on site 38: borders

ON SITE r e v i e w bo r d e r s and br ea ch e s

38: 2021

B E R L I N : S Y M P H O N Y O F A G R E AT C I T Y Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt, directed by Walter Ruttmann Germany, 1927

MAILLART’S BRIDGES Maillarts Brücken, directed by Heinz Emigholz Germany, 2000

ON SITE

This issue is based on the premise that a border only reveals its true nature when it is crossed, or breached. Until that point, it is an edge, inert, often invisible. Cross it, inadvertently or purposefully, and all hell breaks loose.

r e v i e w

When the call for articles was formulated, climate change was the global trans-national constant, owned by no one but highly industrialised societies, suffered by everyone. As a consequence, there is a migration crisis in which borders play a defining role — their closing, their arming, their razor wire, their steel walls against refugees trying to escape some intolerable situation for some other place perceived to be wealthy and empty enough to allow them some small place in it.

borders an d b r ea c h e s

Weather literally transcends borders, and the speed with which the coronovirus spreads involves borders within the body — cell membranes breached at the microbial level. Ideology admits no borders, although boundaries are marked in its name. Closing a border to an idea or a drought; impossible. Transmission is through ephemeral materials such as words, breath and wind. Ideas, weather and viruses have breached borders with much violence — a paramilitay quelling of protest, an uncontrollable forest fire or the ICU ward. It forces us to question what a political border is actually for.

38 winter 2 02 0 / 2 1

Some of these essays presage a borderless world, others point out the existing ambiguity of the border condition. Some tie borders to resistance and transgression, others to the unexamined ordering systems that borders represent. The present is a condition to look at, decipher and to step over. Literally.

co n t e n ts border

occupation

Lawrence Bird Andrey Chernykh Fionn Byrne, Diana Guo and Jiahui Huang

2 10 14

para || e | A line made by clearing The common border

20 26 34

Checkpoint Bravo Floating between borders Softening the edge

38 44

Walking dialectics Curbside effect

Piper Bernbaum

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Mining the edge

calls for articles contributors and masthead

56 57

On Site review 39: tools; 40: books who we are

border dissolution Evelyn Osvath Diana Guo and Mingjia Chen Connor O’Grady

walking borders Francisca Lima and Tiago Torres-Campos Jongwan Kwan

coded borders

para l l e l lawrence bird

para||e| is an evolving single channel video, harvesting satellite imagery from Google Earth as multiple sequential high-resolution images which are sorted and edited into a single seven-hour long aerial tracking. Audio is comprised of three superimposed tracks, all modified: found music, ambient sound from the International Space Station, and the sound of a border patrol MQ-9 Reaper drone. https://vimeo.com/64061190

terms: artefacting: the generation of distortions in an image or sound especially through errors in reproduction. composited: speaks to the mosaic-like quality of the images, Google Earth and similar mapping systems. It’s not composed the way a painting is composed, rather it is collaged from different components. satellite tile: a generally square image of part of the earth which, with others, composes the overall image. Imagine the tiles as a pyramid - from one tile on top showing a large area, to (in several steps down) arrays of tiles each of which shows more detail about a smaller area.

This map is also characterised by the failure of its components to align. On close examination, this digital environment is full of contradictions and anomalies.

The 49th parallel determines 2000 kilometres of border between the United States and Canada from the Salish Sea to Lake of the Woods — a seemingly simple straight line and a significant portion of the longest undefended border in the world.

A border is above else a representation: a mark on the ground and on a map that defines a political entity, often a cultural one also: who is on which side? how is that mark crossed? what is risked in crossing it? This project, para||e|, examines that representation as translated through another: Google’s three-dimensional mapping of the earth.

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on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches

The odd, occasionally eerie, imagery resulting from technical errors in media is layered onto a long history of mistakes. The 49th parallel was always an arbitrary boundary. In the Anglo-American Convention of 1818 following the Louisiana Purchase of 1804, the border was defined as where the watershed of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers met the watersheds of the rivers that drained into Hudson’s Bay — a line in practical terms impossible to find.

Impossible in theory too, without recourse to geometries developed by mathematicians such as Lewis Carrol later in the century.

The 49th parallel was substituted for that watershed border.

In Google Earth and other digital imaging platforms, the map of the world is composited from thousands of satellite images gathered from an army, or several armies, of satellites and licensed by the builders of each platform. Some of these images are in the public domain (notably images captured by government agencies such as NASA or the US Department of Agriculture); others are proprietary. This hybridity of ownership is characteristic of digital ecosystems.

If Google Earth is a lens, it is full of distortions. These can be revealed through a critical use of tools internal to the platform itself — the Historical Imagery function for example, or manipulation of viewing and touring settings. The images here, captured from along the trajectory of the video, have been directly harvested from Google Earth, along the 49th parallel. They have not been manipulated beyond framing and placement on the page.

Images like these, which date from the early 1990s to the present, reveal an obvious asymmetry between the imagery on the American side of the border — highly defined — and the Canadian side. In this case, the area north of the border is often] presented in a much lower-resolution. This distortion comes from the processes that capture and reproduce the image and map it onto the 3-dimensional model of the Earth’s surface. Pixelation and artefacting create a landscape of a new kind, with its own qualities of darkness and light, opacity and texture; it forms a geography and a materiality in its own right.

We expect that such digital imaging platforms fulfil technology’s promise, now over two hundred years old, of a transparent, complete and seamless mapping of the world. But do they?

The border is frequently invisible.

At other times it can be identified by a 6m border vista or by disparities in land use.

The border between satellite images rarely equates exactly to the political border. The edge of the southern satellite tile is typically offset some hundred metres north.

114º 11’ 15” W, 49°N. Akamena-Kishenena Provincial Park, BC

Yet even that simplified border could not be precisely pinned down. Cumulative surveying errors led to the border monuments straying up to hundreds of feet from the theoretical parallel.

Subsequent treaties have defined the border as the wavering line demarcated by these monuments, rather than the parallel itself. So the images you see here, in para||e|, record a landscape whose technological mapping was compromised from the beginning.

Displacement, the error built into all reproductions and representations, even highly technological ones, is built into this media landscape.

on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches

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Anomalies are provoked in particular by the temporal nature of the map. Google Earth is not just a database of current satellite tiles. It is also an archive of historical images of the Earth dating back to the 1990s, and sometimes earlier. Satellite images are not captured simultaneously.They are gathered by a space-based camera moving along a path above the surface of the Earth, and are recorded in sequence before being composed as tiles in a mosaic image of the globe. So the border between two satellite images represents a seam in time, rather than just space. Adjacent satellite images juxtapose separate moments.

Different seasons coexist. The contrast between these times, or worlds, is made more apparent by Google’s tendency to marry images from different times at political borders.

This strange splicing of times seems characteristic of contemporary conditions of media.

Sensitivity to temporality is one of the qualities that makes this amalgam of media and landscape not just an Earth, but a World.

The Dominion Land Survey: a one mile by one mile grid resulting in 640 square acres to which roadways are added

American Homestead Act system: a one mile by one mile grid, resulting in 640 square acres from which roadways are deducted.

The square-mile grid of prairie fields on display here is a result of modern systems of demarcating the world, dividing and owning land, and growing and distributing crops.

These were implemented in parallel with the surveying of the border. To the north, that system was Canada’s Dominion Land Survey (1871); south of the border, it was set out by the American Homestead Act (1862). While the two grids are similar, they rarely align.

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These nineteenth century systems of land division have a strange resonance with today’s imaging technologies. We might even say that the prairie surface seems ... pixilated.

In fact, it is. A pixel is a picture element, a component of a whole image broken down into cells of identical size (generally consistent and organised by a grid within a given image) and with a single defined colour. It makes a complex, rich, and whole image manageable by a digital infrastructure.

on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches

Media resources have their own, complex, relationship to time. They are created in time (almost ‘just in time’ – they do not exist for the user until rendered active by a CPU) and evolve over time (like a wiki); they carry information which is potentially eternal, but which can decay over time with their media substrate, or can be zeroed-out in an instant. Media systems all have clocks, and record their activity over time in logs and archives. As one such archive, Google Earth documents not just changes in the physical environment but also developments in the imaging systems recording that environment.

The juxtaposition of worlds can provoke imagination and speculation.

What would happen were you to cross across the boundary between one time and another, one season and the next? A homestead always implies a boundary: a fence or a row of trees marking the line between us and our neighbours. Imagine riding along this road and glancing across the fence at the advance of winter - or its retreat. What will happen if that other time crosses to our side?

What might that change bring?

What fence might we build to keep it out?

102º 15’ 05” W, 49°N . Eniskillen No 3, Saskatechewan

Like the image representing it, the prairie is broken down into elements manipulable by a technological system. Native plants are replaced by domesticated (and today genetically modified) crops. These units are laid out in a grid and rendered up to transportation networks which carry them to markets across the globe.

To use a term from Martin Heidegger’s writing on technology, both imaging systems and agricultural systems expedite their object; they unlock it, expose it, direct it toward an end.

In these images, para||e| systems from the nineteenth and twenty-first century confront and fold into each other.

Strange that what we do to the Earth, we do to its image too.

on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches

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But the prairie landscape resists instrumentalisation. It displays a tangle of loops, oxbows, and sloughs that disrupt the grid. These illustrate the effect of water: undermining the agricultural grid, erasing and breaking it, forcing an accommodation by the machinery of resource extraction and distribution systems. This disruption is not only spatial but also temporal: riparian knots represent a time frame of seasonal (and episodically cataclysmic) cycles.

Every few years thousands of square miles of farmland are inundated by floods. Over time river courses alter dramatically, snaking across the landscape in an ever-changing evolution, leaving traces of past inundations and water courses as rifts in the grid. This process occurs over cycles of time of long and short duration, in contrast to the grid which aspires to act ‘out of time’, trying to preserve one pattern forever.

As it inundates the land, the mediated flood leaves islands here and there where material has not yet been entirely washed away.

Media can overflow just as a river does.

Frustrated in its attempts to channel meaning, to fit within a pipe, to flow at the bitrate prescribed to resolve an image, media too can exceed its banks. Sometimes it scatters in juddering fragments of image and sound, representing something, though what we cannot tell.

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Having spread beyond its bounds, its meaning, media can stand immobile, the stagnant waters of ‘loading’ waiting to dissipate into the Earth.

on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches

Do the rifts we observe in these images emerge at that breaking point between means and desire, between our cognitive drive to know, to map, to control, and the failure of the systems we deploy to do so?

Are they the debris left behind by the everincreasing flood of data we demand?

Portions of this image were taken in the summer of 2005, when the Antler River overflowed its banks in one of the prairies’ periodic floods; other portions date from 2003. They have been composited together

by Google Earth’s automated image capture and processing workflow.

The two landscapes represent two distinct but related prairie geographies, one terrestrial, the other aqueous; one controlled by human artifice (engineering works can be identified along the river bank just north of the border) and one escaping that control utterly.

This image speaks of the natural cycles of the prairie and our inability to control them. But another phenomenon is also apparent in this image: an inundation of another order encroaches from the north.

What is this flood really about?

The prairie shares a disruptive temporality with that of media.

100º 57’ 29” W, 49°N. Arthur, Manitoba

Imaging infrastructures seem to have built into them the shadow of any technological system: systems whose purpose is to function inevitably imply failure: the condition of not functioning, of breaking, of going off the rails.

Charles Waldheim has used the term representational domestication to describe the satellite image. But these images are not tamed; instead, they have become wild. Andreas Broeckmann has referred to a transgressive disruption of codes as ‘the wild’ in media. For him it is about the excess,and the animation, of our technological culture.

on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches

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Finally the border approaches Lake of the Woods, where it will turn away from the parallel and begin its long meander across the Canadian Shield. The landscape and its image present a rich tapestry here, in which the border itself is an ambiguous presence. Where we can identify the line of latitude, it appears as the border vista, or as differences in land use: forest and wetlands have been cut away to create farmland, but only on one side of the border.

In its very last kilometre as border, the parallel crosses the cape of Elm Point. This is the large peninsula jutting out into the lake towards the right side of the image.

The cleared path of a border vista cuts east-west across its north edge. This is a practical exclave of the United States. From the American side, it can only be reached by water; to approach it by land, you must come through Canada. Elm Point is attached to one country, but belongs to another.

After this, the border turns sharp north to sever another exclave, the Northwest Angle, a kink that was a result of a mapping error.

Just to the west of Elm Point is the even tinier exclave of Buffalo Bay Point. These three remain detached possessions of the United States.

Even on the farmed American side, distinct territories of land ownership and occupation can be identified; like the border, these are created by arbitrary lines of possession.

Another odd result of the juxtaposition of times: a cloud cut as though by a knife, and the sharp edge of a dark and shadowy territory bordering the bright lakeshore, suggests distinct and contradictory realities coinciding in one space. What would happen, we might wonder, if we were to follow that curving road from the bright land into the dark?

As the border approaches the edge of Lake of the Woods, it dissipates; all permutations of land use give way to a shoreline ecosystem that erases almost every human trace.

on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches

This single image presents a complex ecology of image, material, nature, artifice, space and time; an ecology that provokes narrative.

Edges dissolve here.

The closer we look, the harder it is to tell just where the border lies.

The image itself becomes granulated, its atoms start to float apart.

95 19’ 25” W, 49°N. Buffalo Point, Manitoba

But some trace of human passage remains.

Before it crosses the lake to Elm Point, para||e| has its last index: tire tracks.

Surveyors or smugglers?

Perhaps there is no difference.

It hardly seems to matter to earth or image, the question of who owns what.

O

para||e| was included in the exhibition Coding and Decoding Borders at the Dawn of the 21st Century, 2016, at Espace Architecture Flagey-Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, and at the International Symposium on Electronic Art in Manizales, Colombia, 2017. The seven-hour version of para||e| was screened at Inter/Access Gallery in Toronto, 2016.

on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches

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a line m ade by cle ar i ng andrey chernykh National borders invade our mainstream news cycle – they have become more present in our cultural milieu with globalisation in apparent retreat, and with countries considering isolationist policies and building physical walls to keep others out. The global COVID-19 pandemic made borders ever more apparent as restrictions, preventing free movement between different countries, as we all shelter in place to curb the spread of the deadly virus. Historically and globally, the interface of a political border and the landscape that surrounds it has created unique places often defined by tension, control and militarism. The case of the Canada-USA border is quite unique, in its structure and management, as being the longest undefended border in the world – it therefore warrants a critical discussion of its placemaking and the role it plays between the two countries.

being there The Oregon Treaty of 1846 established the 49th parallel as the western section of the Canada-USA border, from Buffalo Point in Manitoba to Tsawwassen on the southern mainland of British Columbia. It is a roughly 2,000 km (mostly) straight, deforested line though the landscape. Known unofficially as ‘the slash’, this six metre wide treeless zone crosses everything from isolated islands to mountains. The line is cleared every six years for the sole purpose of making sure it is visible both from satellite and on the ground. It is a most compelling landscape to witness.

Photographer Andreas Rutkauskas captured heavily monitored places as well as more wild corners of the western borderlands in his project Borderline.1 He recounts the incredible porosity of the border — sometimes both swift and lengthy encounters with border patrol, on other occasions walking for hours along the cutline without impediment. While undefended, the border is nonetheless monitored under variety of surveillance technologies.

Few have fully experienced the slash. Some of us get a glimpse of the clean cutline through the trees from a moving car, after having one’s documents inspected by the border agent.

However, in the more forested areas of west part of the cut, the encounter with the border is one of the starkest. Deep forest changes to a narrow meadow of wild grasses, forbs and shrubs. Not only physically but sonically it is a different experience alltogether. The hollow sound of the forest changes, as if emerging out of an echo chamber into an open space of breezes and buzzing insects. It is less of a transition space but more of an interruption in an otherwise cohesive landscape.

In other cases, the border would not present itself at all until explicitly defined by a sign or an obelisk – one of many old markers that denote the border, erected during the first land clearing and mapping of the 49th parallel between 1872 - 1874.

