When you begin stitching, it is rarely with new material (“new” meaning purpose-made, industrial-grade, fully sealed, and never-before-touched). Stitching is a hybrid practice; it brings different things together. Most familiar in the context of handicrafts, repairing clothes, or accumulating short segments of video into a longer narrative, the verb “to stitch” applies to the built environment as well. In cohering craft knowledge and environmental context around the scale of the human hand, stitching challenges routine thinking on the origin stories of designed places and things. In other words, stitching can destabilize the supposedly linear relationship between nature and the city in favor of more complicated and interesting shapes. Stitching frees makers and materials to form new entanglements rich with possibility for inter- and anti-disciplinary thinking. Eliding a traditional definition of rawness that is “found” in “nature,” stitching instead makes room to investigate the many positions that one can take on the contemporary built environment: from ennui at genericized luxury, to academic interrogations of style and cultural power, to frustration or optimism at attempts to “go green.” Thinking through the act of stitching, it becomes easier to disregard the limited operative categories of architectural business as usual (style, type, sector, use-case), and instead to consider building more holistically, from supply chains, labor, craft, and heritage to its ruin, resurrection, and endurance. To stitch is to spend less time on what could possibly be designed and built, and more on what’s already here, how it was made, and who will take care of it.
Broader systems that deliver buildings under capitalism are often compared to one another through parameters like weight, strength, standardization, code compliance, or the minimum possible wage. For instance, the qualities of mass timber tend to be juxtaposed to the bulk of systems and trades accustomed to non-alternative materials,1 or the efficacy of continued reliance on concrete put in balance with the impending scarcity of its preferred sand.2 None of these metrics for decision-making can account, however, for the whole lives of buildings, or for all the kinds of building that take place in the world today, or for the building systems that might soon take precedence. In response to these more systemic concerns, some designers today step back to interrogate supply, while others accept the conventional chain in order to tweak small details and then repeat them many times over. Some are credentialed and solution-oriented within existing markets, while others remain suspicious of solutionist design. Fundamental and urgent acts of repair, however, require a closeness to observe and thrash within broken systems, and to stay—by choice, or by lack of choice—with the trouble.3
With its manual connotations, the act of stitching seems equally applicable to material attached by hand and needle as to landscapes patchworked by larger devices.4 Consider, for instance, wildlife corridors, where small pockets of retained and restored biome are planned close enough together for species to hop between them, avoiding the concrete and asphalt fabric of semi-urban sprawl. Stretching disciplinary boundaries or swapping methods from different professions further pollinates an understanding of nature and material as cyclic, full of exchange. Stitching tells me to treat materials as processes rather than products, and enables me to ask childlike questions that might actually take us somewhere: Why is the usual way of doing things still being done? How did this get here, and what would it be doing if they had left it alone? Who was involved in making this, and what do they think of the work? Will this still be here when I’m gone?
A repaired calabash from Kenya by an unknown maker, stitched with plant fiber. Held in Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology since 1950. Collected by Louis Leakey, MAA 1950.562. Photo: Lucie Carreau.
