galt. issue 04: PAUSE/PLAY

04 galt. publication

BEFORE ALL ELSE, this work begins with the land. This publication was founded at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture in the community of Galt, Ontario, which is located in Block 1 of the Haldimand Tract—land that was promised to the Six Nations under the Haldimand Treaty of 1784. These treaty lands extend for 10 km on either side of the Grand River, from its source at Dundalk until its end at Lake Erie. We live and design on the traditional territory of the Neutral, the Anishinaabe, and the Haudenosaunee Peoples.

This year, members of the galt. team are also guests in Tkaronto (Toronto) on the traditional lands of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat Peoples under Treaty 13 with the Mississaugas of the Credit; in Scarborough additionally under the Williams Treaties with multiple Mississaugas and Chippewa bands; in Mississauga on the traditional land of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Huron-Wendat, and the Seneca under Treaty 14 with the Mississaugas of the Credit; in Vancouver on the unceded traditional lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh; and in Surrey on the unceded traditional lands of the Semiahmoo, Katzie, Kwikwetlem, Kwantlen, Musqueam, Qayqayt, Tsleil-Waututh and Tsawwassen First Nations.

We design, publish, and distribute this publication on lands which are still home to many diverse Indigenous Peoples across Turtle Island.

It is important to reflect on the deep extents of physical, legislative, and social colonial infrastructures which pervade this land. We recognize Indigenous Peoples’ ongoing activism to decolonize Turtle Island, including the Six Nations–led O:se Kenhionhata:tie Land Back Camp in Waterloo.

Land is at the heart of everything we do—as designers, editors, and students, we maintain the urgency of land reparation and return to foregrounding Indigenous presence and environmental stewardship.

Editors-In-Chief Natalie Jianyi Kopp Lucy Lin Editors Nisha Bhathella Sigi Buzi Vicky Cao Tobias Feltman Cathy Li Mayuri Paranthahan Poorna Patange Ali Sermol Cynthia Zhang Graphics Vicky Cao Jamie Cheung Magdalena Kaczmarczyk Isabel Kim Ellie Kingsley Omar Oosthuizen Brian Tien Daisy Zhang Cover design by Natalie Jianyi Kopp

Traditional land of the Neutral, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee Peoples (Grand River, ON)

Traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit (Port Credit, ON)

Traditional land of the Neutral, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee Peoples (Galt, ON)

Traditional land of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Chippewa, Wendat, and Mississaugas of the Credit (Scarborough Bluffs, ON)

Traditional land of the Neutral, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee Peoples (Waterloo, ON)

Traditional land of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Chippewa, Wendat, and Mississaugas of the Credit (Toronto, ON)

Unceded traditional land of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Peoples (Vancouver, BC)

Traditional land of the Neutral, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee Peoples (Galt, ON)

Traditional land of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Chippewa, Wendat, and Mississaugas of the Credit (Scarborough, ON)

Traditional land of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Chippewa, Wendat, and Mississaugas of the Credit (North York, ON)

Traditional land of the Neutral, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee Peoples (Waterloo, ON)

Unceded traditional land of the Semiahmoo, Katzie, Kwikwetlem, Kwantlen, Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, Qayqayt, and Tsawwassen (Maple Ridge, BC)

Images by the galt.editorial team

This year, we’re not based in Galt.

In fact, we’re not based anywhere.

The University of Waterloo School of Architecture sat mostly empty for most of the year while the galt. team gathered remotely to do our call for submissions, selection process, editing, interviewing, and graphic layouts.

All our work for this issue came together within the digital realm.

As we assembled this book, borders were closed and cities locked down.

The world around us screeched to a halt, then picked up the pace more rapidly than ever. We saw the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic highlight stark social inequity. Encampments filled public parks, and support networks rushed to sustain them before bulldozers took them away.

Marginalized groups bore the brunt of the efforts to find a scapegoat as restaurants were boycotted. Activists were imprisoned, police officers were acquitted, and statues were torn down. Institutions were criticized and curricula revised. Online symposia abounded as we found the digital world accessible in its breadth, but limiting as an imitation of reality. Within this reality, so much has changed since we began this book, and there is still so much left that needs to change.

We advocate for change through publication. This issue aims to capture a snapshot of where we are right now, and a projection of where we want to be. During this forced pause, time has slowed down and stretched out, been compressed and then spit back out. We’ve forgotten what day it was, picked up new hobbies, and spent a lot of time on the internet—but we’ve also thought about how we relate to the land on which we live and its history of colonial violence. We’ve thought about who we are as designers and worked to confront ingrained standards and ways of thinking which privilege certain bodies over others. We’ve moved to demand imminent realities which centre care and foreground hope as we hit play.

Within the following pages, we’ve curated responses to our current reality which arrived in our inbox in essay, design, poem, drawing, and idea form.

Our deepest thanks to the contributors, supporters, and members of the galt. team who worked to turn all of this into a book.

We invite you to pause, and we hope to move forward in a better way.

—Natalie + Lucy

ALTERNATE REALITIES 02 in conversation with Vivien Sansour 06 SWON Taylor Halamka, Igsung So + Bijan Thornycroft 12 The Elephant on Your Mantel Marco Adly 16 Man Missing in the Bermudas Reappears in Georgia Meryem Chahboun 22 Mindful Data Maria Smirnova 28 The Phenomenologym Brian Tien

DESIGN REFLEXIVITY 36 in conversation with Joel Sanders + Susan Stryker 44 Let’s Draw a Tree T.K. Justin Ng

48 Let’s Draw a Tree II Abhishek Ambekar, Bhavna Bhathella, Byron Cai, Cynthia Eng, Leela Keshav, Cathy Li, Leanne Li, Valentina Aguayo Martiri, Caitlin Paridy, Michael Salib, Silja Walenius, Cynthia Zhang, Daisy Zhang, Ethan Zhang 56 Pomp in Absurd Circumstances Tianyi Huang, Kimberley Huggins + Jing Liao 62 Clutter vic 68 Placelesness Niara van Gaalen 72 No Loitering Here: Studying the Made Non-Places of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Ontario Piper Bermbaum + Connor O’Grady

SUBVERSIVE PROCESSES 82 in conversation with Amy Smoke 88 Breaking Foundations Simone Delaney, Vic Mantha-Blythe + Niara van Gaalen

94 Barricades Chi Him 100 Tuning Monuments Victor Zagabe 106 Contact Zones: Infrastructure as Ally Hannah Newton 114 Care, Politics, and COVID-19 Brenda Reid

ALTERNATE REALITIES 120 in conversation with Syrus Marcus Ware 126 Calgary’s Deserted Metropolis: Re-Imagining Density in an Emptying Urban Core Hailey Darling 132 Imagining a Home for Holobionts Britney Yan 138 Dungeons & Dragons: Building Empathy Through Play Eric Oh 144 The Canned Tour: Engaging with Architectural Travel Bianca Weeko Martin

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in conversation with

VIVIEN SANSOUR Vivien Sansour (she/her) is an artist, researcher, conservationist, and storyteller. She uses image, sketch, film, soil, seeds, and plants to enliven old cultural tales in contemporary presentations, advocating for seed conservation and the protection of agrobiodiversity as cultural and political acts. Vivien founded the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library as part of this work with local farmers and has been showcased internationally, including at the Chicago Architecture Biennial, V&A Museum in London, Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, and the Venice Art Biennale. A culinary historian and enthusiastic cook, Vivien works to bring threatened varieties “back to the dinner table to become part of our living culture rather than a relic of the past.” This work has led her to collaborate with award-winning chefs, including Anthony Bourdain and Sami Tamimi. Born in Jerusalem, Vivien lives in both Bethlehem, Palestine and Los Angeles, USA.

June 7, 2021 @ 11:00 a.m. EDT galt.

[00:00]

VS [00:33] 1. The ongoing Palestinian–Israeli conflict recently escalated in May 2021 when protests of Israeli violence and forced evictions led to the launch of several rockets from Gaza towards Israeli-controlled areas. After 11 days of airstrikes and violent clashes, a ceasefire was called. “Q&A: 2021 Hostilities between Israel and Palestinian Armed Groups,” Human Rights Watch, May 28, 2021.

To learn more, see B’Tselem’s interactive map of Palestinian space in collaboration with Forensic Architecture: “Conquer and Divide: The Shattering of Palestinian Space by Israel,” B’Tselem, accessed June 15, 2021.

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To start off, we want to express our solidarity with Palestinians who are rising up against ethnic cleansing, forced displacement, and settler colonial violence under the Israeli apartheid regime. We want to give you some space to reflect on your work in relation to the current events in Palestine.1 My work is a process of grief. How do I process my grief and refuse the world that I was forced into? What is the decision we make to move forward? I have been thinking about this work as a way to regain our strength and our sense of autonomy while we are going through this horrendous experience of being completely destroyed. In the middle of this destruction, I tried to find seeds for another world. I don’t want to accept this reality, I’m not interested in it. I found a lot of strength and solace in our biological and food heritage. Seeds are the greatest activists in giving me the platform to keep the story of our people alive while revealing new possibilities. Nature is constantly offering us new possibilities, and the way things in nature evolve and co-evolve is a real collaborative process of design.

The big question for us as we think about the oppression of all people, not just Palestinian people, is how to make a new design for the world.

What does that design look like and how do we want to build it together? How committed are we to a new design? It is so much easier for most people within institutions to close their eyes and say, “That’s how it’s done.” That’s the most dangerous attitude, because it assures you that nothing will ever change. It’s impossible for us to think about a global design without acknowledging that not only our struggles, but our survival is connected. In whatever design we create for the future, we must break old patterns of constantly destroying each other. In this moment, we’re going through a lot of pain, grief, and loss in Palestine. Yet at the same time, I feel really optimistic that I can speak for myself, and that people like myself can do the same, even while struggling to tell our story in the midst of a very

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hostile environment that tells us that we don’t exist. With the work we are doing to move forward, we will soon be able to celebrate new seeds sprouting, and new shade created by the trees we planted.

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[07:25]

VS [07:50] 2. The Palestine Heirloom Seed Library (PHSL) is an art and agricultural engagement project which supports the exchange of biodiverse seeds and their inherent knowledge and presence as a form of activism. As a space to promote traditional Palestinian farming practices, storytelling, and identity, the PHSL engages in cultural discourse through food. “Palestine Heirloom Seed Library,” Vivien Sansour, accessed June 15, 2021.

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[13:15] VS [14:30] 3. “It’s very important that we bring who we are to this struggle. If you’re committed to creating a new world, a new design, then you have to be rigorous with yourself. [...] Knowing who we are is such a big power that is so underestimated.” Vivien Sansour, “What Is Solidarity?: Food Sovereignty” (What is Solidarity? Speaker Series, Waterloo Architecture, March 9, 2021), 01:25:30.

You’re thinking about plants as storytellers and how they can push back against legacies of power. What do you think is the most challenging part of rejecting this reality for people as individuals and within communities?2 The question one has to ask oneself is: am I committed to the mediocrity of the existing world, or am I committed to investing myself into creating another world? If you choose the latter, you have to understand that it’s a much harder road. It means that you might not have the comforts of belonging, and you might not be supported or even acknowledged—but I think it is our job to rebel against mediocrity. There’s a lot of fear of living without comforts like having a house, a car, or an institutional presence. This fear makes it really difficult for people to take on a different route, but there are always reasons to be afraid. If you have children, or people you have to take care of, it becomes even more urgent to bring who you are to this struggle. There is no one formula; not everybody has to be a farmer, maybe you’re an architect. You can bring this commitment to another world through your work, within an institution or through your practice. You bring commitment in the way you talk to people with love. How do we expand our hearts and stretch them beyond what is comfortable in the spirit of that commitment to another world? I think the new generation is bringing so much hope to all of us because of their courage and authenticity. We are saying we want a world that welcomes everybody. Nobody has to live in a lie because of who they are.

Could you speak more on the importance of self-understanding, and how to be artists in our activism?3 From the perspective of someone who “does not exist,” what does it mean to create art?

I think that knowing who we are is the most important work. Who we are isn’t something static, it changes because we’re dynamic beings.

When we are trying to work in solidarity with each other, it is not fake and it is not just slogans that we throw around, it is a real practice of saying, “This is who I am.” It gives us the strength to build something real that can transform, change, and continue to grow from a place of truth, from a place of good soil. Knowing ourselves makes it very difficult for someone else to define us, so it’s liberatory on so many levels. The very definition of subjugation is telling people who they are or what they are capable of. In that way, colonialism seeks to define all of us on its own terms, and that’s when the courage to know yourself honestly is extremely powerful.

The whole world can continue to say I don’t exist, but I have a different experience. I am not here to prove to the world that I exist, I do exist—it’s a matter of fact. I know the land I come from, the language I speak, the plants I interact with. I know the history of it.

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Knowing who we are gives us the ability to rise up and assert ourselves. For me, art has been a lovely way to have that space to be creative in any way I want, whether through installation, photography, plants, or poetry. Assert your presence by creating beauty, and ask questions that invite others to fall in love with the things that you are in love with. I’m in love with nature, and I create things that express how I feel. Growing up, voices of authority will tell you that there’s a certain way things should be done, but I think it’s quite tragic when society commits to only one way of doing things. We’re missing out on the multitudes of ways to imagine. Imagination is infinite, and art presents these possibilities to us. There isn’t one way to drink tea, to dance, or to speak, and so we have this amazing kind of unlimited diversity. As designers and artists taking pieces of this puzzle, there will always be something new to create.

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VS [23:58] 4. “First of all, we have to unshame ourselves about the fact that we are emotional beings. [...] When I started this work 10 years ago, people in my community thought I was totally crazy. [...] But in my heart and mind, I am committed to imagining something else.” Vivien Sansour, “What Is Solidarity?: Food Sovereignty” (What is Solidarity? Speaker Series, Waterloo Architecture, March 9, 2021), 01:19:55.

You’ve previously talked about emotion-shaming, and how it’s difficult for people to accept that we as humans are emotional beings.4 Could you speak more on emotion, and how to navigate creating and sharing things that we love?

Like most women, sadly, I was often told that my “problem” was that I was too emotional, too sensitive, that my passion was a vice. I think it’s so abusive and violent to tell someone that the most beautiful part of them is a problem. I am extremely emotional, and I love it. I think that suppressing our ability to be these living and feeling beings brought the world to where we are today. We aspire to be like inanimate objects, working in the world, and that is violence we exercise on ourselves.

Beyond our material aspirations, there’s power and beauty in expressing that we are nurturing souls who comfort and support each other. I think men are expected not to show emotion either, and they become vulnerable to societies that don’t welcome that expression. It always comes back to the same thing, that we’re not being honest about who we are. Everybody walks around as if we feel nothing, and we say we’re doing great when we’re really not. Our emotions are the core of our power, and a powerful existence is one where your brain works for your heart. Particularly in schools, we’re taught to prioritize the brain, the brain, the brain. But the heart is so powerful and its fire is so grand, silencing it is a crime. Committing to being honest about who you are allows others to do the same. I think it would do us really well to be more honest about the fact that we all have fires in our hearts and we all burn inside, and maybe it’s time that we don’t burn all alone.

To know more, Vivien recommends: Gagliano, Monica. Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2018.

Watch the What is Solidarity?

Food Sovereignty Lecture featuring Vivien Sansour on the Waterloo Architecture Youtube Channel.

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Ryan, John C., Patrícia Vieira, and Monica Gagliano. The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence. Santa Fe: Synergetic Press, 2021.

Sansour, Vivien. Episode 14: Cistern by Vivien Sansour. StorefrontTV, 2020.

Sansour, Vivien. Zaree’a. Delfina Foundation, 2019.

PAUSE: On tracing trajectories, surviving time, telling stories of elsewhere, re-evaluating productivity, and deconstructing our bodies.

ALTERNATE REALITIES

SWON

Taylor Halamka, Igsung So + Bijan Thornycroft Taylor (he/him) is a recent graduate of Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and a consultant at SWON LLC. He currently lives in Boston.

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Igsung (he/him) is a recent graduate of Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and a consultant at SWON LLC. He is also a graduate of the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, where he was the founding editor of Mole Magazine. He currently lives in Toronto.

Bijan (he/him) is a recent graduate of Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and a consultant at SWON LLC. He currently lives in New York City.

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SWON Song: O Cambridge, O Cambridge Igsung So (left): Mystery Falls at Ausable River, ON.

Dear Waterloo Architecture, I’ve been meaning to write to you. I’ve been thinking of you more and more recently. The last time I saw you, we were both in a bit of a hole. We felt then, as we still do today, that the architectural discipline was too weak: too slow and ill-defined to assess itself against ever-changing demands and contexts of the modernizing world. Once aware of this general problem, perhaps in shock, we burrowed seasonal nests in Cambridge, Canada. In school, we quietly drew and practiced our architectures into the night. In off-seasons, we would nuzzle into various corporate and boutique offices that the global market continued to proliferate. At these offices, we incessantly questioned their architectures even as we frantically worked throughout their days. After a few seasons back and forth, we paused to reflect and published a journal together. After a few years back and forth, I decided to leave for America.

The Cambridge of America was fine. There were more people there.

It seemed older there. It was Harvard there. My years were shorter there, but you know that... I’m writing to let you know that I’m back; that I’ve been back; that I’ve come back, to see you.

In all realness, I biked from the Toronto airport to come see you. You know that I still cannot drive.

I took my bicycle and rode 90 km a day until I reached our dear Cambridge once again. Though I should have realized from the recent pandemic, you were no longer in school. In fact, all schools were to be closed for the foreseeable future. Perhaps in shock, I kept biking... perhaps in search of you... perhaps I’ve been meaning to tell you that we had it right all along: the truth that no Cambridge in this world could teach us to be as fast as modernity purported us to be; and that the struggle to keep up with its marketplace had come to define the limits of the architectural profession.

Yet as the recent pandemic slowed the world down to an alternative pace, I feel less and less of an imperative to be novel all the time. Even cities seem less enticing as the de facto hub of architectural work and discourse. Maybe I just needed a break... so I kept biking... down the Grand River to Paris, Canada; then down the Thames River to London, Canada; aspirations of our grandest cities from recent history, burrowed into the countryside of Southwestern Ontario. With intense optimism and a lot of exercise, I began fantasizing about the possibility of a practice in this rural, historic, and ambitiously named context. I simply realized that every place has buildings that could be subject to architectural discourse if imbued with enough intent and narrative.

Through trails, through fields, I noticed a small white canvas tent raised on a square cedar deck, off the edge of a forest. I inquired about my stay for a few nights, wishing to breathe in the morning mist and trip over the grassy mounds. The owner told me that she had recently inherited this old dairy farm and had begun converting it into a retreat ground. At this point, I could not help but slip my architectural background into the conversation.

She responded in kind by sharing her plans to build a more permanent structure that could perhaps replace the existing tent. Nothing fancier than a cabin. She was considering tucking the structure in the slight valley of the site and asked whether this may be a bad idea. I suggested to her that most architectures began as pits in the ground anyways and that we could instead focus our efforts on designing the top.

A hat for Stratford, ON. 07

ALTERNATE REALITIES Biking away from the fields, I reached a lake and stayed a few weeks.

I regularly visited a local dispensary in a nearby Indigenous reserve and enjoyed my growing conversations with the store owner. Through these visits, I gradually met his brothers, aunts, uncles, and grandchildren. They asked if I would be interested in building a sweat lodge with them; and if all goes well, the community was also considering building a longhouse. They were curious to see if my formal training would offer variations to their practiced tectonics.

I told them how it is every architect’s fantasy to build with their own hands.

A craft for Kettle Point, ON. Back up along the rivers, I found a museum celebrating its local history of cheese and agricultural productions. As the curator toured me around the campus, I took note of the board-and-batten constructions and elaborated on the similarities and differences to those I had visited during my time in America.

Once aware of my enthusiasm for these structures, he told me of their plans to add another room to their one-room schoolhouse building. They had an initial sketch, but the local designer had recently passed away. Now the museum needed further drawings to complete the scheme. I told them that I could draw.

A drawing for Ingersoll, ON. This is my swan song to recent history, to our years in school together, and to our days lamenting on the deficiencies of the architectural discipline and profession. I feel iffy about our cities and their predictably “smart” futures, so I design in the countryside. Right here, in Southwestern Ontario: SWON for short. SWON is interested in and concerned with architectural work, yet it is not a professional firm—it is an architectural design consultancy. It is light, fluffy, and bears limited affinity to the discipline and the profession. It simply wishes to enjoy its rural context, then reacts with architectural instincts. It travels via a bicycle, so that it may enjoy the company of as many people and travel as slowly as possible. As it collects and meditates on various stories, it advises and elicits embedded desires of those communities. It does not meet their “needs” nor “service” them. At its best, it seduces them; it takes you for a ride and a conversation.

Since Limited Liability Companies do not exist in Canada, I surreptitiously registered our new consultancy as SWON LLC. I distinctly recall a professional practice course in America that emphasized the expediency of an LLC structure, such that I could limit my professional liabilities from my disciplinary intellections. This is not actually how it legally works, but this is how SWON LLC intends to operate.

SWON LLC is a seasonal company; it roams and engages during the warmer months, but hibernates and ruminates over the colder months. We will probably see you this summer.

Origin Myth for SWON: The Ugly Duckling Taylor Halamka According to the latest, greatest science available from the top swan-studying-schools, swans have good memories. So we wonder with you here: do swans reminisce about childhood? Beyond strong stimulus-response skills, how much nurture remains in their nature? Take one swan, any swan.

Actually, specifically one SWON. From the first breath of untainted countryside air and the vantage of the primitive shell, Andersen’s Ugly Duckling is given everything as certainties. You are a duck and should behave as such even if you are different (and ugly!). Typologies must be respected, precedents revered, canons sanctioned by the architectural authorities. And so on and so forth...

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Down the Ausable River, ON.

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ALTERNATE REALITIES Nothing is inherently wrong with this epistemology. In his odyssey from egg to meadowland to moors, through rushes and farmhouses out into the frigid winter, the ugly duckling gains knowledge of appropriate behavior, dangers of society, and Rhinoceros 3D modelling. Along the trodden path our duckling hears the self-assured instruction of hens and cats and geese and adjunct lecturers—they all have valuable advice, albeit sometimes strongly stated. To be clear, being born the ugly duckling versus a beautiful duckling is arbitrary; all the ducklings receive the same sermons.

Then, a leap of faith! It takes a moment of reflection—literal reflection in a pond, in fact—to rear our SWON. Meditation makes misfits mindful of established structures. Cambridge, America cannot categorize architecture any more than Cambridge, Canada without some biased lens or framework, and neither can SWON; they are all equal if you look at them differently. The SWON simply allows the possibility of perspectives different than those imposed by their parental institutions. And that is what a consultancy does; it deliberates the context in which it finds itself, be it countryside or construction site. It discusses alternatives and suspends categorization for as long as it can.

Everything is a nail to the hammer, just as everyone is a duck to the uncritical mind. The incubation periods of the Cambridge ducklings are at once too short and too long. This coming-of-age is drawn out just enough to produce the illusion of a holistic picture, yet it is conveniently brief such that no counterpoints can carve away or corroborate them. The expedition is essential to recognize that perhaps the best approach to architecture is not inherently as an architect. Get the biases out of your ducking head.

Become a SWON.

Duck, Duck, SWON: Circle of Knowledge Bijan Thornycroft Duck, duck, SWON: around and around. It’s a game. Which one in front?

Which one out back? As the loop repeats, the beginning, middle, and end lose their senses. Unrolled, it is simply a line. One point marks the beginning and another the end. Eventually, the two become too distant to remember each other. To preserve some sense of their attenuating relationship, narratives of their mythical origins develop. Case in point, the “hut” remains a fashionable myth today because it appears to be both architecture’s first and its latest. Both ends are equally present. The line coincides at a point.

Taylor, Igsung + Bijan recommend: Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec (1987) and “Turtles All the Way Down” on Wikipedia.

Also, Reveries of the Solitary Walker by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782) for some guidance on solitude and what to think about while seemingly doing nothing.

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Like ouroboros, the point bites its own tail and eventually consumes itself. In its absence, other origins of architecture are considered. Objectivity is briefly touted as architecture’s original ideal. Complexity arrives soon after to replace this. This too is abandoned at the sight of simplicity, and the intellectual value of its schema. As in most rebellions, each ideology displaces its predecessor. Then again, when the next ideal is argued and sustained. Each point circles to the last. They aim for the same impetus, to connect the end to the beginning—but arrive only at a near miss.

Architecture as first a line, then a point, now spirals. Whether to become what it already was or to escape what it never had been, its ducks continue to go around and around. While beginnings and ends barter endlessly, SWON flies to the middle and seats itself in relative calmness. It does not mythologize the past nor claim to understand the future. Unconcerned with difficult ideals, SWON just enjoys the game and a chance to play.

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Rock Glen Conservation Area, Arkona, ON.

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THE ELEPHANT ON YOUR MANTEL

Marco Adly Marco (he/him) is a photographer and filmmaker currently completing an undergraduate degree at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture.

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PAUSE/PLAY Falling.

Falling, fallingfallingfalling.

You writhe in the shower under the stifling hot air, As water droplets congregate in the crevices of your too-voluminous love handles.

You wonder if you’ll survive.

The crash.

Feeling.

Still able to feel anything but the numbness in your pale left thigh from sitting on the toilet seat for too long, Waiting for earth.

You’ve been expecting it, The crash.

Putting it off.

Tomorrow, yesterday, five- and ten-year plan.

Numbness cream.

You’ve put it off for so long, it has arrived with a vengeance.

On you, your people, and your world.

Come to reclaim its own.

You, your people.

The world, aflame.

Not dancing red tongues making out oh-so-good with the air in the air but liquid blue.

Nitrogen. Slow consummation. A hydrochloric deep-freeze.

Burns so deep through your skin it carves its initials on your bone and keeps it as a souvenir.

Hangs it up over its mantel and invites friends and family over for an unveiling and a showing of the rare specimen.

The elephant on your mantel.

You wonder if you’ll survive.

The fall. Time. Your past.

Things as they were and as they will become.

If you’ll survive who you’ll become.

Time.

Not so malleable.

Brittle.

Explodes into tiny pieces that lodge in your flesh like shards of glass as you make the fall towards the centre.

Heat burning in your right chest, but sometimes also your left, and a nervous trepidation in the upper abdomen.

Tiny time shards lodged in your too-voluminous love handles, As you fall fall fall.

Wait for earth.

Marco recommends: The photography of Trent Parke. Also, Taxi Driver (1976) directed by Martin Scorsese.

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Photos taken during the pandemic within a 5 km radius of where I live. Delta 3200, pushed between two and four stops to its chemical limits.

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MAN MISSING IN THE BERMUDAS REAPPEARS IN GEORGIA “I heard you check in last night. Where did you come from?”

“Oh, are you staying at Pushkin 10 too?

I’m sorry for the noise.”

“You don’t worry about that. Arrival and departure times in Tbilisi airport are just crazy. So inconvenient. Most people check in at ungodly hours! Did you fly Pegasus? They come from Istanbul, but their flights are usually connected, so they make you wait for the flights to get in from Europe before continuing to Georgia...

Meryem Chahboun Meryem (she/her) is an architectural designer and seasoned traveller based in Toronto and currently completing her Master of Architecture at the University of Waterloo. She travelled to 25 countries before her 25th birthday, enjoys the outdoors, and is often daydreaming about faraway places when she is not writing about them.

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PAUSE/PLAY Even if there is only a one hour time difference between here and Istanbul, they pretty much run on the European schedule, which is a few hours behind. Actually, a good way to get to the region would be through Armenia: the Bagratashen–Sadakhlo Border. Keep it in mind.

That’s what I do now, especially this time of the year. The crossing is usually smooth and quick. If you’re driving, though, make sure to purchase your car insurance beforehand. Border brokers charge indecent amounts. Ahh… The drive from Sadakhlo is just beautiful. You probably want to get on the road while you are here, by the way. Like literally—catch any marshrutka from Didube station, and go! Samgori station could also work but departures are less frequent…”

Most travellers are engaging, witty, and fun to converse with, but Mike was different. He was a walking spoiler, trapping people in unpleasant monologues. Nevertheless, to this day, his presence lingers in most of the stories I tell and the narratives I design.

I met Mike in March 2019 in Tbilisi, Georgia. Months later, I was able to distill his monologues to their essence: storytelling. Telling stories is a process of maturation, and stories themselves are breaks from that process; they inform design within organic life patterns, balancing quick and slow, pause and play.

They unveil the latent interplay between spatial qualities and experience.

Bridging the physical world and the human condition, they show us how to be human. Framing and orienting our lives, similarly to buildings, stories guide us to perceive the world from unexpected corners.

[10:00] Downtown Tbilisi is slowly waking up to the smell of freshly baked khachapuri, the Georgian cheese bread. Commuters rush to the subway station, many hastily stopping by bakeshops for a morning treat. Some punctuate their morning rush with friendly chats and warm embraces. I am thoroughly enjoying the feel of the city, although I only landed in the country a few hours earlier. Flights have an odd schedule in Georgia, the country being ahead of European and Turkish time zones. It then imposes a rather awkward timetable for airports; the flights all depart and land at strange hours of the night.

As a result, I arrived at around three in the morning from Düsseldorf, then rode a bus to Freedom square.

[04:00] I wander for a half-hour to look for my hostel. I am by myself in the middle of the night in a country often mistaken for a US state, carrying 11 kg of belongings in my Quechua backpack.

I think to myself, “This is definitely one of those moments my mother warned me about.” Regardless, I am owning the night. I have caught the city on a break.

fig. 1: A sticker I made for a photography exhibition called Rabat d’Hier et d’Aujourd’hui as part of Les Journées du Patrimoine: a yearly festival celebrating Rabat’s rich heritage from its foundation in the 11th century to the Colonial Modern era. I always bring stickers with me as a piece of home when travelling abroad.

