Surviving Collapse…

in wake of recent anxiety.

(1/4) Introduction

Teaching is a familiar gravitational field. 

I am a lifelong student, pulled by teachers, critics, and allies into their gravities. Specifically within the architectural discipline, learning is an impulsive orbit towards not just design, but an inhabitant of found and imagined built environments. Here, the craft of learning is the simultaneous admission of vulnerability, interrogation of existing failures, and the development of representational and communicative legibility. This informs my placement of design, deriving from a continuous self-reflection of identity, position, and background. Architectural instruction takes root in a transformation of selfhood into design stake—a cyclical operation to refine motivations. As applied, design practice is the fine-tuning of learning, positioning, and versed exercise; the expected becoming of which is teaching—a digestion of accountability. 

The classroom is a place of memory, where the experience of learning from the instructor carries further than the course content. In the studio, the instructor’s care for students is just as fundamental to the course knowledge. Productivity is the driving force of a studio, but unproductivity is fundamental to alleviating exhausted capacities (1). In the creative space, especially in architecture, powerful and healthy work emerges from students fueled with a personal stake and sensitive guidance; the impulse to care becomes the greatest influence that an instructor can offer. 

(1) Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Brooklyn/London: Melville House, 2019). 

I orbit around prospects of teaching and design research, fascinated by any opportunity to program funnels that are equally disciplinarily-stimulating and dopamine-inducing. Within the staging of a collapsed-modernism—intersecting and pressing timelines—architectural representation becomes a carrier of audience intuitions.

(2/4) On Research

Collapse (v.): to fall or shrink together abruptly and completely; to condense

Collapse (n.): a sudden failure; a sudden loss of force, value, or effect

Collapsed (adj.): condensed happenings of failures

Collapsed-Modernism: state of surviving in contradiction

My research stages a collapsed-modernism.

As the term “postmodernism” describes time existing within perceived failures of the machine-living rhetoric—the upheaval of aesthetic tradition—its visage of nostalgic motif exaggerates a more generalist inhibition to return. The Jencks projection of postmodernism depicts a “double-coded” affection between the extrapolation of modernist scripture and the pluralist acknowledgement of local narrative (2). Evidently in his assertions in the “death of modernism,” he situates the architect’s hand as masterful, yet absent from labors of maintenance and repair—the failed and outdated inflation of Architecture (3). With an appropriate asterisk—and present, post, and late prefixes aside—the assumption that a modern-ism exists implies a status of architectural intervention responding to a tensioned cultural exclusivity, projecting a desire for control upon a land under perpetual risk. If the label of a modern-ism inspires romance between cultural positions and the built environment, utopian vision returns as a disciplinary response to dystopian alerts. 

(2) Charles Jencks, “Late-Modernism and Post-Modernism,” in Late-Modern Architecture and Other Essays (Rizzoli Books, 1980). Distinction between late-modernism and postmodernism as commitment and repulsion. 

(3) Angel Borrego Cubero, The Competition, (Office for Strategic Spaces, 2013). A documentary following Starchitect culture and the implication of Architecture as an exclusive club within the built environment.

Today, the normative timeline is shaping into an unstable frequency (4). Architecture School’s nature of intersecting with “-ologies” uncovers the multiplicity of dystopias and extinctions; there is no solid ground when the land is defaultly wrinkled and bodied with colonial endeavors (5). Catalyzed by Silicon Valley technological dissemination, data identifies as the evidence of productivity, stratifying “raw” information into formulas, rates, and speeds.

(4) Jack Halberstam, “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies,” in In A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005). Normative time in Halberstam’s context is the privileged construction of time and activity according to bourgeois culture of reproduction, family, longevity, soliciting, and inheritance—heterotopia. A definition of normativity then derives a function of structural modern power that opposes and sustains.

(5) Anna Tsing et al., “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene,” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts of the Anthropocene (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Extinction is both an end and a trigger to surrounding timescales, impacting land (and its living systems) with absence.

