Diversity among Architects

From Margin to Center

Craig Wilkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317479260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Professional Practice in Architecture

Diversity among Architects presents a series of essays questioning the homogeneity of architecture practitioners, who remain overwhelmingly male and Caucasian, to help you create a field more representative of the population you serve. The book is the collected work of author Craig L. Wilkins, an African American scholar and practitioner, and discusses music, education, urban geography, social justice, community design centers, race-space identity, shared landscape, and many more topics.

Part I
Space

1
The Space between Sight and Touch

I

Architecture [is the] art of bounding space.

Paul Weiss¹

Poetic, clear and epigrammatic. As brilliant in its simplicity as it is inspiring in its purpose. Architecture is about bounding space; capturing that most ethereal of concepts and creating from it that most concrete of things. Most architects reading this quote might feel a small surge of pride and not a little smugness about their chosen profession and its ability to shape the built environment. But that euphoria is short lived, however, when thoughts – or eyes – turn toward the consideration of the current state of our urban fabric. Faced with bounding the untamed urban spaces of in-between – the “near-building” spaces that run from the vacant lot to the garbage dump to the urban garden or pocket park – with the current architectural kit-of-parts that has displayed a frightening inability to address these spaces in any concrete, lasting manner, causes a rapid and maddening descent from that most rapturous high. Considering the nature of that descent for this article in hopes of once again ascending to those rhapsodic heights, I have become increasingly convinced that current notions of space, rather than facilitating solutions to these urban spaces in any meaningful and substantive way, actually impede them. In this essay, I will lay out what I perceive as the problems of current notions of space, posit an alternative spatial perspective, and locate it within the urban environment through a cultural model that suggests a manner for approaching the space of in-between. By engaging in this project, I do not mean to prescribe a particular form that should emerge from this spatial thesis, but rather suggest a manner in which to rethink our approach to space in general – and urban spaces in particular – in an effort to provide new possibilities for the shaping of our built environment.

II

Standing at the center of the current Western conception of space in which both the discipline and profession of architecture operate, we find the theories of the philosopher John Locke. Around this theoretical product of the Enlightenment, all other modern notions of space in Western civilization revolve. Current notions of Western space either accept, modify, or reject Locke’s primary spatial thesis. For Locke, space “exists” prior to our knowledge – essentialized – discernible only by the relationship (position) of bodies (people) within it. Lockean notions of Space are held in clearly defined terms (this piece is this distance from that piece and is this long, this wide, etc.), available through the mind by Sight and Touch, which discern spatial positions – or relationships – in a space between its elements. As Locke explains it:

I shall begin with the simple Idea of Space. I have shewed … that we get the Ideas of Space, both by our Sight, and Touch; which, I think, is so evident, that it would be as needless, to go to prove, that Men perceive, by their Sight, a distance between Bodies of different Colours, or between the parts of the same Body; as that they can see Colours themselves; Nor is it less obvious, that they can do so in the Dark by Feeling and Touch.²

Without getting into the sort of behavior that this type of thinking about space has allowed, from the battle cry of Manifest Destiny to the yet-to-rest specter of colonialism, I will simply posit here that Sight and Touch are not the only senses that can be used to determine the body’s relationship to spatial elements – a place.³ Now, as simple as it may be to reach out and touch these defining elements within Lockean space, is it not also possible to determine a position within a space – a place – by employing Sound to touch what you may not? In fact, to argue in Locke’s terms – for the Man in the Dark – Sound, more so that Sight or Touch, is an efficient generator of an Idea of Space, particularly if the relational elements necessary in Lockean space are either hidden from view or no small distance away. In any case, in addition to Sight and Touch, Sound is completely capable of discerning a Lockean Idea of Space. But, as I shall later argue, Sound is not restricted to Lockean constructions of Space in the same manner as Sight and Touch. Sound is capable of transcending Lockean limitations to create a much more … shall we say … malleable space. The construction of Sound and its place in spatial production is an issue that Locke does not sufficiently address (in fact, he does not address it at all), which makes his status as the arbiter of spatial understanding at best problematic.

So, if Locke’s formulation of space is shown to be incomplete in its theoretical framework because of its … let’s say … inattention to the phenomenon of sound, is there a theory of space that can incorporate sound into its structure? Fortunately, there are several that provide openings that allow for such an inclusion to be theorized.⁴ Below, I will focus on one: Henri Lefebvre’s concept of space.

III

Henri Lefebvre posits that space is a social product; that spaces do not pre-exist always-already as Locke proposes but are actually produced.⁵ For Lefebvre, space is experienced by people intersecting, interacting, producing, and reproducing relationships to and with each other, a phenomenon that he refers to as “social space.” Social space, as defined by Lefebvre, is both the interaction and what is created by the interaction, and can be understood as the social activities that occur in a particular time and place that constitute – and are specific to – the establishment of a particular way of life.⁶ These social activities – referred to by Lefebvre as the group’s spatial practices – facilitate the production and reproduction of both the place and the characteristics of the spatial relationships of any particularly defined group of people.⁷ Lefebvre’s space is reciprocal – it is created by but also helps to create social interaction.⁸ It is a form of performed communication, a spatial language that can be observed, repeated, and remembered.⁹ This space has a history, a past. His notion, that space is created by people, clearly allows for the incorporation of sound into its framework, as one of music’s primary functions is to facilitate interaction between people. In addition, the creation of music is also a form of performed communication.¹⁰ We shall return to this notion of performed communication in relation to music and space later.

