The role of Archinect’s new series Cross-Talk is to bring forward the positive aspects of the polemic and allow for the resulting conflict to bring to life an otherwise still and comfortable climate of creativity—if there can be one. Cross-Talk attempts—if to only say that it did—to allow text the freedom that the image has accepted and embraced. Cross-Talk attempts to force the no, to contradict itself, to anger, to please and then anger again, if only to force a stance, to pull out the position of the self, of the discipline and of the hour as a means to begin and maintain conversations moving forward. 

Great Again

The US is in the midst of a desperate and violent backlash by a settler-colonialist population afraid of losing their exalted status. The spoils extracted from an expropriated continent, which they assumed belonged to them alone through their mere existence, are no longer guaranteed. The need for a forceful and unequivocal rebut of nativism, authoritarianism, and attempts to delegitimize the Other has never been more urgent. At stake is the continuation of 75 years progress toward universal human dignity and equality. It is clear, from how easily the mechanisms of power were usurped and used to impede progress, that attempting to work within the approved channels of  power offers no possibility of emancipation. How then can we work toward dignity and justice?

East vs. West

Within architectural education in the US, we were taught that the differences between “East Coast” and “West Coast” are significant. In the Eurocentric world, we were taught that the differences between “Western Culture” and “Eastern Culture” are yet more so. Compared to their commonalities, coastal variations in architectural culture are picayune at best. Judging from the urban forms of the contemporary world city, the dominant architectural cultures in “East” and “West” are indistinguishable from each other as well. The old colonial question of “Occident” vs. “Orient” has been exhausted.

How then can we work toward dignity and justice?

Today, the question is instead one of hegemony vs. oppression. Over the last century, the global flow of building materials, technology, labor, and services has transformed architecture from a series of geographic silos organized by expertise with local conditions and styles, into a series of global strata organized by relative prestige, wealth, and access. Today the paths of an architect and a construction worker may intersect on a building site far-flung from the origin of either, but the path taken by each to get there (literally and figuratively) couldn’t be more different. There was probably no string of international airline members’ lounges for the migrant worker, and the architect’s passport was not seized by his supervisor on arrival to ensure he didn’t flee the conditions of near-slavery. There are injustices endemic to architectural production that must be ameliorated for the discipline to survive.

Orientalism

Throughout the colonialist and globalist eras, ideas rooted in the Western Canon have come to be the basis of the global social, cultural, and economic hegemony. In Orientalism, Edward Said described the process by which these ideas dominate existing knowledge and systems in the colonized lands. Very roughly, this entails delegitimizing the native cultures: framing them as irrational, contradictory, and regressive while simultaneously building the Western ideas, laws, and, systems up as rational, logical, and progressive. By creating a cultural “terra nullius,” the occupiers are able to claim that their paternalism is necessary and beneficial to the otherwise “uncultured” occupied, constructing a political and cultural hegemony.

By creating a cultural “terra nullius,” the occupiers are able to claim that their paternalism is necessary and beneficial to the otherwise “uncultured” occupied, constructing a political and cultural hegemony.

Said also cautions that the mis-understanding of other cultures is often accidental, perpetrated by those with genuinely good intentions. A central feature of post-colonial dialogues is they contain the actual voices of the oppressed themselves, not simply their proxies or allies. I have no legitimacy to speak for the dispossessed, and to speak to them about what “they” should do would simply be replicating the problem I’m trying to unwind. So here I speak only for my (white, straight, cis-gendered, professional, western, able-bodied, educated) self, and to others who benefit unjustly under our system, but who also recognize the need to use their privilege to help reverse or mitigate the damage it causes. We are already over-represented in the public sphere. Our voices are not inherently more valid simply because we are heard over the din because we’ve been gifted a seat at the front. Power is not wisdom.

Gone Native

Maybe in a previous century, I could have attempted to avoid these issues entirely, disappeared into some un-mapped territory – “gone native” as the other colonizers would have said. No longer Western, but never able to be truly of the land I occupied, this would have been the ultimate cop-out, and a perpetuation of the same privilege enjoyed by those who embraced the colonial regime. Today, finding myself in a dialog about “East vs. West,” without standing to assert any claims to speak for the “East,” and unwilling to mount an argument for the “West” how do I avoid this same cop-out?

Today, finding myself in a dialog about “East vs. West,” without standing to assert any claims to speak for the “East,” and unwilling to mount an argument for the “West” how do I avoid this same cop-out?

An Index of Cultural Forces

For architects, confronting injustice is especially fraught, but practicing while claiming autonomy from responsibility to respond is to hark back to the time when architecture was not a vocation but a pastime for the wealthy sons of the gentry. Our work product is an intersection of a culture’s dominant economic and social values. The building is an index of innumerable cultural forces. From the identities of those whose labor we rely on to build our designs through to clients who profit from the building’s existence, to the platforms espoused by the politicians to whom our clients “donate” some of their profits, the economic values that our product instantiates are inseparable from its form. Our designs in fact become the infrastructure of those values by virtue of being durable and thus relatively expensive.  To claim autonomy for architecture from the political and economic structures into which they are built is to fundamentally lie to ourselves. We cannot claim innocence from brutal typologies by simply asserting (as many do) that they are merely “buildings” and not “architecture” when their designers usually have the same education and professional qualifications other architects do.

