Hallie Chen

This summer, my boss at studioMDA asked me to help him write an essay on

“Architecture as a Social Art.” This came at an opportune time in my personal life as I was trying
to decide whether or not to pursue graduate studies in architecture. The struggle for an
articulation of architecture in the context of an existential search for meaning in/through this field
helped crystallize my commitment to it in its multiple formations. For me, there are two primary
ways in which I think about Architecture; 1) as a moment and 2) as a mode of inquiry and
representation. As a moment, it embodies the culmination of interdisciplinary thought and as a
mode of inquiry it is a creative and optimistic practice.
Drawing on the experiences I’ve had working at architecture firms on public and private
projects, as well as having attended many city planning meetings during college-I know that
Architecture is a negotiation. It is a balancing act between an incredible amount of forces;
economic (client, city, developer), political (departments, city, state, nation), social/cultural
(neighborhood groups, local development corporations), historical (existing fabrics, paradigms),
and so on. The moment when all of these forces are included/excluded, considered, addressed,
and shaped into an emergent form is what we call architecture. This also reflects, conceptually,
how one who is concerned with the forces responsible for shaping the world in any given
discipline may arrive at architecture as the moment of opportunity.
Despite a very meandering path, my personal and academic background seemed
destined to engage with the built environment both critically and creatively. My enthusiasm and
aptitude for science was overtaken by a passion for art in high school. As I relinquished my naïve
notions of art, I began university as a student in Conservation and Resource Studies (CRS).
CRS, a highly interdisciplinary program, was a platform for me to apply my math and science
skills in real situations. Looking at pollution, resource conflict and degradation as sources of
poverty in developing nations seemed to address the most pressing issues I saw in society. Over
time, with each new case study and conflict- my analysis, that I had become adept at conducting,
revealed progressions that were not linear. There were no finite causes and effects in bounded
localities. Poverty was not caused by pollution and pollution was not caused by poverty. The
more in depth the analysis, the more closely the case study approximated a Borges story rather
than a scientific paper. Each study became a genealogy that could be traced to issues of culture
and identity, to structures of power and knowledge. These forces were spatially focused in cities.
In studying urbanization, development, modernization- these complex processes had
sites of analysis and practices associated with them. Architecture straddles theory and practice
and I think it is both the professional aspect in combination with scholarship that is the hallmark of
great architecture. John Biln in his essay on (De)forming Self and Other: Towards an Ethics of
Distance, “Michel DeCerteau has written that ethics “is articulated through effective operations
[defining]a distance between what is and what ought to be,” a distance designating “ a space
where we have something to do.” I want to occupy this space with Architecture. It would be
arrogant to posit that Architecture could provide a panacea to issues such as housing,
development, or poverty. With that caveat, I think self-relection, theory and criticism are integral
components to Architecture. I think Architecture includes these things but should not be centered
around a fetishized version of “green” or “social.” Sometimes the “greenest” act is to not construct
new buildings at all. As such, I hope scholarship will keep raising questions in my mind for the
future. Questions such as these that I quoted in the essay I wrote this summer:
“There’s a big difference between asking ‘What do people need?’ and ‘What can
architecture provide’? - Keith Mitnick
“Architecture is saddled with the legacy of environmental determinism. How do we create
a praxis without the arrogance of the’expert’? -Ananya Roy
In this vein, I am compelled to pursue a deeper understanding of the production of space. It may
not be a vast awakening of the collective unconscious but I believe design and Architecture have
a significant role to play in the unfurling of history.

Previously, the firm I worked for tossed me into a sea of design and fabrication- living and
breathing architecture. To study, draw, design and make grounded me firmly in a commitment to
excellence in design that made sense in a comprehensive way.
I had the opportunity to see an exhibit called “Design for the Other 90%” at the Cooper
Hewitt National Design Museum. In a sense, this was my ideal exhibit: I started my
undergraduate career in Conservation and Resource Studies examining poverty, resource
conflicts and ecology and ended by studying urbanization, city planning and architecture. I should
have been thrilled to receive confirmation that I was heading in the right direction, that a
meaningful praxis in the designer dominated realm of the built environment was possible. But
rather than excitement, I felt conflicted. As my family had taken to mocking my “naïve liberalism”
and self-righteous pretensions, the rising popularity of “green”, organic, and sustainable had been
a welcome shift over the past two years. It seemed the world was finally catching up with what I
had been uncovering from the time I took a class called “globalization” during my junior year of
high school. But why, then, was an exhibit that perfectly related a number of my areas of interest
and study causing me such anxiety? Had not mainstream culture turned a corner and exonerated
guilt from the largely insular and apolitical world of design? The answer to this question is
intimately tied to how I conceive of myself as a designer and scholar and what
 In Environmental Studies, Sociology, Art History, and Literature several concepts
appeared again and again. Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism was critical for understanding
French revolutionary painting, the role of the state in postcolonial Africa, and ethnography in the
Brasilian Amazon. Foucault was integral to understanding the scholarship and representation of
knowledge in resource conflicts, the status of the body and citizen within the city, and the
institution of academia itself. Theory had a strange and amazing ability to enforce a self-reflexivity
that had a unifying effect on everything I studied. But along with deepening and broadening my
scole of understanding came frustration. While I could trace the genealogy of any resource
conflict in a developing nation to structures of power and knowledge- I felt as though I knew less
and less how I could actively participate to intervene in these processes that determined the
world around me.
making a coffee table from reclaimed steel, selecting the finishes for the walls in a
powder room, and designing a sustainable tower for affordable housing and cultural space seem
to be unrelated. But over the course of the last two years, the diversity of architectural projects I
have engaged with in conjunction with my increasing immersion in the field of urban studies has
altered my preconceived notions about design.

