Master of Architecture Thesis- The Projective Ruins of the New Wild West.

THE PROJECTIVE RUINS OF THE NEW WILD WEST: Visions of Harney County

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THE PROJECTIVE RUINS OF THE NEW WILD WEST: Visions of Harney County, Revitalization through the arts. by Quinn McCallum-Law

Thesis document submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Architecture at Portland State University Portland, Oregon June 2016

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PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE COLLEGE OF THE ARTS The undersigned hereby certify that the Masters thesis of Quinn McCallum-Law has been approved as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Architecture

Thesis Committee:

Advisor Andrew Santa-Lucia Assistant Professor of Practice __________________________________ ________________ Date

Committee Member Aaron Whelton Assistant Professor __________________________________ ________________ Date

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Acknowledgements This research and documentation would never have been able to be accomplished without the support and guidance of the faculty of the School of Architecture at Portland State University. Many thanks for just letting me in the door.

To Andrew Santa Lucia Thank you for never having a poker face, good or bad you told me how you saw it.

To my children Eero and Julia, who continue to be a source of inspiration to me, every single day.

To S. thank you for 15 years. Thank you for challenging me.

To A.K. for supporting me through one of the toughest years of my life,.I’ll always remember the expansive views.

To Kip Olkowski, a kindred spirit and lover of whimsy. You will be missed. For every run we missed out on, I’ll ride ten in your name.

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Abstract In the digital metropolitan city, speed above all else rules. In the field, lay the victims of modernization, dead or dying micro-metropolises, forgotten agrarian communities, and Native American Reservations alike, all make up the prideful collective of unwilling martyrs to the industrial age. The time of the rural west, as we think of it, homogenized and idylistic, has passed.

In reality, it is, and always has been queer, we should not lose sleep in sadness over the death of this image. We should allow it to be put to rest, and move forward in celebration of a new wild west that honors this. The ruins and monuments of the North American Rural West will not be like those catalogued in rural Europe. There will be no grandiose fortresses, castles, or churches for pilgrimage. The digital and universal have grown and taken hold, fixated on the urbanmetropolis. Scales large and small have suffered their “principles” and simplifications. What will bring new pilgrimage? How can it be shaped for new and old alike? How do we honor the past as we move forward, without fetishising what was?

A land art project for no-one, a cultural quarter, and mixed program building for everyone, containing a Contemporary Art Center, a Planned Parenthood, and an extra-curricular school program make up the programming framework for a new rural architecture.

Rural planning, community driven architectures, heterotopic vernaculars, sign and simulacra, are the design tools and systems to look toward new rural architectures and architecture’s own rural future. It is time to reassess what we have learned through urbanization, refocus, and revisit the rural. Time to start designing for global dispersion, micro-metropolitises, and local agglomeration.

The enormous, yet sparsely populated Harney County, Oregon is exemplary of the economic and socio-cultural conditions in much of rural North America (declining/aging population, poverty, negative economics, and more [juvenile] prison beds (50) than hospital beds (19)) the community was thrust into national views with the takeover of Malheur Wildlife Refuge. Opinions of residents on the matter of land, who and what the land is for, are starkly divided and there is little else in Harney County beside the land itself. Harney County is an example of agrarian communities, post global urbanization.

Projective Ruins seeks to optimistically design and create new futures and set a new course through re-presentation and reconceptualization of what it means to be “Rural.”

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Research Question What is the role of architecture in community redevelopment and reframing the futures of the rural?

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Table of Contents Agglomeration and Dispersion ��������2 Rurality in North America Harney County and its People What was, a History What is, Present Conditions Mapping the Social Landscape

From Mausoleum to ������������������36 Memorial to the Old West v, Contemporary Pilgrimage Constructing the New Wild

West

Conclusion �������������������������88 Appendix A: Bibliography

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Agglomeration and Dispersion

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Rurality in North America Globally, since 2008 we’ve lived in an agglomerated world. Meaning more people, worldwide, now live in urban areas than rural areas. A manufactured diaspora and agglomeration.

There is little opportunity for youth in these rural areas. Under different names, the story plays out just the same.

