This is not an architectural thought, particularly.  I am writing in regards to the question of democracy and the peaceful transition of power, what it means to have that threatened as it is tonight.  https://www.msnbc.com/the-reid...  

In the mid-1990s I accidentally worked at a right-wing think tank for two or three weeks.  It was a summer job that I stayed in for as long as it took for me to figure out that 'non-partisan research institute' didn't mean anything, but also just long enough to get one paycheck.  I might as well share-- it was American Enterprise Institute.  

While I was there I would lurk around the fax machine to see what was being discussed across offices.  There were exchanges about burying welfare aid in requirements for work and drug testing.  This was one of the efforts that became successful.  But there was also fax machine chatter about efforts that never became well known.  One of them was an outline for legislation to ban rap music.  Ban an entire artform (or genre, depending).  I will never forget what I saw in the fax machine: "We would likely face a 1st amendment challenge."  

This has stayed with me for decades. I always thought of it as an example of collegial exchange of ideas buffering the tendencies of racism and myopic power, even in a vacuum of rightwing homogeneity. 

It is only in these past two years that it occurs to me that the caution about the 1st Amendment was possibly not at all one of principle.  It was likely one of cost.  The cost of litigation.  What I saw in those two weeks at the fax machine may be understood as a well-resourced pocket of civil society that deferred to the Constitution not out of principle, but simply out of budgetary discretion.    

In this past decade, as billions of dollars concentrated in individual wealth and corporate annual profits have virtually no limit in their allocation to political goals, such budgetary discretions have become moot.  What we are experiencing now as a threat to democracy at the level of principles cannot be divorced from the machinations of political funding. 

Perhaps this does relate to architecture.  I am disheartened every time I see our design ambitions aligned with dictatorships. Does architecture really require a concentration of wealth and desire for authority?  

We have re-thought our field as planetary.  What would it take to rethink our field as democratic?  

If we cannot, what will our own transition of power look like? 

(Photo from July 26th New York Times)The project is presented as a “renovation.”  It is presented not in terms of a project brief, a program, or any goals related to a national agenda.  (The last garden change tied explicitly to a national agenda, of course, being Michelle Obama’s... View full entry

[This post consists of long excerpts from a text that got published by Infinite Mile in Detroit a few months before the 2016 election, a text which was quickly forgotten by the few people who read it, including myself.]    "Years before I had understood that all I had to do, really had to do... View full entry

This post is in some ways inspired by the bold move that artist Shantell Martin made a few weeks ago to expose the crass ways that marketing entities sought to turn Blackness into a quick response, a cheap way to be 'relevant.'    There are not many of us Black folks in architecture, landscape... View full entry

Like many others, within a few groups of Black architects and urban designers, I have been processing this moment and what it might demand from the fields of architecture and urbanism.  A paradox is becoming evident.  In this rapidly changing reality, there are many pressures for speed. We have... View full entry

Note: This is an excerpt from a 2015 article that I am updating to reflect that the cabaret law was finally over-turned in New York City in November 2017.  I am posting it after presenting an 8 minute talk related to this subject for the Urban Design Forum.  In the summer of 2001 I visited New... View full entry

The Department of Homeland Security's Inspector General has found "dangerous overcrowding" and unsanitary conditions at an El Paso, Texas, Border Patrol processing facility following an unannounced inspection, according to a new report.Watchdog finds detainees 'standing on toilets' for breathing... View full entry

This is more of a musing that a full post. I've been thinking more aggressively these past months about what we allow ourselves to know in the discipline.  Because a discipline doesn't just deliver unending knowledge or create knowledge out of nothing.  It defines what is relevant, it collects... View full entry

Below is an excerpt from Profound Modernity, my essay on the design of dry ground in Mexico City and its image of modernity.  See e-flux for the full text. http://www.e-flux.com/architec... Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time…—Mierle Laderman Ukeles This article is not about... View full entry

This drawing by Ludwig Hilberseimer has been fascinating me recently.  Most architects with any interest in urban planning in the USA know the story of RAND corporation doing post-World War II consulting on the dispersal of the American city.  The assumption was that the kind of weapons... View full entry

This musing on time travel comes from notes that I jotted down in February of this year.  With the beginning of the illegitimate real estate developer presidency, my only way of making sense of this moment in America was to think of travelling back in time (What if Comey hadn't done that, What if... View full entry

