ing resource scarcity, how has your remetre building and mapping out everything about it so that evensearch on different systems guided the tually, I’ll be able to do a 100 square metre building. I work with use of your design agency in solving wood because understanding the relationship between buildproblems? ing and forest is so key. If you’re a student of ecology, the term scarcity doesn’t really come up. People who are interested in sustainability are motivated by thoughts about scarcity, but ecology functions on abundance and excess. There are great studies of how design can actually amplify an ecology and make it more powerful, but it’s a question of what design actually is. If it’s just putting up another developer condo in Toronto, then that should be condemned. If there’s some actual regenerative, thoughtful, and just design practice, then that should absolutely be pursued. It requires very different methodologies that they’re not going to tell you how to do at a school of architecture. People think the schools need to change, but I don’t think they’re going to change. They’re all full of old tenured faculty who don’t want to do anything other than what they’ve been doing.

Instead, we need to change our expectations of what schools do. We can’t accept that a degree of architecture should qualify you for designing one of the kinds of practices that we’re talking about. In some ways, it’s unfair to expect them to have a clue about what architecture should be in this century. That’s okay, it takes some time to cultivate genuine alternatives, especially if they’re not the standard mode of architectural practice. We need some alternative schools and design practices that aren’t overt forms of climate change denial or white supremacy elitism. There are other ways of being a design activist like working and learning with real people and places. For example, if you don’t know what the soil, hydrology, or weather of your site is, or what the forest and meadow is doing, then you’re not going to know what you’re building fundamentally. It requires a level of commitment that I rarely see in architecture—but it’s totally possible. đ&#x;Œ• There are great examples of certain studios and courses in the It's interesting that you say that, befringes of any good school, but every curriculum I’ve seen is a cause you are an educator yourself. form of climate change denial. One studio that has a little bit on Where do you position yourself in this thermodynamics or a couple courses about sustainability is in no and how are you approaching some of way commensurate as a response to what your generation and these studios you're teaching? future generations will deal with. Even with a great studio, the students will continue in the next studio to do another bad formalist beaux-arts project about material cultures

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a library downtown, that’s rendered with a certain taste culture that’s popular on Instagram.

A majority of one’s studios will be some version of these deeply cynical aesthetic culture debates and then they’ll have maybe one good seminar, workshop, or lecture class on something related to these topics. Much of the curriculum is just denying the importance of the climate change issue. I’ve only had one class ever that was on anything related to race and architecture, but I had tons of projects telling me what the canon of architecture was—all Anglo-American. I’ve gone to so many lectures where they tell me that architecture is an autonomous discipline.

Architects developed autonomy because architecture was “under attackâ€? from the social sciences and environmentalism in the ‘60s. This is just the gospel that they use to justify their work, which is just a dog whistle to say, “There were race and environmental issues in the late ‘60s that we didn’t want to deal with, so we developed autonomy, and went so far as to insist that the entire project of architecture is reducible to a small set of Anglo-American precedents.â€? It’s just absurd, but that’s dominated architectural pedagogy for decades and it was allowed to persist. Most studios are still operating on the idea that architects are somehow autonomous and that, as a designer, you can do whatever the fuck you want and it’s fine because there’s some sacredness to the center of the discipline. I completely agree something has to change, and I was inspired by your call because I think it’s more on point than most faculty are. You are aware of the issues and want to do something about it. There has to be a bigger change, and there will be a bigger change at least coming from what I’ll be doing in the next phase of my career. đ&#x;Œ• Systems that are on the verge of collapse are the most interesting because you can push or pull them and it’ll have a huge effect that could be catastrophic, or totally beautiful. What we do right now with climate change will set up a huge range of futures. This is the same with race and vertiginous economic disparities that have continued to emerge, especially through COVID-19. These are all related through capital, so if you go after that, then you go after all of it at once. Calls for “moral reformâ€? that are trying to hit race, climate change, and economic disparities all at once would be great for architects to take up. The way to do that through architecture is again through ecology because it touches all those material, social, and economic issues.Â

Issue three of galt. is examining collapsing systems and how to be an agent of change through design activism.

What opportunities do you see in the collapse and dismantling of our way of thinking, practicing, and being in the world?

I wouldn’t want the immense amount of suffering that’s going to occur in the next few decades to be seen as opportunistic, but the most optimistic and clear book I’ve read on this is Prosperous Way Down by Elizabeth and Howard Odum. It’s a very clear and unsentimental view of how you could start to reorganize society, given the fact that there’s going to be a decreasing flow of materials, money and energy. How do you still have a prosperous life and how do you be optimistic about designing life in that context? It’s a pretty amazing and frank assessment of what you could do as a designer. One idea is to teach children what and how energy supports their life. If you don’t know where your food is coming from, or where that brick is coming from, then there’s something wrong. There’s a few ways to act on your observations and pre-assessments of what the coming decades are going to be like, but it’s radically different than what we get in school or journalism. đ&#x;Œ• Your point about slight pressure on collapsing systems inducing dramatic results is a good way to describe 2020.

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To answer galt.’s big question about how to design a burning house—every house is burning. The history of architecture is a history of combustion. Just because the house is not literally burning

burning, it doesn’t mean that combustion didn’t drive every aspect of its material and space. I love the question on one hand, but on the other, it’s describing every building that I can think of.

One of my favorite ways of starting a book was, “it’s so much worse than you think it is.â€? We need to start waking up with that thought in our minds. Everybody keeps asking “when is it going to go back to normal?â€? But nobody should want that. Nobody. Normal was so fucked up, so criminal, so unjust, and it should not go back to that. This is a great moment to change all kinds of behaviors, design practices, pedagogies, and so on. We are at one of those tipping points, or points of inflection, where change can and should happen. đ&#x;Œ• When I was in undergrad, we had to do weeks of air conditioning For us at galt. and for a lot of students, calculations and then the next set of lectures was about insulait's one of the first times that we're retion. The first thing the professor said about insulation was that ally starting to examine this. I'm curi“air’s a great insulatorâ€?. I said, “but we just spent six weeks doing ous about your wake up moment(s). air conditioning calculations, why would we heat a cooled building with an insulator?â€? There was no response. It seems like what architects do is pass down these traditions about design and engineering, but rarely know what the point is. There was a loose sense of the science, which they could never explain or provide any calculations for, so I knew there was something awry in the epistemology of environmental design. It’s crazy to think that architecture exists in this vacuum, but that’s how most faculty are. They’re leaving out the salient ecological and social issues that we’re seeing now, and it’s because they’ve been ignored systematically for several decades. I can’t really point to a single wake up moment, as much as a daily cascade of disbelief at how irresponsible architecture has been in the last decades, and how unwilling they are to to make even the most nuanced of changes. Something bigger has to happen and the wake up moments still get to happen. But I can tell you this: the beginning is near... đ&#x;Œ‘ For further information on these topics, Kiel Moe recommends...

Howard T. Odum and Elisabeth Odum, Prosperous Way Down (Sebastopol: University Press of Colorado, 2011).

Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume 1: Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991).

Joan B. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993).

TorbjĂśrn Rydberg and Jan JansĂŠn, “Comparison of horse and tractor traction using emergy analysis,â€? Ecological Engineering 19, no. 1 (July 2002): 13–28.

Eric D. Schneider and James J. Kay, “Life as a Manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, “ Mathematical and Computer Modelling 19, No. 6–8 (Spring 1994): 25–48.

material cultures

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in conversation with:

JOSHUA G. STEIN galt.: Your work focuses on the intersection between the contemporary and traditional. Often we think about these two methods in opposition to one another. How do you position your work within this intersection?

Joshua G. Stein: When I started Radical Craft, I was working directly with digital fabrication and ceramics. This was the moment when I started thinking about the interface between something I saw as new and something I saw as old. At that time, I probably had the assumption that new tools had something to teach the old materials. Over 20 years of working on this, I’ve come to believe the opposite. I like to question the assumed positivist notion of technology and technological progress.

Some of these older ancient crafts and materials offer ways to challenge this. I still think technique is important. I like to refer to the work of Radical Craft as high-tech and low-fi. However, most of the time when we speak of “tech�, it’s very much an immaterial use of that word. When we think about technology, the idea is to remove ourselves further and further from material complications. For me, the “tech� doesn’t necessarily refer to technology, which implies the new, but instead technique, which is agnostic in terms of time period. I’m interested in techniques both old and new. It’s the opposition that I find valuable, but it’s more of an opposition to a clear idea of progress, with a remaining interest in technique. The lo-fi is low-fidelity.

What does it mean when we allow the process to steer things a little bit more than a desire or an end goal? So, when I use the phrase “mucking-up the gears of progressâ€?, I think it’s important to take that seriously. It allows us to engage in some kind of course correction. đ&#x;Œ• In your Rome Prize research, Trajan’s Hollow, you explore ideas about reproduction and replication of historic monuments using digital fabrication methods—how does this affect and change the significance of monuments? Can you speak to this in the contemporary context of our relationship to public statues and monuments that are being pulled down across the globe?

At this moment, I think it’s a really exciting time for historical artifacts. The fact that they’re being pulled down right now is beautiful. To me, it speaks to the power of these monuments to still operate in a contemporary world, to ask us to pose questions we thought we already knew the answers to. Ancient, archaic, or known forms are important because we believe we know them thoroughly.

The Trajan’s Hollow project was about diving into an inquiry that includes all of our assumptions and our blind spots. Trajan’s Column is one of the best documented Roman monuments and yet, there are still so many aspects that people overlook. Most tourists would imagine this is simply a monument to the glory of Rome, which is true. But specifically, it is a monument to a genocide—to the destruction of the Kingdom of Dacia—sitting in the middle of Rome, but this is a significant thing that not everybody knows or talks about.

While my research focussed on the overlooked interior and material history of the Column, I was interested in exposing a range of assumptions and lost histories. A lot of my research looks at the act of replication, and what it can offer us in terms of reckoning with the past to recontextualize it continually. I’m interested in fabrication as an act of

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inquiry. I don’t know if the act of replication or fabrication is necessarily what we need to be doing with confederate monuments and all the problematic monuments at this moment, but I do think that the spirit of reckoning is obviously critical. Artifacts are a way to re-examine history from a fresh perspective and I think that this is absolutely what’s happening right now.

To question the things we thought we knew about a history we inherited is a powerful act. đ&#x;Œ• I developed a personal and collective relationship with materiality at an object-based scale. When I talk about material intimacy, it’s about being able to work with your hands. Clay was the material in which I really discovered the potential of that relationship. It’s an inquiry that is both material and ideological. If you talk to most ceramicists, I think they understand those materials historically within the context of a human time frame, meaning how humans have worked with these different clay bodies, different glazes, different traditions of working with all the above.

You work with ceramics which have a vast temporal lifespan on the Earth.

The artifacts that you make today have a lifespan that far surpasses your own as a designer. Could you speak to the choice to work with ceramics within the context of time?

Ceramic practice sits inside of a human time scale, but ceramicists understand mineralogy and geology as well. This expands the understanding to a larger time scale, and to a larger spatial scale, to the point where it automatically becomes collective. It’s hard to talk about clay and earth without talking about geology and other things that include the entirety of humanity. The history embodied in clay asks us to do this regularly. It’s inescapable, and I would argue that it’s something that architects should be doing at every moment. This worldview I learned from ceramics started to retrain me as an architect with a different type of accountability: a different desire for a collective reckoning with the material world and then all of the material histories that go along with that. This is why I started to transition into research at a different scale, which became the Geological Atlas of the Built Environment. This research comes directly from an initial experimentation with clay in my hands. đ&#x;Œ• I’m questioning what it means to work with materials that don’t always listen. This is also a metaphor for how we work with something at a planetary scale and how we deal with the earth at this moment as well. It doesn’t necessarily have a consciousness, it’s not always listening. We can project personas or desires onto material, but it is something that doesn’t necessarily listen to us, therefore we need to adapt our desires with the materials that we’re working with. Clay teaches you this very quickly. The minute you put something in the kiln, you realize you can’t anticipate exactly how it will move during the firing. It can come out in a way that you don’t want, so you start to negotiate your desires with what the material can do.

We can look to Richard Sennet’s description of Anthropomorphosis to understand the qualities we attribute to natural materials versus manufactured and highly processed ones. Have you found that through working with materials they reveal their inherent qualities to you? How does this inform your design work and what is lost when we are designing digitally and removed from direct material contact?

I’m not totally self-taught in ceramics, but I certainly don’t have a degree. I took a community college class a few years after graduating from architecture school and found my way back into it. I’m kind of a dilettante, I’m not steeped in the tradition of ceramics and there are moments when I wish I were. I am thoroughly steeped in the tradition of architecture, and I think that does offer a different way of thinking about clay. Clay has a very different paradigm and mindset that I can bring to architecture. I have been working for a while with digital fabrication in ceramics and there are certain things that I am able to question. What does it mean to use digital fabrication tools that offer us an assumption of almost infinite precision, or the material cultures

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delusion of infinite precision in a world where the material itself is precise in a very different way? I would offer that clay is still precise, but it’s a precision that can be at odds with the virtual digital precision that I use inside of Rhino. That has been the crux of what I’ve been working with: a dialectic of taking these two, mashing them up and seeing what comes of it. đ&#x;Œ• University of Waterloo School of Architecture faculty member Jane Hutton recently published her book Reciprocal Landscapes, inspiring student research interest in material tracing. You recently led a seminar on material tracing at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, as fellow students we were especially excited about seeing this research applied in a studio setting. What were the aims of researching and tracing materials through the Geological Atlas of Built Chicago project?

