CCA x AR Ecologies: how to do no harm

The Architectural Review is joined in this episode of the AR Ecologies by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, as we follow the research of CCA's ‘How to: do no harm’ residency, curated by Lev Bratishenko and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes.

AR host Ellen Peirson looks at the harm that architects do to land, cities, materials and workers. Stories from Sahar Shah, Guujaaw, Sename Koffi Agbodjinou and Jess Myers weave together an honest argument about how harmful it is to exist in this ecological age. Once we acknowledge that we can’t create without extracting, we can start transforming our ways of working to make them regenerative. From the oil pipelines snaking through Canada, the search for an architectural identity in the globalising cities in Togo, the labour organising happening in classrooms and workplaces and the unceded lands of the Haida Nation in British Columbia, these truths hurt. Architects want to find new ways to practise architecture on this scarred planet. To do no harm. But is this possible?

AR Ecologies, a podcast by The Architectural Review, explores the tension between architecture and ecology through critical positions which launch each chapter. Instead of standalone interviews, each episode weaves curious and critical voices together to meet, discuss and give space to perspectives outside an architectural orbit. This episode is an audio counterpart to our October 2022 issue on Energy, while the first season revolved around trees, an audio counterpart to our October 2021 issue on Trees.

The publication that was produced during the ‘How to do no harm’ residency in September can be found here. It is an illustrated diary of an architect in ethical crisis who is judging between contemporary strategies to separate what’s promising from what’s just cheating: ‘It is not easy to accept that one’s profession causes harm. We like to think of ourselves as good people—and most of us are. But we live in systems that we did not choose, feel unable to change, or may not even perceive. When we harm other living things, or the world sustaining our bodies, cultures, or even ourselves as architects, it is most often because it seems we do not have any choice.’

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Bibliography

How to: do no harm (2022), Amélie de Bonnières, Lev Bratishenko, Sophie Weston Chien, Marianna Janowicz, Swati Janu, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Mariana Meneguetti, Bailey Morgan Brown Mitchell, Loránd Mittay and Samarth Vachhrajani
Red Skin, White Masks (2014), Glen Sean Coultard
Inhabiting the earth: a new history of raw earth architecture, AR February 2020, Jean Dethier
Graphic novel: a global moratorium on new construction, AR November 2021, Zosia Dzierżawska and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes
Anishinaabe Ways of Knowing and Being (2014), Lawrence Gross
On the money: the merits of degrowth, AR September 2019, Phineas Harper and Smith Mordak
Make do and mend: care and maintenance in Burkina Faso, AR December 2019/January 2020, Carlos Quintáns
Violence in the pipeline: Indigenous resistance to oil transport infrastructure, AR October 2022, Sahar Shah
A Decolonial Feminism (2021), Francoise Verges, translated by Ashley J. Bohrer
Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (1999), Gerald Vizenor

Transcript

The Architectural Review: This is a curious podcast exploring the tension between architecture and ecology through critical positions. Welcome to AR Ecologies, a series by The Architectural Review. Founded in 1896, the AR has set the international architecture agenda in its pages for over 125 years.

The AR is joined in this episode of AR Ecologies by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, also known as the CCA, based in Montreal in Canada, we’re following the research of the ‘How to: do no harm’ residency, curated by Lev Bratishenko and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes.

This chapter will look at the harm that architects do to land, cities, materials and workers. It’s about being honest – realising that in many ways, existing in this ecological age is harmful. What happens when we accept that, as architects, we will always do harm? And what does that mean for the workers, buildings, cities and land we extract from in the name of architectural production? Architecture is created by ripping materials out of the Earth that then infringe on other lands. It displaces human and other-than-human lives. It weaponizes the promise of growth and capital to trap people through debt and mortgages, or otherwise evict them. Architecture demands the backbreaking labour, not just of architectural workers, but miners, builders, cleaners, and maintenance staff.

These truths hurt. Facing the reality of the harm that architecture inflicts on the world raises more questions than answers – questions that architects alone do not have the answers to. Once we acknowledge that we can’t create without extracting, we can start transforming our ways of working to make them regenerative.

