Building Future Ruins
Written as a final paper for ARCH 3711V: Environmental Design in the Sociocultural Context with Secil Binboga
The relationship between architecture and the matter that comprises it is too often discarded in favor of the study of form and aesthetics. Architecture exists not just as a creative discipline, but as an active participant in the conditions of the built environment, inevitably influenced by politics and economics, and therefore the history of colonization and resource extraction. As Mark Wigley puts it, “[b]uildings are not so much objects as knots woven out of material flows.” The legacy of colonial extraction is hidden in plain sight in the materials that make up the world around us, but by exposing the origins and impacts of these materials, we can begin to understand the networks of extraction, and begin to disrupt and dismantle the narratives that support them.
An in-depth look at the Seagram Building, a darling of the modernist movement, reveals how the process of construction and maintenance perpetuates extraction and consumption. The Van der Rohe icon from the 1950s is seen as a prime example of modern architecture due to its rational design and prominent use of materials rather than ornamentation to accentuate the form. Its glass facade displays brass I-beams as a distinct point of focus. This brass, which only comprises 1.8% of the building’s mass, is responsible for 46.9% of the energy consumed by the building’s construction and prolonged maintenance. The brass, a copper alloy called architectural bronze, came from mines primarily in Montana and Chile through the Anaconda American Brass Company. Mines in Chuquicamata, Chile had been under control of American companies for decades, serving American manufacturing and business interests at the expense of workers and the country. This is a prime example of the economic status of so-called ‘third world countries’ being a result of not just underdevelopment, but overexploitation by colonial powers. Former Chilean president Salvador Allende combatted this exploitation in 1971 by nationalizing the mine, along with other industries during his time in office. However, Allende’s Marxist policies were seen as a threat to the largely anti-communist American government, so with aid from the CIA, military leader Augusto Pinochet led a coup d’etat in 1973, which ended in Allende’s death. With the fall of the socialist government, control of the Chuquicamata mine was relinquished to Anaconda, additionally compensating the company $250 million despite national debt being one of the driving factors of political instability. Today, Chuquicamata’s mine is no longer in operation, the town itself having been evacuated due to the crushing threat of millions of tons of rubble waste. Yet the Seagram Building still stands, its stylistic influence reverberating in central business districts all over the world, its physical consequences lying thousands of miles away, under millions of tons of tailings. It is impossible to separate the architecture of the Seagram Building from its place in the network of material flows. Not only does the Seagram Building represent overconsumption in the very materials that comprise it, but its continued operation does not adhere to sustainability standards of the present day. The low-insulating glass facade can be seen as a post-war effort to stimulate the economy through energy consumption. Like the impact on Chuquicamata, the effects of such energy production, particularly of fossil fuel extraction, has material consequences on the land and people from whom it is extracted.
A semi-temporary ‘man camp’ in North Dakota
From “The Temporary Logics of Extraction” by Elsa MH Maki
Yates Gallery at the Chicago Cultural Center
From the Settler Colonial City Project
Diagram of the use of Brass in the Seagram building and the amount of energy it accounts for
From Unless by Kiel Moe
We need not look far to find such consequences, considering the massive projects of domestic crude oil production. One example of these projects is in North Dakota, where the dynamic between rig workers and indigenous people on tribal land is a direct continuation of the colonial project of the United States. Semi-permanent oil drilling sites flood towns near reservations with men who cannot be prosecuted by the tribal judicial system, creating a vulnerable environment for native women in particular. The energy extracted at these sites is then taken to urban centers, powering the lives of people ignorant to the everyday consequences. Because the land is characterized as empty, the narrative becomes such that the whole country benefits from extraction, and the real impacts are just personal, individualized problems. The temporary nature of the drilling sites makes it difficult to track the long term consequences of single sites–the type of evidence needed to prove responsibility in the American judicial system. It’s clear that there is a mutually beneficial relationship between capitalism and colonialism, but the massive scale of these socioeconomic structures makes it hard to comprehend where and how changes can be made. To think deeply about how our lives are constructed and powered is to reveal the unsustainable and downright harmful practices that our lives as we know it depend upon, unsettling the narrative of clean and positive progress.
