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On the term “settler colonist”:

“It’s worth pointing out that both the United States and Israel are prototypical “settler colonist” states, a term recently embraced by leftist movement activists. The term is helpful in correcting a widespread self-misunderstanding of Americans in relation to our own colonial history: we usually forget that in contrast to most parts of the world—all of Africa, Asia, and most of the Middle East—there has never been an anti-colonial revolution returning the indigenous people to power in this country.

Yet the term has a limited usefulness in helping us to think through how unceded land should be governed now and in the future. As one activist friend made clear, accusing me of adopting a white supremacist ideology in calling for a multiethnic state in Israel and Palestine, the term “settler-colonist” implies that the pre-colonial indigenous people of a territory are the sole inhabitants entitled to self-determination. This would exclude not only the descendants of the original colonial settlers but also, for instance, African Americans whose ancestors were brought to the Americas against their will, and political refugees and asylum seekers from every part of the globe, who have migrated to the United States seeking freedom of conscience and freedom from oppression.

Here, alongside the principles of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the principles set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights should be our guide. Adopted in 1948 almost simultaneously with the formation of the state of Israel, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been embraced by nearly every nation in the world. It guarantees the inalienable rights of all people within a territory to legal and political recognition.“

Full article at publicseminar.com
@publicseminar

Public Seminar is an independent project of The New School Publishing Initiative dedicated to informing debate about the pressing issues of our times and creating a global intellectual commons.
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Please consider this position I argue would lead to a just, equitable, humane US policy in Israel published in @publicseminar .

“Let’s think through the conventional explanation for the exclusion of a majority of Palestinians from citizenship: it’s supposed to protect Israelis against the danger of a takeover by a Palestinian government. Given that balancing minority rights is one of the most basic principles in the formation of any democracy and the original Zionists conceived of Israel as a multiethnic federation, this comes off as rather preposterous. Multiethnic states throughout the world have established frameworks to protect the rights of minorities….Among the Israeli diaspora, countless Israeli-born Jews have left Israel permanently and migrated to the United States, with no hope or desire to return to a nation in which they cannot imagine a just and peaceful future, and whose ethno-nationalist reality they completely repudiate.”
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“Whether or not it sways Netanyahu, we should certainly withhold military funding now and make our support contingent on clearly stated humanitarian objectives and an ultimate governing framework that conforms to our ideas of justice. If Israel chooses to continue its current course, it should do it alone, without our support. ”
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“The United States should stand behind a policy in Israel consistent with its own governing principles: support only a multiethnic, nonsectarian state within which all inhabitants and all those living within the territory it controls are legally guaranteed civil rights.“

Full article at publicseminar.org

Thanks @publicseminar and editors James Miller and Evangeline Riddiford Graham for providing the space for this discussion.
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In the February issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine @landarchmag check out the story on Kongjian Yu @kongjianyu_turenscape founder of the first and only landscape architecture program in China at Peking University, and Turenscape, the first private Chinese landscape architecture office, which has designed hundreds of municipal projects recovering wetlands and restoring polluted industrial landscapes as stormwater-remediating parks and wildlife habitats. @tclfdotorg

"In awarding the second biennial Oberlander Prize to the Chinese landscape architect Kongjian Yu, FASLA, the Cultural Landscape Foundation and its 2023 jury sent an unmistakable signal about the future of the field. For the prize, which seeks to function as a counterpart to architecture’s Pritzker Prize, Yu is a resonant international figure whose theory of sponge cities saw its influence and exposure steadily grow in the past decade. Gray infrastructure and channelized rivers of the past century are being increasingly daylit and replaced with naturalized environments that absorb water and restore wildlife habitats. Given the accelerating climate crisis and its impact on hydrological cycles, Yu now talks about the need for a “sponge planet,” updated to reflect the urgency of climate adaptation facing human settlements worldwide."