The Geological Atlas of Built Chicago course tries to develop the idea of accountability which, in this case, inherently involves counting. This includes tracing, but also trying to quantify, while still producing artifacts which have a storytelling value to them.

The goal was not to produce design solutions; I think that was very explicit in terms of how this trains us for the milieu we’re inside of in much broader terms. Material tracing doesn’t necessarily lead to a design strategy. The important thing to include inside of our role as architects is the conception of materiality before it arrives to us, and to think of geology or to think of the sites of extraction, as being a part of architecture already. Then vice versa; to think of buildings both as archives of a geological repository, and as archives of inequity or archives of violence. Â

There was the expectation that we could uncover the extraction sites from which all these materials come from for a set of specific buildings. As it turns out, this information is very opaque and very difficult to find, which is intentional because there’s a corporate veil that stops us from tracking the sources and movements of the commodities we use every day. This is already an important lesson for us in this current culture that we live in: even if we really wanted to, we cannot find out where our products and materials come from. And that’s crazy.

What really came out of the course was the need to change the public imaginary. That’s a word that architects are throwing around a lot at the moment and I do think it’s an important one.

The goal of somebody trained inside of architecture is to immediately try to solve the problems through design or through building. I think I was very directly trying to focus the class away from problem solving but instead towards world building. How do we build a different world, at least in our imagination, and then, how do we tell the story to the public? It has to be done in a way that the public can understand viscerally. đ&#x;Œ• The spaces of extraction cannot be conceived of as materially distinct from the artifacts that we build. I think architects have found it easy to talk about sites of extraction as “otherâ€? and buildings as “oursâ€?. When we talk about the commodification of materials, even to use the word “materialâ€? verges on “resourcesâ€?, which automatically severs us from any kind of narrative or empathetic relationship that we might be able to have with the world that materials come from. If we’re only thinking about what we’re building, we’re only thinking through one half of the equation.

We need to be responsible for the entire continuous movement of materials, the transformation of materials over time, and everything that goes along with that. Material histories as they are embedded in culture are included as well; it’s a wider viewpoint than just matter alone.

Resource harvest disproportionately affects communities of low-income and minority populations. For example, the indigenous communities in Canada’s resource-rich north have been ravaged by mining practices. In a world where materials are commodified, how can the field of architecture work to protect landscapes and people affected by resource harvest?

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What I’m hoping to do with the work on the Geological Atlas of the Built Environment, is to directly tackle these issues, and to conflate these two sites. Where Jane Hutton is talking about these sites as reciprocal, I also want to view them as contiguous. We can view geological strata, even when separated by long spatial distances and temporal distances, as contiguous, or at least contiguous at one point in time. Therefore, I think there’s a different accountability that goes along with that way of thinking. đ&#x;Œ• We’re watching so many systems collapsing around us. What’s Issue three of galt. is examining coleven worse are the systems that should collapse, but are becomlapsing systems and how to be an agent ing more and more entrenched. One of the thesis students I was of change to design activism. Can you advising at SAIC was talking about the metaphorical relationidentify and elaborate on a collapsing system within your realm of research ship between ink, and the ways we as a culture are marred by the and practice? petroleum industry. She was using ink as the stand-in for petroleum. What she revealed to me, was that most inks we use today are actually petroleum products. I had no idea. I can understand the analogous relationship, they are both black, but I would have never guessed that it was as direct as one actually equaling and supporting the other. These types of revelations are just horrifying because we realize how complicit we all are at every level in these structures.

Of course, racial injustice is what we’re reckoning with at exactly this moment. I was having a conversation with a good friend the other day. We were both talking about what it means when the Black Lives Matter movement calls for dismantling a structure that may or may not have a replacement in mind. To some, that uncertainty is terrifying, which is what most people are scared of when you ask them to not only defund the police but abolish it. However, in this case there are well-developed replacement structures that have been proposed and theorized. But even in the absence of a well-developed replacement, it is critical to demand the dismantling of problematic structures. I am invigorated by the calls to completely question our most fundamental assumptions and the systems, policies, and infrastructures we have built on these assumptions. I also believe thoroughly in the necessity for a deep connection with history. Those two notions are not incompatible. I believe that we can have a desire to start again while simultaneously looking into the past to understand how we got where we are.

Now, the question we are faced with is how to set up the design guidelines to accomplish this.

I don’t know if I have the answers. I can only say I’m trying to work on these issues with my colleagues. It’s an incredibly invigorating moment to be inside of. It’s a struggle and it’s exciting to know that change can happen fast—and the demand for change is pressing and real. đ&#x;Œ‘ For further information on these topics, Joshua G. Stein recommends...

Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

David Gissen, Subnature: Architecture's Other Environments (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009).

Kiel Moe, Empire, State & Building (New York: Actar, 2017).

Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). w: radical-craft.com material cultures

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BUILDING THE PAPER ECONOMY Finding Spatial and Cultural Agency through Recycled Paper Jesse Bird holds a Master of Architecture degree from Carleton University, where he also completed his undergraduate degree in Architectural Studies. Jesse’s research interests lie at the intersection of material recovery solutions and the socio-economic and environmental factors of waste management—topics he has explored in Australia, Brazil, and Canada. Jesse is currently leading an independent research team at Carleton University where he is exploring alternative fabrication methodologies for the design and fabrication of fibre-based building components.

fig. 1 (above): Implementation and deployment scales within a Sao Paulo community. fig 2. (opposite): Manufacturing processes, available feedstock, and output densities.

Throughout the world, demographic, economic, and technological trends have accelerated our ability to knowingly and unknowingly change the environment in which we live. Changes that are forcing us to reconsider our relationship with material resources and consider alternative frameworks that support resource recovery, inclusive policy strategies, and sustainable economic design. There is a growing likelihood that meeting sustainable economic climate goals will require carbon dioxide removal techniques, also known as carbon sequestering, with some scientists and practitioners starting to recognize material innovation in cities as a global carbon sync. In order to understand how new material technologies can aid in this process, research presented in this paper demonstrates the potential of waste recovery as a viable and sustainable alternative to existing unsustainable building practices.

Global reports show that city produced waste is continuing to rise with little concern for how or where it is treated.[1] In more developed regions, waste is often treated behind closed doors through sophisticated and costly waste management infrastructure, while in less developed regions, waste management employs millions of people around the world who collect, sort, recycle, and sell materials that would otherwise be thrown away.[2] In recent years, sustainable material development has moved to embrace not only materials sourced from within a technological cycle (recycling) but also has embraced the importance of “clean” materials that

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decompose and partake in the biological cycle.[3] With over half of the world’s population living in cities today, and an expected 70% by the year 2050, urgent and long-term waste management solutions are needed in order to combat the growth in construction and exponential accumulation of waste.[4]

Reimagining the Geographies of Waste On a surface level, it is apparent that the world is beginning to shift its recycling habits, from industries and governments to small businesses and homes. The reality, however, is governments have maintained a three decade long “out of sight, out of mind” attitude towards waste management, leading to over 90% of the world’s trash being offshored to Chinese ports because of their low costs of processing and high demand for recovered materials.[5] In early 2018, global waste trade underwent a radical transformation after the Chinese government proposed new precautions for how they handled and processed the world’s waste. Named The National Sword Policy (NSP), its goal dramatically reduced the importation of soiled and contaminated materials (including metals, plastic, paper, and glass) coming from much of the developed world. Resulting in a major reshuffling of the international waste trade, the NSP left many waste exporters such as North America, Europe, and Australia, scrambling to find alternative solutions and destinations for their unwanted paper and plastic exports.[6] As other countries followed suit, large volumes of material are

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Hurds

Wood Chips

Recovered Cardboard

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Bleached Pulp

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Cellulose Fibre Ideal Input

Available Feedstock

now accumulating in landfills, headed for incinerators, or sitting dormant in shipping ports around the globe. Yet the NSP has already proven to be double-edged, as new pressures have forced governments and industries to find alternative solutions for their surplus of second-generation material.[7] In response to the effects of the NSP and through a series of investigations conducted in Australia and Brazil, this project imagines an alternative paper waste chain that emphasizes intelligent product design, inclusive policy frameworks, and circular economic principles to reuse and recycle fiber-based products into a sustainable structural building material.

Ideal Input

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Process Form Milling Stage

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Ultra Dense

Dense Load Bearing

Water Resistant

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Combine with Water

Styrofoam Light

In the last decade, contemporary innovation has largely been adopted by a range of industries and professions alike, fostering a rich awareness of both local and global environments. This confluence of culture, people, policy, and economic factors all play significant roles in how designers interpret the concept of sustainability. Over the course of 12 weeks in the summer of 2019, I had the privilege to work with Australian bio-tech company, Zeoform, to study the technical properties of nano and micro-fibrillated cellulose (NMFC) made from industrial hemp and old corrugated cardboard. With over 20 years of prior technical knowledge of cellulose refining technology, Zeoform uses natural properties of mechanically refined cellulose in a water-only matrix to achieve a range of structurally mouldable product outputs. Cellulose is the most abundant and natural compound on the planet and exists in everything from newspaper and wood chips, to crop-harvests and cardboard. Unlike traditional fibre refining, Zeoform uses natural hydroxyl bonding to achieve a matrix of properties that range from the lightness of Styrofoam to the strength of ultra-dense composites. Academic research has confirmed the success of NMFC as a material that will redefine the future as a durable and sustainable product due to its abundance, high strength, low weight and biodegradability. [8, 9] In recent years, cellulose research has moved from laboratory curiosity to an explosion of interest in materials research, design development and business opportunities and is set to play a major role in moving advanced materials away from petroleum-based products that are not biodegradable.[10]

fig. 3: Local communities and economies that can be uplifted through recycling.

With the help of an interdisciplinary team of engineers and material scientists at Carleton University, we have begun to design and develop manufacturing methodologies using ASTM building standards to determine the material’s mechanical and thermal properties. These results will serve as design development parameters for material connections, assemblies, and product placement. The material’s initial exhibitions show promising potential for the prefabrication and rapid construc-

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tion of new building components within the built environment.

Contemporary building practices have long developed around the concept of prefabrication, with Structurally Insulated Panels (SIPs) becoming key players within the industry for their lightweight, structurally sound, and dimensionally accurate qualities. With a global demand for sustainable industrial and economic solutions, this project provides low-tech/high-value alternatives for indus-

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tries and grassroots stakeholders to take part in a more circular economy. Contributing to local goals of economic and environmental improvement in regions with high volumes of fibre accumulation and recycling.

Material Deployment The concept behind integrated and sustainable waste management implies a hierarchy of objectives that include the minimization of waste, maximizing job creation, and the development of regenerative and circular ideologies.[11] In conjunction to material studies conducted in Australia and Canada, this project directs its focus towards developing regions in hopes of formulating new systematic waste recovery solutions that respond to local conditions and available resources. Among many regions within the developing world, Sao Paulo, Brazil became an exceptional example of a city with high waste accumulation and a leader in sustainable waste treatment practices. In Brazil, the annual rate of household waste generation has been rising more than twice as much as the population growth rate. Placing significant stress on city officials to deal with increasing amounts of municipal waste. Much like many developed countries, Brazil’s waste regime is still predominantly based on dumping and landfilling without recognizing the important livelihood and opportunities that recycling can offer.[12] In early 2020, I had the privilege to travel to Sao Paulo and study ideas of waste management, the circular economy, and alternative cellulose recovery techniques. I experienced first-hand the many complexities of informal and formal recycling while engaging with local organizations, community members, and agencies to understand how current waste management practices could benefit from alternative recovery solutions. Over the course of two weeks, multiple levels of organized and sophisticated recycling practices were observed that were both inclusive and supportive to the broader community.

Waste picking or material salvaging is currently a predominant or exclusive way for material to find its way back into the waste stream. Often referred to as cart-men, salvagers, or catadores in Brazil, they formulate sophisticated social networks that result in high levels of collection. Despite federal acknowledgment of the work being performed, pickers often work in sub-par working conditions,

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rummaging through landfills, collecting from streets, or buying and trading amongst themselves.

Waste picking has been recognized by the UN Habitat Report as a viable occupation that demands support from all levels of government.[13] Recent studies have shown waste picker’s provide significant environmental and economic benefits and, in some cases, have been observed contributing to almost 90% of their cities recycling efforts. Effectively saving millions of dollars per year in conventional waste processing fees.[14] This helps not only illuminate the significance of the informal waste sector as a foundation economy, and back-bone to the city, but represents a systemic waste management issue that requires immediate attention and support. In recent years, some NGOs and privately funded international organizations like Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), have helped initiate waste picker inclusion by providing alternative frameworks that spur grassroots investments to reduce poverty and provide reasonable working conditions.[15] This project aims to work with organizations like WIEGO to better integrate its proposal in regions of sub-standard living and economic neglect.

