This podcast miniseries reflects on a Buell Center publication called The A&E System: Public Works and Private Interest in Architectural and Engineering Services, 2000–2020. Together with Director Reinhold Martin, Associate Director Jacob Moore, Program Manager Jordan Steingard, and an incredible team of graduate research assistants, over the course of nearly three years, from 2017 through 2020, we worked on a project at the Buell Center that asked: Who will design and manage the green infrastructure needed to combat climate change? In the United States today, whether this infrastructure is financed publicly or privately, it would most likely be designed and managed by public-private partnerships led by large architecture and engineering (A&E) firms, or what we are here calling the “A&E System.”
Distributed across anonymous joint ventures, tangled bureaucracies, and vested interests, uncounted designers and producers of the built environment in the United States and beyond its borders constitute a formidable system of private interest. Thanks to its inscrutability, this system has an enormous impact, reproducing and reinforcing manifold injustices even as its most visible, if increasingly limited, public manifestations remain subject to democratic checks and balances.
What does architecture look like when studied through this system? Considering the increasing number of climate-related disasters requiring federally funded mitigation and response efforts, long-stalled infrastructure proposals, and heated debates about a “Green New Deal,” “Green Stimulus,” or even “Green Reconstruction,” what does this system reveal about the built environment’s relationship to today’s interconnected crises of mutual care, racial oppression, and climate?
Systems hide. Accordingly, these questions are not easy to answer. This resource for students, teachers, and professionals in the arts and sciences of the built environment — available on the Buell Center’s “Power: Infrastructure in America” website, and on Instagram at @a and e system — offers a provisional portrait of the A&E System. This system’s power is well established and diffuse, which makes it both important and difficult to understand.
In these podcasts, you’ll hear from students from across GSAPP who worked on the “A&E System” project in its various stages — from early case study research, to learning to use public databases, to the development and writing of the publication. In their conversations, they discuss their unique disciplinary perspectives, the role of the built environment in relation to climate change and government, and the ways that this research has shaped how they’re moving forward as professionals.
Contributors to this podcast include Eddy Almonte, Henderson Beck, Alicia French, Anays M González, Zoe Kauder Nalebuff, Jiazhen Lin, Maria Linares Trelles, Emma Macdonald, Laura Veit, Isaac Warschauer.
Alicia French graduated from the Master of Architecture program at Columbia GSAPP in 2019. French currently works for Montroy DeMarco Architecture in New York City and is a member of the AIANY Civic Leadership Program.
Laura Veit graduated from the Master of Architecture program at Columbia GSAPP in 2019. Veit currently works for Field Architecture in Palo Alto.
LAURA VEIT: I joined the Buell Center during the summer of 2017 which was my first summer at GSAPP. And then I continued with the Power Project for that following academic year, so that was 2017-18. When I first joined the project, it was a relatively new initiative so it was a very wide net we were casting in terms of research.
We were interested generally in the relationships between political power and the development of infrastructure and planning in cities, and specifically as a way of looking at that interaction. We focused on three cities initially: Flint, New Orleans, and we were also looking at New York City. For Flint, we were looking at the redevelopment after the water crisis and also looking into the ways emergency management had led to that crisis. In New Orleans, we were looking at the way housing and other infrastructures had been privatized after Hurricane Katrina. In New York City, we were originally looking at how the development of downtown had been instrumentalized by private interests after 9/11, and used in ways that those private interests had sort of wanted to redevelop the downtown for a long time, prior to 9/11.
ALICIA FRENCH: I joined the project in the summer of 2018 and saw it through to the end of the academic year 2019. We basically picked up where Laura and the team from the year prior had left off and zoomed into the post-Katrina landscape. And those became a number of projects where they had pointed out the year prior specific incidences of privatization in the city proper. We expanded on that, mapped it, and analyzed it.
We started with Mapping an Unnatural Disaster—it was done between three teammates and myself. We split up the work which included looking at public hospitals, public housing, and various other buildings that had suffered significant damage during the storm and were basically erased from the map. They were no longer inhabitable—everybody put a lot of money into ensuring that no one would redevelop these and make them once again functional public housing and public hospitals. And so over just a few years, the privatization cycle had started before Katrina but it was greatly exacerbated by Katrina, and it gave them a great excuse to say that none of these buildings can possibly be restored. So all of the public hospitals in New Orleans are now closed whereas I think four were open in 2000. And just mapping those public hospitals and their closures gave me a launching point to do the project Privatizing Public Health where I was specifically looking into the University Medical Center in New Orleans and this years-long process where they maintained that Charity Hospital, which was damaged during Hurricane Katrina but not irreparably so, could not be reopened because it would just be prohibitively expensive. They had to use eminent domain to clear out hundreds of homes in this New Orleans area and create a facility using state and FEMA money that was completely state-of-the-art and no longer fell under the domain of a public hospital.
To answer this question of what did you learn about the design, planning, and preservation of the built environment that you didn’t know before going into this project: I think that a lot of the projects that I was working on when I was in grad school were kind of operating in a little bit of a bubble. And purposely so. You don’t have to worry about financing, you don’t have to worry about the parameters of technology, like what’s able to be built right now. That frees you up to design what you want and to think more creatively about how people are going to live together in an apartment building if you don’t have to worry about who’s paying for it.
But I think that having this research project in the background when I was a grad student made me more aware that the vast majority of architecture that’s being today is being built within this system with a lot of really complex agents that take agency away from architects for the vast majority of the time. You know you always have to satisfy a client, you always have to satisfy the needs of the RFP. It kind of set me up to recognize what real-world architecture is and how to, in certain cases, fight against it, organize against it, and to kind of see it as something that if you spread awareness of the fact the system is set up in these ways you have more agency going into it.
LV: I also think, parallel to and also slightly different from what you’re saying Alicia, I realize the ways in which certain types of firms allow themselves to be instrumentalized in what you’re talking about in this kind of vast or ongoing privatization project. Some architectural actors are perfectly fine operating in this sort of context of new urbanism, redevelopment of New Orleans post-Katrina to replace areas that were formerly public housing with a sort of public-private partnership system that looks a specific way, that produces renderings in a specific way. As a practitioner, that’s the sort of the American context that you are operating in at this moment in time.
If you’re aware that you don’t want to sort of do the kind of work that simply allows privatization to sweep through after natural disasters or human-made disasters, it’s very important to be aware of these patterns in the way firms operate so that you can sort of steer clear of them if you really want to do something else. And as you say Alicia, educate people more about how this is structured so that if people don’t want to operate within it they can find other ways to practice.
I was part of the early editing process for the videos that are posted on the website about Flint and New Orleans, and I remember trying to make a graphic that showed the different emergency managers in Flint. And it was just incredible—I mean there were so many, there was a sequence of I think seven emergency managers that were appointed by different jurisdictions and at different times in a rapid sequence.
And it was the austerity measures that were implemented by those emergency managers that led to the water crisis itself. And I guess just that detail always sort of stood out to me because it was so ridiculous when you put it into a graphic form for a video, it was just like one after the other, like what is going on? What’s going on is austerity emergency management.
AF: That was my introduction to the project—seeing that video.
