oliver-community-meeting baltimore via gensler

Space to Dream: Reflections and Projections from a New Generation of Designers

Architecture students don’t often get the chance to step back and consider our place in the trajectory of design, but deep reflection can bridge the ideals of academia with the realities of practice. In October, a Common Edge team led by Steven Bingler, Martin C. Pedersen, and Bobbie Hill came to the University of Virginia for a workshop meant to create space for these valuable reflections. Entitled “Your Voice Is Your Power,” the workshop presented statements about architecture from dozens of seasoned practitioners, critics, and educators and asked students to consider where the field has been and where we, as future designers, would like to take it. 

After reviewing these reflections, we noticed that practicing architects and planners focused on business acumen, such as establishing a successful firm. They often focused on the depth of technical proficiency that practice demands. “Making a design succeed not only requires creative vision, but also demands extensive technical knowledge, hands-on field experience, and dispassionate critical feedback,” wrote John Cole. Design educators reflected less on personal achievement and more on student development. One wrote that their “most memorable experience [was] seeing students move from not trusting the process, to trusting the process.” Few wrote about the prosaic realities of finance or construction documentation. Critics offered some of the most potent reflections. Many discussed remarkable experiences with designers, buildings, and landscapes. We found Blair Kamin’s reflections on his Pulitzer Prize–winning work for the Chicago Tribune inspiring, as he wrote about criticism’s place as an accountability mechanism in architectural and city design. 

Once we had sifted through the statements, the attendees crafted a mission statement piecing together what we’d like to take from the experts, as well as our new ideas. Our collective statement reads:

The future of memorable and meaningful design will be grounded in the concept of repair through balanced growth and change. The goal is a human and community-centered environment built through joyful, humble, and collaborative processes that foster restorative and sustainable outcomes.

 

The two of us are here now to take this mission statement, created by more than a dozen architecture students, and distill it into a discussion of the future of design. A future that will center justice over all else. 

The architectural status quo stands to benefit a select group of individuals with overwhelming wealth and out-of-touch priorities. We, the next generation, need to reframe our goals as a profession. Previous generations who’ve designed with “beauty” as the priority have cost our generation an assured future. Don’t misunderstand us—we also delight in the beauty of Zaha Hadid’s effortless curves or Mies’ quiet rigidity. However, we’re unwilling to sacrifice equity, accessibility, and the hopes of a just built environment for aesthetics. We recognize individual expression can lead to a beautiful building, but the “singular genius” paradigm fails to address the harm that comes from unilateral design. One thinks of Robert Moses, whose expressways, completed under the guise of access, fractured neighborhoods throughout New York City, or more recently The High Line, an urban amenity raising serious questions around design’s role in real estate speculation, displacement, and Manhattan’s identity. 

One of the most troubling symptoms of the singular genius paradigm is an obsession with novelty. The capitalist narrative of constant growth at all costs requires newness: new objects, new products, new services. Architecture isn’t blameless in this harmful cycle, as architects use novelty to capture attention and create a brand, focusing on starchitect object-buildings over substantive interventions that service and empower communities. This is not to say that the profession should shirk progress and new modes of thinking, fabrication, and representation. If we’re to imagine an equitable and accessible built environment, we will certainly need novel thinking and design implementation. However, our obsession with the new must decouple itself from ego, shifting the means of creation from the hands of an individual to the collective. We seek to redefine, not end, our field’s relationship with the cutting edge. The most sustainable building is the one already built and there exists a world of possibility in reimagining that which is already here. Instead of focusing so much on “placemaking,” we should aim for an intensification of place: embracing the complex and contested stories that already occupy any and every site.

When responding to the harm long perpetuated by the design professions, repair is often the proposed solution. It’s an idea that came up a lot in our reflections and drives much contemporary discourse on social justice issues of the built environment. We, however, take issue with this word. “Repair” implies that there was a time when the world was whole and places a premium on returning to a state of novelty: a new, complete whole. This isn’t the case. To repair the institutions and systems we currently wrestle with would be to uphold a narrow set of exclusive values antithetical to the just world we hope to inhabit. Ironically, we find dreaming to be a more realistic response than repair. To dream is to recognize that our world has never been whole, and thus we are free to imagine new systems and futures where imperfections and fragments are viewed as catalysts for change. Repair places a premium on the value of the reconstructed whole, but dreaming takes on the responsibility to engage and hold space for that which is inherently broken. 

