5 points to an "ethical" architecture

Here is an interesting, very brief, documentary that introduces a few contrasting perspectives on Le Corbusier's architecture and the role of the architect in society.

Architecture for the Underserved

"Architecture for the Underserved" is an ethnographic film on design-build architecture programs around the United States that I documented during 8 months of participant observation fieldwork on the Rural Studio of Auburn University in Alabama, the Alley Flat Initiative of the University of Texas, Studio 804 of the University of Kansas and others (as part of my undergraduate sociology thesis at Marlboro College, Vermont).


Architecture for the Underserved from Kenton Card on Vimeo.

The video was edited with Douglas Adams and a team of transcribers. The film would not have been possible without the open doors of the architects, students, clients, and community members.

Following the traditions of sociological mosaic by the Chicago school of sociology and of Walter Benjamin's belief in constructing history as montage, I believe such a collection of interviews and observations can present an alternative glimpse into the process where "I needn't say anything. Merely show."

Community Architecture at Nordrand 45

I recently completed my final project for a workshop in Cottbus. I collaborated with three other students: Anne Groß, Sebastian Seyfarth, and Erko Luhaaru. In the beginning of the project, I wrote an abstract on what we hoped to practice—Community Architecture.

We strive to democratize the design process. This begins by connecting constituencies: the community, the local governance, and the owner. Each constituency will be approached and compassionately listened to, not judged, until theirs and others' perspectives have been voiced and evaluated. We will engage constituencies on a one-to-one basis, going door to door in the community, contacting the local governance, and contacting the owner—while simultaneously we will begin a public outreach campaign with fliers, signage, and installations. We will host meetings with all the constituencies to create dialogue and explore possibilities for the abandoned Stasi site at Nordrand 45. Each meeting step will be documented as a stream of design process data, which will be interpreted with the community and the students to come to terms with the various positions, through synthesis or recognition of differences. Democratization of the design process cannot predetermine outputs, but we must be open to the communities decisions and outputs, while we hope to create documentation, installations, tangible streams of intervention, or architecture. 

Beginning with this abstract and resulting in the final video, my group engaged in a dialogue that placed the architect out of the traditional role of delivering vision, and into the public sector, engaging in public service architecture.



English subtitles soon to come (maybe..).

firebreak project

Here is a very short sequence of clips I edited together a few years ago for Dan Pitera of the Detroit Collaborative Design Center that he presented in a lecture at the GSD's Career Discovery Program, which I had attended the previous year. This is a thin slice into a larger sociological analysis I have conducted on design-build architecture in poor communities around the United States.



As I noted in the previous post, I have developed an interest in multi-media communication to engage complex sociological (or other disciplinary) concepts into the public sphere, beyond academic rhetoric, to become accessible to the citizenry, because the citizens are meant to run our democratic countries. Shouldn't they understand their society? Lets help people understand the world by not obfuscating academic work.

Neil Smith, CUNY geographer, referenced this notion of making academic arguments accessible with two powerful quotations in his talk Urban Politics, Urban Security: Securing Accumulation.

I'd always heard this story, years and years ago, that T.S. Eliot, as a poet had always said: If his butler couldn't understand what he was trying to say in his poetry. He should rip it up, throw it away, and start again. I've always taken a certain inspiration from that especially since I didn't really understand what was going on in T.S. Eliot's poetry half the time. 

But I found out an even better version of the same kind of sentiment, which actually comes from Margaret Mead... "If one cannot state a matter clear enough so that even an intelligent twelve year old can understand it," Margaret Mead said once, "one should probably remain within the cloistered halls of the university and the laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one's subject matter." 

communication

I am very interested in the communication of complex ideas through accessible language and multiple media forms. A few years ago I thought of the ideal communication embodying "multiple forms of expression," such as analytical writing, creative writing, graphic, video, audio, et cetera. The following links I found have excited me because of their medium makes more accessible complex economic or sociological analyses.