[04:30] The 24-hour receptionist is a medical student around my age. She wakes up when I walk in. She is kind, accommodating, and offers to set aside some pancakes for me the next morning. I accept and offer her a homemade sticker from Rabat (fig. 1). It is a traveller’s tradition to carry stickers or magnets from our hometown to offer to new friends around the globe. Arriving at my assigned dorm, I am delighted to find that my bed is a lower bunk bed with a privacy curtain and an individual reading light. After travelling regularly for five years and full-time for ten months, my standards for comfort have changed.

Having a roof is most of it. Having a bed where I can both sleep and sit without my legs dangling down in other peoples’ faces is a novelty.

Having a privacy curtain and an individual light at my disposal is a luxury. I check my Couchsurfing messages one last time and confirm a khinkali dinner, or typical Georgian dumplings, for tomorrow.

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ALTERNATE REALITIES [20:00] After a full day of exploring, I am finally back at the hostel. Some travellers are playing guitar by the fire and ask me to join them.

Everyone is going skiing tomorrow in Gudauri, the local ski resort.

“The Caucasus mountains are gaining popularity in Europe! You can’t miss being one of the few lucky ones who can still catch it while it’s cheap and authentic,” says a friendly traveller, wearing Christmas socks and casually drinking tea while inviting me, a complete stranger, to join a ski trip.

I reply eagerly, “Let’s do it! I’m down for Gudauri. I will shower quickly and join you.”

I am amused and charmed by such a warm, impromptu encounter.

After my shower, I come across Mike again. Having been to Pushkin 10 many times in the past, he helps me find a hairdryer.

However, this comes at the price of listening to another story, this one about how he became Georgian.

I do not recall the actual story, nor do I remember his insider tips on how to make it to Mestia and back without jeopardizing my out-of-country flight.

Apparently, it is difficult to navigate the snow maintenance schedules of the different regions I would cross. However, I do remember how Mike’s interpretation of the world, travel, and conversations made me feel. He had a life of milestones—an exciting but unfulfilling life.

At the time, I instantly recognized our similarities. We were both travel enthusiasts; we wanted to go everywhere and know as much as possible about “niche” destinations. For us, staying in one place for three months or buying produce six times from the local market constituted having lived somewhere. I saw in him a possible post-travel version of myself and was disappointed. I had always assumed that in travel, fulfillment was guaranteed. I was frightened. Would I also impose similarly “fascinating” travel stories on unsuspecting travellers, friends, and clients? Would I lose empathy, all sense of exchange, and become a cautionary tale? In Mike, I witnessed how travel could make one self-centred and one-dimensional, rather than worldly. I started seeing travel, for the first time, through a different lens.

Travel is a purposeless act of dislocation unless it is followed by periods of reflection to actively learn, share, and create from these experiences.

The journey does not end with the trip back home; it keeps unfolding through conversations, stories, and knowledge thoughtfully exchanged.

The baggage with which we return connects us to the world, making us better listeners, more open-hearted, and greatly perspicacious. We craft our own personal histories from a wonderful patchwork of worlds.

1. Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere (United Kingdom: Penguin Books, 1986).

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I am comfortable being away. Travel is synonymous with my inner self, the way that I achieve a balance between my being and the physical world.

And yet, these experiences transcend any immediate physical space, gradually forging a feeling of connection to a greater system. I am on a curious quest for unfamiliarity and togetherness. Looking back, I recall conversations with my father about travelling to faraway places.

I remember reading Milan Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere, which suggests that life is a gigantic sphere of alternative universes, threaded together lyrically by utopic imaginations.1 Inspired by this concept, it has become my life’s goal to find these alternatives, this elusive “elsewhere.” In favour of an overly optimistic view, I had never considered a dark side to travel and I was disturbed by the boastful view that Mike’s monologues revealed.

PAUSE/PLAY More than a traveller, I am a designer. I believe stories bridge the physical world and the human condition, the visible and the invisible. Stemming from our experiences travelled, lived, or imagined, storytelling is a lesson on world-making and a sine qua non of design. In architecture, sharing stories makes me vulnerable. It is difficult to balance the threshold between myself and my designs, yet this pushes me into a realm of rich creativity and awareness. Storytelling dismantles my own safety and questions my set order, influencing the way I relate to others through spaces.

[22:00] After the Christmas-socks-wearing stranger offers me a cup of tea and we successfully purchase seven resort passes, we all head back to the dorms. Helen, a new friend, is packing and we start talking.

She warns me about Mike’s Lonely Planet–style lectures, but it is too late. We instantly bond over our shared and overwhelming “Mike experience.” Of American and Norwegian descent, Helen grew up in Washington DC before moving to Oslo with her family. She is living and studying in Paris and contemplating going on a Study Abroad program to “Joburg” the following fall.

She is here for the same reasons as me. “I just wanted to check out what’s going on in this spot of the map no one talks about. Plus, it’s cheap!” she explains.

Georgia feels random and unique, exotic and homey; an affordable Berlin, an engaging Helsinki. Helen and I were both in search of an alternative to frenetic Europe when we chose this Central Asian, hipster-ish, almost underground location. Georgia is a conversation starter. The country feels like a pause from something—it makes people stop, think, and talk. Diving into a surprisingly deep conversation, my new friend and I realize we are constantly citing Mike, but we both dread asking for further clarifications. With his knack for giving unsolicited advice, we just could not stand the thought of another round.

My adventurous, almost frivolous 24-year-old self overlooked a vital component to my travel because it is daunting and uncomfortable: stepping away to tell stories. Stories translate into relationships, conversations, and forms which make design relatable and inspiring. This dialogue between action and reflection, travel and storytelling, listening and conversing, can achieve empathy in design by leaving behind dictated realities in favour of thoughtful experiences.

[20:00] The Cabify driver is here. It is time to leave, and I am excited. For my last evening in Georgia, my friends Mar and Giorgio make a delicious risotto Milanese, and I leave after our late meal. My next destination is San Francisco. I will be road-tripping along the American West Coast for six weeks with a friend I met six weeks ago at the Köln Carnival.

Travel has kept its promise once more; my heart is blessed, but my mind is shattered, overwhelmed by experiences to digest. I need to pause and reorganize my thoughts. A pensive flight is ahead of me.

Meryem recommends: The film Nomadland (2020) directed by Chloé Zhao.

Today I realize that all I know of Mike is from Helen’s travel journal: he is Canadian, he somehow acquired Georgian citizenship, he is 52 years old, never married, no children, he cooked for a living in Hawaii, and he once disappeared in the Bermudas and reappeared in Georgia. When physically in the same location as him, I was avoiding him. Now, I tell stories about him.

Travel is a curious experience.

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ALTERNATE REALITIES

fig. 2: Salvador is a 26-year-old civil engineer. Here, he rides his bikecab down Cuba Street in Havana after we shared a bocadillo de jamón. He is permanently in action—he just does not seem to ever catch a break.

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fig. 3: Simon was born “on the Island” and will not let you forget it. He seems to be constantly on break. He knows everyone, and can usually be found near the book return slot of the Vancouver Island Regional Library in Ucluelet where he enjoys watching the infinite Pacific Ocean and occasionally chatting with book-returners. This picture was taken in the morning as Simon approached his chair.

Even when he is in movement, his spot still conveys his inner stillness and tranquility.

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ALTERNATE REALITIES

MINDFUL DATA

Maria Smirnova Maria (she/her) is an undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture and a cross-disciplinary designer interested in the exploration of design development in relation to psychology, engineering, economics, and environmental change. Through her professional work, Maria hopes to develop tools and systems that enhance positive habit formation.

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fig. 1 (left): Not all tasks cause anxiety, like feeding the cat or watering your plant; others do, like newsfeeds, phone notifications, or writing essays with deadlines such as this one. fig. 2: This work aims to emulate a mesh or soft grid by rethinking structure, standards, and the rigid logic of lists.

1. Simon Lindgren, Data Theory: Interpretive Sociology and Computational Methods (Cambridge: Polity, 2020).

2. Sarah Perez, “Meditation and mindfulness apps continue their surge amid pandemic,” TechCrunch, May 28, 2020.

3. Ciara Conlon, Productivity for Dummies, 1st ed. (John Wiley & Sons, 2016).

Limitations of the To-Do List Data does not exist in a void. As it undergoes processing by the human mind, it becomes affected by personal experiences and biases which alter our perception of the world. In data theory, data is deliberately separated from its origins to prioritize useful information.1 The data set enters a flurry of automated processes and loses its complex associations to society and culture as it is reduced into a list of pure information. Context is removed, subsets are categorized, and names are anonymized. These processes are not scalable when adopted for daily use and distort a data set by reducing it to its most consumable and manageable state. To this effect, they neglect our capacity for emotional response and reduce the human experience to a digestible list. This inhibits users of personal data from critically questioning how these processes affect their emotional and mental well-being. Over time, users may gradually accumulate negative emotional responses when confronted with their data in list form.

To holistically compute our vast amount of entangled data, we need a hybrid approach that retains the nuances and humanity of our information.

A common form of filtering and organizing data is the to-do list: a linear structure that shows us what is on our plate in its simplest form. In both analogue and digital variations, data is inputted into spreadsheets, calendars, mind maps, and bullet journals. The rise of meditation apps throughout the COVID-19 pandemic such as Headspace and Calm attest that people are looking for improved ways to organize their internal chaos.2 With increased time for reflection during lockdowns, the effectiveness of task lists in capturing our reality is called into question.

Even a pedestrian text such as Productivity for Dummies suggests that happiness and to-do lists are incompatible, since infinite task lists will never lead to a feeling of accomplishment.3 The array of checkboxes can evoke one of two responses: it either motivates or paralyzes. These rigid structures hinder authentic emotional responses to necessary components of our daily lives, limiting how we define productivity and maintain our mental health.

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fig. 3: This prototype for an alternative to the to-do list sorts tasks into three coloured categories: Personal, Co-op, and School. The prototype was coded by Rebecca Zarins.

4. I tested around 20 productivity apps for deadline tracking, goals visualization, and task assignment before settling on Ticktick for this test. The other apps include Taskade, Wunderlist, Asana, Dynalist, and Trello.

5. Kanban boards show the tasks for a project by organizing them based on their stages of completion, shown with columns of designated milestones such as Planned, In Progress, Completed.

6. Stress-tigers refer to experiencing stress and anxiety as predators that are hunting you. Terry Gordon, “Today’s Saber Tooth Tiger,” Psychology Today, January 25, 2013.

Our tasks are not only tasks; they are events in our lives, inseparable from our emotions. For example, here is how my organizational structure has looked like in the past:4 There are five main folders to organize files: I have 17 subfolders with lists inside them: Within seven of those lists, I use Kanban-style boards for task sub-categorization to further lay out the work for each project and topic.5 The seven boards average around three to five sub-columns of lists, making the overall list count more like 38.

Each folder is colour-coordinated according to my colour associations for various topics and their degrees of threat: Orange folders are typically stress-inducing tasks like To Do Today, To Do Tomorrow, To Do This Week, and To Do In General.

Assignments for my seemingly never-ending architectural education are labelled in a crisp denial pink.

Things that I would rather not do, but that are still important, get acknowledged as red.

Passion projects are all unconsciously labelled with hues of blue, for example: Photography, Help with Parents’ Home Renovation.

There are also list filters titled Aahh! for items of high priority, You Can Do It! for medium priority, and Take Your Time for low priority. This way, I can see which stress-tigers are chasing me at any given time.6 My organizational structure demonstrates how a task is inextricably tied to emotional intent. To learn from these feelings and associations, I propose a digital application that moves beyond the to-do list. TaskMapper is a browser-based tool that allows users to visualize their data in ways that are emotional and intuitive, instead of regimented and linearly logical. The application is grounded in the belief that every human can benefit from accepting emotion as an active principle in their daily endeavours.

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fig. 4: Aurora Mode represents data through colour, illustrating the emotional toll of your current tasks through a gradient image.

This abstraction emphasizes the cumulative effect of all tasks, instead of the individual tasks themselves. The example map shown represents a moderately stressful inner state.

A Lot on Your Plate

7. Anjan Chatterjee, “Neuroaesthetics: A Coming of Age Story,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23, no. 1 (January 2011): 53–62.

The substructure of TaskMapper can be imagined by thinking of a Venn diagram that, with an increase of information, pulls apart into a network of interconnected bubbles. Each bubble or node displays distinct relationships to others. One can add, modify, and remove nodes from the network as circumstances change, such as when a task is completed or changes in priority. The radius of a task node is determined by the deemed priority of the item based on how much anxiety, excitement, happiness, apathy, frustration, or dread the task incites. After a task is completed (e.g., a presentation, an assignment or exam, an important conversation), users will be asked about how they feel regarding that task and its ease of completion. Completed tasks can either be dispatched or kept on the map to float freely and represent one’s achievements. Although it is impossible to accurately quantify emotion, this style of organization can expose emotional patterns within one’s tasks and their corresponding rewards. The result is an information-rich visualization where one’s tasks can be seen alongside their emotional impact, allowing users to prepare accordingly.

8. Mitsuhiko Hanada, “Correspondence Analysis of Color–Emotion Associations,” Color Research & Application 43, no. 2 (August 2017): 224–237.

Customizable colour palettes link tasks with their emotional meanings as perceived by the user. While some emotions may be describable in words, others might be more easily mapped through colour. Depending on relative cultural meanings, red could be understood as courage, passion, anger, or urgency.8 Yellow, orange, pink, violet, blue, white, or black could represent other complex emotions such as envy, jealousy, and fear.9 Users’ emotions are not limited to predefined interpretations and can be any shade or hue they choose.

9. Ralph B. Hupka et al., “The Colors of Anger, Envy, Fear, and Jealousy,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 28, no. 2 (March 1997): 156–171.

The development of TaskMapper was inspired by the field of neuroaesthetics, which examines humans’ neural responses to visual interpretations of the world.7 TaskMapper aims to subvert the conventional to-do list with a system that encourages visualizing emotion alongside tasks.

User-inputted data produces a network of intentionally coloured nodes which represent things you need to do in relation to one another. TaskMapper aims to fundamentally change the way we process our mess—our data.

TaskMapper proposes several modes of navigating one’s emotions and data, depending on which visual collections the user finds most helpful and informative. Aurora Mode (fig. 4) abstractly maps the tasks in pure colour to 25

ALTERNATE REALITIES illustrate each task’s pure emotional toll, while Constellation Mode (fig. 5) offers a more geometric and high-contrast visualization. These two modes recognize that designing towards neurodiversity is crucial; each individual’s data organization is not reducible to a universal approach, as is obvious from the plethora of existing options for productivity apps. TaskMapper aims to draw connections between tasks and make sense of our internal chaos to lower feelings of anxiety, discombobulation, and depression.

This tool provides a platform to foster users’ sense of agency over their realities in an increasingly complex world.

Rethinking Productivity 10. Jerry Useem, “Bring Back the Nervous Breakdown,” The Atlantic, February 9, 2021.

By recognizing our dependence on emotionally opaque lists and altering how we plan our daily lives, we can move towards a more honest evaluation of our relationship to productivity. In 1811, George Miller Beard posited that “we all [have] a set amount of nerve force which [can] be depleted, like a battery, by the stress of modern life.”10 Who can say that the world has become less nervous since then? We need to take care of ourselves by understanding the complexities of our emotions, and the systems which allow us to thrive. What do your tasks tell you about yourself? How does each component in a network of tasks make you feel about others? Where is most of your energy being spent, and what actions recover that energy?

What kind of work continually gets pushed aside?

At a time when we need more self-organization than ever to achieve productivity from the confines of our homes, we need to find ways to better represent our data. Never-ending to-do lists will not empower us to understand what undergirds our schedules, let alone our overall well-being.

TaskMapper is for those who have a lot on their plate, providing an alternative digital interface to understand not only what’s on the plate, but the plate itself.

Maria recommends: The animated preview of the upcoming TaskMapper program on Vimeo.

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fig. 5: Constellation Mode groups tasks based on user-defined criteria. Information may include the positive and negative emotional impacts of tasks, visualization type, or colour.

Users recognize patterns within these information sets, helping them be more aware of their emotions, work patterns, and overall well-being.

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ALTERNATE REALITIES

THE PHENOMENOLOGYM plate storage

squat toilet

work-from-home station

bench press

kinky deadlift

Brian Tien Brian (he/him) is a graduate student at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture currently researching the architecture of contemporary fitness spaces. Empowered by exercise and “healthy living,” Brian has dabbled with powerlifting and bodybuilding as a way to cope with architecture school.

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PAUSE/PLAY Working Hard or Hardly Working? fig. 1 (left): Axonometric of the phenomenologym.

After the monotony of a full day’s work, one way to relieve stress is by scheduling carefully calibrated movements to simulate physical labour under the guise of a “fun” activity. People work out for different reasons: to feel empowered, to be seen, to be happy. It is a form of suffering that we condition ourselves to enjoy as a unique blend of labour, leisure, and pleasure. When commercial gyms, yoga studios, and community centres were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, many resorted to alternative exercise options such as running outside or performing calisthenics at a local playground. However, most conceded to working out at home, squeezing in cardio and bodyweight exercises between online office hours, school hours, or housework.

Homes are now improvised training spaces that host an agglomeration of fitness equipment, blurring the boundary between working out and everyday labour. You might place a treadmill in the living room, do push-ups in the bedroom, or follow a YouTube yoga tutorial in the backyard. Everyday furniture clashes with dumbbells sprawled across the floor, and the air becomes thick and musty from elevated body temperatures; these scenarios are a sensorial disarray of the live-work balance in an already disrupted environment. Even though we no longer travel to a commercial gym, our schedules of sit-ups, squats, and curls are evidence of our desire for what we deem a beautiful body. Within our homes, we disassemble ourselves into chest, abs, and ass before reassembly for production.

The Phenomenologym: Body Politics

1. Joel Sanders, “Ergotectonics: The Multi-Identity/Multi-Task Environment,” in Inside Space: Experiments in Redefining Rooms (Cambridge: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2001), 6–15.

2. The name phenomenologym is a play on phenomenology, the philosophical study of experience and awareness.

3. Hank Lazer, “The Art and Architecture of Holding Open: The Radical Yes of Architectural Body,” Interfaces: Architecture Against Death 1, no. 21–22 (Paris: College of The Holy Cross, 2003), 35. See also: Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Architectural Body (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2002).

[...][A]s the boundaries between sex and gender, living and working, and public and private space become more porous, homes can no longer afford to function as single-family, single-purpose environments built based on the outmoded notion of the gendered division of labor and Puritanical ideas about propriety.

—Joel Sanders, 2001 1 When our spaces become less defined, so should the boundaries of our bodies. The phenomenologym reinterprets the home gym by questioning the rituals of everyday life, work, and working out that are typically separated by physical spaces and scheduling (fig. 1).2 Rather than being composed of strict partitions, the phenomenologym behaves like flowing cloth; its form shifts and adjusts to the user’s needs. Inspired by Arakawa and Gins’ writings on phenomenology, the phenomenologym proposes the idea of a landing-site: “a place for learning an attitude toward perception, a location for developing a craft of open attentive awareness.”3 The phenomenologym is not simply for physical exercise, but for living in a state of connectivity between the mind, the body, and the surround. Here, perceptions are not simply visual, but transcend to encompass bodily experiences.

Why do we consider lifting a kettlebell different from lifting a laundry basket?

Liberated from an architectural canon rooted in the standardization of the heteronormative body, the phenomenologym acts as a site for physical activity which does not presume or limit what a body can achieve. While both exercising and domestic labour involve repetitive physical movement for the sake of maintenance and care, fitness has been culturally manufactured as a form of “fun” labour. Its social construction has allowed something as intuitive as movement to be wrestled away from the user and then resold at unreasonable prices fueled by insecurity and desire. The gym reinforces gendered movements which influence the way we interact within and outside of these spaces. Critiquing different forms of labour, the phenomenologym relinquishes control of one’s body back to its user, thus dismantling the barriers which isolate fitness labour from daily labour.

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fig. 2: Types of movement within the phenomenologym.

Design & Equipment Enter the phenomenologym and you will feel the floor’s curving topography forcing your body to compress and stretch while traversing from one point to the other. Your hands and feet grope for stability, a contrast from the prescribed standards for the built form of gym spaces. The railings guide you while doubling as a tool for calisthenic workouts. Gradually curving and shifting in elevation, they force your body to adjust, heightening your awareness as you reposition yourself within the space (fig. 2). Depending on the height of the railing, a range of exercises from pull-ups, bodyweight rows, and dips can be added to your daily workout. As you go about your everyday tasks, you can stretch by hanging or pulling from the columns and railings.

The gym equipment present in the phenomenologym doubles as everyday furnishings, removing the hassle of moving and hiding your workout gear.

The broomstick can be dismantled into a barbell and equipped with weighted plates that can then act as dinnerware. Thus, the phenomenologym is full of open-ended possibilities; there is no correct way to move. You are free to use your surroundings however you see fit, whether to play, exercise, or rest.

One-size-fits-all pieces of equipment do not exist here, nor do rigidly scheduled regimes designed to impose monotonous movements onto your body.

The intersection between performance and intimacy is explored by the kinky deadlift platform featured in the centre of the phenomenologym. To encourage movement through feeling and kinesthetic awareness, you are tied to a steel rod at three points: the head, the scapula, and the base of the spine. This reinforces the importance of maintaining a neutral spine during a deadlift. The rod is hung from a pulley held by your partner, who simultaneously watches the form of the deadlift. The phenomenological deadlift requires communication between partners and emphasizes the connection between mind and body.

Within this space, the deadlift is reborn as a performance that is sensual, vulnerable, and reciprocal.

As gym equipment transcends the boundaries between furnishings and working out, these items are designed to elicit visceral responses from the users. The squat toilet highlights the ritualistic and bodily similarities between defecating and the weighted squat while incorporating the barbell squat rack, an otherwise bulky piece of equipment, into a household space (fig. 3).

Contemporary gym spaces often do not account for the discomfort new users experience when performing exercises under the relentless gaze of onlookers through mirrors and sidelong glances. The tension of knowing that you are being observed by nearby gym-goers can freeze your joints and stiffen your movements. To continue, you must close yourself off from the rest of the world and desensitize yourself from surrounding viewers.

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fig. 3: The squat toilet in use.

4. bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (New York: Atria Books, 2004), 155.

Under scrutiny at a typical commercial gym, the action of unracking a physical load and sticking your rear out to squat down is both uncomfortable and intimate. What happens when that sensation is paralleled with an abject experience? As you lower yourself down to the squat toilet, movements typically performed in private are increasingly similar to their public counterparts, highlighting your vulnerability during this physical exercise.

Our patriarchal society dissociates physical strength from intimacy, as notions found on opposing spectrums; however, during the toilet squat, the intimacy of defecating meets the strength of the hold. Feminist bell hooks argues that “the warrior ethic has damaged us. As we move into the 21st century we need to mature beyond war and warriors.”4 Physical power has traditionally been a foundation for cultures of domination and aggression and must be re-trained as something which can thrive in parallel with vulnerability.

Deconstructing the Patriarchal Body

5. Roberta Sassatelli, Fitness Culture: Gyms and the Commercialisation of Discipline and Fun (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 25.

6. Jesper Andreasson and Thomas Johansson, “Ironman: Concluding Thoughts,” in Extreme Sports, Extreme Bodies: Gender, Identities and Bodies in Motion (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 151–52.

The phenomenologym is only the first step towards deconstructing notions of beautiful and desirable bodies. The obsessive need to control every aspect of our body is still very much existent, reflected through prescribed rigid workout schedules; precise, regulated equipment; and the monitoring of one’s every movement. Driven by the “perpetuation of heavily gender-biased images of the body,” notions of happiness and liberation are falsely promised under the capitalist patriarchy.5 As Sport Science and Youth Studies professors Andreasson and Johansson suggest, “this is a body that can be commodified and commercialized. The controlled body is, in a sense, a neoliberal body.”6 In the pursuit of the heteronormative reproductive body, the concept of wellness is relative to the amount of work one can produce. Feeling back pain 31

ALTERNATE REALITIES from working long hours at the desk? Try yoga! Want to show off to your boss how hardworking you are? Take a corporate CrossFit class with them! In pursuit of beauty, we epitomize the neoliberal body.

7. Eugen Sandow was a Prussian bodybuilder who popularized bodybuilding worldwide by establishing the Institutes of Physical Culture and Physical Culture, a monthly periodical that taught readers methods of diet habits, exercise, and weight training.

The narrative of physical culture in the West has largely been focused on the white heterosexual male, idolizing figures such as Eugen Sandow and Arnold Schwarzenegger while ignoring the existence of non-conforming bodies.7 Even today, the desire to achieve the romanticized Western re-interpretation of the “Greek god” physique is deeply embedded in contemporary fitness content; gendered constructs are reinforced through advertisements marketing the illusion that this is a healthy body which equates to success.

While most gyms today are open to all genders, they embody traditional notions of masculinity and femininity within a panoptic space defined by the male gaze and spatial hierarchies. The phenomenologym is more than a site for experiencing bodily perception and active movement, it is a step towards dismantling the raced and gendered body conceived by patriarchal constructs existent in both Western sport and architecture.

Despite actively rejecting the patriarchal notions of discipline and punishment used so frequently in gyms and fitness studios, I realize that many of these aspects still frame and define my attitudes towards exercising. I critique the masculinist culture of fitness, yet it is the only thing I know. I don’t want to be just another soft, quiet Asian boy—I want to be powerful, I want a colonizer’s physique. Being instructed to tough it out or to “be a man” explicitly prompts one to assault one’s own body with barbells and violence. While building up my body, I feel pride in my struggle to acquire power through calloused hands.

Although the phenomenologym recomposes the way physical labour is sold and differentiated, undoing the patriarchal thinking which dictates beauty standards is still an ongoing process.

As our homes become our gyms, contemporary Western methods of regulating bodies bleed into the most intimate parts of our daily routines. We isolate ourselves within fitness prisons and perform the same exercises over and over again, endlessly pursuing some form of beauty and standardization within a world of non-standard bodies.

Brian recommends: The Gym: A Site for Sore Eyes (2015) by Joel Sanders.

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Thursday Evening Schedule A workout program that begins the body’s dismantling of ingrained patriarchal ideals.

Glute + lower back stretch: Hold each pose 2 x 30 seconds per side.

Warm-up: Goblet squats using a dinner bowl for 12 repetitions.

Deadlift: 4 x 10 reps @ 185lbs with 90-second rests.

Recovery: Massage your back against the undulating floor for thoracic relief.

Kinky deadlift: Have your friend tie you up in Kinbaku poses using the ropes hanging above the deadlift platform. Hold each pose for 5 minutes with 1-minute rest periods.

Squat warm-up: Front-seated squats. Use the toilet behind you for guidance.

Weighted squat: 3 x 8 repetitions @ 140lbs with 1-minute rests.

Active cooldown: Light stretches which target quadriceps, hamstrings, and hip flexors.

Seated meditation: Sit for 20 minutes and contemplate the pervasiveness of patriarchal thought.

Make dinner for two: Serve on the lifting plates. Repetitions are not counted for this exercise.

fig. 4: Thursday Evening Schedule diagram I.

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fig. 5: Thursday Evening Schedule diagram II.

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in conversation with

JOEL SANDERS + SUSAN STRYKER Joel Sanders (he/him) is the principal of JSA/MIXdesign, a New York–based award-winning architecture studio, inclusive design think-tank, and consultancy dedicated to the creation of accessible buildings and public spaces that meet the intersecting needs of people of different ages, genders, races, religions and abilities. Joel is also a professor at the Yale School of Architecture where he is the Director of the M. Arch II program. His work registers the impact of changing contemporary social and cultural patterns on the built environment. His studio’s design projects have been featured in global exhibitions and belong to the collections of the MoMA, the SF MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. His studio has received six New York Chapter AIA Awards, two New York State AIA Awards, two ALA/IIDA Library Interior Design Awards, four Interior Design Best of Year Award, and two Design Citations from Progressive Architecture.

Susan Stryker (she/her) is a leading trans activist in transgender studies. She is a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona and founding executive editor of the academic journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. In her advocacy, Susan moves beyond traditional conceptions of gender and sexuality in pursuit of non-discriminatory environments. This involves analyzing the role of policy and government in cultivating biases and uninformed hatred specifically towards transgender individuals. As the author of the book Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution and co-director of the Emmy-winning documentary film entitled Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, Susan has spearheaded many creative works which make visible the trans and queer culture that has long occupied urban centres.

Since they began working together in 2015, Joel and Susan have collaborated in a variety of formats including papers, interviews, lectures, and organizing symposia, all dedicated to raising awareness about social equity and public space.

June 9, 2021 @ 4:00 p.m. EDT galt.

[00:00]

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Your work engages the public washroom’s long history of concentrated discrimination, as a site which brings strangers together in close proximity. Can you speak more about the public washroom’s potential as a space of coexistence, despite its highly political nature?

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SS [00:49]

In redesigning the public washroom, we wanted to foreground the notion of “public” as a space that needs to truly be for everyone. The washroom claims to be public, but it actually enacts many forms of segregation. It is a spatial strategy for segmenting populations according to a hierarchy of values where some bodies are privileged and others are less so. In public spaces, everybody should have equal access to dealing with their bodily functions in a way that doesn’t discriminate against them.

JS [02:34]

Stalled! is based on the premise that the restroom is just one example of how everyday building types assume that the user has a “normal” body, one that is presumed to be a white, cisgendered, able-bodied male or female.1 The restroom exemplifies this paradigm because it sorts human beings into two categories based on the false idea that there are only two genders: male and female. Stalled! calls into question this prevailing assumption that restroom design is shaped by seemingly objective factors like human physiology and infrastructural systems like plumbing. We argue that restrooms, like other everyday building types, are actually culturally and historically contingent spaces that reproduce heteronormativity, structural racism, and ableism.

1. The Stalled! project began in 2015 as an initiative to address social inequity through the design of gender neutral public washrooms. “About,” Stalled!, accessed August 08, 2021.

2. MIXdesign is a design consultancy founded in 2018 by Joel Sanders which addresses accessibility in the built environment. MIXdesign draws from the knowledge of a multidisciplinary team of experts, including Susan Stryker.