The last major industry job provider, The Hines lumber mill, a half-mile long architecture, closed in the 1980s and is being dismantled. Ranching is a big business but requires little manpower in today’s time. All this has caused an exodus or emigration of the youth in search of opportunities. A manufactured diaspora and agglomeration caused by industrialization and the capitalist class.

Which makes Harney county’s current conditions exemplary of many rural communities in North America today. What about those who cant leave, or simply would prefer to stay? The contrasts are stark. Life is tough, and requires the ability to accept less, and make due with what’s available. A choice we are all facing, a choice between complacency and revolution.

In all these places, the architectures tells the story of a place that was. And the conditions tell the story of what currently is. Almost all movements of architecture are represented. Reminders of open, healthy, and strong communities in a not so distant past.

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The Resettlement Administration, Farm Security Administration, and other organizations before and after, were formed out of other movements to improve life both in rural and urban areas with food security. While there were many benefits to urban communities, like more stabilized and consistent food pricing, and some benefits of security to rural areas.

There were many negative outcomes for rural and specifically, the rural poor. Portions of the programs were “participatory,” meaning the rural communities were consulted for input.

Other things were not, many rural farmers were removed from their land and resettled in urban areas and public housing without choice, consult, or compensation, land was aggregated and redistributed. These decisions were made in the interest of urban populations. This was the birth of industrial farming as well as a marked turning point towards an urbanized United States.

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COUNTRY LIFE MOVEMENT

LEVITTOWNS USA GARDEN CITIES

COTTON GIN

CIVIL WAR

WW 1

DUSTBOWL

WW 2

VIETNAM AVG. FARM SIZE

AGRARIAN NEW DEALS RESETTLEMENT ADMINISTRATION

GARDEN CITY HOWARD (1898)

URBAN RENEWAL DPZ/TRADITIONALIST

443 ACRES

FARM SECURITY ADMINISTRATION

(2018)

LOW MODERNISM/ “PARTICIPATORY” POST WAR MONSANTO

ENSLAVED POP. 3.2 MILLION BURNS PAIUTE (1850) RANGE 1.5+ MILLION ACRES (1841) THE GENERAL LAND OFFICE (1812)

AGGLOMERTATION/URBANIZATION DAVIS (1965)

MOCKBEE/RURAL STUDIO AND DECIPHELS 1993 STRONG TOWNS (2008)

RURAL RESISTANCE TO INDUSTRIALISATION

USA POP.

6.4 MILLION

309 MILLION (2010)

FARMS (1910)

BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT (1946)

USA POP. 152 MILLION (1950)

AVG. FARM SIZE

2.2 MILLION

205 ACRES

FARMS

(1850)

(2008)

JAMES C. SCOTT SEEING LIKE A STATE (1998)

1.4 MILLION

AVG. FARM SIZE

FARMS

155 ACRES (1935)

USA POP.

ENSLAVED POP.

(1850)

23 MILLION (1850)

PRE-INDUSTRIAL FARM

BURNS PAIUTE RANGE 13000 ACRES (2018)

0?

(1935)

INDUSTRIAL FARM

BURNS PAIUTE - USA RECOGNITION (1968) BURNS PAIUTE RANGE 760 ACRES (1933)

RURAL RESISTANCE TO ???

CLEAN WATER ACT (1972) URBANIZED USA 1965 URBANIZED WORLD 2008 OREGON SENATE BILL 100- URBAN GROWTH BOUNDARY (1973)

ENSLAVED POP. 0?

(2008)

POST-INDUSTRIAL (PRESENT)

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I spent some time becoming personally familiar with the area, know as Harney County, Oregon- the history and the people. Four trips for this project specifically, and I researched the contemporary rural condition nationally and locally. Discussed ideas with locals and former locals.

What I learned was Harney County is a place of extremes. Civilization is either non-existent or you are in the micro-metropolis, made up of three towns. It feels as if there is no “in-between.” Weather fluctuates from below zero in winter, to triple digits mid summer. Politics… and the politics of land and water specifically, are hotly divided subjects.

Poverty and wealth are as disparate as the weather’s extremes, and much of the land is owned and controlled by absentee ranchers, the remainder is mostly under federal control. Poverty rates in Burns float around 25%, roughly 10% higher than Portland, Oregon. Housing is “cheap” compared to the median income, yes. But much of it is in serious disrepair do to its zero-sum game of material and labor costs being comparable to any other market with better economies. Many in the community live in substandard conditions, simply because they cannot afford even basic maintenance.