Special posthumous thanks to Michael Sorkin for having introduced me to Kongjian Yu many years ago, instigating the conversation about how ecologically restorative landscape design happens within the Chinese system of government and in private developments, and to Yajun Dong of NV5, who originally suggested I write about Turenscape after reading my story about Moscow public space design in Landscape Architecture Magazine in 2018. Thanks LAM editor @leahaline Leah Ghazarian!
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Check out this exquisite renovation by @fmt.estudio in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico published in @dwellmagazine (subscription only link in profile)

FMT Estudio describes their design style as a sort of “ludic minimalism.” “It’s not always playful to think about buildings,” says Orlando Franco. “This building is very serious, stark, and serene—so we thought about how people can be on the building, around the building, under the building, or move through the building, with colors and surfaces to support that.”

Thanks editor @mike.chino !

Details from photography by @amybello.fotografia
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This fall, Mary Miss launched a citywide public art project in Milwaukee, a series of beacons announcing a new era for the city’s municipal water system.

A pioneer of earth art since the 1960s, Miss’s early installations began as minimalist environmental sculptures constructed on the grounds of museums, parks, universities, and urban developments like Battery Park City. Made of rough industrial materials influenced by manufacturing and production facilities, the structures heightened the immediacy of spatial experience in relation to their surrounding natural environments. Several of these works are currently on display in Groundswell: Women of Land Art at Dallas’s Nasher Sculpture Center, on view through January 7, 2024.

In 2008, Miss established the nonprofit City as Living Laboratory (CALL) in collaboration with founding director Olivia Georgia as a way to build capacity to realize complex science, art, and advocacy-based projects that engage diverse stakeholders, community organizations, government agencies, and development partners. Meanwhile, Miss’s ideas were expanding to larger-scale initiatives tied to the urgency of climate change.
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Over the last three decades, Milwaukee has almost completely eliminated the harmful release of sewage through a combination of gray and green infrastructure projects like deep retention tunnels and restored wetlands, putting it far ahead of cities like Boston, Houston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and New York City—many of them under court order to comply with provisions of the 1972 Clean Water Act requiring cities to prevent pollution of waterways during heavy rains.

