Inveterate Scars: Confederate Monument Removal in the New South

Ann Hunter Lynch (MLA ’19)

The removal of Confederate monuments as it is carried out by city and state governments typically consists of the relocation of the figurative element of the monument. The pedestal, that which most readily distinguishes the monument in the urban landscape, remains. This fracture has created a new spatial typology: the post-monument site.

The post-monument site contests the actual and perceived spatial extents of the monument, suggesting that the removal of its figurative elements does not change its performance in the landscape. As such, an exploration of the post-monument site reveals that monumentality is a system comprised of the entire urban surface; and its destruction is, therefore, dependent upon the strategic destruction of the city itself.

This project imagines a post-monument site on Richmond, Virginia’s Monument Avenue. Built in 1890, Monument Avenue established a memorial archetype in the post-bellum south as it merged transportation infrastructure with monument figure. The five confederate monuments along the avenue are situated at major intersections. As each occur at critical nodes of circulation, the monuments dictate the city’s movement– rhythms of transit, commerce — are thus transformed into acts of ritual consecration.

Consecration depends on its reverse, twinned process of obliteration, a relationship that is observable in Richmond’s construction of interstates 95 and 64. Built in the 1950’s, the interstates bisected many of Richmond’s historically black communities in a municipal “slum clearance” effort. The act effectively destroyed these communities as their inhabitants had once known them, and these areas were quickly populated with vacant lots.

The project proposes the disruption of Monument Avenue as well as its reconstitution through a system of transfer between vacant lots and the avenue itself. Monument pedestals are dismantled and recycled as sidewalk pavers, gabion fill, and tree trench fill. The Avenue’s tree-lined medians are thinned and re-planted with nursery trees, destined for vacant lot sites.

Simultaneously, vacant lots become sites of community-informed excavation. Through the material exchange between the Avenue and the excavation sites, this project proposes a means by which existing monumental infrastructure is dismantled and a new method of retrieving and experiencing history in the city is introduced.

For decades, the design discipline has been complicit in constructing the physical environment of white supremacy.  The removal of Confederate Monuments, redefined as a city-wide project, calls upon designers and planners to work with Black communities to create a new memorial landscape that excavates obliterated areas and with them silenced histories.

Inveterate Scars proposes an expansive definition of monumentality and memorialization that critiques broad historical narratives, honors and amplifies local forms of memory practice, and elevates the memorial qualities of lived, every day experience.

View Inveterate Scars on Hollis .

In the Name of Heritage: Conservation as an Agent of Differential Development, Spatial Cleansing, and Social Exclusion in Mehrauli, Delhi

Karan Saharya (MDes ’20)

I intend to study the impacts of the architectural conservation of the Qutub Minar Complex on the urban village of Mehrauli, New Delhi, because the manner in which national- and international-level preservation and planning frameworks operate reveals underlying sociopolitical conflicts and instruments of spatial cleansing. The thesis seeks to develop a new framework for the examination of “heritage” in the post-postcolonial milieu that contextualizes the designated monument within the larger urban fabric and can inform policy using a stakeholder-centric approach. I hypothesize that the appropriation of “heritage” in contemporary urban India is a tool to develop elite tourist destinations while displacing local communities, expropriating land, and reiterating colonial-era identity politics.

A Guidebook to an Empty Land: Kalimantan and the Shadows of the Capital

Angela Mayrina (MDes ’20)

Indonesia is an archipelago of 17,000 islands that were once made of separate kingdoms. The history of the islands and their political recognition is linked to their colonial past and practices of extraction. Years after its independence, the colonial legacy has continuously influenced the way the nation looks at its people, nature, and resources, as well as the interaction between its islands within the national planning, initiatives, and policies. Today, the legacy of past forces is especially prominent in the government’s decision to move the capital from Jakarta (in Java) to East Kalimantan (in Borneo). None of the proposals for the new capital talk about the impact of the move on the current social and environmental ecosystem in Kalimantan. The island is mostly discussed in terms of potential: an empty faraway land, a perfect location for the nation’s new capital—but of whose visions? Throughout history, the “emptying” of the land becomes a method of claiming space by ignoring its existing memory, history, and cultural practices.

A Guidebook to an Empty Land is an ongoing research project that seeks to archive the lives of different inhabitants of Kalimantan that are shadowed by the grand narrative. The archive attempts to reveal the complexities of human and nonhuman beings that are constantly intertwined in the conversation of this empty land. By de-emptying the land with stories, the archive provides an alternative where the history and inhabitants of Kalimantan should be considered and included in the conversation of the moving capital.

Rescaling the University: Vertical Campuses and Postindustrial Urban Restructuring in Western Sydney

Justin Cawley (MAUD ’20)

Western Sydney University is a public university in Sydney, Australia. Since 2017, the university has expanded its network of campuses with new ‘vertical campuses’ in Parramatta, Bankstown and Liverpool.

Vertical campuses are appearing across western Sydney as universities attempt to secure advantageous locations in rapidly developing suburban centres. Western Sydney University is the most visible proponent of this trend, adapting the commercial building type for academic purposes in commercial centres currently experiencing intense redevelopment under initiatives backed by the New South Wales’ state government’s plans for a ‘Global Sydney’.

