aug.
Will / Impose / Control
It’s a beautiful thing to will… and to wish… and to dream. Not only is the ability to will beautiful, but it’s also quite powerful. To express the future tense from one's present condition is an act of power – some might say an act of control. And as we all know, with great power comes great responsibility. But what happens when power manifests as enduring physical control? This is the position in which the architect is found.
In my first letter to you, reader, I expressed my position of belief: architecture is political, and that the absence of intersectional thought in architectural practice and theory leaves architecture, as object and discipline, in a state of inequity and discrimination. Not to quote myself, but “Every design has a direct effect on the lives of the people over which it assumes sovereignty”.
Now, this letter to you is not to beat a dead horse or to reopen a can of worms, but it is a recall to the responsibility that an architect, and a designer, and an engineer, and anyone else who wills an idea into physical form holds for the benefit or detriment of our social world. Whenever any of these parties begins to impose an idea onto occupiable space, then there is a level of control that must be addressed. Although temporal, physical constructions often last a temporary timeline of centuries. The things that we impose physically will outlive us, and most likely will last for generations to come. Your skin and bones and brain and heart that you used to compose this thing, to construct these ideas, are less durable and long-lasting than the material put forward to actualize your idea as a palpable object, space, or environment.
I recently found myself in conversation with an architect over whether or not making buildings would be the best use of my time. He surprised me with his response and almost insultingly told me that he would much rather make buildings than make words, because words only work for some, but you can control all when you formulate space. After further discussion, I realized he was right. Even the illiterate have an innate sense of how to read space. After all, we are all physical beings. What stood out to me, though, was not this fact. It was the example that he used to prove his point, and it was something that hit just a bit too close to home (literally).
I was raised in Westchester County, in Yonkers, New York. Too north to be The Bronx and too far south to be grafted into the suburbs that house the famed, the fortuned, and the New York City elites. Yonkers, an urban fringe, sits between two historic parkways erected during peak suburbanization: The Hutchinson River Parkway and the Saw Mill River Parkway. One day, we can talk about all of the racist tactics, divisions, and plans that went into suburbanization in New York, but for now, I should probably stay focused on the story at hand.
This architect started to talk about the cute little stone bridges that over-arch The Hutch on its Westchester side, not the Bronx side. He referenced their beauty, and then proceeded to call them “evil little things,” and evil little things they are.
Just high enough for automobile thoroughfare and too low for anything more than a 5 passenger vehicle, these quaint little bridges were designed to control population and mobility – specifically the mobility of the poor, working class, and “of color” in the residing south. Only those who possessed a vehicle in the late 1920s were able to escape the crowded and polluted city on holidays and weekends to enjoy the beauty of the Hudson Valley. The parkway, designed with four 9-foot-wide travel lanes, was a limited-access parkway with no median separation, shoulders, or acceleration/deceleration lanes along its original 11-mile span. This collaboration of the imposed wills of the two landscape architects, Hermann Merkel and Gilmore Clarke, still controls mobility between NYC and Westchester County to this day. That is 84 years of spatial control.
It is oftentimes the quaint beauty of suburban landscape and urban design that goes unrecognized for its inequitable function by nature. And many of these roads, paths, and highways continue to go unaddressed because they have just come to be accepted. Honestly, many of the people driving these roads might not even know the history behind them.
This conversation, which I am now relaying to you, is a call to action. This is a provocation for you to question the built environment and to challenge those things that have been designed for the benefit of inequity, in favor of spatial oppression. What service do boundaries hold for freedom?
Until next month,
stay BAD.d