Full story linked in bio & at Metropolismag.com under “Projects” tab. @cityaslivinglab @metropolismag thanks editors @avirajagopal @jax__stone !
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I did a little post-occupancy survey of the Hunters Point Queens library by Steven Holl Architects while I was in the neighborhood to find out how it is being used now and to consider again claims about its accessibility. I went to only the areas that I could access by elevators to see whether the extraordinary views that I had appreciated in the original pre-opening site visit were obtainable by any user. I observed how they had adapted the building based on objections about lack of storage for strollers and what happened to the tiered stacks originally conceived to foreground books within the open atrium projecting views across the East River. To a surprising degree, the changes demanded to make the building feel safer and more accessible beyond the current accessibility standard of reasonable accommodation for all users have made the building much worse, less beautiful, and have harmed its utility for all users, including those in wheelchairs. Whereas the original plan was filled with stacks of books that any user could request, as they do in any other library, now the books are just gone, replaced by empty shelves that serve no one and harm the building’s original intent, as well as the intent of the ADA. Protective glass at every staircase and overlook impedes the building’s views and sense of openness, and unnecessarily rises far higher than anyone could reasonably fall from or climb over. Strollers are parked in hallways and ad hoc signage directs people where to park them. The outdoor terrace is closed, limiting its use by young people who would otherwise have additional space to hang out in. That said, all areas of the library are filled with people on this particular weekday, late afternoon. I asked two groups of young people what they thought of the library and whether they come there all the time. “Not all the time, only twice a week,” says one. “It’s lovely,” says another. “But there are not enough books.” Anecdotal and needs more research and reporting, but I continue to think it’s a great public building that offers an experience for all that you can only get in New York City otherwise by being a billionaire. @stevenhollarchitects @qplnyc
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“Confidence in intellection is in all respects more philosophical than is confidence in time and the virtues of forgetting, for at least intellection is an activity of the mind and it results from a personal effort of the human being, whereas time flows all alone, independent of our initiatives. Confidence in intellection presupposes a certain philosophy of evil, which is precisely intellectualism, and we rather would like to be able to say intellectionism—for if intellectualism is the philosophy of the intellect, then it is "intellectionism" that is the philosophy of penetrating intellection. This "intellectionism" itself bases its indulgence on the negation of sin. “lntellectionism" is a theory about misdeed, and the intellectionist has an opinion about the nature of the culpable act, whereas the forgetful person does not does not have any opinion about anything at all and moreover intrinsically does not look to account for his need for reconciliation; forgetting is not a philosophical theory, and those who preach forgetting do nothing other than use the fickleness and sloth of men, their amnesia and superficiality…. Let us reconcile because history urges us to do it, because such are the exigencies of life and the necessities of good neighborliness, because duration soothes all ressentiments… But this because…does not indicate the grounds for reconciliation. It simply gives an explanation of reconciliation.” —Vladimir Jankélévitch, Forgiveness (1967)
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“Clemency is not forgiveness any more than generosity is love. The generous person is simply too rich in resources, and the resources overflow themselves, or the generous person blindly distributes them around himself just as a cornucopia gives of the earth and benedictions. In this respect, the generous person resembles nature: nature as well does not love anyone in particular. In its vital superabundance, it squanders its liberalities indistinctly, blindly, and without any selective predilection for anyone, for nature does not have preferences and it neither chooses nor hierarchizes values; moreover, nature gives flowers to everyone, to good people as well as evil. And it is likewise without gratitude just as much as it is without rancor; ungrateful and forgetful, nature shows itself to be perfectly indifferent to our sorrows.”
Vladimir Jankélévitch, Forgiveness (1967) trans. Andrew Kelley @therealandykelley
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“True forgiveness is a significant event that happens at an instant at the margins of historical becoming. True forgiveness, which is at the margins of all legality, is a gracious gift from the offended to the offender. True forgiveness is a personal relation with another. To begin with, the event is certainly the decisive moment of forgiveness, just as it is the decisive moment of a conversion.… [but] it blurs into certain condescending forms of clemency: the sage is exempted from the meritorious effort and from the harrowing sacrifice that permit the offended to surmount the offense; for this invulnerable person almost nothing occurs or comes of it; the injuries of the offender do not affect him at all.… Injuries, for the sage, are more insignificant than scratches; he hardly perceives their existence. By disregarding evil and wickedness, clemency minimizes the injury at the same time; in minimizing the injury, it renders forgiveness useless. There is no forgiveness, because, so to speak, there was no offense and absolutely no offended party, even though there was an offender… The magnanimous person is much too big to see the gnats and lice who harassed him… Not only is the offender neglected but… he is quasi-nonexistent.… Clemency is forgiveness that has no interlocutor. Moreover, the person granting clemency does not utter the word of forgiveness to a true partner of flesh and bones. this tête-à-tête is a solitude. This dialogue is a soliloquy, this relation is a solipsism. It is an understatement to say that the person granting clemency has never suffered from the act of the one who insults him, that he never had time to hold a grudge, that he neither reproaches the person who insults him for anything, nor even gives him the honor of feeling the least bit of rancor, be this even a nascent rancor that is just as quickly suppressed by forgiveness… Actually, he does not even care for the person whom he absolves!” Vladimir Jankélévitch, Forgiveness (1967)
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“It is not difficult to understand why the duty to forgive has become our problem today. The forgiveness that one should grant to the offender and to the persecutor is… exceptionally difficult for a certain category of humiliated and offended people: to forgive is an effort to begin again continually, and no one will be astonished if we say that in certain cases the ordeal is at the limits of our strength. But this is because forgiveness in the strict sense is effectively a limit case, just as remorse, sacrifice, and the gesture of charity can be. It is very possible that a forgiveness free from any ulterior motive has never been granted here below, that in fact an infinitesimal amount of rancor subsists in the remission of every offense, such as the calculating self-interest that cannot be weighed, or that a microscopic motive of concern for the self subsists hidden in the underground of unselfishness…. From this point of view, forgiveness is an event that has never come to pass in history, an act for which there is no place in space, a gesture of the soul that does not exist, in our contemporary psychology…However and even if it is not a datum within psychological experience, the gesture of forgiving would still be a duty. …Forgiveness is certainly not a decision of the will… but like a decision it is an event that is initial, sudden, and spontaneous. …Pure love without a change of one's mind and a pure forgiveness without ressentiment are …not perfections that one might obtain in an inalienable fashion…Whether we forgive out of weariness or charity, it means the same for the one who insults: the differential element will stay invisible ... Apocryphal forgivings nevertheless have something in common with authentic forgiveness: they put an end to a situation that is critical, tense, or abnormal and that would unravel one day or another; for a chronic hostility that is passionately rooted in a rancorous memory demands to be resolved, as does any anomaly. Rancor arouses cold war which is a state of exception, and forgiveness… does the opposite: it lifts the state of exception, liquidates what the rancor maintained, and resolves vindictive obsession.”
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While I was in Milwaukee to see Mary Miss’s WaterMarks, I met up with a friend, Luke Brecken @ekul3691 a visual artist I knew in college at Michigan State who had been living in Chicago until a few years ago. Luke studied sculpture at Michigan State and was part of a close community of musicians, artists, and writers who worked in the restaurants while going to school and afterwards. Back then, he was already avidly collecting industrial design objects like transistor radios, clocks, ceramics, glassware, and tschotchkes from antique stores and garage sales, as well as objects like keys, metal rings, beveled wood, hubcaps, hood ornaments, etc., which he kept stored in crates in his studio and periodically sold as collector's items over the years, incorporating others into his sculptural assemblages and paintings.

