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Critical Practices in
Architecture
Critical Practices in
Architecture:

The Unexamined

Edited by

Jonathan Bean, Susannah Dickinson

and Aletheia Ida
Critical Practices in Architecture: The Unexamined

Series: The Arts, Design and Culture in Cities

Edited by Jonathan Bean, Susannah Dickinson and Aletheia Ida

This book first published 2020

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2020 by Jonathan Bean, Susannah Dickinson, Aletheia Ida

and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-5275-4193-2

ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-4193-1
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... ix

Foreword ................................................................................................... xi
JANE RENDELL

Introduction ........................................................................................... xxiii

JONATHAN BEAN, SUSANNAH DICKINSON AND ALETHEIA IDA

Section One: Working on the Ground

Chapter 1 .................................................................................................... 3
Ushering in a New Era of Criticality: Pedagogies for Design Teaching
JANET MCGAW

Chapter 2 .................................................................................................. 27
Informal Water Service Providers: Water Access and Quality in Kibera
Informal Settlement in Nairobi, Kenya
COURTNEY CROSSON AND KEPHA NGITO

Chapter 3 .................................................................................................. 45
Decolonizing Spatial Practice: Critical Insights in the Agency
of Landscape in Post-disaster Recovery
JOERN LANGHORST

Chapter 4 .................................................................................................. 69
Central Neighborhoods’ Revitalization and the Tourist Bubble:
From Gentrification to Touristification of daily life in Montreal
HÉLÈNE BÉLANGER, DOMINIC LAPOINTE AND ALEXIS GUILLEMARD

Section Two: Taking a Step Back

Chapter 5 .................................................................................................. 97
Open-Cut Data Mining: Multi-scalar Complexity and Critical Spatial
Practices
EDUARDO KAIRUZ AND SAM SPURR
vi Table of Contents

Chapter 6 ................................................................................................ 119

Limitless Capacity: Water, Landscape and Society in the American West
KATHLEEN KAMBIC

Chapter 7 ................................................................................................ 143

After the Storm: A Post-Critical Stance on Practice for Puerto Rico’s
Reconstruction
YARA M. COLÓN RODRÍGUEZ AND LUZ MARIE RODRÍGUEZ

Chapter 8 ................................................................................................ 173

Eisenman’s Critical Practice: Beyond Urban Formalism, In-Between
Actualizing Function, and Virtualizing Chaos
NAJLAA KAREEM

Section Three: Making in Detail

Chapter 9 ................................................................................................ 197

Social Infrastructures
JULIA JAMROZIK

Chapter 10 .............................................................................................. 209

Kites
ANDREA WHEELER

Chapter 11 .............................................................................................. 229

Practicing Place: Tactical Modes of Practice at the Intersection
of Art and Architecture
KATHY WAGHORN

Chapter 12 .............................................................................................. 251

Performing Choreographies of Spatial Labor as Critical Spatial Practice
BETH WEINSTEIN

Section Four: Transforming What’s Next

Chapter 13 .............................................................................................. 275

Soft Materials: Confronting the Socio-Cultural Effects of Software-
Embedded-Design in Shaping an Inclusive Built Environment
MAYA PRZYBYLSKI
 Critical Practices in Architecture: The Unexamined vii

Chapter 14 .............................................................................................. 297

Building Integrated Food-Energy-Water Model: The Application
of the Food Resilience Urban Infrastructure Tools (F.R.U.I.T.)
JAMES BRAZIL AND SHRUTI KHANDELWAL

Chapter 15 .............................................................................................. 317

Toward Human-Centered Smart Cities: Understanding Emerging
Technologies and Their Effect on the Urban Experience
CELEN PASALAR AND GEORGE HALLOWELL

Chapter 16 .............................................................................................. 341

Performing Multiplicity: Digital Tooling and Ecological Thinking
MARANTHA DAWKINS

Postscript ................................................................................................ 357

From Critical to Ethical Spatial Practice
JANE RENDELL

Contributors ............................................................................................ 381

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Critical Practices in Architecture: The Unexamined was initiated at an

international conference co-hosted with Architecture, Media, Politics,
Society (AMPS) at the University of Arizona, School of Architecture in
February 2018. The editors are grateful to Dr. Graham Cairns, the founder
and Honorary Director of AMPS, for this meaningful collaboration with his
international nonprofit research organization. Many members of the faculty,
administration, staff and students at the University of Arizona were
supportive and integral to the conference’s success, particularly Director
Rob Miller, who encouraged the effort from the start. The quality and
diversity of the conference delegates led to the contributions in this
publication.

We would like to acknowledge the following for their generosity in

moderating sessions for the conference: Barbara Bryson, Graham Cairns,
Elena Canovas, Kristina Currans, Kirk Dimond, Christopher Domin, Dan
Hoffman, Laura Hollengreen, Rob Miller, Clare Robinson, Chris Trumble
and Siri Trumble.

A special thank you to Bill Mackey, Clare Robinson and Beth

Weinstein, who provided key input and insights.

We are also grateful to AMPS for connecting us with Cambridge

Scholars Publishing, whose editorial and production teams have been a
pleasure to work with.

Lastly, a huge debt of gratitude to Jane Rendell. Her work is a key

inspiration to many of the authors and delegates and her generosity of spirit
and work were indispensable to the conference and this publication.
 FOREWORD

CRITICAL SPATIAL PRACTICE:

INTRODUCTIONS AND ADJUSTMENTS

JANE RENDELL

When I first introduced the term ‘critical spatial practice’ (Rendell 2003a,
221–33), to describe projects located between art and architecture, and the
standpoints theory offered for playing out disciplinary definitions, I was
keen to stress three particular qualities of these practices as the critical, the
spatial, and the interdisciplinary. I proposed that the definition of the term
‘critical’ be taken from Frankfurt School critical theory, particularly those
processes that involve self-reflection and the desire for social change, that
seek to transform rather than to only describe. Where Max Horkheimer,
arguably the originator of critical theory, distinguishes it from traditional
theory, by arguing that traditional theory is a theory of the status quo
designed to increase the productivity and functioning of the world as it
presently exists (Horkheimer 1937/2002), according to Raymond Guess, in
his later account of the work of the Frankfurt School, of which Horkheimer
was a founder member, critical theories are forms of knowledge that differ
from theories in the natural sciences, because they are ‘reflective’ rather
than ‘objectifying’. In other words, according to Guess, critical theories take
into account and reflect upon their own procedures and methods: ‘A critical
theory, then, is a reflective theory which gives agents a kind of knowledge
inherently productive of enlightenment and emancipation’ (Geuss 1981, 2).

In my own work, I have argued for an extension of ‘critical theory’ to

include the work of later theorists, poststructuralists, feminists and others
whose thinking is also self-reflective and desirous of change, both to oneself
and to society. For me, this kind of critical theoretical work provides a
chance not only to reflect on existing conditions but also to imagine
something different – to transform the world rather than to simply describe
xii Foreword

it.1 My intention has been to consider how the key qualities of critical theory
– self-reflection and social transformation – might be transposed into
practice. Drawing on the work of Michael de Certeau (2011) and Henri
Lefebvre (1991), I have distinguished between those strategies (for de
Certeau) or representations of space (for Lefebvre) that aim to maintain and
reinforce existing social and spatial orders, and those tactics (for de Certeau)
and spaces of representation (for Lefebvre) that seek to critique and question
them, defining the latter as ‘critical spatial practices’.

I later developed my understandings of the potential for critical spatial

practices by examining a series of projects located between art and
architecture, which sought to question and transform the social conditions
of the sites into which they intervened, as well as to test the boundaries and
procedures of their own disciplines (Rendell 2006, 1–2, 4, 6, 9, 12, 66 and
191; see also Rendell n.d; 2016, 16). I suggested that while multidisciplinarity
could be described as a way of working where a number of disciplines are
present but maintain their own distinct identities and ways of doing things,
an interdisciplinary mode of practice was one where individuals operate
between and at the edge of their disciplines and in so doing question the
ways in which they usually work (Rendell 2006, 10–11).

