Confronting Cities

“How do we situate the problem of the modern?” Cooper Union professor Elisa Iturbe asked Lizzie Yarina and Albert Pope at the second Confronting Carbon Form conversation, hosted by the architecture journal LOG and organized by Iturbe, Stanley Cho, and Alican Taylan. The question followed two presentations on “the city,” where case studies in Ho Chi Minh and Houston revealed divergences on the legacies of modernist urbanism and carbon form.

Questions about the role of expertise undergirded both talks. Yarina, a research fellow whose focus at the MIT Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism is on the relationship between climate models and the built environment, showed that Ho Chi Minh’s so-called resilient urbanism sustains the same destructive logics it ostensibly works against, displacing residents and climatic effects into less protected areas while relying on foreign expertise and capital for new development.

The main concern of Pope, coordinator of the research-based present/future program at Rice’s architecture school, was “how do we begin making the epistemological shifts necessary to respond to this crisis?” Comparing the need to reexamine modernist urbanism’s legacies to Doctor Frankenstein re-entering his laboratory to face the “creature he bungled at first,” he argued for reigniting a modernist sensibility of professional experimentation and applying the designer’s expertise in proposing different futures.

Both agreed that the practices and relations of experts in these processes need to operate “between [the] scales [of] the strategic and the tactical,” in Yarina’s words. But these questions are in no way settled, and the future is in no way fixed.