This podcast brings together voices out of orbit, including lawyers, curators, ecologists, activists, writers and more, discussing the oil pipelines snaking through Canada, the search for an architectural identity in the globalising cities in Togo, the labour organising happening in classrooms and workplaces and the unceded lands of the Haida Nation in British Columbia. While architecture is the common thread that links everything together, we want to dwell in the in-between spaces of the topics we bring to the table – the grey spaces that shift from anthropocentric to ecological, and with the help of our guests, hear stories we never considered before.

Architects want to find new ways to practise architecture on this scarred planet. To do no harm. But is this possible?

I’m your host, Ellen Peirson, assistant editor at the AR.

Lev Bratishenko: I think starting from a position of harm or a reflection on harm is a way of avoiding thinking of yourself as good or as innocent. And I think this could be transformative in architecture. So, I think it also has a kind of a provocative or conceptual, almost rhetorical function of just dismissing the possibility of not doing harm and starting from that honesty.

AR: That voice is Lev Bratishenko, curator at the CCA.

Lev Bratishenko: Under a growth paradigm, there is no potential really for not doing harm or doing less harm if the overall scale of everything is growing. But outside of harm, the opposite of harm, I think there is like helping. But even if the orientation of your work is to help someone, you will still do some harm in helping them.

AR: In 2020, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, architect, urban designer, and assistant professor of architectural and urban design at the EPFL, proposed A Global Moratorium on New Construction. The world had come to a standstill due to the coronavirus pandemic, but we continued to extract from it. This initiative called for all construction to pause until we can find a non-extractive way to live on and with the Earth.

‘Reflecting on harm avoids thinking of yourself as good or innocent and this could be transformative’

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes: Everything is doing harm in architecture. Being an architect means you do harm. From the practice and the way, it operates, mostly to construction itself, from digging foundations to the materials that you're going to use in a building, to the labour and the conditions of labour that are usually on-site, to the operational costs of a building, for instance, from energy to use to even possibly then the dismantling of the building once it's finished with its first use. Everything does harm in architecture. So how much harm is acceptable?

Lev Bratishenko: And who decides?

AR: Charlotte’s moratorium call was a thought experiment, in the face of relentless harm, and growth. But it was asking those involved in construction to pause and rethink about the futures that we are building – asking if they always need to be built anew. That’s where this podcast picks up – what are we building, and how is it harmful?

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes: Doing less harm, I think is a good place to start because I don't think it's possible to be really neutral in terms of the harm that we do as architects or planners. I think that we have to really let that idea sail away and think about mitigation and about harm reduction in fact. And that would probably mean a more general reduction of what we do or thinking about how we can scale down in terms of material use, but also abuse.

‘Everything is doing harm in architecture. Being an architect means you do harm’

AR: This is going to involve some painful truths.

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes: In a way, we have to admit that architects have this adjacency to power and if we know and admit that we as an industry produce like 49% of the carbon emissions, then we need to use in a way that adjacency to power to undo or limit or mitigate and we should really do that.

AR: This adjacency to power, and often power itself, is where we start. because admitting that architecture is a mode of power, is also where we can recognise and take back agency within this power. I wanted to speak to someone who understands the mechanics of this power and the need to define and quantify the forms of harm this causes.

Sahar Shah: What harm is substantively, I guess I have quite a basic understanding of its causes pain and/or a threat to a person's life. But then I think the more maybe controversial and difficult aspect of that is how that harm is enacted. So, there's the obvious maybe unilateral instances of violence, but then there's also these kinds of slow, chronic violences that disguise themselves as help, that look fine or benign and are actually chronically harmful.

AR: That voice is Sahar Shah, a critical legal studies scholar who researches and teaches on decolonisation and climate justice in Canada at the University of Bristol in the UK. This field offers a perspective that makes visible the ways that seemingly well-meaning structures can be deeply harmful and actually codify violence into their operations.