During my time in Brazil, I experienced many facets surrounding sustainable waste management that helped formulate systematic strategies that could be deployed within these regions. Through

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fig. 4: Waste collection zones of Sao Paulo Metropolitan Area.

fig. 5 (opposite): Potential applications and products that use only secondgeneration based feedstocks.

a series of spatial mapping exercises, I merged existing recycling cooperatives, regions of sub-standard living, and established recycling routes to determine three potential sites of interjection. These sites become primary locations for new recycling facilities that provide alternative destinations for pickers to exchange paper waste for high-value solutions. These facilities work alongside local stakeholders to become hubs of collaboration, innovation, and education through integrated workshop components. In addition to the project’s formal proposal, long-term architectural initiatives and pamphlet style architectures are created to advance public awareness on the benefits of second-generation material solutions. The pamphlets are divided into two formats, one focusing on manufacturing methodologies that outline optimal fibre feedstocks, methods of fabrication and installment, and its potential uses and applications. The second pamphlet illustrates the current condition of the Informal Recycling Sector (IFS) and sheds light on the significance of waste picker inclusion. Using five concepts for deployment, the second panel engages the public on the benefits of inclusive waste management and how resource recovery could become a solution to the city’s unsustainable waste accumulation. Together, these public information boards are to be distributed through the city, engaging in all forms of media, and broadening the conversation of sustainable waste management and the circular economy. Empowering local communities with the knowledge to reimagine their occupation as a new form of economic and environmental improvement.

In response to emergent sustainability and economic challenges in the construction, housing, and waste recovery sectors, recognition of second-generation materials may become the key to alternative building solutions. This project aims to become a case study into the technical and mechanical performance of cellulose-based building components while simultaneously addressing the demand for more inclusive and sustainable waste management practices. The intention was to consider the past, present, and future of recovered fibre products and reimagine frameworks that address the gap between informal and formal economies. Continued academic and professional research is set to explore additional feedstocks like crop-harvests, wood

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chips, invasive weed species, unveiling new discoveries and challenges, while generating much needed conversations on our unsustainable resource dependence, thereby provoking consumers and industries alike to rethink what happens when we simply throw something away.

[1] Jutta Gutberlet, Torleif Bramryd, and Michael Johansson, “Expansion of the Waste-Based Commodity Frontier: Insights From Sweden And Brazil,” Research Gate: Sustainability, no.1 (Oct 2020), 2-4, DOI: 10.3390/su12072628.

[2] Gutberlet, “Expansion of the Waste-Based Commodity Frontier,” 5.

[3] William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the way we make things, (New York: North Point Press, 2002).

[4] United Nations, Sustainable Cities and Communities: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable (New York: UN Publishing, 2015).

[5-7] John Reed and Leslie Hook, “Why the World’s Recycling System Stopped Working.” Financial Times, Oct 25, 2018, https:// www.ft.com/content/360e2524-d71a-11e8-a854-33d6f82e62f8.

[8] Alain Dufresne, Nanocellulose - From Nature to High Performance Tailored Materials (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012).

[9] Blaine Brownell, Transmaterial Next: A Catalogue of Materials that Redefine our Future (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2017).

[10] István Siró and David Plackett, “Microfibrillated Cellulose and New Nanocomposite Materials: A review,” Cellulose 17, no.

3 (June 2010).

[11] Martha Alter Chen and Vic Van Vuuren, Cooperation Among Workers in the Informal Economy: A Focus On Home-Based Workers and Waste Pickers (Geneva: International Labour Organization And Women in Informal Employment, 2017), 10-21.

[12] Gutberlet “Expansion Of The Waste-Based Commodity Frontier,” 2-4.

[13] Kofi A. Annan, United Nations Human Settlements Programme (United Kingdom: Earthscan Publications, 2003).

[14] Martin Medina, “The Informal Recycling Sector in Developing Countries: Organizing waste pickers to enhance their impact,” Gridlines 1, no.44 (October 2008).

[15] “Basic Categories of Waste Pickers,” Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing, accessed February, 2020, https://www.wiego.org/basic-categories-waste-pickers.

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Tube Structures

Furniture Components

Thermal Wall Components

Alternative Building Typologies

Structural Wall Components

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Alternative Building Typologies

Sustainable Buildings

Public Component Parts

Alternative Building Typologies

Interior Wall Components

Structural Bracing Components

Stair Components

Alternative Building Typologies

Ladder Components

Alternative Furniture Components

Structural Tube Members

Housing Components

Alternative Building Typologies

Furniture Components

Roof Structure Components

Structural Members

Alternative Building Typologies

Furniture Components

Exterior Wall Components

Alternative Building Typologies

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Alternative Furniture Components

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Alternative Building Typologies

Alternative Building Typologies

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Alternative Building Typologies

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Alternative Building Typologies

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Alternative Furniture Components

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THE RE-AMORTIZATION ACT Material Metabolisms and Cultural Memory Alex Robinson completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Waterloo in 2015.

After working in London and Vancouver for four years he started his graduate degree in Waterloo’s M.Arch program. His research focuses on environmental justice and the duration of materials as an essential outcome for the future of urbanization.

fig. 1 (opposite): Re-Amortization Act DNA. Diagram by Jamie Cheung.

With the ever-pressing climate crisis, we need to begin thinking of new systems that properly value the embodied energy invested in the built forms of Toronto. The current rate of development and the impacts associated with it demands us to challenge the prevailing neoliberal land value paradigm where existing buildings are demolished in the wake of densification and revitalization of neighbourhoods. Globally, the construction industry accounts for a staggering 38.8 percent of the 100.6 billion tonnes of material consumption per year and also currently contributes 31 percent of landfill waste.[1] Currently the most protective form of material continuation in Toronto is that of Heritage, which focuses on the aesthetic and cultural values that a building has. Alternatively the Toronto Green Standard provides a point driven system for the amount of adaptation a building may have, however is stuck within LEED’s narrow minded system that values energy efficiency much more than the unique building configurations and the embodied energy that resides in them.[2] Both systems have fallen short in properly addressing a material-focused agenda based on embodied energy for the duration and continuation of buildings.

In response to these overlaps, we must consider the possibility of designing a new perspective for urbanism in our cities. Re-Amortization is a political act that will focus on the duration of materials as an important cultural outcome. Commonly used in real estate, the term ‘amortization’ refers to the gradual expensing of an asset over a number

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of years instead of in the year of purchase.[3] For a fixed asset such as property and an existing building on that property, amortization is coupled with depreciation as financial institutions seek to accurately quantify the lifespan of a building. Through the quantification of depreciation, obsolescence is built into the financial ownership of property.

Re-Amortization speaks of a different model that takes place before a property is purchased, where the existing building is evaluated and its materials undergo both a cultural and an embodied energy audit to determine what classification best suits its unique configuration of materials.

This proposed process begins to question the notion of who takes ownership of materials when a building is deconstructed; is it the original manufacturer, the building owner, or the deconstruction company? In an ideal future, building components will be designed to take into consideration greater cyclical reuse goals, and the manufacturer will be held accountable for those cycles. Yet the issue of who to hold accountable for existing buildings still remains. The Re-Amortization Act mandates that the cost of existing materials and their duration is factored into the development cost as well as included into the tender for the job to the deconstruction contractor, making it necessary to have materials have longer durations that exceed use changes from capital development. If developers or contractors were to ignore this re-classification of the existing building, a considerable embodied energy fee would have to be paid. In order to understand the classifi-

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▼ Cultural Value Criteria (Aesthetic)

▼ Durational Criteria

▼ Life Cycle Analysis Values (MJ)

1. Enduring Values:

1. The property has design value or physical value because it, i. is a rare, unique, representative or early example of a style, type, expression, material or construction method, ii. displays a high degree of craftsmnaship or artistic merit, or iii. demonstrates a high degree of technical or scientific achievement.

2. The property has historical value or associative value because it, i. has direct associations with a theme, event, belief, person, activity, organization or institution that is significant to a community ii. yields, or has the potential to yield, information that contributes to an understanding of a community or culture, or iii. demonstrates or reflects the work or ideas of an architect, artist, builder, designer or theorist who is significant to a community.

A. Material must physically remain or return to the context which it was originally configured for material continuity overtime in it’s surroundings(3ii)

B. Representative of a material or construction method of an era, or a material process manual or manufactured, that contributes to an understanding of community or culture. (1.i,ii,iii,2ii)

C. Material deconfiguration would cause a highly energetic differential between material recovery rates and formation energy so that the building must remain in it’s current configuration as to do otherwise would not properly value the energy invested in the building. (6)

2. Disembodied Values:

D. Yields moderate use salvaging refurbishing, recycling of materials. (7)

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E. Yields a high use of salvaging, refurbishing, and recycling of materials. (7)

3. The property has contextual value because it, i. is important in defining, maintaining,or supporting the character of an area, ii. is physically functionally, visually or historically linked to its surroundings, or iii. is a landmark

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F. Deemed structurally unsound and material entropy at highest, in other words it has lived it’s full lifespan (t). Materials must be re-processed into new forms in order to be used again (Specialist).

❶ Product [A1-A3] This encompasses the full manufacturing stage, including raw material extraction and processing, intermediate transportation, and final manufacturing and assembly. ❷ Transportation [A4] This counts transportation from the manufacturer to the building site during the construction stage and can be modified by the modeler. ❸ Construction Installation [A5] (Optional) This includes the anticipated or measured energy and water consumed on-site during the construction installation process. ❹Maintenance and Replacement [B2-B5] This encompasses the replacement of materials in accordance with their expected service life. This includes the end of life treatment of the existing products as well as the cradle to gate manufacturing and transportation to site of the replacement products. ❺ Operational energy [B6] (Optional) This is based on the anticipated or measured energy and natural gas consumed at the building site over the lifetime of the building, as indicated by the modeler. ❻ End of Life [C2-C4] This includes the relevant material collection rates for recycling, processing requirements for recycled materials, incineration rates, and landfilling rates.

The impacts associated with landfilling are based on average material properties, such as plastic waste, biodegradable waste, or inert material.

Accounts for waste processing and disposal, i.e. impacts associated with landfilling or incineration. ❼ Recovery [D] This accounts for reuse potentials that fall beyond the system boundary, such as energy recovery and recycling of materials. Along with processing requirements, the recycling of materials is modeled using an avoided burden approach, where the burden of primary material production is allocated to the subsequent life cycle based on the quantity of recovered secondary material.

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B

C

D

E

F high

Disassemble

A

med-low Disassemble

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high-med

Adapt

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Remain

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fig. 1: ReAmortization Act DNA. Diagram by Jamie Cheung.

high Remain

cations of buildings under the act, we need to look at the most radical forms of legal material preservation: heritage.

Currently, the Ontario Heritage Act is the most powerful legal measure preventing developers from demolishing existing buildings. It has three criteria for acceptance into the heritage register: design value or physical value, historical or associative value, and contextual value (fig. 1). These values all require qualitative analysis of buildings.

As seen under physical value— “ii. Representative of...a unique material or construction method”—or similarly, under contextual value—“ii. is physically, functionally, visually or historically linked to its surroundings.”[4] Although it is important to maintain these qualitative values for communicating memory and place, the criteria’s downfall lies in being too interpretive and based on nostalgic principles. These values need to account for other criteria such as life cycle analysis and material recovery to have a more nuanced understanding of the durational criteria The Re-Amortization Act seeks to mandate.

The Act splits the durational criteria into two segments: enduring values and disembodied values (fig. 2). The enduring values of the act are those criteria that promote a material to remain within its site or context. For example, criteria C of enduring values notes that if a building set to be demolished has an extremely high amount of embodied energy, that would not be recaptured through material recovery, then it’s energy differential would be too consequential and it would mostly remain in its current configuration. Criteria B is similar but promotes structural reuse of an era or building system

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type and is specifically intended for buildings with high adaptability. The only criteria that is mandatory across all classifications is Criteria A, which mandates that all materials must remain on site or return to their regional contexts for material continuity. It ensures that material flows will not be extrapolated outside of the city over time, but instead develop a unique language and material culture specific to Toronto.

The other set of valuation criteria is the ability for a building to be deconstructed, resulting in its energy disembodied. This category requires an understanding of the effective yield for building material systems to be salvaged or recycled. Criterias D & E are meant to be a set of guidelines for this yield.

They include high to medium and high to low potentials of recycled and salvaged materials. Lastly, Criteria F focuses on high material re-processing if the majority of materials have reached their highest entropy and are deemed structurally unsound by a professional materials analyst. When both sets of the durational criteria are taken into consideration, a building may be classified as either I (remain), II (adapt) or III (disassemble).

The Act itself is simple, however the systems and agents that are required for its function are much more complex. Before the industrial era, material reuse was one of the primary practices of architecture. The extraction of new materials and their assembly was economically less viable, so considerable effort was put into material reuse of urban environments. For example, the Cordoba Mosque in Spain uses marble columns mined from the ruins of Roman buildings and was given a new structural function in the Mosque. However, in large capital

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cities such as Toronto that undergo large material inputs for future infrastructure, urban mining is less economically viable, costing on average about 17–25 percent more than demolition and taking 2-10 times longer to complete the building.[5] This is because most existing buildings weren’t built to be deconstructed. This cost would be greatly reduced if systems that allowed for easier deconstruction were to become mainstream in building design.

The Re-Amortization Act would incentivize cyclical processes of designing for deconstruction and would also create opportunities for necessary new building industries centred around reuse. The Re-Amortization Act matches the sociopolitical will of sustainable material practices with the technological and economic improvements needed to yield more materials from existing buildings. Other barriers to the potential for material reuse include changing the existing perception of used materials as unsuitable for structural or code reasons. This could be addressed through more inclusive engineering practices and building codes, like obtaining a system for certification that reduces the risk that professionals would incur.[6] Furthermore, one of the key elements of The Act would be the creation of regional city caches of salvaged and recycled materials. As one of the prominent material reuse advocates Mark Gorgolewski remarks, “waste is sometimes described as material without information.”7 Through the provision of correct and current information, an existing material stands a better chance for future use. For this reason, a rigorous process of material inventorying and tagging in The Re-Amortization Act will help facilitate a better transition of disembodied materials. Enabling these materials to be brought back to their original regions, things such as material logs, connection details, structural design, and deconstruction plans are all vital for designers to understand both the practical capabilities and historical relevance of each material.