Fairly conservative, very rural. It is the 10th largest county in the nation, the largest county in in Oregon, and yet the least populous in Oregon. Yet there is a large portion of people, albeit a quiet minority who see the inequities for what they are. And there is an unsurety of how to fix this within our current, very broken, political and economic system.

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Harney County and its People

What was, a History What is, Present Conditions Mapping the Social Landscape

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Liberty Theatre, Demolished 1964 Claire McGill Luce Western History Room

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Dog Mountain Oil Well Claire McGill Luce Western History Room

Horizontal Skycraper, Hines Lumber Company Expansion Claire McGill Luce Western History Room

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The Northern Paiute Wadatika/Wadadökö Tribes, also known as the Harney Valley Paiute, along with the Walpapi or Hunipuitöki, federally recognized as the Burns Paiute Tribe are the original inhabitants of the area.

Their range covered the majority of what is now Eastern Oregon, into Idaho and Northern Nevada. White colonizer’s and the United States Army reduced that, first to a 1.5 million acre reservation shared with other Northern Paiute Tribes.

After a few of the men joined to fight the Army and colonizers, alongside the Bannock tribe in the Bannock War of 1878, The reservation was stripped and they were forced off their lands to the Yakama Reservation.

In the 1970’s they were able to restablish themselves officially and legally in the eyes of the colonizers.

The legal name is the “Burns Paiute Indian Colony” and the reservation’s boundaries overlap with the town Burns, Oregon.

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Old Camp Casino, 2013. Demolished 2014 Richard Bauer

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Crystal Crane Hotsprings, a private glampground and resort appropriates imagery of the west in a somewhat anachronistic fashion.

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Harney County and its People

What was, a History What is, Present Conditions Mapping the Social Landscape

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Tower and Barn: ruins of past future, a beacon of loss.

Hines, Oregon

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This is the watch tower, located on the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which took the national spotlight a few years ago, when it was taken over by armed extremist militants who had co-opted a local ranchers spat with the federal government over water and grazing. Almost all of whom were from other states. I don’t believe any of the extremists were from Harney County, only four were from Oregon at all. But what leads to these extreme views in rural social landscapes? It is prevalent and pervasive. Even in the more even keeled individuals, there is distrust of outsiders, and distant authority. Most recently, their has been a push for the region, along with other parts of Oregon and Northern California, to become part of the state of Idaho.

Decades of top-down, modernist planning, urbanization, industrialization, general mistreatment, and ignorance of urban populations to the struggles have left a feeling of desperation throughout most of the rural populations in the united states. This, exacerbated by misinformation, has been capitalized on by exploitative opportunists, furthering the percieved divide.

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Amelia Templeton / OPB 18

Unfinished Ponderosa Hotel, what might have been. In the tiny garden city, Hines, Oregon. A company town designed

by Stafford, Derbes & Roy.

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Crossroads Ranch, Formerly silos owned Purina Corporation’s Livestock Branch.

It is a very recent addtion to the community’s social services in Burns, Oregon.

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“Main Street” Images along Broadway Avenue in Burns, Oregon

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Harney County Library Burns, Oregon

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Malhuer Migration, Larry Eifert

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Headlines and imagery of a commuity under siege. Varied

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Within one hundred miles of the micro metropolis there is very little in usable resources; those shown here are largely historic or have transitioned to methods or locations unhelpful to this community.

Canyon City and John Day are the nearest towns of any similar populations. Many social services are limited throughout the region. The nearest university, or planned parenthood, are hours away.

In The Burns, Burns Paiute Reservation and Hines micrometropolis there are more youth prison beds than hospital beds. (50 v 19) Educational opportunities are limited to highschool and whatever social capital is available. But there is pride and hope nonetheless, and signs of previously vibrant life.

Hines, was originally a company town for the logging mill. Radial in plan, with a civic core. It’s a tiny garden city.

Burns is an older town, is gridded and carries many of the details you expect to find in the old wild west.

The reservation struggles alongside the others. Western expansion/colonization and systematic and institutional racism reduced them from millions of acres of space to roam, to nothing. They have clawed their way back to a few hundred acres for the main community, legal recognition, and a population in the hundreds as well as a few thousand acres of trust land.