I. Design and Repair
Modernity and its legacies of settler-colonial building have accelerated genericism: a centrally designed and peripherally dispatched sameness. Buildings are now made as object-assemblies with standardized parts and, in the US for instance, everyone groans at another 5-over-1 with the same four cladding materials wrapping blandly over steel and engineered lumber.5 An architecture made of leftovers, scraps, waste—material assemblages stitched together—diverges from this standard. That is to say: entropy frustrates standardization. The wear for which all buildings are destined—through weather, war, redlining and redevelopment, retrofitting, maintenance, and the marks of human and animal life—is assiduously externalized from “new” building and the investments that fuel it. The moment a building is inhabited, it is worn and will always require repair. Artist Kader Attia says that, in Western modernity, “repairing something is to erase the injury,” sacrificing the depth and continuity of care evident in scars for a perpetual newness that is unblemished and apolitical.6 Among a growing number of today’s architectural thinkers and teachers, Attia posits “repair” as the conceptual and practical foundation for an anticolonial ethic.7 Within an exhausted capitalism, old and new visions for the world are taking root. According to Attia:
Everyone is talking about repair today because it resonates with a need to stare at the blind spots of our societies. The environmental catastrophe we are living in is an intersection with so many topics that carry the weight of modernity. So, you can talk about systemic racism, patriarchal structures, classism, and so on: all these blind spots that have made modernity a delusional project. Thinking about repair has become a tool for revealing the ways in which we are all still living in the colonial laboratory … What often happens today is that we theorize a lot and then grasp for examples that incarnate what we are arguing. It is like the idea of care. We talk about care and then we organize dinners. We should organize the dinner first and get in touch with the materiality of that tangible experience.8
First, organize the dinner. But until we are together in the same room, gather up these ideas—repair, care, energy, extraction, citation, reciprocity—and dump them in a pile. Rather than sorting them by discipline, time period, or reference, let them jumble. Digest them together. Consider a repaired calabash from Kenya, stitched with plant fiber: the hollowed fruit, dried up and woody, is a superlative vessel. Sometimes its skin is richly decorated; sometimes left plain. Before it cracked, it could carry water or milk a long way. After breaking, it was neither waste nor useless. Mending it, the maker made no effort to hide the cracks. Instead, they repeated a large, elegant stitch back and forth along the rifts, and kept the calabash. The museum that collected it valued the same object for reasons similar and dissimilar, and they kept it too.
Even new material cut against a pattern-piece holds traces, and stitching invests an object with the residue of its rhythm and creation from miscellaneous parts. These contingencies have been a feature of global building practices since time immemorial. Think of how people describe the roughness of plaster or the grain of wood as warmth. Think of Inca dry-fitting techniques for stone cities high in the Andes, an art form no Western architect has managed to repeat.9 Conversely, drywall, for instance, lacks precious endurance. Thin and pliant, it is easily tacked to a lumber frame with a nail gun, its joints smoothed out by skilled laborers working quickly to save their bosses’ boss’ client’s money. Materials designed to require the minimum possible labor—to go up quickly—also come down quickly. Punched through a few times, the drywall can be patched with mesh and putty, but if introduced to water, it will stain and sag. This is not a material designed to withstand life, but to change apace of related, externalized values like style or real estate. The warm roughness that accompanies things made and mended by hand is more challenging to a regime of industrial progress that depends upon standardization.10 This is not to say that slow building is always or inherently more ethical than quick; or that mass-engineered building systems do not offer lovable benefits. Instead, we should consider the accumulation of both ways of working in a patchwork built environment and ask bigger questions about how values shape livelihoods over time.11
Designers and scientists who approach contingent materials and leftover sites are presented with a distinct set of challenges by their counterparts working with more standardized, new construction. Materials are often conditioned by multiple processes, some of which are deemed “natural” and others a result of (“unnatural”?) human intervention. Some materials could be described as offcuts—scraps—while others are laced with the consequences of refinement, often heavy metals left behind in mines, pits, and factory grounds.12 Scraps are rarely valued on par with “new” material unless they are first cycled back through similar industrial processes with new energy applied. There is no longer a single origin story—if there ever was one—but many, and some of these originary processes have consistently been toxic to humans and other living things.13 To stitch things together, architects often take stock, creating an inventory of odd parts and offcuts to be assembled anew. In their Ashen project, for instance, HANNAH Office parametrically mills ash trees into human-sized slabs of cabin cladding.14 The ashes, cut down to limit the continental march of invasive insects, display the burrowing scars of the environmentally entangled process that turned them from trees (perhaps destined to be standardized, dimensional lumber) into waste material, now diverted into building.15 Similarly, in Circularity Park, Gramazio Kohler Research assembles a large wall-pile from stones that had been scattered on site by scanning and digitally modeling each fragment, and then instructing robots to assemble the stones in an optimized order.16 These materials are what Katie MacDonald, Kyle Schumann, and Jonas Hauptman from After Architecture call “standardless,” a term—and a design ethos—that “emphasizes the natural transformation of a raw material during the fabrication process … [and] the fruits of imprecision” borne out of novel digital fabrication.17