Designers need to question their complicity in reproducing widely held but problematic assumptions, not only about “normal” bodies, but also about what we call non-compliant bodies. These are people of different ages, genders, races, religions, and abilities who have been marginalized and actively excluded from participating in “public” spaces. At MIXdesign, we are looking at alternative prototypes and recommendations which might allow the maximum number of non-compliant bodies—individuals, friends, families, and caregivers—of different embodiments and identities to mix together in public space.2 We believe that a democratic society fosters and promotes health, well-being, and respect for human difference by allowing people to mingle in public spaces like bathrooms.

SS [06:01]

From an architectural standpoint, non-compliant bodies suggests that you’re supposed to bring bodies into compliance, but rather than finding ways to make bodies compliant to existing space, we’re trying to change the code.3 Creating space around non-compliant bodies supports a different vision of what public space and sociality actually looks like.

3. Founding team member and legal scholar Terry Kogan led the work to change the International Plumbing Code for the Stalled! prototypes.

JS [07:44] 4. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a US law passed in 1990 and amended in 2008, aiming to provide equal opportunity in the public realm to those with disabilities as to those without disabilities. “What Is the Americans with Disabilities Act?,” ADA National Network, accessed August 08, 2021.

The Americans with Disabilities Act was an important milestone for the creation of accessible public space in the United States.

However, it still operates from a common approach to accessibility where design provides spatial or functional accommodations to allow non-compliant bodies to behave like compliant bodies.4 We’re trying to shift this mindset by designing spaces from the perspective of marginalized populations. We feel that looking at the world through the lens of non-compliant bodies will not only yield innovative, alternative architectural solutions to meet their needs but will enhance almost everybody’s experience of the public realm.5 37

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SS [09:43]

If you meet the needs of the most marginalized, then you will also address problems faced by less marginalized people who are affected by the same circumstances. Rather than thinking about how we can provide the most access to a normative space for the greatest number of people, we have to think about how we can include those on the edges. Include the margins, and you capture the middle.

JS [11:31]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, most of us have become non-compliant bodies, navigating through disabling spaces that don’t accommodate our needs. We fear coming into contact with the contaminating surfaces of architecture, as well as other human bodies. MIXdesign has been studying three marginalized communities—people in wheelchairs, the Deaf and hard of hearing, and people with autism—who have come up with novel ways of dealing with environmental stressors: disorienting, loud, and unnavigable public spaces. We are applying lessons we have learned from them to teach “us,” the general public, how to behave.

We call it multisensory wayfinding: a design approach which uses architectural characteristics that we believe will enable everyone to safely navigate public space, such as sightlines, barrier-free zones, activity zones, non-reverberant acoustics, and glare-free lighting. In other words, non-compliant bodies are setting a new design paradigm for the future.

5. Influenced by Magda Mostafa’s motto to approach problems from their extremes.

Magda is an autism design specialist and the author of the Autism ASPECTSSTM Design Index. She is an architect, associate professor of Design at the American University in Cairo, and a member of the MIXdesign team of experts.

“TEAM,” MIXdesign, accessed August 08, 2021.

Let me share another example of how we are applying lessons we learned from non-compliant bodies to generate design innovations that can improve everyone’s experience of the built environment.

MIXdesign is conducting a series of focus groups as part of a two-year study to make the Queens Museum better meet the needs of its diverse audience.

At an onsite meeting in a gallery, one of the study participants was a woman who uses a wheelchair, who said, “You know, this space isn’t for me. I can’t look at the pictures without straining my neck.”

The art was displayed using the convention of hanging pictures according to a horizon line based on the average male, able-bodied eye height. Her comment prompted a discussion. Should there be a new standard? Should everybody look at pictures at the lower horizon line of a person in a wheelchair? In the end, everyone agreed that rather than impose one uniform standard, pictures should be displayed at multiple heights in a way that invites all of us to look at the world through the lens of people who have different perspectives and embodiments, including people with disabilities as well as children and people of different statures. Engaging empathetically with public space will allow us to give up rigid standards based on embodied norms and free us to experience the world from multiple perspectives. The people in the focus groups asked us to design not only for them, but for everybody.

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galt.

[18:12]

Susan, you’ve described the body as a built environment and a medium for how people perceive each other. Can you expand further on the idea of the body as something built and inhabited, and the standards which influence its design and conformity?

SS [18:47]

As a trans person I’m deeply aware of how appearance and shape are ways of relating to other people. If my gendered sense of self isn’t perceivable to others, one way of communicating that sense is through the alteration of appearance and shape. There’s a spatial redesign component to your body-project. Implementing the design requires intentional thought and action. What should I look like? What changes do I need to make to this material substance called my body? Within the constraints of this material, how can I create an appearance in a shape that conveys my sense of self to others while being a comfortable dwelling space for myself? This aspect of what it’s meant for me to be trans is at the root of my interest in problems of architecture and design.

6. This idea came out of a conversation between Susan and one of Joel’s colleagues at the Yale School of Architecture of Keller Easterling, where she sat in on student presentations for the Masters in Architecture program.

Culturally, we tend to assume that the body is a naturally occurring undesigned thing that occupies designed space: rooms, houses, cities, landscapes.6 Spaces shape how we comport ourselves.

They script our movements and privilege some ways of being, moving, and acting rather than others. Environments inform our bodily habitus at some level. But bodies are designed too—shaped through explicit practices like diet, grooming, going to the gym, surgery. And there’s an interplay between how body-design practices inform how we move through and occupy designed spaces, and ways that designed spaces inform how we move our bodies through them or occupy them. There’s a relationship that goes both ways between bodies and architecture, it’s not architecture on one side and bodies on the other. There is some set of principles or codes—some logic, some imaginary, some ideology, some something—that informs both bodies and architectures, and which relates them to each other in mutually transformative ways through practices that begin on either side of the dyad, starting with how bodies makes spaces to be in, or with how spaces make bodies that fit them.

7. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings and Howard Eiland, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2006).

In Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, he describes the relationship between what of the past we can use to see or know about today as always being defined by what he called a secret index.7 I think of that index—that principle or filter or whatever you want to call it that provides some basis for how one thing can be brought into relation with another—as being like an architectural code. The code is the set of cultural beliefs and practices that governs how bodies and spaces interrelate. To think about architecture as merely a prosthetic extension of a will that emanates from a body, or bodies as something with a given or natural form that is merely acted upon through an architectural program misses something vital in the middle. Both bodies and spaces are terminal points in the same set of mediating codes and practices. The code is in the intermediate zone, materializing both bodies and spaces in particular ways.

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JS [24:55]

galt.

[26:16]

SS [27:05] 8. Clare Sears is an associate professor of Sociology and Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University whose book Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law and Fascination in NineteenthCentury San Francisco was the 2017 co-winner of the Committee on LGBT History’s John Boswell Award.

JS [31:16]

Although Susan and I come from different fields, I’ve always felt that our common ground is fundamental recognition that both bodies and buildings are socially and culturally constructed, historically relative, and self-consciously designed artifacts that interrelate with biology and nature. We’re both very aware of how the design environment constructs and shapes performing bodies as they interact with one another in the world around them.

Thinking about codes as things that frame our bodies as well as our buildings which imply many degrees of generalization and categorization, how would you define the current role of the building code? And in working to change these codes, how do the timeframes of current design standards affect the way they are created and upheld?

My colleague Clare Sears wrote a book about 19th-century nuisance laws in San Francisco.8 They were legal codes that defined what constituted a public nuisance, including things like public intoxication, nudity, and noise. They included laws against cross dressing as well as against the visible display of physical impairments and disabilities. They also included laws that were ostensibly about how much space around your body constitutes private space when you’re in public, which discriminated against Chinese people who were “taking up too much space” by carrying bundles on “burden poles” across their shoulders. Clare was able to show that these seemingly neutral municipal regulations became ways of discriminating against non-normative bodies.

They were a really powerful way of defining public space according to white, able-bodied, cisgender, heterosexual, masculinist norms and then spatially segregating people who did not embody those norms into distinct geographical zones—set off from the public sphere in homes or institutions, in Chinatown, in sex work ghettos, dime museum freak shows, or nightclubs. Codes and laws regulate individual bodies to produce public space in a particular way, for particular people, using spatial strategies of enclosure and containment to enact discriminatory practices.

Building codes purport to be neutral regulations that are shaped by seemingly objective functional, biological, or technical requirements. But they dictate human behavior in public space and consequently they include and exclude different kinds of bodies. For example, most building codes in the USA mandate sex-segregated bathrooms—separate men’s and women’s rooms—because this spatial configuration responds to the “universal need for privacy between the sexes,” based on the erroneous notion of the gender binary.

As a consequence, bathrooms exclude trans and non-binary folks, as well as other people who deviate from the norm, including religious Muslims, orthodox Jews, and people with physical and sensory disabilities. Bathroom codes are just one example of the way that building codes masquerade as being truly objective,

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when they are often based on problematic cultural biases about non-compliant bodies. We need to read building codes in the same way we would read any historical relative text. Codes need to be analyzed and deciphered so that we can unpack their pernicious embedded assumptions in order to transform and change them.

Under the leadership of Stalled! member Terry Kogan, lobbying efforts led to the amendment of the International Plumbing Code.

The 2021 code now makes the non-binary multi-user restroom type that we favor code-compliant.

galt.

[34:32]

SS [35:44]

You mentioned that Stalled! began as an interdisciplinary collaboration between a trained historian, architect, and law professor. Understanding the relationship between different disciplines and in solidarity with other social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter, Disability Justice, and Land Back, can you speak to the importance of working in solidarity with other perspectives, movements, initiatives, and each other? What is the value of that collaboration in striving for inclusive environments?

It’s not just our disciplinary training and perspective that has a bearing on the design process. There are lots of ways of being in the world. Some of them are embodied, where you learn something because of how you move or don’t move through the world.

Bringing these different embodied perspectives to bear on the design process feels every bit as important as disciplinary training.

You want the broadest diversity of opinions and you want the biggest diversity of body types and body experiences, so that you get the most interesting story out of that process. We each brought a cluster of different strengths and attributes to bear on this project, and we recognized that we needed to reach out to people who were differently embodied and differently trained than the three of us. For example, in spite of all of our differences, none of the three of us are people who menstruate. Making sure that you’ve got somebody who has an embodied perspective on that biological process is part of what informs the philosophy of MIXdesign.

People who are wheelchair users or who have different sensory capacities or different numbers of limbs have embodied differences that produce perspectives and experiences that strengthen and improve the design process, and the design that emerges as a result. That for me is really the most crucial and exciting part of the work that we’ve done together. I think it is applicable to a design process in ways that far exceed this particular project.

JS [39:28]

One idea that Susan and I share and that is central to the mission of MIXdesign is this notion of cross-disciplinary collaboration. I often bring up the example of Howard Roark, the main character of Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead, modeled on Frank Lloyd Wright. This heroic, handsome, strapping white male exemplifies the image of the architect that I was taught to emulate in school: a solitary genius who, working alone, solves the world’s problems through design.

Other people, particularly clients and their needs, threaten to 41

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contaminate the integrity of his designs. However, this conception of the “Starchitect” is outmoded. No one discipline or authority figure has the capacity to address the complex social, economic, and environmental problems we face, especially not an architect.

Design professionals have no choice but to reach out and forge alliances with people from other disciplines who possess complementary expertise to imagine alternative futures. Design activism through transdisciplinary collaboration is easier said than done. But in the end, this is what really enabled Stalled! to work.

SS [44:05]

In the name of what I would call a common ethos, or a shared sense of what we would like sociality to be, we were able to talk from each of our perspectives about ways of relating to the world that we both deeply believe in and that we think of as good. As a non-architect, maybe I have an overly romanticized view of this idea of doing things, but it’s really inspiring to me that you’re going to go out and build the world the way that you think it should be.

Let’s not just think great thoughts or try to create things that are pretty—how can we literally make the world different in a concrete way through our immediate actions?

JS [46:10]

For me, collaborating with Susan works for a variety of reasons.

We respect each others’ different but complementary expertise.

As someone who is not constrained by the lens of architectural training, she brings to our work fresh and unforeseen ways of thinking about how the designed environment shapes human embodied identities. Architects too often lose sight of what people like Susan know every day: the potential of architecture to change the world.

To know more, Joel + Susan recommend: Allen, Sandy. Where Do We Go From Here?. 99% Invisible, September 8, 2020.

DeVun, Leah. The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.

Watch the What is Solidarity?

Breaking the Code Lecture featuring Susan Stryker on the Waterloo Architecture Youtube Channel.

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Sanders, Joel, and Susan Stryker. “Stalled: Gender-Neutral Public Bathrooms.” South Atlantic Quarterly 115, no. 4 (October 1, 2016): 779–88.

The Architectural League of New York. “Panel Discussion: Social Distance, Health, and Inclusive Public Space.” Accessed September 12, 2021.

Tingley, Kim. “How Architecture Could Help Us Adapt to the Pandemic.” The New York Times, June 10, 2020.

PAUSE: On slowing down, drawing trees, designing with uncertainty, representing the unrepresented, living on colonized lands, and analyzing non-places.

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LET’S DRAW A TREE

T. K. Justin Ng T. K. Justin (he/him/his) is the author of The Vancouver Sketchbook (2019) and The Urban Sketcher’s Guide to Helsinki (2017). Justin holds a Bachelor of Architectural Studies from the University of Waterloo and currently continues his studies at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

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PAUSE/PLAY (left): This carefully groomed Japanese Yew beckons young climbers in Massachusetts, 2021.

On a cloudless afternoon, Melville Street sizzled and our class of first-year architecture students swarmed a small patch of green. Our professor, Donald McKay, had just told us to sketch a tree: a simple task of an intimidating magnitude, as one of our first assignments in university.

Eighty teenagers searched for worthy subjects and with graphite in hand we translated Galt’s tangled branches into our notebooks.

With the first stroke, I realized I was unfamiliar with drawing landscapes.

Growing up in Hong Kong’s urban jungle spoiled me with the regularity and perpendicularity of a modern city, so a tree appeared capricious, demanding acute observation. As crooked streaks of black sprouted outwards from the bottom of my page, I began to notice the life and motion of the environment around me. The patience required to sketch freed me from the hunger that characterizes much of urban life, which rushes past everything at an impossible speed. From the lichen at the base of the trunk to the thickening of the foliage towards the sun, the drawing pace resonated with nature’s frequency. Slowing down brought me closer to the monumental scale of the reality we inhabit.

1. Emma Newburger, “COVID Pandemic Drove a Record Drop in Global Carbon Emissions in 2020,” CNBC, December 10, 2020.

Tree-sketching turned out to be a one-time lesson in architecture; but six years later, those memories have acquired new relish and urgency.

The pandemic has reconfigured the social sphere and new forms of working, gathering, and learning have transplanted much of our lives online. Confined to our homes, carbon dioxide emissions in 2020 decreased by seven percent from 2019, while many commuters discovered unexpected pockets of time for exploring hobbies.1 However, this “new normal” has also thrown us into a boundless virtual landscape detached from a shared reality.

2. Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (New York: Penguin Books, 2012).

Amid a raging pandemic, 2020 laid bare the severity of environmental degradation and the precarity of truth. Our world is on edge and the internet’s bias is pushing us further into disagreements.2 We need to recognize both the built and natural environments as common ground, to promote democracy, solidarity, and simple fellow-feeling. We have a lot of work to do. In the trinkets of time we have, let’s draw a tree. Whether it is from a bedroom window or a park bench, give Mother Nature time to reveal her majesty. Slow down and let her remind us of the shared planet we are fighting for.

Justin recommends: The Overstory: A Novel (2018)

by Richard Powers

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Norway Spruces poking through almost 2 m of snow in the Finnish Laplands, 2016.

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A Northern Hardwood forest surrounds a campsite in Massachusetts, 2020.

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LET’S DRAW A TREE II This spring, we invited students and community members to draw a tree as means for pause. We asked participants to reflect on the role a tree plays in their quotidian life. This simple task aims to inspire awareness of our connectivity to both the surrounding environment and the current diaspora of our community.

Many of our submissions came from students enrolled in a course taught at the University of Waterloo by Mkomose (Dr. Andrew Judge), which exposes students to Indigenous Peoples’ relationships with the Carolinian forest and the larger issues that land-based knowledge can address.

We’ve compiled these trees into a forest for you to meander through within the pages of this book.

The rest of the Let’s Draw A Tree submissions are featured digitally on the galt. website at galtpublication.com!

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1 Cedar of Lebanon Cambridge University Botanic Garden, Cambridge, UK Leela Keshav “Every time I visit the botanic gardens, I greet this tree. Sitting for some time with her for this sketch, I appreciated the dancerly twisting of her branches, and wondered about her story—how deep are her roots? How old is she? What has she witnessed? Who has made a home in her branches? Who has sketched her before me?”

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3

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2 Unknown Tree Galt, ON Ethan Zhang “This is a tree out on a neighbour’s driveway. I love using charcoal, pastels, and bold mediums in creating art.

I wanted to try drawing the likeness of a tree using only positives and negatives.”

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3 Baobab Kenya Bhavna Bhathella “Africa’s majestic tree of life that provides shelter and food to many animals in the wild.”

4 Unknown Tree Grand River Trail, Cambridge, ON Byron Cai “I love the way the leaves seemingly all merge together to create a curly shroud around the trunk. I thought that pen would be the best way to achieve the diversity in values while also embracing the texture of foliage.”

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5 Northern Red Oak Rosetta McClain Gardens, Scarborough, ON Daisy Zhang “I was drawn to this tree because it caught both the light and shadow of the sunset.”

6 Eastern White Pine Mississauga, ON Leanne Li “A windswept tree reminds me that we are capable of being resilient, and the form we take afterwards is one of the things that makes us all unique.”

7 Unknown Tree Pinterest, my imagination Silja Walenius “I wanted to paint an in-person tree but it was raining.”

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8 Willow Tree Humber River, Toronto, ON Valentina Aguayo Martiri “I found this Willow tree along the Humber River in Toronto on May 17, 2021. I was interested in capturing how her moving strands layer up and reveal other colours.

The longer I watched, I began to see purple and grey tones peek out at their own rhythm. I thought the saturated colours of my oil pastels would be best to document this moment and pop out on the page.

The Willow tree is like a tent, and it opens passageways between strands that invite us in. A feeling of calm arises as this Willow sways in her own peaceful dance.”

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9 Black Spruce Churchill Meadows Community Common, Mississauga, ON Michael Salib “This exercise allowed me to recognize and appreciate all of the tree’s little intricacies, and made me realize that everything on the planet has impeccable detail—we just never take the time to look at it.”

10 Sugar Maple Palmerston Ave, Brantford, ON Caitlin Paridy “This little wonky tree was planted by my dad and I four years ago. We transplanted it from our cottage and it now lives in the front yard as a perfect perch for birds.

When I look at it now, I think about the land where this tree was born, and the adventures it has had!”

11 Ginkgo Tree Galt, ON Ethan Zhang “I like Ginkgo trees as they are a genus of their own. This one is starting to sprout for the new season and its leaves have not yet formed into fan shapes.”

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12 Oak Tree Nitobe Memorial Garden, Vancouver, BC Cathy Li “This was a spontaneous sketch in the midst of walking through a Japanese Garden on the UBC campus. I normally keep a pen in my bag for times like this because it’s simple and easy to carry around and use anywhere, but also forces me to be confident and intentional with my strokes (no erasing here!)”

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13 Oak Tree In front of my house Cynthia Zhang “I drew this tree with a loosely gripped charcoal pencil. While branches swept across my page, the drawing started to look like a network of intersecting veins and arteries. I kept with it because they’re quite similar—carriers of life.

The nature of the sketch mimics the nature of a tree: loose, unhinged, and oftentimes unpredictable.”

14 Eastern White Pine Tree North Bay, ON Abhishek Ambekar “I was captivated by this tree due to the high density of pine needle leaves that form the clusters of its wide volume, and also the height of the tree which reaches over 15 m high.”

15 Sweet Chestnut Tree Vancouver, BC Cynthia Eng “I discovered this tree while researching tree species in the Carolinian forest that were an important food source for Indigenous People in the past. Sweet chestnut is also called the American chestnut, and is now a critically endangered species.”

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POMP IN ABSURD CIRCUMSTANCES

Tianyi Huang, Kimberley Huggins + Jing Liao Tianyi (he/him) is a graduate of the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, where he obtained a Bachelor of Architectural Studies in 2020. He has worked for architecture and urban design offices including Diller Scofidio Renfro, Kengo Kuma, and OMA.

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Kimberley (she/her) is a graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she obtained a Master of Landscape Architecture. She previously attended the University of Western Ontario where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical and Environmental Sciences. She is a founding and current editor of the Pairs publication.

Jing (she/her) is a graduate of the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, where she obtained a Bachelor of Architectural Studies in 2020. Jing has worked in urban design, interior design, and architectural design offices in Hong Kong, New York, Amsterdam, and Toronto.

PAUSE/PLAY fig. 1 (left): Compilation of process work and final images on the narrative and stakeholders’ engagements.

If you will allow us for a moment to be self-centred in reflecting on the past year, we would like to point out that the experience of graduating at this moment was absurd. Graduation marks a moment of transition with celebration and optimism, two qualities that were impossible to embody without feeling pompous and out of touch with the surrounding context.

After years of travelling along the somewhat linear trajectory of our education, many of us were thrust off course in its closing months by the force of several crises unfolding on far larger scales. We found ourselves unexpectedly stuck, witnessing how a historic failure to address systemic injustices affected every aspect of our daily lives.

Searching for a meaningful way to move forward, it was only natural to feel increasingly apprehensive of the career paths in view and unsatisfied with the issues skirted by our profession. We felt that clarity might come from ourselves if we just tried something. We tendered a competition entry to the Future of Ontario Place call for counterproposals, drawn to the discordant nature of reviving a past utopian vision in a moment that was anything but optimistic. We hoped that through this effort, our ability and agency to envision change as young designers would become slightly less indistinct.

1. The Future of Ontario Place Project, “The Future of Ontario Place Project: George Baird,” Youtube video, September 20, 2020.

Ontario Place was designed with the singular optimism and expertise of a past generation. Conceived at a time when Toronto’s lakeshore was dominated by industrial activity, it was a visionary creation promising public access to the waterfront, complete with showpiece steel megastructures and an equally novel landscape. Designers of the Toronto landmark sought to physically manifest the heroic technological ambitions of metabolism and other late-modernist avant-garde influences.1 The utopian spirit of Ontario Place was uncompromising in its ambition.

2. Amara McLaughlin, “Casino isn’t ‘off the table’ as Ford government takes aim at Ontario Place,” CBC News, November 17, 2018; “Casino not among options Ford government wants for Ontario Place redevelopment,” CBC News, May 28, 2019.

Yet the bravado of these bold ambitions has fractured over time and proven to be an illusion. Five decades since its opening, the site has fallen into well-intentioned but conflicting managerial custody. Ontario Place currently faces unforeseen economic pressures, including private speculation by the current provincial government.2 Revitalization attempts lacked the original visionary rigour and political support and prioritized immediate financial gain, resulting in the uncoordinated and piecemeal demolition of conceptually crucial elements.3 Ontario Place lost its technological novelty, and consequently, much of its programmed public value. Its obsolescence was inadvertently fated by politics; the site’s managerial decisions compounded and conflicted with the original priorities of the designers, slowly destroying its optimistic ideals. Although change is inevitable and neither inherently bad nor good, we hope to speculate on change that foregrounds the well-being of people, place, and ecology, at all scales ranging from incremental to radical.

3. Desirée Valadares, “Ontario Place: A Place to Stand? A Place to Grow? A Biographical Approach to Landscape Research” (Master of Landscape Architecture, University of Guelph, 2013).

The Future of Ontario Place 4. “Ontario Place: A Call for Counterproposals, CanadaWide Design Challenge Brief,” The Future of Ontario Place Project, 2020.

Ontario Place, like many of us, is in a state of transition. Although no longer students, we are still unsure of what will constitute our new identities as professionals. We felt anchored to the stakes of the competition that asked, “What can the future of Ontario Place be?” and, “What do we have to say about it?”4 We felt obligated to acknowledge its changing identity without declaring what this identity will be. This design envisions a reality in which Ontario Place can react to changing ecological and financial conditions.

The transformations aim to create an embedded experience and a deeper place-based relationship between the user and the landscape.

As recent graduates straddling the realms of academia and industry, we welcomed the apprehension and confusion accompanying our unique perspective. The concept of shifting identities became central to our final proposal.

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fig. 2: Compilation of precedents, process work and final images on the Quad. fig. 3 (next): Compilation of precedents, process work and final images on the U.

5. Andrew Witt, “The Machinic Animal: Autonomic Networks and Behavioural Computation,” in When is the Digital in Architecture?, ed. Andrew Goodhouse (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2017), 213–77.

The Link consists of two major organizational gestures: the Quad (fig. 2) and the U (fig. 3). These elements stitch the park coastline to the larger network of parks and trails along Toronto’s waterfront while catalyzing multi-layered processes to augment Ontario Place’s public value and ecological resilience.

The Quad refers to a mixed ensemble of new and existing structures that protect the historic character of Ontario Place, constituting a central core for performance and community engagement. This unified core seeks to extend the entertainment functions offered by Exhibition Place towards the north, into the islands of the park. Year-round public outreach programs enrich the Cinesphere and Pods, now connected to the east and west islands by a floating deck. To improve public access to the site, a floating structure on the north shore hosts an open-air theatre and stepped market. This ensemble of adjacent structures can fluctuate spatially to accommodate several functions concurrently, such as a market, theatre, forum, and pool ice rink; alternatively, they can unite into an extended complex for large-scale events.

Encircling the Quad and the entirety of the island’s fragmented perimeter, the U symbolizes the changing future of the park while physically reinforcing the continuity of the public waterfront. Modern technocratic thought suggests that computation and machines can emulate and control nature, upholding the larger belief that technology can replace a robust ecology.5 Challenging this binary, a paired system of built and landscape infrastructure encourages users to interact with technology and ecology as inseparable entities. The U employs machine and natural processes, enabling the park’s landscape to exert its own will. This combined infrastructure builds ecological resilience within a constructed landscape, supporting Ontario Place’s adaptation to our changing climate.

As the architectural node of the U, the Hub is a central pavilion positioned along the sweeping elevated walkway. The Hub is a lightweight shed structure that houses a band of robots named the Follies. These machines glide along the walkway and operate on the ground below, following daily and seasonal rhythms. One of their maintenance tasks includes breaking down the existing hardscaping to make way for local flora and fauna, and producing a recycled

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PAUSE/PLAY substrate for new pathways. Together, the Hub and the Follies engage the public with spectacles of seed-bombing, irrigation, mowing, and other processes that deconstruct and rewild the park’s landscape. These components of the U braid together an experience that invites the user to participate in ongoing processes of landscape rehabilitation and inspires a sense of precarity beyond what design can anticipate.

Designing with Uncertainty This proposal does not claim to be the perfect answer, rather a step towards finding our collective language and honing our intuition. Competitions can be helpful instruments to experiment collaboratively and build experience for young designers, but they also compound issues of inequity within the profession. Young practitioners weigh issues of financial stability against participating in uncompensated or even pay-to-enter formats. For submitted work, the terms of the competition might require indefinite royalty-free access and demand the right to approve any distribution of the work by the designers. Agreeing to participate under these conditions can easily undervalue professional worth and ownership.

Beyond the context of a competition, we hope to cultivate other circumstances for open experimentation. Deviations from the conventional course of practice are evidence of greater possibilities within our field.

Forensic Architecture applies architectural methodologies to present evidence in support of political, social, and environmental justice. Anna Heringer integrates material ecologies and traditional knowledge into a framework for sustainable development. The Assemble collective’s socially responsible approach aims to collaborate with members of the public, who act as primary stakeholders, design participants, and ultimately residents.

In all of these cases, design presents itself as a verb that can be exercised within the fuzzy extremities of the profession.

The absurdity of real life often trumps the predictions we make as designers.

Therefore, maintaining a loose grip on what falls within and outside of our notions of practice is likely our best bet in remaining open to the joyfully unexpected places where our hard-won skills might belong. The transition between student and professional life is gradual, continuous, and nuanced; this ambiguity holds potential for resilience and adaptability. We are flexible and receptive in our status and thoughts as recent graduates, and these qualities can be our strengths. We should not resist the uncertainty of our situation as we transition into actors in a destabilized world, but aim to better align ourselves with the emergent nature of long-term transformative and collective work. Moving forward from design education with an active effort to release any pretense of certainty, we might instead allow for a little openness to absurdity as we step into the jumble of professional practice.

Tianyi, Kimberley + Jing recommend: Insanity Can Keep You Sane (2020) by Molly Young in the New York Times.

Also, a collection of experimental architectural tools, The Other Architect: Another Way of Building Architecture (2015) by the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

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CLUTTER My father lives in a city-(under)funded bachelor’s apartment in Toronto.

Before he moved in, the apartment was bare, concrete, and austere in that modernist way we are taught to fetishize. Now, the house has dark shadows in the corner, signs of a building riddled with bedbugs.

The living room is tetrised with old electronics, hundreds of cigarette packs are stacked in a corner, and instead of chairs are old walkers that my father fished out of his neighbour’s apartment. The point is that there is stuff, mess, dirt, and lots of it.

vic vic (they/them) is a queer, beyond-the-binary, white settler. They are invested in exploring the role of architecture drawings as a tool for storytelling and unpacking how particular embodiments interact with our space. As a recent M. Arch graduate of the Waterloo University of Waterloo School of Architecture, they are currently working on understanding the intersection of intergenerational care, disability, and addictions in spaces of nurturing and home.

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PAUSE/PLAY Without all this clutter—without him—his apartment could pass as aesthetic, with the summertime light hitting the concrete kindly. But the reality is that a layer of dirt covers the floor and remnants of hard nights stain the walls.

Never in my architectural education have I seen a drawing that represents the kind of space my father lives in. He is elderly and has lived experience with houselessness and poverty; his reality, shared by many, is absent from architectural visualizations. There is no room for him or his stuff in the spaces I am taught to admire. This lack of clutter in architects’ drawings and designs contributes to the systemic erasure of our communities and reflects the classism and ableism of our profession and its education.