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Harney County and its People

What was, a History What is, Present Conditions Mapping the Social Landscape

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From Mausoleum...

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CRITICISM

ART

CONCEPT 37

THEORY

PAPER

SPECTACLE

RUR ARCHIT

TECTO

ACTIVISM

SOCIAL

RAL TECTURE

PRACTICE

ECONOMICS (CAPITAL)

ONICS

CULTURAL

FINANCE 38

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Memorial to the Old West v. Contemporary Pilgrimage

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Echoes of impermanent interventions. (Precedents)

Brian MacKay-Lyons, Ghost 6, (Nova Scotia)

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Brad Cloepfil, Maryhill Overlook, (Washington, 1998)

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Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect (NYC 1970)

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Nancy Holt, Rock Rings, (Washington 1978)

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James Turrell, Roden Crater, (Arizona, Ongoing)

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The Memorial Site one, Harney Lake, located 30 miles south of the micro metropolis. Visible from afar, yet inaccessible to anyone but the animals of Malheur Wildlife refuge. A very politicized site of recent land rights issues, and an integral location for migratory birds of the western hemisphere.

A massive architectural installation in a dry lake bed.

A memorial to the past, flipping old to new and representing that what once was.

An intentional cemetery of the old west... the good and the bad.

A casting of the entire micro metropolis as it stands today in negative form.

It is a new architectural habitat, quite literally, for the birds.

In the dry lake bed, Each excavation, an exact 1 to 1 negative of its corresponding architecture from the micrometropolis, is then sheltered by soils removed, and placed on structures that would’ve supported a water tower in another life. Entropy eventually taking hold and burying the memorial to be lost until another age as an architectural folly.

The upside down city.

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Section of excavation, imprint and backfill.

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The New Wild West The New Wild West celebrates the dis-aggregation, the diaspora. The foreign and familiar.

A hundred rooftops for a hundred uses.

Cultural meeting grounds comprised of a mixed program building stocked with services to connect, and confront the needs of a dying rural-urban community.

A mixed program building surrounded by an open air plaza and makers complex.

Repurposed Storage units, year round, affordable commerical space.

Senior Center Parking Shelter. Flexible protection from the elements connecting the makers units complex to the rest of the cultural quarter.

Railbarn Repurposed for a stage in the plaza. Providing formality to the connection.

A new arts council office.

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Constructing the New Wild West

Ronnnie, Blunt War (2020)

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Shelter

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Monument

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Shelter

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Monument

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Monument, Sign, Site (Process)

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Surfaces of SecurityA mixed program building 1 Arts 2 Education 3 Medical

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Monument, Sign, Site (Process)

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Site, Shelter and Monument,Sign

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The shelters are simple, and repeated, and bleed out into the town. They provide a link between the, watchtowers, abandoned water towers, and the land art, reinforcing these elements of rural identity. The center piece is a new, stone-walled, mixed program building containing programming and services for locals and visitors alike.

With The Arts Council and Analog Craft buildings annexed and restored on either side.

The new building is sheltered behind the basalt stone guard-wall. The penetrations, forms and shapes are representations, agglomerations, of the many architectures the manifest in this rural-urban environment. The layer of the guard wall provides mental and physical shelter and welcomes entry simultaneously.

Site Plan Collection

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Gathering space, viewed from stage

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The Center has one formal entrance. All who come, come the same.

The primary programming consists of: The Open-School for the arts, media and analog craft: A non-profit, after school program focused on teens and young adults to skills in media, arts, design, and crafts.

A Contemporary Art Center: Bringing the dialogue of contemporary arts to a rural community, and creating a meeting ground and mutual inspiration for visitors and locals.

Lastly, Planned Parenthood: Providing necessary anonymous medical and family planning services in a community lacking other reasonable options.

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Though there is only one primary entry, the ability wander is encouraged as well and there is a second public entrance through the school common. Providing a slightly more discreet entrance for those that desire it and connecting the school to it’s annex building.

Intended to be a preventive alternative to the 50 bed juvenile detention center down a mile down the road. The Open-school would serve to provide after school education to teens and young adults in a professional setting, where they are paid through stipends to learn while working on real world projects. With open shop hours for self directed projects.

