We surely have loads to say about the architecture profession, but how would you compose all those thoughts into the good ol' classical form of a letter? The "Dear Architecture" ideas competition asked its participants just that.
Created by Blank Space, the same people who organized the Fairy Tales Architecture Competition, "Dear Architecture" entrants had to pen their own 500-word letter to architecture — whether as a concept, a social practice, or as a community — along with an illustration to supplement their letter's message.
Entrants from over 60 countries responded to the brief. Not too surprisingly, the letters got upfront and personal, if not a little bit heart-breaking.
The jury — which included Fernando Romero, Elena Manferdini, Hani Rashid, Natasha Jen, and Archinect and Bustler's very own Alexander Walter — selected three top-prize winners and 12 Honorable Mentions.
Read the top three letters in their entirety below.
1ST PRIZE ($1,500): Craig L. Wilkins, Ph.D., RA
"Dear Architecture:
I’ve been wondering why you don’t speak to me. Is it because you don’t see me? Are you ignoring me? Maybe it’s because you really don’t care for me; but whatever it is, you sure don’t. speak, that is. At least, not to me.
When I go downtown, I hear people saying you speak all the time. But I never hear it. I wonder what you say.
When I was little, I thought you spoke to my dad. He sure had a lot of nice things to say about you. Driving around our neighborhood with my mother, big brother, little sister and me, he’d often point and say things like, “I used to play there!” or “Bobby Ford lived there; we used to sit on his porch all hours of the day waiting for Betty Roberts to walk by just once.” I don’t Betty Roberts. Maybe you do. Do you speak to her, maybe?
Anyway, he always seemed happy when he spoke about you. But not anymore. Now he tells me you hide things. People. Drugs. That I should watch out for you. Around you. I wonder what you did to make him not like you anymore. Did you stop speaking to him too?
My friend Jamie, she likes you. She used to live next door but her dad got a different job and now she lives somewhere else. I see her sometimes at cookouts or birthdays. Sometimes she comes to see her grandmother. She never used to but now she talks about you all the time. Is that why you stopped speaking to my dad? Because now you have Jamie?
My teacher Mr. Phillips asked us to draw you yesterday. I tried to remember what Jamie told me; to remember what my dad said about you when you were friends. I dressed you up real fine. You had a tall, pointy hat, big shiny eyes and a long porch wide enough for the entire block to sit on. I didn’t want to draw the flat tops and shut eyes that say, “Post no bills” around here. I mean, what would be the point of that? I tried to draw something I thought would speak. But still, you wouldn’t. Speak. Not to me.
Last week, my mom, dad, all their friends and a bunch of people I didn’t know were walking down the street shouting and holding signs. Most of the signs were about the police but some of them were about you. Said you were cheap. Broken. Mean and always had been. They want something better. I don’t think you speak to them either. If so, it’s not in a way they can understand.
Mr. Phillips seemed to hear you though. He smiled a great big toothy smile and asked me if this is what I wanted; if this was my dream house. I told him I didn’t know but I knew what I didn’t want.
Architecture that won’t speak to me."
Reflecting on his letter, Craig L. Wilkins stated: 'Almost 50 years after Whitney Young, the field remains deeply implicated in the Baltimores of the nation. I wanted to remind practitioners, people beyond our immediate circle often think long and hard about what we do. Even if they don’t call it architecture, they’re acutely aware of the things that make their lives better or worse.'
2ND PLACE ($1,000): Vershaé Hite and Brittany Eaker Kirkland
"Dear Architecture,
Today over beer and gourmet cupcakes, my co-workers and I celebrated Ashley's last day at the office. The salted caramel flavor I'd chosen felt oddly appropriate as I contemplated the loss of a mentor and talented peer. You see, it's not just her last day here; she's decided to join “The Missing 32%” of women in the United States who were unable to see a long-term future with you despite years of dedication. Our countless conversations over morning and afternoon coffees could not shake her lingering discontent with the tumultuous relationship between the two of you. So she's moving on and, honestly Architecture, I don’t blame her.