The obelisks, a further sculptural component of an already sublime landscape, are scattered, due to imprecise surveying at the time, sometimes as far as 200 feet away from the border.

Sometimes the line almost disappears, disguised by a piece of infrastructure like a road, or in some urban areas it can even serve as someone’s property line.

1 https://www.andreasrutkauskas.com/borderline

a l l i ma g e s c ou r te sy o f An dr ea s Rutka uska s

10 on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches

from the top: Cultus Lake, BC Whiskey Gap, Alberta Abandoned crossing, Big Beaver, Saskatchewan

Wide enough to be accessible and free of any continuous constructed barriers such as walls or fences, this political border, at times, is one of the most serene and peaceful places on the planet compared to some of world’s more heavily guarded borders that feature a 15-foot wall (parts of the USA-Mexico border), or a large zone that is subject to a tense military standoff (Korean Demilitarized Zone). Once one steps into the cutline, a vista opens up that stretches far into the landscape, a dispassionate line that runs along the terrain and eventually disappears over the horizon.

Walking and hiking the border reminds us of land artist Richard Long and his 1967 work, A Line Made by Walking, where he walks a straight line in a field and leaves an track of trampled plants in an otherwise undisturbed meadow. This ground-breaking act remains one of his most well-known pieces, launching his career and a fascination with trails and traces. His subsequent projects continued to reference the original, including Walking A Line in Peru in 1972 and other similar projects around the world varying in scale. By leaving a mark, a trace, an unintended vestige of life, he explored one of the most universal human acts there is. In the case of the Canada-USA border, the simple, practical act of clearing an area to reveal a border could be seen as a deliberate and at the same time unintended work of land art.

On such a grand scale the act demonstrates trust, camaraderie, transparency and an international symbol of cooperation between two countries. However, its current purpose as a method of perpetual surveillance and border demarcation, does not reveal its layered identity, an ongoing development since the border’s inception.

eyes on the line Security around the border has been fairly loose for the most part of each country’s history. However, since September 11th, 2001 border security has increased from having a few hundred border agents to more than 2,000. Canadian and American travellers now need passports, tightening the border. Since 2001, United States has added aircraft with sensor arrays, thermal cameras, video surveillance, embedded sensors in roads and unmanned aircraft to keep a close eye on the remote areas.

CCTV cameras triggered by sensors in the road record crossings in-between border stations. Towers supplied by Boeing are equipped with variety of sensors, including cameras, as well as heat and motion detectors. The towers dot the entire border from coast to coast. In addition, there are ‘eyes in the sky’, aerial patrols on both sides of the border. The RCMP uses helicopters and fixed wing aircraft as part of its aerial border patrol duties, while Blackhawk helicopters are used on the US side — their radar can detect moving vehicles and persons, and the sensors can track heat sources – including people – and transmit video imaging in real-time to border patrol agents. If suspicious activity is detected, officers are dispatched to investigate and apprehend intruders. Border officers have also expanded ways they patrol the border by using boats, SUVs, mountain bikes, snowmobiles, as well as foot and mounted patrols. In addition to all the technological gadgets, a $1.4 million budget from IBC (International Boundary Commission) is dedicated to keeping the cut line open. The open space itself is a powerful instrument of surveillance; making one feel exposed and constantly under close watch.

Barricade near Gretna, Manitoba Monument No 4, Tsawwassen, BC Surveillance equipment, Coutts, Alberta

a l l i ma ge s c o u r t e s y o f And r e a s R ut ka us ka s

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Border transect on the 49th Parallel: top: crossings, parks that touch and even cross the border section: elevations, and ecoregions that the border crosses and their characteristic wildlife.

a long border park A transect through the border line reveals both US and Canada’s shared geographic identity. Travelling along the border, one witnesses constant change in topography, environment and culture as the line cuts through complex natural systems of rivers, lakes, eco-regions and habitats. Small municipalities on the border act as gateways, reflecting both the national and local identities of their inhabitants. Omnipresent surveillance systems keep a constant watch, while submerged in a beautiful wilderness of cascading mountains or sprawling prairie fields and endless sky. The border’s relentless cut through infrastructure, property lines, fields and forests reveals a strange and sometimes uncomfortable urban and exurban juxtaposition. The cutline reveals such layers and the conflicts between them.

Besides its scale, there is an element of the sublime in this linear landscape, derelict yet structured, dangerous yet pleasant, but somehow inviting, nonetheless. Wide enough to be accessible and under a set maintenance regime, the western borderlands suggest a potential program or typology that might unify currently conflicting elements of security, experience, ecology, tourism and mobility. With the multitude of national and provincial parks and First Nations reserves that are adjacent to the border, could the border become a sort of Olmsteadian green necklace that connects them all, becoming a system of bi-national parks?

a ll im a g es c ourtes y o f A n dre a s Ru t ka u s ka s

Peace Arch Park, British Columbia/ Washington Douglas Port of Entry, BC

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The border’s layered identity of culture, landscape, politics and surveillance, reflects the complexity of our world where public places must inherently negotiate these issues. Parks by their nature and history are intricately designed and shared cultural and ecological public spaces, reflecting and evolving with the times we live in. A landscape free of constructed barriers and virtually free of military tensions could link disconnected communities and various ecologies adjacent to the border, developing a renewed identity built on dialogue, stewardship and international collaboration. Border towns would have a renewed amenity at their door, capitalising on the tourism that would result from the border’s enhanced role. Border crossing stations with a public park attached to them would make them community hubs and meeting points that go beyond transitory, transactional and often uncomfortable border experiences.

And r ey C he r ny k h

How would this work? To start, the program must be a complex of pedestrian trails, picnic areas, conservation zones, lookout features, pavilions, and gardens. The International Peace Garden located on Turtle Mountain straddling the border between Manitoba and North Dakota, and the Peace Arch Park shared between Douglas, British Columbia and Blaine, Washington are precedents that outline how such a border zone is accessed — people from both sides can enter these parks without officially crossing through to the other side. Coordinated visitation and stewardship to make the border landscape ecologically healthier and more accessible, enhances security along the border, reducing expenditure on surveillance technology and staff. A multi-use border trail that runs east-west weaving in an out of the cutline is an uninterrupted parkland used both for pleasure and patrol.

Rest nodes, pavilions and gardens: tourist destinations? additional revenue for border municipalities? maintenance centres for the border itself? While the border is under federal jurisdiction, an expanded border zone engages state and provincial interests. Tied by strong branding and a bilateral agreement between the US and Canada, this park would potentially reinforce better cross-border collaboration and cooperation among IBC, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, US State Park Service, Provincial Parks, Parks Canada, and various conservation agencies on both sides. Does it become a UNESCO site — a model for reducing conflict and for the demilitarisation of conflicting territories? A border park is an opportunity to reaffirm the role of the park in the twenty-first century as a powerful mechanism capable of integrating various systems for the benefit of people and the earth.

Time for us to walk the border in our minds and dream of how it should be. As said at the beginning, it is a long, undefended border. lnstead of sliding further into increased surveillance and para-militarisation, might we think of cooperation, coresponsibility and our identical geography, environment and ecological potential?

We’ve been sharing the border inadvertently for so long, it is time to become deliberate. O

a l l i ma ge s c o ur t e s y o f And r e a s R ut ka us ka s

Chief Mountain port of entry Monument No. 276, Waterton Lakes, Alberta

on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches

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th e C o m m o n B o rd e r fionn byrne, diana guo, jiahui huang

If you have ventured out for a walk in the past several months and have been determined to remain six feet apart from others, you will have temporarily stepped off a sidewalk to avoid a passerby.

This act draws your focus to your feet, as you navigate a suddenly unfamiliar ground. On occasion, you find yourself gauging the height from a sidewalk to the road. Other times, you are caught delicately tip-toeing over grass or walking through a rough terrain of tree roots, long grasses, and puddles. You may easily conclude that the landscape beyond the sidewalk is dangerous and messy, and you will hurry to pass and get back on your way. On other occasions, the ground beyond the sidewalk seems so impassible that you come to a complete halt only a foot from the path to let another pedestrian pass. In every case, however, the moment passes quickly. As carefree as we walk the city along paths of poured concrete, more than anything when we transgress this surface our behaviour indicates a truth we implicitly understand: we do not belong beyond the public sidewalk as this adjacent ground is otherwise spoken for.

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In our cities, property lines are contiguous. Where one use of land stops, another starts. In most cases, this also means that where one claim of ownership ends, so too does another begin. The sidewalk, then, is a publicly owned circulation route that enables free movement between independently owned parcels of land. It allows for unbroken movement without crossing through private property. When we step off the sidewalk, we are either on land that is dedicated to some other use, such as for car traffic, or claimed by a private owner. Cities around the world are an amalgamation of land that is owned, either publicly or privately, governed by laws and controlled by force. Yet even in the wilderness, we find signs that oblige us to stay on the trail. Wherever we go, we are constantly following predefined paths. Given this contemporary situation of being unable to pass through any city, suburb or even rural land, without following pre-established circulation routes, it seems worth exploring alternative models of land organisation and ownership.

enclosure of the commons A history of land ownership would be incomplete without reference to mideighteenth-century England, when a radical transformation of the organisation of land had a significant social and economic impact. This time was marked by the enclosure of common land, where land that had previously been open for communal uses, such as grazing, gathering provisions, or cultivation, was physically enclosed by fences or hedges. Powerful landholders took ownership of these newly divided lands, which drove independent cultivators and part-time labourers to growing industrial towns where they sought employment and eventually comprised a new working class.

Thus, enclosure, being a form of legalised seizure of land, formed the foundation of a developing agrarian capitalism. To this day, our contemporary capitalist economy remains bound to the premise that land can be possessed, and that ownership of land is an indicator of social status. The enclosure of the commons signalled the elimination of land with indeterminate use, and any remaining public lands were assigned specific purposes. Even parks today are rule-bound and dedicated to leisure and recreation. One cannot, for example, pasture a goat in a public park, nor grow vegetables without prior approval in a sanctioned ‘community garden’. So, when we step off a sidewalk, we step onto land that is likely owned by a separate entity and certainly with some other use, even if just dedicated to being unused, as in the case of the residential lawn.

the common border However, it is not the goal of this essay to recount the history of enclosure and the disappearance of the commons.

For this, one could turn to Raymond Williams’s 1973 The Country and the City, Ann Bermingham’s 1986 Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740 – 1860, or more recently to Jeanette M. Neeson’s 1993 Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820. Rather, this design essay presents a work of speculative fiction. Whereas design fields commonly use a method of working where a critical position on the past is used to conceive of possible futures, the images here establish an alternative history, where contemporary critiques of the past are contextualised within that past. In contrast to proposing how to improve our future, designing an alternative history prompts an imagining of our present had we acted differently in the past. Thus, design can be a tool to help us understand the failings of the present.

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Our speculative fiction begins in 1764 with the passing of an Act of Enclosure.

Let us imagine that this bill approved the measuring, mapping and subsequent division of the lands within a typical township, the White Ladies Aston parish in Worcestershire, for example. A survey team took stock of the open and common fields, common meadows, common grounds, heaths and wastelands surrounding the village. They would also survey the existing buildings, paths and carriageways. The team brought their field books and chain. At sixty-six feet long, the chain subdivided into four rods or one hundred links. It was closely associated with agricultural practice, as ten square chains neatly equals an acre. The chain was the standard unit of measure used not only to survey England but also to map and organise land in the colonies, especially in North America.

We will imagine that the survey team made an error. In their work, they used an Irish chain, a variant of the English chain that measured eighty-four feet long. Without realising the discrepancy in dimensions, the surveyors mapped the entire parish.

Individuals subsequently claimed title to the newly divided common land, dispossessing many and forcing the landless from where they had lived. The new landowners set about marking their properties by planting perimeter hedgerows, using the enclosure map as a guide to determine the edges of their land. Oddly, the boundaries of their properties never seemed to match what was mapped.

private but shared While we are pushing the plausibility of this fiction, let us imagine that the error in measurement leaves eighteen feet between each property in the parish, the difference between one Irish chain and the English. The former boundary line between properties becomes an occupiable area bordered by two parallel hedgerows. Thus, while the traditional commons were enclosed, a new linear territory was formed, the Common Border. This border zone is unique in two ways – it is private and it is interconnected.

This combination enables us to imagine a common private space – private, not in the sense of being individualised, but in the sense that decisions and actions are taken beyond the reach of the public sphere and the influence of the market, and communal meaning that resources are shared beyond the typical familial unit.

The eighteen-foot Common Border is essentially invisible. Quick growing vegetation like hawthorn or blackthorn were typically planted in hedgerows, their density blocking livestock from crossing between fields. Of course, a line of hawthorn would also conceal lower activity within the border zone. Above these shrubs, trees like ash, elm, and oak were planted for firewood, and lines of these trees would screen the borders’ upper reaches. The planted border, because it is hidden, is distinct from the surrounding fields. Importantly, visual openness was not only a feature of agrarian landscapes but also a design goal for landscape architects of the time. Raymond Williams, for example, argues that the control of views was integral to the physical structure of the new agrarian capitalist economy: ‘The clearing of parks as ‘Arcadian’ prospects depended on the completed system of exploitation of the agricultural and genuinely pastoral lands beyond the park boundaries. There, too, an order was being imposed: social and economic but also physical. The mathematical grids of the enclosure awards, with their straight hedges and straight roads, are contemporary with the natural curves and scatterings of the park scenery. And yet they are related parts of the same process – superficially opposed in taste but only because in the one case the land is being organised for production, where tenants and labourers will work, while in the other case it is being organised for consumption – the view, the ordered proprietary repose, the prospect.’

Visibility meant control, and landholders were determined to actively observe their property from their estates. To be provided privacy, therefore, was to be granted freedom. Of course, the now well-known inverse condition was being formulated around the same time by Jeremy Bentham.

His model of the Panopticon, described in the 1791 publication, Panopticon; Or, the Inspection House, imagined an architecture that policed individuals’ actions by forcing them into a space of constant observation.

Thus, to grant privacy means both to be hidden from view and to be beyond the reach of systems of social and economic control.

Today, more and more of our interactions are mediated and observed by corporations and the state. In a coffee shop or across social media platforms, we make visible our actions and interactions. Popular films like Jeff Orlowski’s (2020) The Social Dilemma shock us by demonstrating our lack of privacy, especially when it comes to our technology use. We modify our digital behaviour after watching such films to regain privacy, but where do we go to find physical spaces where our behaviour avoids observation?

Traditionally, it has been the bedroom, yet our communications technologies are highlighting what authors like Ulrich Beck have previously warned: ‘The private sphere is not what it appears to be: a sphere separated from the environment… Anyone who does not see this misunderstands an essential and basic characteristic of social ways of living in the phase of advanced modernity,

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independent but integrated the overlapping and networking of the emerging individualized privacy with the seemingly separate areas and production sectors of education, consumption, transportation, production, the labor market, and so on.’

Accentuated by the ongoing pandemic, video communications software emphasise the collapse of social and economic spheres into our private spaces. We are being made more acutely aware that few spaces beyond observation and control exist.

The Common Border is an eighteenthcentury linear territory of resistance to the totalising expansion of surveillance. It is not visible on maps or on the ground, yet it is a space where the dispossessed and all others who were unable or unwilling to conform to the demands of the new economy are welcomed and can move freely and unobserved. By appropriating the contemporaneous technologies of control, both mapping and its physical manifestation in the hedgerow, the Common Border succeeds in opening our imagination to a private way of living and engaging with space. From the map and the hedgerow to satellites and smart phones, a contemporary proposal which sought to increase freedom by granting privacy would necessarily have to design the boundaries of this space to actively limit their transparency.

The second condition of the Common Border is that it is interconnected. Many networked spaces, either circulatory or infrastructural, are typically publicly owned, but in most cases, the land these spaces occupy is dedicated to moving products or consumers to market. As an alternative, this border zone is a public space that prioritises production and rest. It is difficult to list similar examples, contemporaneous or contemporary. Again, the community garden, but they are more decorative than functional. We would never expect to live off the products of a community garden plot.