LV: And we made that graphic to sort of understand even what was going on because you know you’re reading through documents and you’re taking notes and you’re trying to figure out, trying to reconstruct the history for yourself, which obviously people who were there sort of understood more innately. But it is so important to put those things into graphic forms. We did a lot of mapping of New Orleans, you know mapping the pipeline and the proposed—well, they eventually finished—but the pipeline in Flint that was supposed to replace Detroit Water initially but was then delayed and became a contributing factor to the crisis.
AF: I think that there’s been a lot of research done in all of these areas and all of these different scenarios about privatization and there’s a lot of great journalism that has been done in the past. But mapping brings a sense to it that shows how all-encompassing it is. It’s a new way to look at it and it’s a useful way to look at it. So I think we contributed to the larger dialogue in that way.
LV: I think it could be useful for any interested citizen but certainly in an architecture school—this approach to the structures of architectural practice. I think it’s important to use documents like these or resources like these to situate one’s practice within a larger context. And this is a resource to allow students and practitioners and professors to do that I think.
AF: I think that a lot of the ways that these infrastructure-scaled projects are set up are purposely opaque and by picking apart some of these scenarios in which services have been privatized and the buildings that house those services have been privatized, I think that you can take that knowledge and look critically at new situations that are happening across the United States. One of the things that I liked about the project was that we figured out how to troll the USAJobs site for contracts, which is kind of infinitely useful for anybody to know about who’s getting these contracts, how much they’re for, when and how they are being assigned. As a practitioner, you don’t really come across a need for that very often. But once you start digging, I think that there’s just a lot of useful knowledge to be had there.
LV: Even if you’re asked to participate in a smaller project that’s related to some big federally-funded project, even if you’re far down on the food chain of a project like that, it’s very important to still understand who’s distributing the federal aid and know what their reasons are for it. As in the New Orleans case study, is it being distributed by questionable prominent local developers and is there some sort of agenda? Things that are very small can seem innocuous or unrelated to these larger structures. But something like being able to understand the current, being able to troll those listings, and understand what’s happening now is I think, as you say, a very good thing to be doing and to be aware of.
I appreciated the time that we had to just go into all of these sources—it is obscure but it’s all available, they’re public documents. And you can find exactly where the money goes in the federal government and just track it. It’s a good trail to follow to understand the structures of things, just the money trail.
AF: Yeah, that’s useful for anybody even marginally associated with any of these projects. I’m personally most interested in housing and I always have been while I was a grad student and now. So I feel like my career will eventually branch off in that direction. Now I’m trying to get as much experience as I can with a bunch of different projects. I mostly work on office spaces right now. But I think that this project also really helped me understand and expand what I thought of as housing.
One of the essays that I wrote was about mobile homes and how they were underutilized as a disaster response because of just like a long history of corruption and then basically just mistaking past mistakes for future promise.
LV: I too, similar to Alicia and especially in school, was very interested in housing and did, outside of the second-year housing semester, a couple of other housing projects. That’s a huge sort of realm of architectural research and interest. I mean it has been for a long time. But I am keenly aware that in the context of a lot of cities, states, and in this country at the moment, there’s diminished funding for public housing and social housing.
So it’s challenging to practice that kind of architecture in a context that doesn’t provide for it financially. I guess one thing that I would like to do more of and that I am starting to get connected to in the context of the Bay Area is understanding the public policy side of that and trying to push for change in that realm so that subsequent change can be materially possible. I’m currently practicing in a small firm that does mostly residential work with a strong focus on net-zero homes. But these are not social housing projects, they’re private residences. I very much appreciate the sort of technical skills I’m getting at this phase in my career, but at some point I would like to merge those with the social side of things and potentially keep writing and getting back into the more history/research side of things. But the goal right now is to get licensed and to sort of understand all of the technical aspects of design and building.
AF: I agree with Laura. You realize by doing a project like this how much politics is intrinsically tied to these architectural projects. And it does make you want to be more of a political actor as an architect. And currently, I am trying to. It’s a slow build though.
This conversation took place during the summer of 2021 and will be published on September 24, 2021.
Zoe Kauder Nalebuff graduated from the Master of Science in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture (CCCP) at Columbia GSAPP in 2020. Kauder Nalebuff works as a writer and archival researcher.
Maria Linares Trelles graduated from the Master of Science in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture (CCCP) at Columbia GSAPP in 2019. Linares Trelles is an architect from Lima, Peru and currently based in U.S., where she teaches at Parsons School of Design and works in research and curation.
MARIA LINARES TRELLES: I started in the summer of 2018 working on the A&E Systems project at the Buell Center. That lasted until my graduation so I was there for the summer semester and also the fall and spring, which was great because I got to see a lot of the different stages of the project.
At first, it [involved] a lot of myself trying to get familiar with all of the context. And it was really interesting to find a lot of connections with realities that were happening as well in Peru. Especially following a particular year, 2017, when all major climate disasters quote-unquote happened everywhere.
I was working with Alicia French and Eddy Almonte on different parts of the project. At the beginning, with Alicia, we were trying to navigate all of the concepts and define what architectural and engineering services meant. From that, we tried to navigate the legislation, terms, processes, and procurement process which was obscure in itself. And then, through particular case studies in New Orleans and after Katrina, we tried to—now with all of this background information—find the loose ends and track down where the money went, where projects came from, and the consequences of that.
It was clarifying trying to work with all of these abstract concepts in one particular case study and see how everything ties together. From that, we kept finding other things between the two scales: the big scale of how the whole system worked, and how [on a smaller scale] it affected areas such as New Orleans. I did one [case study] in Mississippi, so the contrast between what happened in Louisiana and what happened in Mississippi was clarifying in terms of how states worked to address the issues of recovery.
I was interested in the Stafford Act, which was new to me. It made an impact on me when I realized that everything was being built in the same way—like those were the conditions. And suddenly, while we were doing these projects, the disaster recovery reform came to be and started entering the discussion. So that’s why I focused on that and researched that particular legislation, the changes, and what those changes meant. That case took place during the Trump administration, a climate change denier. So [I asked]: how would they frame it? How were the concepts being manipulated to fit the general discourse? That’s what I dedicated my efforts to.
It’s been great to see how it all came together in such a didactic and clarifying way because from looking at the research, you know that it’s not easy to understand. It’s difficult to navigate all the terms in the legislation. Everything is obscure, it’s not easy to get and download these huge databases—you don’t know where to start. I think it was a huge accomplishment at the end with these guides; it’s so didactic in many ways.
ZOE KAUDER NALEBUFF: I started at the Buell Center right after Maria Linares Trelles, and also worked through that same term from summer between the first and second year of the program through the second year until graduation. It was such a gift to build on Maria and her coherts’ work because wrestling with these terms and trying to cull through hundreds and hundreds of datasets to even begin to grasp an understanding of what we were looking at, let alone try to define, was so much work. I’m grateful that I was able to come in afterwards. Because that initial work for the Architecture & Engineering project took so much time and so much work to even begin to put into words kind of what this thing that the Buell Center knew was there and was just sort of feeling out and trying to understand the contours of.
Building on that incredible foundation, the work that I began doing along with my cohorts was looking into these firms that kept appearing on the government procurement lists and kept on getting contracts. And more and more of these disaster programs were getting contracts because they had already received contracts so their contracts were getting extended and just more and more money was going to them. [I was] trying to understand the histories of these companies, how they developed, and the power that they hold.