These architects describe their practices as being liberated, to some degree, from standardization through the use of digital fabrication technology, which frees them to use industrial leftovers directly and often on the same site where the waste was produced. It allows them to be somewhat agnostic to the materials available, thus distinguishing their approach from “recycling.” Within this context, “developments in on-site robotic building methods offer the opportunity to leverage context-specific, locally sourced or upcycled materials that are inexpensive, abundant, and low in embodied energy.”18 These practices belong to what MacDonald, Schuman, and Hauptman call a “middle ground between designer and material,” a murky and enticing overlap among material quirkiness, tool-driven form, and stylistic tradition.19 This approach ascribes abundance to waste, which is an important proposition for building in the twenty-first century, but also one familiar to centuries prior. It also allows one to question the externalization and internalization (embodiment) of carbon in building processes. While they make use of waste in place of new material, the computing machines, their fuel, and the orientation of a site toward daily energy consumption continue to invest a place in vast networks that demand mining and fossil fuel extraction.20 Can we then think of robotic assembly as a reparative practice, or as harm reduction? Are these two ideas even compatible? In either case, it’s fun to think of huge robots and regular-sized architects trying to learn from multiple Indigenous construction techniques some 500 years later.
II. Feminist Labor and Endurance
Conventional construction tends to set waves of skilled workers and their tools against instructions that were drafted and negotiated by professional workers (architects, engineers) in distant offices. After passing these waves over a given site until the project receives a stamp of approval, the finished product is left to its own(er’s) devices. In alternate lab- and studio-based visions of future construction, computational mediation animates the relationship between designer and designed structure. This relationship is made simultaneously closer and more distant than today’s conventions allow by rehearsing the design precisely in digital form, then enacting it in a tangible place as an object or, increasingly, as a process that carries itself out cyclically. Open-source design goes even further, following an ethic of the early internet by refusing to gatekeep or codify the status of “maker.” The interpersonal rigor of this approach distinguishes it from normal product-generating design—and especially from practices that actively conceal their source material, such as large language models proliferating under the banner of Artificial Intelligence—reaching instead toward the practical generosity of long craft traditions that are handed down among makers. This ethic is evident in stitch-based works that utilize LilyPad, an open-source sewable electronics kit designed by Leah Buechley, or kobakant.at, an open repository of e-textile projects and ideas by Mika Satomi and Hannah Perner-Wilson. Meticulously and publicly citing work, especially giving credit to the labor of women and young academics, is itself a feminist ethical practice.21 Stitching is an act of consensual knowledge production and voluntary, unpaywalled knowledge-sharing. Citing the open-source tools her lab uses, Felecia Davis emphasizes that the invisible pool of digital and analog transmission in which we all swim “needs more attention to construct a life-valuing future.”22
Winding through air, around existing buildings, and through complicated urban conditions, tensile structures are often imagined and sometimes deployed as gentle editors of the city.23 Contingent design and construction practices recognize that most buildings standing in the year 2050 have already been built, so primary attention must now be to their alteration and stewardship rather than their invention on supposed virgin ground.24 While this disciplinary shift in mindset might inspire designers to move beyond the capitalistic myth of infinite growth, they would still need to contend with disaster. Destructive weather, war, and other malign events of sufficient scale have always reformatted what and how people build, and climate change is accelerating the uneven clearance of built communities. Under current building regimes, disaster is often an investment opportunity, one that reasserts or even accelerates unsustainable building-as-usual for short-term rewards.25 Moments of rupture flood with potential. Countering these highly externalized systems in favor of building practices that help people root themselves resiliently in place fundamentally requires architects and designers to work with, not against, entropy. This is where disparate ways of working—repairing gourds, digitally modeling waste material, configuring wildlife corridors, deploying weaver drones, making a quilt together—fit as an alliance of mixed methods under the mantle of stitching as a material act. It is also a junction at which grassroots activism and citizen science have long been working. Take, for instance, the nonprofit Matters of Trust, based in San Francisco since 1998. Their “Hair Matters” program aims to create a network of waste-hair collection and felting centers by 2030. Extant centers collect and “recycle hair, fur, wool, fleece from salons, groomers, ranches and individuals,” felting them into absorptive bales and mats that soak spilled oil from waterways.26 This work is both reparative in nature and explicitly a form of stitching in action, reminiscent of what Sámi artist and architect Joar Nango calls “nomadic thinking”:
You see every object or every material around you as a potential problem-solving material, which really explodes the idea of the commodity and the consumer mentality. It’s a way of seeing objects and materials as something else, as something more, and giving them more value, or giving them some kind of a philosophical value.27
This approach to design might be called a “dissonant optimism,” but what takes place while the reparative act of stitching is done? Long, slow, sometimes mindless work carried out by experienced hands tends to make room for conversation. The gossip, the wisdom, the midwinter stories, the advice passing between generations: all this happens while a tool works its way deftly between the edges of different things. Familiar to Indigenous societies and close-knit communities anywhere, the social intimacy of these acts also resonates in the digital. Felecia Davis says that her Textural Threshold Salon: Dreadlock project was “about those spaces that use biodata, in this case hair, to permit or restrict access.”28 Davis defines all thresholds as physical delineations of more ephemeral values, with Dreadlock illustrating the “intersection of the two via electromagnetic resonance.”29 Davis invites viewers to study the social attachments and preconceptions woven into braids and locs from the outside. She restages the salon chair—an intimate space for handwork—as an exhibition/lab framed by an algorithm trained to parse viewers by hair texture alone. Davis also discusses the challenge of finding open databases that include Black hair textures in the first place.30 By presenting oneself at biometric thresholds contrary to the black-box assumptions through which a database reads the world, one becomes a trickster, at once seen and unseen.
Felecia Davis, Mona Mirzaie, and Taylor Hufnagle, sample of Fabricating Networks Quilt, fabricated for the 2021 MoMA exhibition Reconstructions. Many of the photos featured are from the Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive at the Carnegie Museum of Art.
Making and thinking with textiles—particularly computational textiles that are imbued with conductive yarn, sensors, and other means to make them highly responsive to their environments—enables scientific research to “leapfrog” into another space, where posture and physical memory are honored as the utility of designed objects and systems. This wisdom has been situated within a “domestic sphere” since industrialization, and has been a current in feminist histories pushing outward to this day. Davis’s repertoire of computational textiles argues that these materials so closely associated with clothing, insulating, and signifying the human body inherently hold and respond to emotion, and that architectural textiles create fundamentally emotional spaces.31 Embedding responsive technologies in this intimate material can both illustrate and heal these associations in social space. The dialects of architecture, engineering, construction, tech, and design are, in contrast, rarified and full of jargon. These professional languages hew to an apolitical tone that is service-oriented to match the twentieth-century business structures in which they operate, channeling wealth and energy. Until recently, these languages struggled to describe emotional bodies at all, much as they still struggle to take seriously anyone but the archetypal lone genius (read: male, white, moneyed). But vocabulary and culture change together.
What happens when care and repair are hollowed of their politics? When repair, following Attia’s reasoning, is driven to erase, instead of returning places and things to life?32 Davis asks a similar question with the Fabricating Networks Quilt, a community-building archival project for Pittsburgh’s historic Hill District: “when does the repair push people out of their neighborhoods?”33 With archival photos printed onto cloth and collaged with conductive copper fabric, the quilt literally embeds an audio narrative of each photo’s story into its respective square, assembling a document of the district that asserts a right to belong through the memories and associations of its residents. The quilt complicates the division of analog and digital, and presents algorithmic thinking as a fundamentally human act, layering generational techniques accordingly. It also calls to mind Basma Ghalayini’s introduction to Palestine +100: Stories from a Century After the Nakba:
Four generations on, any Palestinian child can tell you all about their great-grandfather’s back garden in Haifa, Yaffa, or Majdal. They can tell you about their great-grandmother’s kitchen, the patterns on her plates, and the colours of the embroidery on her pillows …This child has never been to any of those places, of course, but so long as they keep the memory of them alive, then, should they ever get to go back, it would be as if they had never left; they could pick up exactly where their great-grandparents left off. Indeed, wherever Palestinian refugees are in the world, one thing unites them: their undoubted belief in their right to return.34
You can remember a life through chapters of hair; through skin-stitched milestones faded over years in the sun and wind; through old shirts made into the squares of a new quilt.35 More worn still are the “whole” things put to work—nets caught on rocks, jeans torn at the knees, scraps and ends—as their outlines contain no design directive toward wholeness, but instead toward the collected destinies of parts and their absent neighbors. To stitch ragged edges together is to absorb this contingency, to embrace this irregularity as a condition of life lived. Holding both edges in your hands and slowly pulling them together over a story is a profoundly intimate act. It gives the stitcher a familiarity with the roughness of things. Real repair requires patience and a respect for entropy.