Sahar Shah: The way I approach the idea of harm in my work is from the perspective of law as a system that tends to perpetuate systemic violence. So, people in my area of law that come from my field, which is something called critical legal studies, tend to have quite a cynical view about law as a whole. So, both the substantive laws that we see in Western societies, which is the type of law that I focus on in terms of the object of my enquiry, but then more importantly the modality of power that's exercised through law and the ways in which law exercises force along specific dynamics of power that have been historically constituted.

AR: In the recent Energy issue of the AR, Sahar wrote about oil pipelines in Canada, and how they inscribe the settler colonial thesis on Indigenous land, just as railways did in the 19th century. In her essay, she writes: ‘pipelines comprise over 840,000km of the railway networks’ 49,422km. Pipelines are born from and feed into globalised systems of wealth and accumulation. Like railways, pipelines are built primarily through the labour of precarious and temporary migrant workers, and on the lands of Indigenous people.’

Sahar Shah: There's this idea of settler colonialism as a structure. And so, then there's the question of, well, if that structure is harmful and violent, which I kind of take as axiomatic then, how do you dismantle that structure without it seeming like harm or violence? And that's actually a tension that emerges so strongly in legal discourses relating to, for example, what I look at, which is Indigenous environmental protection and land activism. The law characterises any instance of Indigenous or allied activists – for example, blockading railways to protest legislation that will remove environmental protections – the Canadian legal system will characterise those instances of protest as a form of irreparable harm because they've threatened the property rights of a railway company or a pipeline company, as the case may be. And it's very difficult to understand the legal characterisation of harm as something that doesn't seem to match the definition that I said earlier, that causes direct harm to a person's body or mind or anything like that. It's so divorced from the idea of, the plain English idea, of the word harm. Property is a fictitious thing, so how can someone violating the idea of a fictitious concept constitute a form of irreparable harm? And, yes, I guess there's the question of harm would need to be may be enacted in the short term, but we would also need to question what that harm would be and whether and to what extent it is really harmful.

AR: This brings us to a context where, someone’s very presence in a particular location is already deeply harmful. In the energy issue, Sahar argued that the ghosts of settler colonial violence are contained within the architectures and infrastructures. She wrote: ‘Two highly visible, aggressively transformative technologies of settler colonial violence illustrate the structural, living presence of colonialism in Canada: the railway and the pipeline. We might think of railways, which first etched the settler colonial thesis on land in the 19^th century, as containing the “ghosts” of settler colonial violence that the state cannot ‘lock away’ in the past. And we might consider pipelines as spectres – both ghost and prophecy, embodying past violences and engendering further violences’

‘Property is a fictitious thing, so how can someone violating the idea of a fictitious concept constitute a form of irreparable harm?’

Sahar Shah: There's this continuous political reproduction of the idea that there's a legacy of colonialism, there's vestiges of colonialism. And that flies in the face of the idea of settler colonialism as a structure that actively produces things in the present and is structured to cause violence rather than a kind of benign system that in the past maybe malfunctioned. That's the implication when colonial violence is considered a historical thing in the context of a settler colonial society. There's this idea that the law itself and the system of governance is somehow neutral or even good. But there were these violent slip ups somehow that we can't understand how they happened and now we need to kind of just altogether move forward from it, as if there was no actual perpetrator, there was no logic of violence that is still not only embedded in our society or in Canadian society, but that actually is the logical foundation of the society. And it's difficult for, I think, the Canadian government to accept that active, alive presence of colonialism. Because if we accept the idea that colonial violence was not this kind of confusing anomaly from the past and actually is the structure of the current government, then we might start to ask, well, by what logic and authority does the Canadian government actually exercise jurisdiction on what it calls Canadian, quote unquote, soil? And legally, it's never fully articulated. There are two sources by which the Canadian state or the Canadian federal government can claim jurisdiction. So, it claims jurisdiction through treaty – it points its origination sometimes on certain lands to the treaties it entered into historically with Indigenous groups. But that doesn't cover all Canadian land firstly, and secondly, there's a lot of disputes between Indigenous groups and the Canadian federal state as to how those treaties should have been interpreted. And the Canadian state problematically interprets the treaties as constituting unilateral permanent transfers of land from Indigenous groups to the Canadian state. So, there's already a problem there with its claims to legitimate jurisdiction. But then also there's a huge amount of land in Canada, particularly in British Columbia that's unceded. So, it can't trace the origins of its relationship with the Canadian state to any kind of treaty or more problematically, but this is the language that the Canadian state uses, or to some kind of surrender.

