"Dear Architecture" winners write fictional letters about real problems in the field
By Bustler Editors|
Wednesday, Sep 16, 2015
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We have loads to say about the architecture profession, but how would you compose all those thoughts into the good ol' classical form of a letter? The "Dear Architecture" ideas competition asked its participants just that. Created by Blank Space, the same people who organized the Fairy Tales Architecture Competition, "Dear Architecture" entrants had to pen their own 500-word letter to architecture — whether as a concept, a social practice, or as a community — along with an illustration to supplement their letter's message.
Entrants from over 60 countries responded to the brief, and well, things got pretty real in the letters, if not a little heart-breaking.
Scroll down for more.
The esteemed jury — which included Fernando Romero, Elena Manferdini, Hani Rashid, Natasha Jen, and Bustler's very own Alexander Walter — selected three top-prize winners and 12 Honorable Mentions.
Read the top three letters in their entirety below.
1ST PRIZE ($1,500): Craig L. Wilkins, Ph.D., RA
"Dear Architecture:
I’ve been wondering why you don’t speak to me. Is it because you don’t see me? Are you ignoring me? Maybe it’s because you really don’t care for me; but whatever it is, you sure don’t. speak, that is. At least, not to me.
When I go downtown, I hear people saying you speak all the time. But I never hear it. I wonder what you say.
When I was little, I thought you spoke to my dad. He sure had a lot of nice things to say about you. Driving around our neighborhood with my mother, big brother, little sister and me, he’d often point and say things like, “I used to play there!” or “Bobby Ford lived there; we used to sit on his porch all hours of the day waiting for Betty Roberts to walk by just once.” I don’t Betty Roberts. Maybe you do. Do you speak to her, maybe?
Anyway, he always seemed happy when he spoke about you. But not anymore. Now he tells me you hide things. People. Drugs. That I should watch out for you. Around you. I wonder what you did to make him not like you anymore. Did you stop speaking to him too?
My friend Jamie, she likes you. She used to live next door but her dad got a different job and now she lives somewhere else. I see her sometimes at cookouts or birthdays. Sometimes she comes to see her grandmother. She never used to but now she talks about you all the time. Is that why you stopped speaking to my dad? Because now you have Jamie?
My teacher Mr. Phillips asked us to draw you yesterday. I tried to remember what Jamie told me; to remember what my dad said about you when you were friends. I dressed you up real fine. You had a tall, pointy hat, big shiny eyes and a long porch wide enough for the entire block to sit on. I didn’t want to draw the flat tops and shut eyes that say, “Post no bills” around here. I mean, what would be the point of that? I tried to draw something I thought would speak. But still, you wouldn’t. Speak. Not to me.
Last week, my mom, dad, all their friends and a bunch of people I didn’t know were walking down the street shouting and holding signs. Most of the signs were about the police but some of them were about you. Said you were cheap. Broken. Mean and always had been. They want something better. I don’t think you speak to them either. If so, it’s not in a way they can understand.
Mr. Phillips seemed to hear you though. He smiled a great big toothy smile and asked me if this is what I wanted; if this was my dream house. I told him I didn’t know but I knew what I didn’t want.
Architecture that won’t speak to me."
Reflecting on his letter, Craig L. Wilkins stated: 'Almost 50 years after Whitney Young, the field remains deeply implicated in the Baltimores of the nation. I wanted to remind practitioners, people beyond our immediate circle often think long and hard about what we do. Even if they don’t call it architecture, they’re acutely aware of the things that make their lives better or worse.'
2ND PLACE ($1,000): Vershaé Hite and Brittany Eaker Kirkland
"Dear Architecture,
Today over beer and gourmet cupcakes, my co-workers and I celebrated Ashley's last day at the office. The salted caramel flavor I'd chosen felt oddly appropriate as I contemplated the loss of a mentor and talented peer. You see, it's not just her last day here; she's decided to join “The Missing 32%” of women in the United States who were unable to see a long-term future with you despite years of dedication. Our countless conversations over morning and afternoon coffees could not shake her lingering discontent with the tumultuous relationship between the two of you. So she's moving on and, honestly Architecture, I don’t blame her.
If you took one moment to be introspective, you would discover appalling imbalances. You would see that not even a quarter of architects in the U.S. are women, although women are going to design school at nearly equal rates to men! This number continues to decrease at higher leadership levels in the field. Imagine how difficult it was for Ashley to encourage young female professionals in our office when she consistently saw them unable to achieve their career goals because of office leadership that devalued their contributions, ignored their strengths, and amplified their weaknesses. Even she felt buried under the weight of these recurring issues. Seriously Architecture, are we building on rock or sand here?! Face it - the exclusive "boy's club" culture you’ve established has forced Ashley to take her Jimmy Choos elsewhere.
Architecture, I'm revealing all of these things to you because I love you. I love design and the incessantly changing, challenging nature of the daily work in architecture. I love how essential you are to the human experience, allowing your user to impress upon you as you do them, becoming a living archive of societal evolution. I love how you scale, humbling me so that I feel my smallness while simultaneously empowering me to create my environment. I love your infinite physical expressions, especially when imbued with theory and experimental ideas that attempt to rescue humanity from its ailments. I love how we are always intertwined and in continual dialogue with one another. But our relationship needs work.