Similarly, those who live on public land are more often than not considered homeless, not because they are lacking a home but because they are lacking ownership of property and, therefore, land.

A theme of many utopian visions since the disappearance of the commons has been to grant the family unit sufficient land to independently provide the necessities of life – housing, food, and access to necessary resources. Writing at the time when most of England had been enclosed, Andrew Jackson Downing argued that it was still possible to build a fair and equal agrarian society in America by avoiding the same manner of organising land as in England. In his 1851 book The Architecture of Country Houses, Downing wrote optimistically: ‘But the true home still remains to us.

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Not, indeed, the feudal castle, not the baronial hall, but the home of the individual man — the home of that family of equal rights, which continually separates and continually reforms itself in the new world — the republican home, built by no robbery of the property of another class, maintained by no infringement of a brother’s rights; the beautiful, rural, unostentatious, moderate home of the country gentleman, large enough to minister to all the wants, necessities, and luxuries of a republican, and not too large or too luxurious to warp the life or manners of his children.’

Downing’s publication includes plans for multiple homes, the first of which is ‘A Small Cottage for a Working-man’, simply built of wood and with the largest room measuring eighteen feet wide. Accepting Downing’s critique, our imaginary Common Border scheme describes an ideal cottage with the same overall floor area but scales the widest room to just eight feet across. The result is a long, narrow house that fits comfortably within the eighteen-foot border zone, built of timber harvested from the adjacent hedgerows.

In addition to providing opportunity for housing, residents would also need access to the resources and sustenance that land provides. A strategy for the amount of land

to which every home should have access was at the core of a later American utopian vision. Almost one hundred years after Downing, Frank Lloyd Wright described the ‘Broadacre City’ in his 1932 book The Disappearing City: ‘On the basis of an acre to the family, architecture would come again into the service, not of the landlord, but of the man himself as an organic feature of his own ground. Architecture would no longer be merely adapted, commercialized space to be sold and resold… Ground space is the essential basis of the new city of a new life.’

Wright assessed one acre as the minimum amount of land to sustain a family. He envisioned landholders occupied in intensive farming, living off of what they produced and sharing any excess at market. In this society, Wright characterised families as independent but integrated. Wright imagines a new agrarian economy and, as if trying to recreate the lost commons of England, he says of the farmer, “He does not need many fences except those that are a part of his buildings.”

If one acre of land sufficed for Wright, we will not ask for more in the Common Border.

Just as we stretched Downing’s utopian cottage, so too can we scale Wright’s ideal parcel of land. At eighteen feet across, one parcel in the Common Border would extend close to 2,500 feet in length, which is less than twice around a running track.

With commoners circulating between the crops, each home would work enough land to produce the necessities and achieve the independence that Wright sought.

At the same time, each home would be a comfortable eight-minute walk apart from one another through the border’s path, which facilitates local exchange of necessities and regional specialties without relying on a separate infrastructure of commerce that results in the accumulation of wealth central to Downing and Wright’s critiques. This speculative fiction thus preempts the utopian schemes subsequent to the eighteenth century that responded to the radical reorganisation of land prompted by the enclosure of the commons in England.

The Common Border pushes the essence of Downing and Wright’s critiques back in time and spatialises an alternative past.

new forms of living and new relations to land Today, a century after Wright’s Broadacre City, our critique of land organisation advances. As Downing and Wright made clear, the organisation of land is foundational to our society and economy. Understanding and addressing longstanding structural inequalities, thus, requires experimenting in alternative modes of organising land. The

speculative fiction of the Common Border considers an expanded notion of common land, envisioning space that is private but shared as well as independent but integrated. The fiction also foregrounds two premises that utopian visions have typically accepted without question or critique: both Downing and Wright premised their utopias on a normative patriarchal family and the necessity of land ownership.

Downing and Wright determined the family to be the nucleus of a new society and economy. Downing’s vision positioned a pioneering man protecting his family against a wild environment, while Wright, in contrast, pitted the family, led by a “manly man,” against the corruptive forces of the city, or symbolically, the failures of other men. Their utopias are antagonistic at their core, setting man against nature and other men and expressing skepticism of social structures outside the family, explicitly rejecting spaces of communal living. However, neither their definition of family nor their support for individualism are useful today, as past definitions of what constitutes a family no longer reflect the social organisation of our society and global challenges, such as pandemics, climate change, and economic inequality, require collective action. A contemporary utopian vision, therefore, would prioritise mutualism over competition.

This, furthermore, suggests that our modification of Downing’s cottage is a failure, as the architecture remains a physical manifestation of the self-sufficient normative family. The design of the cottage demands greater investment in finding new spatial modes of co-habitation and resource exchange that will facilitate “… breaking up the false alternative between family conservation and market conformity.”

The new configurations must not work to preserve the traditional family but to imagine architectures that will allow “Men and women themselves… to invent and test out new forms of living together beyond feudally ascribed roles.” If we are being optimistic, we can hope that the erosion of privacy in the bedroom, as a consequence of our technology use, will correspond to an extension of obligations to a social group beyond the family and the corresponding confines of the house.

However, this is also an architectural problem.

How do we extend the responsibility and privacy historically afforded to the family beyond the boundaries of the home and into a landscape of mutual care? It is worth remembering that the commons of the eighteenth century was neither private nor public space, despite expressing characteristics of both. Resources of the commons were shared between families, as in the public sphere, however, the space was also beyond the control of the nascent capitalist economy, as in the private sphere.

Finally, returning to where we started, we might wonder what would happen if we had land that was neither claimed by the public nor by private entities. Downing and Wright believed that each citizen should own land. However, imagining the existence of an alternative commons that avoided land parcellation leads us to ponder the outcome if Downing or Wright had taken a theoretical step further and rejected land ownership outright and instead envisioned a model of free access and fair use. If we are to address global challenges that are products of our social and economic structures, such as climate change, then our present utopias will have to move past Downing and Wright.

Beyond a commitment to individual land ownership exists design speculations that envision ways of living on unowned and un-zoned land with indeterminate usage.

These speculations would lead us to ponder the land on which we tread when we step off the sidewalk today. Would this land serve a function? What new relationships would we have with this unclaimed land?

Our imaginary mid-eighteenth-century proposal is a model of land organisation that projects a shared private space on a newly emerging capitalist economy. Private here does not mean individualised but instead indicates a space that remains independent from the outside economy, and land in this context is not zoned to extract use value but is shared and mutually improved. Set in the past, this design speculation renders an instance of ‘what if?’ Pondering the answer leads to the follow-up, ‘so, what now?’

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C heckpo i nt B ravo – betw een remembrance and renewal e v e ly n o s vat h «T h e a m b i t i o n w a s n o t f o c u s e d towards depicting the whole, but rather towards grinding and dissecting its basic elements in order to establish scenic contrasts» ­ — K Malevich 1921

c opyrig ht Sti ftu n g B e rl i n e r M a u e r

introduction Along highway A115, leading to Berlin, there is a widening framed by several iconic, colourful buildings. This widening, which appears as a motorway station, is a remnant of the Cold War era: Checkpoint Bravo, built after the 1948 separation of Germany into an eastern and western part by the WWII Western Allies to control any social, economic and cultural exchange between the two sides.

This characteristic urban structure in the shape of an isolated, enclosed island floating in the wooded outskirts of Berlin is the epitome of the parallel reality a border crossing creates – one of the most striking ones the history of divided Germany has to offer.

However, over the past 30 years since German unification, this place has experienced declining public interest and material decay. In this sense, it seems legitimate to speak of an (un)defined space; a space with missing awareness, despite its importance as a heritage site since 1992. It appears somewhat ahistorical, yet still full of untold stories and memories of its past.

This rich and somewhat ironic history of the site and also its very unique spatial and structural condition of a checkpoint has led to my interest in a potential architectural intervention aimed at bringing back awareness and acknowledgment. It goes without saying that as an architect, any interference with such a historically important site requires sensitivity and self-reflection. I was born after Germany’s reunification and thus have never been an immediate part of the scenery and experiences that Checkpoint Bravo has had produced.

At the same time, I find myself bound up with the past of the state I call home and thereby cannot escape subjective feelings or attachments. It is part of this journey to make myself aware of them.

In its original function, Checkpoint Bravo structurally supported an oppressive political regime and thereby inherently has carried elements of structural violence and control ever since. This said, it is at the core of my research to not only reflect on but also draw the reader’s attention to the bias that ultimately occurs from dealing with someone else’s memory and history attached to a certain space. This is challenged by questioning the usual processes of either eliminating history or overloading memory, therefore our aim should always be to strike a balance between remembrance of the memorable and renewal of the oblivious. Only then will we be able to find meaning in new structures that carry the past.

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history At the end of WW II, Germany was divided into four occupied zones

by Great Britain (northwest), France (southwest), the United States (south) and the Soviet Union (east). Berlin, the capital city, was also divided into four occupied zones. These complex realities have produced different terms; for ease, this article follows terminologies as defined by the German Federal Agency for Civic Education.

West Germany, or the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), was officially established in May 1949, and East Germany, or the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was established in October the same year. Under their occupying regimes, the two sides followed very different paths. An increasing separation of the two systems had culminated over the years in the gradual erection of the ‘Wall’ in 1961. Beyond mere separation, the Wall had obtained political relevance through the control of movement – of resources, goods, humans – across the border. This was supported by several border crossings between the FRG and the GDR. One of the most important crossing between West and East was Checkpoint Bravo (in German known as Kontrollpunkt Dreilinden).

The present location and appearance of Checkpoint Bravo has undergone transformation over time but took definite shape in the late 1960s. Its relevance was emphasised by its location on the western territory as part of the American Sector — in fact, as the most important entrance to the West. It was the only entry point that allowed access to the transit routes leading from WestBerlin to West Germany. As these routes were crossing over East German territory, the GDR had established their own checkpoint as a counterpart around 3km away, the Kontrollpunkt Drewitz, less significant and demolished in the 1990s.

The transit routes through Checkpoint Bravo were mainly used

by West German citizens and diplomats. To maintain control of movement, the GDR gradually established a powerful system that operated in two ways: on one hand, it prevented intrusion by people hostile to their regime from entering; on the other, it prevented people from escaping their regime; it prevented influx to the West.

The supportive structure for this endeavour was manifest in a heavy border fortification of diverse features such as a security wall, watchtowers, a safety area, various minefields and the Todesstreifen (death strip). Structures can tell a lot about the values and ideas of those who have created them and need to be carefully examined before encountering them and creating interventions.

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architectural violence Diverse disciplines and research areas have engaged with the tangle of materiality and identity and how places are subjectively understood. The logical proposition is that places are never experienced the same way. This is especially the case when we talk about architecture that follows an intrinsic logic of power and violence, as in the case of borders and checkpoints. How the materiality of a place produces social realities has a rich history of texts. French Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, in The Production of Space, argues that each place can be understood in three dimensions: each place is lived, conceived and perceived at the same time. Next to these complex characteristics, any space represents a product of social relations, as it is simultaneously precondition and result of social interaction.

Applying these various dimensions Checkpoint Bravo’s character will reveal that it can indeed be conceived as a weapon of control by those who design it for their purpose, and at the same time can be perceived by its surrounding population, or those that wish to exert their freedom of movement, as highly negative and restrictive.

One crucial point made by Lefebvre guides this project’s approach, namely, that the constructed meaning of any space can be changed over time by alienating existing structures in different ways.

Another important theoretical perspective is offered by Michel Foucault who argues that material in itself can act as a political ‘agent’ because it inevitably stands in relation to, and causes reactions by, humans that encounter it. Taking the bridge house at Checkpoint Bravo as an example, one could argue that it represents and symbolises a gate that marks the only way of entering or leaving a site, therefore triggering existential, political and economic issues.

However Checkpoint Bravo manages – due to its unique spatial and structural condition in the ensemble – to avoid further self-acting control, compared to, for instance, watch towers that inherently evoke fear.

The political dimensions of both regimes, GDR and FRD, were activated and unfolded in their built environment. Walls, border crossings, checkpoints, watchtowers along the inner-German border were structures of control. They do not only manifest the presence of separation but also, referring to the public, create a sense of exclusion and inclusion, who is supposed to be, in Leopard Lambert’s terms, ‘inside’ or ‘out’. Checkpoint Bravo on West-Berlin territory and Kontrollpunkt Drewitz on East German territory reveal very different interpretations, ideas and ways of instrumentalising architecture. Drewitz, now demolished, was monumental and brutalist. The massive, wall-like structure was understood as an elongation of the defence system that was only marginally permeable, creating an unease that kept up the system without being questioned by its people. Checkpoint Bravo, in contrast, presented a much different idea of a border crossing — a unique case in German history in its materiality and spatiality of architectural elements. The elements are characterised by its strong shape and colors (pink, yellow, blue). The playfulness of geometry and dynamics produces iconic buildings able to be identity-formative, a symbiotic and strong relationship between materiality, physical space and history.

The West-Berlin based architect Rainer Rümmler, known for his diverse metro stations in Berlin, was commissioned at the end of the 1960s to design the buildings that surrounded the checkpoint: a restaurant, two gas stations and other structures such as a pack station and clearance office. His fondness for striking architecture and his passion for details seemed predestined for Checkpoint Bravo, establishing a provocative contrast to the GDR checkpoint.

One could argue that the intention to create colourful structures that produce positive associations signalled the freedom of WestGermany in opposition to the dull, plain, monumental architecture of East Germany. The toll station (known as Bridge House) and designed by Hans-Joachim Schröder, spans the highway and symbolises not just the gate to West-Germany but also the gate to freedom and the absence of oppressive control.

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intervention Checkpoints on GDR and FRG territory are classified as an ensemble heritage site. The Berlin Monument Authority lists a particular structure as heritage if it has an inherent meaning as evidence of history regardless of its ability to evoke positive or negative memories. This identity-creating ability of the structures due to their visual effect and the implicit political statement of Rümmler and Schröder ultimately led to their protective status as cultural heritage in 1992.

Despite the intrinsic political effect of Checkpoint Bravo it is important to acknowledge that history and memory do not stop, but rather shift and evolve over the years. This idea is the basis for my architectural intervention: existing structures require confrontation and dialogue. The fact that in Germany the awareness and the rehabilitation of its divided history is relatively weak motivates my desire to work with the extant structures, not to overwrite or eradicate the past, but rather to balance the preservation of the elements and simultaneously to create something new with a different character. Regardless of the general awareness of historic sites I do believe that anything that is a part of a collective identity is important to preserve.

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Malevich, the painter of the Black Square, once said that you have to free the things of their own weight. This can be understood as a phenomenological method, approaching anything with an open mind withholding judgement, oriented to a conscious experience of things as are found and perceived. As a subject/non-participant of the existing space, I can rely on my own physical presence and experience of the site as an important part of self-reflection and sensitivity.

As structure is the primary principle of architecture and to create a dialogue of the existing and new, I have used the very basic, existing elements of Checkpoint Bravo as a starting point.

As an act of decoding Checkpoint Bravo, I was seeking details, slight connections and shapes, the assemblage of planes, walls, circles, foundations and their relation to each other, as the intrinsic architectural logic of the site. This creates a material and objective substrate for new elements that carry both the past and the present.

Meaning lies within the creation of liveable space while balancing out the severity of the site’s past and its historical, cultural importance.

The legibility of Checkpoint Bravo remains, as the past and the present will simultaneously exist, inseparably connected, something Juhani Pallasmaa writes about in The Architecture of Image.

My methodology is an act of composition to change the formal syntax of Checkpoint Bravo. The morphology of elements alienates and shifts the relationship of the users, challenging imagination and memory. The proposition of simple, basic structures, subordinate to the existing and unostentatious in appearance is nurtured by details of things found.

Mimicry, mirroring, disintegration, modelling, layering define methods of confrontation and alienation.