AR: Denying that the violence of the past is both still felt today, but also in fact ongoing today is key to the settler psyche and creates a condition where the full scale and nature of the violence cannot be properly understood. This temporal condition is in contrast to ideas of ‘survivance’, a term coined by Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor: Survivance is more than the notion of surviving in the face of adversity, but an active and alive celebration of the cultural, literary, philosophical and epistemological thriving of a group, while enduring the ongoing violence of settler colonialism in North America. Sahar describes this as ‘a reminder that the colonial project to destroy never fully succeeded in extinguishing other people, worldviews, social orders, and natures.’

Sahar Shah: So, if you break it down to its essential logical kernel, the Canadian state can't really pull that thread too hard of the presence of colonialism, because it would start to really undermine its legitimacy. It would not have any kind of historical or logical claim to authority on the land that is today called Canada. And so, I think in a way, it has no choice but to deny the presence of colonialism, to deny the aliveness and structural nature of colonialism. And it has to instead present colonial violence as a mystery that even its baffled by – that we all are so puzzled that this could have ever happened, even though we have, for example, the 2019 national enquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women, arguing that the Canadian state is locked into an ongoing genocide against Indigenous people and particularly Indigenous women and girls. And the Canadian state even then, Trudeau is saying, 'yes, maybe it was a genocide' and it's crucial, that actually they're claiming that it is a genocide, but that dispute in temporality is of enormous political, legal and philosophical importance.

AR: When a settler colonial state denies that colonial violence is active and ongoing and disregards the importance of nature and ecology over infrastructure, the consequences weight heaviest on those who have lived with and on the land for generations.

Guujaaw: You know, like if you don't have nature., you don't have any touchstone of what is true.

AR: Guujaaw is a Raven of the Haida Nation. Haida Gwaii is an archipelago off the coast of British Columbia, between Alaska and Vancouver Island. In November 2004, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled unanimously in Haida Nation v. British Columbia that the province must consult with the Haida Nation before exploiting any land to which have claimed title, even if the title has not been recognised by law. This followed decades of violent extraction and abuse of their lands, and unilateral actions by the provincial government, such as issuing Tree Farm Licenses on land that the Haida Nation had an Aboriginal Right to. The Haida Nation fought to assert rights and title over the land and waters of Haida Gwaii and receive compensation for profits made from the abuse of their lands. Guujaww is a Rights, Title and Earth Advocate – founding member and president of the Coastal First Nations coalition, and president of the Council of the Haida Nation. He is also a carpenter, canoe builder, copper maker, singer and carver. Guujaaw sees land as something to live with, not on.

Guujaaw: The harm is at the collective level. where we live in square walls and usually made out of gyprock and stuff like that and there's no thought ever of the Earth that we're living upon. If you take it apart and look at what the heck's going on, it almost looks like a deliberate effort to spoil the Earth. And so, it takes a heck of a lot of individuals to reverse what they're doing. Every dollar that we have eventually comes from resources, comes from the earth. And so, the more you have, the more effect you've had on the Earth.

‘If you don't have nature, you don't have any touchstone of what is true’

AR: For the Haida Nation, the use of the land also ensures its protection. When they use a 500-year-old tree to carve a totem pole, they are keeping their ancestral culture alive – showing that the value of the tree as lumber is worth nothing to them. When a totem pole stands tall on the land, they are celebrating the land and its products.