I think that I had an idea of architecture, design, and planning that I knew was going to be broadened while in school—of course that’s a part of why you’re there. But what was interesting about what we were doing at the Buell Center was that it wasn’t just about expanding and understanding the practice, but kind of sitting with the difference between what I understand as architecture and design and what the government considers architecture and design. Or why these two things are incongruous, and why they don’t overlap as actual sort of structural questions. It wasn’t just about kind of expanding but sitting with that contradiction, sitting with that gap.
And I feel like that kind of thinking is so key to the work in the CCCP program [at GSAPP]. Like Maria was saying, it’s like holding two scales at once and learning something new but also asking why that is new knowledge or why these pieces of knowledge are different? That still feels so important.
MLT: I think it’s really interesting what you mentioned. That, in a sense, you know these two ideas of what we conceive as being architecture and engineering services and how many of us don’t work in the government and know how the government operates. We live outside of it somehow. And because of the general context and how the discourses are shaped and the media is shaped, architects are in another world. Only a few actors are left to participate in these firms and participate in drafting legislation. So not even the experts, or the whole community of architects, planners, real estate developers, and engineers are taking part in the discussion. They are living outside of it. I think that was clarifying, like a realization.
I think one of the things that stuck with me was how the concepts were shaped. We get some of these concepts as a second layer or on secondhand basis—we just incorporate them, use them, and generalize them. We are not actually aware of how those concepts were shaped, who they serve, and how they came to be.
For example, [take the concept of] resilience or even sustainability. Many legislations and many of these projects are adopting those concepts and making them popular. But because they are being shaped by government views of how disasters need to be managed, some of those concepts are just perpetuating the system as it is. For example, resiliency refers to this idea of protection and protective infrastructure—making walls to protect us from rising seas or just raising houses three stories to protect them from flooding. One could actually go to the root of the problem to ask: How do we avoid these things from happening? And so [it’s important] to reappropriate concepts like sustainability or resilience and to step away from these preconceived notions of technological mega-structural visions of architecture and rather go back to [thinking] it’s facing the issues of climate change, maybe it demands us to imagine different processes and sets of relationships and not just enter a defensive mode in which we just close ourselves to what’s happening outside.
ZKN: What Maria is saying makes me think about the way that so much of architectural education [is built on] and a kind of idea about architectural exceptionalism, the idea that architecture can problem-solve in ways that haven’t been otherwise figured out. Or that architecture is really about providing solutions to really big problems. And I think that such a solutions-oriented field and discipline can become shortsighted or never called into question.
Or the idea of like yeah, what’s at the root of the problem, or is there a different way of approaching this? Is there a way of slowing down? Is there a way where this isn’t a race to the bottom, whether that is about labor or disaster recovery, or contracts?
It’s like the belief in the fact that architecture can change the world. The technological optimism of architecture makes those deeper questions harder to fully look at and to answer because they’re harder questions.
And it’s not something that we’re taught to think about—that is what architecture can do, or what it’s for. It feels like there is such a focus on solutions to the problem that it’s kind of like having blinders on in a certain way.
MLT: So it’s funny because before I came to this project, back in Peru, I had done a huge infrastructure project for the government: a museum that has many layers. It was really frustrating in the sense of how many processes were taking place and the delays. I was in the position of an outside contractor designing and trying to preserve the project. That gave me a little glimpse of how procurements at the government level might take place. I think that project was enlightening in that sense. It made me realize how sometimes architects lack the abilities to actually navigate these systems. We’re lacking the language, concepts, and don’t know how the process works. It’s difficult to operate when you don’t know the matrix. In that sense, I think it helped me to understand the process behind-the-scenes and understand how, if we want to contribute, how to operate inside of those frameworks. Which is like, at the end, legislation is a way. A lot of the long-term solutions might take place, it’s where they start taking shape.
I recently taught a studio on environmental design related to sea level rising in New York. [The studio addressed] those questions that I just touched on: How do we understand or reframe these concepts of resiliency to move away from these huge infrastructural projects and try to restore and understand these thresholds between water? Where we can renegotiate our relationships with other species, with natural resources and to the natural processes instead of just going for a default technological solution as defensive infrastructure?
And there’s a broader takeaway about how to understand the power structures that have shaped the territory and shaped the landscape. Especially because they often happen so far away from us like a dam, super-highway, or huge infrastructure project. It can happen next to us in an urban context, like going to school or operating in a city, or sometimes it happens in rural areas or outside of big cities. When they happen, it can obscure a community and destroy them.
Trying to understand the scale and be aware that, because they all operate in these huge scales and these huge numbers and volumes of water, the impact is going to be felt across many states and square feet or hectares of land.
But they don’t talk about the specifics. They don’t talk about what is affecting each [area], like how this is shaping the territory and the communities. Most of the time, [inhabitants] have a better understanding of that territory than the people doing the project.
I think the biggest take away from these projects is to understand those power structures and how they don’t live in an abstract world if they are materialized in the built environment. They have clear consequences to the people living in those territories. In the process of going through these material applications of power structures, there are a lot of agents and a lot of steps at those scales.
We as architects are taking part in that. Maybe not so specifically in the sense that we are not working for the company doing it, but it is taking a stake in that, it’s part of that.
So how do we operate in that system? What do we want to do with the systems? How do we see ourselves as agents in the system? How can our decisions and practice affect that and change that if necessary? I think that’s the most important thing I learned.
ZKN: Maria, everything you said is so exactly right. I feel like working at the Buell Center was so affirming towards having a practice rooted in research, historical studies, and critical geography.
What is happening now and what architects are doing across what we understand as the discipline but also beyond that is something that started somewhere and we can trace that historically and we can look at that to understand where we’re at now.
Architecture is broader than what we understand it to be in school. It includes things like flooring and commons and what the government considers architecture.
It also includes historic research, forms of community archiving and organizing, and hearing from individuals on the ground and reading their stories, and thinking about power and who has power and how we are beholden to them.
The Buell Center does that so well, and it’s really inspiring. A moment that stands out from my research on large architecture and engineering firms was when we were compiling material on the firms and how they designed the terms like resiliency, sustainability, environmentally-friendly, and how they gaged the metrics of their footprint.
In the cohort that I was working with, we kept on having this problem where a link that we had found a definition from or information from the companies themselves, the link would be broken, or like the text would have changed.
And it happened every week. And these lost web pages, and also the language itself that we had found was essentially inscrutable. Every company from Florida kind of said the same thing but they also said nothing and we were trying to understand it.
At the same time, we were losing the web page that it was written on and at a certain point it became clear that this wasn’t a methodological problem, it wasn’t something that we were failing to grasp. It was actually the practice of the company. We encountered this strange constantly shifting ground. And that became such a clear revelation for us: this language doesn’t make sense, we don’t need to figure out what it meant, we can just use it as evidence. That was a moment that stood out for all of us across different fields. We were all bouncing things off each other and it became clear that this was evidence of something.
This conversation took place during the summer of 2021 and will be published on October 1, 2021.
