Decolonizing Architecture
Yessenia Funes:
Hi. Today I want to talk about decolonizing architecture. know it may feel like there's a new headline or campaign every other week claiming to decolonize this or that, whether it's decolonizing ecology or decolonizing your diet. I mean, come on. Has decolonization become gentrified? That's a separate topic, but let's keep it real. Colonization lies at the root of why many of our institutions and infrastructures are the way they are. That's especially true with architecture. Conquistadors and settler-colonizers invaded and stole lands to eradicate the people there and build what they believed should exist on those lands instead, right?We're going to get into all that today with our two special guests whom I’ve had the great pleasure of meeting. Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski are a couple who practice and teach architecture together with their studio, WAI Architecture Think Tank. Cruz is Puerto Rican, Nathalie is French, and together their brains can create some pretty radical and inspirational ideas. I absolutely love them and their perspective on design. There's a richness to the world of architecture that you can miss without learning perspectives like theirs. What's the history behind how a place was designed? Is the solution to build more, or is it to dismantle? How does design factor in the people who live and work in a place? How do we learn from cultures?
This is the Architectures of Planetary Well-being podcast. I'm your host, Yessenia Funes.Hello everyone. We are here today with WAI Architecture Think Tank, which is a planetary studio that practices by questioning the political, historical, and material legacy and imperatives of architecture and urbanism through a panoramic and critical approach. Founded in Brussels during the financial crisis of 2008 by Puerto Rican architect, artist, curator, educator, author and theorist, Cruz Garcia, and French architect, artist, curator, educator, author and poet, Nathalie Frankowski, WAI is one of their several platforms of public engagement that include Beijing-based anti-profit art space, Intelligentsia Gallery, and the free and alternative education platform and trade school, Loudreaders.Nathalie and Cruz, thanks for joining me today.
Cruz Garcia:
Thank you for having us. Super happy to be here.
Nathalie Frankowski:
Thanks a lot for having us.
YF:
I'm super, super excited to dig into all of this with you. We met a few months back in Denmark and I was blown away by the way, by which you all talk about architecture. I'm very new to this realm. It's a theme that our listeners will hear on this podcast, but listening to you two speak when we met in Denmark really gave me a new perspective into what architecture means, into the power that architecture holds. And so I'm really just excited to hear about what drew you both into this world. Could you share a little bit about that history and how you two got involved in architecture?
NF:
Yes, sure. I think for me, it might be something that was also driven by my family. I know that, actually, I think one of the brothers of my grandfather was an architect in Poland, so I was always surrounded by... I think my grandfather initially wanted my father to be an architect, so there was a lot of architecture around me somehow, like books and things like this.But I feel like what really opened the field for me, and was really relevant, was studying in Paris-La Villette. So knowing that, again, there was something coming from family that made me decide to study architecture. When I was studying in La Villette, I was in a department of art, architecture, and philosophy. And suddenly I could bring questions that were much wider than, for example, the design question that was the one that I was more used to.
And I could really combine different interests, different tools—if it was also the tool of movie-making, the tool of writing, the tool of questioning—and understand architecture as something that was much more political. And that would help me a lot to frame questions that I had and hopefully try to find different tools to provoke discussions about things that were really pressing issues that was around us.
CG:
Yeah, for me... Puerto Rico's really strange. It's very, I think, very different to the French context and to Nathalie’s context in the sense that I didn't know what an architect was. I never met any. I didn't know any architect or didn't think of architecture as a profession, although I always wanted to be somebody that designs buildings or spaces.And in Puerto Rico, I thought it was what an engineer is. So I was about to study engineering at the university and I have enrolled at the school and everything. And I remember, last-minute, change of decision to not go to the university that had engineering because we prefer to be in the track team. Me and one of my friends from high school preferred to be in the track team of the university that was close to where we grew up, where I grew up—10 minutes from home, Rio Piedras—and they didn't have engineering. And I remember the director of the athletic department, he was trying to figure out what was there for me, and they told me, “well, there's no engineering here, but there's architecture and if you want we can make you a special program in the first year. You take some other classes and you see that's something that interests you and you apply for the year after because you already passed.” The architecture has its own application deadlines. And I was there in the architecture school for a couple of years, not very interested, to be honest with you. I didn't have much connection to it.And a couple of years later, I started reading some things, particularly political things. I mean, some of them connected back to France with the Situationist... I read this amazing quote that said that urbanism doesn't exist and architecture exists like a commodified product in the market sense of the world, like an ideology. And he compares architecture to Coca-Cola. And I was like, "Whoa, this sounds like something that... There's some anger in this text that is kind of interesting to me and I can identify with it."