If you took one moment to be introspective, you would discover appalling imbalances. You would see that not even a quarter of architects in the U.S. are women, although women are going to design school at nearly equal rates to men! This number continues to decrease at higher leadership levels in the field. Imagine how difficult it was for Ashley to encourage young female professionals in our office when she consistently saw them unable to achieve their career goals because of office leadership that devalued their contributions, ignored their strengths, and amplified their weaknesses. Even she felt buried under the weight of these recurring issues. Seriously Architecture, are we building on rock or sand here?! Face it - the exclusive "boy's club" culture you’ve established has forced Ashley to take her Jimmy Choos elsewhere.
Architecture, I'm revealing all of these things to you because I love you. I love design and the incessantly changing, challenging nature of the daily work in architecture. I love how essential you are to the human experience, allowing your user to impress upon you as you do them, becoming a living archive of societal evolution. I love how you scale, humbling me so that I feel my smallness while simultaneously empowering me to create my environment. I love your infinite physical expressions, especially when imbued with theory and experimental ideas that attempt to rescue humanity from its ailments. I love how we are always intertwined and in continual dialogue with one another. But our relationship needs work.
Consistently, I ask for opportunities and you respond with preconceptions, limitations, and pigeonholing. I beg for critical life balance and flexibility and you respond with unpaid overtime. I plead for a clear path to advancement and you present me with an ultimatum: choose status quo or exit sign. So before I reach my breaking point confronting the same issues which drove Ashley to leave, how are you going to change? The practice of architecture has to evolve. We need diverse professional leaders. We need office leadership that is aware of the issues and willing to take quantifiable action to support qualified female professionals.
We need women architects, and women architects need change.
I haven't given up on you yet, Architecture, but we have a lot of work to do.
Sincerely,
Lauren
P.S. I know a great relationship counselor."
'Having recently discussed the role of women in architecture, this competition gave us the opportunity to tell an au courant story drawn from a collage of varied circumstances,' Vershaé Hite and Brittany Eaker Kirkland commented. 'We wanted to highlight significant issues by presenting lived experiences in relation to statistical data. Our hope is that this letter will incite and amplify meaningful dialogues between men and women in architecture firms across the country, and aid in encouraging an eventual demographic transformation within the profession.'
3RD PLACE ($500): Lewis Williams
"Dear Architecture,
It’s happening again. Hydraulic fracturing is the new resource rush and it is rapidly consuming the American landscape. Since 2008 its boomtowns are leaving countless homeless and displacing locals through explosive growth and skyrocketing rent. Watford City, North Dakota for instance has exploded to nearly five times its 2010 population. The speed and intensity of this shortsighted economic brutality bludgeons communities into rapid growth and exposes entire regions to a constant risk of precipitous collapse. If we continue to do nothing, broken fragments of these communities will litter the country as the carcass of industrial whim to remind us time and again that we consistently have no idea how to handle the boomtown. We must act.
When industry arrives, each town is flooded with workers and every element of infrastructure is strained. Roads deteriorate, land is compromised, and town services are stretched to an extreme. Housing looms as the predominant issue and there are simply not enough places for people arriving to live. Many end up homeless or live in their cars, others live in man camps.
While prefabrication has become the go to for rapid response, it has consistently been bound to the limitation and disorganization of a single building or automobile. Why has architecture abandoned the rail? Why not take this symbol of industrial efficiency and transform it into a vessel of architectural deliverance? Switchyards can provide a canvas for urban growth as rail cars reimagined as buildings anchor or migrate in response to the needs of each community. It has the potential to combat current homelessness and deliver housing as well as civic resources to towns through a previously unrealized economy of fabrication, scale, and speed.
This image re-imagines the railroad as a framework for buildings to be shipped, docked, and integrated into existing town structures. Through this new mobility we can deliver everything from health clinics to fitness centers. We can provide classrooms for children and even public libraries and parks. Grocery stores can provide a platform for local farmers and a variety of housing types will serve a population from all walks of life. Rail cars can deploy and connect to form larger spaces and routinely rotate between towns in order to establish new connections between communities.
