Over the last century, Daniel Burnham’s city has experienced unprecedented urban and regional transformations. A glance at history reveals that the sometimes more and sometimes less explicit intersections between dichotomies like nature-culture, center-periphery, interior-exterior, and urban-wilderness activated a sequence of inquiries that were largely unknown. The truth is there is a spatial phenomenon of much larger implications that merits greater attention. In fact, the “thickness” of the Chicago-Great Lakes region has historically been constituted as a strategic territory that not only converges complex ecologies and operational landscapes but more than ever it continues to be a critical space; the enormous Great Lakes water body, the vast hinterland with its fields for resource and food production, grand-scale infrastructural systems, as well as a popularized anthroprocene shed new light on Chicago’s expanded geographies.
Historically, Chicago has been a hotbed of action, architecturally and otherwise. Many views and architectural legacies emanated from the city, but not always in theoretical nature. Known as Carl Sandburg’s “City of Big Shoulders,”1 Chicago’s tale as a city of “tool makers, stackers of wheat, player with railroads and the nation’s freight handlers […] fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding” sets the foundation for our investigation.
Straddling between the cities history and future, theory and practice, and the academy and praxis, the Chicago Expander program at Archeworks builds upon Eva Maddox and Stanley Tigerman’s legacy of innovation in design research, design thinking, and applied design. Chicago as a geographic entity set the foundation for the Expander program to reflect on some of the major transformations the region and larger geography are undergoing today. We placed these issues before architects and urbanists not only because of the way the cities (regional) identity has been built over the last century––in part through its architectural tropes and stereotypes––but because of the speed of transformations it currently is being radically revised.
In workshops on Energy and Economy, Agency and Consumerism, Transportation, Water, and Food we intended to capture the emergent nature of Chicago’s ecological, economic, and geographic transformations and illuminate new processes that shape urban development. Within these frameworks our goal was to shorten the distance between reconceptualizations of inherited epistemological and methodological assumptions about “the city,” how this relates to innovation in design research, and the way we as designers critically examine how contemporary urban theory unfolds in questions immanent to Chicago (and beyond). What are these trajectories suggesting for design, design research, the informants of design, and future practice? How can the discipline venture into an era in which (political) commitment can translate into new alliances? What spaces does it produce?
This volume of Archeworks Papers reflects on two years (2012–2014) of the Chicago Expander program. Launched in 2004, the Archeworks Papers book series reflected on the critical dialogues within Archeworks. In five volumes Archeworks Papers not only exposed the school’s critical design, research, and teachings methodologies, but its role as an alternative institution in Chicago. Since its emergence, contributors like Annie Pedret, Eva Maddox, Sarah Whiting, Doug Garofalo, Bob Somol, Ben Nicholson, Daniel S. Friedman, Bruce Mau, Clive Dilnot, and Victor Margolin have shaped the firmament of the Archeworks pedagogy.
In addition to showing some of our research findings the new volume of Archeworks Papers features a series of interviews and samplings from nineteen respected colleagues. The goal was to initiate a dialogue between critical voices of the discipline that would engage, react, respond, and expand on some of the ideas and concerns we placed in front of them. With responses from Rafi Segal, Ross Exo Adams, Clare Lyster, Nikos Salingaros, Mose Ricci, Tim Ivison, Nikos Katsikis, Derek Hoeferlin, Victor Muños Sanz, Stephen Ramos, Justin Fowler, Aristide Antonas, Slobodan Velevski, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, and Stanley Tigerman we intended to foregrounding some concerns that currently underpin the role of the city and tackle “the whole soup in which architecture sits.”2
The reason why we published our works and findings along with the voices of our colleagues is two-fold. On one hand, we want to place the work that emanated from the bowels of Archeworks within contemporary discourses. And on the other, we are interested in discussing matters of the impetus for designers and our awareness of scale, the relationship between individual action, and the bigger picture. Our approach illustrates how we have developed new strategies and tactics, took risks, tried and failed in finding ways to not only question the limits of the metageographical binarism of the urban-nonurban divide, but critique urbanisms that are too focused on the city and ecologism that is too concerned with “nature.” As a result, the book is not only an anthology of the Chicago Expander program, but it tackles architecture’s colonized frontiers and challenges the metamorphosis of the agencies that shape it. This not only helped shape “an almost expansionist rhetoric in terms of the things that design believes it can tackle,”3 but also recovered new trajectories of research and teaching we might suggest for future practice.