Guujaaw: The old culture, which was all cedar houses with totem poles – expressing the relationship of our people to the land. And that you depend upon the land, not just for the food and all that, but for the building materials. And so, you go to some other places around the world where the Indigenous cultures built with the materials that they had. And if it is from the forest, or if it is from the earth, in either case, there was no separation from the land. Using a tree is different than laying waste to a forest. It's a whole different thing. You're using the resource, but you're not particularly affecting the drainage or anything like that if you're doing that. But it's also to celebrate that relationship between us and the Earth. So, the crest and stuff are our story going back to our origins and who we are.

AR: Guujaaw speaks mournfully of a lost connection between us and the Earth. Under a settler colonial state, this is severed – denying what is there and creating something new.

Guujaaw: To make concrete, you got to grind up the Earth. But you reconstitute it and make it look like as if it was never earth, it was never anything. And so, feeds on that thing of people being separate from the earth and not having anything about. I mean, the trees or any plants that are around would often be exotic, brought in from somewhere else as the colonisers had done. You know, they all decorate their houses with daffodils and things from the old country and people will go into other lands and bring the plants and stuff that have no bearing on the natural condition there.

AR: In contrast, Guujaaw describes his own home on Haida Gwaii, which he built from the land around him.

Guujaaw: Everything that I used here is from here. So, there's a lot of cedar and those kinds of things that are constant reminder. It's not separating me from the land, but I'm in comfort in my house because of the land.

AR: This connection to nature that Guujaaw speaks of goes against the modern project and its obsession with the new. Charlotte talks about the assumed tabula rasa that was the foundation of the international style:

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes: I think also software should not open anymore on these blank pages. I think this is fallacious and really, really inherited from the modernist tabula rasa that you open your CAD file and it's blank. I mean, it's never the case. Nowhere is blank. There was always something before, and there is something in the soil and there is something in the air and there are people around.

Sename Koffi Agbodjinou: Our work as architects is one of the most aggressive right now in the global state of the world.

AR: This is Sename Koffi Agbodjinou, an Architect, anthropologist and entrepreneur from Togo. He created L’Africaine d'architecture in 2010, a platform to share projects, research, and experimentations on questions of African architecture and the city. In his work as an architect, and through tech start-ups, he coined the term ‘’neo-vernacular’’ referring to grassroot technological initiatives that aim to address local issues, created in the face of fast-growing megacities in Africa, in order to foster an African architecture identity that is more adapted to the current anthropological reality. Sename talks about what neo-vernacular means to him:

Sename Koffi Agbodjinou: For me the neo-vernacular is everything connected to a specific site, everything who is situated. These twenty years I saw that one of the biggest issues of the world is this global city in construction, which is a direct consequence of the the idea of the modernity. And I found that at some points, the modernity itself will become very problematic with this project, to try to create a universal way of living for people wherever they are in this planet. And to address these future issues, people wherever they are, should be able to begin to try to develop their very situated capacities, possibilities. If you want to specialise building in earth, you will have to do everything yourself because you don't have the infrastructure, you don't have the laboratories, you don't have those companies working on it. Everybody right now in Africa, almost everybody is on cement, concrete, and it is the only one perspective people have for building. And it is a lot associated to the modernity to this fascination Africans have for the west. So normally building in local materials like earth should lead you to have less in terms of costs for your project, because those material are just there, they didn't come from an industrial system. 20 years ago, I was only interested in building with local material and tried to revitalise the modes of the earth architecture, building with earth. But for some reasons people are not interested anymore in building in earth, so one of my commitments at the beginning was to see how I can show that earth is modern and how building earth architecture, we can achieve the same quality or the same comfort people see in what they call modern architecture, the international architecture.

‘Nowhere is blank. There was always something before, and there is something in the soil and there is something in the air and there are people around’

AR: Sename is asking architects to act in the local, while being aware of the globalised nature of construction. How do we reconnect these severed links between architects and their sites, between buildings and the earth that they are hollowing out

Lev Bratishenko: Maybe the architect can't go to the site, but they can still go to another site in the city. They can still go to, you know, to the dirt, to the construction workers, to a quarry or cement place where cement is being mixed or even maybe produced. I don't know. There's still there's still ways that they can kind of, you know, in their body encounter some of these things, maybe not a copper mine, but all of that is better than not.

