Author: Alex S.

Summary of Radically Public Architecture by Dana Cuff

Spatial justice is a theory/movement/ideology to distribute and revise geography and urban space to be equitable and grant agency to the spatial inhabitants. This piece describes five principles of this theory: initiative over project, limited resource access, accessibility, and people over profit. The issue over what constitutes accessibility ties into the difficult to define concept of “the public” and who that encompasses. Architects are fundamentally apart from the non-architect public because of their unique knowledge set, like any profession. This gap introduces more opportunities for fissures in access. After the 2011 disaster in Japan, independent architectural organizations like ArchiAid and Homes for All/Minna No le strived to close this gap by working closely with displaced people to rebuild community vibes through public space. Post-disaster, formal efforts were focused on mitigating potential disasters in the future, with little regard to the pitfalls of isolated temporary housing planning that can result in medically dangerous social isolation.
Building trust within communities is a key part of introducing spatial justice into an architect’s repertoire. In Colombia, local governments like that of Medellín strived to rebuild community trust and engagement by investing in public space after a period of decline. Outside of custom residential architectures, a client is often not the primary or most frequent user of a space that they hired an architect to design. Breaking this relationship to focus on the collective community gives space to build creative and comprehensive solutions to a more varied array of issues that may have been considered otherwise. Additionally, heavy public involvement brings to light potential implicit and explicit biases of existing power structures and past projects.

Summary of I Mean to Be Critical, But… by Kim Dovey

Critical architecture practice involves both forms of social meaning and forms to contradict or test those meanings, and the social structuring of space either by placement, material, or otherwise. Further, critical architecture aims to understand how the field of architecture relates and is a part of power structures. Architects who created work that fell within the critical architecture practice sometimes did so because of career gains, and not so much for generating social questioning. Others, like Dutch Architect Rem Koolhaas, have utilized form to almost parody the power structure it exists in (see the CCTV headquarters in Beijing, China below).Critical architecture is faulted by the adherence to a separation of life and the practice of art, as well as it’s inward seeking nature that eschews more complicated, colorful, and interconnected practices.

China Central Television Headquarters

Summary of Indigenous Modernities: The Tocapu and Other American Grids by Fernando Luiz Lara and Felipe Hernández

Grids are not a modern invention, but a long existing form used by many humans throughout time. In the colonial era, the use of constructed grids was a tool to crack the social and spiritual structure of Indigenous communities and to racialize the Indigenous population. This text argues that if Indigenous communities (and large-scale civilizations like the Inca/Tahuantinsuyo empire) adopted such “modernity” like grids well ahead of modern Europe and the US, then there are possible counter-histories of other modern systems. In Cusco, a large plaza with cosmo-spiritual and historical importance was split into smaller plazas, literally breaking apart a place of centering. This is one of the examples of how the Inca and Indigenous grids were not meant to control the landscape in the way European grids were, but instead convened in a center of cosmological meaning. On the other hand, French astronomers built out initial longitude and latitude lines – which grid the entire planet, perhaps in an attempt (implicit of explicit) to dominate the landscape.
Grids have been used in the US to control land and commodify land into owned property. It is argued that the gridification of modernity by colonizers was not a side effect of ambitious men, but an intended impact on existing populations.

Critical Response

My bias: I am enamored by the goals of spatial justice and heavy community involvement. My dream is to convert city blocks into micro-villages with a walkable shop within 2-3 Portland-sized blocks (1 Phoenix-sized block) of every residence. Anyway, this is to say that I’m not very critical of Radically Public Architecture by Dana Cuff, but I did want to jump on the chance to write about issues that are often ignored in architecture.
Recently I had a weird dream about a child that did not exist past adulthood – and thought about how that child would have lived almost their entire short life in a world primarily built not for them. Large, bright, and loud spaces are not for me, and when a space is specifically designed to be bright and maze-like (grocery store) to entice consumerism, I avoid it. Of course, a singular thing cannot be designed for all properties of a person or culture, and I’m not expecting such. But, if not for personally having overly sensitive eyes and ears, would I even think to design for them? This is what community involvement can help mitigate – simply by learning of experiences other than our own we can grow our own inclusivity toolkit.

Application and Interpretation

The A.A. Maramis Building, (previously the Palace of Governor-General Daendels) in Jakarta, Indonesia

Carte de l’isle de Iava ou sont les villes de Batauia et Bantam, ca. 1720

Located in Kota Tua Jakarta (Jakarta’s Old Town), which was known as “Oud Batavia” or “Batavia” by the Dutch colonial power, began construction in 1809 and was not completed until 1828. The “palace” was never actually used as a governor’s palace. After the Dutch recognized the Indonesian Republic as an independent state, the building quickly became the Indonesian Ministry of Finance’s HQ. The building was built using bricks from preexisting structures in Batavia, including the Dutch Batavia Castle. Batavia itself was influenced heavily by the Dutch conversion of a pre exiting grid system. The neighborhood had long been using grided canals for transportation and drainage. The Dutch also prescribed to this method in many of their neighborhoods back in the Netherlands. The canals were weaponized to drain land for inhabitants and Dutch agricultural methods. The Dutch manipulation of the canal system resulted in stagnated, sickening water during certain times of year, showing the lack of consideration to preexisting Indonesian technology. The reuse of this colonial structure by Indonesia is not uncommon in post-colonial societies, but this is a particularly poignant example because of the building’s direct connection to colonization of Kota Tua Jakarta.

Take-Aways

– Spatial justice is a piece of a larger movement engaging with economics, political, and marginalization
– Modernity in design is subjective
– There is much to learn from pre- and post-colonial communities and their differing uses of landscape and the built environment