III. Conclusions
Full consensus—on history, on technology, on money—is not required to bring the future closer, but the thousands of tiny, productive steps between here and there will be more effectively taken by a crowd. The lone visionary-CEO-inventor hasn’t got much to offer (and probably never did) because no single vision of what comes next is helpful for everyone. Let’s instead look to the grandmas for advice. What would it feel like to move beyond an idea of nature that draws a single line from past to future, from primitive to civilized, trending slightly upwards or halting abruptly at Armageddon? A technocratic understanding of history posits that progress equals new technology equals better life, and, in many ways, this has played out—while sowing climatic and humanitarian crises.
Working with leftovers and stitching them back together resets the settler-colonial clock. It is a passionate admission of living inside ruins, and making use of what remains. Not a fresh start; a restart. Stitching, a repeatable practice without explicit beginning or predetermined end, counters linear time and hierarchical labor. This act makes clear that material, method, maker, and motivation fundamentally fit within the same thought. Stitching can help us think of design and people inseparably, a necessary step toward a building ethic that survives the next century. My grandmother grew up during the Great Depression and she saved everything: thread, rubber bands, scraps of paper. So did my mother, and so do I. These spare parts, collected in a junk drawer, become the needful medium to fix a problem, catch a thought, close a hole: all the mundane acts of a life lived resourcefully, carefully, on the edge of survival and the fulfillment of love. Stitching takes leftovers and makes them, if not new, then part of life again. It points to an ecological and social understanding that resists disposability; a sort of entwined material destiny between people and the stuff with which they surround themselves.
Jim Robbins, “As Mass Timber Takes off, How Green Is This New Building Material?” Yale Environment 360, April 9, 2019, ➝. The lexicon of sustainability has a habit of sorting materials that enter architectural territory into two camps: “alternative”—possibly good?—or “standard”—bad, but well-understood. This sorting seems to embed a logic of replacement, of this for that, without considering the complex net of interactions and transformations that make anything into a discrete object with a designed purpose. I hope that poking fun at alternative and non-alternative materials helps us think about more than swapping out current practices for nominally adjusted ones.
See: Arnaud Vander Velpen et al., “Sand and Sustainability: 10 Strategic Recommendations to Avert a Crisis,” UN Environment Program Report (Nairobi, Kenya: United Nations, April 22, 2022), ➝. These considerations for concrete and carbon even arise in discussions regarding the cycles of war and rebuilding in Gaza. Natasha Aruri, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, and Brad Samuels, “Architecture, Planning, and International Law: On Domicide” (The Architectural League of New York , May 23, 2024).
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
Stitching also brings to mind international tribal efforts to restore bison habitat across a huge swath of the Great Plains divided by the US-Canada border. Damage done to this ecosystem through genocidal Indian Wars-era policies, including targeted bison extermination, rail infrastructure, and unsustainable farming practices, are slowly receding in favor of land management grounded in Indigenous knowledge and stewardship. See: Dan Joling, “Alaska Prepares for Wood Bison Return after a Century,” CBC News, March 20, 2015, ➝.
This is not dissimilar to a cotton gin or a musket, the two bellwethers of industrial standardization as a result of their reliance on interchangeable parts.