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes: You go from, for instance, looking at a very small detail, you know, like, a handle, like a doorknob. And you see how actually that knob is made out of aluminium, which is extracted through very violence processes of extraction processed into, you know, aluminium and through bauxite and doing a lot of harm through that process. And then it's put on boats and then the boats are, you know, going somewhere else. And then they're like, you can, you know, where you can follow from that to the bigger scale. And at the bigger scale, the questions of who is affected, I think gets more blurred. In the case of aluminium, it's bauxite and for the sake of constructing dams, the Alcoa, for instance, the big aluminium corporation of America, they flooded thousands of hectares of tropical forests which actually was home to Indigenous populations. So not only were the forests gone and eliminated but also the people who were living there had to flee and today they decided to stop mining there because it was not enough productive. So, they just gave money in the name of sustainability. It's never going to be enough.

Lev Bratishenko: You have a special moment to talk about this when the person you're speaking to has their hand on an aluminium doorknob.

AR: What Lev and Charlotte speak about here, comes back around to shifting values and assumed modes of production, and even down to the way we as architects and as citizens encounter buildings, through the simple act of opening a door. What new possibilities does this create?

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes: If we think about architecture as the existing stock, as something that is of new value in a way, as we have reduced resources, for instance, then we we need to deal with this stuff a little bit more carefully than we do right now. I mean, you can't demolish anything anymore. You really have to take care of what we have. And this also means that it puts into question newness, I guess. So that would loop back at bosses and power structures. if we were to rethink the ways we operate with these new value systems, this value shift, then probably the kind of pyramidal systems also don't hold because you question, you know, the kind of genius production of something, a new idea or like how things are always actually recycled in fact.

AR: We started this conversation by talking about power structures, and that’s where it ends too. We have accepted that architecture is an engine of extraction and production that inflicts harm by its very nature. But if you open the engine up, you find operational harm at its core, fuelling the entire project

Jess Myers: You know, that's the least sexy thing about learning architecture. It has nothing to do with the aesthetics of an object, and it has everything to do with your ability to navigate networks of politics and power within the action of your working life.

AR: Jess Myers is an assistant professor of architecture at RISD, where she was among the college’s cluster hire of educators on race in art and design. She has been co-steward of the New York chapter of the Architecture Lobby, a global collective of architectural workers. Jess speaks about what harm in architecture translates as, and how it is reproduced:

Jess Myers: It can be the harms that you carried from school and how you're reproducing them in your working life. It can be the harms that you're navigating from a client and how a partner may be diffusing those harms within their firm, that kind of thing. So, whether it's a demand for overtime or the inability to communicate to others without abuse or the inability to consider the implications on land or on residents of this action of the line on the screen. Right. So that's how I think about the, let's say, economy of harm that like moves through all of these different relations within architecture. So, you have all of these forms of relation that exist inside of an office, right? You have the relation with contractors, with consultants, with all of these other groups of external stakeholders. You have the relationship with clients and client groups, but then you also have all these other external relationships like the relationships and memories of relationships that folks are bringing in from their educations. And then you also have the relationship between obviously the product of these firms and land, as well as occupants, residents, folks who are like making meaning from the built environment and kind of building their lives or having their lives shifted by the built environment. So that's the interesting thing about architecture, I don't think that gets talked about enough, is all of these different relationships kind of converge on the action of kind of like drawing a line on a screen, you know? So, all of those relationships come to bear and then get pushed on or reconfigured based on those actions, right? So, when it comes to harm, I think about harm in the context of all of those relations. I think a lot about this idea of kinship. It's not like friendship. It's not like you did the terrible thing to me and I never want to see you again. It's that people who do harm or people who hurt others are still in the relation of kin. It's the idea that like you can be in good or poor relation with others, but you're still in relation. So, I think about how you become good kin or how do you think about being in good relation and when you've been in poor relation, how are you accountable to that.

