Powers of Recuperation

Adrienne Rich, Mariam Kamara, built things, and unmet purposes

Every built thing with its unmeant

meaning unmet purpose

-Adrienne Rich, “Powers of Recuperation”

Adrienne Rich in conversation with poet and filmmaker Dionne Brand in Listening for Something (National Film Board of Canada to watch)

In “Powers of Recuperation,” Adrienne Rich wrote that “every built thing has its unmeant purpose,” its “unmeant meaning” and “unmet purpose.”

5.

Every built thing with its unmeant
meaning unmet purpose

every unbuilt thing

child squatting civil
engineer devising

by kerosene flare in mud
possible tunnels

carves in cornmeal mush irrigation
canals by index finger

all new learning looks at first
like chaos

the tiny magnet throbs
in citizen’s pocket

“Powers of Recuperation” is a bleak poem with droplets of optimism dispersed throughout. The old woman who is the subject of the poem and its consciousness is held by built things, “suspended between desolation and the massive figure on unrest’s verge, pondering the unbuilt city.”

Since the start of the industrial era and the domination of modern architecture, built things have come with the unmeant meaning of the quantities of greenhouse gas emissions associated with their creation. Built things shelter humans, to a degree, against the increasingly chaotic and catastrophic fluctuations of weather and climate. Lasting shelter is the primary purpose of a building. When a building is torn down, or kept vacant even while there are people in need of housing, its purpose is unmet. When a building is designed in such a way that it can only be comfortably inhabited when it uses exorbitant amounts of energy, or is built in such a way that it is always breaking or decaying because it is not appropriate to its climate, or because the materials and skills needed to maintain it are not locally available, its purpose is unmet. 

At the current threshold of atmospheric carbon accumulation, we are (and have been) on unrest’s verge, and the kinds of cities—and ways of living in them—that can withstand the results of climate chaos without contributing to it are as yet unbuilt. 

from Listening for Something

Mariam Kamara of Atelier Masomi, in a lecture last week for the MIT Department of Architecture, talked about the challenge of making buildings that respond to local needs, culture, and history while also addressing new and changing global problems like climate change and resource scarcity. Talking about building in Niger, she said

The chronological interruption [of colonization and European imperialism] in the architectural evolution of a place like Niger kind of left this vacuum, where you have these fabricated styles on one end, and on the other end you have the struggle for modernization which has come to mean just this aesthetic, this International aesthetic, that apparently the whole world is supposed to use in order to be deemed evolved and to be deemed civilized. We’ve had to deal with a dearth of modern precedents that are locally viable. 

New locally viable architecture built to exist in and address the problems of this century will not recreate what existed before colonization, or what might have existed without it. As countries in Asia, Africa, and other parts of the world were colonized by the West, elements of their architectural styles were appropriated or silently integrated into modern architecture. Technological advancements developed hand in hand with imperialist ventures and relationships premised on the extraction of labor and resources. For example, the development of prefabrication in Germany was closely intertwined with its short-lived and geographically dispersed empire in Africa, a history Itohan Osayimwese explored in Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany. Despite the claims prominent 20th century architects and urbanists made regarding “the ‘unanimous’ origins of modernist urban planning,” modernism is a product of the world colonialism shaped, not a creation belonging to colonial powers. “Whether one maps the spread of technology or style, new ideas about architecture and urbanism were often adopted more quickly beyond Europe and the English-speaking world than within it,” Kathleen James-Chakraborty wrote in Frontiers of Architectural Research:

 The collection of highrises clustered already by 1940 along the Bund and Nanjing Road in Shanghai, for instance, or in the center of the Brazilian cities of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo had no rival in Europe, except perhaps for Stalin's Moscow, until well into the 1960s. Nor were these isolated examples. Rabinow and Wright explored the degree to which the French colonies in particular served as “laboratories of modernity,” places where administrators could impose the latest urban planning ideas outside of the checks upon them imposed in France itself by representative government and strong property rights. 

…

Precisely because the rupture with “tradition” was so great in many nonwestern settings, the insistence often voiced during the 1980s that to deviate from it was somehow inauthentic rings hollow. Nuanced histories demonstrate that the architecture of high profile buildings, if not always of vernacular dwellings, has almost always been in flux. The mastery many European colonial regimes eventually acquired over the architectural pasts of those they colonized, quoting secular and sacred precedent alike on the surfaces of infrastructures devoted to administration, education, and health, further called into question the extent to which it was possible after independence to link the present to either the pre-colonial or indeed the pre-industrial past.

The proliferation of the International Style meant the universalization of certain hierarchies of building materials: glass, steel, and concrete made their signatures on city skylines on every continent. There are many ways to tally the weight of unintended consequences, but here’s one: a ton of steel corresponds approximately with a ton of greenhouse gas emissions. 