Architectural drawings often present spaces as idealized by the dominantly heteropatriarchal, wealthy, able-bodied profession. Architects perpetuate ideals of minimalistic and clean spaces through drawings devoid of stuff.

These drawing principles, which are named as efficient and essential, are emblematic of modernist values that have become desirable in design and representation. Architectural drawings in design education are intended to communicate materials, structure, site relationships, form, proportion, and program, but they often exclude the presence of people. These drawings show spaces in their supposedly pure forms before an individual has had a chance to inhabit a space and make it their own, filling it with noise, clutter, mementos, and memories. When they are not empty, drawings are often populated with vectors of young, wealthy, able-bodied, professionally clothed, white, straight people, awkwardly filling void spaces that look staged and unlivable. I have never seen a vector of a dead plant or a couple having an argument in an architectural drawing, yet these realities fill almost every space I have ever been in. These omissions are value statements that communicate what qualities are desirable or undesirable and dictate who is or is not welcome.

1. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept,” Hypatia 26, no. 3 (2011): 591–609.

To my father, his walker is a chair, a mobility device, a place for the cat to lounge, and that which bridges his embodied reality to the space he inhabits.

It is objects like these that fill the gap between our bodies and the places we live in. They create a good fit, especially for those who are otherwise misfits in an inaccessible and ableist environment. From a feminist and materialist view, misfitting refers to the implications of our bodies in all their uniqueness meeting our often rigid, standardized, and unforgiving spatial environments.1 This concept offers a critical lens on disability that does not define a single view of a disabled body, but rather describes a misfitting of body and space.

Our stuff, mess, and dirt are tools that minimize friction in these misfit relationships. They are necessary to placemaking and belonging; a lamp in the corner lights up dead and uninhabitable space, pillows on a window ledge let us cozy up to the sky, railings act as a way to stabilize and ground ourselves.

Following are three images of well-documented modernist bathrooms onto which I’ve projected the traces of someone who is “dirty,” “disorganized,” “disabled,” and ultimately human. By filling these spaces with daily objects, I advocate for the use of clutter in architectural representation to bring life and lived experience into our drawings and understandings of space. In the most architectural and romantic sense, the bathroom is a place intended for one to bathe in a slow and meditative manner. In reality, the bathroom is where all private and unpalatable aspects of human life occur. It is the site of the house where we grapple with all that is excess; expelling dirt off our skin, urine and shit from our bodies, and all other manners of abject activities that are never shown in architectural drawings. All three case studies focus on modernist spaces which situate the excess and the ornament as visual indicators that a person does not fit. By highlighting the substance of daily life, I resist the modernist design principles which problematize the particularities of our embodiment and defer blame from the spaces that intentionally exclude us based on gender, ability, age, and class.

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Villa Tugendhat

by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich.

Case Study 1: Villa Tugendhat Clutter, mess, and the trappings of daily life are imposed on the Villa Tugendhat bathroom designed by architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich. Mies van der Rohe adopted the sensibilities of “less is more,” a perspective that manifests in the design principles of this modernist bathroom. While a sparkling and tidy bathroom is what gets drawn and photographed, this documentation ignores that the space will inevitably find itself in a state of disarray at some point in time. It is in these moments that we wish we had more counter space, more cupboard space, more hangers and shelves. It makes apparent that less really is just that: less. In the drawing, there are streaks of toothpaste in the sink, a hairdryer is lying about, and a menstrual cup sits drying on the counter. These practicalities are left out of representation, especially those designs which imagine that there is someone else—a cleaner, a maid, a mother—to keep the space looking tidy.

I, however, maintain that a bathroom, where our daily objects (the stuff that we rely on to make us feel better, cared for, and healthy) are displayed and celebrated, is a beautiful space in its own right.

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Villa Savoye

by Le Corbusier.

Case Study 2: Villa Savoye The durability of a space can be easily tested by children: they splish, they splash, they spill. A space that needs constant tidying up to make it look as the architect intended is not always feasible. Children bring brightness and spontaneity into our lives that are inevitably accompanied by large messes and a lot of dirt. In Villa Savoye, a renowned example of modernist design by Le Corbusier, the bathroom is a space for a wealthy family that has all the spare time and none of the design needs that a working-class family might require. Despite being a family home, there are no traces of childlike inhabitation; the windows lack fingerprints and smudges, and the floors are bare, with no toys or clothing in sight. For a child, the act of going to the bathroom can be an ordeal as they may need stools to reach the sinks, toys for bathing, and attachments to make toilets usable for their smaller bodies.

When we exclude children’s toys, games, and accessories from our drawings and photographic documentation, we inevitably erase their experience; the children remain neither seen nor heard.

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The Glass House by Philip Johnson.

Case Study 3: The Glass House As our bodies change with age, the spaces that once fit us become inaccessible. Bathrooms are retrofitted so that we can age in place, and the original designs are altered to accommodate our changing needs.

Toilets adopt raised seats, chairs are added to tubs and showers, and grab bars adorn walls to help us move around, providing stability and safety.

These additions do not appear as revered moments of joy in architectural drawings, but rather the unwanted ornament of the bathroom. Grab bars interrupt the floor-to-ceiling tiles and hence disturb the initial vision of the architect. Physical disabilities unsettle architects’ notions of what a beautiful bathroom looks like; the additions and modifications are considered excessive, cluttering up a space with unwanted objects in the attempt to comfortably inhabit the architecture. Accessibility modifications are sometimes difficult to alter after construction, but can easily be integrated at the stage of drawing and design. In Phillip Johnson’s Glass House, the bathroom is far from accessible for anyone with additional mobility needs. Its curved walls make retrofits especially difficult, leading me to question who the architect imagined would live in this space and who would not even be able to visit.

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PAUSE/PLAY Drawing conventions in architectural practice are classist and ableist, often prioritizing the form of a design over the inhabitation of space. By filling visualizations with the presence of people and all their mess, we can begin to expand the boundaries of architecture to provide people and their lived experiences a place to find refuge. Clutter will take over any building, no matter how modernist or efficient it was originally designed to be.

By excluding the stuff and dirt of everyday life in architectural drawings, we reinforce the idea that clean, empty, and wealthy spaces are the ideal, and that architecture should operate separately from the objects that allow us to fit comfortably in spaces.

Like my father, my body and objects are not excessive or wanton ornament, but rather the clutter that allows me to engage in placemaking and belonging.

For students whose sphere of influence is often constrained to unbuilt projects, drawings can serve as an avenue for resistance and advocacy.

Drawing in a way that highlights all the objects and mess inherent to our existence exposes the biases which affect our design education, the architectural profession, and the spaces architects create. In representing these typically invisible realities and communities within our drawings, we can begin to disrupt existing design principles and imagine alternate futures where people and their mess have a place to belong.

vic recommends: Vector__Vault, a project that works towards diversifying architectural visualization by providing free Creative Commons vectors of underrepresented bodies.

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PLACELESSNESS What does it mean to belong and to build on colonized land when your ancestral homeland is also colonized?

How am I, as a Black immigrant studying architecture, complicit in Canada’s settler colonial project?

Niara van Gaalen Niara (she/her) is a third-year architecture student at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. She was born in the Netherlands and is of Afro-Surinamese and Dutch descent.

At the age of six, she immigrated to Turtle Island, now the settler colonial state called Canada.

She grew up on and now goes to university on the Haldimand Tract, which are lands promised to the Six Nations of the Grand River.

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PAUSE/PLAY Homelands Having been educated in the colonial school system, I now have the responsibility to unlearn and to educate myself on Canada’s treaty obligations and Indigenous histories. Settler and immigrant architects often adopt the colonial mindset that the land we work on is a blank slate—this is not true. This is how we end up in the realm of placelessness; we neglect the elements of the land and the beings on it which give specificity to each place in the world. By devaluing the importance of land and place, we harm the natural environment and marginalize native communities and cultures. Within architecture, this reveals itself in a lack of site-specificity, where large chunks of the built environment are interchangeable between urban centres. This problem of placelessness is especially pervasive in settler colonies like Canada, which create utopias for settlers and conversely, dystopias for Indigenous Peoples. Architects project an image onto the land of what they want it to be, instead of asking, “What does the land want to be?”

I always feel that I exist in the realm of placelessness—like I belong neither here nor there, untethered from the land. This phenomenon fascinates me.

I was born in the Netherlands, where I was an outsider due to the colour of my skin. My ancestors on my mother’s side lived in Suriname, and before then, in West Africa. I was two continents and many decades removed from my ancestral homeland before arriving in Canada in 2007. At the time, I thought I was alone in my feelings of placelessness. As my family searched for a place to live, we drove through countless monochromatic, newly built suburbs. I had never felt more lost, trying to find my way through a maze of cul-de-sacs. Even though many immigrants live in the suburbs, the design screams, “White nuclear family!” and the inward facing roadways which prevent strangers from entering the neighbourhood ask, “What business do you have here?”

1. O:se Kenhionhata:tie means Willow River, for the many willows that line the river’s banks. It is the Mohawk word for the now-called Grand River.

Amina Lalor and Amy Smoke, “What Is Solidarity?: Land Back” (What is Solidarity? Speaker Series, Waterloo Architecture, September 24, 2020).

It was only when I began architecture school that I learned that this residential design was intentional; the exacerbated feelings of placelessness I experienced were not only logical, but common. To counteract our feelings of alienation, we immigrants bring seeds, food, and other cultural land-based elements from our homelands and build havens for ourselves here. While we continue celebrating our cultures, we must also build relationships with the plants, water, and natural elements of the new land to feel that we truly belong. I have spent 14 years breathing the oxygen made by the Black Walnut trees and willows along O:se Kenhionhata:tie, drinking water from deep within the ground, and eating wild mulberries.1 I am now made up of this land, and you are too.

2. John Ralston Saul, A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada (Toronto: Penguin Books, 2009).

In Canada, placelessness stems from colonial insecurity. The structure of trade, government, and culture are appropriated from American and European models, thereby severing the country’s Indigenous roots.2 The Indigenous Peoples taught European settlers to view society as a growing circle, where there is space for newcomers who bring complexity and difference, and where there is abundance, not scarcity; European settlers quickly buried or appropriated these land-based values as they sought to assimilate and purposely obliterate Indigenous Peoples.3 When we think of Canada as a welcoming place for people of many backgrounds, which I realize is an image that does not always reflect reality, we must understand that Indigenous Peoples first embodied these values on Turtle Island—the name for what we call North America, originally used by Lenape, Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, and other Woodland Nations. Whether we are of white-settler or more recent migrant-settler origins, as non-Indigenous architects we will never create meaningful buildings here without understanding and respecting the land and its original guardians.4

3. Saul, A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada.

4. Kory Wilson, Pulling Together: Foundations Guide (Victoria: BCcampus, 2018).

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DESIGN REFLEXIVITY Architectures 5. Lane Wallace, “What Makes a Place ‘Real’?” The Atlantic, May 11, 2010.

What does it mean to be a part of a place? The places that feel most authentic tend to be where the community feels a sense of belonging and collective identity. Does the community feel safe in that place? Do they have ceremonies related to the land? Can they name the plants and animals? Do they know their neighbours? Do they remember things that have changed over the years?

Author and journalist Lane Wallace explains how marginalized communities see their sense of place as being more flexible—they need a place in the circle of the community, but do not need to be at the centre to feel a sense of belonging.5 On the other hand, when white settlers assert their identity at the centre of a place, they become the focus of architecture and design.

For example, houses designed around nuclear families and settler norms of cooking, sleeping, and gathering centre whiteness and reinforce colonialism both on Turtle Island and beyond. By inherently creating a disconnect from the land, white people also suffer from placelessness.

The Western world’s individualistic culture is a key obstacle in designing authentic places. Architects who refuse to set aside their ego believe their designs will fix major underlying issues such as poverty, institutionalized racism, and illness. More socially conscious architects use community consultation and site analysis to interpret complex socio-political situations of a given place. By using this approach, we acknowledge that we do not engage in placemaking because we are not gods building the world from scratch.

As architecture students, we must realize the limits of our profession. We are curators and not creators of place. The land has built itself using its own tools, from wind to glaciers; other creatures have layered their worlds onto that work, and Indigenous Peoples have shaped the land since time immemorial.

As architects, we must not take credit for the work of becoming that the people and other beings of the land have already done.

Revolution of Place Architecture is a double-edged sword. Before we aim to create architecture that can help others, we must first do no harm. A simple example of this is the design and placement of park benches. A well-placed bench can enliven a park or path. If it has a back and armrests, it functions better as a place to rest, especially for the elderly and disabled. But if the bench has gaps and extra armrests in the centre, it purposely prevents unsheltered people from sleeping on it. Design becomes a subtle form of violence that says certain people do not belong and do not deserve to rest.

6. “How To Become An Architect—Architect Demographics,” Zippia, October 2, 2020.

7. Léopold Lambert, “Letter to a Young Architect,” The Architectural Review, September 2020, 79.

8. Amal Dirie, “Nomadic Passage: Water Conservation and Land Preservation” (Master of Architecture thesis, University of Waterloo, 2020), 6–7.

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In practice, we rarely question who is harmed by design and why. It does not escape me that architecture as a profession is largely composed of white men who benefit from holding the balance of power within the status quo.6 Architect Léopold Lambert argues that “a weapon tends to favour the powerful. Yet a weapon can also be used for insurrections and revolutions.”7 Used by marginalized people trained in architecture, these weapons can support revolutionary ways of life in the home, in public space, and everywhere.

Before there were architects, there were builders and makers. Their traditional knowledge of materials and crafts produced an architecture that supported ways of life that were in balance with the needs of the entire community.

For example, nomadic women in Somaliland design huts that can be easily deconstructed and rebuilt as the community moves with their livestock in search of water. This architecture supports “female kinships, friendships, and rituals” that have existed since ancient times, even as the hut materials and configurations evolve.8 Although the community is always moving, its strong sense of place is rooted in relationships between the architecture, the land, and the community’s values.

PAUSE/PLAY 9. Lambert, “Letter to a Young Architect,” 79.

Remembering and redistributing knowledge of building and making is a way of arming ourselves for a much-needed architectural revolution that supports non-Indigenous relationships with the land. Space will always be political, but “each line you trace will materialize into a wall, which itself will be enforcing a certain organization of bodies in space.”9 Each time we draw a line, we choose to protect or harm different communities, to reinforce or remove power structures. As architects, we curate spaces and the bodies which inhabit them.

Resolution of Place Within a respectful relationship with the land, how can settlers and more recent immigrants find place?

10. “Brixton Mosque,” Counterspace Studio, accessed June 5, 2021.

One answer that has captured my imagination is rooted in how the built environment exists in the ephemeral qualities of light, sound, and smell.

Colonial strategies of mapping and urban planning simply do not capture this quality. The Brixton Mosque by Counterspace builds on ephemeral qualities; the Muslim community that uses it today wanted to respect its origins as a Dutch-reformed church while adapting it into a mosque. Counterspace altered the facade, and at prayer time a well of light suggests the shape of a minaret as the call to prayer goes out.10 This dynamic architecture captures the changing nature of time and space in a way that recognizes what came before.

Earlier, I asked what it means to belong to a real place. I ask this because I encompass many ancestral homelands, and now a chosen homeland as well, even if it was not mine to choose. I am unsure of my answer. What I know is this: architecture at its best allows us to foster a nuanced understanding of a place in its present and historical context, and create buildings that respond to and enhance the surrounding environment. In this way, the best-built forms allow me to better understand the land. They are the opposite of placeless, rooted in place as deeply as the walnut trees. As I begin to work against oppressive systems such as colonialism and capitalism, I know that architecture is a powerful weapon with which to rethink how we on Turtle Island want to live. If we let ourselves, architects can work to connect people to the land and to one another. Maybe then, we as settlers and immigrants can understand this land as a valid and distinct place. Maybe we can remember that architecture, like you and I, like everything—is never drawn out of empty space, but is borne of the land itself.

Niara recommends: Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

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NO LOITERING HERE STUDYING THE MADE NON-PLACES OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC IN ONTARIO

Piper Bernbaum + Connor O’Grady Piper (she/her) is an assistant professor at the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University in Canada. She is the recipient of the Prix de Rome for Emerging Practitioners, and the Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal for her work. Piper’s research is focused on the intersection of law and architecture, the considerations and constraints of social and spatial plurality in urban environments, and the appropriation of space through design.

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Connor (he/him) is currently practicing at Shean Architects in Ottawa, Ontario.

He is an instructor of design, drawing, and digital practice at the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University, and currently engages in research and conceptual design projects as Director of COCOLLAB, an experimental studio. Connor has presented and published papers and articles on several topics, including but not limited to: responsive architectures, inclusive and empathic practice, as well as peer-to-peer design learning.

PAUSE/PLAY Alexander Lamarche contributed to the broader research project related to this work as a Research Assistant. Alexander (he/him) graduated from Carleton University in 2020 with a Bachelor of Architectural Studies, majoring in Design. He has worked with firms in Toronto and Japan and is currently a junior designer at the Studio of Contemporary Architecture. His research interests relate to spaces where people don’t want to spend their time.

Two Metres Apart.

(left) Costco, April 2021.

COVID-19 has transformed our daily lives, garnering global attention since January 2020. It is now July 2021, and amid substantial health concerns and erratic government regulations, we have recomposed the way we navigate our constructed environment. A simple trip to the grocery store or a walk through a public park is now a disorienting experience; each stage of the pandemic has altered our engagement with the everyday. These varying degrees of intervention formed the basis of our observations and the creation of an ongoing index of the pandemic’s impact on the quotidian.

One-way Aisle.

Stay Home.

Mask Required.

Park Closed.

No Entry.

Border Closed.

Social Distancing.

Sanitize Before Entry.

Curbside Pickup Only.

No Loitering Here.

At the beginning of the pandemic, we watched from our apartment window as the province of Ontario reacted to the many unknowns surrounding the coronavirus. We quickly realized that the pandemic city was shaped by spatial consequences. Our firsthand observations and fieldwork were limited to our immediate surroundings: the Canadian capital and urban centre of Ottawa. We began by documenting through photography, writing, sketching, and drafting the built interventions constructed by everyday citizens in response to new spatial distancing and protective measures. We gathered news articles and documented Instagram posts that captured these new architectures. As designers, we were focused on the everyday innovations which adapted to the multiple waves of government-mandated spatial regulations. The study of the resultant infrastructures are intentionally not from a single site, as anti-gathering regulations accentuated the sitelessness of the public realm. These spatial interventions formed both inclusive and exclusive environments, responsible for creating experiences of hope and care, or fear and oppression, within the city’s existing public realm.

The increased factor of isolation within collective spaces drove many of the observed spatial impacts. The distancing requirements for physical health bred detached and lonely environments—spaces where we no longer lingered, but moved quickly through. Public spaces of care, education, and recreation closed down or became highly restricted as the concept of destination dissolved. Meanwhile, the previously-overlooked armatures of the day-to-day such as grocery stores, cafes, parks, and city streets drew the public’s focus.

1. Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (London: Verso, 2009), 75–120.

These public places became non-places, which French anthropologist Marc Augé associates with loneliness, anonymity, particular legal guidelines, unique instructions, forced boundaries, and limits.1 Non-places are not visited, but instead hastily traversed on our way to elsewhere. These spaces of transience existed before the current pandemic, first categorized through modern phenomena of the 20th and 21st centuries. The mass ubiquity and proliferation of shopping malls, airports, and train stations exemplify the rise of the non-place.

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Wave 01: The Supermarket Wayfinding is used as a means to instruct and redirect people as they experience an alternate version of these everyday spaces.

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PAUSE/PLAY Each wave of the pandemic presented itself with new health information and updated safety procedures implemented by all levels of the Canadian government in an established top-down strategy, reordering the public realm as a continuous and controlled non-place. However, it was still up to everyday citizens to fabricate buffers and spaces in the urban environment of non-places. The outcome was a bricolage of at-hand materials and ad hoc spatial interventions that reorganized public social interaction.

2. Deborah Berke, “Thoughts on the Everyday,” in Architecture of the Everyday (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), 222.

Despite the homogeneity of these blanket regulations, the spatial outcomes were unique and resourceful quotidian architectures. As architect Deborah Berke discusses, the architecture of the everyday serves the many, rather than the few; it is primarily functional and acts out of necessity. These architectures may be generic and crudely crafted, but they are built, tested, and exist in real space.2 Ad hoc pandemic architectures speak to the mandated non-placeness of our cities. Time was a key factor in these transformations; as the pandemic continues, non-places have become embedded in our everyday urban environments. Interventions that began as temporary citizen-made practices have transformed into substantial, manufactured, and “designed” architectural elements. The everyday has shifted, and we adjust to the otherness it invokes.

We observed spatial transformations in three non-places corresponding directly to the three phases of restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario.

Wave 01 The first wave began on March 17, 2020, when Premier Doug Ford declared a state of emergency, calling for the closure of indoor recreation facilities, restaurants, all private schools, all licensed childcare centres, libraries, theatres, and concert halls. Ford broadcasted that this was not a provincial shutdown, yet streets were empty and stores closed, and a new reality was born. Businesses deemed essential, such as the supermarket, were permitted to stay open but required reorganizing to ensure greater distances between customers. People lined up around the block as capacities were enforced. It was illegal to socialize in public, and so destinations frequented by citizens were deserted. People were expected to remain at home and only move through public spaces when absolutely necessary—no loitering allowed.

3. Berke, “Thoughts on the Everyday,” 223.

The architecture of the everyday may be banal or common.3 Although this may seem obvious, it is important to note that everyday architectures do not seek to be extraordinary, that they are often overlooked, and most importantly: they allow the individual citizen’s experience to assign value.

Supermarkets used ad hoc floor markings to keep people apart; the lineup at the cash register became an informal yet regimented place to possibly meet a friend. Front lawns were littered with cardboard signs and noisemakers made of pots and pans to honour frontline workers. This was a time of resourcefulness and solidarity as everyone scrambled to adapt.

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Wave 02: The Restaurant Restaurants search for ways to safely operate through online ordering services, outdoor street patios, and curbside pickup windows.

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PAUSE/PLAY Wave 02 4. Sean Davidson, “Ontario unveils back-to-school plan for September. Here’s what you need to know,” CTV News, July 29, 2020.

5. Evan Mitsui, “Ontario implementing stricter public health measures as province sets COVID-19 case record,” CBC News, October 3, 2020.

As the spread of the virus slowed in the summer, Premier Ford lifted the first state of emergency in Ontario on July 24, 2020. However, as schools reopened in Fall 2020, Ontario witnessed a spike in COVID-19 cases.4 A five-tiered colour-coded response framework dictated what was allowed in cities across the province as hotspots emerged in Toronto, Peel Region, York Region, and Ottawa. Toronto led the province in the number of cases, entering the red zone entitled Control, Stringent Measures just before the city was completely locked down and the second state of emergency began.5 The enduring memory of the previous shutdown lent a certain resilience to the operations of the city’s restaurants and retail stores, and citizens still found ways to socialize. With winter around the corner, people sought out ways to spend time in outdoor rooms by filling zones with heaters, blankets, and where possible, fire itself. Civic spaces like roads and parking stalls were relinquished to restaurants, bike lanes, and extended patio regulations.

The city as a non-place became even more layered and complex; most interactions between individuals on the street involved navigating signage and following directions. By the second wave, we observed that the everyday citizen had increased comfort handling distanced delivery and pickup procedures for retail and restaurants, which reduced face-to-face communication. Distance was normalized as part of the urban realm; signs, arrows, and posters told people where to stand, line up, wait, pick up, go, or not go. Businesses’ COVID-19 responses were designed and sometimes branded, streamlining their spatial composition, general organization, and overall aesthetic.

Wave 03

6. Chris Herhalt and Chris Fox, “‘We are in the third wave, it is just a matter of what kind of wave it is,’ Ontario’s top public health official says,” CP24, March 18, 2021.

Only weeks after the stay-at-home orders were fully lifted across the province, the Ontario Hospital Association declared a third wave of the virus in early April 2021 with ICU numbers at a record high.6 Premier Ford issued another province-wide shut-down and stay-at-home order, and the third state of emergency. Schools were closed, and only essential services remained open. The third wave brought panic with record-breaking infection rates and new COVID-19 variants Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, as Canada’s painfully slow vaccine rollout tentatively began.

7. Berke, “Thoughts on the Everyday,” 223.

The third wave brought crude interventions that went beyond the resourceful.

Berke describes these architectures as “rough and ready,” which means money, quality, and even thoughtfulness were sacrificed for the speed of construction and service.7 Ford’s stay-at-home order led to new infrastructures of oppression where spatial interventions came primarily from the government. Ford implemented police powers to stop individuals on the street, fine them if they were without cause for being outside their home, and monitor provincial borders in an attempt to lock down the province.8 Rules were delivered abruptly and both haphazardly enforced and modified.

The third wave was a time of surveillance; we were ushered through space, fined, monitored, and controlled as the city ultimately defined a non-place.

8. Sean O’Shea, “Ontario government alters new, temporary COVID-19 police powers after widespread backlash,” Global News, April 18, 2021.

Although Ford’s mandated police powers were quickly altered after widespread backlash, the mutating virus coupled with the unfamiliar public space regulations compounded citizens’ fear. Conditions of anonymity were enforced, and loneliness was relentlessly encouraged. The spatial outcome was a crude, temporary, and unrefined division of space: construction fences, pylons, and police cars formed swift and foreboding barriers to prohibit the use of public space.

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Wave 03: The Park COVID-19 restrictions such as barricades and fences intended to enforce the “public good” are in fact forms of public oppression.

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PAUSE/PLAY Spatial Outcomes We propose a moment of pause to reflect on the spatial outcomes of COVID-19 in Ontario, most done without building permits or architects.

Citizens negotiated spatial adaptations of their own accord to sustain the everyday. Infrastructures were provisional and supportive in this time of crisis, mainly built by citizens for citizens through their own resourcefulness.

However, infrastructures were also exclusionary; seeking limits and boundaries, they placed significant restrictions upon the public domain.

These practices are still lingering and may continue as we consider a post-pandemic world. So how can we maintain solidarity over isolation in the face of crisis? This ongoing observational investigation does not offer spatial solutions but seeks to study the increasing impact and legibility of non-places in our urban environment, the circumstances that drive them, and the consequences they provoke. In this sense, COVID-19 has simultaneously fragmented and galvanized our communities. The architecture of the everyday offers opportunities to take stock of how we inhabit space and relate to one another in times of crisis.

As we write this during the perceived end of the third wave, what happens next is still unknown. Variants continue to appear, and some hope exists that herd immunity through vaccination will bring reprieve. While it was once a stabilizing force in many peoples’ lives, the everyday is far from reliable.

However, its spatial outcomes are an index for the overall health and well-being of the public. With this in mind, we recognize the power of the individual in transforming common spaces in spite of governance detrimental to the composition of the public realm. The intentional design of spaces for people to dwell and linger both safely and vulnerably should augment the composition of the public realm rather than limit it. We see tremendous loneliness within our infrastructures of power, and tremendous hope within our infrastructures of care. The architecture of the everyday presents lessons for us to heed, as participants in the act of city-building.

Piper + Connor recommend: The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion (2021) by Tobias Armborst, Daniel D’Oca, and Georgeen Theodore.

Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (2009) by Marc Augé.

Architecture of the Everyday (2012) by Steven Harris and Deborah Berke.

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(top): Costco, April 2021. (bottom): Wilberforce, September 2020.

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in conversation with

AMY SMOKE Amy Smoke (they/them) is Mohawk Nation, Turtle Clan from the Six Nations of the Grand River. They grew up in urban Kitchener-Waterloo.

Amy is a Two-Spirit mother and local community member who spent time searching for their own identity, having been through substance abuse, homelessness, incarceration, and the intergenerational trauma of having residential schools within their family. Amy works actively in solidarity with LGBTQ and BIPOC communities to organize events, education, and support for Indigenous women, youth, and Two-Spirit folks. Amy graduated from Conestoga College General Arts and Sciences, from the University of Waterloo with a Bachelor of Arts in Social Development Studies and a Bachelor of Social Work, and from Wilfrid Laurier University with a Masters in Indigenous Social Work. Recognizing that social justice issues such as racial inequity and environmental degradation are inextricably tied to the return of Indigenous land, Amy co-founded O:se Kenhionhata:tie Land Back Camp to support Indigenous land rights, Indigenous queerness, and land-based pedagogy.

May 20, 2021 @ 2:00 p.m. EDT galt.

[00:00]

AS [00:47] 1. The Land Back Camp is a peaceful Indigenous land occupation which petitioned for four demands: (1) to waive fees for Indigenous communities to host events in public spaces; (2) to return the land of Victoria Park and Waterloo Park to Indigenous Peoples; (3) to create paid positions at all levels for Indigenous Peoples to engage with First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples living on this territory; (4) to create paid Indigenous Advisory Committees to work with city officials to address injustice in Indigenous racialization, marginalization, and the Truth and Reconciliation Committee’s 94 Calls to Action. “What is this About?” Land Back Camp, accessed August 8, 2021.

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When the Land Back Camp began in June 2020, it was situated in Victoria Park in Kitchener.1 The camp has since moved to Waterloo Park, and then temporarily packed up for the winter.

Could you tell us more about the need to move the camp, its current status today, and plans to return?

We did spend 122 days in Victoria Park. It wasn’t until about week ten that we began to meet with the city folks weekly. They thought they would be interrupting us by coming over, but we were literally right across the street from Kitchener City Hall for the purpose of beginning these dialogues. We met with both the City of Kitchener and Waterloo in the same space at Victoria Park. Kitchener came to us with a new staffing model that Black, Indigenous, and racialized people had already been working on.

They were also in agreement on building a ceremonial fire space in Victoria Park. Both cities waived the fees for us to access land, but we moved to Waterloo Park because we didn’t find that Waterloo was moving along as steadily. It was getting cold in October, so we purchased the trailer.

We emailed the City of Waterloo and said, “So we’re coming to Waterloo Park today.”