Anays M. Gonzalez is a Class of 2022 student in the Master of Architecture program at GSAPP and previously studied environmental design at the University of Puerto Rico. View work by Gonzalez on GSAPP’s online archive here
Henderson Beck is a Class of 2022 dual-degree student in the Master of Architecture and Master of Science in Real Estate Development programs at Columbia GSAPP. View work by Beck on GSAPP’s online archive here
ANAYS M. GONZALEZ: I worked on this project for about a year starting in September 2019 when I was in my first year of the Master of Architecture program. I was interested because it had to do with the situation in Puerto Rico initially.
HENDERSON BECK: I first started working on this project in the fall of 2019 as well. I was interested in the work that Buell was doing in regards to A&E because it coincides with this long-term goal of a Green New Deal and how architects and practitioners are involved in this process of greening United States infrastructure.
AMG: I mainly focused on analyzing budgets and, more than budgets, contracts between the government and the companies that we worked on. That first semester I was also taking a class that had to do with the Green New Deal curriculum that was being worked on simultaneously—Carbon Footprint with Professor David Benjamin. I had that in the back of my mind while I was also working on this project. And my interest also linked back to the hurricane in Puerto Rico and how that money was spent. I think that was driving my interest—understanding the money, where it came from, and what was actually being done.
I think by just knowing how to follow that flow of money, you can just learn what’s happening in your city. And that was very important for me because, for the reconstruction in Puerto Rico, it was very hard to see any kind of change or reconstruction right away. It took a few years and it’s still happening.
That definitely started the conversation between my classmates in the studio, just talking about these big companies that we know might give us jobs in the future, and some of us might be employed already by them. But just understanding the vision behind the images and prompts on their website images that are matching current trends.
HB: Anays and I started the program together at the same time and also started working at the Buell Center and working on the A&E Project concurrently together as well. Initially, I became interested in not just the public-facing side of the large architecture and engineering conglomerates but also their lobbying efforts.
So one thing that I did a deep dive into is looking at large companies such as AECOM and viewing their lobbying and corporate spending for promoting these sorts of huge government projects. Of course, seeing there is this coincidence that large companies have lobbying geared toward the military and, in the same year, there is an increase in the budget which they end up getting a commission for to design a military headquarters or so on and so forth.
So I became interested in this more sinister look at architecture. At the same time, this was my first professional degree in architecture and I was enthralled with this idea of design and aesthetics. But on the other hand, [I was] very disillusioned by what’s actually happening in the practice. Like Anays was saying, it’s really hard to see in the real world what kind of architectural change is being done that helps people especially in the wake of environmental disasters.
Coming into the world of GSAPP, I had just moved out of my hometown in North Carolina where my family had been adversely affected by Hurricane Florence. So it was really interesting to see the disconnect between the aesthetics of what we’re doing in this world of academia and how anything can go versus the limitations and the actual power structures in the real world.
AMG: I agree with Henderson in that the disconnect between academia and the real world is evident. I think it’s definitely changed how I saw myself in the future, because I entered Columbia University thinking: I want to make resilient cities, I want to make the world a better place. I want to do something with disasters and have an architecture that’s going to be able to withstand whatever hurricane comes. That was my mindset when I entered GSAPP.
Saying something is one thing. Learning about all the nitty-gritty and what happens changed my mind a lot. And also understanding that the design that we’re doing wasn’t everything, it’s more about all the processes that happen before and after the design process.
HB: A lot of the world of architecture was entirely new to me going to GSAPP in the first place. So my mind was sort of in the clouds thinking about the aesthetics of design and not at all thinking about the cost or the bureaucratic impacts of architecture. So I think it totally and completely rechanged the thought process of all of the steps and boundaries you have to jump through to have anything constructed.
At the end of the day, you might create this project that could be benefitting Puerto Rico, it could be benefiting the people in New Orleans, but if it’s a company that’s also working on oil rigs at the same time, it seems like this weird cognitive dissonance and I’m not even sure if I want that company to be designing the project. I think there’s this huge disconnect between these starchitects that we learned about, or these big-name architects that are designing sustainably-marketed projects and what are they actually doing as far as resiliency for an entire city is a totally different question.
So when doing this research, we were looking at more large-scale infrastructure projects such as alterations to the landscape of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Or thinking about how New York City could be retrofitted to withstand a climate disaster and sea-level rise. But at the same time, I’m finding that the vast majority of these large-scale federally funded initiatives are given to these huge multibillion-dollar companies. Small individual architecture firms do not have the bandwidth to work on these projects. They don’t have all of the in-house components necessary to take on these roles, or the experience that the federal government so often requires of them.
I think it was really interesting to be disillusioned in that way, it definitely helps me better understand the things within the current system that would have to change to disrupt that power dynamic. But at the same time, it reinforces this idea in my mind that architects can’t solve everything.
Architects need to be much better and much better equipped to collaborate with local politicians, to go out and vote for people that will create the resources for architects to be hired for projects they want to do. And I think it was very beneficial to, like Anays was saying, head out of the studio and of course, [continue to] think about design and design beautiful things but also understand the limitations of ourselves as designers.
AMG: Yeah, I definitely think that I became more critical about where I choose to work. It became more real when I was at the career fair. I’m not saying that this [research] won’t keep us from working for them but it changed how I see firms. Now I make sure that I agree with their vision, with what they’re doing, and how they’re responding to whatever project and how it affects the environment—or if they’re just putting up a façade or not.
I remember that we started talking about what is green. And thinking about what green meant at that moment, that’s what sparked the conversation off in my studio because everyone wants to do green architecture but what does that mean? That was the main thing that kind of connected all the research that we were doing because we had that question in mind when thinking about architecture: What is green architecture?
HB: Jumping off what Anays is saying, I think that one of the first steps I remember in Buell and conducting this research was simply going to these large companies’ websites, reviewing their mission statement, and looking at their page on addressing sustainability or confronting climate change. On the surface, most of the companies had these beautiful infographics that looked very curated and geared toward what progressive architecture students would want to see.
But on the opposite hand, if you did some digging and looked at the corporate lobbying efforts, or at large-scale federally funded infrastructure that might not be in line with someone’s morals or political ideology and actually saw the company working on those projects, or advancing projects that are in contrast to what they say, I think that’s what students should know. They should do that research, and get into those nitty-gritty details. If that’s something you’re willing to take on, if you’re willing to try and change the system from the inside, I say go for it. But also I think it’s really important for students to do that research. Especially for larger companies.
AMG: Something that we don’t learn a lot about in academia is numbers. It was just a different perspective on understanding the scale of a project. Maybe it’s for the military, it will be millions of dollars. So just understanding—I think that was my biggest takeaway—the scale of projects in terms of money was a very rich experience and something you don’t get to learn in school.
HB: I agree and I think not necessarily a statistic or one fact but one takeaway from this research is the amount of gatekeeping within large-scale infrastructure projects, and few and far between small architecture firms are receiving these commissions for city revitalization projects. Maybe there are some companies like BIG that will be working on The BIG U, but I’m sure a lot of that project is subcontracted out to one of these larger companies that have the wherewithal to work on the industrial and the engineering aspects of projects.