The University has presented Vertical campuses as a way to re-embed its operations in both urban and economic space. In 2017, the University marketed the building as “a major economic catalyst that is set to transform Australia’s fastest growing city and the broader Western Sydney region” (Whibley 2017).

The central location of vertical campuses is strategic for creating new student catchments and for increasing accessibility of higher education institutions in the region. Commercial centres like Parramatta, Bankstown and Liverpool are attractive for their concentration of commercial firms, amenities and excellent connectivity on the metropolitan rail network.

The increased pressures placed on the University to manage its land assets and liabilities by successive waves of funding austerity accelerated the proliferation of the vertical campus model. 

New vertical campuses are calibrated architecturally and contractually to reduce the friction to spatial expansion and contraction. One of the key features of Western Sydney University’s vertical campus model is that these spaces are leased, rather than owned. Flexibility has been a key driver in the development of new campus procurement strategies and design concerns.

Despite the commercial appearance of vertical campuses, these new buildings are offering multiple publics new interior public spaces. 

Drawing on Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt, this thesis argues that a Western Sydney Thinkbelt is vital for the coordination of new campus development that is more inclusive, locally-embedded and democratically-accountable.

 

The Next Southern Landmark: A Roadmap to Confederate Monument Redesigns and RFP for the Site of a Former White Supremacist Statue

Margaret Haltom (MUP ’20)

Following white supremacists’ acts of violence in Charleston, South Carolina (2015) and Charlottesville, Virginia (2017), activists and city officials mobilized to remove 52 Confederate monuments across the South. This contemporary era of monument removal is well-known—documented in news outlets and academic journals alike—and ongoing. Preservationists dispute the role of monuments in public memory, while progressive policymakers battle against heritage laws that prohibit their removal. But the future of these vacant pedestals, and, in particular, the role of community members and urban planners and designers to collectively create new landmarks in their place, remains relatively unexplored.

This thesis considers the context of, and process for, redesigning the sites of former Confederate monuments through a case study in Memphis, Tennessee. Focused on a former Nathan Bedford Forrest monument and its surrounding nine-acre park, I collaborate alongside a community coalition to create a process for redesign and Request for Proposals. I partner with the Lynching Sites Project (LSP) of Memphis, a coalition of teachers, faith leaders, local historians and other community members seeking to build monuments to victims of racial terror. Together, we ask: How might communities in the South reimagine and redesign former Confederate monuments? And, as the urban planner liaising with this community coalition, what is the planner’s role in creating inclusive processes to reclaim and transform these highly charged public spaces?

Through collaboration with LSP, as well as interviews with other activists, local leaders, planners, and designers, the thesis offers a roadmap for community-driven redesigns and explores the planner’s role in facilitating a more equitable design process. 

That Sinking Feeling: Subsidence Parables of the San Joaquin Valley

Chelsea Kilburn (MLA I AP ’20)

This thesis explores the dissonance between the naturally blurry edge of groundwater and the structures of management that define the surface landscape of California’s San Joaquin Valley. In this region, extreme groundwater extraction causes land subsidence, thus physically and directly altering topography. The project frames a reality where imminent coastal migration leads to a soaring urban population in the Valley, further intensifying the need for extraction that not only provides drinking water but sustains some of the nation’s most productive agricultural ground. Sites of intervention consider local groundwater management typologies and imagine near-future scenarios in which design of the landscape can be used to rethink subsidence not as the effect of groundwater extraction but as a generative infrastructural force able to meaningfully shape the ground for the retention, remediation, and distribution of water that can then be utilized in the recharge of a critically overdrafted aquifer as well as in a speculative subversion of California’s constructed natural history. 

Porch House + 300 Panels, 400 Cuts, 400 Bandages

Anna Goga (MArch II ’20)

The pedagogical experiment of the studio questioned the aesthetic and structural possibilities of Cross Laminated Timber panels or “CLT Blanks”, through the lens of two typologies – a house and a mid-rise tower.

The Porch House engages an old-notion of “folding in architecture”, where the CLT Blank measuring 9’ X 50’ is folded to create a miter-joint connection, allowing for the material to appear less sheet-like and more like plastic. Large CLT folds are distributed at the scale of—a wrap-around-porch—a type found in the American South. The porch becomes the central space of the house, where domestic scenarios, functions, and personal objects change and move over time. The structural fold becomes an inhabitable space that blurs the boundaries between inside and outside and allows for the porch’s bigness to appear.

300 Panels, 400 Cuts, 400 Bandages uses the full 50’ CLT blank vertically with one simple squiggle cut for each of the 300 panels. Assembled as a structural tube, the exoskeleton maximizes 5-story tall CLT Blanks and minimizes material waste. The project rethinks steel connections commonly used in mass timber construction, by re-conceptualizing the generic plate as a “bandage”. Usually hidden within the exterior wall assembly, the bandages are carefully designed, exaggerated, and exposed as compositional facade elements. Structurally and programmatically, the project explores ideas of lightness, the exchangeability of housing and office space, and the afterlife of materiality. The interior of the structural tube is comprised of four 25 meter zones with a gantry system of cranes built into each of the four ceilings. This system allows for the possibility to reassemble the interior floor plates and walls with endless variations.