Other theorists and practitioners have since worked with the term critical
spatial practice, evolving it in different directions. For example, there was
the reading group and blogspot initiated by Nicholas Brown in the early
2000s, which came out of discussions around Brown’s own artistic walking
practice (IPRH Reading Group. 2006–08; Senn 2006). In 2011, Nikolaus
Hirsch and Marcus Miessen started a book series with Sternberg Press
called Critical Spatial Practice which focused on architectural discourse
and practice, and in the first publication they asked the question: ‘What is
Critical Spatial Practice?’ (Hirsch and Miessen 2012). Hirsch and Miessen
went on, in 2016, to set up a website site called criticalspatialpractice.org
to archive their work in this area since 2011. And also in 2017, the
MaHKUscript, Journal of Fine Art Research published a special issue on
critical spatial practice, where many of the contributors describe critical
spatial practices they have been engaged with that concern, above all,
political and ecological issues (MaHKUscript 2017).

For me, looking back at the term now thirteen years on, many of the
debates and practices around art and public space into which I proposed the

1 For a detailed discussion of the various possibilities opened up by critical theory

for thinking the relationship between theory and practice, see Rendell 2003b.
 Critical Practices in Architecture: The Unexamined xiii

term have been reformulated in some important ways, and so I want to offer
five adjustments to critical spatial practice for today. The first is perhaps the
most obvious, but also the most complex, as it relates to the distinction
between art and everyday life. This has been a key aspect of art criticism
over at least the past 50 years, and although there is not the time nor space
to get into the detail of this here, I do want to highlight how the term critical
spatial practice, as I originally proposed it, may not pay sufficient attention
to the ways in which distinctions can be made between practices that operate
as art and those that are intrinsic to everyday life and less interested in their
role as art. In Lefebvre’s work, it is those practices of representational space,
in offering forms of resistance, that might be thought of as closest to critical
art practice, and it is through his understanding of different notions of the
everyday, that we can also start to distinguish between specific kinds of life
practice, from those that simply go along with dominant economic urban
forces, to those which react against them, trying to offer change in multiple
modes, from revolutionary political confrontation to more playful
subversions. And it is this paying of attention to types of spatial practice
that is important, from those that are critical in an aesthetic mode to those
that are more questioning of economic ‘function’, the latter being more
important in architecture where the category of use has such vital
implications for people’s lives. The essays in this book, and the critical
spatial practices with which they engage, develop this aspect of the debate
in some fascinating ways.

Second is an adjustment which explores relations between

interdisciplinarity and trandisciplinarity. The presence of the unconscious in
interdisciplinarity interests me, because it indicates how difficult such work
is, not only materially and intellectually, but also emotionally. In demanding
that we exchange what we know for what we do not know, and that we give
up the safety of competence and specialism for the fears of inability and
failure, the experience of interdisciplinary work produces a potentially
destabilizing engagement with existing power structures, allowing the
emergence of untested knowledges and uncertain understandings. Cultural
critic Homi Bhabha has described interdisciplinarity in psychoanalytic
terms as ‘the acknowledgement of the emergent sign of cultural difference
produced in the ambivalent [my emphasis] movement between the
pedagogical and performative address’ (Bhabha 1994, 163),2 while Julia

2 In an interview with W.J.T. Mitchell Homi Bhabha has distinguished the widely

accepted ‘Interdisciplinarity 1’, where the ‘foundational truths’ of disciplines are put
‘in proximity’ in order to create a ‘wider base’, and the more problematic,
‘Interdisciplinarity 2’, which, ‘posed at the point of our disciplines’ liminality …
xiv Foreword

Kristeva has noted that ‘interdisciplinarity is always a site where

expressions of resistance [my emphasis] are latent’, arguing that because of
‘a tendency to jealously protect one’s own domain. Specialists … do not …
teach their students to construct a diagonal axis in their methodology’
(Kristeva 1998, 5–6).

So if interdisciplinarity is concerned with working in a place between

disciplines in order to question their edges and borders from a psychic as
well as social perspective, transdisciplinarity is often described as a
horizontal movement, concerned with moving across disciplines, transversally.
Derived from the Latin preposition ‘trans’, meaning ‘across, to or on the
farther side of, beyond, over’, the term can be used to give the sense of
‘across, through, over, to or on the other side of, beyond, outside of, from
one place, person, thing, or state to another’ (OED 2019). But as philosopher
Peter Osbourne points out in his important intellectual history of
transdisciplinarity, where he traces the term back to its roots in systems
thinking, the distinguishing feature of transdisciplinary work has been its
way of connecting to disciplines outside academia (see e.g. Osborne 2015),
this insight allows us to remember that these terms are historically generated
and to reconsider the relation of practices both inside and outside academia
and their associated disciplines in new configurations.

In this vein, I have been particularly interested in Gary Genosko’s

discussion of how, for the philosopher Félix Guattari, the interdisciplinarity
(of 1968) was compromised: it relied too much on the disciplines between
which it was located, and served to strengthen rather than question their
dominance (Genosko and Guattari 2002, 24).3 For Guattari, it is
transdisciplinarity that holds the potential of radical critique, linked in his
own philosophy to transversality, an ‘unconscious source of action’, that
carries a group’s desire, ‘a dimension opposite and complementary to the
structures that generate pyramidal hierarchisation’ (Guattari 1964, 22). A
key early question for Guattari concerns what becomes of transference in

requires us to articulate a new and collaborative definition of the humanities’. See

Mitchell 1995.
3 In many ways the problems of the interdisciplinarity of 1968 as recounted by

Genosko, in terms of being ‘team-based’, adopting ‘brain-storming’ and the

‘growing influence of the marketplace’, resonate both with Homi Bhabha’s
definition of interdisciplinarity 1 and my characterisation of multidisciplinarity as I
discuss above. However, a real interrogation of the relation between these three pairs
of distinctions would need a much longer piece of research thoroughly embedded in
the material conditions of the late 1960s in France and the mid/late 1990s in the UK
and the US.
 Critical Practices in Architecture: The Unexamined xv

the institutional setting of the hospital, and it is transversality which for him
provides the possibility of critiquing the ‘institutional context, its constraints,
organisation, practices, etc., all those things and relations which normally
exist in the background’ (Genosko and Guattari 2002, 71).

If critical spatial practice, as I introduced it in 2002 and 2006, prioritized

the role of the interdisciplinary, that I defined as a place between disciplines,
to provide a critique of existing methodologies – including artistic projects
which adopt architectural processes, architectural works which draw on fine
art approaches, as well as art/architectural collaborations – how might the
between of interdisciplinarity might relate to the across of transdisciplinarity
today?4 If the between remains related to the points from which it is
separated, then perhaps the across is more focused on the movement
between these points and what lies beyond them,5 an emphasis which is
particularly useful when investigating the operation of critical spatial
practice in and through time.

