An Imperative Mood
As if the concept of “justice” alone weren’t complicated enough, adding spatial to it moves things into labyrinthine territory.
A Scaffold for Things to Happen, Laureles Canyon, Tijuana BC, Mexico, Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, 2017. (Courtesy MIT Press)
Spatializing Justice: Building Blocks by Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman. The MIT Press, 140 pp., $22.95
Architectures of Spatial Justice by Dana Cuff. The MIT Press, 304 pp., $34.95
In a review of the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion, the architect Douglas Murphy wrote on his blog: “Increasingly I see a real hunger for architecture to engage with pressing social matters, especially amongst students, but I also see an innocence about what architecture is actually capable of, and how projects come about in the first place.” He was mainly referring to the discordance between the arbitrary shapes of the exhibited building and the conceptual justification of those shapes. Still, the innocence he referred to can explain recent efforts to shift the practice “toward a new, more just status quo,” as Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman suggest in their new book, Spatializing Justice, which consists of a list of “provocations.” It is, in short, a manifesto dealing with the politics and civic processes occurring in the US-Mexico border. (A second volume, Sociali…
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