The architecture and its various programs serve as a filter for persons who desires anonymity and security to use the medical services in a small conservative town, who may not otherwise have the ability to travel over a hundred miles for that service. With informal and formal security checkpoints throughout.

Educational Program Foyer, office and mezzanine.

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Educational Program student space and mezzanine.

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Planned Parenthood Loggia, private, protected.

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Gallery. A space for meeting of ideas and worlds.

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List of Artists:

Isaac Vasquez

Isaac Vasquez and Lauren D’amato

Suen Wong

Others by Author

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Conclusion The forgetten homogenous rural is anything but, it is queer, and diverse. It is regarded only superficially by the urbane. It is the ultimate other.

Through signs of past and of future, through collective programming. It is not the end, but a new beginning.

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Bibliography Adams, Jane, et al. Fighting for the Farm: Rural America Transformed.

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

Diversified family farms and ranches have not survived the industrialization of agriculture, which now largely depends on low-wage workers, Specifically migrant and immigrant workers. One specific chapter deals with what is dubbed as “low-modernism” which critically investigates and analyzes the effects of principles of high modernism on agrarian societies and cultures. Another titled “The Entrepreneurial Self ” which interprets and explores the loss of entrepreneurial opportunity within rural areas, from desolate main streets to abandoned farms and the current fragility of remaining members of rural society.

Berger, John. The Sense of Sight. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011.

A collection of essays that explores a wide range of art and promise. I am primarily interested in the exploration of the woodcarvers of a french village who carve wood into birds by soaking the wood in water, making it pliable before carving. They are made according to traditions, with respect for the material. He speaks of urban life and the sentimentality it creates for nature and by extension rural life. He speaks of the importance of locality, and local economies and contrasts it to aesthetic emotion, finding parallels across regions. “The white bird is an attempt to translate a message from a real bird. All of the languages of art have been developed as an attempt to transform the instantaneous into the permanent.”

Birksted, Jan. Le Corbusier and the Occult. MIT Press, 2009.

Architecture and symbolism, architecture and the occult in freemasonry. Jan explores the influence of freemason family members of Jeanneret’s childhood in a small European Village. Freemasonry, a fraternity interested in lessons on things like charity and humility through allegory and architectural symbolism was once a large part of rural (and urban) culture.

In almost every small town I have visited in Oregon there is still an active lodge, nationwide many members are elderly, but there have been recent pushes for enrollment? What role could an international organization (who in some parts allow women) and their symbolism, tradition, or mystery play in revitalizing other cultures. Is there an architectural connection to be made?

Brown, David L. David Louis, Louis E. Swanson, Alan W. Barton, and Rural Sociological Society. Challenges for Rural America in the Twenty-First Century.

Rural Studies Series. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003.

Poverty and demographic shifts, economic restructuring, were extensive in the rural landscape during the twentieth century. The challenges that face rural America in the upcoming century are explored extensively, poverty, social capital, land-use changes, an ever expanding presence of digital economics. One chapter titled “Catalytic Community Development” Castle, Emery N. et al. The Changing American Countryside: Rural People and Places. University Press of Kansas, 1995.

In this book, Emery and others posit that the little attention paid by scholars to rural america has been written by more urban based scholars that “perpetuate out-of-date notions and stereotypes” and largely treat the rural condition as being all the same disregarding locality. The writing covers poverty, environment, education, ethnicities and race among others in specific terms. Addressing the diversity and complexities of issues that have come to be in the modern industrial rural lands of the United states. Patterns of migration and urban invasions of the countryside are explored in detail.

Cloke, Paul, Terry Marsden, and Patrick Mooney. Handbook of Rural Studies.

SAGE, 2006.

What is Rural Space? What is its character, status? What is nonhuman rurality? Idyllic rurality and its variations? How sustainable is our food supply, for those in urban environments and those in the rural environments.

These are some of the questions asked and answered in “The handbook.”

Danbom, David B. The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900-1930. Iowa State University Press, 1979.

Written in 1979, this book provides more historical context to the plight and fight of rural american in the times of global change from an agrarian society to an agglomeration or urban one. How farmers, like my own grandfather, fought and lost the fight against industrialization to efficiency mechanisms and corporate interests. The largely urban movement of “Country Lifers” sought to fix the ill’s and ignorance or rural communities and sought to bring them into the 20th century citing efficiency and or organization as primary needs of the rural and primary values of an industrial society. This gets to the context of general contemporary rural discontent, and lack of family farms or economic opportunity that I hope to explore with my architecture thesis.