So the third adjustment I want to focus on concerns the importance of

time in critical spatial practice. My experience of the time-based curatorial
premise of One-Day-Sculpture curated by Claire Doherty and David Cross,
encouraged me to think again about some key spatial terms and to ask: ‘what
occurs when time comes to the fore rather than space?’ (Rendell 2009). The
subtitle of geographer Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies of 1989,
‘the reassertion of space in critical social theory’ refers to one of the main
projects for cultural geographers in the 1970s (Soja 1989). A number of
marxist geographers in that period took issue with the dialectical processes
of historical materialism, where history was taken to be the active entity in

4 My initial conceptualization of the ‘between’ drew on the radical move offered by

Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction as a critique of binary structures, to think
‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’, in order to invent a new term, like ‘critical spatial
practice’, which operates simultaneously as both of the binary terms, and yet exceeds
their scope. Yet I also drew inspiration from Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the relay as
important for thinking about the relation of theory to practice. See Rendell 2006, 9–
10.
5 Although current debate is full of references to multi-, inter-, trans- and post-

disciplinary research and practice, there are very few accounts, which attempt to
define the terms, or discuss on what basis an account of their differences might
proceed. An exception is Isabelle Doucet and Nel Janssens (2011, 2), who have
suggested that transdisciplinary knowledge in architecture and urbanism is
distinguished by three features: the relation of discipline (theory) to profession
(practice), an ethical dimension, and the experimental quality of design.
xvi Foreword

shaping social production, and space was considered merely as the site in
which social relations took place.

Geographers such as Soja, as well as David Harvey and Doreen Massey

argued for the importance of space in producing social relationships and in
so doing had turned to the work of Lefebvre (Harvey 1989; Massey 1994)
and his understanding of the two-way relation between the spatial and the
social: ‘Space and the political organization of space’, he argued, ‘express
social relationships but also react back upon them’ (Lefebvre 1991, 8).6 The
‘turn’ to spatial theory in the late 1980s and early 1990s highlighted the
importance of space in the postmodern period, when academics from all
kinds of disciplines turned to geography for a rigorous and theoretically-
informed analysis of the relationship between spatial and social relations,
and of place and identity.

But more recently we have seen the valorisation of the relational and the
performative, two terms that cannot be theorized or practised without
reference to time. These emerging critical thematics are integral features of
what is being called the ‘performative turn’. Noticing time again has huge
implications for spatial practice, practice is a process, it is nothing if not
time-based: to practice is a verb, verbs are words of action – they make or
take place over time. So what happens if we rethink Soja’s call for the
‘reassertion of space in social theory’ as the ‘reassertion of time into critical
spatial practice’? It is stating the obvious that the spatial must be thought of
in relation to the temporal; yet what we are considering here is not
necessarily time only as history, but a rather fuller investigation into time’s
various modalities: flow, flux, duration, ephemerality and event.

Such ‘a reassertion of time in critical spatial practice’ (to paraphrase

Soja) leads us to search for the temporalities of site-specificities. This time-
based focus would seem to be particularly appropriate for thinking through
my fourth adjustment, which is a reflection on how the dynamic of work in
this area has been until recently at its most vibrant in relation to urbanism,
from resistance to neo-liberal patterns of regeneration, including state-led
gentrification to the ways of reconstructing after disaster, and to broader
propositions for alternative forms of planning and practising ‘otherwise’.7

6 This quote from Henri Lefebvre, emphasized by David Harvey, is discussed in Soja

1989, 81, footnote 4.

7
See the work of Doina Petrescu on altering practices and practising otherwise. For
example, Petrescu 2007; Petrescu et al. 2010; and Petrescu and Trogal 2017.
 Critical Practices in Architecture: The Unexamined xvii

Reflecting on the work of art-architecture collaborative muf, critic Kath

Shonfield posed the following questions and observations: ‘How do you
develop a city-wide strategy when you are fascinated by the detail of things?
And how can you make something small-scale in the here and now if you
are driven by the urge to formulate strategic proposals for the future? muf’s
work … develops the particular to the general and back to the particular...
It is expressed in the formula d/s = DETAIL/STRATEGY’ (Shonfield 2001,
14). Shonfield frames the micro-macro interactions of muf’s working
processes through the spatial turn, as does my own term ‘critical spatial
practice’. However, it has become increasingly clear that the tactics and
strategies – ambient, ambulant, direct, DIY, instant, insurgent – to name but
a few, of this current phase of urbanism set the tone for a nuanced
exploration of temporality, the need to include both the fleeting event as
well as the patience required to ride out the long duration of planning, as in
the work of the Austrian collaborative duo, transparadiso, and architect and
visual artist, Apolonija Šušteršiþ, which span the making of temporary
interventions and long-term engagements and projects (see e.g. Holub and
Hohenbüchler 2015; transparadiso 2013; Šušteršiþ 2019).

But the fifth and final adjustment is perhaps the most important one, as
it concerns the effectiveness of criticality to deal with the kind of challenges
we currently face. Does a critical position contain within it the offer of an
alternative, or is it simply a negation or rejection, of a norm? This attempt
to position criticality in relation to the positive and the negative relates to
current debates around both the post-critical and the question of the
‘unexamined’ in the title of this book. So I offer these thoughts as an
opening into the book’s content, perhaps as a lens through which to consider
the different perspectives put forward here, all of which deal in practices
that are forms of art, design or architecture, that offer not only critique as a
rejection of practices and ideologies that are understood as unacceptable and
unjust, but also alternative ways of doing things that affirm a set of
alternative aspirational values and start to enact a path towards the futures
to which they point.

The US version of post-criticality dominant in the architectural

discourse of the early 2000s, exemplified by Robert Somol and Sarah
Whiting’s paper, ‘Notes around the Doppler Effect and other Moods of
Modernism’, is something I took issue with in the introduction to Critical
Architecture (Rendell 2007). While I agreed with Somol and Whiting’s
rejection of an autonomous form of disciplinary, previously advocated by
critical architects like Peter Eisenman, I disagreed with their rejection of an
oppositional dialectic, believing that there are certain things and ideas that
xviii Foreword

need to be opposed. My position then was to hold onto the basic tenets of
the critical theory of the Frankfurt School – namely forms of knowledge that
are self-reflective and emancipatory – and to argue for their transposition
into practice (for a more detailed discussion, please see my chapter at the
end of this book, which can be read together with this foreword). I still hold
those views, but here I want to focus on the question of why opposing
something and choosing to reject it might have been considered a problem
in itself.

In an age of relentless positivity, where the demand is to see even

problematic situations in terms of their potential ‘going forward’, one of the
reasons to reject a critique which takes the form of opposition, may well be
to do with the perceived negativity of such a position, and the problems
neoliberal cultures have with the negative. For this reason alone, it is
interesting to consider how to argue for the potential of the negative. In the
Work of the Negative, the late French psychoanalyst Andre Green puts
forward four specific thematics for considering how the negative operates
in psychoanalysis – through absence, refusal, reversal or inversion, and
nothing (Green 1999). He writes that the practice of psychoanalysis is a
particular kind of work, one which makes the negative visible, and that this
is because it concerns intersubjective confrontation, not just the address of
another subject, but an experience in which the other subject must be
included but not controlled. There is the confrontation of another without,
he says, which corresponds to the self-confrontation of another within. This
is a doubled confrontation with the other – without and within. Green called
this method – where ‘the positive’ equates to ‘the negative of the negative’
– ‘dialogical’ (rather than dialectical) ‘thinking’ (Urribarri 2018, 66).
Green’s ability to complexify negativity, and to understand that it contains
– as well as refusal – reversal, absence or even nothing at all, might offer a
way of considering how the negative of the critical function is still relational
and perhaps then even ethical.

Following a different philosophical trajectory, Rosi Braidotti has

proposed ‘that political agency need not be critical in the negative sense of
the oppositional and thus may not be aimed solely or primarily at the
production of counter-subjectivities. Subjectivity is rather’, she writes, ‘a
process ontology of auto-poiesis or self-styling, which involves complex
and continuous negotiations with dominant norms and values and hence also
multiple forms of accountability.’ She has argued that: ‘Contemporary
nomadic practices of subjectivity – both in pedagogy and other areas of
thought – work towards a more affirmative approach to critical theory’
(Dolphijn, and van der Tuin 2012, 19–37. And in their work on a post-
 Critical Practices in Architecture: The Unexamined xix

critical pedagogy, Naomi Hodgson et al, posit that this affirmation does not
need to accept, but can take the form of caring and protecting what we love,
and in so doing turn towards hope (Hodgson, Vlieghe and Zamojski 2017).