As theologian Walter Brueggeman notes, “memory produces hope the same way that amnesia produces despair.”[8] Our current heritage conservation value system neglects the complexity of more than just the immediate aesthetic; we are left with the amnesia of past spaces and in turn the stories that go with them. What we choose to deem as valuable constructs a narrative that is constant-

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ly changing and evolving as time and the environment around us demand it to. The proposed act is but a set of guidelines, and it is up to the architect in charge of translating the material fragments left from each classification to further the reading of the context through design. As the great postmodern urban theorists Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter claim: the city is a didactic instrument where even the most banal aspects charge our perception of a space, just as the most seemingly mundane aspects of a building can redefine our relationship of architecture to memory.[9] By understanding a new way of un-doing seemingly banal buildings and creating a vision in which the built environment carries not only the relevance of our past but also one of a cyclical utopia, can we better tackle and reduce the wasteful impacts that real estate development has on the city of Toronto. The accelerated cycle of extraction, production, and destruction—which urban development relies on—are no longer appropriate for our processes of human initiated environment making. The Re-Amortization Act mandates that the duration of materials is a cultural outcome and a part of our struggle to maintain our collective memory as forces of capital create amnesia and nostalgia. By having the presence of the past become flexible through materiality, the processes of the present can play an equal role in the creation of duration.

[1] Damian Carrington, “World’s Consumption of Materials Hits Record 100bn Tonnes a Year,” The Guardian, January 22, 2020.

[2] “Toronto Green Standard Version 3,” City of Toronto, last modified September, 2019. https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/planning-development/official-plan-guidelines/toronto-green-standard/toronto-green-standard-version-3/.

[3] “Amortization and Depreciation,” TaxTips.ca, last modified August 2, 2019. https://www.taxtips.ca/glossary/amortization.htm.

[4] Ontario Ministry of Culture, Heritage Property Evaluation: A Guide to Listing, Researching and Evaluating Cultural Heritage Property in Ontario Communities (Queen’s Printer for Ontario, 2006), PDF, http://www.mtc.gov.on.ca/en/publications/Heritage_ Tool_Kit_HPE_Eng.pdf.

[5-7] Mark Gogolewski, Resource Salvation: The Architecture of Reuse (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2018).

[8] Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2016).

[9] Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Basel: Birkhauser, 2009), 124.

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ON DISASSEMBLING Nathanael Scheffler is currently pursuing his Master of Architecture degree at the University of Waterloo. His thesis work engages with modern material culture, investigating how we can learn and hopefully teach people to engage with the things around us.

Check out more of Nathanael’s work at letsmakegoodstuff. com and nathanaelscheffler. com

fig. 1 (opposite): A relatively modern drill shows the increasing complexity of new products.

The current climate of crisis has changed daily life for almost everyone, be it their occupations, routines, connection with friends and family, or even their ability to experience in the world outside of their residence. As we have all tried to adjust to our increasingly compartmentalized communal existence, we have had to learn to work and live with limited access to other people, things, and materials. It is no longer possible to simply walk into a store and try on clothing until we find the perfect pair of jeans. Many companies have moved to fill this gap through online sales, making the world’s wealthiest richer while small businesses scramble to catch up.

However, this uptick in online sales is not the only trend to emerge; we are also seeing people turning to old hobbies, video tutorials in craft, and baking. Quarantine has marked an overall shift toward self-reliance. With the developments of industrialization becoming less accessible, people are learning anew how to make things for themselves.

Since the industrial revolution, society has experienced a shift away from individual craft towards mass production and specialization. Continuing in this trend, most modern products aim to separate their function as much as possible from their internal workings, presenting themselves as perfect artifacts, untouched by human hands. In combination with a reduction in technical education, which Matthew B. Crawford laments in his book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, that we have fallen out of touch with the things around us.

Working within this new opportunity for self-reliance, we can begin to reclaim agency over the things around us. Since simply replacing broken things is no longer as simple an option as it used to be, we can learn to make use of the things around us and attempt to repair them for ourselves. We are not alone in exploring how these things work, even though the detailed user manual seems to have gone extinct. Guides posted in on-line communities

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like iFixit and Instructables provide more support than ever. There is already a mass of people out there who are learning to repair and build things for themselves, and most of them want to teach others what they have learned.

Through disassembly, whether for the purpose of fixing or simply for interest’s sake, we can discover how the individual item itself works, as well as the things that came together to make it. In my own explorations, I have learned about manufacturing trends through a series of drills, namely: increased sophistication of tools and subsequently more complex parts and assemblies. The shift away from expensive and stubborn metals to cost-effective and malleable plastics and a tendency toward electronic controls over mechanical ones have become apparent. Acting as mechanical archeologists, we can learn from these changes and assess their benefits and downfalls. Through the things we make, we can access a larger metaphor for our contemporary world. A more complex part may be lighter: does this make it harder to replace if it breaks? Although making something out of plastic makes it cheaper, does it reduce the lifespan of the overall piece?

And even though electronic controls can simplify production, does that also serve to mask the inner workings from somebody trying a home repair down the road?

As designers, we should carefully weigh the costs of these trends and choose the best solutions from both old and new designs, creating items that are not only pleasing to use for their function but are also easy to understand and repair, should they ever break. By making a practice of disassembly and maintenance we can make better decisions in our own work, in turn making more opportunities for others to take personal agency over their own stuff and make a world that ultimately becomes more repairable.

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04

DESIGNING ACTIVISM

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Interview: Suzanne Harris-Brandts

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Interview: Geoff Christou

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Building on Unsettling Ground: Instability and Adaptation In Arivat, Nunavut

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Our Burning House has set Fire to the Streets: Empowering Activism through Collective Artefact

Suzanne Harris-Brandts is Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University and a licensed architect with the Ontario Association of Architects (OAA). She holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Waterloo and a PhD in Urban and Regional Studies from MIT. Her research brings together design and the social sciences to explore issues of power, equity, and collective identity in the built environment—often foregrounding the role of designer agency. Suzanne has over a decade of international professional experience. Her work has been widely disseminated in books, blind peer-reviewed journals, design publications, and exhibitions. Her work has been supported by the Graham Foundation, Open Society Foundation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Aga Khan Foundation, and MIT, amongst others. In 2017, she co-founded Collective Domain, a practice for spatial analysis, urban activism, architecture, and media in the public interest.

Geoff Christou is an architect and permacultural designer in Ontario. For the last 10 years he has been intensely involved in implementing net-zero carbon and high-performance buildings with permacultural landscapes. Over his career Geoff has worked on projects that range from childcare centres, hospices, community centres and homes. His most recent permacultural design was for a 10-bed hospice located in Orillia, Ontario. While operating on a very tight budget, Geoff produced a site plan which preserved mature trees, incorporated an integrated stormwater management plan using rain gardens and naturalized swales, as well as an herbal and kitchen garden for patients. Geoff’s intervention preserved old-growth beech and maple trees and created scenic paths with seating opportunities within the adjacent forest. As a permacultural designer Geoff conceived of and currently runs the four year-old Balsam Food Forest, a permaculture food forest located near MacKellar, Ontario.

Jason McMillan

Devin Arndt

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A Drink of Water Takes a Village Hiba Zubairi

Tales to Astound Brendan Lacy

in conversation with:

SUZANNE HARRIS–BRANDTS galt.: Your work has involved critically assessing the politics of architecture and its correlated image-making. In a 2018 article for the journal Eurasian Geography and Economics, you coined the term “architectural rumors�. Could you speak further to this idea and the impact it has on local communities?

Suzy Harris-Brandts: Representation and project mediation have always been major factors in how architecture is argued and communicated. Often, images of architecture aren’t just selling their aesthetics, but they’re communicating larger moralistic and political messages, which is where this concept of “architectural rumors� came from. It became of interest to myself and my research partner, David Gogishvili, when we noticed these great disconnects between the shiny, early project renderings of proposed mega-projects and their long-term realities. That there is often a disconnect between built and unbuilt work is, of course, not a revelation. But most research today compares how built works have fallen short, rather than looking at the life of an unrealized project in and of itself, and that political utility.

One example that we point towards in the article is the eco-island mega-project Zira Island by Bjarke Ingels Group, proposed for Baku, Azerbaijan in 2009. Over a decade later, it is clear that the project will never be realized. Yet, its images are still circulating widely. Admittedly, such unrealized projects may not have the same detrimental physical impacts as built mega-projects, but they still have wide-ranging impacts on communities. They enable illiberal governments to present themselves as progressive and environmentally conscious, using architecture to launder their illiberal rule and deplorable human rights records. đ&#x;Œ•

Can you comment on the agency we have as architects to impact politics?

What are the sociopolitical tools we should be familiar with and how can they promote change through our work?

Our agency as designers, at the most basic level, should be thinking twice before we circulate some of these projects, or refer to them as precedents in our work. The cousin of architectural rumors is this idea of “greenwashing�, where a project’s overstated environmental claims ultimately fall flat. With an increase in project images circulating globally—often showing places we will never visit first-hand—there’s a whole realm of dirty design-politics to consider in relation to unrealized projects which have huge local impacts.

We often collect the sexiest and most romanticized images of architecture not thinking much about such underlying complexities. This is logical given that we want our designs to aspire to the best they can be and look toward captivating images that help reflect future prospects.

But, inadvertently, we may promote some of the darker, politicized aspects of these projects.

Moving beyond this, if we think about the agency architects have to impact politics, there’s a great opportunity to start thinking about how we can produce our own counter-images that challenge these narratives. In one of the cities I research, Skopje, North Macedonia, local architecture students acted as activists by posting counter-images of their own proposed project alternatives on construction sites around the city. They were taking a stance against a massive, top-down, government-led initiative to transform the capital with divisive ethnonational architectural narratives. The students’ projects showcased to the public the possibilities of an

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alternative urban reality. I think in this sense, our skills of visual representation can be really powerful tools for activism. As practitioners, we also need to be a bit more explicit about the ethical standards that dictate our profession. Another example from Skopje was that the Association of Architects of Macedonia boycotted all of these contentious state projects and called on their members not to participate—claiming that it would impact their licensure. I think this raises some interesting questions about what we can expect from our licensing bodies like the RAIC (Royal Architectural Institute of Canada) and the OAA (Ontario Association of Architects), and what constitutes professional ethical standards. At the end of 2019, all Canadian schools of architecture started the Canadian Architectural Forums on Education (CAFÉ), which was meant to encourage thinking about the ethical implications of our profession. This is promising and I think it will be interesting to see if it opens up a new horizon for thinking about the structuring of the profession through broader socio-political and ethical mandates. đ&#x;Œ• Over the past few decades, the political implications of design Given that architectural work is unhave increasingly come to the fore as architects react to things avoidably political, what methodololike global market crashes, international humanitarian crises, gies can we look to establish an ethical and now the COVID-19 pandemic. In turn, architectural analysis standard of service? By what standard has shifted more toward the humanities and social sciences. As can the architect act to? an example, the rise of conflict-induced displacement over the past few decades has led to an incredible surge in design responses in this field. Part of this is because conflicts are more often taking place in cities and displacement is becoming more urban. In addition, conflicts have become more protracted with longer-term impacts on cities.

I’ve become really interested in the deeper issues of how displacement comes up against other aspects of urban development because of this, especially for architects who are not even consciously seeking out the topic. For example, my small research practice, Collective Domain, is looking at state-led efforts to redevelop a former Soviet resort town in the Republic of Georgia, called Tskaltubo. Since the collapse of the USSR, the vacated hotels of this town—which are called sanatoria—have served as de-facto humanitarian shelters for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) that fled from the nearby secessionist region of Abkhazia. These buildings have now equally spent their lives as humanitarian shelters and places of tourism—roughly thirty years as each—which raises some important questions about what should be preserved and forgotten in the face of present-day heritage-based redevelopment. These are the kinds of questions that now challenge architects who might simply be interested in heritage or tourism alone, and not actively seeking out work on displacement or humanitarianism.

In terms of the methodology in our work, this project involved community outreach through multiple focus groups and interviews. I think for architecture students wishing to study these sorts of places, there’s a lot that can be gained from taking research method classes in other departments like anthropology or political science. Design students should also think about submitting their proposals for IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval before making site visits and engaging with local communities. At the most fundamental level, we must ensure that there are real community benefits from the research phase and not just theoretical benefits from our speculative work.

When we talk about practicing architects getting commissioned to design projects for these types of sites, it’s a bit more difficult. Architects often arrive far too late in the project process designing activism

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to have any effective community engagement, which is a shame. I think if there are architects interested in doing work in these contexts, they can consider approaching things differently.

First, they can find a local group with whom they’d like to advocate alongside. Then, they can use their skills in things like visual representation, design, and knowledge of the building code to help lobby that community’s causes as allies. It’s a much longer and less profitable path. But it’s one way that we can start to say from the beginning: “Who do I want to ally myself with as an ethical practitioner?â€? and “How can I help this community realize what’s important for them?â€? đ&#x;Œ• Architecture is behind when it comes to allyship and ethnographic modes of research, compared to other faculties.

Your work has focused on the injection of ethics into research methodology.

How does this equip students and professionals to understand the complex systems we operate in?

