Paradox is at the heart of the relationship between architecture and citizenship. For every act of fortified inclusion and exclusion, there is a counter, perhaps informal or subversive, act that strives to undermine distinctions. Border walls are the default architectures that describe nationhood, but also just one of many architectural expressions of citizenship. Citizenship has never been constituted as a singular, monumental edifice, reducible to any one institution of power or construction of identity. As a cluster of rights, responsibilities, and attachments, the lived experience of citizenship speaks to the plural, complex, and intimate relations we have with the actual and virtual spaces we inhabit. If citizenship itself designates both a border and the networks that traverse and ultimately elude them, then what kind of architecture might be offered offer in lieu of “The Wall”? What designed objects, buildings, or spaces might speak to the heart of what and how it means to belong today?
Editors
Niall Atkinson
Nick Axel
Iker Gil
Nikolaus Hirsch
Ann Lui
Anton Vidokle
Mimi Zeiger
Dimensions of Citizenship is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the United States Pavilion of the 16th International Architecture Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia.
The first seven essays of Dimensions of Citizenship were published as a part of Dimensions of Citizenship: Architecture and Belonging from the Body to the Cosmos (Inventory Press, 2018).
Rod Barnett is Chair of the Graduate Program in Landscape Architecture at Washington University in St Louis. His research is in landscape emergence and nonlinear landscapes.
Adrienne Brown is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of two books: A volume of essays co-edited with Valerie Smith, Race and Real Estate (Oxford, 2015) and The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race (Johns Hopkins, 2017).
Ingrid Burrington is the author of Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure (Melville House, 2016). She works at the Data & Society Research Institute.
Kian Goh is Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. She researches the relationships between urban ecological design, spatial politics, and social mobilization in the context of climate change and global urbanization.
Dan Handel is an architect and curator whose work focuses on research-based exhibitions and publications with special attention to underexplored ideas, figures, and practices that shape contemporary built environments.
Ana María León works on spatial practices of power and resistance as they inform the modernity of the American continent and its global reach. León teaches at the University of Michigan and is co-founder of several collaborations laboring to broaden the reach of architectural history including Decolonizing Pedagogies Workshop, Nuestro Norte es el Sur, and the Settler Colonial City Project.
Nicholas de Monchaux is Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of California, Berkeley, where he serves as Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media. He is the author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (MIT Press, 2011), as well as Local Code: 3,659 Proposals about Data, Design, and the Nature of Cities (Princeton Architectural Press, Fall 2016). He is a partner in the Oakland, CA-based practice Modem.
Enrique Ramirez is a scholar and historian of modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism. He is working on a manuscript that considers how exchanges between architectural and aeronautical cultures in eighteenth and nineteenth-century France constructed new, modernized ideas about air and the natural environment.
Jennifer Scappettone is the author of the critical study Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice and of two cross-genre verse collections: From Dame Quickly and The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump. Her research and writing practice has extended through installation and performance into engagement with built environments such as Trajan’s aqueduct on the Janiculum Hill; Fresh Kills Landfill; and the stripped residential housing of 6018|North for the Chicago Architecture Biennial.
Imre Szeman in University Research Chair in Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. His recent books include After Oil (2016), Energy Humanities: An Anthology (2017), Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture (2017), and the fourth edition of Popular Culture: A User’s Guide (2017). A collection of his essays, On Petrocultures: Globalization, Culture, Energy: Selected Essays, 2001-2018, will appear later this year. He is currently at work on Transitions: On the Politics of Energy for MIT Press.
Mabel O. Wilson is an architectural designer and cultural historian. She has authored Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016) and Negro Building: African Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012). At Columbia University she is a Professor of Architecture, a co-director of Global Africa Lab and the Associate Director at the Institute for Research in African American Studies. She’s a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?) a collective that advocates for fair labor practices on building sites worldwide.