The post-critical is used here not to reject or negate criticality but to

consider how work that occurs after criticality has been asserted can operate
in dialogue with it in order to develop more possibilities. We could think of
the post-critical here as a way, not of saying that because we come after the
critical, that everything critical is over, but rather as an indicator that the
critical has arrived, and that everything which occurs after this
announcement, is in its midst, marked by it, and so a form of continuation
with, or relation to, rather than breakage from, the critical.

The art critic Jan Verwoert, by suggesting that we need to enact refusals
of options which allow us either a no or a yes, takes things one step further
in opening up the space for other possibilities. He refuses to choose the
negative nor to assert a positive: ‘Maybe the secret of autonomous agency
and the good life lies precisely in opening up the space of those other options
through a categorical refusal to accept the forceful imposition of any terms,
leaving us no choice but to choose between either yes or no?’ (Verwoert
2017, 208). In this light, the work that is done through the ‘unexamined’
need not be understood as that which is not there, not examined, and so
considered in the negative, nor as what is there, as a posited possible
unexamined, but rather as a refusal of the existing options of yes or no, and
instead a way of negotiating a space of multiple alternatives placing ‘the
affirmative potential of no alongside the dissident capacity of yes-saying as
a species of refusal’, as artist-writer Emma Coker has put it in The Yes of
the No (Cocker 2016).

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 INTRODUCTION

Critical Practices in Architecture: The Unexamined, embraces the idea that

in today’s complex, unsustainable world, multiple, emerging perspectives
are critical to the design fields and the environment as a whole. This
orientation to complexity, questioning, and self-reflection characterize
critical practice. In opposition to conventional conceptions of architectural
education and work, Jane Rendell’s ground-breaking work defines critical
spatial practice as “self-reflective modes of thought that seek to change the
world.” This mode of practice is reflected in the growing body of work done
by socially engaged architects and artists across the world. This book
extends a much-needed conversation on the built environment. It seeks to
open up directions for understanding various aspects of critical practice as
an expanded field encompassing architecture in all its entanglements,
questioning the experience, agency, ethics, and the making of place—and
what critical practice means in our changing times.

The book contributes to newly emerging and established dialogues

occurring within today’s art and design professions internationally.
Focusing on the broad theme of critical practice and what that means for the
work of architects, artists, urbanists, planners and social theorists in our
complex, changing times, each chapter seeks to find places of convergence
for the multiple strands that form around themes of practice, methods,
theory, pedagogy, and representation across these disciplines. The goal is to
engage and challenge readers from across countries and fields of study.

The chapters in this volume connect several relevant conversations

under the umbrella of critical practice. For example, chapters in The
Experience of Place relate to the kinds of conversations about social
engagement, art, and design. The chapters on data mining, digital tooling,
and soft materials relate to a growing interest in the intersection between the
built environment and technology. The Unexamined builds on questions
raised by several existing edited collections, including Fast-forward
Urbanism: Rethinking Architecture's Engagement with the City, edited by
Dana Cuff and Roger Sherman, Beyond Shelter: Architecture and Human
Dignity, edited by Marie Aquinilo, Expanding Architecture: Design as
Activism - edited by Bryan Bell and Katie Wakeford, and Becoming Places:
Urbanism/architecture/identity/power, edited by Kim Dovey.
xxiv Introduction

As noted in the acknowledgements, The Unexamined presents a

selection of work from an international conference co-hosted with
Architecture, Media, Politics, Society (AMPS) at the University of Arizona
School of Architecture in February 2018. The conference was titled
“Critical Practice in an Age of Complexity.” It offered an interdisciplinary
critique of the built environment and bought together global delegates from
various fields and backgrounds, including artists, architects, community
activists, designers, ecologists, film-makers, historians, landscape architects,
media specialists, sociologists and urbanists. The conference call asked
participants to question “whether in today’s increasingly complex world,
practice can be ‘critical.’ Can it understand the conditions it operates in?
Can it challenge these conditions? Can it change them? Can it make a
difference?”1 Our faculty found these themes and questions especially
pressing, as we had been grappling with them in the context of institutional
pressure to keep an architecture program relevant to the shifting priorities
of a land grant institution in the early 21st century.

The Unexamined continues and develops this initial line of questioning

about critical practice, elaborating on theory, methods and practice. Inviting
Jane Rendell to keynote the conference was a natural choice due to her
stature and relevance to the concept of critical spatial practice. At the last
minute she was not able to travel because of a strike across the United
Kingdom that was opposing proposed cuts to pensions for those in higher
education. Instead of traveling to the conference, she woke up in the middle
of the night to give her presentation in Arizona by Skype so she could
remain present in London to participate in the strike. The backdrop of the
strike gave her lecture an especially memorable, critical context, which she
related to her theories and experiences with ethics, research and teaching.
What could have been a conference organizational disaster ended up being
an inspiring lesson in personal character and ethics.

Since the conference the need to double down on our commitment to

critical practice has grown even more apparent. The Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Global Warming, released in
the fall of 2018, made clear that the time we have to prevent the worst effects
of climate change is dwindling rapidly. The pressures of migration and
increasing political instability around the world have become impossible to
ignore, especially from our location in Tucson, Arizona, close to the border
with Mexico. We are reminded daily that architects, landscape architects,
and planners are instrumental in creating the built environments that are the

1 http://architecturemps.com/arizona/
 Critical Practices in Architecture: The Unexamined xxv

backdrop for the global processes of late capitalism. There is a growing

understanding in discourses about architecture and design that to be critical
means not only to understand how our work perpetuates and accelerates
global processes, but also to question how reframing the work of design
might lead us to establish different trajectories for our culture and the built
and natural environments we all share. This is an expansive definition of
what it means to be critical, spanning education, practice, community
engagement, and theory-building.

The work of the authors in this volume illustrates the potential of critical
practice through a series of rich examples and theoretical inquiry. Building
on Jane Rendell’s work on critical spatial practice, many authors engage the
discourse of contemporary design by expanding upon ideas that infuse
political, social, and environmental agendas into art, architecture, and urban
design. Critical theories of Marxist sociology introduced by Max
Horkheimer in the 1930’s can be traced from the first chapter onwards,
registering in references to Noam Chomsky’s disaster capitalism theories,
and then again in Manfredo Tafuri’s general critique of the architecture
profession in the 1970’s as a support mechanism for capitalist objectives. In
many chapters, the authors cite concepts from materialist and assemblage
theories, including those of Deleuze and Guattari, Michel de Certeau, and
Kim Dovey, as well as the social complexity theories of Manuel DeLanda.
The introduction of the aesthetic as a core value to be considered in
contemporary practices arises in these writings by way of Maurice Merleau-
Ponty’s phenomenological position on direct individual experience as a
means for understanding environmental conditions and human-nature
relationships, is echoed through Graham Harmon’s object oriented ontology
and notions of enmeshing, and in Bruno Latour’s arguments on the politics
of science vs. the arts under contemporary climate change. Authors who are
concerned primarily with the urban scale engage the reader with early
thinkers, such as Walter Benjamin, who identifies architecture in the urban
environment as a background that crafts life’s social experiences. These
ideas are echoed in the ideas of simulacra by Jean Baudrillard and in Henri
Lefebvre’s opposition of conceived and lived space. Experimental
approaches to mapping urban conditions are addressed in several chapters,
including Kevin Lynch’s notions of human flows and interactions as a
significant element of city form, Ian McHarg’s ecological design theories
informing contemporary GIS techniques, as well as William Mitchell’s
assessments of landscape and power and the emerging invisible conditions
of technology pervading urban life. Many authors, in one way or another,
tend to culminate their arguments around the reactions to late capitalism and
technical determinism using the work of critical theorists, from the
xxvi Introduction

significance of play by Miguel Sicart, to the optics of disciplinary

methodologies by Henri Lefebvre, and the resistance to conformist
operations of dominant culture by K. Michael Hays. The origins of such
contemporary subaltern theories may indeed have roots in Michel
Foucault’s critiques of architecture and urban design, which make clear the
instrumentality of these disciplines as mechanisms that serve authority and
as an inherent form of social control. Yet the critique of the top-down
influences from these critical theorists may be exactly why some chapter
authors seek knowledge through theories of human psychology, such as
those developed by Donald Broadbent and Amos Rappaport, or the feminist
and sexual theories of Luce Irigaray. In sum, the diversity of theoretical
discourse presented in this book reflects a common perspective with similar
threads and echoes of thought in different contexts. At the same time, each
chapter provides specific theoretical insights and nuance to spark our
curiosities, raise questions, and engender hope for alternate possibilities to
emerge.

