Each winter term, the Taubman College seniors in architecture collectively reflect upon a common studio
theme, inspired by the life and actions of Raoul Wallenberg. To follow the example of Raoul Wallenberg, who,
as citizen of a neutral country, utilized his training in architectural thinking at the service of preventing Nazi
crimes, we can use our expertise as environmental designers to address humanitarian issues and address
questions of social and spatial justice. This year, we will collectively ponder over the following set of questions:
Raoul Wallenberg is remembered today as a hero of what we call the Resistance. World-War II resistances existed in
opposition to defined collaborations with Nazi and Fascist forces. Unless one is acutely aware of the impact
and/or instrumentalization of their work, neutral stances will always risk accountability as “collaborative”
practices. How do we explore the meaning of Resistance in the context of architectural education?
Just as architecture and urban design can both resist or contribute to oppressive forms of power, they can
also equally resist or contribute to scores of other afflictions such as economic segregation, environmental
disaster, etc. To those who are suspicious of architects’ capacity to be socially responsible,1 or skeptical of architecture’s capacity to ameliorate the social fabric of our society, let’s call to mind the first tenet of
professional practice: “do no harm!”
Many an architect and cultural critics have called out the potentially
devastating power of architecture and urban design, when one is not paying careful attention to the
consequences of their interventions. Architecture and urbanism are tools of power and instruments of control.
For the Situationist Raoul Vaneigem, “urbanism is all that will be needed to preserve the status quo without
recourse to the indelicacy of machine guns.” 2
When the motivations behind the power in question reveal
dubious ethical practices, architects are forced to take a position. “Collaboration has always an alternative -
refusal!” posits Eyal Weizman before suggesting that architects be trialed for their complicity.3 Reinhold Martin
advocates for a similar reluctance to taking on commissions unconcerned by their impact. For Martin,
architects should aspire to a utopian realism and borrow from Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville’s
“anonymous modest clerk who, when asked literally to reproduce what the ’60s would later call ‘the system,’
simply and politely refused, declaring “I would prefer not to.” 4
When addressing socio-political questions, two dominant and independent forms of political agency come to the
forefront. The first addresses the politics of representation and inclusion within the dominant hegemony.
Who has been excluded or marginalized? Whose perspectives are missing from the construction of
dominant discourse? And yet, isn’t the enticement of a voice within an unchecked power system an
invitation to collaborate in strengthening that system’s dominion?
Unless we consider the failures of the established order to be limited to its exclusionary politics, a second
mode appears, which concerns the politics of overthrowing the dominant hegemony. What alternative
worlds can be imagined and realized that would challenge and replace the status quo?
Both of these positions solicit the imaginations of architects: the latter as world-makers invested in total
design—design as physical environment but also as configuration of social and cultural infrastructures to which
we map our lives; the former as script-writers for lifestyles, whose work begins and ends with the concept of
representation—the prescriptive representation of new forms to be, the world itself as an indexical
representation of our value system. By changing representations, we transform the world.
And yet, attempts to remediate the dominant system’s failures, or intents to revolutionize it, respectively
demand either belief in that system or alternative sources of power — neither of which are readily available to
the most disenfranchised populations. A third form of resistance thereby arises, as formulated by bell hooks
in her essay “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.” In it she argues that exclusion from
dominant discourses and structures can generate a powerful capacity for openness and resistance. Existence in
a context of repression, hooks argues, can enable the invention of “spaces of radical openness,” which she
identifies as spaces of resistance, or margins.5 Utilizing bell hooks’s essay, we are to investigate margins,
undergrounds, alleyways, shadows, backstages, pochés, spaces of disinvestment, irregulated spaces, etc, as
sites of creativity and power, as spaces that hold the capacity to foster freedom of action, of being, of
becoming. Accordingly, we will be challenged with this final quandary:
Can we operate in the margins architecturally, without the risk of disclosing them as center stage? If the dominant
order reinforces oppressive hierarchies that benefit a restricted ruling minority, how can the margins offer a
shelter from these power structures? A space whose rules are written by the communities who define and
inhabit it? A space of autonomy and potential emancipation from the colonizing order?
— 1 Margaret Crawford, “Can architects be socially responsible?” in: Diane Ghirardo, ed., Out of Site: A Social Criticism of Architecture
(Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1990), 27–45.
2 Raoul Vaneigem, "Comments against Urbanism," October 79 (Winter 1997): 123-128. Originally printed as and translated from
“Commentaires contre l’urbanisme,” Internationale situationniste nº6 (August 1961): 33-37
3 Eyal Weizman, “Architectural Tribunal” In Rem Koolhaas, ed. Content (Köln: Taschen, 2004), 63.
4 Reinhold Martin, “Critical of What? Toward a Utopian Realism,” Harvard Design Magazine, 22 (Spring/Summer 2005): 109.
5 bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” in Yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics (New York: Routledge,
2015), 149.