A little bit of a side note in tangent but I’ve since moved from Morningside Heights down to the Lower East Side and East Village area and currently the community is fighting back against the city’s project to pave over the East River Park in an effort for sea level mitigation cover over that park which has been a staple within the community for over eighty years. With this research in the back of my mind, I’ve been wondering: What large companies are at play pushing this agenda? And what companies will be given the commission to work on this project that’s inherently going to impact thousands and thousands of people and change their daily lives? It most likely won’t be a local firm, it most likely won’t be someone that knows the community.
I’m interested in community outreach in the world of architecture and I think it’s very hard to see these projects that adversely impact thousands of people, and the [project leaders] being in a totally different state or city and not on the ground where it matters.
AMG: When you said that about the Lower East Side, I remembered that we also had this amazing opportunity to have a public forum where we were able to do some community outreach and try to give this back to the community and see their response. I think that was very productive in seeing the different perspectives on what we were doing and seeing how all the research we were doing affected their daily lives and how they could imagine a future where this could be solved.
HB: When I entered GSAPP I was interested in environmental design. But since then, over the past two years, my architectural lens has shifted more towards equity in every aspect of the word: environmental equity, social equity, economic equity.
And from an architecture and development standpoint, I think that there is a lot that needs to change within the landscape of architecture and especially real estate development in New York to create a more equitable city, create more equitable infrastructure, especially in somewhere like New York where the developers are unfortunately most often worried about the bottom line.
In a post-COVID world, I think it’s more important than ever to think about which communities are adversely affected by development—luxury architecture and high-rise condominiums—that are imposing themselves on low-income communities. What can architects, developers, and practitioners do within the industry to change the mindset?
I think that New York is a great place with a lot of local incentives, tax abatement programs, HPDs … [there are] so many ways for architects and developers that care to get involved and make a difference. But I think it takes a coalition of a new wave of designers and a new wave of practitioners to make that change, outside of the world of policy.
AMG: When I started [at GSAPP], I thought I knew what I wanted like Henderson. I knew it had something to do with resiliency, as I mentioned, and making better architecture, whatever that means. After doing this whole research, I centered my concept on thinking about the community. Most of my projects, I think all of them, began with research on protests in the area. What are the complaints of the community there?
I think working at the Buell Center really helped me understand more about the environmental aspects. Even though I worked in Puerto Rico on the reconstruction, when I came here I guess I thought I was alone in a certain way because I did not see this much involvement back home, at least in the practice.
It was very disconnected, like temporary fixes for whatever had to do with climate and environment. And then at GSAPP, one of the rewarding things that I’ve had while studying here is meeting people like Henderson that are also interested in making positive change, changes related to the environment and climate change. That reminded me that I’m not alone in this way. And that also motivates me to move forward in the practice, looking for [these opportunities] and thinking about community.
That’s the biggest takeaway for me in my future. In my practice, I will hopefully make sure that I have the community input that I need before starting any project. That’s what I want as an architect.
HB: One thing I can end on is I think now with everything that’s happened in the past world—living through COVID, being in my cohort and talking with people like Anays and other people in the program, through the impacts of COVID, through the impacts of BLM, and just even yesterday going to a march for Black trans liberation—and thinking about what’s happening in the city, what role can practitioners take, where can they choose to listen, and how can they let others’ voices be heard? Especially for me as a white cis male, how do I use my skills as a practitioner, as a future architect, and possibly developer to elevate the voices of those who have been marginalized, in a way that is productive, in a way that’s effective and also a socially sensitive way?
AMG: I completely agree because the architects don’t have much say in some projects. But we need to be strategic and smart about how we can amplify the voices of those that need to [be amplified] through projects.
This conversation took place during the summer of 2021 and will be published on October 8, 2021.
Eddy Almonte is a Class of 2019 graduate student of the Master of Science in Urban Planning program at Columbia GSAPP. Almonte is currently a Neighborhood Planner at the New York City Department of Housing.
Emma Leigh Macdonald is a Class of 2020 graduate of the Masters of Science in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture program at Columbia GSAPP. Macdonald is a New York City-based writer, editor, and researcher.
EMMA LEIGH MACDONALD: My name is Emma MacDonald. I’m a graduate of the Critical Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture program at GSAPP and these days I’m primarily working in arts and architecture writing and exhibition curation.
EDDY ALMONTE: My name is Eddy Almonte. I was part of the Masters in Urban Planning program and graduated in 2019 from GSAPP. Right now, I am an urban planner for the City of New York. I work for the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
ELM: Well, my program at GSAPP, CCCP, already took a very expansive view of how to define an architecture and what kind of fields get included when we talk about it. I think that while I had the chance to work with The Buell Center on the “Power: Infrastructure in America” project and the A&E research more specifically, I think that the expansive kind of definition of infrastructure and of architecture and engineering that the Center took to include politics, governance, building, and individual experiences into this research on these topics has kind of continued to seem more important to me as time has gone on since this research. Especially as architecture schools and architecture practices think about changes to make towards practices that are less harmful to the planet, I think this very broad scope of what gets included in this sort of work in architecture seems super important.
EA: I think for me, the aspect that I learned from – I was also part of the A&E Initiative under the Power and Infrastructure – was looking at the policy implementation perspective. I think I was a little naïve and surprised at how major infrastructure projects are essentially glorified public-private partnerships with little government oversight.
And maybe it was just the idealistic way that made urban planners kind of see government and how quote-unquote private projects and services are meant to serve the general public. And I think what happens when these sort of corporate systems led by white supremacist culture are in charge is that Black and Brown systems of social infrastructure are uprooted and displaced.
And that kind of made me question what public means, or what it is, and how, for a long time for such a specific part of the history of this country, public wasn’t for all. And I think that was the biggest thing I’ve learned from this initiative.
ELM: I guess one thing that sort of builds off of what Eddy was just saying and is also kind of maybe a larger fact in the vein of what we were just talking about – one thing that was really kind of eye-opening to me and that has stuck with me in research since is specifically the green certification processes for these projects.
And I just saw that the Buell Center shared an interesting article about this specifically in the context of green building in Denmark and the outsourcing of pollution that takes place for buildings that will be opened with all of these kinds of environmentally-focused certifications and accolades.
But the process of building them is not aligned at all with those kinds of goals and values. And I remember, just similarly to Eddy describing, the kind of rethinking of what a public project means and who that’s really for.
I remember reading specifically about this one large architecture and engineering firm that would receive, maybe it wasn’t LEED certification, but something like that, some sort of climate-friendly stamp of approval for a mine – there were all of these kinds of discrepancies between internal and external emissions and statistics. That was a kind of factor process that stood out to me in kind of reconsidering when you’re reading descriptions of projects such as those, to kind of question what that’s coming from.
EA: One thing that sort of struck me in the research that I did on the Flint water crisis was how the use of emergency powers was so precarious and can be easily amended to include political agendas in some ways. And how those powers vary by state. And this is probably very obvious for how local government works and how it differs from local and state law. And it’s probably very different here for New York State. But in Michigan State, the way that someone can implement emergency powers is so easy.
And the powers that are granted to whatever manager is appointed at that point is they just have this full suite of anything they can do – including making water go through lead pipes that poisoned people that lived in Flint. And that was just like a fact for me that I was kind of mind-blown about.