‘The least sexy thing about learning architecture is it has nothing to do with the aesthetics of an object, and it has everything to do with your ability to navigate networks of politics and power’

AR: Jess now addresses these issues at the root, in how she teaches professional practice, and also design studio at RISD.

Jess Myers: What I wanted to do, which is a departure from what professional practise does typically in the US, which is to prepare students to be firm owners, what I wanted to do is ask, how do you teach professional practise from the scale of being an architectural worker? So, within that it's like, what are the skill sets that are good for people who work in architectural services to have? So, we brought in questions around what is labour organising, what does unionising look like? And we brought some of the organisers from SHoP to talk to students. But at the same time, we did a financial literacy workshop, we did a negotiations workshop. In negotiations, I think the interesting thing is that it's really understanding all stakeholders, like being able to identify stakeholders, being able to do a map, like a power map of how those stakeholders are in relation with each other and having some understanding of the priorities of each of those stakeholders and navigating your negotiations in relation to that, in full knowledge of that.

AR: The abusive processes of architectural culture also enable the harms that architecture then does upon the world. The industry is continually producing an exploitable workforce – often one that graduates with the kind of debts that crush demands and agency with practice. Architecture practices at their most exploitative, will tell you that you’re part of the family. And at the top of this family, is the daddy. Jess explains architecture’s daddy complex:

Jess Myers: I have jokingly in the past referred to it as daddy culture where like, and this is not just exclusive to firms, this carries through from studio culture where it's like, what I do is I bend over backwards to impress this person right, to impress this one person, because I think that I'll be able to get ahead, I'll get a good grade, I'll get recognised. Maybe this faculty will like let me work in their office, maybe this person will include me in a book or something like that, and I'll be able to like benefit in some way, some way that's not tangible or even you can't really evaluate if it's commensurate to the amount of work that you put in or again, going back to this understanding of opportunity cost, the opportunity cost of the other relationships in your life that are also support systems and also, you know, forms of wealth, if you think about wealth in a more holistic way. What I think is interesting about the culture of  'we’re a family' is also about, one that that tries to flatten the power or the structures of power that exists in an office where it's like, yeah, you know, we can sit together at the lunch counter, but then when I turn around and I'm like, I need you to be here for the rest of the night, and you try to push back and say, like, actually, I need to, you know, pick up my kids or I need to do this other thing, then that creates tension. It's not as if there's a two-way street to that family relation. It's very clear about who is expected to exhibit superhuman amounts of flexibility and who is expected to receive that flexibility. And thinking about how one of the incentives to receiving harm in architecture is that you will be able to be the person doling out the harm down the road. So, like, I think that when we're talking about the exploitation of workers, we have to also talk about like, are we attracted to that incentive? Are we attracted to that desire to also be an arbiter of harm at the same time as we ourselves are buckling under the weight of the harms that we ourselves are kind of receiving in our working lives.

AR: These power dynamics are constantly reproduced when the rewards for having harm inflicted on you is to go on to inflict harm. This is built into the stratified nature of architecture workplaces, in an industry where people rarely see themselves as workers.

Jess Myers: If we think about construction workers and people who work in more industrial work they think of themselves as workers and they have to protect themselves from physical harms. And, you know, that's what they have unions for. But we're very prestigious. We have all these degrees. And that's why, you know, we don't need that kind of protection because we have this level of prestige. But that doesn't mean that you don't have the workplace concerns in the same way. When I talk to students about that distinction, you know, one of them was just like, well, you know, I'm not putting my body on the line. And I'm just like, oh, yeah, like, why are you wearing this arthritis glove on your hand right now? Or your back or your eyes? Like this kind of thing.

AR: Architecture as a profession has a history of valorising individuals – always in search of the single author holding the pen, and not the many hands that make a building, build a city. But if, as Guujaaw said earlier, the harm is at a collective level, the solution, too must be at a collective level. How could this reframing, of architects as workers, and as one part in a chorus of stewards of the built environment, be transformative not just for our working culture, but architectural production?