Stranger in Moscow: The Diplomatic Illusive

Ian Miley (MArch I AP ’20)

Diplopia (n.) describes a disorder of vision in which two images of a single object are seen. Situated among other disciplinary -opias, diplopia is re-imagined to invoke a double place, more narrowly, a space for diplomacy. Our modern concept of diplomacy emerged in the Italian Renaissance in the formalization of epistolary exchange between sovereign states. Ancestral letters – or diplomas – on the one hand an official state document conferring privilege, on the other simply a paper folded twice over, fold revelation within the act of concealment. This is the duplicitous act upon which diplomatic practices are founded. Since its emergence as a genre of space, the diplomatic setting has been framed by dramaturgical and optical techniques intended to produce a doubling of reality.

This thesis considers the Embassy for the U.S. diplomatic mission to the Russian Federation in Moscow — a structure implicated in a history of espionage, riddled with listening devices, procured via labyrinthine construction contracts. The reciprocal subversions performed across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War — succinctly illustrated in MAD Magazine’s Spy vs. Spy comic strips — appear to have been recently reanimated. Through the interplay of illusionistic techniques drawn from the ecclesiastical chancel, 1960s Op-Art, and recursive computation, distortive methods propose a dialectic of concealment and revelation in architecture. Stagecraft and statecraft conspire to project the possibility of built form through the production of doubt.

Project Acknowledgments

Rhetorical support: Samantha Vasseur (MArch, MDes HPDM ’21)

Drawing support: Samantha Vasseur (MArch, MDes HPDM ’21), Ian Bankhead (MArch ’22), Aleksis Bertoni (MArch ’18), Cynthia Deng (MArch, MUP ’21), Isabel Tiange Wang (MArch ’22)

Rendering support: Jung In Seo (MIT MArch ’20), Dalma Földesi (MIT MArch ’20), Danmo Fu (MArch ’22), Glen Marquardt (MArch ’21)

A House is Not a Home

Qin Ye Chen (MArch I ’22) and Yiwen Wang (MArch I AP ’22)

“A House is Not a Home” addresses central questions that resonate in important ways with life in our cities today: “How can architecture offer a remedy to social isolation?” and “Can architecture organize different scales of community engagement over different time frames?”

This multifamily housing design redefines home as a space for knowing and engaging with objects and others for some amount of time. It acknowledges that the current housing system no longer responds to the need for community engagement or contributes to building higher levels of community attachment. The project manifests architecturally multiple time scales of knowledge, awareness, and engagement of one’s neighbors. Whether it is knowing your neighbors through windows over the years, a space occupied by different inhabitants for certain days of the week, or objects collected in treasure chambers changing by the hours.

This design combines a range of dwelling types in varying configurations, all seamlessly synthesized on the site. This range of apartment types and the idea of overlapping shared spaces that oscillate between private and public realms are used as an important component of community building and engagement. Furthermore, the aggregation of these varied units in different scalar configurations ranging from low to mid-rise building forms suggest choices in terms of living opportunities for different demographics across ages as well as income groups. Most critically, these aims and objectives are integrated into a form that is responsive to the urban fabric and context in which it is situated. The project suggests a new form of urban living that is socially inclusive and architecturally accommodative of varying lifestyles and cultural aspirations. In addition, the human-centric approach and experiential imagination of space have resulted in inventive places of encounters, which will “serve as a remedy to social isolation” through enhancing community engagement.

At The Dinner Table — Green to Orange: Building Ireland’s food security and identity

Jiyun Jeong (MLA I ’19)

Food reveals the culture and identity of the place. What and how people grow on the land constructs the landscape and what people consume shapes their identity and health. This study focuses on Irish farming and its relation to the Irish landscape, not only in the context of Brexit but also engaging with climate change. The current Irish landscape contributes in a major way to Ireland’s sheep and cattle farming. However, what if the Irish landscape becomes no longer green and placed at risk due to climate change?

The development of agriculture has moved away from crop growing to animal farming. Currently, dairy has become a specialized type of farming and less than 3% of Irish farmers grow vegetables and fruits. However, Ireland is predicted to be seriously impacted by climate change and it will put the unique feature of the Irish landscape and its current primary crops, like potatoes, at risk. In terms of Brexit, the deal could have a major impact on Irish fruit and vegetable importers and wholesalers, meaning shortages and higher prices for consumers.

This indoor landscape system would allow farmers to test and grow new potential species in preparation for climate change. One existing farm in Strabane is selected as a testbed since this farm has already started embracing new technology and innovative systems for farming. Cows’ steamy breath will be used as a form of heating and expired carbonic gas will quicken and promote vegetation. Moreover, the moisture from cow breath will save watering and the waste from cows will be reused as a form of fertilization. Oranges in the greenhouse will eventually come out to the field when the climate gets suitable in 60 years. The indoor landscape system will be reused for other species in future adaptations. This project will eventually establish Ireland’s food security and change their dinner table.