oct.
Rethink Your
Spatial Imaginary
Architecture is convergent. It is the coming together of various ideas and realities to form a physical thing.
When an architect employs a design for a client, there is a translation of knowledge and aesthetics between two parties through a patron/tradesman relationship, and what the architect creates is something that has been constructed with the intention of offering sensual and experiential pleasure.
The success of the finished product usually relies upon the satisfaction of the client. But client satisfaction is just that – an emotional response to an aestheticized work which is subject to the culture, status, and outlook of the client. Those who employ the architect, and in turn whom the architect pleases to satisfy, indirectly assert social power in space through the purchasing of the architect's skill, craftsmanship, and willingness to please for an exchange of value (money, status, visibility, etc.).
By the same token, if a client is prejudiced and desires a physical manifestation of racist and discriminatory ideologies in space, then it is the duty of the architecture, by design, to function in a prejudiced fashion. The architect, as an employed party of the client, must design to keep some in and others out in order to satisfy the desire of the client.
For example, when an architect is employed by a large developer, a project may be enacted in the name of restoration or reform, but the use of eminent domain to obtain property for the architect to set their plans upon proves itself to be the opposite of a restorative practice, but rather a fracturing of the community. And, although these actions may be independent of the direct control of the architect, the willingness to plan, design, and construct under one's stamp of approval makes the architect complicit in this violence. The resulting edifice is a totem in ode to the sovereign power(s). In my opinion, truly radical pedagogical practice would provide the ability for an architect and their architecture to be self-reflective and self-regulatory in matters of ethics and social sustainability. Rather than exclusively holding the architect to the sole responsibility of formal aesthetics, we must recognize the ways in which the architect's work is embedded as an accessory to sociopolitical motives and intentions of what the client aims to assert through a commissioned work. This brings me back to the importance of bringing intersectionality to the discipline of architecture.
Architecture should be intersectional. Intersectional design is important for the 21st-century architect because the post-colonial world, like the architecture that defines it, is also convergent. Mathematically, convergence is the approach toward a definite limit as more terms are added to a series. This is how we should operate through design. Non-intersectional architecture is solipsistic and exceptionally capitalistic at best. This is what underlies the notion found in practice that architecture is solely a physical accessory to our social world rather than a representation of it.
Our designs are not and have never been accessories. Every design has an implication. And until the built environment implies diversity, equity, and inclusion, the practice of architecture will continue to be prejudiced. Practice, until the built environment and its role in race relations are confronted and dismantled, will continue to be an accomplice to the criminalization of the Black body in space.
Brandi Thompson Summers describes spatialized blackness, in her novel Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City as the way in which, “… ‘mechanisms of constraint [are] built into architecture, urban planning, and systems of control that function[ed] through policing and the establishment of borders [that] literally and figuratively created a prison-like environment.’
In other words, spatialized blackness accounts for the ways in which the landscape impacts Black people’s literal (im)mobility as well as their sense of (im)mobility through geographies of confinement and surveillance.” One does not have to be Black by race to exist within spatialized blackness, but instead a member of any communal body negated by the sovereign power and therefore rendered submissive under the white spatial imagination.
And because I would rather not quote it any other way, George Lipsitz, in his book How Racism Takes Place, describes the white spatial imaginary as follows:
“A white spatial imaginary based on exclusivity and augmented exchange value forms the foundational logic behind prevailing spatial and social policies in cities and suburbs today. This imaginary does not emerge simply or directly from embodied identities of people who are white. It is inscribed in the physical contours of the places where we live, work, and play, and it is bolstered by financial rewards for whiteness. Not all whites endorse the white spatial imaginary, and some Blacks embrace it and profit from it. Yet, every white person benefits from the association of white places with privilege, from the neighborhood race effects that create unequal, unjust geographies of opportunity…The white spatial imaginary views space primarily as a locus for the generation of exchange value.”
It might be time for architects to acknowledge that the discipline in practice has, from the inception of colonialism, functioned to appeal to the economic elite and other parties of sovereignty that advocate for a materialization of the white spatial imaginary. And it might be time for this discipline of colonial legacy to actively work to balance the equilibrium between white and Black spatial imaginaries, because, as much as you may deny it, a binary does exist.
Until next month,
stay BAD.d