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Mazzucchelli, Chiara. Bastimenti d’inchiostro: La Grande emigrazione nella letteratura siciliana (1876–1924)
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A Conversation With Yeo-Jin Katerina Bong
No full textYeo-Jin Katerina Bong is an architectural historian with a special interest in building technology, infrastructure, engineering, and architectural manuals of early-modern Italy. Coming from a family of engineers, their father studied civil engineering and their grandfather worked as a construction manager building dams, bridges, and highways in South Korea. Unconsciously, this background slipped into their research, which melded with their studies in art and architectural history.
As a historian of the built environment, Bong is fascinated by the impulse towards sturdy buildings, stable cities, and a robust society (specifically the aversion towards failure, collapses, and defects) which functioned as a common driver for many civilizations across geographical and temporal scales. Many of these building knowledges were passed down as building manuals which recorded and illustrated building procedures, materials, and techniques. Bong’s doctoral dissertation examines building manuals in general, and European and Asian architectural knowledge in particular, to insert artisanal, practical, and infrastructural knowledge as key tools of methodological inquiry in the study of the built environment
The Block Box: Fostering Community Connection in the Suburbs
No full textHow can we help the suburban person to have a place to foster connection at their doorstep, as an urban person might? Through our autoethnography, we discovered that the space and components of a dining room respond to the innate human need to connect with others. This desire for connection in a shared space is also reflected in the public realm. We explored this through a photo essay exercise, documenting spaces which were intended for a specific, formal use, but were frequently utilized for other informal uses—for example, the inclination to converse with your friends while in a study room together. Much like the dining room, we observed people gathered in a study room to partake in bids of connection over the intended, formal use of the room—studying
Decolonizing Colonial Acts of Progress
No full textColonial and imperial powers have portrayed historically ‘undeveloped’ land as an empty slate to enlighten through infrastructural progress. Objects of progress such as infrastructure have often buried within them the story of a sacrificed history deemed less valuable in order to exploit, extract, and claim natural resources. Contrary to the imaginary, these lands are not arid, nor are they ‘undeveloped’ and ‘ancient’. They contain active presents and futures and the act of antiquating them to make room for colonial notions of progress is threatening to their existence. Thus, the act of preservation is a political decision that identifies what history is essential enough to be told - and which can be washed away to make room for progress. Through curatorial design tools, the proposed Kurdish pavilion and archive of cultural objects attempts to subvert historical practices of colonial power such as world expositions and museums to reinstate the Kurdish identity on the south Tigris river. This research decodes the Turkish government’s weaponization of water infrastructure along the Tigris river used to wash away indigenous Kurdish culture, history, and future existence for Turkish progress. The pavilion rewrites the colonial narrative that infrastructure is an object of history, progress and modernization, by highlighting the seemingly mundane objects that build indigenous history, language and agriculture
{in}Visible Maintenance
No full textMaintenance is seldom celebrated or written by architectural theorists, perhaps because maintenance has long been associated with domestic drudgery or reserved for the non-heroic efforts of custodians, groundskeepers, and caretakers. I attempt to quell our societal dissatisfaction with maintenance, casting it into the foreground. There is little attempt at cataloging acts of architectural maintenance in this essay; rather, I approach maintenance, cleaning, and repair, as collected through the everyday observations and lived encounters that can be gleaned through drawings and writing
I Want to Show you the Ocean: Akiya Deconstructed
No full textOne of the many islands dotting the Seto Naikai, Sagishima sits quietly off the mainland’s shore, only connected through ferry. The population has drastically declined, due to aging and the migration of younger generations to major cities. Like many rural areas in Japan, nearly half of the houses on Sagishima are vacant. Buildings are considered depreciating assets in Japan, with houses over 30 years old almost never re-sold. This phenomenon is due to complex socio-economic factors rendering these houses inconvenient and burdensome to inherit and maintain.
Akiyas left to deteriorate become a threat to neighbourhoods, due to decay, risk of accidents, and sheltering of wildlife. As such, they must be cleared away. Stigma surrounds akiyas, rooted in the cultural belief of a spiritual presence in matter and nature. Akiyas hold decay and ‘dirty’ spirits, while the memories attached to them create adversity in being dealt with. Thus they remain at a standstill, offering a glimpse into past lives.
The Red Dot School has been contracted by the City of Mihara to carry out the deconstruction of an abandoned rental house on the Island of Sagishima. Rather than bashing it down in days, the house has been disassembled over months during previous studios, right down to its structural skeleton
Berlin Analogues
No full textIn August 2024, I led a group of twenty-four Daniels Faculty students over three weeks’ travel and exploration in Berlin, Germany. This was the second iteration of “Berlin, A City in Film,” the first having occurred the previous summer. By day, our group explored the city, visiting buildings, meeting with architects and writers, touring museums, and wandering through the city’s neighbourhoods. The students counted their steps by the thousand, and I counted the hours by the pull of espresso shots, as we marvelled at Berlin’s near limitless capacity to generate remarkable urban phenomena
Counter-mapping the US-Mexico Border Landscape
No full textSince the year 2000, more than 4000 cases of migrant deaths in southern Arizona have been recorded, with many more individuals still missing. The primary identifiable cause of mortality is exposure, but many cases remain undetermined. The study area of the project is within this region, named the Altar Valley, which has stood out as one of the most frequently used crossing corridors over the past twenty years.
Movement across this landscape is in constant flux. Every aspect of its terrain is mediated, instrumentalized, and weaponized by a complex web of actors, including the government, ranchers, conservationists, migrants, human coyotes, plants, and animals. This is not a fixed landscape, and importantly, every life-giving or shelter-giving source is also a life-threatening source. The landscape observations including track, ranch, vegetation, water, corridor, and terrain become the entry points to interpret the site conditions and human stories
A Conversation with Douglas Robb
No full textDouglas Robb (he/him) is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in landscape architecture and geography. His research centres on the production of just and inclusive climate futures, and spans topics of energy landscapes, critical resource studies, and concepts of degrowth. Doug’s approach to teaching and research is grounded in place-based methods of drawing, writing, and designing, with a focus on rural and Indigenous lands across North America. Currently, his research investigates the complex landscapes that emerge through processes of energy transition in Canada.
Doug is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Calgary School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape. He holds a PhD in Geography from the University of British Columbia, where he was a Vanier Doctoral Scholar and Four-Year Fellow. Doug also holds a Master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of Toronto where he was awarded the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects Award of Merit. Doug previously worked as a designer at Spackman Mossop Michaels in Sydney, Australia. Prior to joining the University of Calgary, Doug was the inaugural Ian McHarg Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design and a Research Fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. He has taught at the University of Toronto John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, the University of British Columbia School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture, and the University of Technology Sydney Faculty of Design, Architecture, and Building. His writings have appeared in journals such as LA+, Log, Topos, and Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water.
Born in Tkaronto (Toronto), Doug grew up on the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat. He is grateful to now live and work on the traditional territories of the peoples of Treaty 7