Understanding the sources of a building’s materials can be a step towards undermining the ignorance colonialism relies on for its continued operation. The Settler Colonial City Project aimed to do just that with their project “Decolonizing the Chicago Cultural Center” for the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennale. By analyzing the building’s materials and site, this project unearths all the ways in which the conditions for construction depended on colonization and exploitation. On the first floor, the Italian marble was quarried by laborers in Carrera who worked under brutal conditions, whose attempts at organizing against the conditions were forcefully suppressed. Chicago’s own complex history of labor organization is tied up in the Cultural Center, which was designed during a period of unrest after the Haymarket massacre and leading up to the Pullman massacre. Both of these events demonstrated the American government’s willingness to deploy military force against striking workers; in the case of Pullman, it was the same military unit that committed the massacre at Wounded Knee. This is further evidence that the struggle of indigenous people and the struggle of exploited workers is intertwined, as both movements face the same opposition: a capitalist empire. On the second floor, the Grand Army of the Republic Memorial Hall commemorates soldiers who fought for the Union in the Civil War. The project points out how the Union’s victory did not stop western expansion and further genocide of indigenous people. This added nuance is a reminder to look beyond the dominant story of history, a tale of two opposing sides, and see instead how both sides contributed to the systems of oppression that we continue to grapple with today. On the third floor, the windows of the Yates Gallery reads “You Are Looking At Unceded Land.” It looks out over land that was created in Chicago by land fill after the 1833 Treaty of Chicago was signed, which the Potawatomi people claim did not cede the lake, and therefore they should retain control over the new land. The installation forces the viewer to confront their position on land that was taken illegally, and to consider the conditions under which the treaties were signed, many of which were coerced at the threat of violence. “Decolonizing the Chicago Cultural Center” does not suggest that the center should not exist, it instead necessarily acknowledges that it does exist, and the history of its construction should be accounted for in the plans for its purpose and future.
The framework that Ana Maria Leon and Andrew Hirscher–the creators of the Settler Colonial City Project–are creating is one that does not place colonization and decolonization on opposite sides of a spectrum, but instead sees them as two actions that can coexist. The way they construct this alternative historical narrative is intended as a practical form of decolonization. Their work fractures the western sense of time, disregarding the idea that progress is always linear, always good, and always happening. In an interview with philosopher Lisa Doeland, Architectural historian Daniel Barber said “The value systems associated to this mainstream idea of progress are explicitly detrimental to our future. There’s a clear sense of progress for some and not others.” As time continues to pass and the networks of resource extraction continue to operate, a reckoning with the past is not an option; it is happening in the body of every person living in a house built with toxic mining tailings, it is happening every year that temperature records are set and then shattered, every time a hurricane of unfathomable intensity makes landfall. Progress is not a narrative that can continue for much longer; Barber states that “in the name of progress, we’ve built future ruins: glass-sealed office towers, for instance. These buildings are not ruins yet, in the same way a Mediaeval castle was not built as a ruin, but the socioeconomic conditions that supported them, we see now, are in the process of collapsing.” Architects, so often acting as the medium between capital and the built environment, have a responsibility to understand the extensive impact each material choice can have, and who the final design affects, both positively and negatively. As each day brings us closer to the collapse of the present socio-economic reality, perhaps it is in architects’ best interests to start designing the new reality, uncomfortable as it is, instead of designing future ruins from inside their own glass-sealed office tower.
Bibliography
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Binboğa, Seçil. “Land, Territory + Extraction: Activism and Movements.” ARCH 3711: Environmental Design in the Sociocultural Context. Class Lecture at University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, September 24, 2024.
Costa, Nuria Ribas. “Buildings Born Ruins: Philosophy and Architecture After the Apocalypse.” Failed Architecture (blog), May 7, 2024. https://failedarchitecture.com/buildings-born-ruins-philosophy-and-architecture-after-the-apocalypse/.
Leon, Ana Maria, Andrew Hirscher. “At the Border of Decolonization” eflux Architecture, 2020.
Leon, Ana Maria, Andrew Hirscher. “Settler Colonial City Project: 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennale, Chicago” Settler Colonial City Project, 2019. https://settlercolonialcityproject.org/2019-CAB
Le Roux, Hannah, Gabrielle Hecht. “Bad Earth” in Accumulation: The Art, Architecture, and Media of Climate Change, University of Minnesota Press, eflux Architecture, 2022.
Maki, Elsa MH. “Temporary Logics of Extraction: Tracing Architecture’s (Neo)Colonial Deployment at Three Scales” in the Avery Review 31, April 2018.
Moe, Kiel. Unless: The Seagram Building Construction Ecology. Actar D, Inc., 2021.
TIME. “CHILE: The Bloody End of a Marxist Dream.” TIME, September 24, 1973. https://time.com/archive/6841772/chile-the-bloody-end-of-a-marxist-dream/.
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