Now that he's in Milwaukee, he has more space in the house he lives in to show off the collection and his work. The house is starting to look like a special collection house museum, which, though it's still a work in progress, I hope he eventually begins to open up to guests. It's consonant with a range of work from people like Tyree Guyton, who we were familiar with from being in the Detroit area, David Philpot, Olayami Dabls, El Anatsui, Theaster Gates, and Nari Ward.

It's also important to me that Luke is fairly self-conscious in having a poor-and-working-class affiliation, an experience often missing in the context of contemporary recognition of under-privileged identities. In contemporary US culture, we are constantly pressured to become professionalized, self-market lifestyles, and show off our acquisition of status, and we thereby quickly lose contact with the truly dire conditions many people live in. I cannot say whether this is how he would ideally like to be represented, but I personally believe it's a valuable context for his art. He is currently working as an auto parts delivery driver and living in Clarke Square, Milwaukee, and has completely eschewed the middle-class careerist route that most people now feel they have to pursue, turning their “practice” into a fetishized commodity for the art market.
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What is the state of housing design in the US and how are architects of new single- and multi-family housing responding to issues such as the warming climate, affordability, increasing regulations and construction costs, and the demand for new unit types that better reflect today's demographic realities? These questions will be the focus of a half-day event marking the release of The State of Housing Design 2023, a new book that examines themes in housing design, explored through over 100 recent buildings in the US.

“The design of homes and apartments well tailored to the specific needs of diverse community types and user groups has the potential to transform the policy debate surrounding public financing and subsidizing of affordable housing, creating the possibility of a crucial expansion of affordable housing in the US. With its sensitivity to the habits, belief systems, lifeways, needs, and desires of constituencies throughout the country, along with its efficient construction and effective maintenance, community-led housing should rebut arguments that have long precluded an adequate supply
of homes to a substantial portion of the population ill served by the market. Twentieth-century supply-side economists traditionally saw the role of government in offering housing in the narrowest of terms, arguing that rather than directly fund supportive, affordable, social, or public housing, the government should simply lower taxes, decrease regulation, and spur the private market to produce housing based on consumer demand. By 1999, the Faircloth Amendment fully adopted this principle into national policy by making it illegal for the federal government to increase the US public housing supply. Real estate developers argued that public housing would “crowd out” the private marketplace, suppressing demand for their output. The opposite happened: a private market serving less than half the population crowded out access to capital for projects serving the rest of the public.”

Friday, November 17, 2023, 2-6pm
Piper Auditorium, Gund Hall, Harvard Graduate School of Design
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Review of the Perelman Performing Arts Center @pac_nyc by @rexarchitecture in the current issue of @abitare_magazine

The glowing cube of the World Trade Center’s Perelman Performing Arts Center hovers at an acute angle opposite the 9/11 Memorial, as if solemnly looking away. Its abstract form defers to the horrific event that took thousands of lives, left a gaping hole in the city, and plunged the U.S. into two decades of war. Backlit like a film strip by silver LED pendants that wash its marble-and-glass-paneled walls from the inside, an intense pattern of dark gray veins animates the building’s surface, tinted orange as light filters through thin slices of stone.