Fulkerson, Gregory M., and Alexander R. Thomas et al. Studies in

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Urbanormativity: Rural Community in Urban Society. Lexington Books, 2013.

Written 5 years after the world’s population had officially switched to an urban majority. This book explores truly contemporary ideas within the urban-rural dynamic. Chapters Titled “‘Fagging’ the Countryside?

(De)’queering’ Rural Queer Studies” and “Inbred Horror: Degeneracy, Revulsion, and Fear of the Rural Community” explore two very important perceptions of rural life. And assist me in exploring the question exactly who and what is the rural for and how do we design for it?

Green, Gary P. Asset Building & Community Development. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE, 2012.

Theoretical and practical guidance on how to mobilize community capital (physical, human, social, financial, environmental, political, and cultural) to effect positive change.

Hall, Edward Twitchell. Beyond Culture. Anchor Books, 1989.

“A key factor in explaining the sad state of American education can be found in over-bureaucratization, which is seen in the compulsion to consolidate our public schools into massive factories and to increase to mammoth size our universities even in underpopulated states. The problem with bureaucracies is that they have to work hard and long to keep from substituting self-serving survival and growth for their original primary objective. Few succeed. Bureaucracies have no soul, no memory, and no conscience. If there is a single stumbling block on the road to the future, it is the bureaucracy as we know it.” (p. 219)

erases... blanks out time...”

Hill, Ronald Paul. Surviving in a Material World: The Lived Experience of People in Poverty. 59-84, 111-134. University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.

Two chapters explore ideas related to my site and studies“Poverty and juvenile delinquency- Fast Eddie Comes of age” is important because the Eastern Oregon Youth Correctional Facility is located in Burns, Oregon. The story chronicles the life of a person from birth to 18 and the stressors of poverty in a material World. The other is Titled “Rural PoorTammy and Her Momma” a family in Appalachian coal country.

Hytrek, Gary J., and Kristine M. Zentgraf. America Transformed: Globalization, Inequality, and Power. Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2008.

Exploring the critical dimensions of inequality--class, gender, and immigration-America Transformed situates the U.S. experience within the broader global context, and fleshes out the mechanism through which global processes affect social stratification. By examining the social construction of globalization, the authors identify the key policy challenges of globalization, and some of the innovative community-based responses to social inequality.

America Transformed provides powerful insights into the contested dialectical relationship between global and local forces: how globalization shapes stratification and inequality in the U.S., and how local communities attempt to mediate those changes.

Harries, Karsten. The Ethical Function of Architecture. MIT Press, 1998.

Arguing against formalism for the greater good, this book is a guide to my approach in understanding of communities, shared past, and future hopes as well designing for rural communities.

Kallipoliti, Lydia. The Architecture of Closed Worlds, Or, What Is the Power of Shit? Lars Müller Publishers, 2018.

“As partial reconstructions of the world in time and space, closed systems identify and implement the basic materials necessary for the sustenance of life.” But what is the reconstruction? Is anything truly ever closed?

Hejduk, John, and David Shapiro. The Collapse of Time and Other Diary Constructions, 1987. “one of the dilemmas of a generation raised either to isolate the arts in a sepulchral chastity or fuse them in a wagneresque dilettantism is the loss of sense of multivalent architecture as always a multiple mosaic in diachronicity.”

“I am obsessed with time and have recently created time-pieces... clock towers. One of my recurrent persistences is that present time cannot be seen... present time has an opacity... present time is opaque... present time

Koolhaas, Rem. Elements of Architecture. Taschen, 2018.

Elements of Architecture focuses on the fragments of the rich and complex architectural collage. Window, façade, balcony, corridor, fireplace, stair, escalator, elevator: the book seeks to excavate the micro-narratives of building detail.The result is no single history, but rather the web of origins, contaminations, similarities, and differences in architectural evolution, including the influence of technological advances, climatic adaptation, political

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calculation, economic contexts, regulatory requirements, and new digital opportunities.