Section 1, Working on the Ground, builds on the authors’ first-hand

experiences in design studios in Australia, in an informal settlement in
Kenya, in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans, and in two redeveloped districts
in Montreal. These chapters show how critical practice can shape pedagogy,
community engagement, and research. In Chapter 1, Janet McGaw explains
how she teaches a critical studio to engage international students in deeper
exploration of the consequences of global flows. The techniques she uses,
grounded in theory, set up the expectation that design is emergent and
redefine difference as a “subjective and dynamic encounter between
cultures which produces new hybrid architectures.” Her approach helps
students find a critical perspective to make sense of a changing world. In
Chapter 2, Courtney Crosson and Kepha Ngito investigate the different
ways access to water is controlled in an informal settlement in Nairobi,
Kenya. Using Participatory Urban Appraisal as a method, they find that,
despite past reform efforts and future plans to expand access to water, a
critical perspective means considering how water distribution can be
achieved effectively and equitably. Chapter 3, by Joern Langhorst, uses the
lens of a built project in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward to argue that the
discourses of sustainability and resilience are built on fundamentally shaky
ground. The design project described, a platform over the bayou, is used as
a community gathering place. It reflects the concept of critical practice by
providing a community a place to determine their own future. Chapter 4,
written by Hélène Bélanger, Dominic Lapointe, and Alexis Guillemard,
with Sara Cameron, discusses the rise of neighborhoods in Montreal where
the techniques of tourism are reflected back upon the people the developers
 Critical Practices in Architecture: The Unexamined xxvii

and city planners hope to attract to the area. The authors question whether
critical planning is possible and argue that public spaces should be designed
in a way that is broadly inclusive, rather than that narrowly targets specific
users and activities. These chapters set the scene for the rest of the book,
illuminating the many ways the concept of critical practice can inform the
work of design.

Section 2, Taking a Step Back, seeks to question the core assumptions

behind how designers engage with the built environment. In Chapter 5,
Eduardo Kairuz and Sam Spurr clarify the ramifications and complexities
of coal mining in Australia. In defining mining ideology as a hyperobject,
they engage with a form of resistance aesthetics, specifically with its scale
and violence, looking at creative practice as a way to develop new forms of
communication. In Chapter 6, Kathleen Kambic uses the example of the
Colorado Compact to show how water resources have often been
overlooked in the field of landscape architecture. The project has been
managed and distributed through socio technical processes associated with
capitalism and neoliberalism, often considered to be outside the boundaries
of the traditional professional field. Yara M. Colón Rodríguez and Luz M.
Rodríguez explore the situation after the Hurricane Maria disaster in Puerto
Rico in Chapter 7, with a critique of the assumed irrelevance of the
architectural profession to make transformative change. The chapter
provides specific Puerto Rican architecture practices and case study
examples that are pushing the boundaries towards the pluralist and critical
place-making that the authors’ positions aspire to. In Chapter 8, Najlaa
Kareem ties together theoretical ideas to highlight and parallel a shift from
the conventional praxis of architecture and urbanism which uses dualisms,
to a more process-based, inclusive design methodology. Peter Eisenman’s
work as a theorist and practitioner is highlighted to explore these new
directions in critical architectural practice. These chapters invite us to
question our frameworks and propose a way to work toward change.

Section 3, Making in Detail, focuses on creative work that engages

critical practice in the space between art and architecture. Each of the four
authors locate their work in the field of critical theory and explain how this
perspective has informed their practice’s work. Julia Jamrozik presents her
interactive public installations in Chapter 9, which engage multi-
generational populations with acts of play and curiosity, offering a lens to
view the concept of play as a socially liberating force in the public realm.
In Chapter 10, Andrea Wheeler explores nontraditional relationships of
humans and nature and the resultant ecological aesthetic and sustainable
implications. She highlights the increasing need for the inclusion of
xxviii Introduction

aesthetics and ethics in the field of sustainable design and narrates an

exhibition of kites at the Venice Biennale, which reflects and anticipates
these questions. Kathy Waghorn’s practice is discussed in Chapter 11. She
describes her work as an event marked by openness and change rather than
something bounded and static. It is a process of exchanges. She puts her
projects in conversation with the dynamism of assemblage theory as
opposed to static concepts of the master narrative and plan. Beth
Weinstein’s work in Chapter 12 delves into the instruments, artifacts and
laborers in our midst. It shows how her performances engage the senses and
body in a series of multi-layered critical, spatial practices that challenge and
reveal the seemingly at times invisible processes and their manifestations in
our midst. These chapters put a spotlight on the significance of the moment
of interaction—between people and people, people and objects, and objects
and other objects—in critical practice.