The more I delved, the more interconnected interests, my various academic interests,
and the world seemed to be. This is demonstrated in how my academic background inevitably led
me to be interested in urban studies and ultimately the mode and moment of architecture.
Progress. The complexity of this notion extends to all realms of study, all schools of thought, and
every conception of human society. Whether it is civilization, or development- the adherence to
modern society’s project of progress is integral to our understanding of the future of humanity.
The choice of an individual, a society, and their interaction with the streams of pursuit. The path I
took during my undergraduate education mimics the complex encounters that these various
streams tended to have with one another and became central to my approach at academic work.
The future of humanity is intimately tied to the well being of the environment- both built and
natural. Adopting this perspective led my undergraduate career in the direction of conservation
and resource studies, an “interdisciplinary program for students interested in environmental issues and areas of
interaction among natural resources, population, energy, technology, societal institutions, and cultural values.” But
even this interdisciplinary method lacked sufficient complexity and concrete knowledge to explain a great deal of what
I saw around me. Until I reached my third year, I had not even realized the insularity of a field as interdisciplinary as
mine. The underlying ideologies and assumptions were rarely acknowledge much less studied as a critical framework.
From one perspective, the future of humanity is synonymous with the preservation of natural
resources. While this is true to an extent, ultimately, resource efficiency and environmental
preservation as a for sustainability only goes so far. For me, environmental studies provided a
lens under which each resource conflict or issue revealed an even more complex set of
processes involving political economy, governments, cultures, information, history, and power.
Finding sustainable solutions to human society’s interruption of ecological cycles brought me to
the field of political ecology. Political Ecology focuses on three primary areas of study which
coalesce to provide a more c analysis of a given situation concerning resources; cultural
anthropology, political economy, and poststructural analysis. Whether it was land, erosion,
deforestation, desertification, agriculture, biodiversity, pollution, petroleum, or mining- tracing a
geneaology led to the specific actions on the part of powerful individuals and institutions. The
deforestation in rodonia brazil disturbing the last untouched tribal cultures of the amazon losing
their only sourceo f subsistence- the question of ethics becomes secondary to the forceful
submission that the project of development mandates on all that it encounters.
Globalization is no longer a choice, it is a force to be reckoned with but in so many cases tend to
perpetuate a version of colonization of the global south by the global north.
Without adequate study in economics, political science, policy, or even the social sciences in a
truly rigorous manner, the intense inter disciplinary nature of conservation and resource studies
left me wanting. Over the course of two years, it became apparent that the majority of issues that
concerned me were geographically oriented towards the global south (developing nations). But
not in a romanticized sense, not in a nostalgic sense. The realization that the state of these
impoverished, conflict ridden countries was a wholly a result of their interaction with powerful
nations that determined the policies and articulated the narrative of third worlds nations altered
the course of my studies.
Thus I endeavored to immerse myself in an understanding of the third world. Classes like Survey
of the history of the world, postcolonial African development, and Urbanization in developing
countries made evident the impossibility of studying other without studying the self. More
specifically, the work of Edward Said in Orientalism appeared in every single class I had. In Art
history it was central to 19th century French painting, in Middle Eastern History and Postcolonial
African history it was pivotal in Peter Hall’s essay “The West and the Rest.” It was as though
every path inevitably folded back and converged on an analysis of relationships, of
dependencies, of representation.
Situated in an institution of higher learning in America, the awareness of both the material
ramifications and the discursive violence enacted by first world nations upon the developing
nations guided my focus towards nodes of power. The study of poverty and aid was inextricably
linked to the history of colonization. Over time, the project of Development (economic, social, or
cultural) increasingly resembled patterns of civilization and colonialism.
This insight remained latent in my intellect until I took a class on Urbanization. While the disparate
areas of my study had afforded me a satisfaction of discovery and unity in academic work, I failed
to find a field in which these concerns could be translated into a praxis.
The question of development also shed light on what some call the spaces of globalization.
Professor Roy’s class on Urbanization in Developing countries combined ethnography, art,
anthropology, literature, philosophy, political economy, theory, history, and architecture into a
coherent and imperative revelation. The examination of cities and urbanization revealed the
dominant paradigms of growth and development without the insularity I had been so frustrated by
in engineering and environmental studies.
The study of the urbanism, the modernism, the development of today can only be dealt with by
possessing a comprehensive understanding of the paradigms that prescribe and influence cities
now. By force, mimicry, or opposition, the EuroAmerican cannon is the force with which any
developing nation or high performing newly industrialized country must contend.
How could one possibly begin to study poverty in mexico without the prints of ___ or the poetry of
Octavio Paz? How could one see the failure of Russian modernism without Dostoevsky? How
could one understand Vienna or Hitler without Freud, Kilmpt, or Klee? How could one conceive of
of 19th century Paris without Baudilaire and Benjamin?
Architecture is the “mineralization” of all of these processes. It is both influenced by and influence
on human society. Architecture is a practice that is committed to a consideration for culture,
beauty, representation, and simultaneously a negotiation of ecology, economics, politics, and
time.

The time I spent trying to understand ecology from the “scientific” methods was an understanding
of