The boom will end. Whether in five months, five years or fifty, whether immediately or gradually, these towns must be equipped to handle a population exodus. Desired services will remain while the rest migrates to serve other areas and saves these towns from becoming graveyards of abandoned structures. I hope that this idea reaches beyond the boomtown to provide aid for disaster relief and any situation of immediate architectural urgency both now and in the future."
'I hope this submission generates a larger discussion about the impact of industry on communities and the architectural consequences of modern boom towns built around hydraulic fracturing,' Lewis Williams stated. 'I want to make the often unnoticed migration of these communities visible through architecture, as well as transform our perception of railways from a historically industrial symbol into a network for social response.'
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Dear Architecture Jury:
All the winning entries, honorable mentions, and other notable submissions will be published in Blank Space's upcoming "Dear Architecture" book. The book is expected to start shipping this December, but it's available for pre-order online.
30 Comments
Wait, in essay two her friend quits architecture to join the missing 32% and she doesn't tell her that is a stupid and highly ironic move. What kind of friend is that? You shouldn't get an award for being a terrible person.
"The salted caramel flavor I'd chosen felt oddly appropriate as I contemplated the loss of a mentor and talented peer. "
This is so wonderful! I had intended to enter but as often happens got too busy to follow through. I will buy the book for sure.
Fred, you clearly don't understand how discouraging, depressing, and draining it is to suffer sexism. The decision to just not take it anymore is perfectly understandable when you see male colleagues handed opportunities, praise, and higher wages of which they are no more deserving than their female peers every day.
If she were to stand up and point these thing out to her company's leadership, what do you think would have happened? Likely, they would have called her a bitch and dyke behind her back and slowly and passive aggressively pressured her to leave anyway.
Well I guess we celebrate the quitters now over those that struggle and do the work. Not really a good message for the women who are actually doing it.... That complainers and tweeters are representing them
Fred your responses are extremely tone-deaf -- not only for completely missing the point of the entry in question, but also for how you are deriding the creative work of individuals who obviously spent a lot of time, thought, and energy on their entries. The fact that they submitted such a beautifully written, yet tragically true, entry is a form of activism - not one of "quitting" as you say.
i guess positivity and thankfulness for Mr. Architecture were not on the jury's agenda,or there were no happy letters? will have to go over to blank space site and read the others.......based on essay 2 it clearly is addressed to Mr. Architecture which makes that one a very interesting and slightly absurd read given the competition constraints. sounds like Mr. Architecture is an asshole or something. and in a weird way I thought it was about corporate workplace than the entire profession, i don't live in the corporate world.......don't mind Fred, i suspect he is one of those archinectors with 5 aliases for posting purposed - red herring.
Ask not what you can do for architecture,
Ask what architecture can do for you.
This whole competition reeks of entitlement. Probably because it's all media people and no designers
Dear Architecture,
Thanks for keeping me dry last night.
Love,
jla-x
Olaf, this part of Vershae and Brittany's letter is very happy and full of love:
Architecture, I'm revealing all of these things to you because I love you. I love design and the incessantly changing, challenging nature of the daily work in architecture. I love how essential you are to the human experience, allowing your user to impress upon you as you do them, becoming a living archive of societal evolution. I love how you scale, humbling me so that I feel my smallness while simultaneously empowering me to create my environment. I love your infinite physical expressions, especially when imbued with theory and experimental ideas that attempt to rescue humanity from its ailments. I love how we are always intertwined and in continual dialogue with one another.
Fred: "entitlement"?
yes, but Donna it was a precursor to a big but and def. makes the Mr. Architecture proposal more tangible....and by absurd I did not mean bad, its a very strange essay that I got, much better than the first....the first is just very hard to get the first time without the explanation below...
but the overall context was negative on all 3 winning essays.....
NOT that I would have been different had I entered anything, I would have been slapping architecture silly for becoming a commodity and making existence marketable....
the love is almost expressed as if the sacrifice is worth it....