Section 4, Transforming What’s Next, brings the perspective of critical

practice to bear on the technological changes transforming our world. In
Chapter 13, Maya Przybylski discusses software-embedded design, where
computation is key to the ongoing mediation between the designed object
and the external world. Drawing from concepts in the field of Software
Studies, she argues for a higher level of literacy, not just in computational
techniques, but also in the qualitative and quantitative aspects of data
quality. These “soft materials” profoundly transform the way space is
designed, used, and experienced. In Chapter 14, James Brazil, Shruti
Khandelwal, and Esber Andiroglu outline a proposal for a way the urban
built environment could be better integrated with the food production
system. Their concept uses a dynamic model to match the food needs of a
given population with the affordances of different building types and
locations. Chapter 15, by Celen Pasalar and George Hallowell, raises
provocative questions about the implications of smart technologies that
suggest a top-down, rather than bottom-up, implementation of technology
with a primary focus on efficiency. The authors suggest planners work
towards a human-centered perspective on how planners could evaluate the
interaction between the implementation of smart technology and the goal of
creating high-quality places for everyday experiences. In Chapter 16,
Marantha Dawkins begins by describing landscapes as the result of power
relations. Applying this lens to present-day Pittsburgh, she introduces the
concept of the superorganism, returning agency in a landscape that has long
been dominated by human activity to an ecosystem of plants. She describes
a project called Behavioral Landscape, a collaboration with Nicolas Azel,
that shows how critical practice works from theory to design. Together, the
Another random document with
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reason why I should be completely subject to Gage’s slightest word. We
can’t build on that basis.”
“What he wants,” said Margaret astutely, “is to have you subject to his
dream.”
Helen smiled rather ruefully.
“He might wake up from his dream!”
“That’s the chance women have always taken—even the luckiest ones.”
“I don’t see that it’s any use for me to think over causes and rake up a
justification here and a justification there anyway,” said Helen. “The only
thing of vital importance is to decide whether I’m going to let events come
as they will and be passive under them or whether I’m going to try to
manage the events.”
“I shouldn’t think there’d be much choice there.”
“There is though. It’s so easy to sit back and say, ‘I’m trapped. I’ll just
have to take whatever fate sends. There’s nothing I can do.’ ”
“But you won’t, for there are no ends of things you could do. It’s
complicated of course. If you leave Gage, of course it puts a crimp in your
political possibilities just now, not that the fact of separation would much
matter but of course up to this point your political reputation has been partly
builded on Gage’s name.”
“And I can’t trade on his name and not live with him. But then I can’t
trade on his name anyway. I must define a position and take what is coming
to me as an individual and give up the rest.”
“No. It’s complicated too by money. I haven’t any, you know, Margaret
—and Gage has made a lot but we’ve lived rather up to the limit of it. I
don’t believe he stands awfully well financially. If we are to separate things
would go pretty much to pieces in every direction.”
“Very much,” said Gage. He had come in quietly and stood looking at
them in a kind of derisive anger. “I’m sorry to break in on your conference,
and on this delightful exhibition of my wife’s loyalty but since we are all
here, let’s talk it over.”
He sat down elaborately, his eyes on Margaret, ignoring his wife fixedly.
“Have you made up your mind what we should do, Miss Duffield?”
“Don’t be insulting, Gage,” said Margaret, “it’s so unnecessary. I haven’t
been interfering with your affairs any more than was necessary.”
 “Than was necessary to release Helen from the chains of marriage?”
Gage laughed. “Well, your work is done. As far as I’m concerned she’s
released. You may tell her, since you are in charge of our affairs, that I will
leave her as soon as possible—and that is very soon—and that whatever
financial arrangement is possible shall be made for her and the children.
She is correct in saying that my affairs are in a bad way. Mr. Sable, from
whom I have just separated in business, can tell her more about that. She
might care to engage him to represent her in any action you might see fit for
her to take.”
Helen had risen to her feet, quite white.
“Stop!” she cried. “Don’t you dare keep on insulting me. You’re mad—
abnormal—”
Gage bowed vaguely in her direction and continued speaking to
Margaret.
“Tell her that she is right. I am mad and abnormal and that she has made
me so, instigated by you. Excuse me now, won’t you?”
He went upstairs but he could hear through the floor the swift, staccato,
shrieking sobs of Helen’s hysteria, hear the whisper of a maid to the nurse
in the back hall, hear a murmur which must be the calming voice of
Margaret. He paced viciously up and down—up and down.
Yet he had come home, driven by an invigorating impulse which had
come to him inexplicably, perhaps born of pity and sudden insight into
Helen’s mind, come home to ask her forgiveness, explain what Freda
Thorstad had told him and ask her to go away with him for a little while
until their minds both cleared. The impulse had risen in his throat—it had
choked him with delight and fear lest she should not be home. And then
through the sunroom doors he saw them, two calm women, talking together,
making and receiving confidences, uncovering him, dissecting him, and as
he stood still and let the blackness of rage sweep over him again he had
heard Helen tell this stranger, this inimical stranger, of his financial
condition. The sense of outrage overmastered him.
After a little it was quiet downstairs and he decided to go to the city
again, going downstairs, looking straight ahead of him. He wanted to see
the children, to have their reception of him ease this last sharp hurt. They
were in the garden of course, and they greeted him with their usual shouts
of delight.
 “Well,” he thought, as he bent down to caress them, “I can’t stop now. I
can’t stop now.”
He sat down on the garden bench and took the children on his knees, the
boy and girl, so sturdy and happy, with fat brown knees and thick soft hair.
They were full of comments and questions. Peggy was three and Bennett
just eighteen months older. It was going to hurt terribly to break away from
them. Sable had said, “You can’t act as though you didn’t have a family
dependent on you.” He had shown Sable that he could act that way, that the
family dependent on him was not going to force him to knuckle under. He
stroked Peggy’s hair. How restful it was—if he could only stay here in this
sheltered little garden with the children who had no tangles in their minds—
if Helen would come out as she used to come out last summer and sit with
him while they talked and planned of the beautiful things ahead for the
children and their initiations into living.
Helen had deserted. She had gone off notoriety seeking. She preferred to
sit in that room talking disloyalty to that woman to whose hard influence
she had subjected herself—Helen was driving him out.
He kissed the children sternly and went back through the house. In the
hall Helen met him. Her face was ravaged by hysterics, red hollows under
her eyes, mouth pulled out of shape. It hurt to regard it.
“Where are you going, Gage?”
For a moment he was gentle.
“Downtown. I’ll not be back till late. There’s no use trying to talk. We
are killing each other.” Then he thought of Margaret Duffield, listening
perhaps and loosening his wife’s hands from his shoulders, where she had
placed them, he went out.