I think that this work has very much informed how I see housing as infrastructure. And as folks from this cohort and GSAPP, we can all agree that housing is part of the infrastructure. And as someone that’s working in city government and working in housing development and community planning and understanding how investment as housing needs to come in this equity lens and acknowledging the history that we have in this country that infrastructure and public services have not served all of the public has very much informed the way that I approach my work.
One example that I can think of is I do a lot of work in coastal communities in the city and the way that we are sort of facilitating housing development and bringing in new housing but also preserving existing housing and for the Rockaways, for example. And there’s a huge Army Corp project that’s coming into the Rockaways that is creating a flood protection feature on the bayside of the Rockaways facing Jamaica Bay and also Rockaway Beach. And there is a huge planning initiative that we’re bringing in to engage folks that are living in these neighborhoods that are gonna be affected by this flood protection feature.
But one sort of perspective that I’m trying to understand more is that in creating these physical systems of infrastructure how are we also facilitating systems of soft infrastructure and social infrastructure? And how are we facilitating sort of local agency and collective decision-making within these sort of larger things that are happening within a neighborhood? Especially for a coastal community.
And I’m happy to say that we’ve been exploring that and we’re looking at community land trust models in these neighborhoods, and creating a social infrastructure that responds socially to climate risks and is adaptable and resilient, not only in a physical manner but in the way that we engage with our neighbors and when thinking about a climate disaster.
And I feel like that has very much been informed from the research we’re doing with the Power: Infrastructure in America initiative. And it’s also extremely complicated and I can talk a lot more about this. But I’m gonna stop for now.
ELM: That’s so exciting to hear about, and interesting to hear about being able to find ways to take that approach in the work that you’re doing now. I was also thinking about Buell’s research when reading a Twitter topic that was going around a few weeks ago about how everything is infrastructure and how healthcare is infrastructure, food systems are infrastructure. And I think that your description of applying that and that being a kind of connection to Buell’s work is also something that has stuck with me.
As for the work that I’ve been doing more recently and since graduating from GSAPP, I would say one thing that comes to mind aside from just wanting to continue research and writing on these topics in that side of my work, and thinking about how we considered how this work would be presented in a way that would be legible and really get all this work across in the best way.
The other thing that comes to mind is working in exhibitions. I have also thought back to this way of thinking about building green infrastructure and its different statistics. And internal versus external, the way I was describing as something, as kind of something that I learned as part of the A&E Research. And I think that there is so much – whether it be in the art world or the architecture world exhibition work – that tackles environmental concerns, and looks into these topics, whether in abstract or direct ways, but then goes on to like throw the material in the trash or like make temporary models out of Styrofoam or that is doing important work in its subject and its quote-unquote public-facing aims.
But its internal practices either haven’t been able to or hasn’t realized that taking that approach internally is just as if not more important. And so working in architectural exhibitions, that’s something that I’ve become interested in and have been trying to kind of seek out and apply as much as I can. There are plenty of opportunities to do so.
EA: That’s so funny. Before life at GSAPP, I was working for a private art collection on exhibition planning and with curators. And it’s insane for me how that world is so incredibly wasteful in terms of material, and how much we produce with not only the logistics of planning for a type of an exhibition but the way that we’re thinking about how this could be more of a circular economy. And I’m curious to hear a lot from your experience.
ELM: Yeah, it is something that I’ve been able to address working on independent projects and in smaller installations. Recently over this summer, I organized a room that was part of NADA House, which is an exhibition on Governors Island. And in choosing the works that I included and considering where they would go next and the materials that were part of this space – these kinds of questions were definitely how I structured thinking about realizing the project. But I would say it’s also something that I’m still kind of seeking out in terms of other work to be part of, for sure.
Jiazhen Lin is a Class of 2021 dual-degree graduate of the Master in Architecture and Master of Science in the Real Estate Development programs at Columbia GSAPP.
Isaac Warshauer is a Class of 2019 graduate of the Masters of Architecture program at Columbia GSAPP.
ISAAC WARSCHAUER: I was a Master of Architecture student at Columbia when I worked within the year 2017 to 2018 for The Buell Center at an earlier phase of the A&E System initiative. I graduated in 2019 and I’m now working at a small, mostly residential firm, like probably most in New York City, that’s in Dumbo in Brooklyn.
JIAZHEN LIN: I just graduated from the Master of Architecture program this spring, and just finished the Master of Science in Real Estate Development program. I’m currently working at an affordable housing developer shop called Monadnock Development that also has an in-house construction arm. They primarily do affordable housing but also have some commercial and market-rate projects in their portfolio. I worked on the A&E System Initiative after Isaac, from the fall of 2018 to the spring of 2019.
IW: I was involved in 2017 and 2018. The project was still at a changeable phase. The whole scope was shrinking and growing and exactly what the end product was still being determined when I was working with Laura Veit.
And kind of by the end of our tenure at The Buell Center it had resolved into two videos that we showed at a conference in Ann Arbor. And it was very interesting to be involved in the project at that stage because we were really coming to terms with exactly how slippery addressing the system really was. We were looking at all sorts of contract data in New Orleans, recovery efforts, looking at all the contracts that the Recovery School District had. We were looking at all of this data. We weren’t really sure what to do with the data at that point. And so trying to figure out what can be done and how to cut through all of the rhetoric and the money and all of that and to make something out of it, it was a growing experience.
I’m really glad to have had that chance at The Buell Center to try to come to terms with taking stuff that is talked about in the media but viewing it in a different light and trying to see something a little deeper in all of that.
The main thing that I learned about the built environment and the role of architects and engineers is that is so much of what architects and engineers do is within the framework of a scope that’s already decided.
And I think in this project, in terms of how power moves through the A&E system, the power of the kind of undemocratic aspects of American governance is in setting the scope and determining the flow of the money and doing all of that, which mostly occurs before architects and engineers are actually involved.
So architects and engineers end up acting essentially as the tools within this much larger system. And so really, no matter what the language is used, in the planning process for instance the participatory planning process or the language of environmental resiliency or affordable housing. I mean there can be many good aspects of a project, and the project can still be problematic in the sense that the way that the scope is set and the framework is decided beforehand.
For example, maybe the Urban Land Institute plan in New Orleans or all sorts of different plans that we’ve investigated in this project, no matter what the priorities, they could be very good priorities, or taking green space, environmental resiliency, because all of that can determine what the project’s impact is, regardless of the design work itself.
JL: Yeah, and I think I agree with everything Isaac said. And just to continue on that, we know when we were looking at New Orleans as a case study, I think there were a lot of different scenarios of environmental justice that I wouldn’t say was something that I wasn’t aware of before, but I think this case, in particular, was very overt. Especially with the reorganization of the public school system. And after Hurricane Katrina and the kind of projects that were still maintained, even though there was an opportunity to kind of address some of the systems of injustice that had facilitated the construction of a lot of these schools on very toxic sites before were, unfortunately, once again basically neglected by public officials, by public infrastructure and public funding.
I hope that this case study and what we took away from that can contribute to the framework that Isaac is talking about in terms of really recognizing these problems in advance and maybe organizing a lot of these communities to be able to have more of an active voice in the decision making, instead of relegating the power to a lot of the top-down decisions.