Each existing structure receives a counterpart as an abstracted idea of itself. For instance, the bridge house, graphically illustrating a line, is extended in two directions. The formal intervention does not only create a new enclosure of space but also questions the perception of the gate by changing the balance point. The elongated figure, like the corderie in Venice, houses artists studios, ateliers, working and exhibition spaces. The restaurant building with the circular shape receives a huge box sitting on its back. This is the new high-point for Checkpoint Bravo. The house suggests rooms for dwellers, using shared, private and open spaces. The verticality enables the view over the whole site and beyond, pointing towards a twisted logic of observer and observed. The two gas stations are diagonally offset and separated by the highway. One of them is re-used as a platform, a stage like a theatre and receives a complementary structure opposite as a grandstand for the viewers, underlining the direct confrontation of the original checkpoint.

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The transition from a three-dimensional to a two-dimensional layer – as an investigation of the threshold of art and architecture – enables the understanding of Checkpoint Bravo as part of an open concept similar to François Morellet’s Récréation N° 3, thus making it possible to continue the formal ideas of the found, allowing a sense of incompleteness.

Within this open image, Checkpoint Bravo is interpretable in various ways, balancing out existence and alienation, adding up to people’s individual perception of physical experience of the site. By avoiding static results, my proposal aims to continue spatial experiences and create sequences and new scenarios for inhabiting a space again; in terms of connection, solitariness, work, communication.

Continuation of space is not meant as the continuation of inherent violence and power but rather serves to connect and re-interpret the existing, as the beginning of a dialogue. The unique spatial and urban condition – as an enclosed island and as an ensemble of self-contained buildings – gives way to the idea of a dense space filled with multiple functions, served by elements of the past and new forms that cooperate. Coming back to Lefebvre’s socioanthrophological approach, the intervention is meant to change the precondition of the previously perceived and lived place.

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In my position as an architect, I cannot determine the ultimate perception of individuals, instead I define my intervention as a catalyst and suggest possibilities of interaction between people and space. This can be seen as a way to re-appropriate the space. Using a narrative methodology that engages with the physical reality and qualities of the site enables different states of architecture to exist, pointing towards reference and reflection. However it is not about mitigating the power of violent structures or about reviving them, but about acknowledging the unique particularity and vulnerability of Checkpoint Bravo. This requires awareness of differing meanings – the perceived, conceived and lived realities of spaces – and consideration of what our ideas are contributing to. New ideas can transform the whole site.

The idea of remembrance and renewal starts with the dialogue between remnants of the past and newly added elements that trigger new discourses; knowledge exchanged against the context of a blurred memory of what was there and what it has become today. What might this place have resembled 30, even 50 years ago?

Allowing spaces to be viewed and experienced through individual and collective imagination gives value to emotion and memory.

Reading the site as a palimpsest consisting of various physical and symbolic layers enhances the understanding of the complex site of Checkpoint Bravo, thus allowing a balance between remembrance and renewal.

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F l oa t in g betw e e n bo rd e r s

… o r, pe rh a p s , a n Ear th w ith o u t bo rde r s? a n o n l i n e e xh i b i tion diana guo, mingjia chen

D ia na G uo a nd M ing jia C he n

Cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove treats the modern airport as a poetic metaphor of the modern world’s unboundedness, flexibility and mobility. For him, the incessant flow of travellers symbolises a modern global interchange that cuts through both geography and the constraints of time. However, this aesthetic observation fails to address the realities of sociopolitical conflict. Today, it is pure fantasy to say that modern travel has blurred national identity or social hierarchy. National borders are, in fact, the very focal point of hyper-surveillance and sociopolitical boundary-making.

The pandemic acts as a catalyst, asking people to re-examine and acknowledge inequality in global mobility. A travelling body is now considered as a potential ‘carrier’ of disease by the border. The formation and assertion of geopolitical borders has been pushed to extremes during the pandemic, leaving many people stratified, deported, denied visas or otherwise unable to cross from one country to another.

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This exhibition reflects on and proposes radical reunion, borderlessness, the fantasy of reuniting with a loved one who just happens to be born with a different citizenship. It critiques the bureaucracy of borders and asks, what would the world look like without nation-states? What would earth look like if we did not have borders at all, if we could travel freely from one place to another?

An Earth where nobody is a foreigner, nobody is inside, nobody is outside?

affective borders, technological borders and the shifting border Harald Baulder, a geographer, on the issue of migration observed that the imagination of open borders is a faint, amorphous image, arising on a distant horizon where the concrete terms of what an open-borders world would look like is not yet discernible. Yet, open border politics are already practiced by migrants and activists on a daily basis — not utopian but part of an ongoing struggle for change. In the affective border, borders are inscribed onto bodies themselves, in so far as one looks different by race, sex, or religion from accepted norms. Selective security screening, randomised background checks and the tactics of ICE patrols show that some bodies are perceived as a carrier of disease while trusted bodies, complete with legal citizenship and a valid passport, can pass.

In the spring of 2020, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi announced nationwide lockdown. Hundreds of migrant workers from neighbouring countries had to go home, walking for days on foot only to find themselves barred at their own border — many low-wage Nepali labourers were stopped at the border after Nepal restricted all movement from India. In another case, a boat with 400 refugees from Bangladesh was turned away from the Malaysian border and abandoned to float on sea for weeks without aid. Neither inside nor outside, the ‘distrusted’ body floats between legislative boundaries.

D ia na G uo a nd M ing jia C he n

While convention superimposes precise lines on a map to delineate boundaries between nation-states, using policy and law as enforcement, in reality borders are not fixed lines but rather floating ones. In an essay on pandemic borders titled ‘The Disorder of Things’, Umut Ozguc observes that borders are an affective experience produced by our everyday movements, personal narratives and semiotic codes that define our relations with the world.

Borders carry weight, deployed as a tool to regulate the flow and migration of people, labour and capital. As Arundhati Roy aptly put it, COVID lockdowns around the world and the closing of borders worked like a chemical experiment, suddenly illuminating hidden things. As the rich guarded themselves in gated communities, large metropolitan cities pushed migrant workers, their labour force, out of the city’s legislative boundaries. In the age of the pandemic, such workers are seen as unwanted accrual, health threats and ‘disposable’ bodies.

Border enforcement recognises that rigid lines cannot fully control the flow of bodies. As a result, ‘the border’ can be framed through many lenses, including the technological or bureaucratic border, an expanding and shifting boundary that regulates flow and migration. With the increasing use of technological tools at security checkpoints, it is becoming clear that privacy is contextual — ‘distrusted’ bodies do not experience the same standard of privacy as those with a more legal status. The use of biometric tools in refugee camps, AI detectors, algorithm automation in visa application processes and United Nations’ use of blockchain tools to profile asylum seekers are all methods of surveillance that maintain borders. With COVID-19, many visa application agencies have implemented a medical exam to further determine eligibility to cross a border. In a sense, the exam classifies and analyses the body­­— a biological border between the test subject and the nation-state, the coveted destination. Migration management in the pandemic allows enforcers to test emerging tracking and surveillance technologies in the name of containing the virus.

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D ia na G uo a nd M ing jia C he n

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the physicality of curating an online exhibition The border exists not only at the edge of a territorial boundary, but is also a shifting device. For example, the US border is activated by hundreds of American visa regulators and border patrol agents deployed globally, screening potential visitors before they land on American soil. By expanding the buffer zone between US territory and the outside world, the border travels well beyond the territorial border. In reverse direction, the border buffer also seeps into the interior. ‘Expedited removal’ policies allow immigration patrol to remove from American soil undocumented people found 100 miles away from an official land or coastal border. Offshore visa processing is another way that the border has expanded — in Australia, asylum seekers are put through a procedure in what the country calls ‘regional processing’. Set into place seven years ago, the policy states that any illegal undocumented visitor will be automatically removed and transferred to offshore immigration detention facilities to await further action on their claim(s) to asylum.

Ayelet Shachar aptly observes that by “legally recharting the area of Australian territory upon which asylum claims can be made, and by removing any intercepted irregular migrant offshore in remote locations in poorer and less stable third countries, Australia has invented one of the most striking manifestations of the shifting border.”

Similar to many events in 2020, Floating Between Borders took place in the virtual realm. However, the exhibition firmly grounds itself in the physical presence of an empty room filled with artifacts that resemble our personal COVID border experience – mannequins fully dressed in single-use hazmat suits, passports, endless numbers of stamps, hand sanitisers, folding tables. This room provides an anchor for thoughts, from which further ideas spiral outward.

In Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud argues that the intention of art is to prepare and announce a future world; however today it is modelling our possible universes. For Bourriaud contemporary art spaces present a period of time that we live through, rather than a sequence that we walk through. In our context, the exhibition room is a snapshot of the unprecedented time that we are living in.

In examining the concept of the shifting border, we were initially interested in the literal modelling of a national border in a domestic setting – transforming one’s own bedroom into a border services device at an airport.

The development of the online proposal runs parallel with the transformation of the room. The process of collecting the materials and setting the room up loosely mirrors the process of preparing to cross a border. Taking the bed apart, packing and placing items elsewhere parallels relocation. Acquiring the props needed for the live performance from many different sources recalls gathering all the required documents, evidence and certificates for a visa application or an asylum claim. This transformation helps us to understand the contemporary border system as an immanent materialised social construct. Its devices, from online customs declaration apps to electrified fences, all aid in developing arbitrary boundaries that segregate families and inscribe varied legal statuses onto bodies. The room is essential to our exhibition, initiating discussions and providing a workstation to continue reading and educating ourselves on the subject of borders.

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performance Umut Ozguc describes borders as an affective experience embodied in our movements. They are lived spaces actualised by bodies on the move – they only live when certain actions are performed. To capture and model this, the centrepiece of this exhibition is a live performance of a body in a hazmat suit, constantly stamping imaginary declaration forms throughout the length of a short film, hugging the mannequins at the end. Stamping is a decision: at a border crossing, a passport being stamped grants or denies a body’s entry into a nation state. The invention of passports in the nineteenth century created a global mobility divide, where people from wealthier states move more freely, while those from less stable states are restricted. The privilege of crossing a border without being extensively examined is a birthright that many bodies have taken for granted.

At the beginning of the pandemic, we wrapped ourselves in singleuse hazmat suits, nervously checking border closure information and flight updates daily, hoping that we could make it home. Towards very end of the performance, the body stops the stamping action and walks toward the mannequins in a welcoming embrace, as the film asks – “What would radical reunions look like?” O

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Poems from a Declaration Form Facing a border declaration kiosk at Vancouver International Airport, we are assessed by a set of YES/NO questions: “Have you visited a farm in the past 10 days?

Have you visited China in the past 14 days?

What will you offer to this country?

Are you carrying more than $10,000 in cash?

Most importantly, are you carrying a disease?...”

The declaration form is designed as the most effective way to screen the travelling body. Each incoming human brings either benefits to the country or presents a potential threat. The binary nature of these questions violently flattens identity, agency and humanity, failing to recognise each individual as a person.

To start to imagine an absolute borderless world, we start by taking apart a single sheet of the declaration form. As found poetry, five poems are presented, rendering the declaration form as a critique of selective inclusion. Here, a dialogue starts between the form the travelling body, gradually stripping border enforcement to its core.

POEM #3: See Definitions on Reverse

I AM (SEE DEFINITION ON REVERSE) COMMERCIAL MERCHANDISE” ARTICLES OR GOODS THAT ARE NOT CONSIDERED PERSONAL.

POEM #7: General Entry

ENTRY OF DANGEROUS AGRICULTURAL PESTS AND PROHIBITED LIFE (IS) RESTRICTED: SOIL, MEAT, BIRDS, SNAILS, AND OTHER.

CONTROLLED OBSCENE AND TOXIC SUBSTANCES ARE GENERALLY ENTRY.

BORDER(S) AND CULTURE AND LIFE CAN RESULT IN SEIZURE.

POEM #8A: The Sport of Monetary Instruments

THE TRANSPORTATION OF MONETARY INSTRUMENTS IS LEGAL.

HOWEVER, YOU BRING IN TO THE UNITED STATES MORE FOREIGN EQUIVALENT.

A NATION OF LAW ON 105 BORDERS.

POEM #8B: The Rulebook of Monetary Instruments

PROTECT MONETARY INSTRUMENTS IN COIN, CURRENCY, CHECKS, AND CASHIERS CHECKS AND STOCKS AND BONDS.

IF YOU HAVE MONETARY FAILURE TO REPORT YOU ARE CARRYING CIVIL PENALTIES AND/OR CRIMINAL PROSECUTION, ON THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF TRUTHFUL DECLARATION.

POEM #10: Haiku of an Information Processing Machine

A PERSON IS NOT INFORMATION UNLESS UNTIL IT DISPLAYS A VALID CONTROL NUMBER.

THE CONTROL NUMBER FOR THIS COLLECTION IS 1651-0009.

THE ESTIMATED AVERAGE TIME TO COMPLETE THIS APPLICATION IS FOUR MINUTES.

YOUR RESPONSE IS MANDATORY.

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references Ayelet Shachar, The Shifting Border Manchester. UK: Manchester University Press, 2020

Roy, Arundhati. ‘The Pandemic Is a Portal’. Financial Times, April 2020. https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca.

Beech, Hannah. 2020. ‘Coronavirus Finds Fuel in a World of Migrants’. New York Times, April 10, 2020, sec. World. https://www.nytimes. com/2020/04/10/world/asia/coronavirus-migrants.html.

Shrestha, Subina. ‘Hundreds of Nepalese Stuck at India Border amid COVID-19 Lockdown’. Al Jazeera, April 1, 2020. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/hundreds-nepalese-stuck-indiaborder-covid-19-lockdown-200401031905310.html.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon, France: Les Presses du Reel, 2002 Carens, Joseph. ‘Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders’. The Review of Politics, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Spring, 1987), pp. 251-273. Cambridge University Press.

Esposito, Roberto. Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008 Ozguc, Umut. . ‘Borders, Detention, and the Disruptive Power of the NoisySubject’. International Political Sociology 14 (1), 2020 pp. 77–93 Ozguc, Umut. ‘An Essay on Pandemic. Borders: From ‘Immunitary Dispositif’ to Affirmative Ethics’ . The Disorder of Things, For the Relentless. Criticism of All Existing Conditions Since 2010, April 23, 2020. https://thedisorderofthings.com/2020/04/

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Slater, Joanna, and Nina Masih. ‘India Coronavirus: Migrant Workers Stranded

by Lockdown Walk Hundreds of Miles Home’. Washington Post, March 28, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/india-coronaviruslockdown-migrant-workers/2020/03/27/a62df166-6f7d-11ea-a1560048b62cdb51_story.html.

Stevis-Gridneff, Matina, and Patrick Kingsley. ‘Turkey, Pressing E.U. for Help in Syria, Threatens to Open Borders to Refugees’. New York Times, February 28, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/world/europe/turkey-refugeesGeece-erdogan.html.

Turner, Bryan S. 2007. ‘The Enclave Society: Towards a Sociology of Immobility’. European Journal of Social Theory 10 (2): pp. 287–304

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link to our online exhibition/webpage: https://www.gsdkirklandgallery.com/ exhibitions/202012-floating-between-borders

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Soften i ng t he Ed g e :

d iff u se b o un dar ie s be tw e e n b o d ies, b ein g s an d arch ite ct ur e connor o’grady I want to tell stories about relating in significant otherness, through which the partners come to be through flesh and sign... about evolution, love, training, and kinds of breeds help me think about living well together with the host of species with whom human beings emerge on this planet at every scale of time, body and space. The accounts I offer are idiosyncratic and indicative rather than systematic, tendentious more than judicious, and rooted in contingent foundations rather than clear and distinct premises.1 —Donna Haraway Traditionally when we think of borders, we think of vast territory, contentious walls or other forms of geopolitics. Rarely does our mind first go to the edges of our own skin, arguably the most intimate territory of our being. If you can, close your eyes and take a moment. Take two fingers and press them together. Feel your finger pads against one another. Feel your cuticles, the wrinkles on your knuckles, the underside of your nails.