But that was not the only crisis Margaret had to meet that day. She was
eager to go back to New York. There was no possible work left for her to do
and she wanted to get away from St. Pierre. She did not tell Helen that she
was planning to go in a few days as she had told her landlady that morning.
When she left the Flandon house Helen was quite calm. With her fine
power of organization she had already decided that the best temporary thing
to do was to accept Gage’s actions and see how far he would go, allowing
her action to be modified by that later. Margaret looked rather pale. The
reasonableness of her own mind was bound to be affected somehow by this
drama through which she had passed and in which she had been forced to
play so disagreeable a part. Perhaps it showed chiefly in the slight hardness
of her attitude toward Walter Carpenter that night.
She never seemed to attack that decision squarely. She seemed to try to
deny it a right to confront her. And yet, definitely, constantly, with less
impatience than a younger lover and vastly more skill than a less
intellectual one, Carpenter made himself felt. Now and then in their
discussions and in their arguments, he destroyed some reason against their
marriage. Her defenses had been made very weak. She had no argument
against the lack of liberty in marriage which he could not destroy. He would
grant anything. Indeed he asked only for the simplest, most unadorned
marriage bond—and companionship which she had admitted she enjoyed
with him. She might retain her own name if she liked without any
altercation—might leave him for months at a time—he let her frighten him
with no such threats. He offered too, more leisure for thought than she had
ever had in the pressure of earning her own living. She had told him a little
of what it meant to always need all the money she had in the bank—to do
many things and yet never have any feeling of ease, to fear dependency. “It
would mean a charitable hospital or going to a remote little Pennsylvania
town to an aunt who lived with my mother until she died and who lives on
in the almost worthless little place where I was born.” When she told Walter
that, he had almost won her, so absorbed were they both in the pity and
dread of her loneliness. Then again there leapt between them some deep-
rooted fear, some instinct, some dread pulling Margaret back to her little
island of celibacy.
It was far from an unpleasant, bickering companionship that they had.
Margaret, at thirty, past all the desires of adolescence, informed without
experience, had given Gregory nothing and had only been disturbed and
made nervous by him, even while she appreciated his fine fire and ardors.
Carpenter satisfied, soothed her. They had the same shynesses, the same
dread of absurdities in themselves. And Margaret was afraid that she might
be lonely without him and that too worried her. She did not want to be
lonely for any one. So she told him and he laughed and ventured to bring
her hand to his lips and hold it there. She did not draw it away, perhaps
because she was reasonable, perhaps because she was not.
To-night he talked of Gage, reflecting the gossip of the men of Gage’s
acquaintance. With them the fact of the severing of the firm of Sable and
Flandon was a subject of much speculation. Walter was worried about it, in
his own quiet fashion. Gage and Helen were both his close friends.
“Talking won’t do any good,” advised Margaret.
“Talking never did do any good with a man. It drives him into himself,
and that’s usually unhealthy. I mean the sort of talking which is full of
advice, of course—or of prohibition.”
“Yet some of you ought to do something with Gage Flandon before he
goes straight to pieces.” Margaret said nothing of what had happened that
afternoon.
“Yes,” said Walter absently, “he’s been going to pieces obviously. But
let’s not talk about him. Let’s talk about ourselves, Margaret.”
They were driving through the summer night, trying to get all the
coolness possible. It was soft warm darkness but the swift car made a wind
which blew back upon them, laden with clover smells, deeply sweet. All the
elaborate mental approaches which Walter had made to the girl he wanted
to marry were abandoned. He stopped the car and put his arm around her,
not supplicating but as if the time had come for concession.
“About ourselves. We talk too much impersonal stuff, Margaret. It’s
great fun but there’s more to be done than talk. We must begin on the other
things. We know each other’s minds now. Let’s know each other’s
feelings.”
It may have been the night, the darkness, the remoteness of the country
road which made him so bold. He tipped her face up to his and kissed her
eagerly, quite different now from the calm mannered man who had sat so
calmly in discussion with her night after night, who had squired her so
formally, who had made love to her mind and tried to capture her intellect
but never more, except for those two easily restrained outbreaks.
She stiffened like an embarrassed school girl, her hands pressed against
his chest—
“Please don’t, Walter—”
“Foolish girl,” he said gently, “you mustn’t tie yourself up so. Let your
mind ride for a minute and just remember that we love each other, just as
every one in the world wants to love and be loved.”
All the while he talked, urging her, demanding her, he held her against
him, unrelaxed.
 “I love you,” he told her. “And I want to be—oh, unspeakably
commonplace about it. I want to indulge myself in a lot of emotions that are
as old as the hills and as glorious. But I want you with me, darling.”
Still she did not speak. He let her go a little and held her shoulders,
searching for her eyes in the dimness.
“You do love me, don’t you? Why, I’ve seen it for weeks. I’ve seen a
look in your face when I’ve come in—it isn’t boasting, dear, it’s just a
wonderful confidence I have to-night.”
She freed her hands and clasped them tightly in each other. They seemed
the index of some passionate inhibition, some repression, which was
charged with nervousness. Her easy freedom had deserted her, and every
muscle seemed drawn taut.
“Oh, my dear,” he pressed her, “don’t be so afraid. I won’t take
advantage of the fact you care for me. Is it that which holds you back—that
worry about making concessions to a man? Everything I’ve ever said I’ve
meant. I respect every militant inch of you. I love you just as you are and
for it. But above all that—beyond it—there’s more and hasn’t the time
come for the least bit of abandonment?”
“Why?” Her voice was low, not as firm in its tones as it was wont to be.
“Why?” Carpenter repeated her question, “Why? Because we love each
other or we don’t. And we can’t love at arms’ length, dear. We’ve got to be
close, trustful, together. You do like me, don’t you, Margaret?”
“You know I do.”
“And you know I love you. Won’t you come a little way to meet me?
I’m so sure you can trust me. I’m so sure we could be happy. Just let your
mind rest. Let yourself go a little.”
Her mood was chilling his. He tried to gather up the shreds of the
impetuosity that had first driven him to embrace her.
“Let’s not talk,” he said again, almost plaintively, “Can’t we just—rest in
each other?”
“But why are you afraid of talk?” she protested.
He dropped his hands from her shoulders.
“Have I been afraid? Haven’t we talked on every conceivable subject?
Haven’t we said enough to understand each other perfectly?”
“Then—”
 “Margaret, dear, we’re at it again. This is what I protest—dragging
argument into every natural emotion. I don’t want to be mind to your mind
to-night. I don’t want to reason or even think—I just want to be man to your
woman and caress you without thought.”
But the verve had gone out of his words and as it went she seemed to
regain her confidence. He made a last attempt to bring back his spirit. But
his embrace seemed to stiffen her. He withdrew his arm and sat tapping on
the steering wheel.
“When will you marry me, Margaret?”
No impetuousness in his voice now, no romance. It met hers in calmness.
“I don’t know.”
“You must know. I can’t stand it any longer. You must or you must drive
me away. There’s no sense in further talk. You know I’ll exact nothing but
the right to be near you. But I must have that. I must know. It isn’t as if I
were younger and could rebound from one love into another. You’ve got
me. I don’t think of anything else. You color every bit of work I do—every
bit of thinking. I’ll trust to your terms. I’ve spent weeks building up my
theory of marriage to suit your desires and visions. I don’t want to play
upon your sympathies but I’ve got to have you, Margaret—or not.”
He sounded very discouraged, very humble, very desperate.
“I think I’d disappoint you, Walter.”
The pity in her voice and her own discouragement made him turn to her
again but she held out a hand to meet his and he stayed, letting her clasp his
hand loosely.
“I’d be just like this all the time. You think I’d change—under emotion
—when we were married. I don’t think I would. You don’t know how all
the things I’ve thought and seen have influenced me. I couldn’t go into
marriage believing in it much. I couldn’t—go through it—trusting it much.
And when I was cold and I’d nearly always be that way, you’d be
disappointed if not angry. And if I did do as you say—relax—I’d be
spoiling it by not trusting my own feeling. Don’t you think I know? Don’t
you think I almost give in and then some devil of analysis comes and prods
me into a watch on myself? I haven’t anything to give, Walter—except just
what you’ve had. And the reason I can’t marry you is because while you
say and I say that companionship is enough we both know it isn’t all you’d
want. And it’s all you’d find. It’s all I can give to any man.”
 “But, my God, Margaret, women and men have to marry—.”
“I know. It’s all right for other women—most other women. I’m not
speaking for them now. They can keep reasonable and still have enough
feeling to transcend reason now and then—carry them through it.” She still
held his hand in a kind of cold comfort and he could feel her fingers tighten.
“I’ve tried to have feeling lately, Walter—tried to see if I could find enough
—and that kind of feeling isn’t there. I can’t—I can’t—don’t ask me.”
She withdrew her hand now and sat looking straight ahead of her. A
cloud slipped past the moon and as the earth brightened in the cold white
light Walter, turning to look at her saw her quiet and rigid, tears in her open
eyes, a slim statue of what she claimed to be, sterility of feeling for him or
any man.
“I’m afraid that it’s true,” he said. “Perhaps you can’t.”
At that, coming as a terribly dreary acceptance, she let the sobs come
and for a long while she wept, her head in her own hands. Perhaps she wept
for him, perhaps for herself. He did not offer to touch her again—as if her
dearth of feeling had spread to him in those few minutes. When at last she
straightened herself again, he started the car and they sped silently back
through the country towards St. Pierre.
“Good-by, then,” he said, as they reached her door and he unlocked it.
“Good-by.”
She saw his face, heavy and lined and stern and it seemed to hurt her
cruelly.
“I’ve cheated you,” she said pitifully, “but it’s been myself too. It is
myself.”
He hesitated. For a moment he seemed ready to try again and then he
saw the pity in her face stiffen into resistance. Bending, he kissed her
lightly.
“Nothing I can do for you?”
“Nothing, thank you.”
She heard his car back away from the door. As long as she could hear it
she stood listening. Then with swift definiteness she went to her closet and
pulled out the trunk standing there.
 CHAPTER XX

