Facing Two
Carpenters built this 800-sf workshop in the Ogwuyo neighborhood of Ebenebe-Anam over five days using $500 worth of materials. Left New Anam School, a collaboration with creative think tank DSGN AGNC, was one of the seed projects developed for Anam City, the Chife Foundation’s open-source new town initiative in Eastern Nigeria, 2010-2012. Indoor/outdoor classrooms integrate the buildings into a K-12 learning landscape tuned for seasonal flooding.
DK: Yes. Throughout the pandemic our government has shown that it values money over human life. It is also about individuality versus collective life and health, and the extreme polarization of political, social, and cultural views in this country. People of privilege don’t have to acknowledge injustice because they typically don’t witness it firsthand and don’t want to see it because it will ruin their comfortable repose or expose their selfish attitudes. RB: They are properly “socially distanced.”
DK Osseo-Asare DK Osseo-Asare is co-founder of Low Design Office (LOWDO), which is based in Austin and Tema, Ghana, and an assistant professor of architecture and engineering at Penn State, where he directs the Humanitarian Materials Lab. The following conversation between Osseo-Asare and his LOWDO partner, Ryan Bollom, AIA, has been edited for clarity and length.
Ryan Bollom: We are in the midst of a historic moment where architectural practice is forced to dramatically change. First the pandemic and now the social upheaval of the Black Lives Matter movement. I know you are interested in the system that perpetuates these issues. Can you explain the systematic problems the upheaval points to as it relates to architecture?
RB: A more holistic approach to life that places some form of currency toward social, cultural, and environmental issues. We need to refocus our culture and economy to respect the things that support quality of life.
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IMAGES COURTESY LOWDO
DK Osseo-Osare: While architecture situates itself as a social enterprise, the profession is wedded to capitalism and the currency of wealth and power it seeks to serve. Architects first designed for kings, followed by the church (or equivalent), state, and currently corporations and elite private wealth. Today we are well aware both that neoliberal ordering drives wealth disparity, and that asset wealth and income correlate with access to quality of life. The current structure of society — whether by accident or by design — concentrates wealth and power. Who does the architecture profession [seek to] serve? What would architecture look like if it did not mirror wealth and power? Only if we work to place ever greater value on human life and the environment can we start to rectify this disequilibrium.
DK: However, if people of privilege experience injustice themselves, they demand justice immediately and for the rest of their lives. In order to survive in the world, we instinctively fear otherness. But as humans evolve, we come to recognize our common humanity. Just as elites and more privileged classes deliberately and systematically segregate themselves from the rest of society, so does the architectural profession: It sees itself as a specialized class situated above if not everyone else, at least the rest of the people involved in manifesting the built environment. Architects are oftentimes apt to claim sole authorship, responsibility, vision, authority and it is folly! Architects are obsessed with the idea that it must be our signature on the building, our vision that the builders execute. It’s unidirectional. In theory we have a fiduciary responsibility to the client, but oftentimes the architect tries to impose their will on the client. This is massive arrogance. Many architects don’t think they will learn from the builder. In order to preserve this mentality, architects must see themselves as better than builders (and, by extension, the rest of society) — more educated, more professional, more civilized — and as custodians of a specialized knowledge that allows them to be the interface between the client, builder, jobsite, and the administration (regulations, standards, codes, etc). This preserves a professional class of architects. Becoming an architect is an education-intensive, expensive experience that self-selects by class and perpetuates itself because its exorbitant cost and aesthetic politics orient the graduates of this educational experience both toward work on behalf of the people who can afford to pay them with the salaries commensurate to the cost of their education, and toward career opportunities most likely to guarantee them the lifestyle expected upon entry
into this professional class. What happens if we challenge or destabilize this self-interested notion of a professional class which sees itself as special and separates the architect from the builder, the client, and society at large? Today as we respond to movements like Black Lives Matter, let us first ask how much of the contemporary crisis encompassing racial, social, environmental and climate justice we desire to dismantle, and then let us determine our positions relative to the recognition that architecture mirrors money and power. Is it too much of a leap to suggest that architecture requires alternative approaches to architecting, if we aim to be relevant actors involved in building (growing) future human society that is more equitable and genuinely safe for everyone? More diversity in the profession is an essential goal, but not enough. Focusing solely on racial or ethnic or gender inclusion within the profession of architecture itself — as it exists today — runs the risk of simply admitting a select group of people of color or more women to join the club serving the same elite segment of society. The mentality of trying to dominate an ever-larger territory of land or property in order to extract value from it is piracy and is fundamentally about enslaving other landscapes, bodies, and beliefs. If you want to break out of such primitive topologies you need to break out of the idea that architecture — and society — needs to be a pyramid. You need to break down the idea that people need to be stacked vertically according to economic class, social status, academic or vocational training, or professional qualifications — let alone skin color, race, ethnicity, hair type, age, stature, gender, ability, cultural, political or religious affiliation, or whatever else — such that society overall authorizes select groups to exercise unchecked levels of power, wealth, and influence over the people “below” them, just as the design professions largely ignore those people making up the base of the pyramid. If we neglect to interrogate this reality as the starting point for design, we will invariably reinscribe these self-same systems of inequality and injustice into any downstream designed outcomes. At the same time that architecture excels at visioning and realizing spaces and scenarios, there are myriad externalities that influence the financial cost and accessibility of quality of life but lie outside the strict boundaries of the domain of architecture. Why
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Texas Architect 49