I think one of the great challenges design professionals and students are facing today is that we continue to be pulled in all directions. We are increasingly having to specialize to keep up with technological advancement and at the same time, in order to fully comprehend the challenges we face today, we need to constantly broaden our horizons and acquire new knowledge from other fields. We have to comprehend the global as it manifests locally and balance the needs of individual projects with broader societal needs. There’s no one easy and simple answer, but something that’s promising to me is that architecture seems to be moving away from the claim that social concerns are not our responsibility. Zaha Hadid famously rejected criticisms regarding construction workers welfare at her office’s al-Wakrah stadium site in Qatar, claiming that it’s not her duty as an architect to care about workers. I think that many architects nowadays would refute that sort of stance—at least, I hope they would.

Complicating all of this is that we are increasingly seeing the commissioning of really big mega-projects that address existential threats like climate change. Looking at the mega-projects and rise of incredibly large master plans, I’m not entirely convinced that we’re giving enough attention to the larger socio-political complexities or long-term impacts of these projects.

These are projects that take decades to realize and cost billions of dollars. In my opinion, it’s not appropriate for such projects to be based on the vision of a single starchitect and reminds me of these top-down initiatives that were so popular in the mid-20th century. James Scott famously talks about the perils of technocratic high modernism, where modernist designers like Le Corbusier believed they could solve social and political issues through grand designs.

Today, we are being confronted with problems that definitely require large-scale responses.

But we need to resist falling into a similar trap of thinking that top-down, technocratic design has all the solutions.

On a positive note, I think this is something for which design schools are well aware. Incredible student thesis work is being produced in Canadian schools of architecture. There’s also a foundation of work to build on from not only architecture, but related fields like urban studies and human geography. Over the past decade, there has been a growing body of work around the world looking at topics like community engagement and climate response. Some of that work builds on ideas from the 1960s and 70s that get reconsidered and reframed for use today. Moving into the future, I think interdisciplinary collaboration will be key. On a personal level, I’ve learned a lot from engaging with local communities and from both of my co-founding partners at Collective Domain who are human geographers. Architects learn from these other fields which are learning from us, as well. We need to collaborate through finding both community allies and similar scholars engaged in our work. đ&#x;Œ•

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I’m indebted to those who have taught me while working overWhat kind of challenges and experiseas and I very much appreciate all that I’ve been able to learn ences have you had working in differfrom those with whom I’ve crossed paths. In my time spent in ent countries? How do architectural the West Bank, I worked with DARR (Decolonizing Architecture firms nowadays approach global projArt Residency), which gave me a platform from which to begin ects and their affected communities? learning through peer and community engagement, while also offering my own skills in ways others might find useful. My more recent research across Eurasia has taken a similar but more self-directed path, where I have learned from, collaborated with, and became really good friends with those studying the local built environment. These experiences have been quite different from earlier ones that I had when I was an undergraduate student working at international design firms.

When I worked in London and Toronto, I was at times involved with projects that were not based locally. We would receive just a few photographs and a site plan and then begin designing. It’s a lot harder to design appropriate site responses in situations like that, and I have actively worked to move away from that model. At the end of our Architecture Rumors article, one of the questions we ask is who needs who more? Is it autocratic regimes that need starchitects to launder their image, or is it starchitects that need autocratic regimes to constantly fund their work and keep their employees paid, their portfolios filled, and so on? I think it is worth having these sorts of discussions. I can empathize with the excitement of working abroad, which can be a very enriching experience. But it’s important that as ethical practitioners we balance that excitement with the greater implications of how we may become complicit in something for which we didn’t sign up. đ&#x;Œ• I have just started a new job as Assistant Professor of ArchitecWhat are you working on now? ture and Urbanism at Carleton University, which I’m really excited about. The school has an amazingly talented faculty and student body focused deeply on engaging with design’s social, political, and economic aspects. In my opinion, it’s leading the way in terms of bringing together students of architecture, urban design, and heritage preservation who learn from one another. At Collective Domain, in addition to the work on the Tskaltubo that I mentioned, we are in the data collection phase of a three-year research project called Socio-Spatial Georgia. It looks at the social impacts of large-scale urban development in Georgia’s two largest cities of Tbilisi and Batumi. At the end of last year, we conducted focus groups in each city and are now expanding that to larger public opinion polls. After that, we will move more into the propositional realm.

In terms of my personal work, drawing from my dissertation research uncovering the politics of urban development and image making in capital cities, I’m pushing forward my current book project, entitled Constructing the Capital. It foregrounds case studies from Eurasia to look at city building campaigns in “hybrid regimesâ€? (part-democratic/part-authoritarian regimes). It demonstrates how architecture and urban design are manipulated for power retention, also highlighting bottom-up, community-based strategies that resist such actions. đ&#x;Œ‘ For further information on these topics, Suzanne Harris-Brandts recommends...

Suzanne Harris-Brandts and David Gogishvili, "Architectural Rumors: Unrealized Megaprojects in Baku, Azerbaijan and their Politico-Economic Uses," Eurasian Geography and Economics 59, no. 1 (April 2018): 73–97. w: kolektiuri.com designing activism

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in conversation with:

GEOFF CHRISTOU galt.: There is a misconception that permaculture is primarily a response to monoculture farming. But permaculture isn’t just a form of decentralizing and diversifying food production, it’s actually a design framework for creating sustainable and permanent human settlements. Can you tell us more about permaculture as a form of design?

What scales does this system operate at?

Geoff Christou: As soon as you spend a minute or two thinking about food you realize society is built on our stomachs. Food forms the foundation of our basic hierarchy of needs [in reference to Maslow’s hierarchy], so any system for organizing a society has to be dependent on the food system, which can then catalyze all the way up to self-realization. In permaculture you’re creating more than just a building, you’re also creating a system for food production and water collection. It’s a system that looks at inputs and outputs, feedback loops and energy potentials, and ties all these systems together in pragmatic ways. It avoids abstract aesthetic theories that are far too common in architectural practice.

In permaculture, one strategy of understanding a site is through the concept of “zones of use�.

[Architecture is represented as the central point in a number of concentric rings which make up different zones. The smallest rings are the zones you travel to frequently, and the furthest rings are places seldom travelled, like the peripheries of urban life.] The first zone of use might be where you walk to go to your car, or to lunch. The idea is that most of your food should be grown in the places we spend most of our lives. It’s about putting things where they belong. đ&#x;Œ• How does permacultural thinking inform the way we design architecture or urban development in the context of climate change?

Another way to think of permaculture is in contrast to a reductionist approach or—in terms of architecture and design-thinking—to the “diagram�. There are famous examples of starchitects standing up in front of a diagram during a presentation and saying: “thus it is proven why my building should be this way.�

Permaculture would, instead, consider the building as a porous membrane that moderates the climate of the site: shielding it from the sun or, at the right time, harvesting the energy. It’s not an abstract theory imposed onto a site but a direct response to the site. When you start to think of all the energy flows that come onto a site—the wind, rain, and sun—you realize how urban development often works in opposition to them. For example, as soon as there’s 100 mm of rain in Toronto streets start flooding and buildings start breaking down. In my building when there’s a lot of rain, the pipes start to shake because there is so much water. All of that water is potential energy that could be used to flush the toilets or to generate electricity, but the current approach is to deal with water as a waste product. It’s sent into a sewer and then it floods the sewage treatment plant or it goes down into the lake. What if that was actually considered a resource?

At Coolearth, I worked on a hospice project where we designed a swale to infiltrate rainwater from the parking lot and the building; the swale was also naturalized, so it avoided any trees.

A lot of the time, the idea is to get the water off the site immediately and into the municipal

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ditch or sewer. Instead, we wanted to have rain gardens that infiltrate the water throughout the site and then we wanted to have swales which would bring the water throughout the site and infiltrate it again. We turned a waste product into a resource to increase the groundwater for our site’s giant trees. đ&#x;Œ• The main thing is I never asked anyone what they wanted to do, I just said what we should do. Engineers know about these natural-integrated techniques from school but unless someone says otherwise, they often revert to standard practices. I knew that I had my own knowledge of infiltrating swales and rain gardens, and that I wanted to implement them. We didn’t ask the client and we didn’t hold a meeting to convince anyone.

How did you navigate the bureaucracy of a standard, policy-driven solution to water management? What was the process to expand on something that would typically be part of an engineer's scope?

At a policy level, the City of Toronto tries to promote sustainable design, such as the Toronto Green Building Standard, which can get bogged down by bureaucracy. At the end of the day, you—the architect—are the expert, you need to make sure these strategies get known and it doesn’t need to be a big neon sign that says, “Effective Rainwater Harvesting Here.â€? While you can sit on your tower and make pronouncements for change, unless you’re double checking the stormwater management drawings from the engineer before they’re issued then you won’t end up making a positive impact. đ&#x;Œ• The rethinking of our built environThe core idea of a utopia is that it’s a place derived from ideas ment based on our proximity to and and first principles—that’s why the world literally means a “nonrelationship with food is extensively place.â€? But it also relates to eutopia which means a “good placeâ€?. dealt with in your book Utopia: A PerThis book was my attempt to show how using permaculture we macultural Vision. Two quotes that could create a good place. Permacultural thinking is often described in manuals and handbooks, I wanted to use my abilities really stood out for me were: “We are as a designer to help actualize some of those ideas. To explore proud of our footprints. It is often said what the world would be like if permaculture was implementthat forests grow in them,â€? and “Pered. A world where there is harmony and abundance, and where maculture is not just ‘sustainable’, it people really didn’t need to work because they are working with is regenerative.â€? Can you summarize natural systems. Right now we’re destroying species, ecosystems the purpose of your book and possibly are collapsing, and great aquifers are being depleted. I wanted to speak to these two concepts? show just how much we have to gain from working and thinking holistically with nature. By creating positive feedback loops you’re not just sustaining what you have, but you’re actually healing the land. That ends up healing people too because what we’re doing to the climate is actually being done to us.

Collapsing ecosystems are being seen alongside rising inequality and the many issues in the news today. Apparently, political uprisings can be predicted based on food shortage, yet we trust a system that has only 80 days of grain supplies globally and has only six or 12 main food products. Whereas in a permaculture garden you might have a hundred different types of food. There’s some permaculture sites in Norway that have 500 plus different edible species!

If the weather is hot one species will thrive, if it’s damp another species will grow in its place.

Instead of a linear agricultural industry there is this incredibly complex web of production. đ&#x;Œ• I think so much of our conception of humanity comes from this initial idea that humans are separate from nature. That we committed a sort of “original sinâ€? that made us need to work in rependesigning activism

How can positioning human beings as a protagonist working with the environment be a productive perspective?

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tance forever. But if you view that as just a myth—and you start to look around you—suddenly there’s examples everywhere of people working with nature and making the world a better place. Of course humans have an impact on the Earth: we use its resources. But what is the overall impact of those resources, for example, if you’re recycling the waste you produce? There’s also the fantastic example of the Amazon rainforest. Scientists have discovered something they call “black goldâ€?, a soil stratum that’s dozens of feet deep containing pottery shards and different elements which shows that it’s clearly man-made. This extremely rich topsoil was created by a civilization that had a radically different approach to society, but still managed to benefit the environment. It’s not just like humans are and have always been a swarm of locusts flying around and consuming—this sort of thinking is a product of a Western-colonialist approach to Earth as a resource rather than a source. đ&#x;Œ•  Human culture is often vilified in the If you trace back the threads of science fiction, they actually context of climate change, which sets emerge in utopian writings. This goes all the way back to Plaup this paradigm that human beings to’s Republic where he first imagines a fictitious world—so yes, and the natural ecosystem are unable science fiction can be a form of utopianism. Though I do think to coexist peacefully. The obvious refthere’s a difference between writing a 500-page fantasy novel erence in terms of literary structure is with character development and plot, versus a collection of utoThomas Moore’s “Utopia,â€? but I was pian writings. One is essentially entertainment, whereas the othalso reminded of a number of popuer is a social critique. lar sci-fi narratives. Can speculation  through science fiction become a form I think sharing a vision of a world is ultimately a form of activof activism? ism. Strong ideas have this amazing capacity to travel through time and space: I think of when I first read Thomas Moore, written over 500 years ago, his ideas absolutely affected me and ring true today. In that sense it’s an activism that doesn’t occur on the streets per se, but a vision that resonates through generations. Hopefully by sharing writings of these utopias we can plant seeds in people’s minds that inspire change. đ&#x;Œ• When we think of the word “permacultureâ€? we think of its literal definition: as a portmanteau of “permanentâ€? and “agricultureâ€?. I wonder if this way of thinking can also be extended to a way of being. For this next question could you reflect on the “cultureâ€? in “perma-cultureâ€?? Not in the scientific sense of the word, but through a social lens.

The reason we bring this up is because one facet of moving towards a more resilient environment is changing individual habits. Does a perma- “culture� give us the tools to change our individual, destructive habits? And how do we, as designers, participate in influencing this change?

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There’s an inherent ambiguity between “agriculture� and “culture� itself. The word “culture� can mean “to grow�, but it also means “a system of practices and beliefs that informs a group of people�. Going back to Maslow’s hierarchy, you can see how a culture depends on the energy and resources of the location in which it is based. I view fossil fuel culture more like a form of resource slavery—we use it to do whatever we want. Whereas in permaculture, you operate within a system which uses the resources that are nearby to create an integrated cycle.  If you want to design a better world for other people you must start with yourself. Think of how your waste streams can be refined, and how your behaviors and actions can start to create a more positive feedback loop around you. The good news is it’s not rocket science; ask yourself, “Am I eating locally grown food?