Consistently, I ask for opportunities and you respond with preconceptions, limitations, and pigeonholing. I beg for critical life balance and flexibility and you respond with unpaid overtime. I plead for a clear path to advancement and you present me with an ultimatum: choose status quo or exit sign. So before I reach my breaking point confronting the same issues which drove Ashley to leave, how are you going to change? The practice of architecture has to evolve. We need diverse professional leaders. We need office leadership that is aware of the issues and willing to take quantifiable action to support qualified female professionals.
We need women architects, and women architects need change.
I haven't given up on you yet, Architecture, but we have a lot of work to do.
Sincerely,
Lauren
P.S. I know a great relationship counselor."
'Having recently discussed the role of women in architecture, this competition gave us the opportunity to tell an au courant story drawn from a collage of varied circumstances,' Vershaé Hite and Brittany Eaker Kirkland commented. 'We wanted to highlight significant issues by presenting lived experiences in relation to statistical data. Our hope is that this letter will incite and amplify meaningful dialogues between men and women in architecture firms across the country, and aid in encouraging an eventual demographic transformation within the profession.'
3RD PLACE ($500): Lewis Williams
"Dear Architecture,
It’s happening again. Hydraulic fracturing is the new resource rush and it is rapidly consuming the American landscape. Since 2008 its boomtowns are leaving countless homeless and displacing locals through explosive growth and skyrocketing rent. Watford City, North Dakota for instance has exploded to nearly five times its 2010 population. The speed and intensity of this shortsighted economic brutality bludgeons communities into rapid growth and exposes entire regions to a constant risk of precipitous collapse. If we continue to do nothing, broken fragments of these communities will litter the country as the carcass of industrial whim to remind us time and again that we consistently have no idea how to handle the boomtown. We must act.
When industry arrives, each town is flooded with workers and every element of infrastructure is strained. Roads deteriorate, land is compromised, and town services are stretched to an extreme. Housing looms as the predominant issue and there are simply not enough places for people arriving to live. Many end up homeless or live in their cars, others live in man camps.
While prefabrication has become the go to for rapid response, it has consistently been bound to the limitation and disorganization of a single building or automobile. Why has architecture abandoned the rail? Why not take this symbol of industrial efficiency and transform it into a vessel of architectural deliverance? Switchyards can provide a canvas for urban growth as rail cars reimagined as buildings anchor or migrate in response to the needs of each community. It has the potential to combat current homelessness and deliver housing as well as civic resources to towns through a previously unrealized economy of fabrication, scale, and speed.
This image re-imagines the railroad as a framework for buildings to be shipped, docked, and integrated into existing town structures. Through this new mobility we can deliver everything from health clinics to fitness centers. We can provide classrooms for children and even public libraries and parks. Grocery stores can provide a platform for local farmers and a variety of housing types will serve a population from all walks of life. Rail cars can deploy and connect to form larger spaces and routinely rotate between towns in order to establish new connections between communities.
The boom will end. Whether in five months, five years or fifty, whether immediately or gradually, these towns must be equipped to handle a population exodus. Desired services will remain while the rest migrates to serve other areas and saves these towns from becoming graveyards of abandoned structures. I hope that this idea reaches beyond the boomtown to provide aid for disaster relief and any situation of immediate architectural urgency both now and in the future."
'I hope this submission generates a larger discussion about the impact of industry on communities and the architectural consequences of modern boom towns built around hydraulic fracturing,' Lewis Williams stated. 'I want to make the often unnoticed migration of these communities visible through architecture, as well as transform our perception of railways from a historically industrial symbol into a network for social response.'
HONORABLE MENTIONS
- Will Fu
- Petar Bojović
- Ekaterina Dovjenko
- Nicholas Venezia
- Giovanni Bellotti and Giacomo Sarto Favorito
- Aimilios Davlantis Lo and Celine Park
- Aditya Ghosh
- Seth McDowell
- Chriscelle Banas and Noel Vazquez
- Shane Reiner-Roth and Kyle Branchesi
- Alexandre Barrère
- Arnold Yok Fai Wong
Dear Architecture Jury:
- Beatrice Galilee: Associate Curator of Architecture and Design at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Fernando Romero: Founder, FR-EE
- Daniel Arsham & Alex Mustonen: Cofounders, snarkitecture
- Elena Manferdini: Principal, Atelier Manferdini
- Natasha Jen: Partner, Pentagram
- Hani Rashid: Founder, Asymptote Architecture
- Kelsey Keith: Editor in Chief, Curbed
- Dr. Diana Balmori, FASLA: Founder, Balmori Associates, Inc.
- Matthew Hoffman & Francesca Giuliani: Founders, Blank Space
- David Celento: Founder, DigiFabLab
- Dr. Rebecca Henn: Professor of Architecture, Pennsylvania State University
- Adam Hostetler: Founder, Urban Nomad Architecture Lab
- Alexander Walter: Editorial & Production Manager for Archinect and Editor in Chief of Bustler
- David Basulto: Founder and Editor in Chief, ArchDaily
- Becky Quintal: Executive Editor, ArchDaily
All the winning entries, honorable mentions, and select notable submissions will be published in Blank Space's upcoming "Dear Architecture" book, featuring cover art by Irena Gajic. The book is expected to start shipping this December, but it's available for pre-order.
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