Kristina Rapacki, “Interview with Kader Attia,” The Architectural Review (February 2024), 77.
People have been doing this forever and everywhere. Consider stitched gourds, kintsugi, and embroidered manuscripts, among many other practices of returning damaged objects to use. See also: Gaetano Speranza, ed., Objets Blessés: La Réparation En Afrique (Paris: Musée du Quai Branly, 2007). See: Kader Attia, Maria Hlavajova, and Wietske Maas, eds., Fragments of Repair (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2025, forthcoming).
Rapacki, “Interview with Kader Attia,” 78-79.
For super technical further reading, see: Jaime Castro, Luis E. Vallejo, and Nicolas Estrada, “Mechanical Analysis of the Dry Stone Walls Built by the Incas,” The European Physical Journal Conferences 140, no. 06012 (2017). For work deeply interested in approaching this practice from contemporary conditions within the architectural field, see: Brandon Clifford and Wes McGee, “Cyclopean Cannibalism: A Method for Recycling Rubble,” in ACADIA 2018: On Imprecision and Infidelity, Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (Mexico City, October 18-20, 2018), 404-413.
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes describes the technologies that produce complete environments, like BIM software, as facilitating “an anti-contextual production of space.” Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, “The Devil Is in the Details: ‘Who Is It That the Earth Belongs To?’” in Non-Extractive Architecture: On Designing without Depletion, ed. Space Caviar, vol. 1 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2021), 95.
For instance, I am thinking with Melanija Grozdanoska, “Ma maison cherche-t-elle à me tuer?” Centre Canadien d’Architecture (CCA), May 2024, ➝.
Elsa MH Mäki, “Building Backward: Archaeology of a Queer Built Future” (Cambridge, Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2022), Harvard DASH, ➝.
For further reading, see: Tracy Brynne Voyles, Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). See also: Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt, Tizziana Baldenebro, Lauren Leving, Joanna Joseph, eds., Sketches on Everlasting Plastics (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2024).
HANNAH, founded by Leslie Lok and Sasa Zivkovic, collaborated with the Cornell Robotic Construction Laboratory to scan, digitally model, and cut tree fragments into an array that could function as a small building’s skin. Paula Pintos, “3D Printing and Robotic Construction: HANNAH Office on Their Experimental Prototype Ashen Cabin,” Arch Daily, July 7, 2021, ➝.
Pintos, “3D Printing and Robotic Construction.”
“Circularity Park, Oberglatt, Eberhard AG, 2021-2022,” ETH University research group projects (blog), 2022, ➝.
Katie MacDonald, Kyle Schumann, and Jonas Hauptman, “Digital Fabrication of Standardless Materials,” in ACADIA 2019: Ubiquity and Autonomy, Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (Austin, TX, October 21-26, 2019), 3.
MacDonald, Schumann, and Hauptman, “Digital Fabrication of Standardless Materials.”
MacDonald, Schumann, and Hauptman, “Digital Fabrication of Standardless Materials,” 3.
As Malterre-Barthes writes, “The production process of these high-technology machines drives extractivism perhaps as much as ‘classic’ construction materials do. But the material impact of data is rarely recognized or subjected to accountability, even though substantial infrastructures is required, such as electrical power, fiber networks, air-based cooling systems, and hard-drive disks, are all dependent on extractive processes.” Malterre-Barthes, “The Devil Is in the Details,” 95.
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi elaborated on the practice of citation in her International Womxn’s Week Keynote Address at Harvard GSD, March 7, 2023.
Felecia Davis, “Soft Systems: Crafting an Architecture” (lecture, Penn State University, State College, PA, November 6, 2023).
For an extremely literal take on this notion, see: Benedict Hobson, “Drones Can ‘Weave Structures in Space in Just a Few Minutes,’” Dezeen, March 4, 2015, ➝.