And luckily I was also studying literature with some amazing Puerto Rican writers, like Rafael Acevedo and Eduardo Lalo, and I was asking them questions about what's happening in the ’60s and then they were explaining to me. And then I saw this segue from architecture to get there. I mean I love designing and all that, but that's never enough. And I feel like in a way, similar to Nathalie, it was when literature and very important fields of knowledge start clicking; that's when architecture makes sense, in a way.
YF:
Yeah. I love that. Words and writing have been some through-ways for you all to connect more deeply with architecture. I'm curious to hear about the milestones that you all have experienced throughout your practice. Are there any milestones that have informed your architecture practice and values?
NF:
Well, architecture is quite a slow and long profession and I feel, as we were pointing out already in thinking about how we approach architecture, the richness of architecture is the fact that you can define it in many ways. So you can practice it in many different ways and it means, also, that it will shift and it will change, sometimes during your lifetimes. Of course, it depends on how you approach the field and the profession. If it's... Some people will have different types of paths, but I feel, for us, was every time we moved from places to places, I feel that was also a big learning curve.And it shifted a lot in the type of projects we did and maybe of the questions we did; I'm sure Cruz will add on that. But I feel like, for example, the first big move was when we actually moved physically to Beijing, where we practiced for seven years, because that was really a place that forged our thinking, our way of working. The speed of a city was quite amazing.The fact that the city was also going through a lot of changes, that we could really visibly see how people would live there. And that brought a lot of different ways of practicing architecture, of producing different types of projects. After when we moved back, for example to the US, then it was also summer 2020. We were here and again, another shift happened. Cruz was in the street; he can speak more about it. So I feel really being in different places, different contexts, depending on also, of course, of what was unraveling at that time helped us a lot to change and to enrich how we would see and approach our projects.
CG:
And there is something about, as Nathalie mentioned, all those places. We met in Belgium, hated what we were doing, this sort of relationship of architecture and capital. Moved to Amsterdam, had really close encounters with white supremacy. Ended up going to Beijing, running away from Europe in a way.And then discovering—not discovering—discovering ourselves in this place in the middle of modernity, in that really violent, fast, creative process of modernization that Beijing was going through. Then opening a gallery there, publishing a couple of books when we were there. Intelligentsia was really fundamental for starting and developing all these curatorial and publishing platforms that engaged with many different people from many different places. And as Nathalie said, coming back to the US in 2016, also a very critical year if we're talking about white supremacy, and then experiencing 2020 in Pittsburgh, in Virginia—I feel like all of those are really fundamental years to understand.We finished school in 2008, in the middle of the financial crisis. Then we went all the way to Beijing and then back to the US, in the middle of where we are right now. And I feel like this work that has been produced there, in a way, is a reflection of all of those things. And in a way our practice, and ourselves, is also a reflection of having lived in those places. We always tell everybody that we are also a Beijing practice, because many of the ways in which we approach our practice, whatever it is—in architecture and art and writing—has to deal with the fact that we were based in Beijing for seven years.But also I'm Puerto Rican and Nathalie's French, and we are entangled in all these discourses of decolonialism and imperialism, against white supremacy, and how do they manifest in the different places where we go, while also touching all these other interests that our work has and relationships with people. Because I think a lot of what we do has to deal with teaching on one hand, and the other one on developing networks of solidarity through our practice.
YF:
Wow. And so all these networks are being built and established and all these different places where y'all have lived. And I imagine that there's the people, the culture, but also the built environment and all these different pieces of these different places that you two are taking along with yourselves, helping inform your practice and helping guide the direction where y'all hope to take WAI and the direction that y'all hope to take the architecture field at large.