Follow the contours and lines as your fingers meet your palm, and your palm meets your wrist. Press deeper, feel bone. Press lighter, feel whispers of hair. Feel the many layers of your own edges. If you are so inclined, close your eyes and begin again. Feel the differences, find patterns.

Our skin is our daily interface with the world around us. Between buildings, bodies, nature and its elements, it should not be treated lightly. Beneath this layer, in many ways, is an internal mystery, one we may never personally see inside. Yet it is from within that our essential operating systems dwell. The skin, and our senses mediate our internal cognition; our emotions, memories and perception. This deeply nuanced, fraught and sensitive boundary is rarely considered as we go about the many tasks of our day to day. But this most intimate threshold contains potential keys to an alternative mode of thinking about our built environment. What kind of world can be imagined if our constructed environments are treated similarly?

Imagine a world where our bodies do not privilege the eyes. A place where the history of Western thought and its grip on popular culture has suffered a great amnesia. It is now a world where the network of systems within fill us all with anticipation. Mysteries of the brain have been revealed, and its relation to all our other parts are awakened with renewed significance. Nerve endings intertwine, custom-programmed for each

of us. The bodily operations of both interior and exterior are acknowledged for their symbiosis. The boundary of the skin is not a barrier or wall. Rather it is a composition of many thresholds; protecting, moderating, sensing.

It is through the nascent scientific discoveries in neuroscience that we can see our bodies differently. Comprehension of the brain has gained in both depth and breadth with technological advancement.

The brain and the nervous system are the conduit that maps the insides and the outsides of our bodies together; a phenomenon that encodes itself within both skin and mind. Our perceptions and memories become experiences and emotions, encoded as a series of traceable coordinates, placed throughout us, archived and adaptable. Neurons fire and send messages to one another. Billions of conversations are happening between myriad parts of the body; prompting each of us to function, think, and act. These conversations lead to mirrored simulations.

Previous experiences are remembered in the brain, and replayed prior to the repetition of an action.

This means we can avoid pain, or experience the feeling of falling or jumping by revisiting past actions through memory. Because of this process, a particular sense can trigger responses in others, even without direct stimuli. Although the understanding of cognitive power appears to be simple, it has vast potential to modify our conceptions of and approaches to architecture. The archive of the mind extends the boundaries of the body beyond its physical and sensorial existence through a gradated system of perceptual thresholds. This extension of realms forms a complexity of boundaries that operate around our body, expanding the operative spatial realms being governed by our cognitive processes.

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The applicability of this nuanced sensitivity to the body in space has only recently emerged as fertile ground for architectural conception. One example can be found in Architect Sean Lally’s sensorial envelope diagrams. These helpful illustrations communicate the perceptual realms that surround our body, and signify ‘invisible’ stimuli that can impact our personal experiences.(figure 1)

fro m Se a n L a l l y, ‘ T he Air f r o m O t he r P la ne t s ’ , mo di fi e d by C o nno r O G r a d y

figure 1: Sensorial envelopes of the body

1 Donna Jeanne Haraway. ‘Species’ In The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. pp 24-25

Within the diagram, we see that senses are activated at varying distances, forming bodily territories. Within each of these territories, different changes in the environment are registered and the body is calibrated accordingly. The primary bodily interface is composed of the five human senses: hearing, sight, touch, taste and smell. Senses are responsible for processing information affecting us, and can be quantified through thermal, electromagnetic, acoustical or chemical fluctuation. Although the diagram illustrates a simplification of threshold distances indicated between concentric lines, in reality the state of these territories is in constant flux and is completely subjective.

A myriad of variables such as physiology, emotional state, past relatable memory and ambient environmental stimuli, can all factor into the spatial quality of each sensorial envelope. This bodily awareness can extend beyond our sensory functions and can occupy realms of thought and expectancy. It is the mirrored simulation of the mind that allows us to build possible realities even for facets of our reality that we can not immediately sense. (figure 2) However, what this mode of thinking does is expand the ways upon which we confront all our relations. Through the broaching of personal, intimate territories, we insinuate potentials for connection and interaction, be it physical or emotional, between individuals or groups. These territories are also inherently inclusive, and do not preclude relations beyond human interaction, welcoming other beings, bodies and forms into the fold. If we accept this world of constant change then fluctuation and interaction become key design factors in the choreography of gradated, individual boundaries between bodies and the environment.

C o nno r O G r a d y

figure 2: Localised spatial connections

When Vitruvian ideals were included as part of the humanist movement that accompanied modern architecture of the twentieth century, the body was no longer thought of as a physical analog for built form, rather spaces were body-centred in their design. Unfortunately, the humanist ideals of the modern era were superseded by the technological inventions of the first and second machine ages. Architecture attempted to create a machine which seeks to provide for the individual needs of the end user. This endeavour to construct

Although the awareness and importance of the relationship between the body and architecture is historically prevalent, the depth and breadth of influence has — for the greater part of thousands of centuries — been solely formal, and mostly reductive.

The human form was used both literally and symbolically in the formation of temples in Ancient Rome. Caryatids lining front thresholds and notions of symmetry related the ideological alignment of humans with deity. (figure 3) This relationship was explored and indicted by Vitruvius, whose theories were instead organised around notions of representation, proportion, symmetry and eurythmy. Geometry, still, relentlessly tethers the built environment to static artefacts.

environmental homeostasis, inherently made places for people in opposition to their natural environments, antagonising relations to our greater environment and ignoring individual subjectivity in the design equation.

At the end of the twentieth century and with the establishment of the digital turn an alternative approach to humanism may prove favourable. Posthumanism redefines ‘human’ as an entity inseparable from its environment. This positioning acknowledges human impact so widespread that we can no longer be defined independently from our environment. The consequences of human action have left the boundaries of bodies and the territories of nature intertwined and fraught in their coexistence.

Through this learned understanding of embodied cognitive simulation, and unique subjectivity of experience, along with the understanding that we are intrinsically related to our environment, a proposal for alternative modes of living may be considered. How does architecture itself emulate the complex territories of the skin and its bounds? How can we imagine a post-human architecture? Can buildings be active contributors in fostering continual and individualised well-being? Now that we have imagined a slightly different world, let’s imagine a possible architecture for it.

Ri c h a rd D a l t o n , ‘A n ti qu i ti e s a n d v i ews i n Gre e c e a n d Egy pt ’, 1 751

figure 3: Caryatid at the Erechtheion

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An alternative architecture is an open and highly technological system that seeks to diffuse physical bounds and to engage in the subjective sensorial envelopes of the body. This approach seeks not only to evolve architecture from passive service to active participant, it seeks to implement relationships of mutual stewardship between bodies and environments. Architecture is conceived as a spatial embodiment of a mutually active embrace.

Through the act of embracing, spatial motifs of softened edges, intertwining systems, and intimate thresholds scaled to the human body are explored. A transition away from the solid and rigid is proposed; instead diffuse systems are constructed of many distinct and varying elements, spreading and stretching outward. Simply, diffusion produces a reduction in concentration, and an increase in volume. It is through such intentional porosity that overlap and softening occur. It encourages deliberate and intentional confrontation through pliable, physical acceptances. These systems seek to adapt to external conditions while simultaneously recalibrating its own inner workings. Diffusion reconfigures the enclosure, and acknowledges working with the impacting conditions. This system recognises flux, and chooses to embrace it. It is made to intersect, sharing space with other species around it, celebrating post-human pluralism as a desire for infinite difference and variation.

In this world heterogeneity is celebrated over homogeneity, entanglement over separation, relating to, over fear. Fertile, open networks of scaffolds and instruments.

Porous, active, breathing architectures. A reciprocity of relations between architecture and bodies. When we release traditional canons of architectural relations, the formal figure and ground fades away.

The boundary is subjective, contingent, changing. Layers of nested interiors and exteriors, porous envelopes of exchange reconfigure our preconceptions around living and inhabiting. This shift in organisational geometry assists in modifying our spatial readings of architectural form.

From architecture that emulates (classical, passive) to an architecture that hosts (modern, passive) to an architecture that participates (contemporary, active, sensing and reacting), this is the first step in translating architecture from its traditional position as static, and serving, to an active environment meant to be viewed as a companion. (figure 4) When considering the technological requirements to support the architectural forms described above, its sensing and responsive components require technological dexterity. Fortunately, in the

posthuman world, increased economy and availability in manufacturing and physical computing makes an embodied architecture possible. Digital and electrical components of mechanical construction are readily available, and so are the tools that can be used to work with them at the individual scale.

softer, sensitive architecture that emulates the boundaries of the body, help us find better versions of ourselves? (figure 5) C o n n o r O Gra dy

figure 4: Expanded thresholds, diffuse boundaries

Desktop 3D printers, CNC routers, knife and waterjet cutters, all have dramatically expanded the world of independent making.

The accessibility of infrared and light sensors, moisture readers, piezoelectric systems, and electrical microcontrollers mean that interrelational dynamics can be quantified, and a responsive architecture can be calibrated. It is in this world that the quantified self is embraced, where biological, emotional and social measures are taken. When the strides in human neuroscience and psychology are paired with sensing equipment and manufacturing capabilities a diffuse architecture of posthumanism can form and can come alive.

Before, these invisible qualities — the neurological ingredients of emotion, big data systems, microscopic nano-systems and intangible sensory responses — could be speculated upon, but could not be used to inform sensitive architectures that respond to personal behaviour. This new shared language between being and system allows for nuanced and intimate relationships to form. The environment — sensing our own behaviour — reacts accordingly, through its own mechanical being. When we witness this response, it too becomes part of our own embodied simulations, allowing for active relationships to be formed between building and bodies. Empathy and understanding can be cognitively processed through a responsive architecture. Can a

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This premise of architecture in symbiosis, simultaneously empathetic and contributing as it engages directly in the processes of everyday life serves to view architecture as a ‘companion species’. A form of other, more significant in our relations than traditional architecture. This necessary modification of the relationship between user and building from its traditional, ambivalent, served and serving dynamic, to an explicit, reciprocal, companion relationship is driven by the reassessment of boundaries between beings.

The hope for such a modified humanenvironment relationship would be the activation of a greater collective, aimed at cultivating social-emotional learning and fostering greater empathy. The proposition of such an architecture is best suited for the public realm, where the personalities, interactions and subsequent reciprocities of the many are formally projected.

Architecture could reflect this process of ‘becoming’ and recognise the multiplicity of sensing layers we have in order to better respond to our human needs.

The intended architecture can be described most easily through the description of choreographed hands. When two fists meet, closed and unfamiliar, the duration of contact is generally brief. It is an action that signifies informality and casual circumstance. This exemplifies the current relationship between humans and the built environment. The next evolution of such relationships, to the act of shaking hands.

More formal in nature, it has an increased duration and some degree of intimacy.

C o nno r O G r a d y

figure 5: Diffuse Responsive Systems, From Within

The way that people collect housewares or decorate in order to make a house into their home is an example of how this relationship can form between people and their spaces.

However, illustrating the quality of a diffuse architecture, requires the highly intimate and prolonged act of intertwining fingers. This relationship is rare yet significant between individuals and the built environment. But it can be found more commonly in the interactions of people, exemplified in the brushing past another person on the street, the act of hugging or being immersed in a crowd at the local stadium.

It may be a human disservice to build only such finite and robust structures, focused on creating separations between nature and one another, rather than infusing our world with systems composed of softened boundaries and teasing thresholds akin to those of our own bodies. An architecture that could mediate between nature and culture offers the potential to expand current definitions of the relations between beings and things. (figure 6) This world may benefit from a diffuse, responsive, public environment viewed and treated as a companion species. An architecture that contributes to the health of all beings and the environment. An architecture of difference, that participates in the act of knowing, and aims to help each of us to know one another better.

Entangled, inefficient, and co-dependent, as modern architecture was once described

by Le Corbusier as a machine for living in, a post-human architecture may be considered as the machine for living with. A built environment participating in a collective effort to champion empathy, for our wellbeing and ecological good.

O

C o nno r O G r ad y

figure 6: Diffuse Responsive Systems, Speculative Section

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W alk i n g Di al e ct i cs

pro x i m i ty, in t im ac y an d pl ace i n t he c it y’s n e w me tr ics francisca lima and tiago torres-campos

A new pandemic lifestyle puts walking back on the map, quite literally. Walking has become for some the only possible daily routine, a newly acquired central habit, a desperate need to escape. First, anxious, quick walks around the block, which then led to more distant and confident strolls. To many of us, walking became a way of accessing new places in old cities, of redesigning the cities we took for granted in new maps, slower cartographies made of bodies moving under the promise of a new, human-silent yet nature-thriving spring. Walking unfolded new senses of place, circumscribed by health-bound metrics of proximity and intimacy, or the lack thereof. We began to avoid passing too close to our peer human companions, but we let ourselves come perhaps closer than ever to wet stone walls, blossoming trees, bustling birds and squirrels. Where our former walking led us through the shorter routes possible with the certainty of an internal compass, the new pandemic walking serendipitously took us to new city frontiers.

Two landscape architects, friends and colleagues, enter in a dialogue across the Atlantic. Their conversation reflects on their walks as a form of spatial investigation, a dialectic of proximity, intimacy and space. They dedicate this reflection to their walking companions Miguel, Luis and Lotus.

1 WA L K I N G A S D I S COV ERY Tiago: Even though Mount Hope, the neighbourhood where I live in Providence, Rhode Island, is roughly a fifteen-minute drive, or a twenty five-minute walk away from downtown, it feels extremely residential and, in a way, a preamble to American suburbia. Walking in these neighbourhoods is not necessarily an experience linked to discovery, or at least, it hasn’t been until very recently. People do walk: they jog, power walk, dog walk, walk around the block to put their kids to sleep, or to visit a neighbour; they mostly walk along pre-established routes that feel safe. But walking is never an act of discovery, one doesn’t set out to the neighbourhood with the intent, at least explicit, of finding something new. It is a distinct experience from, let’s say, Lisbon, where both you and I come from, where we do wander the old and crammed streets and get lost in the city for a while. The same can be said of many European cities, like Edinburgh for example, where I lived for a few years, and where you still reside.

My pre-pandemic experience in Providence quickly adapted to the logic of commuting to work, albeit privileged, since I could either walk downhill in good weather or catch a bus in bad weather. (In the US walking to work is a luxury, whereas riding a bus is often frowned upon.) The neighbourhood was a territory to cut across from home to RISD’s Downtown campus by the river.

With Covid’s spring lockdown and the experience of working from home, I got used to a different daily routine that usually ended with a walk to get out into the fresh air. That experience was odd at first since we didn’t necessarily know where to go, where to walk to. (I speak in the plural here since my walks are always together with my husband Luis and our dog Lotus.) We decided to wander deliberately aimlessly, a way of walking that is totally alien to the sort of logics one walks around here. Others were doing the same. People who never actually walked the neighbourhood were suddenly stranded and they too began to weave around the neighbourhood with their daily walks.

These weaving walks of discovery got progressively longer as New England’s spring, famous for its lavish blooming, kicked in. We got fitter – one does get fitter at walking – and braver too, a combination of good weather with the recognition and crossing of boundaries and thresholds. Mini daily victories whenever everything else seemed to be falling apart. Always without a conventional map, sometimes a little lost, but never completely out of control. A direct relationship between our bodies and the neighbourhood, where the map is constantly redesigned through open dialogues, negotiations and bodily limits.

Francisca: Our experience during the lockdown was similar and although Edinburgh is a European city with a well determined centre, unlike the American cities, it has also offered us new discoveries. The experience of having only one hour to escape a life indoors, imposed for the protection of all, opened new options. How is that escaping hour used? Where do we

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go, what do we do? Every time we left our building door, a spontaneous decision was made: left, right or ahead? A decision that was not considered before the lockdown. The layering of these daily decisions that lead us to different places allowed the development of a mind map of the places that were forbidden and the ones that were aspired for. The last ones were thinly explored up until that point, but were since then intensely sought for, wandered, gazed, felt.