The often-referenced but rarely cited statistic that somewhere between two-thirds and eighty percent of existing buildings will remain in use in 2050 appears in reports by sustainability consultants and nonprofits like the UK’s Climate Change Council, 3Keel, the Canadian Climate Institute, as well as McKinsey & Company. I have not found an original source for statistics of this type; rather, they seem to be a newly formed common understanding for energy and construction policy recommendations since 2019. Gemma Holmes et al., “UK Housing: Fit for the Future?,”Committee on Climate Change (2019); Rob Kilgour et al., “Global Retrofit Index: An Assessment of the Performance of G20 Countries to Reduce Emissions from Buildings,” 3Keel (November 2023), ➝; Pierre Verrière, “The Future Passes through Old Buildings,” Canadian Climate Institute, May 25, 2020, ➝; Stephen J. Naimoli, “Decarbonizing the Built Environment Brief,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, November 30, 2020, ➝; Jose Luis Blanco et al., “Call for Action: Seizing the Decarbonization Opportunity in Construction,” McKinsey and Company (New York, NY, 2021); and so forth.
As the war in Ukraine is financed by development dollars, see reports: “The World Bank and Ukraine: Laying the Groundwork for Reconstruction in the Midst of War” and Frédéric Mousseau and Eve Devillers, “War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land” (The Oakland Institute, 2023), or, as developer proposals for razed Palestinian lands pop up in the bombs’ wake, see: social media posts by Israeli developer Harei (or Harey) Zahav in November-December 2023 that pasted luxury residential architecture renderings over rubble in Gaza, Palestine, and a recent article on the developer’s West Bank projects: Hagar Shezaf, “The Fall and Rise of Israel’s First Ultra-Orthodox Settlement,” Haaretz, August 28, 2022. Wholesale residential demolition through bombing and road-making in Palestine and Ukraine, for instance, were thoroughly discussed at a virtual event hosted by the Architectural League in May 2024. Aruri, Rajagopal, and Samuels, “Architecture, Planning, and International Law.”
“Hair Matters (Formerly Clean Wave) Program,” Matters of Trust (blog), ➝.
Nango continues: “I’m trying to work with this attitude to incorporate the connection between context and the agency of the object. I’m trying to not separate them or pull them apart — that’s what the architects always do, for some reason. Like, very often designer architecture considers nomadism as something placeless, or something that’s traveling between airports or coffee shops. But for me, nomadism is the exact opposite.” Mimi Zeiger, “Joar Nango on Indigenous Architectures and Slippery Identities,” PIN-UP, ➝.
Felecia Davis, Textural Threshold Hair Salon: Dreadlock. See also: Kate Nelson, “How This Designer Is Using Black Hair to Inspire the Architecture World,” Architectural Digest, February 2, 2023, ➝.
Davis, “Soft Systems: Crafting an Architecture.”
Umar Riaz Muhammad et al., “Hair Detection, Segmentation, and Hairstyle Classification in the Wild,” Image and Vision Computing 71 (2018): 25–37; Davis, “Soft Systems: Crafting an Architecture.”
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, “Buildings Made of Wool and Fungus? Meet the Textile Expert Who’s Making It Happen,” Washington Post Magazine, November 15, 2022, ➝.
Rapacki, “Interview with Kader Attia.”
Davis, “Soft Systems: Crafting an Architecture.”
Basma Ghalayini, ed., Palestine +100: Stories from a Century After the Nakba, trans. Raph Cormack et al. (Manchester, UK: Comma Press, 2019).
Traditional tattoo revitalization movements are ongoing from the Arctic to the Pacific and across the American continents. These practices, until recently banned by settler authorities (church or governmental), are deeply embedded in the material and architectural practices that compose the inherited knowledge of sovereign Indigenous nations. Please note that, while support is welcome for free cultural expression through these markings and the residencies that are helping Indigenous artists share them, these techniques and patterns should not be appropriated. Tattooing often happens in ceremony and is tied to kinship relations that are specific to each nation and their homelands. For further reading, see: Jana Angulalik, “Kakiniit: The Art of Inuit Tattooing,” Canadian Geographic, July 26, 2021, ➝.
Material Acts is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and Craft Contemporary within the context of the eponymous exhibition, curated by Kate Yeh Chiu and Jia Yi Gu as part of Getty PST ART: Art & Science Collide.