To claim autonomy for architecture from the political and economic structures into which they are built is to fundamentally lie to ourselves. 

The Problem of Critical Regionalism

Can we rely on design alone to repair the pain inflicted on the powerless through architecture? In Towards a Critical Regionalism, Kenneth Frampton quotes Paul Ricouer in invoking the idea of “authentic dialog” between cultures, one not based on conquest or domination. But by the end, the text proposes only how to (slightly) open the cultural hegemony to stylistic idioms recognizably rooted in a particular area. Frampton doesn’t attempt to exceed the scope of decidedly Western design culture, and when calling to prioritize experience over mediation, he only speaks of the importance of “readdressing the tactile range of human perceptions.”  This is presented in such base generalities that he does not acknowledge that the experience described could be completely different to anyone with a non-normative body or non-Western cultural background. Worse, the exclusion of these subjects is not even acknowledged. My goal is not to pick on 35 year old ideas or their author, rather I cite the omissions of Towards a Critical Regionalism as an example of the inadequacy of our education; of the negations ingrained within the Canon that expose the values of the culture shaping it, and it is included here to represents the Canon as handed down to us all as the essential learning in the discipline.

The Master’s House

The hegemony is composed of mutually-reinforcing social institutions claiming that the damage of hundreds of years of subjugation under slavery, colonialism, apartheid, and economic exploitation can simply be willed from existence by stating that are all treated equally today.. This is demonstrably false, particularly in light of the rise in public and blatant acts of xenophobia, racism, and every day bigotry at all levels of U.S. society; the routine targeting of the economically disadvantaged; the continuance of gender-based exploitation; and the gross disregard toward and erosion of the historic and modern struggles for dignity and equality.

Our responsibility in this moment is develop new tools with which to examine, challenge, and deconstruct the dominant hegemony...

Audre Lorde posed this challenge to the organizers of a conference on the role of difference within the lives of American women: "What does it mean when the tools of racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable." Lorde summed this up later by saying, "The Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house."

Our responsibility in this moment is develop new tools with which to examine, challenge, and deconstruct the dominant hegemony both in our work and in our everyday lives.

Conclusion

This is a hasty map of some of the challenges in dealing with privilege, especially within architecture. “Speaking for” the dispossessed continues the imposition of the voice of privilege onto those whose experience it can never know. “Speaking to,” or more bluntly - “speaking at” the excluded continues the patronization of the colonizers.  We can proclaim autonomy or feign innocence, but both are grossly irresponsible cop-outs. If we omit that we possess privilege from the dialog, we negate the agency of those without it, replicating the sins of omission in the Canon. If the basic goal is justice, the only people from whom transformative ideas can come are those who have been subjected to the system’s injustice.

The “authentic dialog” between cultures that Ricoeur espouses is a possible starting point. To enter into a dialog is to let both sides speak. Today “both sides” is not the colonialist “Occident” and “Orient,” but the privileged and the dispossessed. As people of privilege, hundreds of years of our voices coming at the expense of others means it’s time for us to shut up and instead actively create platforms for victims of institutional injustice to be heard. And when victims say something, we should believe them. 

As people of privilege, hundreds of years of our voices coming at the expense of others means it’s time for us to shut up and instead actively create platforms for victims of institutional injustice to be heard. 

We need to forefront the ideas of those exploited by these injustices in order to identify and interrogate our own privilege. Not just in the “conversation,” but in our actions. We need to actively dismantle the institutions that perpetuate our  privilege. We need to all understand the ideas and employ the methods of those who have forever had to suffer under the weight of our privilege in order to dismantle it.

The toolkits for this action are already vast: out of movements for equality, a deep and ongoing lineage of critics has emerged who are examining the conditions of oppression and creating the scholarly tools to disarm it. But even more important are the tools for survival developed by the everyday people living under oppression. If we are allowed to create a world through our work that others are forced to occupy, our biggest responsibility is to them.

It is important to note that any one person’s list of these ideas and methods is incomplete. To write an opinion about the necessity of a diversity of voices in dialog and to mention only the theorists and activists I find important without acknowledging this would be hypocrisy. This is hopefully only the start of a much longer and richer dialog.

If we are allowed to create a world through our work that others are forced to occupy, our biggest responsibility is to them.

I hope in the comments below you will join in, feel free to share your opinions. Please share information on the writers, advocates, and activists that you find meaningful in identifying, interrogating and dismantling privilege and hegemony in all its forms. And if you recognize yourself as benefitting from this system – let those who don't  speak first and loudest. It is important that we participate, but “check your privilege at the door.”