I guess I don't know what "architecture" is either. I thought it was the design of the physical world, but apparently it's the misplaced rage at some father figure (says a bunch of bloggers and a few "architects")
I would have been slapping architecture silly for becoming a commodity and making existence marketable....
This would make a great letter, Olaf!
Fred, design of the physical world for whom?
Well I guess we celebrate the quitters now over those that struggle and do the work.
why are you equating 'struggling' with 'doing the work?' the point is that there is a glass ceiling, so some people struggle to do the work, while others just struggle.
sometimes it's best to work hard to build bridges. sometimes it's not.
Move not unless you see an advantage; use not your troops unless there is something to be gained; fight not unless the position is critical. No ruler should put troops into the field merely to gratify his own spleen; no general should fight a battle simply out of pique. If it is to your advantage, make a forward move; if not, stay where you are. Anger may in time change to gladness; vexation may be succeeded by content. But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life. Hence the enlightened ruler is heedful, and the good general full of caution. This is the way to keep a country at peace and an army intact.
Architecture is for dogs. Didn't they make a book about that one too?
it's silly season again....
The problem is there's no such thing as "architecture" just each individual person and individual person and what they do. If you are talking to a word or brand then you're having a psychotic break. And if you quit architecture that's your own fault
Fred, I'll just say it bluntly: your inability to be imaginative about other peoples' experiences makes me suspect you're not a very good architect. You may be a fantastic spec writer or curtain wall expert or water infiltration detailer or any myriad aspects of architecture, and those are all really valuable skills that are needed within architecture, so bravo for that, but if you can't empathize with other people having a different human experience from yours how can you be a good designer?
Fred I believe another way to put it in terms I imagine a dude like you could understand (schizophrenic or autistic) As far as the Columbine shooters were concerned the whole world was against them so they shot up everyone............ in the assignment here they asked people to address Architecture in a formal letter. You write formal letters to people. This is literally in the brief. Now this is why in my opinion the absurd essay #2 is the best essay because it is about architecture but it is also about the predominate culture which is MALE. There is an actual personification of it,practically its you Fred Herring............they PS noting they know a relationship counselor. this is literally just like boys and girls not getting along because boys like to detach massive portions of reality as "abstract number machines" and discount empathy as weakness within the number machines and then when the number machine isnt working in their favor they shoot people as if they were uncontrollable variables.....lack of empathy!.......get it........so although architecture can exist without us perceiving it and is not alive or organic and therefore technically an object without character or emotion, it is also something humans give meaning to by pursuing it as a meaningful aspect of their lives.....so essay #2 clearly points out that in the end the MALE abstract number machine can actually crush meaningful pursuits in architecture because like Donna says - the spec writers and tech guys don't see it that way and dominate the culture......did i clear that up for you Fred?
Thanks PC bros
so you're just an idiot? not sure how else to explain it to you. and maybe calling you idiot is not PC,you may be suffering psychological or mental issues. i apologize if you have a condition and the meds arent working.
Do they even teach architecture is school anymore or is it hazing by PC bros.
what does spec writing have to do with anything? I think imagining others experiences is architecture, while this fall more in the category of looking out for number one narcissism
why you getting all emotional bro?
we call it 'personification'
it's a thing
it even has a wikipedia page
Yes, literally devices can be used by PC hacks too.
I don't know how anyone can read these without laughing. They're dumb.
Fred you ok bruh?
I mean for someone who thinks this shit is laughable you do spend a lot of time talking about it.
wait wait....Fred is a bot....no personality, just a personality disorder.
what is Architecture Freddy?
Olaf, nice use of Columbine, that's exactly what I meant. Failure of imagination all around, failure to empathize, failure to understand consequences.
This one is really good, too. Imagination takes Power.
/\ yes to above Donna. i really like this persons work all around.
Lots of fashionable nonsense not addressing any of the profession's real problems. Boring.
I agree with gwharton. It gets boring. Seen this for like the past 8 years. Come on, guys.
Excellent work and great!
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