The suburban streets of outer neighbourhoods of Edinburgh composed this newly permitted area of exploration and offered a de-densification that allowed strolls to be less fear-impressed.

It has also allowed us the new experience of walking for walking and not necessarily to reach a destination. Even if before the first pandemic lockdown Edinburgh was always walked and walkable, the trajectory was mostly operational and the park a daily necessity to reach the University Campus. The design of this park – the Meadows – with green grass and majestic trees – Acer sp., Ulmus sp. and Maple sp. – follows a nineteenth century’s public park style with framed views to Arthur’s Seat, with links to nearby urban territories and where the life of the University of Edinburgh pulsates in normal times. This space of encounter lost its importance, lost its encounters, and the focus turned to places unseen until that point – each small garden, small plant, new blossoming tree in a forgotten alley became a centre of renewed interest, enjoyed differently each day and with a new attention to detail.

1 Albert Camus. A Peste. Porto: Livros do Brasil, 1947 2 Ibid, my translation, 11 3 Ibid, my translation, 13 4 Ibid, my translation, 12

In this period, I started reading forgotten books I had at home. One of them was Summer by Albert Camus, which quickly directed me to his other book, The Plague.1 In the first chapter of the latter, Camus describes the city of Oran, where the drama unfolds and which he describes as a ‘neutral city’ where spring “is only announced by the quality of the air, and season changing only detected via the sky.” 2 Everything else is neutral. The city turned its back to the landscape and therefore “became soulless,” Camus writes. 3 What I have experienced in Edinburgh was the precise opposite. I experienced seasonal change in each day differently and intensely. It was also an experience shared in couple. A new routine shared in the micro social scale of the household – in our case the micro scale of a couple. In The Plague’s first chapter Camus states that “[t]he men and women either devour each other rapidly in the so-called act of love or give themselves to a long habit between two.”4 For me one of the consequences of the pandemic was this long strengthening of a habit between two people – a habit of small discoveries. We discovered the successive limits of the city and the park as limit – very specifically in the Blackford Hill park. A park away from the University Hub, away from the Meadows, but that links the suburban city to the outward southern Scottish landscape. Edinburgh is a city that, unlike other cosmopolitan places, didn’t go through a strong fragmentation process – what Thomas Sievert would call the Zwischenstadt. The limits of the city are often very clear and Blackford Hill park is one of these clear limits. It is topographically rich, a high hill with a 360º view to the city on one end, and an embedded stream on the other where one feels kilometres away from the city. Sensorially, the experience was also extreme, from the cold and windy hilltop, to the warm slopes and again the cool and breezy stream. After the first lockdown period I have been in Lisbon – our hometown – where the experience is once more totally different. The climate, the vegetation, and the limits are extremely different. You cannot read the limits. The city is too wide to perceive this.

T: Also, because Edinburgh is a product of its partially built green belt, which conditioned its size and avoided too much urban sprawl, whereas Lisbon continued to grow.

5 In 2017, Edinburgh was considered UK’s ‘most walkable city’. online: https://www. livingstreets.org.uk/news-and-blog/pressmedia/edinburgh-is-most-walkable-city.

6 Rob Walker, ‘The art of noticing: five ways to experience a city differently,’ in The Guardian (2019). online: https://www.theguardian.com/ cities/2019/may/09/the-art-of-noticing-fiveways-to-experience-a-city-differently.

F: Exactly. In Lisbon we have the Monsanto Park, which instead of being the city’s limit, is limited by the city. It works like an island. This place has become our aimed destination in our Lisbon walks – the place to decompress – however to reach it the experience is more disruptive than in Edinburgh. In Edinburgh we walk towards the limit through an intimately scaled fabric, even if homogeneous, whereas in Lisbon we need to walk through five thresholds and several moments of impersonal monumental scale before we reach the park. We need to conquer each barrier and overcome the fear of each limit to reach our aimed destination. It is a broken walk. Walking in Lisbon becomes, then, more intentional again. Wandering is less permitted or afforded. In Edinburgh we walk. We just walk. Not by chance, Edinburgh is considered one of the most walkable cities of the UK. 5 The destination however, both in Lisbon and Edinburgh, is equally rewarding.

Another walking discovery in the pandemic for me is the silence. Just like Rob Walker has stated in ‘The art of noticing’, one of the ways to discover the city creatively is to “follow the quiet”.6 Walker wrote this book in the spring of 2019, one year before the Covid-19 pandemic, and if for him following the quiet was a clear way to discover the city, this principle has become clearer for a wider group of people since March 2020.

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2 WA L K I N G A S M E T R I C S T: I will circle back to something you mentioned about the discovery of some of the values of living in the suburbs, or at least in neighbourhoods that are peripheral to the logic of a centre.7 The suburbs offer de-densification, which became highly (or even more) attractive in the pandemic. It offered a higher capacity for noticing the silence, which in turn has become a new tool to measure space. Silence is no longer a barrier – ‘It’s silent over there, therefore I won’t venture any longer’ – but can be converted into escape – ‘It’s silent, therefore it is safer to walk since there will be nobody to cross paths with.’

When I think of these new metrics, a fundamental difference between European and American suburbia comes to mind: property lines. In Europe, each private lot is usually surrounded by a wall, high fence, or thick green hedge. This sense of privacy, which is not completely isolated but still segregated, is mostly cultural, even though Europe is very diverse, and in the case of the Mediterranean the plot’s closure is also linked to a centennial presence of the Moorish in the territory and protection against the heat. Surely, in the US we can also find that. When the European colonisers took the Americas from the indigenous communities who already lived here, they were reinventing old and diverse models of settlement. But in New England there is a prevailing Anglo-Saxonist puritan inheritance through which the private is less of a physical barrier, even though it is still clearly marked on the ground. The profile of the suburban street is not from wall to wall, but from doorstep to doorstep, including front gardens, sidewalks, strip lawns and road lanes. And the wealthier the neighbourhood the older the street trees.8 Walking down the street feels less like being inside a trench and more of a choreographed succession of gardens, which allows for both a closer contact with seasonal change and the intimacy of the gardens’ caretakers.

The pandemic changed the walking metrics. It added a new circumscription to our uses of space defined, not by interpersonal distances, but health and safety protocols.9 The so-called Covid sphere with its two-metre radius tries to isolate our intimate and personal space from our social space.10 It puts into question Tim Ingold’s wise co-thought that ‘[n]ot only … do we walk because we are social beings, we are also social beings because we walk.’ 11 You also mentioned how the pandemic created ways of walking in defence, defined by choreographies for fear of contamination, according to which we don’t walk towards but away from each other. Walking becomes a choreograph of measuring distances: who is coming from where, who passes first, who changes sides? An alien logic to our social nature, which we have, nevertheless, internalised in record time. Is this fear as strong as our desire to live socially? (As a white man walking in a predominantly white neighbourhood, this walking fear I refer to here is radically different from the experiences African Americans constantly have while walking.12) To those of us who think of the city as an everyday walking practice,13 the Covid bubble with a moving axis becomes a tube. The former comes from health protocols, while the latter is associated with movement. The city can, then, be imagined as a series of intersecting Covid tubes, but whoever is inside never actually touches the others. Talking with you at this crucial moment for humanity – the imminence of a vaccine – I wonder whether our bodies getting virologically apt to resist will be followed by our minds getting fit to fight against the fear from walking socially again.

7 As someone trained in European schools, I always regarded urban sprawl as a territorial problem that should be addressed by densifying life in the urban perimeters. I still think that it is something necessary if we are serious about living sustainably on a planetary scale.

8 Unlike most European countries, the vast majority of public space in the US is maintained by private associations, usually named ‘Friends of’. At the scale of the street, each household is responsible for taking care of the sidewalk strip in front of their private plot. In my walks in Providence, I noticed a direct relationship between the age and quality of street trees and the wealth of the neighbourhood. Street trees are privately planted and maintained. The city has the Providence Neighborhood Planting Program, which supports tree plantation in streets, but it comes with financial strings attached, namely private responsibility to take care of the tree in the first two years.

9 In his 1963’s theory of proxemics – defined as “the interrelated observations and theories of man’s use of space” – anthropologist Edward T. Hall describes four interpersonal human distances, or distances between people: the intimate (1,5ft or 0,45m), the personal (4ft or 1,2m), the social (12ft or 3,6m), and the public (25ft or 7,6m). Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension [1966]. New York: Anchor Books, 1982.

10 Health guidelines find variations in different countries, but they largely fit within the interval between the WHO’s initial recommendation of one meter (3ft) and three meters. As we got to know more about the virus’ spreading behavior most recommendations settled midway. We now have to maintain around us an invisible bubble with two meters in radius, or roughly six feet.

This bubble, which has now been sprayed on public parks, taped on the ground, and painted on the walls, activates new metrical strategies for us to move and use public space. Beyond the more obvious subversion of our public space codes, these metrics affect our intuitive social interactions with nuance, from a newfound discomfort with proximity to complex spatial paranoias.

11 Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst, ‘Introduction,’ in Ways of Walking: Etnography and Practice on Foot, Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst, eds. New York: Routledge, 2016.

A recent article in The New York Times also describes how plants cultivate a sense of social life in community, albeit in a radically different way than humans, or animals more generally. See Ferris Jabr, ‘The Social Life of Forest,’ in The New York Times, 2020. online: https://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2020/12/02/magazine/treecommunication-mycorrhiza.html.

12 See, for example, Garnette Cadogan, ‘Walking While Black,’ in Literary Hub, 2016. online: https://lithub.com/walking-whileblack/.

13 I understand walking here in the way Michel de Certeau describes it as “an everyday practice.” See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1980) Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984

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F: And this fear is a counter force to our natural drive towards a social life. I am also very curious to understand the consequences that this forced resistance to our innate community living will bring, especially to younger generations. This acquired suspicion towards the other can be intrinsically embedded in our minds even beyond the vaccine and this can have a strong impact on our well-being. The fear can unbalance our senses; it can volatise the meaning we give to our lives, and therefore profoundly change the way we see ourselves.

14 Only on December 18th, 2020 did the Portuguese Government announce the precise guidelines for Christmas, which brought about high collective anxiety.

I also find curious the coalescence of two bubbles. Christmas is approaching and we are all discussing and reflecting on the best ways to meet safely. How many bubbles can meet, and under which conditions? How to balance the extreme necessity of being together with the need to be in a safe space? This reflection can bring many tensions, conflicts, and frustrations.14 Under these circumstances, walking has become the only safe way to be nearby my close family who are not part of my intimate safety pod. Walking has become an exercise of drawing parallel tunnels with our feet and minds. A tunnel that is distanced but intimate at the same time, a social proxy. When these two tunnels get close, there is a tension, a nervousness, a timid encounter, that can take ten thousand steps before a conversation begins to flow more naturally. Fear can be stronger and block a spontaneous conversation. Walking has then become a metric tool to recover meaningful social encounters, especially if long enough to allow for a truthful exercise of listening where conversations can go beyond practical aspects of life and step in the core realms.

T: That is a beautiful if daunting metric metaphor: ten thousand steps to regain intimacy. As well as the fact that some tubes are not only side by side, but they are also attracted to each other.

Yet, this social proxy does not resolve a fundamental tactile need we have of touching, hugging, kissing each other.

F: The magnetic attraction towards the other becomes more apparent when we become aware of the brain strength that is necessary to resist it. Our whole body, our sensorial and cognitive capacities must be re-geared to resist proximity, such is the strength of this innate drive.

T: It is important for me to listen to you talking about this, because I haven’t been able to be with my family or my old ‘hugging’ friends ever since the pandemic started. In my family there is always an enormous temptation for people to be really close to each other, it is a natural part of our family behaviour especially with kids, as I’m sure is the case with a lot of people. Taking ten thousand steps to regain something that vaguely resembles the intimacy one had pre-Covid is fascinating and worrying.

15 Miguel Torga, Diário XII. Coimbra, my translation. Coimbra, 1977, 25–26

F: Still in relation to metrics, Miguel Torga writes: The man who flies measures the world in a different way. What is the perspective that I could take from Africa if I had walked it at the crab’s rhythm? The entire life would not be enough to mark in it half a dozen coordinates. But like this, in one glance I encompass the infinite grandeur of this feverish and sleepy body, at the same time naked and raped. A body where high hills and infinite mountain ranges become insignificant wrinkles and endless flowy rivers look like bloodless veins. Even the fact that I can look at this from ten thousand metres high, comfortably seated in a chair and with air conditioning, makes my observations more significant. I compare two realities: the one I belong to, almost angelical because so abstract, and the one down below, earthly, larval. (…) What denudation has to go through the European to return to the decency of the hut!15 Just like for Torga, and contrary to the abstractness of the experience of flying that is increasingly difficult today, Covid-19 seems to have brought us back to the concreteness of the humble house and the humble details of life.

T: Walking brings situated comprehension across multiple scales. Flying gives us a sense of scale that we can’t have with walking, but with walking we understand a certain set of scales that is simply invisible to the logic of flying. If walking is our slowest movement and flying the fastest, there is a speed spectrum that activates and deactivates all the scales in between.

With flying increasingly distant, the hyperlocal dominates our imaginaries: we have new stories, memories, scents, temperatures, etc. This is a new way of measuring space that was dormant before.

F: Your relationship with your neighbourhood becomes your centre.

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3 WA L K I N G A S P R AC T I C E T: Walking complements the understanding of my own practice.16 Old ways of walking, once dormant to most and now reactivated, can be tools to practice with the landscape. I’ve become more invested in the idea of the ‘professional walker’. What even is a professional walker?

Without bodily constraints, everyone walks. Yes, a physiotherapist can be, in ways, considered a professional on walking, but not a professional walker. Yet, professional walkers did exist in the past. Usually also troubadours, they walked from town to town, telling stories and spreading news. In some cultures they were, and still are, nomadic travellers on foot, storytellers and network creators.17 Walking the same routes, over and again, is almost like tracing lines on a paper that follow each other but never completely overlap. As we weave through the neighbourhood, we become knowledgeable, and internalise minute details about positions, changes, temporalities, without the need of a teacher, or a cartesian map, physical or digital. Walking as iteration means that every day we learn, synthesise and forget something new, and it is in that sense that I think of eventually new professional walkers.

Walking like this creates a map of oscillating lines, a map of vibrations, that I imagine as rhizomes of brain cells.18 I argue that this type of map is very different from the cartesian logic of knowing a territory. It is a map made of walking, like Guy Debord’s Discours sur les Passions de L’amour of 1957 or Richard Long’s 1984 A Seven Day Circle of Ground. When I imagine the map that we have been walking daily in Providence’s East Side, I begin to animate our constant weaving – one more block, one more street, one more park.

Both Lisbon and Edinburgh are topographical cities, and so is Providence.19 We live on Mount Hope’s hill crest, a threshold between the wealthier neighbourhoods to the east and the traditionally African American community on Mount Hope to the west. Walking westwards is a steep slope exposed to the prevailing southwest winds and cut by strip malls and the noisy I95 highway. Walking eastwards is a gentle slope to the Blackstone River, along which there is a long and heavily used boulevard. 20 Going downhill to this side one feels a microclimatic protection creeping up our bodies: warmer in the cold winter for it is wind shielded, and cooler in the hot summer afternoons for it is facing east. More humid in general as we walk down the valley and synchronised to micro-seasonal surface drainage, blooming and then blossoming, tender light and shade.

When we began walking everything was a surprise, but as months went by, we became professional walkers of this neighbourhood, or so I like to think. Our bodies turned into finetuned moving weather stations with thermometers, anemometers, and hygrometers. We don’t usually use our bodies as such, but we can. Fieldwork professionals, hikers, sailors, the military do it, and so can we. I always assumed I was a landscape architect without such wonderful capacities, undoubtedly useful in landscape surveys, but I do have them by walking. My topographical and geographical knowledge of this neighbourhood is rather deep, without ever having studied any of the maps where that information lies. And this, I would argue, is as valid a form of practicing.