CG:
Yeah, totally. Totally. I feel like we started defining our practice as a planetary studio, in a way, responding to that idea of relationships. But also because many of the questions we're asking are how to deal with questions that are planetary in the scale, in the scope, in the relationship to people. So yeah, it becomes a continuous exercise of redefinition.
YF:
But I'm curious how you all are redefining what it means to be an architect, because I think that the approach that you two have is quite interesting.
NF:
Yeah, I feel like one... So, it's linking a little bit to your previous question, too. I think one of the biggest shifts that happened is that—is actually understanding what architecture could potentially be or how we could potentially practice architecture. Because I feel like, as you mentioned, when you practice there, we are dealing with, in some cases, physical rendering of designs that affect everybody's life, that can be, and that are really, really violent, depending on whom you serve and for whom you are designing, for whom you are building. And I feel, for us, thinking, really, about architecture being this field that was meant for approaching the question of living together to then, how could we really find ways to practice in a more solitary way, in a more understanding way.
YF:
Cruz, I'm curious to hear how you are thinking about this—redefining what it means to be an architect.
CG:
I think what Nathalie saying, there's... I think I’ve got to talk about several things at the same time. On one hand, there's this definition of Ludwig Wittgenstein that we love that is from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, where he says, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." I think, also, the limits of my language limit how you can define something, architecture being there. I also had to bring... We were recently doing an interview with Mabel Wilson, the architect and historian, for our issue that we're editing on reparations for the Journal of Architectural Education. And in the conversation, Mabel brought up this amazing idea that she's been discussing, that maybe we shouldn't be calling it “architecture.” “Architecture” has such a European, Latin connotation and it comes with a body of knowledge. And when you talk about the prison system, even parks can be also quite violent because parks are used to erase communities many times, too.
It is a very loaded discipline. The combination of "archi" and "tect" and all this. When you go in the first year in architecture school, everybody's always like, "Oh, what does architecture mean? So it is a combination of the space with this,” and it has a Greek mythology-type of connotation. And I love this text by Lesley Lokko, it's called African Space Magicians, and she talks about how in Zulu, the word for “architect” is space magician. And what does it mean when you think about being a space magician? What are the relationships to your environment? And in that way, we need more words to define what we're doing, because maybe it is architecture or maybe it’s not. Maybe it is something else.
And at some point we were really focused on redefining what architecture can be and should be and should be doing and addressing. But more recently, we’ve also been thinking about maybe there's other words that we need, other concepts that we need to bring in order to describe, really, what this world-making implies, on one hand. And also if architecture is historically problematic, how can we dismantle it and unbuild it, right? Because there's on one hand... But as you say, the people that lay out plans and drawings for constructing things. But if those things are the enemy, how we also open up the possibility of taking those things down, demolishing them and abolishing them. So there's something interesting there as well. I think the constant redefinition of what we do and what we think about, it gets to a point where we start even questioning the very premise of the word, of “architecture” or the architect.
YF:
“Space magicians” sounds so playful, sounds so inviting. I love that because there is this, I think, wall that goes up when someone talks about architecture. It feels so, I don't know, I guess it feels so elite. It feels like something that you need to be invited into versus something that you can just explore on your own. But that term “space magician,” it feels much more welcoming and I think a term that folks can feel much more interested by. So I kind of love that.
CG:
And it's really interesting because as you mentioned at the beginning when you said, "I'm new to this field or I'm just paying attention to it," and I always think that it's not possible. All of us are… especially what you do, you are so much embedded into thinking about the environment, and the built environment is architecture in that sense. But it's… the way that we use “architecture” makes it feel like something unattainable and professionalized, and that's really interesting.
YF:
Yeah.
CG:
Exactly going with what you were saying.
YF:
I mean, it feels artistic. I think about those— “the European architecture of the 17th century.” I mean, I'm just making up timeframes.
CG:
No, totally, totally, totally, totally.