Moving past repair and dreaming of a world that can hold space for all of us requires reconceptualizing the role of the architect. Rightfully recognizing the gargantuan effort that is putting together a building, collaboration is already embedded into the DNA of professional practice, but we must value working with stakeholders outside of the traditional architectural bubble, especially those most affected by potential design decisions. This is where humility comes into play, as our role as design professionals is not compromised but takes on greater importance. As expert citizens, people with spatial knowledge gained from professional training and the associated privileges of that knowledge, we need to make space for citizen experts, the people with intimate knowledge of a place through lived experience. If the architect can serve as a facilitator, giving voice to a co-produced design vision, then collaborative pathways toward a more equitable built environment open up.

So, if we abolish the singular architect and abandon attempts to repair that system, how are we supposed to design? We believe the answer lies within the power of emotion, both joy and grief. 

As the practicing designers included in “Your Voice Is Your Power” pointed out, design is a highly technical and cerebral field. To be modern masters of construction is great, but somehow all this technique and technology has uprooted us from our planet as well as our relation to others. The brain can only get us so far. There are some things only the body knows. We better understand the intrinsic value of ecosystems when we sit out under the stars, campfire ablaze, not slogging through a LEED accreditation. But we don’t mean to smear all that is technical. After all, design is about solving problems. We just want our generation to tap a new paradigm for solutions. The cerebral world of tech and formality is born of the same colonial logics that created social injustice and the climate crisis. Now, our future depends on our ability to dig deeper into matters of the heart. Of course, an embodied, soulful paradigm is not new. It is imbued in the centuries of traditions in indigenous and diasporic communities across the world. 

To reposition design as a more embodied practice is not unreasonable. Architecture’s conception is rooted in one of our most innate emotions: care. The Vitruvian founding myth of architecture, taken from Lucretius, says the origin of architecture was the discovery of fire and consequent human assembly, thus tying shelter to collective care. Yes, architecture is a response to the brutality of the elements, but it’s also a response to formalizing a social union, and our intrinsic desire to care for that union. The Great Mosque of Djenne is an example of an internationally significant work of architecture that incorporates care into its design process. The mosque’s beauty and grandeur are not from any one act of intellectual genius; rather, they are the result of annual maintenance (care) that comes from a connection to Mali’s rainy season and the spontaneous ritual of the community. It is design by the collective body, not the singular brain. 

An element of the soul that must find its way into design practice is grief. Grief is especially important for communities harmed by design because it is a prerequisite for healing. Liz Ogbu, a designer and spatial justice activist based in Oakland, writes extensively on the matter. Her work engaging a community in Hunters Point, San Francisco, impacted by environmental racism didn’t begin with surveys or sticker activities, as in traditional engagement efforts. Instead, she collected oral histories from the neighborhood to create space for the grief necessary for healing. The ensuing design interventions in the neighborhood were rooted in the values of the community, which created a more just built environment. 

Photo by Anne Hamersky.

 

Based on the success of her projects in San Francisco, Akron, and Charlottesville, she asks us an uncomfortable question: “What healing and change could ultimately be unleashed if every artist, designer, and cultural worker committed their skills to increasing our capacity for grief?” If we are to design a new, just future in the age of climate precarity, we will have to grapple with this question in our design practices. 

Grief’s distant relative, joy, also has a place in the future of design. There’s no shortage of literature on architecture’s capacity to elicit joy, but there’s little about joy’s connection to equitable design. We find joy necessary for its ability to lift designers out of a colonial headspace and back into relation with their community. adrienne maree brown, a “pleasure activist,” implores us to pursue joy as its potency in our body pulls us from our head into connection with our hearts. So, how might a joyful design practice look? In Washington, D.C., BLDUS reimagined the Humphrey Building, a Brutalist structure designed to intimidate, as the “Temple of Play.”

Courtesy of BLDUS.

  

This visioning exercise, part of the National Building Museum’s Capital Brutalism exhibition, reoriented this cold federal building into a truly democratic space united by humanity’s shared affinity for fun. Of course, not every project will be a multistory playground with as lighthearted a name as “The Temple of Play,” but the project does highlight joy’s capacity to inspire democratic spaces. The project is a reminder that design rooted in the sensations of the body—in this case, pleasure—can lead to design outcomes that subvert harmful colonial paradigms.

The future of design needs to center justice before technology, regeneration before novelty. Our call is not to abandon all that has come before, nor is it shy away from the future. We simply ask designers to reconnect with themselves before looking for answers elsewhere. We firmly believe in the built environment’s capacity to enact positive change, and our generation is ready to make it a reality. We must be. If we don’t, who will?

Featured image: Oliver Community Association community engagement session, Baltimore. Photo by Ras Tre Jobina. 

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