16 Practicing here is not necessarily regarded as proposition, but more as ways of knowing, an ethics and an aesthetics of contemplation.

17 In Europe these walkers were also pilgrims in times where most villagers did not leave town. In Africa, for example, they still exist.

The Tuaregs are a culture of desert travellers who come to the city gates with their products and stories. They travel mostly on camel, but the logic is the same.

18 This reminds me of Eric Fischer’s Geotaggers’ World Atlas, a data visualisation project through which he creates city maps with the help of geodata from digital photos we take with our phones, and then drawing lines between different photo locations.

Eric Fischer. Geotaggers’ World Atlas, 2015. online: https://blog.flickr.net/en/2015/05/14/ eric-fischers-marvelous-maps/.

19 The perception one gets in topographical cities is obviously very different from flat cities. I lived in Berlin, a plateau city, and I was constantly lost. After a year I still carried a small map with me. And going on top of a former bunker after a few months of getting lost, both spatially and in translation, was revelatory. (And the only reason I don’t get lost in New York is the grid.) Providence’s hills are not as pronounced as in Lisbon or dramatic as in Edinburgh, but they organize the city: universities on College Hill, residential on Mount Hope, the State on Smith Hill, the huge Italian American communities traditionally on Federal Hill, now also a busy hub.

20 Blackstone Boulevard reminds me of Europe’s eighteenth and nineteenth century public spaces built for one to see and be seen. These were spaces of social encounter with rigid rules of behaviour. Blackstone Boulevard is in many ways similar to Lisbon’s Campo Grande, both from the late nineteenth century.

F: I think that knowing by walking is a fascinating exercise. Especially because it is not actively searched for, but it happens. You are confronted with the reality and therefore with new knowledge. Whether cities are planned or grow spontaneously, they end up captured as figureground plans. This representation is rather meaningless if one cannot know it experientially. It is via walking, this other possibility, that the city is understandable on a more profound level. You can then understand why a particular neighbourhood is situated precisely there. You need layers and layers of walking to reach that profound level of understanding. In Edinburgh for example, there are streets where there isn’t a single house or flat for sale, possibly because whoever lives on those streets understands that they have reached the perfect setting. In a windy and cold city, a protected and sunny street is highly prized. It becomes an impenetrable fort and we, as immigrants, will not have easy access to these places. We almost need three or four generations to secure these places for our families. These hierarchies of the city are only known when you walk them.

21 The protection of this place has meant a decade-long ideological struggle where success was eventually achieved, even if not in full, since the corridor has several extractions and cuts. It was a fierce struggle between an ecological thinking and a corporate one; fierce not in the sense of being violent but persistent. Ribeiro Telles was a well-humoured but resilient man and that is at the base of the protection of this place.

During this period, both in Edinburgh and Lisbon, but especially in the latter, I rediscovered a renewed attention to vegetation. The capacity to know that, say, in the fourth week of February the magnolia in my neighbour’s garden will blossom. The capacity to steal with the eyes someone else’s tree. In Lisbon I became acquainted with Monsanto’s green corridor, an ecological fringe that took forty years to fully protect thanks to the work of the recently late Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles. 21 New vegetation was established and planted recently along this corridor, precisely at a time when the summers in Portugal are becoming increasingly torrid, a situation that has led to a fire management crisis. As a landscape architect, the observation of

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this vegetation becomes a way of knowing. Which plants survive? Which plants do not resist?

This is a species-by-species field observation through which I learn which ones have the capacity to reach the soil’s deeper layers, with higher humidity, and by doing this, may grow straight even in the most adverse environments. In walking I have become a fan of the strawberry tree – Arbutus unedo – which can survive straight under the most severe conditions; a symbol of an equal resilience that can mean the survival of a Mediterranean landscape on the threshold of desertification. The awareness of what kind of vegetation can safeguard our soils without access to artificial irrigation can be a key understanding of how to avoid the expanse of the desert.

Our combined thoughts have also made me remember our Orlando Ribeiro, whom we greatly admire, and who was a keen walker and scientist who gathered knowledge of the world by walking the landscape. The ritual and repeated walks that bring awareness.

T: Yes, Orlando Ribeiro deserves a proper introduction at the end of our conversation.

His seminal geography was made by walking for observational landscape fieldwork and ethnography. But he was also one of the first geographers to ever understand the importance of not only borders and boundaries – something crucial in geography, geology, geo-ecology – but also contact gradients that result from overlaps between different zones, eco-sociocultural tones if we may. 22 I could risk it and say that he was arguably one of the most influential European geo-ethnographers of the twentieth century. And all of this with constant and relentless walking. He was, indeed, a professional walker.

22 Orlando Ribeiro first theorised the notion of contact zones with his seminal work, as a student and young geographer of Portugal’s Serra da Arrábida, and later on inland regions in the country, such as Beira Baixa.

O

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Curbside dining during Covid-19 pandemic.

Brooklyn, New York, 2020

p ho t o by G a r y H e

c u rb si de effect jongwan kw on Curbsides are the hotspots amid lockdown. The mundane peripheries in each city block have grown busier during the Covid-19 pandemic because of the unprecedented demands for takeout, outdoor dining, drive-through and online delivery services, while other parts of the city are mostly deserted and silent.

This development has brought solace in the times of indefinite quarantine as curbsides lend themselves to the public and to local businesses. Almost no shops and restaurants would have survived otherwise, and more people would have left the cities for cheaper and safer places. The extensive use of curbsides, crossing between borderlines, is one of the side effects, so to speak, of the new habit of social distancing. In light of the impact, we see the possibility of curbside recast as a flexible infrastructure that responds to new civic demands.

Though the curbside inherently derives from a curb, it identifies differently from its stem. A curb is an immobile artefact that demarcates a closed line that explicitly splits the ground into two surfaces to control various types of flows, including cars, bicycles, pedestrians, fresh water, and sewage. A curbside, on the contrary, is closer to an atmosphere set by parallel offsets from a line marked on a single master plan. Despite its existence everywhere, the curbside is treated as a non-site with indifference — it presents puddles, leaves, and garbage. Because of their ambiguity, curbsides primarily foster extra distancing, in perception, between the binaries divided by the centre line: safe and dangerous; slow and fast; clean and dirty; dry and wet.

U S Po s ta l M us e um , S m it hs o nia n I ns t it ut e

The curbside snorkel chute mailbox in New York, 1953, was an attempt to overcome the separation from the curb by allowing motorists to drop off their mail without getting out of their vehicle.

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J o s e ph B y ro n ph o to gra ph e r. c o u rte s y T h e L i bra ry o f C o ng r e ss

Children playing along the street gutter next to a horse carcass in New York City, circa 1900. People used to live next to piles of muck and dead animals; the street gutters were one of New York’s first pieces of sanitary infrastructure after the Department of Sanitation was established.

i mgu r.c o m

Standard section of a street of Berlin, Germany in 1896. Conduits for telephone, electricity, gas, sewage, and tap water are hidden under, while the water catchbasin lies between the street and sidewalk.

The emergence of curbside signs.

Collage on a sketch from Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown published in 1972.

A rc h i te c t u ra l A rc h i v e s o f t he U nive r s it y o f Pe nns y lv a nia

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J o ng w a n Kw a n

Curbside signs found in 2020 during Covid-19 pandemic

If the curb is a line with exactitude, the curbside materialises as a smudge – an imprecise edge space that provides leeway for improvisation. Soon after city officials in New York City and other North American cities announced new curbside occupation in order to de-densify streets, a network of chairs and tables oozed into the streets for offsite activities such as outdoor dining and open-air pickup, liberating curbsides from the curbs and fusing seemingly incompatible surfaces. New ‘Curbside Pickup’ and ‘Curbside Only’ signs not only cast away curbsides’ ambiguities and configure destination points that people can navigate and inhabit throughout, but they also effect the anomalous conversion of the banal and residual corridor into a programmable platform. These ad hoc signs present a new form of urbanism in which the storefront is conceived as a wall rather than a threshold, and the curbside in front becomes a flexible room tethered to the inaccessible architecture. Perhaps the public arteries in our cities’ new Nolli maps would have been shown thicker than before because of the extensive use of curbsides.

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Often, the crisis of contagious diseases provokes a force of permanent transformation in both modern and contemporary streets. As much as the urban streets have a long history of dealing with public sanitation and health, the relationship with the epidemic is not new. Before current curbs, New York City had deep gutters in streets to combat a cholera pandemic outbreak in the late 19th century. They separated horse manure and impure water from the ground above. Similar to how the gutter’s apparent divide evolved into a shallow stepped curb in modern streets with conduits and machines etched, the curb line is functionally diminished during the Covid-19 pandemic. We now experience how city-owned property downplays itself as a separator and becomes the mediator between private and public spheres partly operated and managed by various private entities. Is this possibly a glimpse into the forthcoming chapter of the urban streetscape? What would the great modernists like Corbusier and Hilberseimer say about the furnished streets?

Would the urban theorist Jane Jacobs have enjoyed more eyeson-the-street and the smallness that the city is offering? Should planners and officials revisit the design tool kits from various architects and designers in the 1990s and 2000s who took the prevailing urban condition as a subject to tinker? Nonetheless, the pandemic crisis demonstrates to cities that fixity is not guaranteed and maintenance is not the answer. In fact, most of the new curbside usages are self-emerged and self-organised without highlevel design or physical transformation, powered instead by the reorienting of our perspective toward adaptation and the paying of more attention to contemporary cultural values of sharing and mutual interest to support local businesses and the neighbourhood.

Jong w a n Kw a n

J o ng w a n Kw a n

The recent unmasking of curbsides’ banalities confronts urban dwellers’ routines, normative forms of practices, codes and classifications, and it discloses fundamental flaws of current city operation. The double entendre of the curbside — that is, a side of the road and a side of the sidewalk — yields to local businesses taking over curbsides, thus reshaping parts of the city more accessible and inclusive. This unexpected phenomenon motivates us to critically examine how the curbside was used, or not used, as inhabitable public space and an independent urban fabric over the past century. Although it would be easy to overlook the curbside reverting to a desolate place holding garbage collection points, fire hydrants, and inlets when the pandemic ends, it might be best to take the rare opportunity and allow the status quo to serve as potential paradigm shifts. As the phenomenon and our assimilation continue to unfold, I say, we need more curbside effects.

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M inin g the e d g e

Fie ldw o rk t raci ng bo und a r i es of th e J ew i sh E r u v piper bernbaum

Although the Eruv is a physical boundary, it is outrageously humble in its physical manifestation. The Eruv’s materiality is its greatest strength, and its greatest weakness. The Eruv is made of everyday materials – fishing line, zip ties, wood posts, 2x4’s, string, wire – items that are bestowed with significance when put together. These spaces are made for the community by the community itself; the Eruv is resourceful, and its manifestations are endlessly fascinating.

I spend most my time these days looking up, and I mean literally.

Tracing the edges of cities and communities, I am constantly looking for a glimmer of fishing line or string cutting across the sky. My main subject of research, but also long burning obsession, has been seeking out an elusive, symbolic and subtle object: the boundaries of the Jewish Eruv.

The Eruv (literally translates to mixing/mingling) is an orthodox religious practice that is a symbolic extension of the home into the public domain of a city, creating a symbolic private realm. The space itself is physical, yet, embedded in its surroundings. Written into the Talmud as a Jewish law, the Eruv is a ‘loophole’, and defined as a legal fiction 1 – an assertion accepted as true. The Eruv law allows leniencies to individuals to break certain rules on the sabbath in order to do work – like carry a child, push a stroller, or even carry a prayer book – so long as you are within the Eruv boundary, which would otherwise be forbidden on the sabbath/day of rest. Eruvin (plural) introduce a multiplicity to urban environments – spaces that are typically mundane to most are bestowed with a symbolic meaning and significance to others. The consequence of the Eruv is the formation of community, one where all its inhabitants can participate in its midst, religious or not.

For five years, the Eruv has been synonymous with field work for me – I have been dedicated to what I call “Eruv hunting” in my spare time, in any and every city I visit. What became so compelling about the Eruv for me as an architect was its inherent urban quality – it defines space, it makes ‘place’, it embeds itself in its surroundings, and it represents its context. It can be a small-scale space that is a portion of a city (Kitchener, Buffalo or Ottawa for example), or it can surround an entire city and even its suburbs (like Toronto, or Boston). It can span great distances, it can run parallel to streets or waterways, or it can cut across civic space. The Eruv, seemingly, has great flexibility, and more importantly, great permeability.

1 Marcus Jastrow, Sefer Ha-milim: Dictionary of the Targumim, Talmud Bavli, Talmud Yerushalmi, and Midrashic Literature. New York: Judaica Treasury, 2004. p 1075 2 Sophie Calle, L’Erouv de Jerousalem. Actes Sud, 2002

above: Eruv hunting right: Symbolic comoponents of the house

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My field work on these spaces began in a place of disbelief. How can a boundary like this exist? The fact that it was fabricated of such mundane materials had me questioning its actual existence. I had to go see it myself, and understand how a boundary, so permeable and gentle, could also be so meaningful and powerful. The material manifestation of Eruvin is one of simplicity, ease of construction and accessibility which allows the Eruv to not only be a symbolic space, but also a tool of community building that can be both an architecture of necessity and an architecture of power. I had seen only a single photograph of the Eruv when I first stumbled upon the topic during my graduate studies. A pole, standing stark in contrast to the surrounding landscape, with wire strong across the top and leading out both sides of the image. The photograph, by artist Sophie Calle, was taken in Jerusalem and made the Eruv look like a statue in the landscape.2 This image sat with me – the object itself was too unbelievable to be true but represented the physical essence of how the Eruv is defined. The construction of the Eruv physically represents the simplified components of a house to make a figurative private space in the public domain. The posts of an Eruv represent walls, the space between posts represent openings, and the fishing line or cable that runs across the top is the edge and the roofline. When you are within the Eruv, you are under a unified roof, a shared household for an entire community.

Eruvin exist throughout North America and have served diaspora communities who, once they immigrated, were faced with finding new ways to maintain traditions while assimilating into society.

The Eruv, an answer to these immigrant communities, offered a flexibility in already built and well-established cities. So, off I went to Kitchener, the closest publicly recorded Eruv to where I was living in Cambridge Ontario, to start my Eruv Hunting and seek out these markers. I needed to see these things outside of the context of Jerusalem’s rolling desert hills.

above: Kitchener: Eruv sketch below: Community Accessible map of the Kitchener Eruv, courtesy of the Beth Jacob Congregation website more below: a variety of Kitchener’s Lechi posts

Upon arrival, and with a map that I had found online through Kitchener’s synagogue, I assumed I would find the Eruv quickly and be on my way. However, when I walked the line, and followed the community-accessible map of the boundary, I saw nothing. I looked up and down, I traced back and forth on the same streets, and nothing. No poles. No fishing lines. I walked the entire length of the boundary, photographing my meandering, only to be disappointed at every turn that nothing stood out to me. The Eruv seemed evasive, and I started to believe this may be a practice of blind faith.

It was only upon returning home and reviewing my photographs that I saw something standing out in my field work documentation.

At the bottom of telephone posts I saw re-occurring 2x4s, cut down to about a metre in height and zip-tied onto the base of the posts. They seemed out of place, yet hardly noticeable, hiding in plain sight. With further research I discovered this was called a lechi or doorpost, used on the corners of streets where the Eruv would bend; subtly identifying an enclosure and its entrances. In front of my eyes, I had wandered in and out of the Eruv space without any knowledge, the border camouflaged like leftover construction material on the side of the road. I was, truthfully, in awe and all of a sudden saw the streets through a new lens.