YF:
But that's the vibe that I think people have when they think about it. But you're right, it's so much more; it connects to us in much more ways than history. And we've been alluding to a lot of the harms that architecture has played. I like the term that Nathalie used to describe pieces of architecture as “violent.” And we've been alluding to some of this throughout our conversation so far, but I think it'd be good for us to get a little explicit in sharing and breaking down for readers the way that architecture relates to the climate crisis, to social injustice, and how architecture could serve as an avenue for decolonization. I think that there's some important potential here.
CG:
Well, recently we've been... We're about to republish or to publish for the first time, physically, our Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education. And in that process we've been also developing some new diagrams that try to explain how the very idea of modernity, be it the Enlightenment, be it the construction of concepts like history, science, logic, are deeply embedded on the footprint of the plantation. On the footprint of capitalism. On the footprint of white supremacy. The first thing that is done once colonizers arrive is to claim the land, is to plan, to make architecture, to make buildings, to make plantations. And in order to maintain that, and to produce crops that are going to bring cash, they enslave people. So there's a really, really close and problematic relationship between that architecture, the architecture of modernity in the Eurocentric sense, and the footprint of ecological spoliation and genocide. Ecocide and genocide are tied by that colonial footprint. That is super architectural. And that's why today many of the big questions, the struggles, whether it's with the climate crisis or Black Lives Matter or the Indigenous struggles around the world, are super architectural. They have to deal with destroying the environment with the energy needed to produce and maintain cities that are usually where wealth is accumulated. And all that comes from that legacy. Also, there's scientific papers that connect the beginning of the Anthropocene with the arrival of Europeans in the Americas and the millions of people that died, and how nature was not taken care of for the first time in that period and the CO2 emissions dropped. And since then, it has been increasing ever since. There's scientific papers that connect it to that.So we can see that relationship between death and architecture and the environment, the decay of the environment, and it is all tied up. That's why we also talk about the relationship between ecological justice and questions about race and gender, for example, how historically disenfranchised communities are the ones that are the most affected by all these questions. But again, architecture is always an enabler in all of this. It's the tool that is used to create the colony to consolidate the power of the occupying state.
YF:
Right. And hearing you talk, it reminds me of, I think, this reality that a lot of us who live in cities and who live in urban spaces—it's easy for us to forget that at some point in time, whether that was hundreds or thousands of years ago, the places where we live now are not what they are. There was a time... I live in Queens, New York, and there was a time where... We have a tiny forest park here. I imagine there was a time where that forest was not just a park, but it was actually all of this land.And to imagine what had to have happened to the ecosystems and the wildlife and the nature and the peoples who were here in order for these buildings and these roads and these lights and sewage systems and all this infrastructure that allows us to live here—what had to have happened to what was there before, in order for us to be existing here, is quite profound. And I don't think many of us actually pause to ruminate on what was here before we were here. And it's an important point that you're raising because it opens up space for that thinking.
CG:
Totally. And not only that, but the fact that to maintain the energy that is needed to maintain the production of the city comes, also, from other places. All the materials, resources, all the energy, it's still extracted for places like that. So that's also how we cannot really lose sight of the footprint of all these things and how this actually is always a planetary question.
YF:
Yeah, it's ongoing and that's why we are where we are, in terms of grappling with the climate crisis. I know that education is such a big part of the work that you all do as well. And your platform, Loudreaders, is one where you hope to educate more folks about architecture, but also the connections that architecture has with all these other realms. Can you break down for folks what Loudreaders is, how it works, and the importance of educational resources like it?
CG:
So building on that legacy that we talked about, a bit of the plantation, we like to think of Puerto Rico being the oldest colony in the world, invaded in the second trip by Columbus, being 400 years a colony from Spain, 120-something years from the US. There's a form of knowledge that is born in the Caribbean that we feel is really important to understand the resurgence of micropolitics and microcapitalism in the world, the rest of the world. As the world gets warmer, in a way it gets tropicalized, so to speak. At the same time, some avant-garde design schools were taking place in Europe, and that's what we get taught in school. “Look at Bauhaus, look at this school making beautiful design artifacts and objects,” even if they have a really problematic relationship between gender and race and so on.