Am I eating organic food? Am I trying to reduce the water I use?�

These things are really primitive yet pragmatic steps. The first step to changing society is to change yourself. burning

Another idea is to transform problems into opportunities. The famous example in permaculture is how you react if you have slugs attacking your garden. Because you don’t want a slug problem, you add a chicken coup so that the chickens will eat the slugs. From here you can start to eat the eggs the chickens lay, and you’ve effectively made a positive out of an otherwise undesirable solution.

I do think we need to be careful of the wolves in sheep’s clothing. Just listening to someone talking about ecology doesn’t mean that they’re working with nature per se—it means they’re just using the word “ecologyâ€?. So I think you have to be very skeptical and use your senses to evaluate the true results of those discussions. đ&#x;Œ• Since I started integrating permaculture into my daily life I’ve It sounds like permacultural thinking been growing more of my food, and it’s been so nice. Not only in allows us to individually become actors terms of getting great food, but also working with a community of change, instead of only demanding of people. I have a food forest that I’m working on—it’s four years change from others. How have your old—and I’ve had dozens of people come and help me plant trees. habits changed? How has this affected People build friendships here and being around that honestly the community you live in? benefits me, it’s not like an abstract project that I’m just holding on to keep my edge in the field. I’m personally benefiting when I practice permaculture.  You can apply this same approach to an architecture school project where you think, “Okay, let’s think about all these potentials for creating a local economy on the site.â€? A method where resources are cycled, exchanged, and value is added. It’s not just a building anymore, it’s a series of feedback loops—and that kind of design is super exciting. đ&#x;Œ‘ For further information on these topics, Geoff Christou recommends...

Dave Boehnlein and Jessi Bloom, Practical Permaculture: For Home Landscapes, Your Community, and the Whole Earth (Portland: Timber Press, 2016).

Toby Hemenway, The Permaculture City: Regenerative Design for Urban, Suburban, and Town Resilience (Hartford: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015).

David Holmgren, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability (Hepburn: Holmgren Design Services, 2002).

Bill Mollison, Permaculture: A Designers Manual (Austin: Tagari, 1988).

Christopher Alexander, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World Systems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

To download and read Geoff’s Utopia: A Permacultural Vision visit permacultureutopia.com.

w: geoffchristou.com ig: @geoffchrisou designing activism

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BUILDING ON UNSETTLING GROUND Instability and Adaptation in Arviat, Nunavut Jason McMillan is an intern architect and researcher based in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, on the traditional homeland of the Yellowknives Dene and traditional lands of the North Slave Metis. Jason has also worked in design offices in Toronto and Paris, and is a researcher at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. His work is focused on the local building cultures of communities in the Canadian North and their relationships to the land, development, and a rapidly warming climate.

fig. 1 (above): Aerial view of Arviat, Nunavut. fig. 2 (opposite): A hunter returning from the caribou herd by snowmobile and qamutiik.

Traditional relationships between Inuit—the Indigenous peoples who call the Canadian Arctic coastline home—and the land were fractured by modern Canadian town planning, which resettled Indigenous peoples within military, mining, and trading infrastructures. These communities have since outlasted the trading posts and military bases that marked them in the landscape—rows of suburban houses are at odds with the instability of permafrost geology they have been built upon (fig.

1). The architectural and urban legacy of the 1950’s, 60’s, and 70’s in towns such as Arviat, Nunavut, rose from a reading of the ground (n.) by colonial developers as a stable geological stratum for construction. While foundation piles seek to ground (v.) structures in the territory, the variable cycles of freeze and thaw deep in the permafrost literally tear these seemingly stable buildings apart. The perceived stability of the frozen landscape is further ground (adj.) down by the compounding effects of the warming arctic air.[1] In Arviat, a predominantly Inuit community located on the western shore of Hudson’s Bay, unique adaptive strategies have transformed the buildings to account for the melting ground; an architectural practice born from local knowledge has emerged in the Arctic, offering lessons of building with instability and uncertainty in the environment.

During my spring and summer visits to Arviat, many of my days were spent shadowing the Arviat Housing Association. Serving a community of just over 2,500 inhabitants, the group keeps the inadequate supply of public housing units in working order despite tight budgets, aging structures,

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and limited building materials. Facing a massive housing shortage and the short life span of the stud and plywood architecture on permafrost, the reality that climate change is warming the Arctic air faster than anywhere else on the planet only compounds historical friction between the community and the buildings they inhabit. [2,3,4] Inuit, the Indigenous people who call the Canadian Arctic coastline home, have always understood the frozen ground as fluid strata. The layers of frozen soils and ice are described as nuna, the Inuktitut word that describes the land as lively terrain upon which all things are related.[5] Nuna is a social, ecological, and spiritual concept; rocks, muskeg, and ice are understood as alive with other species on the tundra and are thus accorded the respect and attention due to all living things.

Nuna describes the dynamic relationships between Inuit societies, the Arctic ground, and the climate as the heart of Inuit Quajimajatuqangit (IQ), multi-generational knowledge which translates to “what Inuit have always known to be true.”

IQ frames a world view around four maligarjuat (translated literally into “big things that must be followed”): maintaining harmony in communities and the mind, working for the common good, being respectful of all living things, and continuously planning for the future.[6] Through constant travel and observation, Arviamuit (how Inuit from Arviat refer to themselves) are continuously renewing IQ from four millennia of constant and variable change in the Arctic (fig. 2). The unsettling implications of later snowfalls, disrupted caribou migrations, and softening permafrost on the already fragile grounds

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fig. 3 (opposite, top): Block and wedge foundations on a Wolflenden house being renovated. fig. 4 (opposite, middle): New 5-plex housing types and older, privately owned lots on the edge of town. fig. 5 (opposite, bottom): Modified HAP house with addition, added porch and outbuilding.

of the community present challenges to Arviamuit, who work so earnestly to maintain harmony with the land.

Through the winter, the Arviat Housing Association do what they can to reconcile the relationship between fluid terrain and building. They regularly replace heaving pile foundations with stacked 4x4 wooden blocks, allowing nearly every house in the town to be leveled and moved in direct response to the thawing permafrost (fig. 3). Without the resources to replace the many aging structures in the community, local building methodologies create often informal, and sometimes messy, architectural projects that unsettle the static relationships between government housing, property lines, and the ground. The small-scale of the buildings and rapid pace of adaptation by Arviamuit, community advocates and local housing authorities build the experience of accelerating environmental change into planned development. In contrast to new housing development, local builders reuse left-over materials to adapt their buildings to the instability of the changing Arctic (fig. 4). Additional layers of insulation, porches, and outbuildings built by residents create spaces of flexibility—structural, thermal, or functional—that place houses in a continuous state of movement and repair.

By early May this year, the ice-fishing season on Maguse Lake—an ancestral home where many families in Arviat maintain camps and cabins—was in full swing. The small workshops throughout the town showed who was getting ready to head out onto the land where a collection of portable shacks, tent frames, and ice fishing huts extend the collective space of family groups (fig. 6). Each year, trails are re-routed around thinning ice, campsites are displaced from settling permafrost, and buildings heave and settle. Yet, the many residents of Arviat I spoke to do not consider their local building practices as a form of climate adaptation, but rather building in a good way—attuned to their community needs and the shifting land. The climate crisis is the most recent challenge for Inuit society and communities who have adapted to rapid, and often brutal, change in the past generation. Each repair, renovation, and construction are part of a multigenerational project of adapting to life on unsettling ground.

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[1] “Ground, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, accessed March

25,

2019,

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/81805?re-

sult=4&rskey=8CS22y&.

[2] As of August 2018, the Arviat Housing Association required an additional 247 housing units to its existing 600 to meet immediate need in the community. This represents the waiting list of community members seeking first-time access to public housing. Moreover, they estimate this number to be low, because the decade long wait time discourages many from applying for housing assistance. Arviat Housing Association, anonymous interviews conducted by the author, May–August, 2018.

[3] 47 percent of housing units in the community were designated “unsuitable” and 32 percent are in need of major repairs according to the 2016 census. See “Census Profile 2016: Arviat,” Statistics Canada, accessed November 15, 2017, https://www12.statcan. gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/prof/index.cfm?Lang=E. [4] Karen Northon, “Long-Term Warming Trend Continued in 2017: NASA, NOAA,” NASA, January 18, 2018, https://www.nasa. gov/press-release/long-term-warming-trend-continued-in-2017-nasa-noaa.

[5] Mark Kalluak, “About Inuit Quajimajatuqangit,” in Inuit Quajimajatuqangit: What Inuit have always known to be true, ed. Joe Karetak, Shirley Tagalik, and Frank Tester (Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2017), 43.

[6] Joe Karetak and Frank Tester, “Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, Truth and Reconciliation,” Inuit Quajimajatuqangit: What Inuit have always known to be true, ed. Joe Karetak, Shirley Tagalik, and Frank Tester (Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2017) 9-15.

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OUR BURNING HOUSE HAS SET FIRE TO THE STREETS Empowering Activism through Collective Artefact Devin Arndt is a graduate student at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, examining the spatial frameworks in which resistance emerges, operates, and intervenes. In continuing to learn and understand his own role in present crises, Devin is compelled to engage in the mechanisms through which change occurs, whether those be found in design, conversation, or political activism.

With only ten years remaining to mitigate the most devastating effects of climate change, continued government heel-dragging has ignited unprecedented collective action.[1] Extinguishing our burning house is no longer an issue of design innovation but of generating political will towards already present solutions.[2] Unwilling to abide by a collapsing status quo, discontent citizens wage ideological warfare through peaceful protest, setting the streets alight with collective cries for an alternative future.

The increasing severity of our burning house has inspired a fresh wave of creative disobedience; new narratives of change are being forged through the emergence of unique artefacts of activism. Using household items, found materials, and designed objects, the collective transforms artefacts of individual insignificance into powerful constructions of resistance.

I have identified seven key characteristics defining collective artefacts in their pursuit of political action.

1. Collective Artefacts Reclaim Space for Effective Protest Protest generates change by appropriating space—physical or virtual—in which to demonstrate unrest and disrupt the status quo.[3] From the haphazard barricades of the French Revolution to the hashtagged social media campaigns of Black Lives Matter, disenfranchised citizens have reclaimed a political voice through reclaiming space.

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[4] Recently, the emergence of three particular artefacts exemplify the critical role of collective artefacts in empowering spatial reclamation.

In October 2019, the global environmental organization, Extinction Rebellion, utilized a simple box as the basis for a series of collective constructions and acts of civil disobedience.[5] Combined, the modular box created physical barricades in the form of stages, sculptures, benches, and planters.

The boxes also hindered state authorities from removing bodies and dismantling activist structures through circular handles in which protesters could intertwine body and structure. In certain instances, police required heavy equipment to deconstruct occupied interventions, a difficult, time-consuming task amid unruly crowds.[6] Another artefact of resistance, the inflatable cobblestone, was developed and tested by Paris based artist collective, Tools for Action.[7] Emerging directly from cobblestone’s history as a construction material and makeshift weapon during European social unrest, the inflatable version replaces hard, dangerous objects with soft, playful cubes. The artefacts form the building blocks for light, maneuverable barricades, allowing protesters to quickly capture physical space for political protest.

In Hong Kong, amidst a resurgence of political action last year, small brick arches scattered across city streets became powerful tools for spatial reclamation.[8] Primarily deployed as riot police protection, the brick arches secure areas for political pro-

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mentation, the boxes rely on the collective to generate material funds, assemble components, invent potential configurations, transport artefacts to the site of protest, and construct and maintain the final structures.[9] Each step of the process offered opportunity for community engagement, granting countless possibilities for individuals to contribute skills or resources within their own unique capacities.

fig. 1: (left) Extinction Rebellion’s modular boxes claiming space in central London.

(Megan McGubbin, Photo_29, 2019, London).

3. Collective Artefacts Proliferate Through Accessibility

test by preventing pedestrian and vehicular traffic, including armoured police vans. Composed of only three bricks, each arch is of little consequence. Multiplied a thousand-fold, however, the artefacts can easily shut down large swaths of the city.

2. Collective Artefacts Derive Strength Through Numbers

The success of crowdsourced activist artefacts hinges on ease of access. Materials, design, and construction must remain broadly accessible to allow for maximum collective engagement. Hong Kong’s brick arches exemplify material availability, utilizing resources directly appropriated from the city’s material composition. The simple, repeatable form also ensures maximum constructibility regardless of age or skill set, as even those with physical restrictions can participate in the human supply chains distributing bricks to their final destination.

[10] Although no longer pulled directly from the city streets, inflatable cobblestones maintain their predecessor’s accessibility by only using inexpensive, common materials. Publicly available instructions demonstrate how to procure, construct, and utilize your own inflatable cobblestone from foil, tape, and Velcro, avoiding barriers to participation through a do-it-yourself design strategy.[11]

No single citizen could effectively mobilize Hong Kong’s brick ingenuity, Extinction Rebellion’s boxes, or Tools for Action’s inflatable cobblestones. Yet, as protest legitimizes individual voices through mass demonstration, collective artefacts transform small, independent contributions into powerful applications of political pressure through the sheer quantity of objects and people involved in their realization. Like ants building an anthill, collective artefacts emerge through a multitude of seemingly insignificant efforts, enabling a strategy of resistance otherwise too large in scale, scope, or cost to manage.

Extinction Rebellion’s modular boxes represent an experiment in this mode of crowdsourced activist architecture. From conception to imple-

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fig. 2: Brick arches in the streets of Hong Kong. (The Editorial Board of the City University of Hong Kong Students’ Union, Brick Arches, 2019, Hong Kong).

5. Collective Artefacts Address Practical Challenges

fig. 3: Tools for Action’s inflatable cobblestones deployed as a barricade in Paris. (Artúr van Balen, Red Line Barricade, 2015, Paris).

