Afternoons

Tucked in somewhere deep into the center of the entwined streets of Valencia, Spain, there is a subtle wind being pulled over my body from one end of the room to the other. To my left, a large door opened to a terrace open to the air, closed to the eye, resting on the first floor of a six-floor aparment building. The source of the wind. To my right, and open door and long hallway that reflects light coming in through a window facing me, on the otherside of the apartment, draining out into the street. The sun is streaked down the dark, cool floors of the hallway. The other side of the building pulls the air over our bodies.

It is late afternoon, after lunch. 'Somos domesticos,' I tell him, as we put away our things in the bureau, sweep the terrace of the sand that has fallen off of our sea-soaked bodies, and listen the crying of the foreign washing machine, pulverizing the dirt out of our clothes.

This photo is from Madrid. Coloring life.

Disappearing Acts

I'm not slipping, I wanted to tell you. Shout it at you. Can I feel this lost around you? Will you give me your company while I fall?

Walk with me. Dance me to the end of my confidence because living can be so hard when sorrow threatens to flood the world with its indifference. "You can leave if you need to, if it is too much to stay here with me this long." But no, no. That is not what I was thinking. What I couldn't think. Through these dark spaces I want you to trust me, that it is only temporary. You bring this to me. Can't I just do what you do? Let it out. Let go without excuse, or even the inkling that it might draw attention to the struggle.

I was afraid you would leave. Or worse, that I would.

Relational Ontology and the Social-Architectural Production of the Projects

The Projects as represented, representational, and representations were simultaneously of a modernist, utopia design, as well as of the fallout of specific cultural and economic policies in U.S. cities. The two cannot be separated and, moreover, it seems necessary to consider how the two co-produced one another through the their respective generations of the 'city within city,' public housing, hoodlum city, modernist designs of social integration. Moving away from the notion of who is to blame--i.e. was it poor design, inadequate fiscal integrity, outright racism, etc.--it is pertinent to consider how this space engendered these contexts. To that end, it seems fit to ask what stories can the Projects, as an idea, form, population, and condition, tell about the relationship between people and the built environment? To what consequences is each implicated within the other in a kind of relational ontology, as Lefebvre indicates in The Production of Space (1974)?

What do people's relationships to space not only tell us about their social and material conditions but how such space constitutes a particular groups' understanding of their conditions? In other words, how are spaces representational as well as generative, affective in a sense that they are the means through which particular knowledges are crafted and disseminated. It is through this process, I believe, that something like the 'inner-city'-its spaces and bodies-become fixed objects of knowledge within and outside of the physical spaces of the projects. Historical and economic circumstances are certainly one extremely important way to tell the story of a place like the Stella Wrights homes in Newark, yet this tends to overlook the nuance of what happens between intentions, circumstances, and effects. I am concerned with the space between a perceived, conceived, and lived space trialectic, considering it, rather, as a continually lived space where architecture is a process of construction that is equally affective and social as it is material. What are the limits of knowing one's condition as a reflection and generative force of impoverishment? What are the possibilities of inhabitants knowing themselves through their material circumstances and the greater historical, cultural, and economic narratives circulated around and through their space?

Space as a form of power

How does knowledge about the projects change through its spatial representations? And how is it then projected into a greater social and economic order in the American city?

I am interested in space as analytic of power, not in a theory of space that challenges a notion of power (Rabinow). As a form of power, space imprints bodies, particularly in built, architectural forms. Within this context it seems fruitful to consider architecture as part of what Rabinow calls a "shifting field of power and knowledge" where we can see the formation of class in a place like the inner-city ghetto (Rabinow). Architectural projects do not inherently have political significance, but they can be platforms and strategies constituted by a particular politics in certain historical moments. In regards to public housing, this can be a way to re-imagine how design and social-economic poverty intersect: could it be that the projects did not "concentrate the ghetto," but rather produced it through a specific configuration of space? A configuration through which power was articulated in an economy of design for the management and knowledge of bodies? Our knowledge of the projects, its residents and cultures, is then constituted by the form of a building/urban environment, a knowable object, that is inscribed upon the bodies that constitute the space.

Governmentality and home

Political power, governance, is spatially re-located in the projects. Housing, for the city of Newark, was the "center" of urban renewal, not city hall or other public/civic spaces. This inscribed the spaces of home as locales of governmentality, producing citizen-subjects and a knowledge about urban politics in the form of the housing project. Policy produced this space, yet this is cannot be unidirectional. How, then, does this inflect in the opposite direction? Does home, the projects, engender governmentality? Neglected, isolated space of poverty in the city is the spatial representation of the city government's power: de-regulation, dis-investment in mid-size, post-industrial cities is known through the urban ruins that populate its urban centers and peripheries. Such spaces reflect the state of governemnt funding for public entities at this particular moment, but also engender or produce,  a knowledge about poverty in the city that constitutes it racially, economically, culturally, but above all visually. The aesthteics of poverty produce a knowledge of poverty characterized through spatial and material conditions, conditions which are grafted onto the bodies the simultaneously construct the projects. Urban poverty can be recognized (known) by the way it looks, in architectural and corporeal form. This is more than representational but generative, a form of power, that produces a way of knowing poverty, not merely reflecting it, but embodying it.

The other side of utopia

How are buildings aesthetic players in the production of the inner-city environment? What kinds of becoming does it engender? What is generated through this space?