Meanwhile, there are people who need places to live. There are millions of people yet to be born who will need shelter and separation from the storms, floods, rising sea levels, and environmental disasters that are coming, and will be more frequent and severe. And people need productive agricultural land to eat from, and libraries to read from, and hospitals, water, lighting, heating, cooling, all to survive. People need beauty, too, and spaces to be together. The building stock, enduring the consequences of its unmeant meaning, still needing work to fulfill its many unmet purposes, needs recuperation.

So what are our powers of recuperation? What powers do we hold—as designers, engineers, or whoever we are, participants in a political collective—to recuperate the world of built things, through repair, reuse, and adaptation, to make it resilient, humane, and independent of fossil fuels?

The path to a zero net carbon building sector looks something like this:

• Electrify existing buildings (eliminating onsite fossil fuel consumption, for example, by replacing natural gas-powered heaters and stoves with electric ones, which are better for so many reasons) and make all new buildings all-electric to begin with

• Upgrade existing buildings to operate using less energy, and ensure that all new buildings meet a high standard of energy efficiency

• Add enough renewable energy generation capacity and storage to meet all demand with energy from carbon-free sources

• Minimize embodied carbon by electing to reuse existing buildings rather than build new ones, using materials low-impact or carbon-sequestering materials wherever possible, designing buildings for disassembly/adaptation/reuse down the line, and developing better materials

This is an outline, not a comprehensive plan, but if we were to achieve all these steps, or each of them in part, emissions from construction and building operation would no longer count so heavily toward the global balance. These are steps toward recuperation. They are not, in themselves, powers, but they are goals that the powers of recuperation can be leveraged to achieve. The true powers of recuperation, as I see them, are rooted more deeply. They begin before technological solutions and extend beyond them. Among the powers of recuperation are the power of history, and the power of repair. By the power of history, I mean the power of honest reckoning with the current situation, how it came to be, and where it can go. By the power of repair, I meant the repair of physical things, buildings and infrastructure, as well as the repair of relationships, the repair of harm done to people, and the making of new continuities.

from Listening for Something

In the same lecture, Mariam Kamara spoke to her process, with Atelier Masomi, of making connections and continuities:

We’ve had to do a lot of research that is focused on more stories that people would tell, collaborations, discussions, everything that we could find in terms of resources. It’s incredibly time and energy consuming. Essentially the challenge has been coming up with new continuities, to figure out or to help flesh out a way forward, as we see it. Our references are not just always local, but they’re often geographically related or climatically related. In the face of global challenges like climate change, food insecurity, excessive energy consumption, I spend a lot of time looking at similar conditions for a project that I’m working on. For a project in Niger, which is an arid country, I would look for precedents in similar geographic or desert regions in Asia or South America or anywhere else I can draw parallels for solutions. One thing we’ve been looking at a lot when working in Niger is desert regions in India that use stepwells, for example, for rainwater harvesting—which is something that is not done in Niger, but used to be done in Mali, but the step wells or water reservoirs have all but vanished, and we can’t really find them or study them as easily. Or we could look at wind catchers in Iran to help cool building interiors and to lower energy consumption naturally. Or the very first tall structures made out of earth in Yemen, for a look at alternative building technologies and density mechanisms.

…

What we know of ourselves and who we think we are is really  important, particularly in architecture. It often determines how we approach the work, obviously, especially since we’ve been trained to look at precedent and look to precedent for guidance, and when we bring everything back to just one set of people, one history, rather than give proper credit to sources of our inspiration (which are plenty in Western architecture, but never acknowledged) we develop a false sense of superiority which really benefits no one ultimately. Unfortunately, except for the superficial cultural appropriation which is usually simply aesthetic, we never really seek answers elsewhere, and we rely on a reduced set of tools to solve our problems. We try to reduce energy consumption by relying on solar panels systematically, for example, which is really just one more fabricated thing. They’re important, they allow us to not pollute by using electricity made from oil, but they also create pollution because they have to be fabricated in factories. This reduced set of solutions we have at our disposal because we are so laser focused on one way of doing things, one evolution of technology.

A stepwell in Osian, an ancient town in Rajasthan state in India (vil.sandi, CC BY-ND 2.0)

What is the tiny magnet that throbs in the citizen’s pocket? There is something that draws us to each other. There is something that draws us into the world. Yiyun Li wrote in her memoir Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life that as a child, she would circle a brick wall next to her apartment building “poking at the centers of the bricks, convinced that in time each brick would bear a dent left by my finger, or the same shape and at the same height.” I am wary of the shortcuts people take by prescribing individual solutions to collective problems. At the same time, I am aware of a magnet in my pocket, the small personal talisman of my own beliefs and choices, that seeks to orient itself in alignment with others. 

Buildingshed is on Instagram.

The full text of the Adrienne Rich poem is here.