The nineteen voices included in the volume addressed three questions about what we perceived as a new readability of the urban. There was only one requirement: no academic etiquette. Below are the questions used to discuss and reflect upon the issues at stake:
- In recent decades the world has been described through established readings of architecture, the city, and nation-states. However, discussions of globalization and new spatial formations have developed an increasing number of positions that are responding to “the complexity of the problem” with more complexity. With the world on one end and architecture on the other, perhaps more than ever we are facing the problem of how to engage with issues that span across national, even disciplinary boundaries. It seems as if the true definition of cities and regions as systems of interrelating systems is getting harder and harder to decipher, and the speeds at which these shifts and resulting spatial consequences occur have also postulated a new level of significance for the readability of regions. The lack of awareness of “the emergence of indefinable, shapeless regions devoid of identity” underscores how current region-making processes all over the world are becoming increasingly transitory. Recent political conflicts are underlining how cities and regions are contributing to new readings of what is at stake in regionalism and urbanism on a much larger scale. Giorgio Agamben describes this condition in The Endless Crisis as Instrument of Power using an interesting analogy of an ill patient going to the doctor:
“Crisis” in ancient medicine meant a judgment when the doctor noted at the decisive moment whether the sick person would survive or die. The present understanding of crisis, on the other hand, refers to an enduring state. So this uncertainty is extended into the future, indefinitely. It is exactly the same with the theological sense; the Last Judgment was inseparable from the end of time. Today, however, judgment is divorced from the idea of resolution and repeatedly postponed. So the prospect of a decision is ever less, and an endless process of decision never concludes.
Is the city of the twenty-first century radically being transformed by the very means that make it? And, is this a decisive moment in which we have to decide whether the patient is sick, chronically ill, or is going to die?
- The distinctiveness and the meaning of region—whether considered global or regional––are no longer defined by its natural frontiers that function as interpreters of signs and symptoms of historic and cultural values. The liquidity of frontiers in this globally uncentered Kulturraum is what offers new understandings of active limitations and a new sense of scalar dimensions within the global territory.
The complexity of the issues and conflicts––climate, the environment, and other new parameters––make it difficult to clearly differentiate the scalar frames that are based on cultural and economic constructs operating. Within these epistemological frames the study of cities, regions, and worlds (within the world) provide us with morphologies of what a newly unfolding city/region can be today.
What are the epistemic frameworks in which you aim to recast cities, regions, and hinterlands as a spatial framework to bring new issues into focus that will allow us to explore unforeseen proximities between concerns separated by space and time?
- We are also interested in recovering subsets that make the urban and regional fabric (including the hinterland) through the eyes of agency. After over six decades of mass-consumption and two decades of financial capitalism, it appears as if we have lost the ability to critically mediate between ethical positions and aesthetic formulations. With the decisive battles of the future for the quality of living fought in the cities and its regions we are asking for a renewed advocacy of spatial practices.
At question are the ramifications on the planet’s environment and human relations. What are the strategic issues we should target for the future? What is the agency for these outcomes to be “positive”? Has there been agency in consumerism, commercialism, capitalism, and subsequently in sprawl, suburban developments, malling, infrastructure, and as a result in extensive infrastructural projects? Is there an agency in how we strategize growth, land-use, density, transportation, and technology? Or how we make and shape social, cultural, political, and ecological systems? Can we recover scale and its limits in order to understand boundaries and jurisdictions that depend on how to hold a heterogeneous contemporary city together? Is there agency in securing our resources for the future? And how does this relate to city design and setting structures for growth that will guide investments, both for the public and private sectors organizing sustainable developments for future cities?
— Antonio Petrov and Iker Gil
1 Monroe, Harriet (May 1916). “Chicago Granite: Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg”. Poetry. 8 (2): 90–93.
2 Mostafavi, Mohsen. “Why Design? .” DOMUS 964 (2012).
3 Ibid.