Reverse function of symbolism: the symbolic function of its materiality is always made in relation to something else, something outside of the architecture itself. That outside, as well, is dually coded materially as well. Such outsides are the ideological futurity of utopia and the bodies that dwell within its symbolism. Building's re-arrange perspectives, but they are also re-arranged by perspectives mapped through them as well.

The first sketches and images of superblock housing in the US are sweeping landscape shots of tall buildings emerging from the industrial city. Scale coordinates with utopic vision: the brick constructions tower over the old city, doing their best to awkwardly integrate. But as utopia began to deteriorate, the intimate spaces of home, the scale of the corridor, room, and face, became the dominant imagery of the projects. Utopia began to have the face of Black urban poverty.

Place was made through utopia's ideology, against its future-oriented, de-historicized vision, demanding attention to the present and presence of bodies and social conditions that were inclusively excluded from modernism's utopian dreams. Occupying utopia as outsiders, the perspective of the outside become increasingly one from within as the projects engendered poverty, destitution, Blackness as the ghetto, inner-city. The projects became, seemingly overnight, socially constituted by their material conditions; these conditions engendered social bodies and identities through practice and discourse that turned the inside and outside upon itself. To know oneself through external conditions was the moral conditioning of the projects. Buildings that looked like prisons (externally) constituted feelings of oppression (internally).

The interstitial space between construction and demolition is collapsed: "the becoming-spectral of a utopian future that, by the time the project was completed, was already identified with the past" (Martin 15). But between the past the future was a time wherein social problems engendered and maginified by broken and devient environments represented the heterogenaeity that was normal in the inner-city. As exceptional poverty became normalized, the projects grew more and more to resemble camps: fixed in an eternal state of exception.

With the destruction of the projects a second utopia, that of nostalgia, emerged from the ruins and the memories of the bodies left behind. Nostalgia is a desire for what never was, a kind of empty signifier, without a sign, that holds the trace of desire, but not of any one thing. It is a utopian space that is constituted by the present for the future through an imagined past. Utopia obscures the present, or unfolds it, diversifies it to the extent that it can hold the fixed imaginings of past and future. The present must be multivalent enough to hold the suspended temporality of utopia, imprinting its shadows upon the bodies in its presence.

Entry 1

Is the project of modernist architecture an ideological one? There are several reasons to believe that the integration of social and architectural form touted by the agenda of modernist design in cities was a "utopian" project, or foiled-off a social utopianism that could equalize or balance the inequalities of social milieus assumed to be produced by material form (Tarfuri, Cacarci, Holton?). Modernist architecture depends on the symbolic function of design. When looking at public housing in the US this seems to be the ultimate irony of the foray: modernist design was successful, for the projects did become symbolic, if not monumental, in their denotation of a social condition. In this way, it would seem that the material produced the ideological to the greatest extent. The design of the projects produced an undifferentiated and equalized space, we can see this in images of housing projects from all over the US, measured, tempered, and strikingly the same. A project in St. Louis looks no different than one in Chicago, to one in Newark, or one in New York. At least when considering high-rise, superblock housing, modernist form achieved its symbolic goal.


Modernist architecture built symbolic transparency-stripped-down, mirrored, and exposed-into a new kind of opacity in its materiality. Building utopia took the construction of surfaces, walls and glass, whose substantive opacity was imagined to be the means of producing a kind of social transparency, an equality through ascetic form: a rational vision of social integration through urban design. This was an optical illusion to the extent that material surfaces were perceivable, that one could see through them and, as such, the could not produce differentiation or inequality because of a kind of democratic transparency. Such an architecture void of ideologies through a production of sameness (materially).

A unilateral sameness of poverty seems to be the ultimate success of the modernist high-rise building. As a reflection or symbolic of democracy the 1950s and 1960s, the early years of superblock public housing, triumphantly symbolized a utopian vision of a kind of social integration, one where affordable housing became available to those to whom it had before been out of reach. The ideology of home, for the poor and middle class especially, was project of cold war nationalism, symbolic of American citizenry and democracy. But the easy transference or translation of social-democratic values into architectural and urban form concertized a radical opacity; out of modernism's ideology and vision of social integration emerged a kind of antagonism within the folds of opacity it created. The housing project was never a natural or utopian form, but rather a constructed utopia that became symbolic not of urban integration but of social isolation, a viral and contained sickness of democracy that was an anti-ideology produced within the ideological reach of architectural modernism.


If modernism was an ideological program, then what happened after ideology? With attention focused specifically on high-rise public housing projects, how what happened after ideology failed? Or did it? In Holston's work, he considers the modernist city of Brasilia within an "imminent critique," one that analyzes it from within to better understand its social-architectural function. What does this mean, a dialectic approach? Is this the best way to ascertain the nature of the relationship between built form and the bodies within it?

City

He is in love with her right now
the evening before October
on the banks of the Hudson.

The moisture in the air makes the city diffuse,
fluorescence
and grime
to still be alive
pulsing at a slower rate.

Dim lights make charcoal paint out of the deep
gray concrete.
Winds of hurricane ask they city dwellers to wait,
wait,
wait for it
surely it will come.

They are too busy to look and wander,
to ask about what they will never know
the answers surround them
overly fluent
they cannot hear
warning drops
rustling leaves remind you the city can be weak
she can fall
she will leave if you don't follow her.