When we retired the camp after 62 days on December 21, they had a new staffing model in place. They agreed to build the ceremonial fire space right in Waterloo Park, so the powwow and urban Waterloo folks would be able to access that space. So three of the Land Back Camp’s four petition demands were met in both cities.

PAUSE/PLAY

We are currently in Laurel Creek Conservation Area. We wanted to move beyond just Kitchener-Waterloo, so Grand River Conservation Area folks jumped into the conversation. We provided a wish list of needs like bathrooms and power, so they gave us the entire Area Two space: there are 20 campsites right on the water for queer, Two-Spirit, trans, and nonbinary youth, with individual fire spaces in each site. We are out of what we call the settler gaze—the onlooking, the voyeurism, the gendered and racial violence that we experienced in the urban downtown parks. This is definitely different. We’re in the bush and we’re on the water, so we’re hoping to focus more on land-based education for our youth.

2. On April 20, 2021, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy Chiefs Council declared a moratorium on development along the Haldimand Tract in an effort to protect the lands and waters against developer exploitation. The moratorium requires the consent of the Haundenosaunee for any development to proceed along the tract, and exercises their jurisdiction over the lands and waters outlined by the 2006 Land Rights Statement. “Haldimand Tract Moratorium—Protect The Tract,” Protect The Tract, accessed July 20, 2021.

3. 1492 Land Back Lane is an Indigenous occupation by Six Nations Land Defenders protesting McKenzie Meadows, a 218-unit residential development site on unceded land in Caledonia, Ontario. Demonstrations began on July 19, 2020 and were met with violent clashes by the Ontario Provincial Police. In July 2021, McKenzie Meadows representatives announced the cancellation of the housing project.

Julien Gignac, “1492 Land Back Lane,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, July 15, 2021.

Again, none of this was a land claim. I’m from Six Nations and I want everything on the Haldimand Tract to go back to the Six Nations—I want all the land in general to go back to the First Peoples.2 We should have access to the land free of charge, without any of the red tape and administrative paperwork. While my family and friends are on those front lines at 1492 Land Back Lane, there are youth at home who need to be on the land.3 We need all the folks in all the spaces, right?

We’re focused on culture and ceremony. We hope to build a sweat lodge and have engaged with some Two-Spirit folks who will run circles for the youth, and other folks who will teach us canoeing.

On the weekends, we hope to have community and family members pitch their tents, and we’ll have a communal kitchen to feed everybody. We’re also planting a garden. We didn’t ask, we just told Laurel Creek.

We said, “So what are your guys’ thoughts on gardening?”

And they said, “Well, we don’t normally let people do that because they would plant invasive species from Europe.”

We all thought that was hilarious. Invasive species from Europe don’t go over well with Indigenous folks. We’re thinking it will be like a lasagna garden. We’re working with White Owl Native ancestry, their group of urban Indigenous farmers. Because of the shortage of lumber, we’ve asked Laurel Creek for some logs to build raised garden beds instead. We have another partnership going on with the Two Row Understanding Group and their group called Indigenous Pride: they’re about 20 youth who have grown up in foster care, who we’ve offered to meet outside on the land.

With the Contemporary Art Forum of Kitchener and Area we’ll be completing an art project—somebody suggested an underground kiln to fire clay.

Everybody has a role here and we are in charge of our own space, so it’s been working out wonderfully. Unfortunately, some folks that regularly come through here have expressed slight hostility when they are unable to come through our homes to let their dog in the water. But straight white people have all the spaces in the world and we don’t. It’s difficult to get urban Indigenous youth out here when there’s limited land to build a sacred fire or a 83

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sweat lodge. We have such a diversity of nations, including Mi’kmaq, Cree, and folks from BC, so we’re especially looking forward to getting the kids out of the city and over here.

galt.

[14:42] AS [14:54]

galt.

[17:38]

AS [18:21]

It sounds like you’ve experienced a shift from the denser urban landscape where you now have more space and time to deepen your connection to the land.

I’ve actually read an entire book from cover to cover since being here. Victoria Park would have never allowed me that freedom because we were constantly on guard, constantly worried. When the Proud Boys showed up—urban infidels, like Nazis basically, circling the camp in Victoria Park—we actually needed to call out for settlers to come and provide that white shield. We had people on guard 24 hours a day. Here, we go to bed at 10:00 p.m. and the biggest thing to worry about is where we put food at night because there are raccoons. We ask the folks that do walk past us to be respectful. If you see us in ceremony, just keep going.

We’re not here to teach anybody, and we’re not here to provoke.

We’re not here to be recipients of hate.

From our perspective as students, you have such a great voice on these issues because you have been a student in several post-secondary institutions as well as a student of the land.

Given this experience, how would you define the limits of the institution in educating people?

To be quite honest, the University of Waterloo is probably the whitest, most colonial space I’ve ever been through. I cried my way through one of my degrees and the Waterloo Indigenous Student Centre got me through it. On top of that, there is no land.

We really had to fight, and it took years for us to even have access to a fire space on campus. I’ve also never been taught by Indigenous folks there. The First Nations Visual Culture and First Nations Literature courses were taught by white women. But the University of Waterloo is now doing a cluster hire of ten Indigenous faculty and ten Black faculty across all of the campuses, which is great. You need to hire multiples so that they grow their own community. One will just be swallowed up and wither and die.

Then I went to Wilfrid Laurier University and took Indigenous Social Work: a program developed, taught, and led by Indigenous People. The first week, we went out on the land for five days, we got to know our classmates, and we connected to the land. It was much more land-based, and then just before we graduated, we ended the program back on the land again. It’s just an amazing way to begin a program for Indigenous People, and for anybody.

I think we forget what the land has to offer.

Unfortunately, they were very different experiences academically.

We need Indigenous teachers to teach land-based education.

It’s all wrapped up in Land Back for me. The biggest solution to all the things—poverty, homelessness, environmental racism,

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climate justice, Indigenous sovereignty—could be solved if you just give the land back. And not just figuratively or symbolically, actually return Indigenous lands to Indigenous hands. For me, it’s not just a hashtag, it’s a movement that we’ve been doing for 500 years.

galt.

[17:38]

AS [24:23]

That’s a great point, and we think those limits in our education are very apparent. We’ve been talking about climate justice, but not enough from the lens of Land Back. From what you’ve shown us of the Laurel Creek camp, we can see there’s a lot of placemaking going on. We believe that everyone is a designer and that the making of space is intrinsic to Indigenous People especially. Do you think that making space through architecture can be a tool for negotiation or reconciliation which supports a certain kind of land-based knowledge?

Listen to your Indigenous professors. There are ways in which we utilize the directions, the sun, the moon, the stars... all of those things. We do things in circles, designing spaces that take away the power imbalance between teacher and student. Everything starts in the east, like the sun and the spring, and we follow that circle. Although, I am Haudenosaunee and we do circles the other way. Utilize not just the things in the land, but the knowledge of where you are. We’re on the Haldimand Tract, so I’m looking at the Six Nations. If I’m in Guelph, I’m going to look to the people of those lands. You would build more from Tamarack when you’re in a certain place. The Grand River is O:se Kenhionhata:tie, which means Willow River because willows grow there. Think about the lands that you’re on, and what symbols and spaces look like for those people. I wanted to build a longhouse, teepees aren’t me.

We had to get a Cree person to teach us how to put these up.

But, teepees are very easy to transport, and we had the youth paint the teepees with all of the things that they saw in Victoria Park to involve them in designing their own space.

In thinking about identity, we also often forget about the erasure of queerness in our communities, not just of Indigenous People.

Sometimes in mainstream narratives we erase the queerness of our identities. The youth yearn for this knowledge but don’t have the necessary binary teachings for it. If I am “female,” do I have to wear a skirt and why? We’re trying to challenge these colonial propositions and allow the Indigenous youth to explore their identities. We want them to flourish in their queerness as well as in their Indigeneity.

galt.

[29:21]

It’s amazing how you’re transforming these spaces by using this long term occupation and the practice of planting a garden to learn from the land and create safe spaces for both Indigeneity and queerness. In architecture, we’re so used to putting buildings on spaces, but that’s not the only thing that you can do with space—it’s a great example for us to see the love, effort, and care put into the land to transform it as you learn.

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AS [30:12]

Food security and food sovereignty are also important. Planting non-native grass is just horrific to me when you can grow native species anywhere to sustain yourself. We’re hoping for some protected trees because if we plant them then it’s illegal to pull them up. We want to put down something permanent because it speaks to our erasure. We are still here on our own land.

To know more, Amy recommends: Briarpatch Magazine. briarpatchmagazine.com. insideWaterloo: In-Depth Local Stories about Our Region. insidewaterloo.ca.

Land Back Camp. “O:se Kenhionhata:tie Respect Our Sacred Space Zine.” landbackcamp.com/zine.

Manuel, Arthur, Ronald Derrickson, Grand Chief Ronald Derrickson, and Naomi Klein. The Reconciliation Manifesto: Recovering the Land, Rebuilding the Economy. Toronto: Lorimer, 2017.

Manuel, Arthur. Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2015.

O’Neill, Erik. Stories from Land Back Camp, 2020.

Find the O:se Kenhionhata:tie Land Back Camp’s flyer, entitled Why We Are Here, enclosed along with this book.

Watch the What is Solidarity?

Land Back Lecture featuring Amy Smoke on the Waterloo Architecture Youtube Channel.

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Protect The Tract. protectthetract.com.

Rainbow Reels Queer & Trans Film Festival. rainbowreels.ca.

Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2017.

White Owl Native Ancestry Association. wonaa.ca.

Wolochatiuk, Tim. We Were Children. Eagle Vision Inc., Entertainment One, National Film Board of Canada, 2012.

PLAY: On challenging institutional standards, claiming protest spaces, subverting the colonial museum, reimagining environmental resistance, and caring for one another.

SUBVERSIVE PROCESSES

BREAKING FOUNDATIONS On October 29, 2020, students from ten architecture schools across so-called-Canada came together in cross-institutional solidarity for a virtual panel discussion entitled Breaking Foundations. On the heels of the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement and amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw stark inequities in our communities exacerbated, this event was a timely call for mobilization.

This article is a reflection by three University of Waterloo student organizers on campaigning for social justice within architectural institutions.

Simone Delaney, Vic Mantha-Blythe + Niara van Gaalen Simone (she/they) is a fourth-year undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture.

As a descendant of fugitive formerly enslaved Black Loyalists that escaped Middleton Plantation in South Carolina, she grew up on various Peace and Friendship Treaty Lands of the Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, and Passamaquoddy (New Brunswick).

She is also a descendant of Black folks in Amelia County, Virginia with further mixed French and eurosettler ancestry.

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Vic (they/them) is a queer beyond-the-binary white settler graduate from the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. Vic is of half British eurosettler descent and half (though lost) mixed French, Métis, and Odawa ancestry. They are currently caretaking and farming on Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq People, a territory covered by the “Treaties of Peace and Friendship.”

Niara (she/her) is a third-year architecture student at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture.

She was born in the Netherlands and is of Afro-Surinamese and Dutch descent. She immigrated to what is now called Canada at the age of six, and grew up on and now goes to university on lands promised to the Six Nations of the Grand River.

PAUSE/PLAY Through this reflection, we hope to probe deeper into common struggles uncovered between institutions and provide a critical student perspective on how regulating bodies such as the Canadian Architectural Certification Board (CACB) impact design education. Lastly, we outline the beginnings of a new vision for an emancipatory pathway forward with excerpts from our burgeoning Radical Architecture Collective Manifesto.

Organizing the Event As organizers, we found ourselves frustrated by the lack of action and initiative being taken to work towards racial equity and justice, both within our respective schools and the wider profession. Inspired by New Grounds for Design Education, an event that brought together representatives from architecture schools across the United States, Breaking Foundations sought to contextualize the impact of white supremacy and colonialism in so-called-Canada. Two guest speakers were invited to introduce the event: Dr. Tammy Gaber, director of Laurentian University and author of Beyond the Divide: A Century of Canadian Mosque Design, and Camille Mitchell, founder of Black Architects and Interior Designers Association (BAIDA) and Building Equality in Architecture Toronto (BEAT). Tammy and Camille spoke to the impacts of discrimination in both a professional and educational context.

1. The school then-named Ryerson University.

Logistically, Breaking Foundations began with a simple conversation between the three authors of this essay, who watched the New Grounds event unfold and were enthused by the possibility of seeing a similar event that would reflect our own educational and professional experiences in so-called-Canada. We started by reaching out to fellow students and student-run initiatives we knew from social media. This soon became an effort in coordinating representatives from social justice organizations at architecture schools across so-called-Canada. We were later assisted by Marwa Alsaqqar, a student from X University, in sorting out the logistics of the event.1 Observations on Student Representation In the Breaking Foundations event, not a single white man nor a white cisgendered woman participated as a school representative. It became apparent that across these institutions, and in activist circles at large, BIPOC women and gender-diverse folks are the leading voices for change.

While cis-white men and women can shelter in their whiteness, and BIPOC cis-men in their maleness, the school representatives demonstrated who bears the brunt of repercussions for speaking out against these injustices. Oftentimes, these are the people who face the greatest barriers in educational institutions and the workplace. For BIPOC women and gender-diverse folks, building community and solidarity to resist systemic inequality in our institutions is necessary for survival.

2. From second year onwards, undergraduate students at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture alternate between periods of study and periods of employment in four-month increments to achieve two full years of work experience, except for one eight-month work term.

During the organization of this event, there was never a point where the three of us were attending school at the same time. At Waterloo, this is a specifically useful insight; while we recognize the privilege we have to attend a co-op program as Waterloo students, our staggered in-person schooling and co-op schedule makes it difficult for initiatives to maintain continued support over a single year.2 Sustained coordination of student initiatives is typically upheld by graduate students, whose program does not have a mandatory co-op component. From our own experiences, we recognized that this fractured organizing effort is beneficial to a white supremacist institution that depends on our inability to organize, advocate for change, and apply persistent pressure.

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SUBVERSIVE PROCESSES Sustained momentum for activism proved to be one of the most challenging aspects of advocating for change across most of the institutions represented in the event. Without a proper support network, students often report dealing with burnout, isolation, and trauma. These feelings are exacerbated when members of the faculty or administration are uncooperative or seek retribution. This is especially nefarious when considering that the people performing this labour are overwhelmingly racialized and gender non-conforming students most affected by systemically oppressive systems. It became unanimous to the three of us that building community is the strongest way forward. Through Breaking Foundations, an outpouring of support came from students at all different stages in their education—support that was further reflected by Tammy Gaber and Camille Mitchell. While we all sat in solidarity with one another, we were able to safely and kindly express different opinions, perspectives, and hopes for the future. We shared tears, laughter, and anger in a setting that prioritized everyone’s personal experiences over academic professionalism.

Event Findings Shared among all of the schools present at the event was a requirement to receive accreditation from the CACB, the organization responsible for maintaining, developing, and implementing standards for individuals in the profession and architecture programs in Canada. The CACB review process evaluates a wide range of factors including human resources, social equity, and student performance criteria met through coursework such as cultural diversity, site design, and accessibility. While the CACB and the accreditation process are intended to hold programs accountable for providing a certain quality and scope of education, we as students are still in a position to advocate for higher standards of education. In the case of Breaking Foundations, it is apparent that a push to address equity and justice across all schools is needed.

3. The Canadian Architectural Certification Board, 2017 Visiting Team Report—Master of Architecture Program, University of Waterloo, February 2017, 10.

4. The Canadian Architectural Certification Board, 2017 Visiting Team Report, 12.

As students and alumni of the University of Waterloo, our critique of the CACB is rooted in experiences at our own institution. While Waterloo met the limited criteria for “cultural diversity,” it was noted that there remained a “perceived lack of integration of Indigenous cultures, and a more contemporary approach of cultural exploration of Asia and the Middle East.”3 This comment suggests that the CACB’s 2017 standard for cultural diversity was incredibly low.

The reviewers simultaneously critiqued the institution for its overwhelmingly eurocentric curriculum while also deeming the limited scope adequate for accreditation. In the “social equity” section of the accreditation report, the CACB wrote: Particularly notable is the School’s effort to promote a better gender balance as it grew its faculty complement. The School almost achieved gender parity among its full-time faculty.4 It is extremely concerning that the CACB’s notion of social equity only considered a binary understanding of gender parity at the time, which the University of Waterloo was able to pass without meeting a 50/50 split in the representation of full-time faculty alone. To this day, its full-time faculty has one of the most disproportionate gender disparities of all architecture schools within the province of Ontario. At the time of the last accreditation visit, the accreditors did not take note that there was only a single racialized member within a full-time faculty of 20 people. There were also no openly gender-diverse full-time faculty. Although the CACB has implemented several changes since 2017, such as a data collection framework inclusive of students and faculty identifying as non-binary, it is clear that further changes are necessary to ensure that the accreditation process holds institutions accountable for structural inequities.

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PAUSE/PLAY University of British Columbia

Those who completed a non-architectural undergraduate degree can apply to the Master’s program, thus opening up architecture to people of many different backgrounds.

Racial Equity Taskforce: YES Student Advocacy Groups: YES, National Organization of Minority Architecture Students (NOMAS)

University of Calgary

Has “Block Weeks,” which are weeks when regular classes stop to focus intensively on a specific topic or problem. Guests and non-tenured professors come in, and this is a chance to break out of the canon.

Racial Equity Taskforce: NO Student Advocacy Groups: YES, Advocates for Equitable Design Education (AEDE)

University of Manitoba

Freshman experience an entire day out on the land learning about Indigenous building techniques.

Racial Equity Taskforce: NO Student Advocacy Groups: YES, Indigenous Design and Planning Student Association (IDPSA)

Laurentian University

Opportunity to learn from Indigenous elders, and build Indigenous structures throughout the undergraduate and graduate programs.

Racial Equity Taskforce: NO Student Advocacy Groups: YES

University of Waterloo

Has a co-operative education program, which allows students to earn money while in school and gain experience. There is a need for pay transparency and equality in the co-op system. Also has a cultural history program so there is time set aside to learn about culture/history, it just must be done from perspectives in other than the western.

Racial Equity Taskforce: YES Student Advocacy Groups: YES, Treaty Lands, Global Stories (TLGS)

University of Toronto

Skipped this question Racial Equity Taskforce: YES Student Advocacy Groups: YES, Student Equity Alliance (SEA)

X University

Still has a reputation as a polytechnic school, which can be both to its advantage and disadvantage.

They are also known as a commuter school at the heart of downtown Tkaronto, and their technical-based curriculum and culture focuses on its community outreach and fitting to the industry’s standards. Through the co-op and exchange program (as well as networking events)[...] these opportunities can be seen as an advantage depending on if they are handled with diversity and inclusion of our BIPOC communities and organisations in mind.

Racial Equity Taskforce: YES Student Advocacy Groups: YES, Department of Architectural Science (DAS) Anti-Racism Call

Carleton University

Has a Conservation and Urbanism stream within the School. This provides an opportunity to question: what is worth conserving?

Racial Equity Taskforce: NO Student Advocacy Groups: YES, Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism Diversity Working Group (.dwg)

McGill University

Has brought in many faculty to research and teach on climate change, which is a force that disproportionately affects marginalized groups. The graduate program also offers global studios which allow students to learn in environments across the globe.

Racial Equity Taskforce: NO, did hire a third party consultant Student Advocacy Groups: YES, Race/Space reading group

University of Montreal

No representative at this event Racial Equity Taskforce: UNKNOWN Student Advocacy Groups: UNKNOWN

University of Laval

No representative at this event Racial Equity Taskforce: UNKNOWN Student Advocacy Groups: UNKNOWN

Dalhousie University

Skipped this question Racial Equity Taskforce: YES Student Advocacy Groups: YES, Where is Dal Arch?

RAIC through Athabasca University

Is a completely online Bachelors of Architecture which provides access to people of many abilities.

Racial Equity Taskforce: NO Student Advocacy Groups: NO

fig. 1: Overview of ongoing actions for equity and justice for schools in attendance of Breaking Foundations.

Source: Niara van Gaalen, “Breaking Foundations Event Summary,” Design With Colour, November 1, 2020.

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SUBVERSIVE PROCESSES fig. 2 (external): We have shared a blank BINGO sheet along with this book so that you may mark it up, or take a photo and share it online with the tag #BreakingFoundations BINGO. 5. Crossroads Ministry, Continuum on Becoming an Anti-Racist Multi-Cultural Institution (Chicago: Crossroads Ministry), adapted from an original concept by Bailey Jackson and Rita Hardiman, and further developed by Andrea Avazian and Ronice Branding; further adapted

by Melia LaCour, PSESD. 6. Treaty Lands, Global Stories is a student-led initiative at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture advocating for curricular diversification and justice in design education.

At the Breaking Foundations event, we recognized the need to hold our schools accountable beyond the inadequate criteria of the CACB. As an activity, we asked representatives from each school to provide a ranking on Crossroad Ministry’s Continuum on Becoming an Anti-Racist Multi-Cultural Institution.5 We also provided a Treaty Lands, Global Stories–designed How Racist is Your Institution? bingo card (fig. 2), where student representatives indicated discriminatory events or behaviours that had occurred at each of their schools.6 The BINGO card’s five blank spaces could be filled with specific issues or situations not otherwise captured. While some included reflections of personal experiences, others relied on anecdotal recountings of incidents and behaviours.

This experience revealed the shared realities and pervasiveness of racism across our architectural institutions. While nine out of ten school representatives selected the categories “students felt unsafe/unsupported in speaking out,” “profs primarily provide precedents done by white cis men,” and “student activists perform unpaid labour for the school,” the only category that was selected by all schools was “not taught about local Black and Indigenous history.” Across architecture institutions in so-called-Canada, students evidently feel that teachings related to Black and Indigenous local history are inadequate if not non-existent in their core curriculum. This consensus highlights how an issue that once felt specific and local is in fact a larger systemic issue within Canadian architectural education as a whole.

In our experience, Black history remained completely unacknowledged at the Waterloo School of Architecture until Treaty Lands, Global Stories pressured faculty to adapt in February 2021. Meanwhile, the School of Architecture fails to acknowledge the importance of Indigenous knowledge as a fundamental part of our architectural education by leaving it out of the core curriculum.

William Woodworth is an active and longstanding Indigenous faculty member at the Waterloo School of Architecture who teaches extensively on Haudenosaunee culture, architecture, and the Six Nations’ relationship to the longhouse. His course content remains an elective component of the curriculum, similarly to young Indigenous architecture scholar Mkomose (Dr. Andrew Judge), who specializes in pre-contact land sustainability.

As both Black and Indigenous histories are neither upheld nor recognized as essential to our architectural design education, it remains necessary to call for structural change and initiate a process of breaking existing foundations.

The Manifesto The recorded talk of the event has been viewed over 200 times on YouTube and documents a critical moment of collective resistance within architectural education. While the event focused on identifying current problems and building support networks, it was later followed by the editable Radical Architecture Collective Manifesto. Created by us organizers, the manifesto stands as a collective vision for a radical design movement across so-called-Canada. This document lays out a series of guiding principles and values that offer insights on how to move towards a more just, equitable, and free society within the architectural industry. Manifestos often serve as a framework of intentions and values which inform our decisions moving forward. We see the Radical Architecture Collective Manifesto as a live document composed of ten leading principles which challenge existing norms within the architectural profession and institution while inspiring radical visions for a different future for design. Responding to the students and speakers of the Breaking Foundations event, the manifesto principles address the wide range of issues within the field of architecture.

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PAUSE/PLAY The Radical Architecture Collective Manifesto

The Radical Architecture Collective Manifesto is a collective document that can be read and added to by anyone at docs.google.com/ document/d/1joIv2lhQrOWnSr xaNAgOM4pL-c14IRRsVPq_M 82mNz8/edit?usp=sharing.

1.

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4.

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No one is free until we are all free.

Support the most vulnerable students.

Measure wealth by how much we can give away.

Support Indigenous Peoples and follow their guidance. Land Back!

View architecture as service.

Value collectivity over individuality.

Recognize and centre the value of oral narratives and lived experiences.

Reject toxic labour demands perpetuated by the capitalist colonial state.

Recontextualize the climate crisis intersectionally as an outcome of global capitalism, colonialism, and the cis-heteropatriarchy.

10. Cultivate and share joy as a tool in the design process.

Three of the ten principles of the manifesto are broader and aim to inspire those who, like us, are breaking the foundations of our institutions and building something new and informed.

Firstly is a call for collectivity over individuality intended to reject toxic and hierarchical top-down modes of operation in the design process.

We imagine a future that fosters modes of co-creation that can encompass pluralistic perspectives and prioritize collective well-being over personal or private gains. We cannot hope to build buildings without first building community and solidarity with one another. Secondly is architecture as service; at our best, we as architects and designers should be gardeners who nurture environments where life can thrive. This involves offering our knowledge of design and the built environment outside of a monetized and protected framework and in line with anti-capitalist systems of exchange.

Lastly is the centring of oral narratives and lived experience. In recognizing the centuries of injustice and resistance on which this country and this profession are built, this principle is a call to reject myths of objectivity in architecture and to value the subjective perspectives of diverse collaborators. These three principles selected from the manifesto were exercised in the Breaking Foundations event and reflect the values of our organizing efforts going forward.

We encourage others to watch the full Breaking Foundations recording and read the Radical Architecture Collective Manifesto as they critically examine the underpinnings of our education systems and reflect on the impact this has on architectural institutions at large.

Vic, Simone + Niara recommend: Black Landscapes Matter (2017) by Kofi Boone in the Ground Up Journal.

Land Back: A Yellowhead Institute Red Paper (2019) by Hayden King, Shiri Pasternak and Riley Yesno.

The Breaking Foundations recording, which can be viewed on the Treaty Lands, Global Stories YouTube account.

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HOW RACIST IS YOUR INSTITUTION? BINGO student students were activists asked to speak perform unpaid on behalf of labour for the their race/ school religion

not taught about local Black and Indigenous history

use words such profs primarily as multicultural/ provide diversity but precedents not equity and done by white justice cis men

white profs teach about BIPOC history and culture

Black/ Indigenous had a prof use only a handful of a racist/sexist/ students come student numbers do not reflect homophobic from working slur class families the surrounding population

first generation students have no specific supports

never had a Black prof

students students are felt unsafe/ racially profiled never had an unsupported in or harassed on Indigenous prof speaking out campus

inflexible deadlines during crises

BIPOC students must demonstrate belonging by outperforming others

FREE SPACES

FREE SPACES

confusing and restricted financial aid

prioritizes academic rigor over student wellbeing

faculty upholds telling students a single they are safe standard of when they what is good, express that beautiful, and they are correct work not safe

galt. publication Issue 04: PAUSE/PLAY Fall 2021

88 Breaking Foundations Simone Delaney, Vic Mantha-Blythe + Niara van Gaalen fig. 2: We have shared a blank BINGO sheet here for you so that you may mark it up, or take a photo and share it online with the tag #BreakingFoundationsBINGO. Image by Treaty Lands, Global Stories

SUBVERSIVE PROCESSES

BARRICADES Hundreds of protesters clad in safety gear and black clothing sit in tight formation with their umbrellas forming a canopy overhead, holding the barricade. Over the loudspeakers, the police repeatedly threaten to use force to disperse the crowd. The chants of “Liberate Hong K, tion of our times” carry a deep urgency.1 Individuals across different age groups and backgrounds express one sentiment in solidarity despite the threats of tear gas and criminal charges: this protest will not be their last.

Chi Him Chi Him (he/him) is a designer who grew up in Hong Kong and is currently based in Toronto.

He graduated from the University of Waterloo with a Master of Architecture and his graduate thesis focused on the tools of place-making in response to the nuanced occasions of the human figure within everyday life. His ongoing research explores temporal spaces created by the anomalous placement of commonplace objects.

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PAUSE/PLAY 1. This slogan is considered to have subversive connotations under the National Security Law and is now censored in Hong Kong.

The summer of 2019 marked the beginning of over a year of burgeoning turmoil sparked by a controversial extradition bill proposed by the Hong Kong government. Fueled by the prospect of the bill’s effects on Hong Kong’s political agency and ongoing pro-democracy activism, protesters filled the city’s streets en masse. Peaceful marches, barricaded public occupations, and organized strikes on government buildings paralyzed the city to challenge the government’s authority.

The right to protest once differentiated Hong Kong citizens from citizens of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), but that freedom has quickly eroded.

The use of public space as a platform for dissident voices has always been subject to the authorities’ approval and the affordances of the city’s topology, both of which easily limit citizens’ perceived rights. However, everyday lives in Hong Kong move through informal, invisible, and sometimes illegal pocket spaces interpreted beyond the confines of their assigned functions. These methods of temporary occupation became purposefully disruptive during the 2019 pro-democracy protests, claiming the city’s spaces through chaotic decentralized movements.

Citizens within a Nation

2. “Hong Kong: Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China,” 1997, Refworld, accessed August 16, 2021.

3. Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, 1st ed.

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1–15.

Hong Kong is a place its people love to hate. They bemoan the absence of protection for cultural heritage, the insufficiency of public space, and the notoriously high property prices; however, they hold a proud sense of identity. The way they relate to Hong Kong is rooted in their own definition: rather than 公民 gong min, people of the sovereign nation, or 市民 si mun, people of the city, they are 香港人 hoeng gong jan, people of Hong Kong.

Within and outside of Hong Kong, the term Hongkonger recognizes the city’s distinct values, culture, and language. In 1997, Hong Kong’s governance was transferred to the PRC after more than 150 years of British colonial sovereignty under multiple treaties. To facilitate a soft transition of ownership, Hong Kong was to remain autonomous from the PRC for the next 50 years as stipulated by the constitutional principles of the Sino-British Joint Declaration.2 However, the PRC’s explosive economic success and strong influence on Hong Kong’s political systems forced Hongkongers to address their long-term relationship with the state sooner than expected; their political identity emerged in the face of its own erasure.3 In recent years, the city is increasingly divided. On one hand, the PRC’s economy has become vital to Hong Kong’s prosperity, and Hongkongers embrace the prospect of integration with its pre-colonial lands. On the other hand, the PRC’s censorship and patriotism threaten Hongkongers’ freedom of political expression, while the extradition bill further exposes them to its judicial system. Recent social unrest stems from issues beyond the lack of job opportunities and unaffordable real estate values; the city is falling apart, and it seems meaningless for the youth to plan for their future.