4. Collective Artefacts Emerge Through Collective Creativity Ultimately, collective artefacts are designed objects, whether discovered through accidental experimentation, evolved out of practical use, or intentionally invented. However, these artefacts reject individual authorship, emerging instead from continually evolving processes of collective creativity. Even designs developed within professional practice, such as Extinction Rebellion’s modular boxes, are the result of collaborative studio efforts.

[12] By adapting a professionally designed construction system, the boxes highlight an opportunity for the design profession to adopt a critical role in generating systemic change by interfacing with grassroots activist movements. Design professionals can leverage unique skill sets to tackle the challenges of collective artefacts, empowering peaceful resistance by providing accessible, adaptable designs. Design innovation may not be the solution to our present crises, but it maintains a valuable role in supplementing protest and procuring political will.

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Resilient demonstrations must navigate a host of functional challenges beyond reclaiming space. Protests are stressful events, and a movement’s longevity often depends upon an ability to meet basic human needs and avoid mental, physical, and emotional fatigue. Extinction Rebellion’s modular boxes form various seating structures, responding to the mundane requirements of political action by providing moments of respite throughout areas of otherwise intense action. The boxes also function as storage containers, facilitating easy collection and transport of other material goods.

Safety and security are another common challenge for political protests, particularly when state authorities enact riot control tactics.

Both Hong Kong’s bricks and inflatable cobblestones offer a counter to indiscriminate police violence, impeding state movements and granting protesters time to navigate away from zones of conflict. In the case of inflatable cobblestones, rolling the objects towards oncoming riot police prevents immediate arrest without engaging in more violent forms of resistance. The cubes provide brief moments of levity in the typically charged space of protest, reducing tension and increasing safety for all parties involved without sacrificing space within which to voice political demands.

The playfulness of inflatable cobblestones reinforces what Extinction Rebellion terms cultural roadblocks: artefacts of activism transformed into people-focused celebrations, strengthening acts of resistance while “blurring [the] line between engaged audience and active protester.”[13] The organization maintains that performance is an important function in perpetuating protest. By providing stages, sculptural blockades, and public seating, Extinction Rebellion’s modular boxes allowed protesters to captivate the broader public through creative demonstrations, activating and protecting disruptive structures from being dismantled. Additionally, the boxes provided a surface for decoration, allowing typical activist signage to be integrated directly into the resulting constructions, further increasing visibility of the movement’s message.

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6. Collective Artefacts Facilitate Constant Adaptation Effective protest must be flexible, quickly responding to constantly changing conditions. As a result, collective artefacts are fluid and adaptable, providing easy maneuverability and reconfiguration amidst shifting contexts.

Adaptability is a core design principle of Extinction Rebellion’s boxes. Intended for easy assembly and disassembly through a simple bolted connection system and incorporated circular handles, the boxes can be relocated and reassembled into a multitude of collective forms. Inflatable cobblestones follow a similar mode. Prior to inflation, the objects can be stored and transported in a typical backpack. Upon inflation, the cubes become light yet imposing artefacts, immediately deployable as physical and visual barricades. Both artefacts allow protesters to remain reactive and agile, constantly reconfiguring and relocating constructions, as necessary.

emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty (Geneva, Switzerland: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018), https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/ sites/2/2019/06/SR15_Full_Report_Low_Res.pdf.

[2] Author Gary Stix writes, “If we are ever to cope with climate change in any fundamental way, radical solutions on the social side are where we must focus, though. The relative efficiency of the next generation of solar cells is trivial by comparison.” See Gary Stix, “Effective World Government Will Be Needed to Stave Off Climate Catastrophe,” Scientific American, March 17, 2012, https://blogs. scientificamerican.com/observations/effective-world-governmentwill-still-be-needed-to-stave-off-climate-catastrophe/.

[3] Paul Routledge, Space Invaders: Radical Geographies of Protest (London, UK: Pluto Press, 2017), 1.

[4] Austerity politics have granted increased agency to corporations and economic elites while limiting the power of the democratic vote, leaving discontent individuals powerless to affect systemic change. The urgency of a changing climate and the contradictions of a neoliberal democracy must be confronted through collective disobedience at the physical site of protest. See George Monbiot, “Neoliberalism—the ideology at the root of all our problems,” The Guardian, April 15, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/ apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-mobiot.

[5] India Block, “Modular boxes used by Extinction Rebellion are ‘protest architecture’,” Dezeen, October 17, 2019, https://www.

7. Collective Artefacts Demonstrate Viable Alternatives to the Status Quo Successful social movements not only advocate for systemic change but exemplify that change in their strategies, organization, and tools. For example, while proposing environmental reform, Extinction Rebellion’s flatpack, adaptable boxes illustrate alternative construction practices in which materials and components can be recycled through circular design thinking. The movement not only proposes a cultural shift away from wasteful consumption practices but uses creative intervention as a means of demonstrating potential alternatives.

All three case studies follow this mode, exemplifying a crowd-sourced environment in which construction emerges in response to a community’s changing needs, rather than through disengaged market forces. In doing so, these artefacts present viable alternatives to how we might design, build, and live to challenge the reality of our burning house. Collective artefacts provide both a means of resisting systemic collapse and a possible way forward.

dezeen.com/2019/10/17/extinction-rebellion-protest-architecture/.

[6] Block, “Modular boxes.”

[7] Artur Van Balen, “Inflatable cobblestones (Berlin 2012),” Tools for Action, last modified February 3, 2014, http://www.toolsforaction.net/under-the-pavement-the-beach-inflatable-cobblestones-berlin-barcelona-2012/.

[8] Verna Yu, “‘Mini Stonehenges’: Hong Kong protesters take on police, one brick at a time,” The Guardian, November 15, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/15/mini-stonehenges-hong-kong-protesters-take-on-police-one-brick-at-a-time.

[9] “Extinction Rebellion Boxes,” Box Crowdfunder, Go Fund Me, created September 9, 2019, https://ca.gofundme.com/f/box-celebration.

[10] For more descriptions of Hong Kong collective tactics, see Marco Hernandez and Simon Scarr, “Coordinating Chaos: The tactics protesters use to fortify the frontlines,” Reuters Graphics, July 12, 2019, https://graphics.reuters.com/HONGKONG-EXTRADITIONS-TACTICS/0100B0790FL/index.html.

[11] For instructions on how to make an inflatable cobblestone, see Tools for Action, “Instruction Video Inflatable Cube / Cobble,” posted April 28, 2016, video, 7:10, https://youtu.be/sAbKcUa5adw.

[12] Extinction Rebellion’s modular boxes are adapted from United Kingdom-based Studio Bark’s flatpack construction systems.

See https://u-build.org/.

[13] James and Ruby, “Cultural Roadblocks,” in This Is Not A Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook (London, UK: Penguin Random House, 2019), 115.

[1] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Global Warming of 1.5°C: An IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas

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A DRINK OF WATER TAKES A VILLAGE Hiba Zubairi is a PakistaniCanadian student who is currently pursuing her undergraduate degree in Architecture at the University of Waterloo. She has been published previously in Chutney, an independent publication that looks at cultural identity through the lens of diversity and representation, as well as a contributor for BRIDGE Centre for Design + Architecture. She is also the winner of the 2019 HeForShe Writing Contest for Creative Nonfiction.

During the summer of 2019 I visited my hometown of Lahore—Pakistan’s second largest city and home to over six million people. It was the come down of one of the hottest summers in decades and I was constantly finding myself seeking water. Coming from a middle-class family that lives relatively close to the centre of the city, our water at home was attached to a private filtration system, individually installed by most households in the neighbourhood; the filter is changed once a month to ensure optimally clean water. Despite this, and out of concern for my health, my family would only allow me to drink from well-known mineral water bottles with sealed caps. The water we used to wash ourselves went through a separate filtration system, with a bucket of emergency water in every washroom in case the water lines were shut off.

Over these two weeks, the amount of thought I had to put into where my water was coming from, and whether it was hazardous to my health, seemed overly cautious and paranoid. This outlined my privilege as someone who grew up in Canada, the country with the largest fresh water supply in the world. Unfortunately, these “overly cautious” precautions failed to keep my family safe. My cousin fell ill when he contracted Hepatitis E from a waterborne disease while drinking water at a friend’s wedding; he was hospitalized and kept in the ICU for four days. My cousin’s illness was not an isolated event in my family, with stories of uncles, aunts, cousins, and others contracting Hepatitis

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A, E-Coli, and Typhoid over the years. Each case tracing back to someone drinking water from the city’s water supply that was not filtered. Despite the many waterborne illnesses experienced by my own family, the neighbourhood we live in has relatively few cases, especially in comparison to Pakistanis who live in low income neighbourhoods or informal urban settlements.

In Pakistan, a country of more than 220 million people, an estimated three million people contract a waterborne disease every year.[1] With water scarcity rapidly increasing in conjunction with expeditious national urbanization, water safety and availability are becoming an unattainable luxury for the overwhelming majority. Pakistan’s water is mostly supplied by the Indus River Basin, which is fed by snow and glacial melting of the Hindu Kush range in the Himalayan Mountains.

With the rise of global temperatures, it is predicted that the glacial supply that is feeding the Indus River Basin is likely to dry up in the next two centuries.[2] The impact of a depleting water source is already being felt, from small rural communities to national foreign policies.

At the beginning of 2019, the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resource (PCRWR) published a report stating that Pakistan reached the “water stress line” in 1990 and crossed the “water scarcity line” in 2005.[3] These reports and their urgency have been echoed by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and WaterAid. As Pakistan’s population continues to exponential-

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ly rise, the severity of these unsustainable water practices and looming water crises will be more harshly felt.

Due to a cultural demand for and historical reliance on water-extensive crops, 95 percent of the water coming into the country is spent by unsustainable agricultural practices.[4] The two most commonly farmed crops in Pakistan are rice and sugarcane, both of which ravage the land as well as water supplies. To produce a kilogram of sugarcane, Pakistani farmers use more water than can be held in an Olympic sized swimming pool.[5] Similarly, Pakistan’s rice-water productivity rate is 55 percent lower than the average rice-water productivity in Asian countries.[6] However, sugarcane and rice will remain popular due to their importance in the livelihood of so many people, as well as the country’s economy. Without proper education into how to sustainably farm and prevent water wastage, the damage will persist.[7] The government has continually struggled to supply everyone, particularly those in urban environments, with clean water and adequate toilets.

In the 1998 census, it was reported that only 79 percent of households received water from municipal sources or by drawing it from the ground.[8] Low-income communities fared significantly worse than the national average. It also reported that 51 percent of Pakistanis do not have access to an adequate toilet, with a clear gender imbalance since most women reported not having adequate facili-

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ties to maintain menstrual hygiene.[9] These findings, more than two decades old, are predicted to have exponentially worsened.

With rapidly expanding urban sprawl in cities such as Karachi (which has grown 22 fold in the last sixty years), maintaining an official municipal authority has proven to be difficult.[10] Much of the urban development in the city is based on “squatters’ rights” and manifests in peri-urban, informal settlements called abadis. In recent years, the Sindh provincial government has made efforts to formalize these settlements and append them to the urban fabric. In 1987, the province developed the Sindh Katchi Abadi Authority (SKAA), whose main function is “to survey and map these abadis, plan for their improvement with minimum demolitions, and issue leases or legal titles of the plots of land to those living there.” However widespread success is far from reality.[11] More than six million people live in Karachi’s informal settlements (less than half the city’s population) and most of whom do not have access to safe drinking water or sanitary facilities.[12] The lack of access to water infrastructure has created a void that is being filled by a black-market trade across the country, controlled by mafias and territorial gangs. These “tanker gangs”, which get their name from the tanks of water they bring into the city, charge a premium price that averages at five rupees for 35 liters.[13] Low-income communities across the country pay almost two million ru-

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fig. 1: Protests in Karachi against “tanker gangs”, DAWN National, Pakistan, 2019.

pees a year to tanker-gangs for water, much higher than what residents of formal city neighbourhoods pay for their water supply.[14] The PCRWR has found that the majority of the water supplied by these gangs is not potable and is unsafe for hygienic use. Tired of the lack of infrastructure from the government and the growing monopoly of tanker-gangs, communities such as the informal neighborhood of Orangi in Karachi or Hasanpura outside of Faisalabad have begun developing grassroots infrastructure on a local level in order to alleviate the local population from poor hygiene, social discrimination, degrading properties, and constant illnesses.

Anjuman Samaji Behbood (ASB) is a non-profit organization that founded the Organi Pilot Project (OPP) and later facilitated similar water projects in Hasanpura and other low-income communities across Pakistan.[15] The organization, partnered with WaterAid, facilitates community led initiatives that develop water infrastructure in neglected communities. They also support gender sensitive outreach programs that seek to provide water and hygiene education, as well as a forum of discussion, for the local community. With its first project in the Karachi neighborhood of Organi, home to 1.25 million people, ASB sought to find and implement a low-cost community water scheme.[16] Their philosophy included the mobilization of the community through crowd funding and pooling of resources to develop community participation in the quest to develop water infrastructure. ASB’s infrastructure development is split into two distinct sectors: internal development, which includes in-home and street infrastructure, and external development, which includes larger collector sewers.[17] In the OPP and Hasanpura Project, internal development was self-financed by each household, with WaterAid providing short term loans to households unable to financially support such developments. In both projects, the majority of the short-term loans have been paid back.[18] External development was crowd funded, with ASB working closely with key community leaders to gain more attention, support, and monetary funding for the projects. The mobilization of the community led to a greater turnout for outreach initiatives and a cross-generational interest in the community’s use and right to water. ASB continues to work with dif-

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ferent low-income communities across Pakistan, creating a local platform for outreach initiatives in rural communities to provide education and resources to promote sustainable farming practices.