The first modernist interruption, caricatured by Global North industrial influence; then late-modernisms, extrapolating such values to the nth-degree; then post-modernisms, seeking answers from pre-era erasures; and now a collapsed-modernism? This may not mean a sequential phasing for the term “modern-ism,” but a speculation of its survival. Collapse—both as a condensing and a premeditated loss—could liberate “modernism” to carry contradiction. The generic “modernism” upholds an assimilation to neoliberal corporatism; what prefix describes the consequential events to a Jencks’s modern-izer hand? Following traces of consequence, the uncovering of multidimensional modernisms is infinite—an impossible survey, a self-stoking provocation.

Collapsed-modernism, here, is characterized by survivance within failures, or in landscapes beyond failure: coloring someone’s contribution to a collaged condition of precarity. This staging, a non-solution contradiction, loops the “post-” instinct to reject a trend and return to an all-encompassing action to crises. When these solutions live, the impossibility of utopia inspires a dystopic panic, where a solution-rubble landfill thrives with environmental, hierarchical, and tragic disparities (6). Collapse can describe this as two-fold: the distortion and competition of timelines, and the carrier-bag method of its visibility.

(6) Keller Easterling, “Impossible,” in Pedro Gadanho, ed., Utopia/Dystopia: A Paradigm Shift in Art and Architecture (Milan: MAAT/Mousse Publishing, 2017).

The collapse of timelines distorts a default standard of living into uncertainty. Living exists within loops of rejection and return towards a past, searching for methodologies in blighted hope. Crisis benchmarks the cycle, focusing in-and-out of normative time of a competitive attention economy. Competition adopts desperation for the crisis to remain in-tune with its contestants.

The collapse of timelines as failure observes a sudden crash with faint fractures, disrupting normative time from clarity to static. The narrative of failure strips its characters of leading roles, firing the protagonist and meeting an end; however, this end to narrative is not a conclusion, but a transformation into a world with a carrier-bag. As life exists beyond “the end,” Le Guin’s carrier-bag theory collects all material—central, peripheral, mundane—towards a systemic understanding (7). In this construction, events and crises are timestamp intersections with other timelines that overlay a built environment as multi-dimensional. Simultaneously, complexity is abstracted into screenplay directions, forensically diagnosing what happened (e.g., what collided, missed, imposed, resisted, blended). In this exercise of character and action, systemic thinking digests multi-dimensionality into legibility—a tool towards architectural positioning and imaging.

(7) Ursula Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World (New York: Grove Atlantic Press, 1989). In design language, the carrier bag pushes the narrative-framework into a practice of world-building, evaluating every character, prop, interaction, environment, and such with a non-privileging agenda.

In collection of “-ological” precedents, an exploration of mundane artifacts—of ephemeral knowledge—may emerge an enchantment of collapsed-modernism that distorts normative time and fluxes towards friendly strangers (8). What are the existing modernisms that fall into wrinkles? How can carrier-bag world-building represent such survivance within collapse? 

(8) José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” in Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8:2 (Women & Performance Project, Inc., 1996). Countering the desire for proof in the heterotopic timeline, where rigor rewards positive reception and incentivizes performative over lived work. Ephemera describes a knowledge-base that channels temporality: emergences, traces, shimmers, waxes and wanes.

(3/4) On Pedagogy

“For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean (feel like) on Sunday mornings at 7 AM, after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth; while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while tasting our new possibilities and strengths” (Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” 1985).

Speaking of the postmodernist turning of past into present locality, the studio tradition is a unique space and time that frees and constrains in one gesture. Studio is a collaboration to populate legacy desks with evidence of creative fever. Yet, to generate such evidence, the institution of the studio expects performance art to barter time with objective satisfaction. Foundationally, studio serves as the place of design tuning and positioning, fishing out multiple trajectories of experience to intersect and influence within a defined semester: from discovery of aesthetic, to its application of spatial registration, and to its imaging of futurist impact. 

Ephemera can be utilized—trusted—in synthesis with empirical evidence, centering a design practice around personal stake and strength. Institutions of the North American invention are founded upon the value of imperial information— thoughts on rationality, order, and survey. While work of this valuation has produced significant worlds of understanding, this perspective was informed, performed, and conformed by bodies of the colonial archetype. Outside of this subscription— of rationality, order, survey— what modes of thought were dismissed? What if the information of the “hysterics,” the emotional, and the feminine were to emerge of equal value to the rational, orderly, and masculine? Thinking through ephemera as a grounding of dark-matter opacities, an architectural convention can brave a drawing methodology through sensation, intuition, and irrationality (9).