Miessen, Markus. Crossbenching: Toward Participation as Critical Spatial Practice. Sternberg Press, 2016.

“Proposing a more discursive approach, he acknowledges the need for “an independent actor with a conscience” to navigate the conflicts, negotiation and maneuvers among the multiplicity of agents, both human (architects, clients, financiers and builders) and nonhuman (silicon, plastic, concrete and so on), that is architecture.Instead of using project-teams or working within the typical structure of an architecture office, however, Miessen assembled working groups incorporating “outsiders” on the theory that architecture and space-making is a collective set of interrelations crystalizing a form of civitas.”

Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. Reprint edition. Columbia University Press, 2018.

Anthropocene era positivity, optimism or bust. “There is no such a thing as the human. But human need not be something that is ontically given: we can’t see it or touch it or designate it as present in some way.”

Sample, Hilary. Maintenance Architecture. MIT Press, 2016.

“An inventive examination of a crucial but neglected aspect of architecture, by an architect writing to architects.Maintenance plays a crucial role in the production and endurance of architecture, yet architects for the most part treat maintenance with indifference. The discipline of architecture values the image of the new over the lived-in, the photogenic empty and stark building over a messy and labored one. But the fact is: homes need to be cleaned and buildings and cities need to be maintained, and architecture no matter its form cannot escape from such realities. In Maintenance Architecture, Hilary Sample offers an inventive examination of the architectural significance of maintenance through a series of short texts and images about specific buildings, materials, and projects. Although architects have seldom choose to represent maintenance—imagining their work only from conception to realization—artists have long explored subjects of endurance and permanence in iconic architecture. Sample explores a range of art projects— by artists including Gordon Matta-Clark, Jeff Wall, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles—to recast the problem of maintenance for architecture. How might architectural design and discourse change as a building cycle expands to

include “post-occupancy”?Sample looks particularly at the private home, exhibition pavilion, and high-rise urban building, giving special attention to buildings constructed with novel and developing materials, technologies, and precise detailing in relation to endurance. These include Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House (1929), the Lever House (1952), the U.S. Steel Building (1971), and the O-14 (2010). She considers the iconography of skyscrapers; maintenance workforces, both public and private; labor-saving technology and devices; and contemporary architectural projects and preservation techniques that encompass the afterlife of buildings. A selection of artworks make the usually invisible aspects of maintenance visible, from Martha Rosler’s Cleaning the Drapes to Inigo Manglano-Ovalle’s The Kiss.”

This is all the more readily visible to the common eye in an area, neighborhood, or region in economic disrepair. Like a dying town in the rural west. How might repairability pay a role in the future of a community that holds repair over replacement not just as a necessity, but a value. How might the lack of economic stability or slow death of a towns financial staples, play a role in disrepair and therefore loss of pride, or nostalgia for the “good old days” over the present, (think of the resonance that “MAGA”, one of the largest political divides of our time, may have on a person with a world view from a town like this) and how can that be reversed?

Schwartz, Alex F. Housing Policy in the United States. Routledge, 2014.

Foundational reading on United States housing policy, the governmental and financial constructs in which Affordable Housing is created in the U.S. Scott, James C. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale Agrarian Studies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. He argues that centrally managed social plans derail when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not - and cannot be - fully understood. Further the success of designs for social organization depends on the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge.

The author builds a persuasive case against “development theory” and imperialistic state planning that disregards the values, desires, and objections of its subjects. And in discussing these planning disasters, he identifies four conditions common to them all: the state’s attempt to impose administrative

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order on nature and society; a high-modernist ideology that believes scientific intervention can improve every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large-scale innovations; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans.

Till, Jeremy. Architecture Depends. MIT Press, 2009.

“Despite the claims of autonomy, purity, and control that architects like to make about their practice, architecture is buffeted by uncertainty and contingency. Circumstances invariably intervene to upset the architect’s bestlaid plans--at every stage in the process, from design through construction to occupancy. Architects, however, tend to deny this, fearing contingency and preferring to pursue perfection.”

Acknowledgment first, and engaging head on the uncertainty, the “mess,” the contingencies, and the power structures that allow architecture to exist in status quo head on gives space to those who cannot access architecture through normal channels. Practice as part of criticism and criticism as part of practice. Practice as part of activism and activism as part of practice.

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