IW: When I was at The Buell Center we were looking both at New Orleans and at Flint, Michigan. And the context of these planning efforts that occurred in Flint at the same time that Flint was under an emergency manager, which created an interesting scenario in which the town government, which really had no control over the finances of the city, was holding a planning process that could only be approved to the extent that the emergency manager was just willing to go along with it. And so this was an example of a participatory planning process that really had no teeth at all. And to the extent that things went forward, I mean at the time it seemed like it was really just – it was just something that could be – could be for show.
And to some extent that was an extreme example, but it showed how at times, even if something seems participatory, a lot of that work can be – can end up being somewhat shallow if the context in which that planning effort as happening is so restricted. The real power was in deciding what could be affected through a participatory process. Not how participation happened.
I think one fact that really stands out to me was – it’s something that kind of came up as I was doing some research into Flint and when I started just to look at all these planning documents that had been happening during the period of emergency management and saw that all these references back to the Mott Foundation, or one of the Mott Foundations. And it seems that all these different efforts to create masterplans, to determine the future of Flint were in some way or other backed by the Mott Foundation or had some tie to it. And then I remember finding this clip of a state senator talking about the fact that the emergency – under emergency management, the emergency manager seemed to have all these close ties back to the Mott Foundation.
I mean it makes a lot of sense. Flint is a kind of a company town, or became a company town, over the years. And so it makes sense that the Mott Foundation with ties to GM should have an influence.
But even after a lot of the automobile production has left the city, there’s this aftereffect where the foundation, with a lot of money that came from automobiles, is now dictating a lot of what happens in Flint. Even after the founders have passed away, after the company is involved in many other places in the U.S. There’s this legacy. I mean it just comes down to where the money is, I guess.
JL: I remember when I was doing research on the funding contracts that were ordered by FEMA after Hurricane Katrina to the public school system. There was one large contractor, Jacobs, and they received the bulk of the contracts at the federal level. And there was, due to the lack of transparency I think, in tracking how this funding was spent because of the kind of decentralized school system, and the turnover and miscommunication between the central school system and the Charter system, and then the private parish schools. There was really a lack of regulation, transparency. So I believe out of, you know three different budgets worth millions of dollars, they only fulfilled like 45% of the scope of work that they agreed to. Yet they awarded the entire contracts.
So that was definitely very surprising because it was heavily publicized at the time. Yet, and I think Isaac was talking about this earlier, due to the kind of disconnect between different levels of government, that was something that was really left kind of unchallenged at the time. And currently at an affordable housing developer that is managing several different projects in various stages here in New York, one of the projects that I’ve been involved with is for a full rise multi-phased mix … development use Brooklyn. It’s very close to Jamaica Bay. Part of the site is on top of a brownfield area. And I think you know we’re doing a lot of … mediation etc. But I think similar to what was uncovered in this research where development for low-income communities often happens on these brownfield sites that need intense remediation.
It’s kind of an unfortunate pattern that I think is something that like – it’s difficult to challenge from the development perspective, because of an acquisition basis and cost of land. Due to the increasing cost of land you typically can’t build affordable housing on market-rate parcels because then you can’t justify the rents to cover the acquisition costs.
So it kind of becomes a never-ending cycle, and it starts to perpetuate this problem. So I think that’s, you know something that is definitely more discussed now, and there’s a lot of federal and state subsidies to change this narrative. But it’s still I think an ongoing issue.
IW: Yeah, I think that I agree with Jiazhen with how, from our end, it’s hard to change the system, but I think the main takeaway from my work is that I can now at least see the system a little bit differently, and understand a little bit more about my role and how my work may have the certain problems that when the opportunity comes up to at least make some positive change, it’s worth taking.
My work is at Eponymous Architecture. It’s a four-person firm in Dumbo. And we mostly do residential work, and most of this work is just for single families, renovations of apartments, renovations of townhouses. So it’s hard to really make a change that’s relevant to the public sphere that can make any sort of larger impact on the way the city operates. But it’s worth understanding that these renovations that are happening in particular areas of the city for reasons they’re only certain parts of the city and we’re mostly doing stuff in Brooklyn, that are seeing a lot of interior apartment and townhouse renovations.
And there are areas that are slowly gentrifying or the makeup of the city is, of the neighborhood in the city is slowly changing. And it’s happening for exactly the same real estate reasons that affordable developments are happening on current brownfield sites.
So it’s at least worth understanding the context in which that happens. And then maybe trying to look for those opportunities when they come up. But yeah, it’s a bit of a dilemma. It’s a difficult aspect of practice.
JL: And I will say like working under Jordan and Jacob with the resource of The Buell Center was a fantastic experience. And I think, you know I was on a team with someone who was in planning, someone who was part of the CCP program, and I think really having that multidisciplinary approach to what we’re doing, you know made the difference for the project.
Claire Cancilla is a Class of 2020 graduate of the Master of Science in Historic Preservation at Columbia GSAPP.
Maya Ephrem is a Class of 2020 graduate of the Master of Science in Urban Planning at Columbia GSAPP.
MAYA EPHREM: I graduated from the Urban Planning Masters Program at GSAPP with a concentration in housing and community and economic development. I graduated in 2020, and right now I’m working at an affordable housing nonprofit based in Brooklyn. We develop, manage, and own affordable housing throughout the city.
CLAIRE CANCILLA: I graduated from GSAPP in 2020 as well with my Master’s in Historic Preservation. I’m currently working at an environmental consulting firm as an architectural historian in Los Angeles, California.
I think honestly going into this project I was pretty ignorant about basically everything about the A&E System. I mean, a lot of the work that we did was very illuminating for me. In a lot of ways, I was certainly aware that these companies existed and that they did really large-scale projects. But I would you know see an announcement of a project or see construction in my daily life and be like oh okay, there’s another thing being built. There’s sort of this almost passivity about some of these large-scale construction projects which I think actually probably helps maintain a lot of the systems that these organizations thrive under and probably kind of behooves them to have people think of them as apolitical projects. So going in I didn’t really know anything. Honestly, I would say for other students and practitioners, I think really getting an understanding of, even a basic understanding of what kind of these major firms are, what they do, where their money comes from, just how many projects they get is really, really valuable. Because you know these projects aren’t apolitical, they’re not separate from our daily lives, from the daily lives of man people in many different communities. And we as citizens are paying for a lot of them because they’re federally funded. So I would really just say that it’s worthwhile to go into the nitty-gritty of all of these sorts of different projects, different companies that they do, that different companies do, how they do them, all of that because I think it’s a very useful supplement to having your sort of basis in education. GSAPP, at least in my experience, was much more sort of theory-oriented and almost – I don’t want to say idealistic – but not quite as maybe pragmatic or it was a slightly different experience than working out in the field in general. So it’s kind of vague, but I think it’s just really important to have some kind of understanding of how these firms work in general.
