In this episode, we address the political context of the interviews: the after effects of 2020’s COVID-19 pandemic and George Floyd uprisings. This moment produced a politicizing discourse within architecture which asked academics to address politics through pedagogy, aesthetics, and labor practices. Despite a shared feeling that the political concerns of the moment were critical, there was anxiety and ambiguity around how architecture could represent, or be instrumental for, progressive politics.
Download“Without a doubt, the questions in the last two years have cleared out some of the discursive jabbering that maybe was happening before.”
“I think a lot of the people that are affiliated with the possible mediums project are embracing their role as one that cannot remain apolitical. Whether it’s architecture’s complicity in climate change or the exclusivity of building for only elite institutions and wealthy clients. I think it’s something some of my peers are confronting. I don’t think any of them have the answer yet, but it’s something that they’re conscious about and working on.”
“I do think we’ve experienced this reckoning around race and are in the process of the growing pains of what are frankly these generational calls to expand and grow as a discipline.”
“I think that a lot of us are reflecting not just on the latest atrocity or issue in the news cycle. People have been working on issues of property, of collective life, and environmental violence for decades.”
“There’s a little bit more of an acknowledgment, that we, the authors of these things, are also political actors and bodies within this work.”
“The politics of the aesthetics is never resolved – and it can mean something else.”
“Architecture needs to respond to meta-politics through issues of housing, through issues of material extraction through understanding how that kind of construction of a city is a profoundly political act and a profoundly necessary act. I struggle with a lot of the trendy ways of saying cool down. Like keep it simple. Let’s be indifferent, let’s be ambiguous.”
“…how do you link up progressive politics to specific visual languages or even specific tectonic languages, or even specific tools, visual schools of thought. It seems, I think there’s a deep pessimism and suspicion towards the ability of a visual school of thought to be able to carry those ideas, to express those ideas.”
“Architecture is, of course, it is very much a spatial expression of private property, spatial expression of industrial capitalism. It is a spatial expression of our energy paradigms. And if we don’t acknowledge that, if we allow architecture to retreat into a purely sort of formal or aesthetic kind of condition. Then we just kind of give up.”
“There’s been such reliance historically on unpaid labor and it’s exploitative conditions.”
“Architecture’s idea of authorship has largely worked to remove us from questions of politics, particularly the politics of labor.”
Interviewer
Joseph Bedford
Producer and Editor
Tim Cox
Writer
Tim Cox
Narrator
Tim Cox
Interviewees
Curtis Roth, Andrew Holder, Michael Meredith, David Eskenazi, Michael Young, Kyle Reynolds, Kyle Miller, Hans Tursack, Katie Macdonald, Kyle Schumann, Jaffer Kolb, Kelly Bair and Kristy Balliet, Bryony Roberts, Meredith Miller, Anna Neimark, Neyran Turan, Michelle Chang, Ashley Bigham, Erik Herrmann, Jerome Haferd, Clark Thenhaus, Paul Preissner, Stewart Hicks, Brittney Utting, Daniel Jacobs, Mira Henry, Matthew Au, Jimenez Lai, McLain Clutter and Cyrus Peñarroyo, Andrew Kovacs, and Jon Lott.
Senior Editor
Joseph Bedford
Music
Background music Dreamsphere 1 by Sascha Ende has been used under CC BY 4.0.