Meta Commentaries

“A quest regarding practice cannot be about overindulgent exercises that constantly try to go beyond architecture and avoid it altogether,” said NEMESTUDIO co-founder Neyran Turan during an “experimental” symposium at Carnegie Mellon University convened by visiting professor Zaid Kashef Alghata in late March. Nor, Turan added, would it do to continue “seeing architecture as heroic problem-solving.”

Such probing (and convoluted) statements abounded in each of the three sessions, which paired off presenters in intense dialogues that were then opened up to other participants and audience members. By toying with the symposium structure, Kashef Alghata hoped to achieve something like an “open workshop,” in which an object of study—a piece of writing, a physical object—could be used as a point of departure for speculation. For Turan (in conversation with Design Earth cofounder Rania Ghosn), that object was Richard Barnes’s Man with Buffalo (2007), a photograph of a diorama that depicts a man vacuuming fake snow around a taxidermied buffalo. “When you see a maintenance worker inside a diorama, the seemingly unspoiled garden of nature [becomes] vulnerable” and consequently, “the neutral story of a buffalo in the wilderness no longer holds,” Turan explained.

Kashef Alghata prompted participants to delve into architecture’s entanglement with ecology, which has long carried with it social, environmental, and political implications. All the while, he underscored the localized nature of every design intervention, saying, “No matter how good your land reclamation project might be, the same techniques and technologies that were used before are still being used.”

Princeton historian , speaking in the final session, observed that over the course of the event “we felt and heard the consequences of [the abundance of ecological literature produced in the late 1970s and early 1980s] on the enormously expansive and continuously expanding definition of architecture.” “At the same time,” Lavin continued, “we didn’t hear so much about the impact of that kind of thinking on architecture in the conventional sense” of buildings, drawings, and those “things very close to the field.” Her plaint fell on deaf ears.