Two things became immediately evident about the Eruv: 1) the Eruv is made of simple, accessible materials that could be bought from almost any basic hardware store, and 2) that the Eruv uses its context and embeds itself in its surroundings. Inherently, the Eruv is resourceful, and this is how it protects itself. The Eruv uses the city to build itself. It can take advantage of the cityscape and bestow new meaning to the everyday. For example, in London Ontario, highway barriers are used to define the Eruv edges, in Manhattan light posts become the symbolic walls, in Boston even trees are given a new multiplicity to their role in the city with fishing line drilled into the trunks with eye-hooks. By using the surroundings and taking advantage of the basic architectonics of a city, the Eruv can be fabricated, so long as it is connected in its entirety. The value of the Eruv is not in its sophistication, but rather in its accessibility.

To patch and mend and connect these urban conditions, simple materials like the 2x4s in Kitchener can be used to complete the symbolic circle. Approachability is key – the Eruv would not exist unless it could be built by the everyday citizen. This is part of what makes it a loophole – the definitions in the Talmud of what makes a private or public domain are unclear, and so communities have interpreted texts to suit their needs and their abilities. The fact that the materials used for the Eruv are so commonplace, and so unrefined, means that it could be built and serve a community easily and quickly. I was surprised to find that this is not a top-down architecture, but rather, a grass roots kind of structure.

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After Kitchener, I travelled throughout North America (Vancouver, Quebec, Ontario, Massachusetts, New York) and to Europe to find the Eruv. And practically every time, I could not locate the Eruv easily, just like in Kitchener, even with my new knowledge. The Eruv is not an ostentatious artefact – its value and its survival in urban contexts is through its ability to blend in. So, it figures that I couldn’t find it - really, it’s not meant to be found. The physical entity of the Eruv serves to make a boundary, yes, but its value is in its symbolic significance. It would be later when speaking with a Rabbi in Buffalo New York, that I would learn even that the community members who use the Eruv do not know what it is made of. He asked me, “Why would they need to know? They just need to know it exists, where the boundaries are and that it is complete”. Something about this resonated with me strongly – as an architect I was desperate to know what the Eruv was built from, what guided its existence, what the materials meant, how it was maintained. In the end, the Eruv was not about what, it was about why. The Eruv provides; it is not ornamental, it is not even complex in its form, it simply allows.

The Eruv allows freedom, leniencies, assimilation, tradition, and simplicity. The Eruv is a privilege of practice and community that is entirely founded on multiplicity of materials and space.

The entire premise of the Eruv goes back to its translation as a mixing/mingling space. As a symbolic private domain, the Eruv is an architecture of borrowing. It borrows objects and artefacts to build its boundary — fences, highway dividers, roadways, train tracks, waterfronts, telephone posts— but it also borrows space.

For an Eruv to be established, it actually leases space from the city in order to rent out the private domain. A symbolic rent is paid, a contract is drawn up, and the Jewish communities can use the space in controlled and agreed-upon circumstances, building their boundaries under the eye of the city. This lease, however symbolic, goes straight to the core of the Eruv – it is a boundary that is undetectable, it is a boundary that can be crossed over, it is a space where anyone can mingle. And in fact, its value is found in the mixing of things – of materials, of people, of communities. Without the existence of the urban material fabric, or the established communities, the Eruv could not exist. It relies on the infrastructures of society. The Eruv is not owned space, it is borrowed. The Eruv is not territorial, it is negotiated space.

Borrowing becomes key in so many ways within the Eruv – it leans on existing contexts and materials, but it also leans on the community.

It borrows time, it borrows skill, it borrows input to become a thoughtful and resourceful boundary line. Its materials are the triumph to me – I have seen Eruvin made of wood boards, out of string or ribbon, from metal or wood posts tacked onto buildings to simple hooks connected to streetlights to allow for a strong rope or wire to be guided through. The Eruv really isn’t a boundary but is rather an edge. Crossing into the space will be insignificant to most, but for a few it is an acknowledgement of a much broader community working together and living among others. For me, each time, it was a little triumph to find something so subtle and discrete, celebrating the architectures designed by people for people; a resiliency within the contemporary world.

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Fieldwork photographs of the many material manifestations of the Eruv

Korah rooflines

Mechitsot walls

Lechi Door Posts

Tzurat Hapesach gates

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Most my time in the first years of my research on the Eruv focused on Eruvin of Jewish communities in the Diaspora throughout North America. And time and time again, the resourcefulness was a means of survival for the Eruv and reflects the stories of those communities. It was only years later when working on a grant overseas that a new view of the Eruv appeared on my radar. I arrived at the same desert hills that Sophie Calle has photographed, and I stood in Jerusalem seeing the Eruv that bordered the Holy City.

Like that first photograph, I found posts standing alone against the yellow rock and meandering hills with a clear and evident wire spanning across the crisp sky to another post. The Eruv was certainly on display in ways that I had never experienced in North America, its edge more evident. Its prominence in the landscape was confusing to me because the Eruv had always been so humble in my previous encounters. Here, it stood out, ambiguous but prominent. It still has an appearance of urban refuse in many ways – like something left over that was never collected. In Jerusalem, these boundaries are an unclear and confusing meandering of lines and posts and wires. Many strings cut; many Eruv boundaries incomplete... I had trouble tracing the line that would surround a community.

In a series of conversations, I was informed of a few things.

The first, is that Jerusalem has one large Eruv that is coordinated by the city and rabbinic authorities and surrounds the city in almost its entirety. The second, is that many communities do not trust the completeness of this boundary and have built, and keep building, new boundaries that overlap and multiply in order to maintain religious law. And lastly, that these Eruvin I had first stumbled upon in Jerusalem were a form of rogue community Eruvin (for which a small number exist).

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above: Jerusalem city Eruv map below: Remnant Eruv posts from the ‘Eruv Wars’ in Jerusalem, near Mount Herzl

The Eruv had never been described in such a way to me. ‘Rogue’ immediately felt like guerrilla architecture, and contrary to my experience in North America where the Eruv always appeared humble yet extremely calculated. But here, there is a nuanced meaning to the material manifestation of the Eruv that goes beyond spiritual or symbolic space into possessive space. In a place where Jewish people are not a minority, the Eruv has become a battle between the different Jewish sects, rather than a quiet pluralistic settling of a community amongst others. In certain circumstances, the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities have slowly begun to use the Eruv as a means to claim territory in secular Jewish neighbourhoods. Inciting what has become dubbed as ‘Eruv Wars’ in the city, these community Eruvin get torn down and put up by battling sides, attempting to stake claim over a neighbourhoods’ religious identity.

The Eruvin in Jerusalem, specifically these rogue community Eruvin, don’t embed themselves in the same manner as the others I had seen. They were superimposed onto the context, some spray painted, many non-functional but still standing with strings blowing in the wind. They felt like leftover flag posts remaining from an attempt to stake a claim on land. The Eruv Wars, now at a standstill, were a push and pull between secular and religious communities.

And because of its material simplicity, it could be just that – a tool of power instead of a tool of community. And this is the unbelievable and yet incredible power of self-made architectures – they can be deployed at ease with different ambitions in mind. Communities have built Eruvin in Jerusalem as if they were patching torn fabric redundant boundaries overlaid and incomplete in order to provide a significance of a space for religious use. Unfortunately, the value of the Eruv is lost in its material manifestation – it becomes instead leftovers and artefacts of a fraught landscape. The Eruv becomes a guise for these territorial markers – they are not mixing or mingling spaces, or spaces of multiplicity. Just leftover materials that tarnish the landscape.

The Eruv is a reminder that boundaries are never neutral in their existence. However, there is a lightness to all this – to see the power a group has in building a sense of community, and that in the circumstance of the Eruv, can be done with respect and care. The Eruv offers many lessons in the world of boundaries, and perhaps the most important is that of plurality and multiplicity. The Eruv is only successful when it negotiates its existence, when it urges mingling instead of separation. The Eruv’s materiality, as stated before, is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. It is an example of a truly open kind of architecture and boundary, but just like anything, can be abused in its humble qualities. But there is no doubt that the Eruv is a form of empowerment, putting the interests of the community in the hands of its members. My time pursuing field work, and still doing so, on these edges has been fulfilling. The Eruv markers, be they modest or territorial, have significance tied to them. The most mundane of materials become the most basic architectonic form – and for me, they each hold a story.

O from the top: Community-scale Eruvin in a religious neighbourhoods in and outside Jerusalem Eruv running parallel to a highway in the Northern Negev Desert

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My work on the Eruv, which is an ongoing project, has slowly turned fieldnotes and photography into an active growing atlas on the Eruvin in the world. With written stories, interviews and anecdotes, these mapped boundaries begin to question the different scales of community.

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calls for articles o n si te r e vi e w 3 9: too l s

o n si te r e v i ew 4 0 : th e a rc h i te c t’s l i b ra r y

A summer issue: a collection of the most beautiful, most useful or the most ingenious tools that you have actually used.

We would like to ask you, as an architect, designer, landscape architect, urbanist or engineer, what your relationship is to books in general and your books in particular.

What is a tool? A device that aids in some task: a hammer hammers in a nail, as does a rock. Or, at the end of some other axis, a book is a tool that unlocks a world. Is a tape measure a tool? yes. Is a brush? a telescope?

Josh Silver’s adjustable glasses? absolutely.

Is this a tool from Home Hardware, or is this Seamus Heaney’s father’s spade? There is quite a bit of latitude here.

Is it passive or active? Do you still use your books, or do you circumvent them with wikipedia and downloads?

Where are your books? on shelves? in boxes? all over the floor? What is the material world of your books — the shelves, the bookcases, the room(s) in which they live?

Do you buy books, or do you consider the library as the site of your books?

And beauty is not an aesthetic qualification in this — beauty is very much in the eye and hand of the beholder: the knife in the box you always use, the pen that fits your hand, the notebook that fits your pocket. There is something in the perfect fit that defines the relationship between body, task and the intermediary.

On Site review 40: the architect’s library will be a perpetual work in progress, laid out and published as pieces come in. It will also work in conjunction with Architecture & Reading in Crisis, a project of city | speculations. https://www.cityspeculations.com/

Lots of different kinds of things work for us, please send a photograph of the object itself, and/or the object in use. Support text minimal, much as in the summer drawing issue of 2020. We really just want to look at things.

Think about the page, 9 x 13” and how you might fill it: what do you want us to see and know about this object?

Ideas please by March 1, 2021 Use our contact link: www.onsitereview.ca/contact-us Final submission materials due June 1, 2021 Remember, we are a journal about architecture, landscape, infrastructure, urban design, all as conducted materially on site.

If books have played a role in your development and your continued practice, we would like to hear about it.

To get you thinking, here are two essays about books, reading, place and time: first, a beautiful essay, recommended by Ella Chmielewska, is ‘The Drowned Library (Reflections on Found, Lost, and Translated Books and Languages)’

by Anton Shammas. There is a free download here: https://levantinejournal.org/product/drowned-library-reflections-found-lost-translatedbooks-languages/ The second is Nicole Raziya Fong’s ‘On the Alchemy of Fields’, in The Capilano Review, Fall 2020. https://thecapilanoreview.com/nicole-raziyafong-on-the-alchemy-of-fields Neither of these are by architects or designers, but they talk about books as material objects, as magical stories, as things that slip forwards and back in translation: not just linguistic, but translation between phases of a life, between studies, between changes of profession, country, states of being.

They move the personal from something inwardly looking and private, to something that reaches outward.

We can all write about such things because we all have a life, a past, and a present —sometimes not too clear until you start to write it down and then patterns form, memories surface. So go to it! Let’s hear about the architect’s library.

specifications: word count: aim for 2000 words images: as ultimately this will go to print, images should be sent as 300dpi jpgs, with full photo credits and permission to publish for any images not your own. to send your proposal, any time, use our contact link: www.onsitereview.ca/contact-us This call for articles will run for a year, submissions will be added to the online publication as they come in. If you need a hard deadline for proposals, make it May 1, 2021. Earlier is better though, as it gives you more time to write your article / essay / photo-essay, or to make your video, or to design a library.

ON SITE r e v i e w on s i te r e vi e w 38 : bo rder s a nd breache s WI N T ER 2020 /21 On Site review is published by Field Notes Press, which promotes field work in matters architectural, cultural and spatial.

F I E L D

N O T E S For any and all inquiries, please use the contact form at www.onsitereview.ca/contact-us Canada Post agreement 40042630 ISSN 1481-8280 copyright: On Site review. All rights reserved.

The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded or otherwise stored in a retrieval system without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of Copyright Law Chapter C-30, RSC1988. back issues: https://issuu.com/onsitereview/docs editor: Stephanie White design: Black Dog Running printer: Emerson Clarke Printing, Calgary distribution: online: onsitereview.ca print: onsitereview.ca/contact-us On Site review 38: borders and breaches was put together on unceded Coast Salish territory, specifically the traditional territory of the Snuneymuxw Peoples, now crossed by many borders, roads and boundaries, laid down in an illegitimate acquisition of land. It was not ours to inscribe.

I acknowledge this.

co n tr i b u to r s to th i s i ssu e Piper Bernbaum 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.

Lawrence Bird works as an urban designer at Sputnik Architecture in Winnipeg. His artwork has been supported by several Canada Council for the Arts research/creation grants in media art. He is co-editor of the forthcoming book Warming Huts for Dalhousie Architectural Press. https://umanitoba.ca/architecture/lawrence-bird Fionn Byrne (@fionn_byrne) teaches at the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of British Columbia (@ubcsala) in Vancouver. He can be found online at fionn-byrne.com.

Mingjia Chen is interested in analysing the performative nature of the found landscape.

Wandering in Vancouver’s ‘non-backbones’ (for example, streets one block off a busy arterial, underused parks, or ‘slower than what google suggested’ routes). Intrigued by these spaces’ potential to initiate actions/performance by visitors that constantly tell and record stories, he captures his own performance in the form of photos, films and small chunks of text. Mingjia currently works as a junior landscape designer at Hapa Collaborative.

Andrey Chernykh is a landscape architect and urbanist based in Toronto. His creative work explores research, visual representation, placemaking, writing and design thinking as tools that aim to strengthen connections between us and landscapes we inhabit. andrey-chernykh.squarespace.com Diana Guo is a student designer interested in creating sensory atmospheres through storytelling and poetry and believes in the soft power that stories can bring. She hopes to further explore the translation of personal narratives into immersive public spaces to incite awareness, emotion, and social change. Prior to landscape architecture at the Harvard GSD, she studied fine arts at Vassar with painting/collage as her primary medium. Moving forward, she will continue researching themes of biopolitics and inclusion/exclusion in design practice and art.

Jiahui Huang has a Master’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of British Columbia and works at Gauthier + Associates Landscape Architects Inc. in Vancouver. She can be found online at https://jhuang5602.wixsite.com/website.

Jongwan Kwon is an architectural designer, researcher, and educator. He has been teaching at Rhode Island School of Design since 2017 and focuses on the postinfrastructural environment.

Francisca Lima is a landscape designer and lecturer at Edinburgh College of Art, where she teaches history and theory of landscape architecture, and directs the MLA program.

In 2016, she obtained her PhD from the University of Edinburgh, which examined the impacts of depopulation on urban landscapes and urban dwellers’ perceptions. mfml.wordpress.com Connor O’Grady is an Instructor of design, drawing and digital practice at Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism, Carleton University. He has recently established COCOLLAB, an Experimental Design Practice focusing on intersections between research and construction. His article is based on his Waterloo MArch Thesis Dissertation, supervised by Philip Beesley.

Evelyn Osvath holds an MArch from Bauhaus University, Weimar and currently works as an architect in Leipzig, Germany. In her research projects she focuses on a deeper understanding of architecture, politics and philosophy.

Tiago Torres-Campos is a Portuguese landscape architect and associate professor at Rhode Island School of Design, as well as the MLA program director. He co-edited Postcards from the Anthropocene. Unsettling the Geopolitics of Representation.

Barcelona: dpr-barcelona, 2021, and is doing a PhD, through which he explores architecture and landscape as conditions of the geologic. www.cntxtstudio.com

ON SITE r e v i e w borders and br eaches

38: 2021