My grandmother was born in West Virginia.  She died last year (not of covid?) almost 100 years old, after many decades of retirement life in Columbus Georgia, a place for comfortable military widows, which she was, in her way.  She retired from being a Washingtonian.

Becoming a Washingtonian was, itself, a career.  She earned some kind of recruitment to work in the US Treasury (as a typist?) by being valedictorian of her (must have been all Black) high school in West Virginia. 

I didn't know much about her childhood in West Virginia until she was so old that people could talk about her.  Her mother died when she was 5.  Her early memories of her mother were mostly cleaning alongside her.  As a pseudo-orphan in the late 1920s she (lived and?) worked in a restaurant run by one of her father's new girlfriends.  This, I now vaguely understand, was so terrible that no one can say anything about it.

She left West Virginia because it was not a place that allowed her to be a child. She left to become someone who could throw herself lavish birthday parties and call my granddad Honey, as if it were a name. 

Because she left I am the kind of person who can design speculative floating swamp towers and teach with robots. 

Because she left I know nothing about West Virginia and have no family there.  But this is not an accident.  This is how trauma works.  It erases.

If you are from West Virginia please call your senator and tell him to stop this madness.  Maybe you are like my grandmother.  Maybe you left and do not think of it ever, as if it never had anything to do with you.  But democracy is counting on you, and the planet is counting on you.  Please go back, for 30 seconds. 

https://www.manchin.senate.gov...   

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... View full entry

(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

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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

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[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

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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