Spaces of Protest To legally protest in Hong Kong, an event must undergo an approval process established during the British regime. Every June 4 since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, an approved vigil was held in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park to publicly commemorate the event. A large-scale protest in 2003 saw the bill for an anti-subversion law shelved. This success supported annual protests where people took to the streets to voice their complaints.

Every year, the series of planned protests and gatherings received the government’s permission and ran like clockwork, until University of Hong Kong Law professor Benny Tai questioned the effectiveness of such pre-approved protests in 2013. Learning from the Occupy Wall Street 95

SUBVERSIVE PROCESSES 4. Benny Tai, “The Most Lethal Weapon of Civil Disobedience,” 思考香 港 6:《罪名是散播希望: 希望的思考》, 2013.

5. Public Order Ordinance, Cap. 245, 2019.

6. Jonathan D. Solomon, “Hong Kong—Aformal Urbanism,” in Shaping the City: Studies in History, Theory and Urban Design, ed. Rodolphe El-Khoury and Edward Robbins, 2nd ed.

(New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013), 106–19.

7. Christopher Dewolf, Borrowed Spaces: Life between the Cracks of Modern Hong Kong (Beijing: Penguin House China, 2017), 14.

8. Be Water: Like a water spill, the protesters would slip away into the dark corners of the city when confronted with force—or like cockroaches, as they were referred to by the Hong Kong police and pro-PRC media.

Blossom Everywhere: As the protests went on, they further decentralized in a form of urban guerilla warfare.

In each of Hong Kong’s 18 districts, movements of different scales and intensities commenced simultaneously.

movement, he argued that stronger measures were necessary to fight for universal suffrage in Hong Kong, and that protests should paralyze the city through acts of civil disobedience.4 The article prompted a shift in protest strategy during the 2014 Umbrella Movement, which demanded more transparent elections. Protesters set up tent cities in several districts, blocking long strips of the city’s arterial roads for 79 days. People manifested their own public space during the extended occupation, transforming the roads into informal classrooms, public forums, community centres, and urban playgrounds. Protest activities intersected with casual street life. However, the occupation suffered from internal disagreements and the authorities’ forceful attempts to restore the city’s daily operations. The world witnessed a peaceful demonstration, but the movement yielded little political change before the police’s crackdown. The 2019 protests did yield change—the Hong Kong government refused to permit the June 4 vigil at Victoria Park for the first time in 31 years, citing pandemic gathering restrictions.5 Hong Kongers’ everyday lives exist among vertical levels. The city’s informal urbanism is fragmented into multi-layered spaces connected through complex networks of pedestrian passages including footbridges, tunnels, parks, malls, markets, and gardens. The proximity of these diverse artifacts and occasions form urban recreational grounds.6 However, the mix between public, private, and privately-owned public realms subjects spaces to closure and isolation, creating a constant tension between urban informality and the forces that attempt to regulate it.7 Hongkongers have the right to protest, but they lack the space to do so; aside from a few large parks, the city cannot accommodate large crowds. Despite this, there is a casual resistance to order in Hong Kong’s everyday production of social spaces: restaurants spill out into streets and alleyways, sidewalks become platforms for performance, and footbridges host gathering spots for domestic workers. Hong Kong’s vibrancy has always been rooted in borrowed spaces, or the residual spaces that seep from cracks in the concrete. The occupants of such spaces move in between government legislation, land policies, and the privatization of property.

Adapting the mottos Be Water and Blossom Everywhere, the 2019 movements manifested this borrowed way of living. Rather than rallying in a single event, protesters planned movements in multiple locations to disperse police forces.8 The protests adopted a multi-faceted approach as their strategy evolved. Street pop-ups distributed information and resources; posters and graffiti populated walls, tunnels, and residual spaces; peaceful sit-ins occurred at malls, institutions, and the airport; and roads and public spaces were barricaded. Operating under a rhizomatic leadership, the crowd used online forums, Telegram, and AirDrop to instantly share information and spontaneously decide the next steps. The rapid movements in multiple locations were difficult for the authorities to efficiently predict and suppress. The protesters concealed their identities behind face coverings, and their black clothing symbolically united a crowd of disparate individuals as an agreement to support one another and bear the consequences as a single entity. However, the protesters lacked a unified position on extreme action, leading Hongkongers to question whether the end goal justified the destruction of spaces they claimed to protect. Occupations of public space usually developed into brutally violent confrontations.

In 2019, a young person wearing black was assumed to be a criminal.

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The protesters (yellow) construct barricades to occupy public space, while the police (blue) vacate the area and dismantle these structures.

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SUBVERSIVE PROCESSES Barricades and Right to the City In November 2019, a five-day city-wide strike culminated in extended occupations at two Hong Kong universities. Within the violent clashes that were almost typical throughout the city at the time, the parties in conflict exchanged claims of space: the protesters physically occupied space through whatever means possible, while the police demonstrated their power to forcefully restore the formal order of the city.

9. “Hong Kong Protest Movement Data Archive: Arrests & Protest Statistics,” Hong Kong Free Press, August 5, 2020.

Police

Arriving at the scene, the police block off the roads and attempt to disperse protesters, first with warnings, then with more invasive methods. By mid-November, the police have fired approximately 16,000 teargas canisters and 10,000 rounds of rubber bullets.9 Each canister contains multiple submunitions that take different trajectories once fired, encasing the area in spheres of smoke and injuring anyone nearby in the ensuing chaos.

10. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27.

Protesters

Found objects are integral components of the barricades, which the protesters use to merge and redefine spaces as those of otherness.10 They strategically incorporate these objects into the design of the barricades as they improve over time. Umbrellas symbolize resistance since the 2014 Umbrella Movement; they protect against batons, teargas, and other projectiles. Metal fences taken from sidewalks are zip-tied together for structural integrity, often accompanied by plastic water barriers and wooden pallets. Bamboo poles, traffic cones, shopping carts, and chairs are among the objects which complete the barricades.

Police

The authorities employ state-of-the-art water trucks which fire high-pressure jets to deter the protesters’ advances. They add blue dye to mark individual protesters and colour entire areas.

Blue is the colour of police uniforms and the colour with which police supporters identify.

Protesters

Although the protesters wear black, their colour is yellow, referring to the symbolic yellow ribbons worn in previous years in demanding democracy and suffrage. As the police vehicles pose a large threat, the protesters tear out pieces of brick from the sidewalk and stack them in sets of three to create brick stonehenges.11 The simple structures adopt unexpected roles as elements of resistance, as they are time-consuming to remove and effectively slow down police advances.

Police

To cut off the protesters’ supply, the police glue sidewalk bricks down and replace metal fences with plastic chains. Police forcefully enter private residences and closed-down stores which might assist protesters on the run. The rail transit system stops servicing locations where protests are planned to cut off protesters’ access and escape. As a last-ditch effort, the government implements an anti-mask law that incriminates any person wearing a face covering at a protest or unlawful assembly.

This contradicts public health measures amid the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

11. These brick structures won the People’s Choice category at the 2020 Beazley Designs of the Year awards by London-based organization Design Museum.

“Brick Arches,” Design Museum, January 19, 2021.

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PAUSE/PLAY The Permanence of Temporary Placemaking The 2019 pro-democracy protests disrupted the city’s norm, breaking down boundaries within and between spaces. The back-and-forth conflicts caused lasting effects on Hong Kong’s urban life. The city’s fabric was divided into colours: businesses donning the pro-democracy colour formed a yellow economic network where consumers used their spending power to support the protests, while boycotting those marked blue who supported the government and police. Commuters adopted alternate transportation routes in response to station closures and politically-charged regions. The absence of metal fences expanded the narrow sidewalks, changing the experience of everyday life. To this day, there are still remnants of barriers, posters, and graffiti across the city, which will be continually taken down and put up again as ghosts of these temporary occupations.

The urgency of the impending extradition bill sparked the awakening of a distinct but collective identity rooted in protest, borrowing spaces of the city’s everyday to assert presence. The COVID-19 pandemic brought the protests to a definitive halt, and while it is hard to say for certain, it is difficult to imagine future protests of such scale in Hong Kong. Despite a landslide victory for the pro-democracy camp during the 2019 District Council election, the PRC’s implementation of the National Security Law exponentially increased the consequences of any remotely subversive forms of occupation within the city, and punished those who spoke of resistance.

Citizens are now forced to confront the city’s colonial past and its future as part of the PRC. Despite Hongkongers’ lack of political control, the barricades created spaces of protest which distinctly belonged to them as they actively constructed and deconstructed the city’s fabric. Whether they support integration under the PRC’s governance or the political agency for the city to become radically distinct, I imagine that every Hongkonger advocates for what they consider to be a better city. The people of Hong Kong occupy space in a way that blends the politics of space and the occasions of everyday lives; no space is neutral within the city. Before we lose this sense of renewed political agency, it is important to remember that our right to space is up to us to be conscious of, to exert, and to protect.

Chi Him recommends: A website called Lau San which focuses on transnational solidarity between Hongkongers.

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TUNING MONUMENTS

Victor Zagabe Victor (he/him) graduated with a Master of Architecture from the University of Waterloo.

His interest in the subject of restitution and architecture stem from his Congolese roots.

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PAUSE/PLAY The Colonial Museum fig. 1 (left): The Reorganization painting by Cheri Samba depicts the cultural struggle between Europeans and Africans at the museum. Source: Chéri Samba, Réorganisation, 2002. Oil on canvas. Coll. RAC Tervuren. Rights reserved. Inv. HO.0.1.3865 1. Michael Bess, “Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” History of the Present 4 (November 1980): 11.

Over the past few decades, a shift in the Western public sphere has renewed an interest in decolonizing institutions. As such, museums have once again become a primary focus within postcolonial discourse, as institutions of concentrated colonial infrastructure. According to French philosopher Michel Foucault, institutions freeze power relations to the advantage of a certain group of people and at the detriment of others.1 This concept is most evident in the 19th-century European museum’s paternalistic retention of looted artifacts. How might we reinterpret our experiences within museums if we were made aware of just how much of their collections were looted?

Monumental architecture commissioned by 19th-century monarchs has often served as a northern star for dubious building projects, funded by the blood of exploited peoples. As European powers partitioned Africa into colonial states, museums provided the physical space to display colonial expeditions to the Western world. During the orchestrated rise of Belgian imperialism by King Leopold II, goods violently taken from Central Africa poured into Belgium through major shipping ports, creating a constant flow of material supply for the metropole. Proudly displaying this stolen cultural patrimony as colonial bounty, the museum’s role was to support a grandiose national identity to garner increased public support for the colonial regime. Despite inciting atrocities and killings, the museum gained traction through the exoticization of the Other. By “civilizing” and exhibiting the peoples and cultures they held under colonial rule, the Kingdom of Belgium hoped to be seen as progressive relative to its European counterparts, performing feats of display as its empire expanded. Designers were complicit in building spaces to animate colonial propaganda, particularly the dehumanizing displays which were recreated at numerous world exhibitions.

The Royal Museum of Central Africa

2. Zachary Small, “As Belgium Reopens Africa Museum, DR Congo Demands Restitution of Artifacts,” Hyperallergic, December 11, 2018.

Established by Belgium for the Brussels World Expo of 1897, the Royal Museum of Central Africa (RMCA) in Tervuren is a state institution which supported Belgian colonial endeavours. Its collections have historically sparked controversy, having been acquired through the violent, unjust, and extremely brutal relations of the Congo Free State. Tervuren was also the site of a human zoo, an ethnological and orientalist reproduction of the Western gaze where colonized peoples were placed in abstracted environments labelled as primitive states. As one of Europe’s most infamously antiquated colonial museums, the RMCA supported Belgian prejudices against Africans until it closed its doors in 2013 for a rebranding project called the Reorganization campaign. Over time, this rebranding was steered towards decolonizing the institution; however, the museum’s reopening in 2018 was met with mixed reviews as some advocated that to truly decolonize the museum, it had to address the restitution of artifacts wrongfully stolen in the colonial raids of Central Africa (fig. 1).2 The RMCA is a monumental institution of regulatory power. Its assimilation into the Belgian state government gives it a large amount of authority, which it uses to maintain its tenure as the guardian of historic Central African cultural artifacts. Given the contemporary cultural shift towards reparations, the RMCA has publicly proclaimed its desire to collaborate with Central African communities, while creating barriers to the physical return of these items.

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fig. 2: Showcased in Tervuren, the Royal Museum of Central Africa’s collections were primarily harvested during the colonial era. Source: View of the Rituals and Ceremonies gallery at the Africa Museum in Tervuren, Belgium. Photo J. Van de Vijver 2018.3.388 © RMCA Tervuren.

3. Pierre Nora and Lawrence D. Kritzman, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 14.

The RMCA’s identity as a lieu de mémoire complicates its role as a gatekeeper. French historian Pierre Nora defines lieux de mémoire, or sites of memory, as complex things: At once natural and artificial, simple and ambiguous, concrete and abstract, they are lieux—places, sites, causes—in three senses: material, symbolic, and functional.3 As a site holding strong significance to both Belgian and Central African groups, the RMCA sits at the intersection of collective memory and colonial power as a node fixed in the public psyche. Due to its legal status as a national monument, the physical building itself cannot be drastically altered; however, the grounds of the RMCA require architectural intervention to generate postcolonial discourse with the building’s history.

A restitution monument directly facing the national monument could simultaneously hold the institution accountable for its theft and promote the redistribution of artifacts to their rightful homes. By doing so, the monument confronts colonial structures of power, authorship, and ownership. In a decolonized world, a restitution monument at the RMCA would be paired up with a reciprocal monument that receives the artifacts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, completing the process of return.

From BLM to a Parliamentary Commission Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement led protests against anti-Black racism to push long-standing issues of inequality into the global limelight. In the West, the media coverage portrayed demonstrations denouncing colonial and confederate propaganda at exponential rates, with increasing public scrutiny of police violence. While “monumental” imperial statues became publicly controversial, academics and activists criticized Western museums for maintaining stolen artifacts harvested during the brutal plundering and looting of colonial Africa.

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fig. 3: The design of a restitution monument at the RMCA. 4. “Restitution Policy of the Royal Museum for Central Africa,” Royal Museum for Central Africa, accessed April 20, 2021.

In July 2020, the Belgian government responded to the protests by creating the Parliamentary Committee on the Colonial Past to oversee a Special Commission “to investigate the Congo Free State (1885–1908) and the Belgian colonial past in Congo (1908–1960), Rwanda and Burundi (1919–1962), its impact and the consequences to be given to it.”4 That same summer, the Belgian Special Commission created a call for proposals related to important themes in the history of Belgian colonialism and its long-term effects, as well as several potential ways to contend with these ongoing colonial processes.Tuning Monuments, my graduate thesis work, was submitted to the expert panel for review to propose the idea of a restitution monument, should this issue become a part of the cultural debate once more.

Tuning Monuments seeks to understand how architects might design monuments that stimulate civic life and bridge transcontinental communities, advocating to monumentalize the process of restitution.

The project is designed as an idiomatic introduction to the museum as it moves beyond looted artifice, commemorating the African struggle for restitution as the elephant in the room within the museum’s attempt to decolonize itself. Before museum entry, visitors are encouraged to contemplate missing artifacts through a semi-rotunda clad in engraved bronze tiles, which surround the symbolic elephant statue (fig. 3).

Through a process of scarification, the tiles are engraved with the names of the artifacts being repatriated, how long they were held in the museum, their place of origin, and their place of return. Following restitution, the new form of the museum prompts visitors to question the institution’s history of looting and exploitation by monumentalizing the absence of these artifacts.

5. “Restitution Policy,” Royal Museum for Central Africa.

In October 2020, a newly elected federal government made plans to implement a restitution policy considered in line with the upcoming work for the Parliamentary Committee on the Colonial Past.5 Naturally, the RMCA was contacted to address its colonial involvement as both a state institution 103

SUBVERSIVE PROCESSES 6. “‘Digital Reconnection’ to Colonial Collections,” Royal Museum for Central Africa, accessed April 20, 2021.

7. “‘Digital Reconnection’ to Colonial Collections,” Royal Museum for Central Africa.

and a place of academic research. Today, the museum showcases its “digital reconnection” to historic collections in what the RMCA deems the first step towards restitution.6 The Transformative Heritage project brings together researchers from the RMCA, Université de l’Uélé, Ghent University, and the Institute of Development Policy to make the museum’s digital research and artistic collection database available to Central African institutions. However, this appears as an initial compromise while the physical items remain in Belgium for the time being. Is this a means of critically engaging with the past, or will it become yet another tactic to slow down the restitution process? RMCA-affiliated professor Dr. Vicky Van Bockhaven of Ghent University recognizes that digital reconnection cannot be a substitute for material restitution, but believes it will help in developing a model for the restitution of cultural heritage—for now, professor Père Roger Gaise of the Université de l’Uélé in Congo adds that they are “researching the wishes and needs surrounding heritage within the communities.”7 The communities to which he refers come from the Northeast of Congo, where the research will begin with international collaboration.

This generates new questions concerning international law, which was originally conceived to be the universal standard of justice and cooperation.

In reality, international law continues to stand in the way of restitution discourse and processes. This is due in part to international law’s delegitimization of non-colonial community frameworks, which buttresses the standards of former colonizers. In past restitution efforts, the RMCA expressed its preference for collaborating with international state institutions of a similar calibre, which undermined restitution advocacy spearheaded by Afro-Belgian NGOs, human rights activists, local communities, and other networks outside of Central African states. The irony of using statism as a means of legitimizing restorative processes comes from international law’s prominent role in undermining the traditional means for colonized communities to self-organize. The very borders which define many African states outline the compounding effect of state divisions implemented during Europe’s scramble for Africa. In revamping the institution, the RMCA cast itself as the legitimate guardian of these pieces of “shared heritage” upheld by self-invented “international” standards. It continues to assert that these artifacts must be presented in formalized Western museums, rather than as living pieces of culture in dialogue with ongoing traditional and spiritual values.

Speculations On the Future The RMCA was built as an institution symbolizing Belgian national unity, intended to entertain an apathetic white European audience. However, its curation of the atrocities committed within the Central African colonies has led the Congolese to voice renewed calls for change. Will this European museum of Africa ever be suitable to an African audience? With a restitution monument in place of looted artifacts, archaic methods of thought might be replaced with moments of reflection on the colonial nature of this site.

By expressing a lack thereof, a void, or an emptiness, a museum beyond restitution might very well disrupt traditional ways of experiencing its contested culture to question the authority and validity of colonial spaces.

8. Andy Stroud, Nina Simone Great Performances: College Concerts and Interviews (Sound Dimensions, NYC, 2009).

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As designers of museums and other spaces on colonized land, we need to critically re-examine our participation within colonial frameworks. To quote the late Nina Simone, “An artist’s duty is to reflect the times in which we live.”8 We must revise, criticize, and reframe the space we occupy to move beyond the ingrained oppressive realities to which we have become accustomed.

We must also draw a clear distinction between monumental heritage and political ideology to better grasp the complexities of our cultural histories.

PAUSE/PLAY While the outcomes of restitution remain uncertain, it is clear that the continuous push to abolish existing systems of inequality will have rippling effects for generations to come. As socio-political imbalances intensify in a rapidly changing world, architects will need to become proactive instead of reactive in designing against unforeseen conflicts that the world is yet to face. To move towards a decolonized future which exists beyond plausible deniability, historically colonial institutions such as the RMCA must re-emerge as vehicles for reclamation and empowerment. The question is, how can we reframe the past to demand a more equitable future?

Victor recommends: Authentically African (2015) by Sarah Van Beurden, a professor at Ohio State University who covers: “The Art of (re)Possession: Heritage and the Cultural Politics of Congo’s Decolonization.”

Intervention D’Anne Wetsi MPoma (2018), a conference recording featuring Anne Wetsi Mpoma, an art historian and member of the RMCA’s “group of 6” Afro-descendants.

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CONTACT ZONES INFRASTRUCTURE AS ALLY

Hannah Newton Hannah (she/her) is a textile artist and Intern Architect in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), Nova Scotia. She holds degrees in Fine Art and Environmental Design, and a Master of Architecture from Dalhousie University, where she focused her research on lightweight tensile structures.

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PAUSE/PLAY Standing Ground in the Past fig. 1 (left): Preliminary sketches of Architectural Allies.

In October 2016, I travelled to Standing Rock, North Dakota and stood ground with the Sioux Nation people in protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline. To get there, I had to pass through roadblocks formed by the US National Guard, armed police, and Dakota Access Security. I later realized these measures were taken to hide terrifying displays of government control where unarmed citizens were met by military forces. As a settler ally, this small act of solidarity was the first time I encountered environmental racism firsthand. It opened my eyes to how governments react when sovereign tribal groups resist corporate interests and take action to defend the land of their ancestors from environmental degradation.

1. Ingrid Waldron, There’s Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities (Black Point: Fernwood Publishing, 2018), 51.

Environmental racism is defined as the placement of toxic environmental hazards near communities of colour and the working poor; these marginalized groups are often targeted because they lack the political agency to have their voices heard within colonial systems.1 This results in the inequitable distribution of industry and toxic materials. The infrastructures associated with industrial extraction projects are intentionally hidden from public view, achieved through censored online content, a lack of news coverage, or intimidation tactics preventing public visitation to protests, such as the road barricades at Standing Rock. This pattern of invisibility often goes unnoticed, perpetuating a cycle that impoverishes and physically harms marginalized communities with great frequency.

After visiting Standing Rock, I began compiling research to help designers better understand their role at sites of conflict and contention between Indigenous Peoples and the colonial system. My investigations started with environmental racism, progressed through the history of protest movements, and landed in the politics of design activism. The underlying question driving this research asked: what role can architects play to help disassemble the structures that connect place, race, and power in cases of environmental racism? In posing this question, designers and architects can begin to better engage in activism and prioritize equitable placemaking over economic growth.

Architectural Allies The following design strategy unfolds as a series of Architectural Allies which draw attention to sites of environmental racism. Taking the form of catapults, traps, watchtowers, and telltale markers, these small, rough, and unofficial gestures have the ability to act as creative mediation (fig. 1).

In the struggle towards truth and reconciliation between Indigenous and settler communities, it is of interest to those in power to hide acts of environmental racism, such as the formation of the Dakota Access Pipeline through Sioux Nation land. As a result, a large part of this struggle requires making unjust operations visible. Markers within the landscape, defined in this project as Tell Tale signs, bring attention to invisible violences being inflicted on people and the land. They act as non-human allies, publicizing hidden harms and unrecognized power dynamics, and revealing the tall tales governments use to support corporate agendas (fig. 2, fig. 3). The markers alert passersby to the ongoing state-sanctioned violence towards Indigenous Peoples, including the devastation of cultural practices due to land dispossession and resource exploitation.

2. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991), 37.

Collectively, these Architectural Allies form a barricade, where people of disparate geographic histories can come together and establish ongoing relations. Mary Louise Pratt refers to this as a contact zone, defined as a social space where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical power relations.2 107

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fig. 2: Three Tell Tale signs drawing attention to invisible infrastructures, such as the Dakota Access Pipeline.

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fig. 3: Sketch model of a Tell Tale sign, made from clay, wire, balloon, and found material.

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SUBVERSIVE PROCESSES 3. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” 33.

4. Sophie McCall and Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, The Land We Are: Artists & Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2015), 57.

Pratt notes that although contact zones are often associated with intractable conflict, they have the potential to be transformed into places of mediation and collaboration.3 In the context of this design proposal, the barricade formed by the Architectural Allies suggests a peaceful intervention (fig. 4).

As McCall and Hill describe in The Land We Are, the barricade is often mistaken as the violent embodiment of an impasse rather than an opportunity for transcendence or transformation. It can also suggest the opportunity for a different kind of relationship with the land and one another, one that both acknowledges the violence of settlement and resource extraction and affirms shared obligations to caretake the land for the well-being of future generations.4 The barricade in this design strategy is a place of action. Catapults are located along the barricade, strategically positioned towards the Tell Tale signs to fling seed bombs into areas in need of attention and remediation (fig. 5, fig. 6). The catapults provide an opening into the barricade, allowing access into a contact zone where conversations can be initiated about how to move forward collectively.

Reimagining Resistance

5. Waldron, There’s Something in the Water, 108.

Resistance to environmental racism comes in many forms; it is not simply through protest. For Indigenous Peoples, resistance often centres on land dispossession and the subsequent extinguishment of sovereign rights.5 This resistance is grounded in oppositional politics which push towards re-reading, re-imagining, and re-centring the counter-knowledge of colonized voices. The Architectural Allies illustrate that approaching design as activism gives designers the ability to call for social and environmental change by bringing attention to sites of conflict where environmental racism is taking place and making space for negotiation.

6. McCall and Hill, The Land We Are, 15.

An architect or designer has the potential to play an important role in reimagining this resistance if we consider that collaborative processes can be a powerful way to acknowledge and respect differences. For settler ally designers, the question then becomes: how do we unlearn the familiar systems that perpetuate colonial power dynamics within this process of negotiation? Approaching this question requires us to foster relationships with Indigenous Peoples and communities and to first acknowledge the colonial influences embedded in our design thinking. Simultaneously, we need to take analytical cues from the work of Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists to inform our architectural practices.6 By approaching architecture as a tool for mediation, we can create the spaces necessary for the ongoing support of Indigenous sovereignty.

Hannah recommends: Our Voices: Indigeneity and Architecture by Rebecca Kiddle, Kevin O’Brien, and luugigyoo patrick stewart. This book centres Indigenous voices and perspectives on design theory and the practice of architecture.

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fig. 4: Architectural Allies from left to right: Tell Tale, Watchtower, Trap (Catchment).

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fig. 5: A Tell Tale sign, illustrating the need for remediation in the area.

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fig. 6: Catapult in action: a seed ball activated and flung towards a Tell Tale sign.

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CARE, POLITICS, AND COVID-19 In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, “care” has become an increasingly commercialized, charged and weaponized word. It has been thrown around without due consideration of its meaning or its history. This text will offer a brief introduction to care theory and the politics of care within the Canadian experience of the pandemic.

Brenda Reid Brenda (she/they) is a recent graduate of the University of Waterloo Master of Architecture program, where they studied care within architectural practice. The work addresses issues of power, oppression, and white supremacy, while searching for the architect’s role in a care-based system.

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PAUSE/PLAY Care 1. “Origin and Meaning of Care,” Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed June 1, 2021; “Definition of ‘CARE’,” Merriam-Webster, accessed June 1, 2021.

In our daily language, care is understood at a superficial level as “to like” or “to have concern for something.” The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it with 15 entries, using words such as suffering, apprehension, responsibility, attention, maintenance, and regard. The etymology of care finds its roots in karo, a Proto-Germanic base meaning “lament,” from which we get sorrow.

To care is traceable to the Proto-Indo-European root gar, meaning “cry out, call, scream,” to make a sound.1 These roots paint a troubling picture of what it means to care. We can also understand the roots of care in relation to the survival of the human species. Our most basic need, to survive, is the original setting for care. In this way, care is indeed both uncomfortable and profoundly part of us.

Care has been well established as a relational activity that involves multiple people and activities. As a moral theory, Western society places value on justice well above an ethic of care. Justice, our foundational moral theory, uses abstract scenarios and universally applicable principles while care is situationally-based, requiring a detailed look at relationships between many actors. Care is concrete and complex, despite Western society’s obsession with reduction and simplicity. We can see oversimplifications in dominant “rational reasoning,” or justice-focused principles, and prevalent sex and gender binaries. These are examples of social constructions which simplify complex and fluid concepts, often for the benefit of a specific group—white supremacists, for example.

2. Berenice Fisher and Joan C. Tronto, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring,” in Circles of Care, eds. Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 40.

3. Fisher and Tronto, “Toward a Feminist Theory,” 41.

Contemporary US-based care theorists Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto define care as a process containing four elements: care-about, care-taking, care-giving, and care-receiving.2 Acknowledging their non-linearity, Fisher and Tronto note that different people may address aspects of care, and perhaps not every element will occur within a care process. This approach also acknowledges other factors that affect care as a process, called ability factors, including time, material resources, knowledge, and skill. In beginning to understand the complexity of care relationships, it is helpful to start with these four elements: Care-about: To “select out and attend to the features of our environment that bear on our survival and well-being.”3 There is an expectation in caring-about that the person paying attention has some knowledge about the subject. However, they do not require the ability factors of skill or material resources. It is very common to care about more things than we can act upon.

Care-taking: Deciding to take on the responsibility of care. Responsibility may seem like the simplest element; however, it is weighty and comes with a power imbalance between the care-giver and care-receiver. This element requires knowledge, good judgment, and time.

Care-giving: The work of care. This element requires all the ability factors: time, material resources, knowledge, and skill, as well as emotional and physical energy. Lack of time or resources can put incredible strain on care-givers and their relations with care-receivers (see Care-taking).

4. Fisher and Tronto, “Toward a Feminist Theory,” 45.

Care-receiving: The “response to care-giving by those to whom care is directed. […] [The] response may not be intentional, conscious, or even human.”4 It is a form of communication that provides information to the care-giver about how the care-receiver’s needs were met.

The care-receiver often knows more about their needs because they experience them but might not be able to communicate those needs.

This phase indicates a moment to re-evaluate and see how the need has been met (if it has) and address additional aspects or needs.

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SUBVERSIVE PROCESSES Politics Care is tied to politics, as power is built into any care-based relationship.

Within the container of Western society, it is impossible not to address how white supremacy shapes and suppresses care within our society. The origin of democracy, a governing structure we perceive as fair and equal, is built on political exclusion. Democracy requires equality between parties, however, care only exists in power imbalances. If all people within a democracy are equal, then there is no place for care.

5. Fisher and Tronto, “Toward a Feminist Theory,” 35.

Care has virtually no place in the description of “the good life” that provides a focus for Western philosophy, despite the fact that caring permeates our experience.

—Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto, 1990 5

6. Joan C. Tronto, “When we Understand Care, We’ll Need to Redefine Democracy,” in Who Cares?: How to Reshape a Democratic Politics. 1st ed., (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 3–16.

7. Tronto, “When we Understand Care,” 15.

8. Shannon Mattern, “Maintenance and Care,” Places Journal (November 2018).

In ancient Athenian society, care roles existed outside of democracy and were taken on by people not considered full citizens or equals, including women, children, the poor, people with disabilities, enslaved people, and immigrants.6 Therefore democracy was available to privileged men born within and who upheld the system they actively benefitted from. Tronto offers a new definition of democracy: “Democracy is the allocation of caring responsibilities and assuring that everyone can participate in those allocations of care as completely as possible.”7 Tronto’s version of democracy sees care as fundamental to society.

There is a great deal of writing, including in non-intersectional white feminism, that attributes care as an inherent or intuitive behaviour of women as they have been designated “natural care-givers” by virtue of being a mother. This debate on moral development within the invention of the Western gender binary is tiresome. This narrative only serves to further a male-dominant white-oriented agenda that keeps women and often BIPOC folks doing care work. When we take a step back from this scenario of white men versus white women, we see many others who have historically carried the burden of care work and continue to be rendered invisible. Care work is continuously devalued; the most unwanted or unpleasant care-related jobs, such as waste removal, are pushed onto less privileged and marginalized groups, such as Black, Indigenous, and people of colour. Presently, through globalism, entire countries take on this work so that we can maintain our capitalist and consumerist society in North America.8 The distaste for dealing with complexity and discomfort in Western culture explains why privileged people pass off care’s discomfort whenever possible.

Tronto writes:

9. Tronto, “When we Understand Care,” 3–16.

The more power you have, the less care you can choose to perform.

What it means to be powerful, in caring terms, is to be able to foist off the unpleasant parts of care onto others and to take on only the care duties we find worthwhile.9 However, those privileged in society do not merely pass it off to someone else.

It becomes the responsibility of the people that society considers lesser. This othering that occurs and the disproportionate delegation of care responsibility have a long history which continues its cycles in our current society.

Care has also become widely regulated and professionalized, such as in health “care,” and can be difficult to access by groups of people who have been marginalized. Educator and activist Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about how people, especially in the sick and disabled QTBIPOC community, might be resistant to or altogether avoid institutionalized care. When care is used as charity and not in solidarity, it can be traumatic. People with chronic health

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PAUSE/PLAY 10. Leah Lakshmi PiepznaSamarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018).

needs may have to resort to other measures, like care webs, to live while protecting themselves from this trauma. Care webs can be formed between people in a system of solidarity, and their creation demands a rethinking of how care should be handled; it requires an entirely new system of care between participants, all while operating within a dominant culture that devalues and misuses care.10 There is an innocence portrayed in care. Care is not innocent and is used as a method of control and governance; it is inseparable from colonialism, racism, sexism, and capitalism. Care has been used as a banner of good to fly over countless acts of oppression. Within Canada, such oppressive acts include the abuse and withholding of care for Indigenous Peoples within the residential school system, the ongoing treatment of Indigenous communities, and the AIDS crisis, to offer a few examples.

COVID-19

11. Justin Trudeau is the current Prime Minister of Canada and Doug Ford is the Premier of Ontario.

12. Paid sick leave was a topic frequently brought to the provincial government throughout the pandemic.

It was especially important for people who could not afford to miss work. Ontario introduced paid COVID-19 leave of only three days in April 2021, over a year after the onset of the pandemic.

“Ontario to Introduce Paid COVID-19 Leave,” Province of Ontario, April 28, 2021.

13. Care work is often labelled as heroic or not recognized at all. The suffering of care work will go uncompensated if they are a hero, and unacknowledged and uncompensated if the care work is in the undesirable category. Mattern, “Maintenance and Care.”

14. Briarpatch Magazine, a radical Canadian publisher based in Saskatchewan, published writing on both the failure of our government’s coronavirus actions and the government’s failure to treat all of our lives as equally important.

15. Maya Menezes, “Migrant Workers Are the Present and Future of Low-Carbon Care Work,” Briarpatch Magazine, January 14, 2021.

Care is a practice; it is a skill that improves with experience and exposure.

Therefore, under the “democratic” structure of our society, women and people of colour will have a more complex moral ethic of care than people who do not perform much care work. Within this stream of reasoning, the people in positions of immense power have little care experience or practice, as it is not culturally valued, and yet are responsible for taking care of cities, provinces, or countries. Ontario’s provincial government and Canada’s parliament are largely led by white men raised in a justice-based society who are unlikely to have developed a mature ethic of care by virtue of their privilege.11 The reality is that while these politicians wield enormous power that directly affects millions of peoples’ quality of life, they have little to no understanding of how to care for people. This lack of practice is painfully evident in the provincial and national handling of COVID-19.

While at times we have been distracted by skyrocketing numbers of COVID-19 infections and deaths in America, Canada is also facing a crisis of care within our government’s leadership. Leaders constantly push the responsibility to curb the pandemic onto the individual. They state so simply that if only people would stay home or wear a mask, the pandemic would end. They are not coming forward with solutions to the innumerable difficult situations that people find themselves in, opting for vague and universally applied “solutions” over and over again as the death toll continues to rise. For example, people were encouraged to stay home if they felt ill yet were not given paid sick leave.12 One common theme amongst national messages and media is the heroism of essential workers. It is their job to save us. Designating care work as heroic is an established tactic used by governing bodies to avoid providing appropriate support or care for the people they serve.13 They create an illusion that the heroes do it simply because they are good people. It is yet another narrative that makes privileged people who are not care workers or “essential” workers feel good for not participating in this dangerous work.14 The reality of treating care work as heroic work during this pandemic, without proper compensation, is brought painfully to our attention by Maya Menezes, an activist living in Tkaronto (Toronto): Instead of arming these workers with what they need—permanent residency, fair wages, and labour regulations—we have been clapping for them from our balconies at a scheduled hour, as they march to their deaths.15 This quotation speaks of a fleeting communal show of appreciation to health care workers, where the general public was encouraged to clap, cheer, and bang pots and pans at a time aligned with the evening nurses’ shift change, which has since almost entirely died off. Menezes’s writing also refers to the 117

SUBVERSIVE PROCESSES dangerous conditions that some essential workers face. While medical staff are surrounded by people with confirmed cases of COVID-19, they also have medical training and proper PPE. Other essential workers, like grocery workers and migrant farm workers, do not. These “acts of solidarity” of clapping are not in fact solidarity, but actions that make us feel more comfortable with the care work disparity and the way in which we shelter ourselves from danger by heroizing care work.

Care is difficult to define. It is incredibly complex and inseparable from power and society. It is learned through experience and is therefore not inherent to any particular group of people. It is a practice full of mistakes that manages to support everything we do. In an anti-capitalist mindset, these mistakes are not failures but are reframed as a step towards sustainable, restful care practices. Researchers Aryn Martin, Natasha Myers, and Ana Viseu write: 16. Aryn Martin, Natasha Myers, and Ana Viseu, “The Politics of Care in Technoscience,” Social Studies of Science 45, no.

5 (October 2015): 636.

“Staying with the trouble” that care sets in motion does not mean that we are left without means to act or to intervene; rather, it is by staying in the thick of things, by analyzing care’s non-innocent politics that our responses can be slowed down enough to make them more care-ful.16 Within the context of Canada, we can see how care has become weaponized politically, institutionally, and socially, and how media narratives continue to either heorize or erase care workers. Care is the foundation of our species—but perhaps care is also the greatest test of our humanity.

Brenda recommends: Leah Lakshmi PiepznaSamarasinha wrote this book, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (2018) from the experience of being a queer, sick, and disabled person of colour. It is an important perspective in care theory from a group of people most often overlooked, targeted, or purposely left out of conversations on care work.

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in conversation with

SYRUS MARCUS WARE Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware (he/him) is an artist, community activist, educator, abolitionist, and Vanier Scholar. His artistic works challenging systemic oppression surrounding gender, sexuality, and race have been exhibited at many venues including the 2019 Toronto Biennial of Art and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Syrus is a core member of Black Lives Matter—Toronto, a co-curator of Blackness Yes!/Blockorama, and a founding member of the Black Triangle Arts Collective and the Prison Justice Action Committee of Toronto. He earned his PhD at York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies where his work examined disability justice in the arts and prison abolition in Nunavut.

Syrus co-authored the anthology Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada and is a founding member of the Wildseed Centre for Art and Activism. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of the Arts at McMaster University.

August 2, 2021 @ 3:30 p.m. EDT galt.

[00:00]

SMW [00:50] 1. “The panarchy cycle is known by many Indigenous and Black cultures.[...] All systems go through periods of rapid growth and expansion, a period of sustainment, and then a period of collapse and rapid reorganization and the planting of new seeds for something else to grow.”

Syrus Marcus Ware. “What Is Solidarity?: Abolition,” (What is Solidarity? Speaker Series, Waterloo Architecture, November 10, 2020), 00:13:30.

2. Originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Black Panther Party was an African-American political organization founded in Oakland, California in 1966 as part of the Black Power social movement against white supremacy. “The Black Panther Party,” National Archives, August 25, 2016.

galt.

[04:03]

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You’ve previously discussed how the collapse of systems rooted in white supremacy makes way for seeds and new growth.1 In extreme situations, people care for each other rather than the police or prison system. Could you talk more about care as a method of activism that moves us toward imminent realities?

This idea that we take care of each other grows out of disability justice communities and Black liberation movements like the Black Panthers.2 They created things we now take for granted: mutual aid and collective care programs, free health clinics, and food programs. These were central to dismantling our reliance on the state, which clearly wasn’t providing for us in an equitable or just way. We can see the continuation of that care through mutual aid programs we ran this year through Black Lives Matter, or care mongering groups that sprang up in communities all over the world in response to the pandemic.3 This radical connection to care has always been part of our movements. It’s important to trace the genealogy to say that this is something that has been practiced and is essential to revolution. We’re in this revolutionary process at this moment, and relying on communities of care to make us stronger is core to what we’re doing. It’s incredible to see our system grow, shift, and turn towards being in relation with other beings on this planet. When we all thrive and take care of each other, we’re watering seeds that were planted by our ancestors, who were doing this work for generations before we got here.

Thinking about caring for seeds as a necessary component of growth, can you expand on your choice to use seeds as an analogy for how you frame your abolition work?

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SMW [04:39] 3. Black Lives Matter gained global traction when a police officer killed George Floyd in 2020. The movement aims to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to prevent violence against Black communities. “About,” Black Lives Matter, accessed August 25, 2021.

4. Healing justice is a political strategy to address intergenerational trauma and systemic oppression through community support. “What Is Healing Justice?,” Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, accessed August 25, 2021.

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[07:37]

SMW [09:23] 5. Walidah Imarisha defines visionary fiction as fantastical cross-genre creations which help social justice movements envision how new worlds might become possible. Walidah Imarisha, “How Science Fiction Can Re-Envision Justice,” Bitch Media, accessed August 25, 2021.

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[11:51] SMW [12:37]

I was in part inspired to study botany in university because of my grandmother, Gwen Irons. She studied plants as medicine and healing, and taught us a lot about healing justice and how to turn to the natural world.4 I was interested in this idea of planting, growing, and what we learn when we have our fingers in the soil. What happens when we actually spend time caring for other living beings? It teaches us about ourselves, but also about the larger system and its life cycle. I’ve been very privileged to be in spaces rooted in Indigenous knowledge and with the Land as a participant and as a teacher. I think about our ideas as seeds. Writer and activist Walidah Imarisha says that all activism is speculative fiction because we’re daring to dream that another world is possible.5 As artists, we’re telling stories that help people to imagine what this might actually look like. That’s seed planting. I love the idea of bringing a connection to the land into our understanding of abolition and activism, because it recognizes that we are part of a life cycle centred on interdependence.

In your abolition work, you’ve described how prisons treat Black and Indigenous bodies as disposable. Understanding Black and Indigenous bodies as seeds which are used to colonize this land, how can they work in solidarity to decolonize it?

I think of the incredible work of Dr. Tiffany Lethabo King and her analysis of the fungible conditions of Black and Indigenous life on Turtle Island. We were treated as if we were disposable income, as seeds to be planted. These seeds were planted to make the master rich and to fuel settler expansion. Our bodies were used to literally transform and terraform the soil as a way of clearing the land.

Indigenizing the environment so the power of Black and Indigenous People come together in solidarity is essential, as are the ways in which we have resisted colonial violence together and the ways that we continue to support each other. I think there are ways colonialism has tried to pit our communities against each other and dissuade us from uniting because we are so powerful when we come together. We’re seeing not only an incredible amount of Black and Indigenous solidarity, but also more communities who are asserting their presence and raising their voices to address these issues. We’re really moving forward into a moment when the fungible conditions faced by Black and Indigenous life will potentially be ending. It is something we’re going to have to figure out with our communities together, but this is a moment where change is possible.

How do you move past an overwhelming sense of frustration and anger about the use of Black bodies within both historic and ongoing colonial processes?

Through generations, there are ways that we have dealt with the violence of these processes and what it has done to us. Of course, one of the responses must be rage—I think of Black feminist 121

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thought that teaches us that there is always a place for rage in our movements. I also think about the place of love in these moments and the balance of those two things. I was born in Montréal and I grew up here in Tkaronto, but I’m from Memphis, Tennessee.

My family spent generations in slave labour camps in the South and I want justice for their memory and for what they went through.

The work I do now is to ensure that this is something that doesn’t happen again, but the reality is that there is a lot of pain. There’s a lot of intergenerational trauma that comes from having to endure the violent disregard for Black life as it played out in labour camps, where Black people were regularly slaughtered just to satisfy the slave owners’ white supremacist rage. My great-grandparents on my dad’s side lived in slave labour camps and experienced a level of violence that had effects on my grandparents, and then on my dad, and then on me. This reality is still very recent and these intergenerational lineages are very close to where we are now.

galt.

[15:44] SMW [16:27] 6. An anthology of Guevara’s letters entitled Man and Socialism in Cuba describes how the true revolutionary is guided by feelings of love.

Ernesto Che Guevara to Carlos Quijano, “Man and Socialism in Cuba,” March 1965, Guevara Internet Archive, accessed August 25, 2021.

7. Watch the BLM-TO press conference here: “Drop the Charges:” Black Lives Matter on Arrests of Toronto Protesters, (Toronto: CTV News, 2020).

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[18:33]

SMW [19:23] 8. For more on irresistible revolutions, refer to: Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Cade Bambara Interview with Kay Bonetti (Columbia: American Audio Prose Library, 1982).

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Thinking about the balance between rage and love, how would you define the radical component that gives life to love and care as activism?

Che Guevera talked about the true goal of any revolutionary needing to be rooted in love.6 There is this political and radical commitment to loving each other through the hardest of times which is rooted in an abolitionist way of thinking about the world.

We won’t discard each other. We will turn towards each other even in conflict. That to me is an idea of a radical love. It’s a love that is limitless. It’s a love that is not bound by capitalism or by ideas of ownership, but is about something much bigger.

An Afro-Indigenous trans woman and activist called Ravyn Wngz gave a beautiful speech about our love being radical at a 2020 Black Lives Matter press conference, just after we had three arrests for a statue beautification project.7 The very idea that we’re rooting our love in a non-carceral logic and in an idea of futurity is transformational. It changes how we work together, what kind of projects we do, and our strategy for organizing. All of it is different by rooting ourselves in a radical commitment to love and care.

You mentioned that the arts are implicated in activism, and part of our role as designers is to make this revolution irresistible.8 What do you see as the intersection of imagination and activism in visualizing an abolitionist world?

We turn back to this idea of speculative fiction described by people like Octavia Butler, N. K. Jemisin, Nisi Shawl, and Nalo Hopkinson.

We read these stories about the future and then we make our own stories. We can start to create semi-autonomous zones within our communities where we test these abolitionist futures.

The apartment complex I live in has a commitment to abolition, so we circulated these pamphlets about alternatives to calling the police and how safer, stronger communities can make prisons and

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police obsolete. Everybody was given the same information and resources for who to call in these different situations and it gave people the option for what to do in an emergency.

I love the analogy of this revolutionary idea of abolition being like mycelium networks underneath the soil. There are visible moments of revolution, but it is part of this massive revolutionary core that spans the entire Earth. All over the world people are pushing to defund the police and asking to remove police from their schools. People are making change seem possible just by articulating what they need in their communities and starting to live as if they’re already there. This is a moment of possibility and hope.

galt.

[21:51]

SMW [23:06] 9. Anique Jordan created this piece for the Nia Centre in the summer of 2020. “Anique Jordan: ‘We Have Done Enough’ Is a Love Letter to Black People,” Nia Centre for the Arts, August 20, 2020.

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[26:39]

SMW [28:36]

You present abolition as a method of activism but also as a way of thinking and relating to the world. When working towards systemic change, how can we decolonize our minds which tell us that we need to keep doing more and more, and that what we have done is not enough?

On the one hand, I think there’s an invitation right now to get more people involved. For people who have been wondering if they should get involved, now is the moment. We need everybody to be involved in shaping and touching change. We need commitment and action to ensure our safety and our survival. On the other hand, abolitionists and many other activists have already set the conditions in motion for revolutionary change to be possible, and we have absolutely done enough. We need to continue to support communities that have been organizing for decades that have also already done enough. A visual artist named Anique Jordan made this incredible banner that starts with the phrase, “We have done enough.”9 Black organizers should not need to convince anyone about what needs to change because we have done enough of that already. At the same time, I’m inviting anybody who hasn’t yet gotten involved to join us. Not only is this the moment when we need you, it is such a powerful and incredible thing to be involved in.

You mentioned that Black and marginalized communities work together to fulfill needs that aren’t being met by the state. How do you navigate living within a community that takes on such an exhaustive role, while still being able to say that you have already done enough?

We get to create these abolitionist communities and then start to live in them, start to practice in them, and start to organize in them.

Activism is a practice, just like art is a practice. We start to practice being in relation to each other, while still asking institutions that haven’t yet crumbled to be more responsive in the ways we need them to be. We need change to look like this for all of us to be able to access it, particularly in our cultural institutions. Change needs to happen at the institutional level until we’ve rebuilt our society 123

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into something else entirely. Even as we build our own Black cultural centres and art spaces, we can still hold institutions accountable to respond to the needs of Black artists and creatives.

galt.

[30:30]

SMW [30:54]

We’d love to hear more about your work with the Wildseed Centre for Activism and Art in Tkaronto, and this idea of subverting the institution by building something which does the things that an institution is supposed to do while foregrounding marginalized voices.

The Wildseed Centre is a space created by Black people, for Black people, about Black people. It’s a space for Black folks to come together to create, to rehearse, to perform, to meet, to network, to find community, to access healing justice programs, to do community gardening and food justice. This space becomes a much-needed hub for our community, especially at this moment when there are so many institutions that just aren’t quite there for Black communities. Through Wildseed, we now have a space that Black people will be able to use in whatever way they see fit—something that will last for generations in our community.

To know more, Syrus recommends: Bambara, Toni Cade. The Salt Eaters. 1st edition. New York: Random House, 1980.

Bambara, Toni Cade. “The Long Night.” Vietnam Generation 3, no. 1 (January 1, 1990).

Butler, Octavia E.. Wild Seed. New York: Doubleday Books, 1980.

Economopoulos, Beka, Jee Kim, Jeremy Glick, Walidah Imarisha, Sanchez Luis, and Shaffy Moeel, eds. Another World Is Possible. 1st edition. New York: Subway Press, 2002.

Hopkinson, Nalo. Report From Planet Midnight. Oakland: PM Press, 2012.

Imarisha, Walidah, and adrienne maree brown, eds. Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Oakland: AK Press, 2015.

Jemisin, N. K.. The Inheritance Trilogy. 1st edition. New York: Orbit, 2014.

Watch the What is Solidarity?

Abolition Lecture featuring Syrus Marcus Ware on the Waterloo Architecture Youtube Channel.

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Jordan, Anique. We Have Done Enough. 2020.

King, Tiffany Lethobo. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies.

Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Shawl, Nisi. Filter House. 1st edition. Seattle: Aqueduct Press, 2008.

PLAY: On envisioning alternate futures, co-living with microbial life, practicing everyday empathy, and travelling with humility.

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CALGARY’S DESERTED METROPOLIS RE-IMAGINING DENSITY IN AN EMPTYING URBAN CORE

Throughout the past year, the world has witnessed a severe decrease in demand for centralized workplaces in metropolitan regions. In addition to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the city of Calgary has been experiencing unprecedented metropolitan vacancy rates since 2014.

Hailey Darling Hailey is a Calgarian whose professional and academic work extends from Winnipeg, Canada to London, England. She received a Master of Interior Design from the Royal College of Art in London, England, as well as a Master of Architecture from McGill University in Montréal, Canada.

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fig. 1: Parking Lots + Parkades: Re-Designated for Industrial Land Use. This encourages the use of vacant space in the core by services typically pushed to the outskirts of the city, such as warehouse wholesalers, distributors, craft breweries, auto shops, and manufacturing plants.

1. Grant MacEwan, Calgary Cavalcade from Fort to Fortune (Saskatoon: Western Producer Book Service, 1975).

2. Drew Anderson, “Calgary, already bloodied, now requires more help than other cities,” CBC News, April 30, 2020.

3. Don Braid, “Braid: Even in hard times, the head office is still Calgary’s bedrock,” Calgary Herald, March 5, 2021.

4. Mario Toneguzzi, “Conversions won’t solve Calgary’s office vacancy issue: Experts,” RENX, December 27, 2019.

5. Mario Toneguzzi, “Calgary’s 600,000-sq.-ft. Nexen building sits vacant,” RENX, February 24, 2020.

Calgary’s Deserted Metropolis seeks to imagine radical alternative uses for infrastructure in Calgary’s downtown by challenging the monotony of the area’s existing zoning policies. The city is currently suspended in a period of pause; however, high vacancy rates in the downtown core urge us to confront urban inhabitation within the future city’s changing economy.

Located in Western Canada, the city of Calgary’s economy has relied heavily upon the production of fossil fuels since the 1914 discovery of oil fields in the nearby Turner Valley.1 Oil booms and busts have strongly affected the city’s development; during a period of rapid economic growth from 2010 to 2014, the Calgary downtown area experienced its highest expansion in history. Over 900,000 m2 worth of skyscrapers were rapidly erected, 73 percent of which were built to accommodate the oil and gas industry.2 As a result of this economic boom, the Calgary Metropolitan Region quickly became one of Canada’s most popular homes for corporate head offices, second only to Toronto.3 Calgary’s downtown office market currently contains an inventory of over 2,390,000 m2 across a total of 148 buildings.4 The rapid expansion of Calgary’s commercial core came to an abrupt halt when oil prices collapsed in late 2014, as thousands of jobs were lost in the oil industry, leading to energy companies vacating huge amounts of space in the heart of the city.5 127

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fig. 2: Vacant Office Spaces: Re-Designated for Commercial Land Use. Aimed towards typically suburban services, such as large box stores, shopping malls and strip malls.

6. Claudia Cattaneo and Geoffrey Morgan, “Vacant skyscrapers are an ‘albatross’ that Canada’s oil capital can’t shake off too soon,” Financial Post, June 22, 2017.

7. “Calgary Office Market Report—Fourth Quarter 2020” (Calgary: Avison Young, January 22, 2021), as quoted in Frank O’Brien, “Energy mergers push Calgary office vacancies into stratosphere,” Western Investor, January 25, 2021.

8. Sasha Tsenkova as quoted in Drew Anderson, “Zoning (yes, zoning) could save Calgary’s finances,” CBC News, September 30, 2017.

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Within approximately 18 months, the metropolitan core went from near zero percent to over 24 percent vacancy.6 As people continue to empty offices and work from home, the vacancy rate has recently increased to the highest it has ever been, at 30 percent: “It now appears that Calgary’s downtown will cross into unseen territory for a modern, major office market in Canada within the next 12 to 24 months,” says the Avison Young Calgary Office Market Report on the fourth quarter of 2020.7 Calgary’s Deserted Metropolis was developed as a series of hypothetical strategies which could bring diversity to downtown regions by repurposing existing infrastructure and ensuring their continued use, rather than letting them fall into urban disrepair. Like many North American cities, Calgary follows a rigid model of planning that zones development into certain areas.

Sasha Tsenkova, a professor at the University of Calgary School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape states that: Things tend to be dispatched in different pockets: here is where the houses go, here is where the schools go, the industrial zone is somewhere else; and resultantly people tend to commute and connect to these places.[…] [W]hile this is a convenient and predictable development model, it is not really conducive to the dynamics of a successful city.8

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fig. 3: Under-Utilized Building Lobbies: Re-Designated for Residential Land Use. Transforming the base of office buildings aims to bring a hybrid housing typology to the downtown core.

Currently, most downtown living is composed of high-rise condo buildings. fig. 4 (next): An area of downtown with all-new land use implemented.

This method of planning tends to limit the diversity of uses for infrastructure in one area. Based on the municipal development plans and by-laws which currently exist for downtown Calgary, a series of potential architectural interventions were developed for this project in response to the lack of zoning diversity. Specific underused sites in the downtown were chosen to illustrate these interventions, including parkades (fig. 1), vacant office space (fig. 2), and expansive lobbies (fig. 3). Rather than focusing on short-sighted conversions for residential and office typologies, this project aspires to re-densify, repurpose, and reuse existing infrastructures, encouraging Calgarians to return to the emptying city centre in the long term.

Within an imagined Calgary Metropolitan Region, these drawings subvert the monotony of vacant corporate office space to embrace hypothetical land-use change, animating the region into a vibrant alternative future.

Hailey recommends: The complete series of drawings for Calgary’s Deserted Metropolis—Re-Imagining Density in an Emptying Urban Core, completed in 2020 for McGill University, available on Issuu.

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IMAGINING A HOME FOR HOLOBIONTS what might a home for a holobiont look like?

Britney Yan Britney (she/her) believes in a planet-centred approach to design and the importance of ecological health in the built environment. Her work explores the confluence of designed and natural environments, specifically the effects of architecture on the mind and body. In her spare time, she enjoys trying new recipes and sketching. Her most recent illustrative work was featured at A83’s inaugural exhibition titled Working Remotely. She received her B. Arch from the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University in 2021.

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PAUSE/PLAY We are Holobionts fig. 1 (left): Imagine: A home for holobionts.

1. Lynn Margulis and Fester René, Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation: Speciation and Morphogenesis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).

2. Reetta Satokari, “High Intake of Sugar and the Balance between Pro- and Anti-Inflammatory Gut Bacteria,” Nutrients 12, no.

5 (August 2020): 1348.

3. Leena von Hertzen and Tari Haahtela, “Disconnection of Man and the Soil: Reason for the Asthma and Atopy Epidemic?” Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology 117, no. 2 (2006): 334–344.

4. Anirudra Parajuli et al., “Urbanization Reduces Transfer of Diverse Environmental Microbiota Indoors,” Frontiers in Microbiology, no. 9 (May 2018): 84.

5. Caroline Winter, “To Make a Building Healthier, Stop Sanitizing Everything,” Bloomberg.com, accessed April 20, 2021.

The human body hosts an array of living things such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi, forming a symbiotic relationship called the holobiont.1 The vast majority of such microbial life resides in our gut microbiomes where they assist our bodies in digestion, immune system regulation, and even psychological functions. Just as these microbiomes influence our well-being, there are many factors that can in turn affect the health of our microbiomes. For example, while the consumption of fermented foods rich in probiotic bacteria can benefit our microbiome by increasing anti-inflammatory bacteria species, consumption of foods high in processed sugar can increase pro-inflammatory bacteria, which over extended periods can lead to microbial imbalance and disease in the gut.2 Similar effects can be generated spatially; exposure to microbially diverse environments strengthens the immune system by enriching the gut microbiome, whereas environments low in microbial diversity tend to yield more numerous microbial expressions such as asthma and allergies.3 During the pandemic, many people dwelling in urban environments have been encouraged or mandated to spend more of their time indoors. These are the environments that host us—where we work, eat, sleep, and play, consequently interacting with its microbiota in ways that influence our own.

Multiple studies in microbiology have found that inhabitants of urban environments are exposed to a significantly less diverse palette of microbes than those who live in rural landscapes, which invariably has a negative impact on both the physical and mental well-being of humans.4 The decreased diversity of flora and fauna coupled with hyper-sanitation and widespread antimicrobial use in urban environments has created vulnerable microbiomes prone to the spread of pathogens such as COVID-19.5 Evidently, low diversity of plant and animal species bear consequences that transcend scales, revealing that true symbiosis may require us to consider the environment at both the macro and the micro scale. As architects, urban planners, and designers of built environments, our ability to influence both external and internal microbiomes makes us curators of microbial environments as well.

Urban Soil, Urban Microbiomes

6. Emanuele Rinninella et al., “What Is the Healthy Gut Microbiota Composition? A Changing Ecosystem across Age, Environment, Diet, and Diseases,” Microorganisms 7, no. 1 (October 2019): 14.

7. Parajuli et al., “Urbanization Reduces Transfer.”

8. Parajuli et al., “Urbanization Reduces Transfer.”

9. Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World (New York: Ten Speed Press, 2005): 55–66.

Once we begin to think of ourselves as holobionts, it becomes clearer that living in environments with low microbial diversity will invariably harm our well-being. To illustrate, the human gut microbiome consists of six dominant phyla: Firmicutes, Bacteroidetes, Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria, Fusobacteria, and Verrucomicrobia, all of which can be found in the external environment.6 Urban environments exhibit a decreased abundance across all six phyla in comparison to their rural counterparts, with significantly less of the phylum Actinobacteria, the group of bacteria that dominates the surface strata of healthy soil.7 This makes sense, considering that much of the built environment is covered with asphalt, greatly decreasing the availability of soil and dispersal of its microbes.