Like a minimalist Agnes Martin painting, each marble-and-glass panel constitutes a single brush stroke of the facade’s composition, repeated on all four sides of the volume. To reduce the aleatory chance of random patterns produced by quarrying enough marble to cover a block-long five-story cube, REX adopted a strategy of biaxial symmetry to plot out repeating patterns of veins. As a result, each face needed only four stones with matching striations, and 16 pieces altogether to make the composition radiate an equivalent pattern on each side.

The venue is a rare cultural attraction within the World Trade Center area after dark, when the office towers close and disaster tourism grinds to a halt. Its geometry recalls Daniel Libeskind’s 2002 masterplan, which anticipated a rudimentary polygon in the future performance space’s lot. Its design—led by principal Joshua Ramus of REX, founded as OMA’s New York office and bought out by Ramus in 2006—also vaguely hints toward the 1960s geometric sculptures of artists like Peter Forakis, Frosty Myers, and Marc di Suvero who once ran Park Place Gallery in a nearby loft demolished for the towers’ construction.

Viewed from Santiago Calatrava’s Oculus, the 9/11 Memorial, and One World Trade Center, the cuboid adds a contrasting figure that resolves some of the site’s contradictions. Neither a void, a supertower, nor a biomorphic form, it leaves the plaza open while offering a kind of stoop for pedestrians to linger.

*Full story in the November print issue.
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Dance. Choreography by Lucinda Childs, Music by Philip Glass, Scenography by Sol LeWitt. Words are my own. (Part 2)
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Dance. Choreography by Lucinda Childs, music by Philip Glass, scenography by Sol LeWitt. The words are mine. (Part 1)
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Memphis riverfront story for Metropolis now in print! “You’ve got to provide hope and a vision of what can be in an alluring way,” Carol Coletta says. “You’ve got to provide allure.” Thanks editor Avinash Rajagopal!
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Art and design publications devalue the essential work of writing. Low pay rates and flat-fee payments amount to freelance writers generously subsidizing publishers, who in the worst cases compensate writers less than a minimum wage for work. Art and design writers demand pay rate increases and improved editorial practices that compensate them for all of the time required to produce content for well-established publications.

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Current industry standards are unsustainable and punitive for writers. The lack of consideration shown for working hours, last-minute requests, additional services with no additional pay, lack of timely payments of contracts, invoices, and fees, and lack of responses to pitches all amount to abusive practices.

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We acknowledge the pressure that’s been put on publications over the last 15 years from lost advertising to the internet. But without writers, there’s no magazine. The response to pushback from writers about uncompensated labor cannot be to cut off assignments. As an industry, we are obliged to figure out a business model that doesn’t systematically exploit people.

Full text at commonedge.org @commonedgecollab
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Check it out in @archpaper a review of @art_omi ‘s Shared Space—Collective Practices curated by Julia van den Hout @jvandenhout featuring @fundamentaldesignbuild @colloqate @wip_collaborative & @assembleofficial

Full story at archpaper.com

The four collaboratives share a style familiar to many community-oriented design initiatives: ad hoc, colorful, joyful, and often temporary, they react to the unique situation of a place and engender a sense of belonging among residents normally ignored by government programs and private finance-led redevelopment. They create places of identification and inspiration that signal intangible, unseen possibilities. While the scale of these projects can often seem inadequate in the face of larger-scale systemic and institutional failures, the work has a self-evident value. They serve as pilots, models, examples, and inspirations, change agents stimulating others to act, and opportunities to expand the imagination for people with little exposure to art and design. They can have substantial results when adequately funded and expanded into policymaking regimes. And the collaborations with community members can be incredibly fun, meaningful, and rewarding.

Thanks so much to the generous assignment and story editing of @yhprumkcaj & @emilyconklin !
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#Writersstrike
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We need to get @ericklottary into tennis! The grunting in this sport requires his artistry.
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New story in Oculus @centerforarch about new public school construction and expansion in New York City.

Get this…

Currently, the New York City School Construction Authority anticipates needing more than 6,200 new seats in Queens high schools alone by 2026. Its budget, fortunately, is appropriately enormous: $2.13 billion for 29 extensions and new buildings in Queens, adding more than 18,000 seats, and $19.4 billion to manage the herculean task of building and maintaining schools citywide from 2020 to 2024.