(9)  Sheree Thomas, “Introduction: Looking for the Invisible,” in Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction From the African Diaspora (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2000). Thomas enables the term “dark matter” in describing the gravitational attraction towards a familiar, yet invisible, understanding. Metabolizing the finding-of-words, dark matter is a temporal identity to productively absorb anxieties of not-yet-knowing.

(4/4) On Methodology and Critique

Fine-tune (v.): to adjust precisely so as to bring to the highest level of performance or effectiveness

A foundational studio of design-thinking exercises an interrogation of student attractions, interests, instincts, and motivations, funneling such mysteries into experiments of drawing, modeling, writing, and ultimately designing. This is a teasing-out of student backgrounds, experiences, and identities as the grounding towards a lifelong development in stake and allyship.

Methodology begins with an introduction to subconscious practice, manifesting poetry through evidence derived from automatic practices such as free-writing, instinctive mark-making, and spatial interaction. As a precursor to self-reflection, a student must trust their body’s natural language to make, mark, and spark, which will develop into legible forms, functions, and ideas. Drawing, modeling, writing, and spatial registration requires time, repetition, patience, and adjustment to become craft; there are supplementary engagements to representation that communicate the sensory body in an immediate and intuitive fashion, inspiring multimodal design and research practices. Representational and critical systems research in documentary and film mediums incorporate video and sound sampling, suturing, and layering to build worlds. Architectural tradition is one instrument of understanding the built environment; experimental production of a sensory lens will examine and delineate controllable and uncontrollable parameters within both physical craftsmanship and broader built environments. Together, these practices foreground an investigation into action and consequence, producing a holistic, embodied critique of form, space, and narrative.

The process of design is personal, dedicating time, physical and creative labor, and care towards an external outlet. In a communal studio shared with allied creatives, the space is a ritual of arriving, learning, sharing, creating, changing… and leaving, unlearning, keeping, limiting, plateauing… Work is the evidence of these becomings, supplemented by the conversations and relationships exchanged within and outside the studio. Work is fundamental to design development— a personal development— as the receptor of creative curiosities, director of experiment and craft, and the prompter of conversation and feedback. Work speaks as its receptor and producer, but its role as a prompter requires collaboration between itself and an audience. In the vigor of the studio, the instructors, students, and invited strangers-turned-guests serve as this audience. This collaboration—between work and audience— is performed as critique.

Critique is a reflection of work legibility; not an evaluation of skill.

Critique is a welcoming of ideas, suggestions and advice; not an invitation for discrimination and unsolicited comparison.

Critique is an observation of reactions and reflections; not judgment.

Critique is a source of diverse feedback of confirmation and contradiction; not a place of defense and competition.

Critique may exist in several forms with varying degrees of work and audience. Desk critiques are low-stake and consistently-held throughout the course, aimed to progress work towards clarity and excitement. This collaboration occurs in individual and small group settings, where new ideas and explorations are comfortable topics. Individual conversations would foster familiarity between the student and the instructor, building an understanding of learning styles, creative processes, cultural and colloquial expressions, and pacing expectations. Small group conversations—either as student pairs or groups of three—would facilitate allyship between students, discovering shared project themes, representational methods, working and learning processes, and challenges and resolutions.

Small group critiques outside of the desk setting provides the opportunity for students to check in with one another, catching up with studio happenings and sharing feedback during pivotal points of production. Students would share their works in-progress and goals towards a formal review. In addition to instructor input, the conversation is primarily student-driven, providing supportive and relevant feedback towards the communally-decided goals. 

Formal critiques celebrate the milestones of a project, where all students will prepare their work to its greatest legibility and present at a point of clarity. These critiques would welcome a guest audience to provide feedback pertaining to their experiences, backgrounds, and identities. Leading up to formal critiques, students are encouraged to support each other’s process towards success. During formal critiques, students are expected to exercise respect for the work and the guest audience.