ME: Yeah, I think I would echo what Claire has just said and illustrated. I think for me my background is in policy, and so going to a school that’s you know really design-focused really sort of challenged me. And then, on top of that, being able to kind of explore through research at Buell, I think I really got a sense of through this project what exactly these firms do, and also how they sort of are perceived, and then also ultimately, you know, it’s complicated. And I don’t think that I came into it understanding just the sort of various ways the system and the various systems that that profit through architecture, through finance, through governments, and then even sort of stakeholders. I mean I think I learned a lot about this very complicated system. And it definitely also challenged me in ways because it was my second year of grad school so I finished my term at Buell right when I was graduating and so a lot of what I was thinking about at the time is where I wanted to see myself end up. And so it also gave me a sense of what organizations, what corporations, what companies exist and are doing work that is very closely related to what I studied and what I’m interested in. And are there ways, as I sort of learned about these systems, for me to kind of be the change within? Or is it not necessarily what I stand for? It was both, on an academic and personal level, a very illuminating project and process.
CC: I didn’t know that there wasn’t really a tool to track where federal money came from for projects like this until 2006. It was really interesting. I think all of the language surrounding the launch of USA Spending and having that be advertised or marketed as this tool of being a very transparent thing, something that’s supposed to really help anybody figure out where the money is coming from for these projects – who’s getting what. And especially then having kind of dived into using that tool and realizing that this is not in fact actually all that intuitive or transparent of a tool. Certainly, it’s better than nothing but it’s not something that I think a lot of people who are just sort of lay people who might be casually interested in this would be able to just jump in and be able to figure out. I mean we had a team of people working on this for years on this project and so I think that was really interesting. And I think, in a broader sense, one of the things that I really thought about was sort of just this general language of transparency that a lot of these firms sort of use. They talk a lot about being a part of a community and sort of allowing public input and all of these things, but in reality it’s actually quite hard to get information on these companies and on these projects. And often like this language of transparency is kind of just that, language. Being able to access all this information is prohibitive and difficult for many people.
I work in environmental consulting now. At the firm I work at, we do evaluations of development projects, and basically assess what sort of impacts they might have. I specifically look at the historical built environment. But there are also biological resources, water resources, air quality – all of that goes in. So it’s sort of this other facet of this, it’s been interesting because the whole idea of environmental review is that it creates another layer of transparency for these big projects. But again, the same issues are manifested in this review, which is great. We create an environmental impact review for a project, which says here are the potential effects, and here are mitigation measures to minimize them. And then there’s a public input period, public comments. But again, you know these EIR documents tend to be extremely large and a lot of people don’t know that they exist, a lot of people have language barriers or access barriers. It’s certainly better than nothing. The public comment period is great, and it’s one way to actually try to make these projects more transparent. But the same sort of problems about access, about whether saying that this is a public comment period is actually sufficient, you know, there’s a question there. And that was really interesting to kind of work in this other side that’s sort of connected to the sort of development projects. We tend to work with much smaller firms than what we wrote about but the principles are there and the idea of kind of transparency and language versus action. I thought that was really interesting.
ME: I’m just gonna again echo what you’ve said, Claire. I think I’m not ignorant, these big corporations are about stewardship and resiliency and all these buzz words and transparency and corporate governance. But really seeing just, you know again, having people studying architecture, preservation, planning, studying the built environment with a background in this work, in this field, and still having such difficulty kind of getting information on public projects was something that was just really surprising in a way that I didn’t think would be the case. Like trying to track down, again like funding streams, even going through different iterations of – I can’t remember the name of that website where you can see what a website looked like in the past.
CC: Way Back Machine.
ME: Yeah, yeah, Way Back Machine. Just seeing how language just sort of evolves, but doesn’t say anything, was really surprising. And I think was just like one of the aha moments for me. I work in affordable housing, and I do a lot of the pre-development development of new construction for low-income to moderate-income households in New York City. We work with the city a lot to finance these projects and work with architects to design these buildings and contractors. So I interface with a lot of the folks that I was, through this project, really sort of studying and analyzing. And I think for some of the projects that my organization is developing, some of them are big projects where we go into it as a joint venture with maybe larger development organizations. So for me, I think through this experience of understanding – I mean we’re not working with like AECOM but we are working with AECOM-like folks – how much the bottom line really is the goal for these types of companies and organizations has kind of just made me kind of go the opposite way and be that much more of an advocate and kind of take on that role when I’m doing these projects, and when I’m a part of these joint ventures and development teams.
I think this experience has made me a more critical practitioner. It’s definitely something that I carry with me when I’m having conversations with folks that represent the same kind of missions or ideals that these multinational architecture and engineering services firms kind of have and propose. Ultimately it’s made me be that much more of an advocate.
CC: I would agree with a lot of what Maya said in terms of I certainly just feel kind of more aware of the fact that all this exists and that it manifests not just within those systems but also where I certainly see a lot of the thematics, sort of categories that we developed in this project manifest in some of the work I do and in the industry that I work in now, in the environmental review side. I mentioned this, but I think that what we learn at GSAPP, a lot of it’s focused on aesthetics, history, theory, and I think that’s pivotally important. But I also think it was very beneficial for me to also have a grounding in a practical kind of pragmatic understanding of like oh, well here are the firms that honestly employ a ton of people in this industry, here is how they function, and here is how that’s different from talking about – in my case – this particularly beautiful architecturally significant historic building. As great as that is, a lot of people don’t end up getting directly to work with projects like that. There tend to be a lot of projects with firms like this that people end up working in. So I think that that’s been valuable just from a practical standing. And I think to understand that these large firms get the work that they do for a lot of reasons, some of which, might be kind of nefarious. But they also get it because they’re able to kind of market themselves as having all these in-house abilities and skills. The federal government likes to hear that you’re efficient. So if you’re able to say we have all these different divisions and we can do this whole project in-house, that’s very appealing. And I think in the industry that I’m in now, it was very useful for me to have that background of understanding. It’s definitely helped me understand the field better. And it’s definitely helped me to sort of have a framework for understanding how these developers work, as well as how the environmental review process works. Because I think that the themes that we developed can easily be replicated in basically any industry. And I see that in the way that I work. I don’t mean that in a negative way necessarily. Things work like this because a lot of these projects are deeply complicated. And an environmental review is one very small part of these massive projects. And it often feels like this overwhelming amount of work with all these different departments and people but it’s one tiny component. So having this basis of understanding that these firms are massive, they do this stuff for a reason, they get these jobs for many reasons, and some of it is … efficiency. That was really useful I think. And I think that having this framework that we’ve developed through the Power and Infrastructure project will be useful in the future. I think I’ll certainly refer back to that document. I know that Buell has put together a guide on how to use USA Spending, which I think is extremely helpful. I think just having that sort of grounding in the way things work and then being able to say okay, here’s a basic framework, and here’s how it applies in other situations, other firms, other projects, is really useful. And I think being able to have that and think critically is really important as a practitioner. You know I would like to think that the work that I do kind of works towards making the potential negative impacts a little bit less with some of these projects. And I hope to continue doing that in my career. And I think having this foundational understanding will be pivotal in doing that moving forward. And I also hope that other people working in this field – whether that be planning, architecture, preservation – will also hopefully be able to use this framework and collectively, ideally we could make some change over time. That’s the goal.
ME: This project has really been sort of like a helpful context for me, especially going into this field, going into development work, and yes, it’s something that like Claire said, I will be referencing and hopefully, and as I said before, see and can find ways to advocate for the communities that I’m seeing that are completely ignored and neglected by these systems.