We found that this school in the Caribbean that was all over the place, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, in Cuba, but also in Durham, in New York, were workers in the tobacco factories—this is talking about the plantation and the occupation and capitalism—workers in the tobacco factories that were denied any means of formal education. And we had to remember that some of these people are either former slaves or the children of former slaves.
They don't have access to education, so they will pick one of their own, that knew how to read, to read for them during the entire workday. That's where the concept of “loudreading” comes from. Soap operas come from that tradition. But also at the beginning, the practice was mostly done by men, until there's people like Puerto Rican anarchist, syndicalist, organizer, and utopian author, Luisa Capetillo, that was this amazing, eccentric, hardcore organizer. She was arrested several times for wearing pants in public. She writes books about free love and feminism, and she used to run, in New York, restaurants and boarding houses, where she would serve delicious vegetarian meals for workers even if they didn't have any money.
So the literature that Capetillo would read in the factories—it was not only the classics like Dostoyevsky or Victor Hugo and newspapers and stuff like that, but she would loudread political theory like Marx and Engels and Kropotkin and Bakunin, anarchist philosophy and communist philosophy. And she would also read out some of her own fiction that she wrote, fiction where workers would rob banks and live happily ever after in the countryside eating delicious vegetarian meals.
So she was helping forge an anti-capitalistic imagination, and workers would organize and strike and there would be tens of thousands of people striking. There were other organizers, like Juana Colón, for example. It was not only for the workers, it was also for the unemployed and so on. So there was all these amazing women—mostly, in this case; really important women—organizing and making this huge movement. And the practice, of course, it became illegal. Persecuted people got shot and killed by the police and the corporations in the newly occupied territory of Puerto Rico, by the US. It used to be occupied by Spain.And then the practice changed and she was persecuted. And then in 2016, with what's happening with Black Lives Matter... First with COVID, right? COVID pushed the students, they couldn't attend the university anymore. They were left hanging in many places. All these places that make you pay a lot of money, also. And they were not really taking the responsibility or providing any protection to students. And we thought, in the same way that the loudreaders were using the space of capitalist exploitation for generating some form of anti-capitalist imagination, maybe we can reappropriate the tools of exploitation that we have in the university. Like Zoom, stuff like that. And reappropriate it to provide space for networks of solidarity. And then we started this platform that was already building on our practice we had from our Post-Novis Collective, where we started making these planetary syllables of the anti-colonial thinkers.And we wanted to see, how can we make this as an education practice that is not only us as a collective of artists and architects and designers and writers, but rather a popular thing? And in 2016, we started the platform. We said, "Let's make 'Loudreaders' a thing." Take these spaces, virtual spaces, and provide. Invite people, philosophers, thinkers, activists, so they can loudread and present something and it's going to be online, free, and accessible for everybody, a growing archive. And then it's been a couple of years doing this. Sorry, 2020, 2020, right? I'm saying 2016, I'm confused. In 2020.
YF:
Okay. I was going to ask. I was like, wait, was it 2020 or 2016? Okay, so this was born out of the pandemic. So Loudreaders was born out of the need that you saw from students and the abandonment that they faced from these educational institutions.
CG:
Yes.
YF:
I didn't know that. Wow!
CG:
Yeah, there was this critique of alienation. Not only are we alienated from our means of production, but also alienated from each other. There was a point, especially–I've seen a lot of international students, they had to even leave the campus and leave Pittsburgh, the middle of a place that they didn't know. And I was like, "Man, it’s kind of brutal." Then we started discovering how in Brazil, the universities closed from one day to the other and the students didn't even know what to do. So it was a real planetary thing too, where people were in a way abandoned by the institutions.
YF:
Fully!
CG:
And we felt like, “I think there's something we can do to challenge that alienation.”
YF:
And so how does it work? Someone that you all invite, there's like an activist, a thought leader, an expert of sort, they record a video? Or they're loudreading something that they've put together or reading from someone else? And that's shared online digitally for other folks to access at no cost?
