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Resolutions: The Explorer’s Chart to Dreamed Horizons
by
Mitchell Lawrence
Through reconsidering the architectural imaginary of site beyond the material, the illogical vision of a dream can guide architectural seeing towards socially and environmentally just occupations of space to care for both neglected spatial trauma and risky territorial futures.
Human practices of exploration as curiosity-in-action must be examined critically so long as knowledge continues to come at the cost of life and the greater natural world. Historically and today, dominant practices of exploration open the door to colonial occupation of territory in pursuit of eventual commodification and extraction. All sites of knowledge production and storage have a spatial impact in the cycle of capitalist occupation; as human lifestyles grow into virtual spaces experienced through digital armatures, architects must also consider not just the space of the human but also the extent of the prosthesis. In pursuit of social and environmental justice, we must seek alternative ways of feeding the endless thirst for knowledge and expansionism beyond the economic model of infinite growth that requires continual colonization of so-called “virgin frontiers.” Polynesian practices of celestial navigation and Pacific colonization subvert the Eurocentric lineage of exploration beyond the white-supremacist, human-centric model, challenging the dominating methodology for extra-planetary colonization.
Since architecture is capable of legitimizing and physically manifesting otherwise intangible social systems and hierarchies of exploitation, it should be considered as a tool in the pursuit of just occupation of land and space. The alternative systems of power that can enable architecture to act in service of such a pursuit are those reclaimed by people through acts of resistance. Through reconsidering the architectural imaginary of site beyond the seizable, the illogical vision of dreams can begin to open the possibility of just occupations of space beyond the inevitable collapse of contemporary settler-capitalist societies. Such a shift in architectural seeing can empower this urgent evolution in worldview necessary in pursuit of anti-colonial human practices of discovery and existence. Other ways of being are possible, but they must be built upon an understanding of historical spatial injustice. They must provide care for neglected resolutions.