Session one:
Reading the built world as record
Keynote:
“The Stones We Stack”:
Evidentiary Politics
and the Protection of Mauna Kua
Dr. Caitlin Blanchfield (Cornell University)
This talk examines how pōhaku, or stones, are represented across evidentiary and jurisdictional regimes at the Mauna Kea Observatories on the island of Hawai‘i. Through oral histories, legal testimony, archival records, and reading the built environment itself, the talk centers the stones erected as shrines within the Mauna Kea Science Reserve, removed by Department of Land and Natural Resources officers, and discounted by archaeologists only to be returned again and again by Kanaka Maoli kia‘i (land protectors). These stones are brought into dialogue with the Hale Pōhaku (stone house) architecture built for the astronomy industry in the 1970s and 80s and which became a site for direct action against the construction of the massive Thirty Meter Telescope from 2014-2019. Emphasizing practices of return and reinscription, I argue for thinking with stone as a means to challenge colonial practices of record keeping and documentation.
Caitlin Blanchfield is a historian of architecture and landscape whose work examines the infrastructures of settler colonialism and material practices of resistance. Her research addresses the role of modernist land management and design practices in projects of dispossession and colonization in North America and across the reaches of US empire, as well as the anticolonial architectures that unsettle them. In addition to her academic work, Caitlin works collaboratively in community-driven research and public scholarship. She teaches architectural history and theory at Cornell University and holds a PhD in architecture from Columbia University.
Graduate lightning talks
“Recording the barriadas of Lima 1961-1961”
Madeleine Aquilina (Ph.D candidate, Art History)
My work explores how architecture and record are co-constructed by demonstrating that state record-keeping practices simultaneously legitimized informal settlements as architecture while rendering them calculable as sites of capital investment in 1960s Lima. In this talk, I how Peru's state housing agency systematically recorded barriadas (informal settlements) as quantifiable forms of value. Beginning in the 1940s, Indigenous migrants from the Andes moved to Lima. In the absence of available housing, they constructed ad-hoc dwellings around the capital. First seen as plague necessitating eradication and replacement with modernist form, architects and politicians began to accept the barriadas as the appropriate urbanization strategy for Peru. In 1961, Peru officially recognized the settlements built by Andean migrants on Lima's periphery through the Law of the Barriadas, which placed these sites under the National Housing Corporation's authority while simultaneously prohibiting future land invasions. Following this legalization, the Corporation's Planning and Financing Department calculated the total value invested in barriadas, breaking down contributions from the state, private sector, and migrants themselves to determine the additional resources needed to meet minimum habitability standards. Through an analysis of two housing reports, I argue that barriadas—once viewed as threats to Lima's traditional urban order and Hispanic architectural identity—were transformed into sites of capital investment through these acts of record-keeping.
Madeleine Aquilina is a PhD candidate in the History of Art at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation Representing Indigeneity and Reforming Architecture in Mid- Twentieth Century Peru argues that architectural initiatives offered symbolic representations of Indigeneity as an alternative to land redistribution prior the 1969 agrarian reform. This research has been supported with grants from University of Michigan's History of Art Department, Rackham School for Graduate Studies, Center of Latin American and Caribbean Studies and International Institute, along with the United States Department of Education, the Society of Architectural Historians and the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry at the New School for Social Research.
The Orbital and the Subterranean
Hilary Huckins-Weidner (Ph.D student, Architecture)
The U.S. Geological Survey’s Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center boasts to have the largest collection of remote sensing data on the planet. The archival holdings span from 1937 aerial photographs to millions of satellite images captured since the first Earth orbits of the 1960s and the launch of Landsat in 1972, alongside declassified military reconnaissance imagery and the daily accumulation of new satellite data. Much of this planetary record remains analog. Beneath the receivers, reinforced concrete, servers, cooling systems, and military- determined security protocols of the EROS Data Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is a 28,000-square-foot subterranean archive containing close to 100,000 film canisters and over 12 million images. This basement-archive also serves as a bunker, designed to withstand extreme weather and national emergency. This talk examines how U.S. Cold War ambitions politicized the vertical axis by placing technologies of observation in orbit while securing their records beneath the soil. It reads the archive as a spatial and built structure of state power, where environmental and climate knowledge is preserved, organized, and instrumentalized.
Hilary Huckins-Weidner is a doctoral student in Architecture (History and Theory) at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Her research examines architectures that sense, process, and manage “nature,” with particular attention to 21st-century U.S. government and corporate infrastructures that facilitate environmental violence and extend imperial systems. She has taught courses on U.S. environmental politics and contributed editorially to numerous books on topics of architecture, urbanism, STS, and human rights. She holds an MS in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture from Columbia University GSAPP and a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Her master’s thesis investigated the politics, labor, design, and environmental impacts of Apollo-era NASA laboratories built to handle lunar materials and potential extraterrestrial contamination.
Author's own work, based on historical photos by Samuel Berg in the archives of the Newark Public Library.
Plundering the City: Interrogating the archives
of technological progress
Myles Zhang (Ph.D candidate, Architecture)
Over the past century, new technologies accelerated suburban sprawl and reshaped urban life in American cities. Moving assembly lines mass-produced consumer goods that penetrated domestic space: televisions, radios, kitchen appliances, supermarkets, shopping malls, and – above all – the automobile.
This changing “means of production” hollowed out local geographies of pedestrian- scale urbanism and local cultures of civic groups, trade unions, and hometown newspapers. Through using novel archives, this project examines the decline of civil society in what is now the American inner city of Newark, New Jersey.
Using the phone book from the 1900s to 1960s, this project digitizes and geolocates the names of 170,000 civic groups and family-owned small businesses. This process visualizes the decline in the number and density of civil society before the modern means of mass production: neighborhood-scale book clubs before the invention of radio and television, family-owned local delis before the spread of fast-food franchises, and walkable neighborhoods before the introduction of the automobile.
What is the fate of city building in the age of mass production? To quote from art historian Walter Benjamin, “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” Or in this case, the work of community building in a built environment whose redesigned form now frustrates social contact.
To quote from the political adage: “All politics is local.” That is, world-spanning new technological and political movements have knock-on consequences for local life and individual communities. To examine one community – its streets, buildings, and social infrastructure – becomes a prism to examine larger political and social shifts in American life.
Myles Zhang is interested in the urban and spatial history of the New York metropolitan region, as well as topics in urban history more broadly. He is interested in how ideas about politics, race, and culture are imprinted on the urban form. Through writing, art, digital humanities, and community engagement, he aims to introduce new audiences to history.
His dissertation examines the decline of “social infrastructure” in American urban life, in which state actors and market forces target specific urban neighborhoods and communities, subjecting them to displacement. Institutional powers created and profited from the "production of decline" in Rust Belt cities. Using the tools of history and archives, this work challenges the popular misconception that certain urban neighborhoods are marginalized because of the work ethic of those who live there. Using the historical tools of archives, architecture, and cartography, this work interrogates the relationship between capitalism and cities.