CG:
So there's different ways. Some of them, it's like that. We invite somebody or somebody says, "I would like to do loudreading." And sometimes they read the books that they wrote or some really influential books for them, like [inaudible 00:32:11] loudreading Kropotkin, referencing the same books that Capetillo was referencing. Or [inaudible 00:32:21] loudreading bell hooks—Octavia Butler, sorry, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Or [inaudible 00:32:32] reading some of his own poetry or... Then we have run a literal trade school for 10 days, an experimental trade school that was free and everybody could do several workshops and lectures and seminars a day. And we do all these workshops online and it's all available. You can download the files even after the thing is done, but also you can enroll and do it live.Also, we are planning to do one in person in Puerto Rico next summer, a 10-day program, also, with people coming from the Pan-Caribbean, this really big zone of really important knowledge. And so, the idea is that it has become also a publishing platform space for a growing archive. And having people from all around the world, like people loudreading from Beijing or loudreading from Cape Town, like the Wolf or can cite The Clerk. Or having people loudread from Ciudad de México or from Santiago de Chile. Or from Brussels or from the Dominican Republic. So the idea is that there is, in the same spirit of the loudreaders, there is this network of people that are willing to share knowledge, to foster networks of intellectual solidarity.
YF:
And why do we need these types of educational resources, especially in regards to the disconnect I think the public has with architecture?
CG:
Dear, would you like to go?
NF:
If I can just add something that ties up on some of the discussions before, is exactly your point. I think also something that was really important for us, from the beginning of our practice, is to try to find different platforms that would widen the discussion around architecture, but try also to approach architecture really more as a collective practice, in a way that we need to acknowledge all limitations.And I think really early on that was something that was really important for us, to always try to learn from each other. And I think that's also a problem when we think a lot about architecture—is, again, how strong the impact is on everybody's life, but how exclusive the field really is. So how can we think of a profession that wants to bring answers to others, but that doesn't want to include others in discussion?So I feel like... And going back to the platform of Loudreaders, again with Capetillo, was so inspiring for us because not only did she create the platform, but she also had the idea that other people would become loudreaders as she would be... It's not even teaching, it's more about exchanging, exchanging knowledges, to bring other people the tools and the capacity to do that, too, and to find other ways to express themselves. Even she would organize workshops for writing. The other workers, also, would create plays, write fictions with her. So I feel like, also, that's something for us that is really important is—how can we expand, always, the idea of a collective or network? How can we include more and more people? Learn from each other? Alone, I feel we are so limited. So we really believe in the power of a collective and that's what brings us hope, especially when we think of a profession such as architecture. And going back to what Cruz was explaining, all the implications, the really real and violent implications that the field can have in everyday life and thinking of the future.
YF:
Yeah, it feels like a really powerful way to wrap up our discussion here, Nathalie. I'm asking all of our guests to share a quote to end our episode, and I'm curious to hear what quote you all might share to... That helps keep you inspired and that signals the world that you all want to see.
CG:
I'll just share a quote that is the quote that closes the Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education, but also is one of the opening statements of our collective, Post-Novis. "The only purpose of education is to make new worlds collectively. This requires the practice of curiosity as a daily habit and the exercise of dignified and purposeful rebelliousness. Other worlds are possible."
YF:
Wow!
CG:
That's from the introduction to the syllabus to the Tobacco Intergalactic School (Post-Novis branch in the Americas).
YF:
Definitely feels like the theme of “another world as possible” is going to be a big one throughout the episode and throughout the podcast at large. So thank you so much Cruz for sharing that with us and thank you Nathalie, as well, for being with us and sharing your expertise. Really, really, really excited to introduce Loudreaders to our listeners and to see how you all continue to shape the field.
CG:
Thank you.
Audio:
Architectures of Planetary Well-Being is a podcast of revisions, a media initiative supported by re:arc institute, a philanthropic organization committed to supporting architectures of planetary well-being. For more information on re:arc, please visit www.rearc.institute. This season is hosted by Yessenia Funes. For more information on her work, you can follow her online at @yessfun, Y-E-S-S-F-U-N, and in her work, The Frontline at Atmos magazine. This podcast is produced by Minah Kwon and Andi Kristins. Music by In Atlas.