Anthropogenic activity and pervasive exposure to chemicals, heavy metals, and pesticides in urban areas have further degraded the quality of microbial communities in soil, rendering much of it sterile or dead.8 Mycologist Paul Stamets suggests that “[...] all life springs from soil. Soil is ecological currency […] [and] a platform for diversifying lifeforms.”9 As such, urban microbiomes and urban soil are codependent; to diversify urban microbiomes, urban soil must be cared for.

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bioaerosol transfer

routine

exposure to soil microbes increases gut microbia diversity and boosts immunity

composting increases microbial biomass in soil fig. 2: Imagine: Opening up the slab on grade via floor paneling systems for composting activities. It’s kind of like going to the lobby to pick up mail, right? But here, you’re picking up microbes.

10. Parajuli et al., “Urbanization Reduces Transfer.”

Urban Homes Even urban homes offer comparably less diverse microbial palettes than rural homes. Findings show that residents of rural homes typically experience a greater abundance of bacteria from the families Prevotellaceae, Lachnospiraceae, and Ruminococcaceae. Urban homes, on the other hand, observed a decrease in the aforementioned bacterial families, contributing to greater cases of asthma and allergies.10 Another study comparing the microbial content of urban versus rural homes used doormats to sample debris tracked in from external environments. Greater quantities of organic matter like soil particles and plant material were found on rural doormats, with urban doormats consisting mostly of inorganic material such as plastics and gravel.

The decreased levels of beneficial soil and plant-associated microbes tracked indoors in urban environments consequently correlates to weaker immune systems in city-dwellers.

Designing for Holobionts What, then, might a home for a holobiont look like? How might we design urban domestic spaces in ways that increase our encounters with diverse microbial life on a mundane basis?

11. Maximilian Mora et al., “Microorganisms in Confined Habitats: Microbial Monitoring and Control of Intensive Care Units, Operating Rooms, Cleanrooms and the International Space Station,” Frontiers in Microbiology 7 (2016): 1573.

12. Mora et al., “Microorganisms in Confined Habitats,” 1573.

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On Cleanliness: We must first reevaluate our understanding of cleanliness. What does it mean to live in a “clean” space? In built environments, this word is most often attributed to surfaces that are smooth and easily maintained: floors, walls, and high-touch surfaces like countertops and doorknobs. However, when viewed at the micro scale, these surfaces reveal environments deprived of microbial diversity—surely no place for a holobiont. Hospital environments exemplify how strict and frequent cleaning routines, oftentimes using antimicrobials, do not necessarily result in a cleaner or healthier space.11 Conversely, recent evidence in microbiology suggests that these cleaning procedures have contributed to increased cases of hospital-acquired infections.12 Consequently, the idea that a clean

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material tracked-in by humans and pets serves as a primary means of microbial transfer fig. 3: Imagine: Circulating through garden egress stairs, carrying a diverse range of microbes on your body which are brought back into your home.

13. “Antimicrobials—Are They Helping Us or Harming Us?,” SixClasses.org—Green Science Policy Institute, accessed June 7, 2021.

14. Stefani Lobionda et al., “The Role of Gut Microbiota in Intestinal Inflammation with Respect to Diet and Extrinsic Stressors,” Microorganisms 7, no. 8 (2019): 271.

15. Parajuli et al., “Urbanization Reduces Transfer.”

space is free of microbes or “germs” perpetuates an inaccurate idea of how interior environments should be designed and maintained; as holobionts, our well-being relies on a diverse range of microbes and our designed environment should reflect this need (fig. 2).

On Materials: A home for holobionts should be accepting of all life forms, both human and non-human. The spaces we design should be welcoming of transient or permanent microorganisms; it is important to be aware of building materials and finishes which contain additives that are harmful to microbial communities. Triclosan, for example, is an antimicrobial and antifungal agent found in a variety of building products, including paint, carpets, engineered wood flooring, and tiles. Routine exposure has been shown to negatively alter gut microbiome composition by decreasing microbial diversity.13 Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), Semivolatile Organic Compounds (SVOCs), Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs), flame retardants, polyurethane foams, and other chemicals commonly found in buildings have similar negative effects on the microbiomes of spaces and bodies.14 As designers, the materials we choose to build with must consider microbial diversity as an equal proponent to factors like cost, performance, and maintenance. Only when we set priorities down to the scale of materials can we create environments that are truly suited to holobionts.

On Boundaries: The microbial boundaries of a home extend beyond spatial boundaries (fig. 3). Many of the microorganisms found indoors are tracked in from the external environment through window and door openings, or transported on the bodies of building occupants.15 As such, an urban home for holobionts should be surrounded by lush and diverse plantings rooted in healthy and microbially rich soil so that indoor microbial diversity may be enhanced beyond the architectural boundary of a home. By striving for connection and codependency as opposed to “cleanliness” and impermeability, we can begin to create spaces that support holobionts.

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ALTERNATE REALITIES On Symbiosis: A home for holobionts is collective living, to the fullest extent of the word; it centres on learning to coexist with other forms of life. We cannot thrive without our microbial partners, both human and non-human, the macro and the micro. Such a home welcomes the various life forms that we live with (and which live within us) through design that is connected to its environment and with materials conducive to microbial life. Viewing humans as holobionts urges us to consider the built environment holistically and at all scales. It reveals that we cannot build our way out of living, breathing relationships, because we can never be separate from them. Like the dynamics of a forest and its mycelial partnerships formed over millennia, balance and symbiosis with the built environment will take time to form, but with time, will become more resilient.

Britney recommends: Mycelium Running (2005) by Paul Stamets for more reading on soil ecology and the vital role of fungi in strengthening ecosystems.

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PAUSE/PLAY improper aeration and poor nutrient cycling in urban soil leads to decreased microbial activity and diversity.

this in turn has a negative impact on the health of humans, or in other words, holobionts.

how might we approach designing for holobionts then? fig. 4: The vast majority of soil in urban areas is compressed under a layer of asphalt.

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DUNGEONS & DRAGONS BUILDING EMPATHY THROUGH PLAY

Eric Oh Eric (he/him) is a graduate of the University of Waterloo School of Architecture and has done installations for Xpace, the Gladstone Hotel, and Nuit Blanche. He has a love-hate relationship with the profession and hashes it out by playing Dungeons & Dragons with his friends.

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ALTERNATE REALITIES The Campaign and the Party (previous): An excerpt from one of my DND sessions, storyboarded using 3D-printed figurines of each character.

Our game ended there for the day. That evening, our group shared hallucinations of the distant past, surfed on giant spiders, and adopted an orphaned baby monster. Remitus, still reeling from the surprise of being stabbed by a skeleton, told me it was the best session yet in our year-long virtual Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

For the uninitiated, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is a tabletop roleplaying game, where players form a fictional party of adventurers working together in a world moderated by the Dungeon Master (DM). A group meets for a series of collaborative storytelling sessions called a campaign, where the party members go from unlikely allies and misfits to a found family working towards a common goal. Everyone playing is an equal participant, iterating and innovating on the ongoing narrative. While often dismissed as the escapist hobby of nerds shuttered away from society, D&D supports new perspectives in a way that traditional storytelling does not. It combines structured rules with the unpredictability of dice and the imagination of the players. This duality is supported by active communication and boundary-setting, creating a safe environment for play in which the party fosters both vulnerability and creativity. The players make decisions and experience the world through their characters, portraying their emotions and behaviours within the narrative. For many, D&D picks up from where they left off as children: learning about others through stories and play. Our values and ethics become complex as we grow up, and the perception of play becomes frivolous—but without play, our sense of empathy atrophies.

Passively consuming stories can slow this process, but D&D actively trains our ability to listen, empathize, and react by forcing us to inhabit fictional bodies in unfamiliar circumstances.

DM

You hold the Staff of Hofnir in your hand, but the altar is still far away.

The river blocks your path, and the shadowy replicas of you and your companions are hot on your heels.

Fiona

Okay, I won’t have time to ford the river. Can I jump across?

DM

The jump distance is past what your character can normally do, so give me an Athletics check. You’ll need at least a 15 to make it, and a 20 to land safely enough to keep running.

Sneaky

I yell, “Jump like when we escaped that witch’s moving hut!”

And then I duck down so she can use my back as a boost.

DM

Okay Fiona, you can roll two dice and take the higher roll.

Fiona

Okay! I rolled 18 and my Athletics is +3, so that’s 21!

DM

You leap forward as you feel the surge of victory close at hand, and the wind itself seems to press you onward...

Iteration D&D follows a consistent pattern. Characters make actions and roll a 20-sided die (d20) to determine the outcome, modifying the result to represent their strengths and weaknesses. They succeed if the total exceeds a Difficulty Class (DC) number set by the DM. Success could be the difference between a night of drinking with new friends and accidentally instigating a pub brawl, or a dancerly leap over a trap and a deadly fall into a spiked pit. The dice influence the narrative as much as the players, and their unpredictability forces the game to be experienced iteratively. This iterative interplay between dice and players repeats indefinitely across three types of gameplay: exploration, interaction, and combat, each defined by their scale of time and space.

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PAUSE/PLAY Exploration establishes context, and weeks pass by in montage as the party traverses trees the size of whole forests, or deep oceans protecting ancient cities. Interaction gives life and stakes to the game as characters explore the quirks of a remote logging town, purchase a novelty strobe-light ring, and play hide-and-seek with an enigmatic cartographer. Combat stretches out time so players can talk through decisions that occur in split seconds, forcing them to creatively navigate their built environment. One character blasts a sandy giant with lightning, crystallizing a portion of its body, while another lassos it from horseback—a ten-minute discussion at the table which translates into a few seconds in the game. If each in-game decision is an iteration of a larger unfolding narrative, moving between these scales reveals new areas to explore, and ensures that themes visited at one scale are explored at all three. Through it all, the party becomes intimately familiar with each other. They share campfire stories while travelling, join forces to escape the belly of a giant worm, and give up powerful magic to resurrect a beloved dog. With each shared experience, the world grows and their bond deepens.

1. Dungeons & Dragons is one of many storytelling Tabletop Roleplaying Games (TTRPG).

Though the genre is unique, D&D is not the only option for this kind of experience.

The players direct the story and world-building by determining the path of the campaign with their choices, both individually and as a party. It is up to them to decide whether success is stopping the apocalypse or opening a pet cafe, and the DM creates the obstacles for them to overcome.

This responsibility comes with unlimited power, and therefore the DM cannot be a fair opponent to the players; the game must be built on collaboration.1 A campaign is not a conflict, but more like a recurring potluck, where the DM coordinates and hosts the dinner party while the players dictate the contents of the meal. Popular stories like Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones have a fixed plot, regardless of what an individual viewer wants them to be about.

In D&D, a party can choose to never leave The Shire and focus entirely on building a flower export to Gondor, or spend the whole time repopulating the dragons of Westeros instead of navigating political intrigue. These hypothetical campaigns may start in the same places as their source material, but because they are constructed collaboratively, their final forms will reflect the story that the players want to tell.

DM

The forest becomes quieter as you march further, the foliage petrified by a botanical plague. After two days of travel, it’s almost like walking through a statuary.

Remitus Do we see any of the plants we saw in the witch’s journals?

DM

Give me a Nature check. DC is just 10.

Remitus 13.

DM

Even amidst the stony forest, you see spots of living flowers, their veins glowing, forecasting the currents of magic that move here.

However, they are no longer a vibrant green, but a sickly blue.

Sneaky

I’m going to try to find some samples.

DM

Make an Investigation check.

Sneaky

That’s a 21!

DM

Not only do you find a rich patch of these flowers, you push some away from what you think at first to be a boulder, finding a life-like statue of an Owlbear, with a baby Owlbear hiding in its shadow.

Asthen

I cast Speak with Animals and ask the Owlbear what happened!

DM

Make an Animal Handling check, DC 15.

Asthen

18.

DM

“My... mom got sick, then she stopped moving,” they say.

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ALTERNATE REALITIES Zsa Zsa We’ll find a cure! In the meantime, you’ll be safe with us.

DM

While coaxing the baby out of its hiding spot, you turn to find yourselves surrounded by skeletal soldiers, the loamy forest soil petrified in their wake. We enter combat and they go to attack.

Zsa Zsa I transform into a dire wolf, and lunge at the nearest skeleton! I’m not letting them hurt another animal!

Collaboration An adventuring party has no main character. Instead, it is made up of a group of protagonists who are most effective when working together, each character with distinct strengths and weaknesses, guilty pleasures, and pet peeves. At the same time, the real players work to craft the most enjoyable story, setting boundaries and listening to one another. In my game, we extend the imagination of the campaign beyond our sessions and into real-life friendships. On players’ birthdays, I mail them a 3D-printed, hand-painted miniature of their character along with a short story about them. After our sessions, we talk about these characters as if they were real people. What is their most treasured childhood memory? How do they like to cook potatoes?

This out-of-game communication and in-game empathy are both necessary for the game to evolve beyond pure spectacle and to feel real enough to take into everyday life.

Ongoing character development happens in parallel to world-building, both occurring iteratively and collaboratively in the game. Although world-building encompasses a large scale to include the environment, culture, and history, this all lends itself to the more nuanced process of character development.

A D&D campaign features a world, but the characters are the focus. Players invest in the success and survival of their character and feel the stakes and threats as if they were real. As the DM shapes the story around the players’ choices, the players react with authentic in-character decisions. Their responsibility to the other players augments the sense of risk and reality in the game; as the party moves deeper into the campaign, they come to rely on and support the other party members as well, blurring the lines between characters and friends. Even in a fictional game, taking risks or making sacrifices to accomplish a goal helps players acclimatise to the anxiety of making real-world decisions. Would a character jump in front of another party member to protect them from imminent death by a giant mushroom monster? Or try to befriend them and invite them to join the party? In this way, D&D helps players expand their sense of empathy by simulating interpersonal relationships between fictional characters.

DM

Your party arrives at the bar. It is a raucous night, as usual in this town, with merrymaking everywhere except for one seat at the bar…

You spot Annaeleth, your tour guide, sitting alone and nursing a beer. It seems like he thought he had been abandoned when your party left to investigate the manor.

Fiona

Aw guys, we need to cheer him up.

Remitus I go over to the front of the bar and yell out, “Hey everyone, it’s my friend’s birthday! A round of drinks for everyone, on me!” And I try to get everyone to sing Happy Birthday.

DM

Roll... I guess Deception or Performance. These guys love to party, so DC is only 10.

Remitus 18!

DM

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The bar erupts into cheers and Annaeleth looks up at you with tears in his eyes. “I... I thought nobody would remember!”

PAUSE/PLAY Vulnerability D&D is also an opportunity to explore aspects of identity without being bound to the presentation of your body. Players can discover facets of themselves through characters that have a differing sexual orientation, gender, status, belief, or race. Playing a person that is radically different from yourself not only helps you be more empathetic, but reinforces that identity itself is fluid.

Questioning and experimenting with your own identity should be as natural as wanting to be a powerful dwarven fighter one day, and a sneaky gnomish rogue on others. It reminds us that we can become different people.

The best moments in D&D come from players fully inhabiting their characters, making decisions that are true to these identities and the story being told. It is a challenge to be vulnerable and openly invested in a fictional game, doing things like rap battling a faerie or crying over a pet. Boundaries should be drawn beforehand to foster good roleplay, and many groups implement safety mechanics such as a safe word or a physical card used to indicate discomfort.

A game of D&D can broach topics like loss, trauma, injustice, and love; examining those through the eyes of a fictional character can be transformative, but only if you feel safe knowing that you will not be ridiculed, nor be made to confront anything to which you did not agree.

2. Rowan Ellis, “Why is D&D so popular for LGBT Nerds?”

YouTube video, April 9, 2021.

Eric recommends: If you’re interested in D&D but can’t find a group or the time, check out The Unsleeping City on the Dimension 20 Youtube channel. It’s a live D&D show featuring comedians. The campaign is set in an urban fantasy version of New York City and is a great introduction to what makes the game so compelling!

I started playing Dungeons & Dragons in middle school and quickly became enamoured with it during my awkward adolescence. It came into my life at just the right moment, as a game where your identity is fluid, with no restriction of performativity. My teenage years playing D&D helped me shed unhealthy standards of masculinity, and let me imagine heroes that looked like me when there were none in movies or on TV. When you play D&D, you are neither bound by your presentation nor your body because the character you embody is of your imagination. The things that make you feel othered in day-to-day experiences, here make you exceptional. It is for this reason that D&D has grown in the past decade to become a safe space for marginalized people.2 While I took a hiatus from D&D after high school, I started playing again in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic illuminated the systems of oppression and failures of late-capitalism, and I was feeling more powerless than ever. The closest thing I had to self-care was a game where I could throw impossible odds at my players and watch them make brave, selfless choices.

I found D&D when I needed help growing up, and came back to it when I needed help playing. D&D is neither a cure for societal ills, nor activism, nor even therapy, but it can be an important auxiliary experience to practice empathy and explore perspectives in a safe environment. Every game is a small-scale reminder that we can choose to try and save the world. While issues like the climate crisis seem insurmountable in real life, it is cathartic to imagine they might be solved by gathering seven ancient gems and slaying a demon with your friends. Players uncover powerful emotions during fantastical circumstances that they can bring back to their reality; adventuring parties discover the joys and strengths of collaboration and the necessity of supporting and relying on others. There is play and joy to be found at the table, as well as lessons to be learned about collaboration, iteration, and communication—not just within the confines of the game, but in almost every aspect of our real lives.

If you’re interested in hearing more about the game itself, check out their affiliated podcast, Adventuring Academy.

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ALTERNATE REALITIES

THE CANNED TOUR ENGAGING WITH ARCHITECTURAL TRAVEL

The Canned Tour: Engaging with Architectural Travel was an online symposium that took place on November 4, 2020 with the support of the University of Waterloo School of Architecture and the Ontario Association of Architects. The following piece is a synthesis of the introduction for the symposium, key takeaways from the event’s three speakers, and a meditation on how these might inform a design ideology moving forward.

Bianca Weeko Martin Bianca (she/her) is a designer, published author, and passionate practitioner of the arts and the internet. She was selected as one of the inaugural AGO X RBC Emerging Artist Researchers in 2021 for her thesis work on counter-narratives of Philippine architectural history. Bianca has worked and studied in seven countries across four continents, and her most recent research and speculative writing has been focused on Southeast Asia, where she was born and partially raised.

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PAUSE/PLAY I want to begin this essay by locating ourselves within the territory we occupy now, and acknowledging the traditional owners who have taken care of these lands for generations. The University of Waterloo is situated on the Haldimand Tract, a swath of land 10 km on each side of the Grand River. This land was promised to the Haudenosaunee of the Six Nations of the Grand River, and is within the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee peoples. Though my ancestors were at one time the Indigenous Peoples of both the Philippines and the Indonesian island of Java, my family and I made our home in settler-colonial Canada when we immigrated in 2000. Both the lands to which we travel and the lands we call home can constitute colonial space, thus colonialism is pervasive.

1. Jayati Gupta, “Modernity and the Global ‘Hindoo,’” The Global South 2, no. 1 (Bloomington: University of Indiana, 2008): 60.

2. Jilly Traganou and Miodrag Mitrasinovic, Travel, Space and Architecture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 40.

3. Traganou and Mitrasinovic, Travel, 5.

This reflection on modern travel is called The Canned Tour, a play on The Grand Tour: a 17th- and 18th-century tradition wherein wealthy European men roamed France and Italy in search of the roots of Western civilization, educating themselves on journeys from a “civilized” locale to a “more civilized” centre.1 The term canned, informal, can mean fired, thrown out; but it can also refer to the process of placing products in vacuum-sealed containers to be mass-produced and mass-distributed—like much of tourism today. The Grand Tour and The Canned Tour, although at odds in terms of accessibility and scope, present equally disappointing directions for the idea of travel. Between the two lie historic and contemporary traditions of travel undertaken within architecture and the arts. The pilgrimages of famous architects such as Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright have long been cited not only for the drawings and notes they brought back, but as influential sources for their building designs.2 Exchange programs such as the Erasmus Programme are increasingly being integrated as hallmarks of a globalization-era university education. The University of Waterloo has distinguished itself internationally through a co-operative education program that integrates opportunities for students to spend four- or eight-month-long terms completing paid internships at relevant professional firms; many choose to do so in cities across the globe. Furthermore, the study of international architecture pervades the studio spaces where precedents are given and lecture halls where cultural history is taught. Architects’ fascination with travel is deeply rooted in an intellectual tradition that links travelling to the production of knowledge; in particular, the epistemological journey from habit to knowledge.3 In early 2019, a global pandemic shut down borders and grounded airplanes, challenging the necessity of travel in architectural research and practice.

While we adjusted to confinement in our impromptu home offices and pseudo-classrooms, we learned that virtual tools and insular thinking could not completely replace the deeply embedding, empathy-building experiences that travel can offer—whether in the context of site visits, fieldwork, or international exhibitions and conferences. Within this rare pause in time, how can we prepare for and maximize the positive impact of our international experiences while remaining cognizant of the environmental and cultural disruptions travel causes? What is the future of travel in architecture, and how must we adapt our means of acquiring and sharing knowledge? How can we move beyond a neocolonial itinerary, guilty of reproducing privileged Western knowledge, to make future travel more intentional, considered, and impactful?

4. The term subaltern is from Rajyashree N. Reddy, “The Urban Under Erasure: Towards a postcolonial critique of planetary urbanization,” Society and Space 36, no. 3 (2017): 529–539.

We can approach better travel, principally, through respect: coming into foreign spaces with humility, resisting the instinct to categorize the Other based on simple binaries, embedding ourselves in places on the basis of reciprocal relationships, and being critical of how we engage with people who might be considered racialized, marginalized in class, or subaltern.4 We need to go beyond spectating marginalized people on our travels, and 145

ALTERNATE REALITIES 5. Matthew Gandy, “Learning from Lagos,” New Left Review 33 (May 2005).

radically challenge the way we understand their roles in the places they live and work. Architects and designers from developed Western countries must approach travel with self-consciousness, because of our tendency to look at foreign, “exotic” places with a sweeping neocolonial lens that de-historicizes and de-politicizes complex histories.5 We must also make it our duty to know exactly whose traditional lands we are moving through, privileging historical narratives over the location of monuments or the appearance of cathedrals.

6. Gupta, “Modernity,” 67.

The presentations from The Canned Tour symposium offered art-based community initiatives, creative architectural representation methods, and inclusive design processes as actionable methods that architects and designers can use to directly resist the neocolonial potentials of travel in research and design practice. Complementary to this are suggestions for optimizing travel-based research more generally: focusing it in scope, balancing objective and subjective research, and framing the research in multiple scales which emphasize the human dimension of architectural projects. While The Grand Tour focused on a traveller’s negotiation of interiority, on a journey in search of the self, the travel that we must embark on post–Canned Tour must centre on the other.6 This means understanding the other, engaging with the other equitably and humbly, at times becoming the other, and finally, designing for the other.7

7. Saiẏada Manajurula Isalāma and Syed Manzoorul Islam, The Ethics of Travel: from Marco Polo to Kafka (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 104.

Bianca recommends: Imagined Communities (1983)

by Benedict Anderson.

Also, Dune Journal published by the faculty of Fashion Design and Multimedia Arts at IUAV University of Venice.

Watch The Canned Tour: Engaging in Architectural Travel on the Waterloo Architecture Youtube account.

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As I write this concluding paragraph, I am sitting in my ground floor apartment in Dorsoduro, Venice, which I have rented for myself for a month.

Officially, I am here to work at the 2021 Venice Biennale of Architecture.

Unofficially, I made the spontaneous and somewhat premature trip to see my two best friends who now live in Berlin, one of whom shares the same late-June birthday as me. I recognize the privilege of being here, arriving from a country wealthy enough to fully vaccinate its residents, and the irony of writing this essay on post–Canned Tour travel while being in a city that virtually epitomized The Grand Tour. Despite this, friendships and family are another kind of privilege I hold dearly in life, and I work every day to nurture those relationships, which immigration has fragmented into a complex global web. And I felt another sort of personal duty, one to understand Venice fully and on my own terms after only charging through her for two days during our Rome semester in 2018. There is a saying here that my Venetian friends told me about—turismo mordi e fuggi. It translates literally to “bite and run tourism,” ironically, another food reference, making the extractive and gluttonous aspects of a Canned Tour ring even more clearly. I do not know what lies in store for the future of travel. I do not know whether I would choose to disqualify all forms of embodied exploration and international travel, even though the past two years I spent at home have led to opportunities and community-building I had never known before. Being at the Biennale at this eerily transitory and transitional time has surprised me with feelings of gratitude and hope at any semblance of coming together, whether from pavilion representatives, international participants, tourists, or locals. Regardless of what happens to travel, there is a lot more I can do than simply “bite” into a place, at home or abroad. I can listen to her languages, learn her mannerisms, the happy and sad faces of her building facades, and I can share her stories through pictures and words attuned to every detail, architectural or human.

PAUSE/PLAY

Piazza Navona Roof Terrace (2018) I drew this as a commission for a film producer named Giulio, who had recently bought a terraced top-floor apartment near Piazza Navona in Rome. We sat on the terrace together and I sketched the fragments of buildings and statues that I could see from our vantage point, as he told me stories from his childhood in Rome that shed new light on certain monuments. The drawing now hangs in the apartment.

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ALTERNATE REALITIES

Sólo Mujeres (2019) In Mexico City, at a certain hour in the day, some subway cars are reserved for women only, an attempt to mitigate assault during rush hour.

I thought this was a short-term patriarchal solution until I got in one of those subway cars myself, and remembered the power of practicality in countries outside the “developed” world. I sketched this afterwards as tribute to a rare moment of all-femme utopia/dystopia.

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PAUSE/PLAY

Laguna Girls (2019) My Tito (uncle) knew I was writing a guidebook on modern Filipino architecture but insisted on taking me to historic Spanish colonial churches and cathedrals during a road trip to Laguna, just south of Manila. It was refreshing to see provincial Filipino life in the countryside, which had a quality of candidness that is hard to find in the chaos of the capital city. In Laguna, I ran into a group of young Filipina girls at the steps of a cathedral fully dressed in terno, traditional “Filipiniana” wear.

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galt. publication issue 04: pause/play Publisher: Riverside Architectural Press www.riversidearchitecturalpress.ca © Riverside Architectural Press ISSN: 2561-7826 Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: galt. publication issue 04: pause/play Names: Cao, Vicky, 1999; Kaczmarczyk, Magdalena, 1998; Kopp, Natalie, 1997; Li, Cathy, 1999; Lin, Lucy, 1996; Paranthahan, Mayuri, 1996; Sermol, Ali, 1995.

Typeset: Microsoft YaHei, Neue Montreal Printing: Pandora Print Shop/Arkay Design & Print Shop (body), Vide Press (cover, bookmark, flyer)

galt. publication is a student-run, peer-reviewed journal based at the University of Waterloo 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.

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.

Images and captions are by the authors unless stated otherwise.

Contributors: Marco Adly, Abhishek Ambekar, Piper Bernbaum, Bhavna Bhathella, Byron Cai, Meryem Chahboun, Hailey Darling, Simone Delaney, Cynthia Eng, Taylor Halamka, Chi Him, Tianyi Huang, Kimberley Huggins, Leela Keshav, Cathy Li, Leanne Li, Jing Liao, Vic Mantha-Blythe, Bianca Weeko Martin, Valentina Aguayo Martiri, Hannah Newton, T. K. Justin Ng, Connor O’Grady, Eric Oh, Caitlin Paridy, Brenda Reid, Michael Salib, Joel Sanders, Vivien Sansour, Maria Smirnova, Amy Smoke, Igsung So, Susan Stryker, Bijan Thornycroft, Brian Tien, Niara van Gaalen, vic, Silja Walenius, Syrus Marcus Ware, Britney Yan, Victor Zagabe, Cynthia Zhang, Daisy Zhang, Ethan Zhang Sponsors: University of Waterloo School of Architecture, Waterloo Architecture Student Association, Society of Waterloo Architecture Graduates, University of Waterloo Graduate Association, University of Waterloo Graduate Student Endowment Fund Check out our other issues and what we’ve been up to lately: insta: @galt.publication web: galtpublication.com

Special Thanks: Liga Brammanis, Jonas Chin, Shaina Coulter, Kelsey Dawson, Jessica Hanzelkova, Lisa Huang, Shannon Kennelly, Amina Lalor, Audrey Leung, Florence Ma, Bianca Weeko Martin, Vincent Min, Zach Ropel-Morski, Logan Steele, Zaven Titizian Support: Philip Beesley, Dr. Anne Bordeleau, Jane Mah Hutton

ALTERNATE REALITIES [02] INTERVIEW: VIVIEN SANSOUR [06] SWON [12] THE ELEPHANT ON YOUR MANTEL [16] MAN MISSING IN THE BERMUDAS REAPPEARS IN GEORGIA [22] MINDFUL DATA [28] THE PHENOMENOLOGYM

DESIGN REFLEXIVITY

[36] INTERVIEW: JOEL SANDERS + SUSAN STRYKER [44] LET’S DRAW A TREE [48] LET’S DRAW A TREE II [56] POMP IN ABSURD CIRCUMSTANCES [62] CLUTTER [68] PLACELESSNESS [72] NO LOITERING HERE

SUBVERSIVE PROCESSES [82] INTERVIEW: AMY SMOKE [88] BREAKING FOUNDATIONS [94] BARRICADES [100] TUNING MONUMENTS [106] CONTACT ZONES [114] CARE, POLITICS, AND COVID-19

ALTERNATE REALITIES

[120] INTERVIEW: SYRUS MARCUS WARE [126] CALGARY’S DESERTED METROPOLIS [132] IMAGINING A HOME FOR HOLOBIONTS [138] DUNGEONS & DRAGONS [144] THE CANNED TOUR

galt. publication Issue 04: PAUSE/PLAY Fall 2021 Our reality has shifted. As time becomes nebulous, galt.’s fourth issue pauses to question the design of our current reality and critically addresses our path towards better ones. galt. is an annual, student-run, peer-reviewed publication based at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. Our team is dedicated to publishing student and young professional work in the context of a larger architectural discourse that brings together the voices of designers, activists, and academics.

ISSN 2561-7826

Riverside Architectural Press