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes: We have been doing a lot of harm with this system. And if we want to think beyond that, we also need to shift value systems. So, for me, the most telling example is always the example of upkeep. So, this is, you know, dismissed work like the, the task of like cleaning up and picking up trash and you know, doing these like daily works is racialized, gendered, underpaid, but actually it's what holds the world together.

Lev Bratishenko: You can imagine a firm; it would no longer resemble anything like an architecture firm we think of. It could not operate the way firms operate today if it also included in it as kind of, you know, respectable colleagues, not somehow under an underclass of colleagues, you know, maintainers, plumbers, cleaning ladies, construction workers of all different trades. If this was integrated, not in a kind of corporate, we're trying to squeeze more profit out of a model, but it like we are all involved in producing and maintaining shelter. You know, there's a just in kind of getting rid of it and calling whatever the profession becomes like shelter farmers, no problem. Immediately you have a whole new set of possibilities. But you know, at the same time as there are architects and that comes with certain legal powers or protections and various kind of access to social capital and all kinds of other things that can be used also to do less harm or produce change.

AR: But where does that leave us? Are we architects, or shelter farmers? We’ve accepted that we have done harm, that we are doing harm, and that we will continue to do harm, but where do we find hope? If we have the capacity to do such violence, how do we continue? Sahar speaks about changing the way we see the world.

Sahar Shah: And so, something I found really particularly intellectually paradigm shifting for me has been the idea of looking at the world from a comic perspective rather than a tragic one. And so, the tragic vision, is something that Lawrence Gross says in many ways characterises the settler North American vision of life. The tragic vision kind of in a nutshell, it's this idea of the individual struggling against the world, committed to their traditional ways. And generally, tragedy ends in a kind of peril characterised by suffering, etc. It's this very linear journey, and then the tragic hero kind of either wins or dies. And this tragic vision explains a lot of the background and assumptions that we have in thinking about the future in the west. And also, I was able to see that that's kind of how I see things and how I see my interactions with the world. And then, by contrast, there is the comic vision, which Lawrence Gross argues characterises Anishinaabe thinking and ways of interacting with the world. And the comic vision is different, essentially. So, it looks at the world in a non-linear way. It's it looks at time in a non-linear way. It looks at realities as potentially multiple and it looks at people as intrinsically linked. So, the story of our lives becomes not one of our own or the individual's linear journey, but it's something that's greater than the sum of its parts. It's about enjoyment rather than suffering about living essentially, rather than just not dying. And Lawrence Gross links this with the idea of quantum physics and this idea of multiverses and things like that. So, there's this idea that the reality that we're perceiving and looking at is not actually the only reality that there is, even though it looks that way. And that idea kind of fills me with hope that there's more to all of this than what we can immediately see ourselves or what we can immediately imagine ourselves doing. Because there's there is just more.

AR: With a comic perspective on life, we might start to have a more cosmic vision of the world. up there, from this vantage point, on our current reality of ecological, social and political crises, the view from the drawing board might feel a little kinder – we might draw with a more generous hand

Jess Myers: Architecture, the stewardship of the built environment is a practise of life. The impulse of creating shelter is in response to sustaining life, right? And if you don't have a life or like you're not able to live a life, then how can you have an imagination for the spaces that would contain it?

AR: Thank you for listening to this episode of AR Ecologies, in collaboration with the Canadian Centre for Architecture. You can find the link to this podcast transcript in the notes for this episode, or head to architectural hyphen review dot com for all the latest pieces uploaded to our website, including projects and essays featured in our AR October issue on Energy.

You will also find a link in the transcript to the publication that was produced during the ‘How to do no harm residency’ in September, an illustrated diary of an architect in ethical crisis who is judging between contemporary strategies to separate what’s promising from what’s just cheating. To quote the publication: ‘It is not easy to accept that one’s profession causes harm. We like to think of ourselves as good people—and most of us are. But we live in systems that we did not choose, feel unable to change, or may not even perceive. When we harm other living things, or the world sustaining our bodies, cultures, or even ourselves as architects, it is most often because it seems we do not have any choice.’

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