Encouragingly, grassroots movements and organizations similar to ASB are beginning to manifest across the country, gaining significant traction across classes and communities. On a legislative level, the federal government of Pakistan, with the new Prime Minister, Imran Khan, backed by the Supreme Court, are directing national funds as well as crowdfunding to make a series of dams that would be key to providing the states of Baluchistan and Sindh with water in the coming years of water scarcity.[19] The dam infrastructure, which is in full speed development, will help Pakistan prevent disastrous droughts and destructive floods in the future; in the past these events have displaced entire villages and led to the death of thousands of people.

The future of Pakistan looks scarce in terms of water, but with a mobilized population and an eager activism spreading across the nation, a world of innovation and possibilities is on the horizon.

The country’s water crisis has highlighted the disparity between classes, filled for a long time by the illegal and exploitive tanker gangs. However, as awareness and education grows around the social, humanitarian, and hygienic need for better water practices, neighborhoods across the nation work towards making water a beverage to cool you off in the summer heat, rather than a tool to disenfranchise and harm low-income Pakistanis. Someday, I hope to return to Pakistan and see the people around me not having to worry about where their water is coming from. The emergence of a global pandemic has provided the federal government of Pakistan with an opportunity. Partnered with organizations such as ASB, who work tirelessly to promote better water infrastructure and mobilize the masses, the government is hiring agricultural workers—who previously lost their jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic—to plant 10 billion trees and create better irrigation channels in a sustainable farming and reforestation project aimed to lower the country’s carbon footprint.[20] As Pakistan struggles to meet the water crisis head on, the disenfranchised masses lead the way to a more socially and environmentally equitable future. One drink of water at a time.

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[1] Khattak A. Azizullah et al., “Water pollution in Pakistan and its impact on public health--a review.” Environment international no. 37 (2011): 479-97.

[2] Phoebe Sleet, “Water Resources in Pakistan: Scarce, Polluted and Poorly Governed” Future Directions International, last modified January 31, 2019, https://www.futuredirections.org.au/ publication/water-resources-in-pakistan-scarce-polluted-and-poorly-governed/.

[3] Syed M. Abubakar, “Pakistan: from a “Water-Stressed” to a “Water-Scarce” Country,” Civil Services of Pakistan, August 26, 2018, http://www.cssforum.com.pk/css-compulsory-subjects/essay/ essays/120950-pakistan-water-stressed-water-scarce-country/.

[4–7] Aisha Khan, “Water Scarcity: Myth or Reality?,” DAWN, October 13, 2018, https://www.dawn.com/news/1438677.

[8-9] Akbar Zaidi, From the Lane to the City: The Impact of the Orangi Pilot Project’s Low Cost Sanitation Model (London: WaterAid, 2001).

[10] Christine Sijbesma, Waterlines: Sanitation and Hygiene in South Asia: Progress and Challenges (Dhaka: Practical Action Publishing, 2008).

[11–12] “Orangi Pilot Project.” Environment and Urbanization 7, no. 2 (Karachi, 1995).

[13–17] Irteza Haider, Development of community based sanitation infrastructure in Hasanpura, Faisalabad (London: WaterAid, 2008).

[18] “Orangi Pilot Project.” Environment and Urbanization 7, no.

2 (1995).

[19] Abdul Aijaz, et al, From Building Dams to Fetching Water: Scales of Politicization in the Indus Basin (Basel: MDPI, 2020).

[20] Rina S. Khan, “As a ‘green stimulus’ Pakistan sets virus-idled to work planting trees” Reuters News Agency, April 28, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-pakistan-trees-fea-idUSKCN22A369.

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Brendan Lacy (he/him) is a graduate student at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. He received his BAS from Waterloo in 2019. His thesis work explores the representation of environmental activism in comics, and questions the vilification of activists as “ecoterrorists�. He lives in Kitchener, which is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land promised to the Six Nations that includes ten kilometers on each side of the Grand River.

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Further Reading Gord Hill, 500 Years of Resistance comic book, 2010 Gord Hill, The anti-capitalist resistance comic book, 2012 Nick Sousanis, unflattening, 2015 Philippe squarzoni, climate changed, 2014 David Harvey, justice, nature and the geography of difference, 1996 David Naguib pellow, total liberation, 2014 Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene?, 2016 For critical online journalism check out the intercept

Follow me!

designing activism

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Brendan Lacy (he/him) is a graduate student at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. He received his BAS from Waterloo in 2019. His thesis work explores the representation of environmental activism in comics, and questions the vilification of activists as “ecoterrorists”. He lives in Kitchener, which is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land promised to the Six Nations that includes ten kilometers on each side of the Grand River.

Brendan Lacy

Thanks for joining me!

It’s been a difficult time lately so I appreciate you being here. Right now we’re in a place that exists between ideas or worldviews.

But I’ll take your silence to mean that you want me to elaborate on what a worldview is.

Imagine this box as a container for all your ideas, experiences, and actions. It’s your personal outlook on life, explaining in your way how the world operates... ...we can call this your “worldview”!

In fact... ...there are many ways to imagine what a worldview is and how it affects our lives!

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Further Reading Gord Hill, 500 Years of Resistance comic book, 2010 Gord Hill, The anti-capitalist resistance comic book, 2012 Nick Sousanis, unflattening, 2015 Philippe squarzoni, climate changed, 2014

Tales to Astound

David Harvey, justice, nature and the geography of difference, 1996

Let’s see an example of how a worldview, like a superpower, could affect our actions.

David Naguib pellow, total liberation, 2014 Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene?, 2016 Okay, here we have something big and complex like the Climate Crisis.

designing activism

For critical online journalism check out the intercept And over here we have a superhero, we’ll call “Very Strong Punch Man”, flying in to solve the problem.

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Brendan Lacy (he/him) is a graduate student at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. He received his BAS from Waterloo in 2019. His thesis work explores the representation of environmental activism in comics, and questions the vilification of activists as “ecoterrorists�. He lives in Kitchener, which is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land promised to the Six Nations that includes ten kilometers on each side of the Grand River.

Brendan Lacy

watch how this plays out

take this!

no thank you

oh.

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Further Reading Gord Hill, 500 Years of Resistance comic book, 2010 Gord Hill, The anti-capitalist resistance comic book, 2012 Nick Sousanis, unflattening, 2015 Philippe squarzoni, climate changed, 2014

Tales to Astound That didn’t work out the way the hero hoped, did it?

This shows that the superhero’s power (being very strong) limited his efficacy in the situation.

In this case, the problem could not be solved by simply punching.

In most of our day to day lives however, a worldview describes things that are a constant: like gravity, or the passing of the sun, as well as our personal beliefs.

The superpower is a very physical example of how a worldview can define one’s actions. Other superpowers like commanding sea creatures, shooting spiderwebs, or transforming into animals all create specific ways for a hero to respond to a crisis. However not all superpowers are effective in every situation.

David Harvey, justice, nature and the geography of difference, 1996 David Naguib pellow, total liberation, 2014 Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene?, 2016 For critical online journalism check out the intercept

It can be a backdrop to our lives, and yet some worldviews have been, and continue to be, used to justify horrific acts against other people and the planet. Colonialism and White Supremacy come to mind.

It’s clear that the way one thinks affects one’s actions, and this is very important when in relation to the Climate Crisis, though not always evident.

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Brendan Lacy (he/him) is a graduate student at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. He received his BAS from Waterloo in 2019. His thesis work explores the representation of environmental activism in comics, and questions the vilification of activists as “ecoterrorists”. He lives in Kitchener, which is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land promised to the Six Nations that includes ten kilometers on each side of the Grand River.

Brendan Lacy

When we think about the many issues around the Climate Crisis it can be hard to know what actions are the right ones to take.

If a worldview demands that the issues should be solved using the mechanisms of the economic market, then the solutions—the “actions”— will follow that line of thinking.

Carbon trading

From inside a worldview’s bubble a problem can seem impossible, or worse: invalid.

exploitive Labour practices

However, like we saw earlier, problems can exist outside a worldview’s reality.

To take effective action we need to question the worldviews telling us “that’s not possible,” “that’s not important,” or to “just let things be.”

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We can demand action, and action is possible!

burning

Further Reading Gord Hill, 500 Years of Resistance comic book, 2010 Gord Hill, The anti-capitalist resistance comic book, 2012 Nick Sousanis, unflattening, 2015 Philippe squarzoni, climate changed, 2014

Tales to Astound

David Harvey, justice, nature and the geography of difference, 1996 David Naguib pellow, total liberation, 2014

all...

it...

Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene?, 2016 For critical online journalism check out the intercept

depends...

on...

your...

...perspective

designing activism

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Brendan Lacy (he/him) is a graduate student at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. He received his BAS from Waterloo in 2019. His thesis work explores the representation of environmental activism in comics, and questions the vilification of activists as “ecoterrorists”. He lives in Kitchener, which is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land promised to the Six Nations that includes ten kilometers on each side of the Grand River.

Font credit: This comic was lettered with the fonts back issue and badaboom, designed and produced by nate piekos

This is, has been, and will continue to be a turbulent year. When I wrote this story I was thinking about how systems of power are too often made “legitimate” by problematic patterns of thought. I wrote this with the Climate Crisis in mind, but I hope the ideas I have presented will resonate with other movements. I openly support those who fight for systemic change, equality, and a more resilient worldview.

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Further Reading Gord Hill, 500 Years of Resistance comic book, 2010 Gord Hill, The anti-capitalist resistance comic book, 2012 Nick Sousanis, unflattening, 2015 Philippe squarzoni, climate changed, 2014 David Harvey, justice, nature and the geography of difference, 1996 David Naguib pellow, total liberation, 2014 Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene?, 2016 For critical online journalism check out the intercept

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Sponsors

galt. publication | issue three: burning

University of Waterloo School of Architecture; Waterloo Architecture Student Association; Society of Waterloo Architecture Graduates; University of Waterloo Graduate Student Association; Graduate Student Endowment Fund

R Publisher: Riverside Architectural Press www.riversidearchitecturalpress.ca © Riverside Architectural Press ISSN: 2561-7826 Library and Archives Canada Cataloguingin Publication Title: galt. publication issue 03: burning Names: Titizian, Zaven, 1993; Clarke-Hicks, James, 1994; Brownlie, Kate, 1995; Ogbu, Chi Chi, 1996; Lenny, Elizabeth, 1995; Kim, Maddy, 1999; Dawson, Kelsey, 1995.

Special Thanks Philip Beesley Dr. Anne Bordeleau Logan Steele

Contributors Ange Loft Urbonas Studio Joshua Wallace Jade Manbodh Kelsey Dawson Logan Steele Neeraj Bhatia Sean Lally Kobi Logendrarajah Zachary Coughlan Emily Guo Yu-Chu Su (Dio) Levi van Weerden Kiel Moe Joshua G. Stein Jesse Bird Alex Robinson Nathanael Scheffler Suzy Harris-Brandts Geoff Christou Jason McMillan Brendan Lacy Devin Arndt Hiba Zubairi Brendan Lacy

Description: galt. publication is a student-run, peer-reviewed journal from the University of Waterloo’s School of Architecture—we are based in the historic community that is also our namesake.

We are dedicated to publishing student work in the context of a larger architectural discourse that brings together the voices of designers, activists, and academics.

Copyright © 2019 Riverside Architectural Press Typeset: GT Alpina

Printing: Vide Press www.videpress.ca All rights reserved by the individual authors who are solely responsible for their content. No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means— graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems without prior permission of the copyright owner. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Any errors and omissions, if noted, will be corrected in any future editions.

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galt. publication Issue 03: Burning Fall 2020

2020 is unlike any year we’ve seen before.

The entire world is battling a cataclysmic pandemic, Siberia reported record-breaking heat waves, Australia was engulfed in bushfires, San Francisco’s sky burned orange, all while Canada’s last fully-intact ice shelf collapsed. Against this backdrop of increasingly severe climate change, the globe is witnessing one of the largest civil rights reckoning in living memory. It’s clear that the time to design for change is more urgent than ever—but how do we do it best?

We must question the ways in which architecture is discussed, taught, practiced, built, and operated. Are these responses an extension of current tools, methods, and pedagogies—or a departure from them altogether? By curating the work of students and professionals, galt. explores how we design for change and, more importantly, to what (or whose) end.

Thus, issue three of galt. positions the design profession as an agent of social and climatic change, while its accompaniment here & now dissects and addresses systemic complacency. Within these pages Joshua Wallace imagines a glacier accordion whose melody morphs as it melts; Emily Guo plans the conversion of a defunct and contaminated military base into a wildlife refuge; Hiba Zubairi investigates the black market “water gangs” of Lahore, Pakistan; and in a comic by Brendan Lacy, an astronaut takes us on stroll through the multiverse of worldviews.

These projects sit among twelve further narratives and are presented alongside eight original interviews—including features from Kiel Moe, Urbonas Studio, and Ange Loft—that prioritize social and environmental resilience in our cities.

I S S N 256 1-7826

Riverside Architectural Press

galt. is an annual, peer-reviewed publication from the University of Waterloo’s School of Architecture.

We are dedicated to publishing student work in the context of a larger architectural discourse that brings together the voices of designers, activists, and academics.