IV

Both expanding and complicating Lefebvre’s understanding of space, enter Michel Foucault. He expands Lefebvre’s spatial theory by positioning the social construction of space – the performed communication – on a larger scale. He sees space as being created by relations between diverse sites, where each site is in turn defined by the social interactions that exist within them individually:

Our epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites … [W]e live inside a set of relations that delineate sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable upon one another.¹¹

Foucault, in expanding Lefebvre, complicates him greatly by arguing that sites are irreducible and not superimposable upon each other, which would preclude the opportunity for any type of interaction – or performance – between sites. If sites – irreducible to each other and not superimposable upon each other – are defined by their relations with each other, then what relationships are being conducted? What can be conducted, and how? As it is currently positioned, each site is a fragment of society – atomized – with no link to the others. How, then, are they – and society – spatially defined?

While quite problematic on the one hand, on the other hand it is quite useful in the sense that in this complication Foucault lays bare a basic preconception underlying current approaches to the design of urban spaces, which ultimately reveals itself in the built environment: the intractability and unequivocal acceptance of the irreducibility of sites to each other by society.

V

In his attempt to address this complication, Foucault gives us an intriguing – but ultimately incomplete – answer to the question of spatial relations between sites. Aware that he has fossilized any and all spatial relations, Foucault posits that there are sites constructed by society that are made specifically for the purpose of linking irreducible sites. These sites are spaces of performed interactive communication that Foucault introduces as heterotopias, in which all of the sites of the society come together:

There are also, in every culture, in every civilization, real places – places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality … I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias.¹²

As theorized by Foucault, these heterotopias are classified as two types: Crisis and Deviant. Crisis heterotopias are described as “forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women, the elderly, etc.”¹³ Crisis heterotopias can, then, be described as temporary sites, temporal in nature. Deviant heterotopias, on the other hand, are described as places in which “individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed. Cases of this are rest homes, psychiatric hospitals, and of course prisons,” and are more spatial in nature.¹⁴

With this thesis, Foucault provides a useful manner in which to understand the relationships not only within individual sites, but between individual sites as well. It follows that if there is to be a link between these sites, there must be some type of interaction – some performance – between each site. But, while he provides us a way to begin to think about relationships between these formally irreducible sites, performances of Crisis and Deviant patterns seem a rather bleak interpretation of the social interaction that create these spaces.

Foucault, in providing only two categories of social site linkage – Crisis and Deviant – does three critical, and potentially problematic, things. First, he positions the possibility of social exchange as extremely limited, being created and linked only by sites that are, if not entirely undesirable, certainly extremely harsh, unpleasant, and most difficult places to construct positive relations – as the term “positive” is currently socially employed. Second, understood as spaces to which one is assigned by authorities, Foucault posits these heterotopias as spaces of non-choice, of non-agency. And third, his theory situates the temporal and the physical aspects of these sites of linkage as separate. We shall return to these elements below.

For the moment, it is important to understand that by their internal relations within sites, their external links to other sites, and as places where less than positive interactions take place, Foucault has positioned his heterotopian links and the in-between spaces of the urban environment – the vacant lot, the gap in the fill, the leftover, transitional near-building spaces – as similar occurrences, essentially homologous. As places of crisis and deviance, Foucault fails to see – along with most urbanists – anything other than bleak possibilities for urban space, due in large part to the underdeveloped theory of sound in his thesis. Why is this important? To answer this question, we must turn to Hip Hop culture in general, and Rap music in particular, the study of which is essential to the new generation of urbanists and particularly important to the project of post-industrial urban spatial reconstruction.

VI

As we have seen, Foucault’s heterotopian categories highlight three problematic elements inherent in their construction that severely limit their desirability in the environment: a predetermined interactive social performance, a lack of self-determination, and a time/space incompatibility. These particular problematic elements are also seemingly inherent in the in-between spaces of urban sites – particularly in the inner city. I would like to posit here that there is another type of heterotopian link that can be theorized, one that is particularly urban, observable in the spatial practices of Hip Hop material culture, and not limited to the elements fossilized by Foucault. For the purposes of this essay, I shall call them Celebratory heterotopias.

VII

Why is Hip Hop culture, you ask, so essential to the new urbanist? Check it. Hip Hop culture in general, and Rap music in particular, has come to massively influence society. From Def Jam to Bad Boy Entertainment, Cross Colors to Kani, Basquiat to Fab Five Freddy, Hip Hop is the driving force behind music, fashion, culture. Hip Hop culture demonstrates the primary principle of heterotopias: it creates a counter-site in which all cultural sites (fashion, music, culture, social relations, etc.) are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. In addition, it provides a hint to its material location, as the “power and promise of rap music rests in the bosom of urban America,”¹⁵ the very place where the problematic in-between spaces are most often found. So, not only does Hip Hop culture reveal its heterotopian origins, it locates the Celebratory site firmly in the urban context.

Returning to the previous analysis that posits space and music as similar types of performed communications constitutive of each other and further defining music as Hip Hop/Rap music, I have posited a Hip Hop/Rap music spatial theory that is predicated on the phenomenon of socially constructed sound, dependent on memory and time, and performed and communicated in the built environment that facilitates the creation of Celebratory heterotopias.¹⁶ But as I shall now argue, Celebratory heterotopias do not carry with them the three problematic characteristics of their heterotopian forefathers.

First, as to the notion of limited, predetermined social interaction, C...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Foreword: The Objects of Hip Hop Architecture
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Space
• PART II Music
• PART III History
• PART IV Practice
• Bibliography
• Index