Back in December I posted an entry about the White Flight from American Democracy, where I predicted that this new President wouldn't be using the White House and the L'Enfant Plan the way it was designed.  Rather:The axes of legislative authority and executive power must be extended dramatically... View full entry

http://mcewenstudio.com/web/vmm-on-whiteness-descartes-and-grids/Here's a mini-podcast on Descartes, whiteness, and grids.  Let's liberate geometry from empire.  Especially in honor of today's American holiday.  View full entry

[This is an excerpt from a forthcoming article to be published later this year in Yale Perspecta #50]This study of water in Detroit and its intersection of racialized geographies of inner city and suburban sprawl uncovers parallels between water infrastructure and transportation planning as... View full entry

[I wrote this at the end of the summer, as I was mulling over certain relationships between aesthetics and warfare and image-making.  At the time I was thinking of it as a sort of historical line of research I wanted to do....   Now it feels related to many weird and horrifying things, including... View full entry

The full interview is here - http://www.sampsoniaway.org/interviews/2017/01/12/recognizing-hungers-that-are-already-there-a-conversation-with-architect-mitch-mcewen/  Interview by Leah Wulfman    /  January 12, 2017  Excerpts below: LW: You are opening up and engaging architecture outside... View full entry

"The city in L'Enfant's Washington is really new nature. The models derived from the Europe of absolutism and despotism are now expropriated by the capital of democratic institutions, and translated into a social dimension certainly unknown at the Versailles of Louis XIV."-Manfredo Tafuri... View full entry

NO ONE CARES ABOUT AMERICA’S STUPID ARCHITECTURE PROBLEMSThe United States is accustomed to being the center of global networks in pretty much any field: film, finance, the art-world, pop music, development economics, tech start-ups, military strategy, and much more.  Architecture, though, is... View full entry

What is the relationship between representation and fabrication today, between drawing and building, or thinking and making? When are we building indications of a process or an idea, representing something, and when are we building the actual thing? If we no longer have to represent in order to... View full entry

Last month I visited Miami and witnessed the carting away of Art Basel.  On the Sunday evening that Art Basel wraps up, as well as the morning after, Miami Beach looks like a truck stop ran into the ocean.  Tents are being dismantled, beach signage points to furniture that's no longer there, and... View full entry

Detroit is now my home city, so I am thrilled that next year's U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale will be dedicated to exploring the intersection of Detroit and architectural imagination.  As excited as I am that The Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of... View full entry

House Opera video

Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Southern California, Veronica Terriquez received her Ph.D. in sociology from UCLA. Her research focuses on educational inequality, immigrant integration, and organized labor. Her work is linked to education justice and immigrant rights organizing... View full entry

Thank you Archinect Sessions podcast for featuring me on the first podcast of 2015.  It looks like with everything happening in December I missed a chance to post here on Another Architecture.  Let's catch up.    Mimi Zeiger wrote a great opinion piece for Dezeen last month asking why... View full entry

Posting this much about Mies makes me feel like this blog is circling back to where it started two years ago, when I posted about Modernity and Ideology from my studio in Germany.  Somehow this recent time in the MidWest, transitioning from Brooklyn to Detroit, does remind me of settling into... View full entry

One of the principles that guides my approach to architecture and urban design is the sense that architecture has much more to offer than luxury.  Whether you consider our field professionally in comparison to doctors and lawyers, or as a discipline comparable to art, we have a lot of room to be... View full entry

Keller Easterling is an internationally-recognized architect and theorist working on issues of urbanism, architecture, and organization in relation to the phenomena commonly defined as globalization. Her latest book, Subtraction, is published by Sternberg Press.  Easterling is a Professor of... View full entry

My collaborators and I have recently secured an office space in downtown Manhattan to lease for $1.  That's one dollar.  It's a pristine storefront, ideal location between the Lower East Side and Chinatown (easy biking from Brooklyn and 1 block from the Grand St subway).  Wifi and utilities... View full entry

Perhaps we are so accustomed to hearing architect's present their designs as inspired by clothing -- whether the drape of a veil in Abu Dhabi or the flair of a skirt in Prague -- that we do not consider the intersection of architectural output and costuming to be newsworthy. The two modes of... View full entry

Mahalia C. Gayle is from Seattle, WA. She completed her undergraduate studies at Princeton University and her graduate work at Harvard University, both in Romance Languages and Literatures with a specialization in French. She has taught at Harvard University, Boston University, Emmanuel College... View full entry

In honor of Her winning best original screenplay in the Oscars last weekend, I am going to finally post this.Spike Jonze's Her is a masterpiece of a movie that lends itself to comparison to Brazil.  At least, architecturally and urbanistically, it does. One could also develop a comparison in... View full entry