Thus, on a busy section of Northern Boulevard at the crossroads of Woodside, Astoria, Sunnyside Gardens, and Jackson Heights, between the Home Depot and a row of car dealerships, a new $178.85 million high school designed and built by SCA’s in-house staff of 170 architects and engineers is expected to serve more than 3,079 teenagers.

Full story at link in profile.

Featuring @rktbarchitects

Thanks editor @jkrichels !!
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Another cool daylighting of a river in @archpaper by @landcollective with pavilions by @hwkn_architecture/ photos by Alan Karchmer

Full story at archpaper.com

Above the start of Grassy Branch of Cool Creek in the small city of Westfield, Indiana, a wooden boardwalk snakes through a renaturalized streambed where pedestrians can hop over the stream or get their feet wet in the flowing water. Nearby, the new park, the Grand Junction Park & Plaza, accommodates dedicated spaces for open-air performances; a glass-walled cafe with a cascading, stepped Indiana limestone facade; and a Great Lawn for lounging. Park users can picnic and play, ice-skate in the winter, or enjoy the many comfortable wooden benches from which they can peacefully observe the resurgence of wildlife.

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The park, which officially opened last year, was designed by David Rubin of Land Collective with architecture by Matthias Hollwich of HWKN in collaboration with RATIO Architects and signage and wayfinding by Bruce Mau Design, along with an extended team of civil engineers and riparian-corridor specialists. While the end result is impressive, the effort began as a more limited project focused on flood control.

Thanks editor @yhprumkcaj !!
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Tennis is a proxy for reflections on desire, reality, nirvana, suffering, transcendence… via Slavoj Zizek.
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Amazing project in @archpaper instigated by @dallasnews architecture critic @marklamster designed by @stosslu & @mpdlstudio

Full story at archpaper.com

“Dealey Plaza became a place of shame and embarrassment for Dallas’s elected officials, who tried to ignore it, placing only an informational plaque at the site until, in 1970, the city commissioned Philip Johnson to design a memorial several blocks away. The unfortunate result is a grim, Brutalist artifact.

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In the meantime, Dealey Plaza attracted hucksters and conspiracy theorists, who regularly marked the locations where bullets were found with spray-painted x’s on the pavement. Rather than taking the situation as an excuse for grandstanding and the reprimand of city leaders, Mark Lamster, architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News, decried the sad state of this part of downtown. “It is a deplorable state of affairs,” he wrote last October, “but also a great opportunity; a chance to transform this site into a space of civic memory and understanding that embraces the past and points to the future.”

Through his leadership, Dallas Morning News has commissioned an extraordinary vision for Dealey Plaza. Led by Chris Reed of Stoss Landscape Urbanism and Monica Ponce de Leon of MPdL Studio, the effort is an inspiring example of what architecture criticism and public memorials can and should be. The Reinventing Dealey Plaza project layers transportation infrastructure, historic preservation, ecological design, and two memorials to shocking incidents of political violence within a generous transformation of one of Dallas’s most significant and neglected public spaces.”

Thanks editor @yhprumkcaj for fantastic assignment!
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Check out a beautiful Paris renovation across from Père Lachaise by @ateliervarenne in @dwellmagazine Photos by @isabelamayerphoto

Thinking of my cinquième arrondissement people after yesterday’s building explosion. 😢❤️❤️

Paris apartments with open views are hard to come by, so when Pierre Vérité and Allira Swick found one with three rooms of south-facing windows overlooking the verdant landscape of Père Lachaise cemetery, what also serves as the city’s largest green space, they knew they’d found something special. And there was more to love: antique chandeliers, plaster medallions, and wood paneling. Yet the apartment had not been updated since 1963 by its most recent inhabitant, a woman in her 90s. Pierre and Allira wanted to preserve some of its antique charms while making it their own.

Interior architect Asma Florençon moved the primary bedroom to the opposite end of the plan, turning the space into a living room and widening the doorway between it and the dining room with a segmental arch, which became a motif for the renovation. It’s a common element in Paris, Florençon points out. "I think of it as a return to origins," she says.