BARBARA BREAKS LOOSE

A GLAZE settled over the surface of events for the next few weeks in the
Flandon household. Both Gage and Helen were torn away from too
much indulgence in their own thoughts by the implacability of the
things which they must do. Having broken up his legal connections with his
own hands, Gage was confronted with the necessity of in some way making
his next steps justify his past action and an unholy pride made him
determined to show a doubting business world that he had been actuated by
deep and skillful motives. There was the alternative of leaving St. Pierre
and that he was disinclined to do. He wanted to start an office of his own
and demonstrate with the greatest possible rapidity that nothing but benefit
had accrued to him from his break with Sable. He guessed what he did not
hear of the doubts about his move, and he wanted to put the world in the
wrong if possible.
It was true, while he had found Sable’s intervention in the matter of
Freda the unbearable breaking point, that he had a kind of long deferred
zest in contemplating his new business freedom. Sable’s offer had been, in
the beginning, far too lucrative and too flattering to lose but there was a
cautiousness, a lack of independence in many of their mutual actions which
had galled Gage. He was tired of the connection. He was at odds with the
political clique to which his close connection with the Congressman held
him. He was disgusted with the result of the convention—not that he had
hoped for much but the flatness of the political outlook, the beating of the
old drums irritated him. There were times when the exhilaration of the
chance he was taking lifted him up and if he had been drinking less steadily
he might have turned the exhilaration to much advantage. But his mind was
too nervous to plan steadily or well. It shot restlessly past immediacies into
dreams of a future when he would have justified every action to himself and
the world and particularly to Helen.
He ignored and avoided Helen’s several attempts to come to an
understanding on the question of money. She knew enough about their
affairs to feel that this change of Gage must make a great difference in their
income temporarily, even if he should ultimately succeed. It worried her
greatly. She had made up her mind to a separation from Gage but mere
independence did not solve the money question for them all. She wanted
very much to know exactly where they stood and she was convinced that
the spendthrift, financial optimism of Gage, characteristic always, but most
marked now, was getting them into deeper waters constantly. Temporarily
she and Gage had dropped their personal problem. In one brief, cold
conversation Gage had suggested that, pending a settlement of his affairs
and his new ventures, they waive the personal matters and Helen had very
gladly agreed.
So the days adjusted themselves to a routine so smooth and orderly that
sometimes even to Helen it seemed unbelievable that it was not the
expression of ease and happiness. Only at times, however, for as she looked
at Gage it was impossible not to be conscious of the strain under which he
was laboring. He was often out nights, working or not—she did not know.
She knew that the supply of whisky in the sideboard was replenished far too
often to serve moderate drinking and she knew that Gage slept badly, for
she could often see the light reflected from his windows in the early hours
of the morning.
He never molested her now but left her to her own activities with hardly
a jeer at them. Now and then some scathing remark escaped him and fell
blunted from the armor of her indifference. But for the most part his early
chafing under her prominence was gone. The flood of letters which came
for her in every mail aroused no comment from him. He saw her at work on
the organization of her section of the country and hardly seemed to notice
what she did. Intent as she was on learning what she could do, how she
could do it, always with the thought in the back of her mind that she needed
to find a kind of work that would earn her independence as well as notoriety
she put an entirely new seriousness into the work she was doing. The old
dilettantism was gone and with the death of that half-mocking dilettante
spirit came an entirely new zest for the work she did.
Mrs. Brownley was full of a glorious naïveté. She wanted to organize
everybody. Politics fairly dripped from her impressive, deliberately
moulded lips. She wanted to pin a small white elephant badge on every one
she met. She had a practical eye that liked to translate enthusiasm into
badges, buttons and costumes. Jerrold Haynes, rather indispensable now
and then to Helen, said that he was sure that the end of the campaign would
see Mrs. Brownley in full elephant’s costume. Jerrold laughed at Helen too.
He told her frankly that she was ruining herself for an observer.
“A year ago you were in a fair way to become the most beautiful
philosopher of the twentieth century. Now you’re like all the rest of the
women—a good looking hustler. You’ve become ordinary in appealing to
your big audience. You should have been content to charm Gage and me.”
“I was. But I wasn’t allowed to remain in my sloth.”
“No—that serpent of a Duffield girl. I seem to remember Gage didn’t
like her either. I didn’t, but undoubtedly Gage and I wouldn’t agree on
reasons, would we? Well, where is she now?”
“Down on Long Island somewhere with Harriet Thompson, resting. She
was pretty well fagged out with the months here.”
“Didn’t marry Carpenter, did she?”
“No. Apparently she didn’t or we might have heard of it.”
“Carpenter saved himself from the yoke of feminism just in time,
perhaps.”
“I haven’t seen him lately.”
“He sits around the club all day and cools himself in case he should
decide to keep an evening engagement and need to look fresh. I see him off
and on. Doesn’t look happy, for a fact.”
“Anyway it’s none of our business, is it?”
Jerrold laughed.
“Not a whit and therefore interesting. I hate talking about what is my
business.”
“That’s a common failing,” said Helen a little bitterly. “I never realized
how epidemic until lately, since Gage has decided to go in for himself.
People ask me about everything except my bank balance.”
“The penalty of being in the limelight, Helen.”
She shrugged lightly, a tinge of weariness in her manner.
“Don’t you like the limelight then?” he urged teasingly.
Impatiently she turned on him.
“Oh, more or less, I suppose. But I shan’t like it six months from now.
I’ll be tired to death of it if it still keeps coming. You get fed up on it pretty
quickly.”
 “So skeptical—”
“You needn’t mock at me, Jerrold. You ought to admire me because I’m
honest enough not to say that I weep every time my picture is in the paper. I
go further. I am quite miserable when I realize that my limelight is directed
mostly not at the inner workings of my mind but at my dress and my name
and the fact that I take a marcel well.”
“So you know that too, do you?”
“I know everything about it,” Helen boasted mockingly. “I even admit
the necessity for keeping my clothes pretty well pressed and clean. I may
scoff with the rest of you at Mrs. Brownley’s methods of organizing a
Junior Republican Club but I know that she’s the finest realist of us all. She
is willing to admit that women love white elephant badges, and appeals to
them as the virtuous sex, and fashionable Junior Republican Clubs, which
are Junior Leagues in action. I can see myself developing a philosophy just
like Mrs. Brownley and learning to speak of democracy and the home with
her impressiveness and Mrs. Thorstad’s italics and bending my energies to
making the Republican party sought after by women because after all it
includes all the best people.”
“You’re a great woman. I think I’ll write a book about you.”
She looked at him out of the corner of her eyes. “You’ll never write a
book about anything, Jerrold. You’re too dilettante to ever get started. I
know. I was the same way until Margaret hurled me into all this action.
Now I am, as you say, spoiled for a good dilettante. I’m spoiled for a lot of
things, in fact. For being an easy going comfortable wife. I’m a poor wreck
of a woman politician.” She laughed at him and looked so mockingly pretty
under the big gray chiffon hat she wore that Jerrold’s eyes were lit with
enthusiasm. Jerrold had motored Helen down to the Brownleys’ summer
home for a conference with Mrs. Brownley, who had the Junior Republican
Club on her hands at the moment and wanted to talk it over with Helen.
Mrs. Brownley had done a great deal of organizing and much of it was
extremely effective along the lines suggested by Margaret and Mrs.
Thorstad. But Mrs. Brownley knew that the lure of the social column was
great and she had pressed Bob and Allie into action. The Junior Republican
Club, composed of girls just preparing for the vote, was to be one of the
educational features of the campaign. They would be useful, she pointed
out, in helping when the Republican women had headquarters, later—and
useful or not they ought to be interested.
So the Junior Republican Club was formed amid much enthusiasm on
the piazza of the Redding Hotel at Lake Nokomis where St. Pierre sent its
fashionable colony during the summer months. They had a president, and
several news agencies had already taken pictures of them “reading from left
to right and from right to left—standing in the back row, etc.” One of the
agencies had been acting for a New York paper and the girls were
somewhat stirred over the novelty. As Allie said, “It was time some one did
something. Look what happened to Russia where the Bolsheviks drove you
out of your homes and took everything you’d got. If they’d been organized
it might have been different.” Besides her father said he thought women,
especially educated women, (Allie spoke with personal feeling, having
spent four thousand a year at the Elm Grove School) were to be the
salvation of the country.
She had plenty of support and enthusiasm. Even in these spoiled and
under nourished little minds a tiny flame of enthusiasm for the new
possibilities of women’s lives were burning. They interpreted the new
freedom to suit themselves as did most other women. To them it meant a
good deal of license, a cool impudence and camaraderie towards men, a
definite claiming of all the rights of men in so far as they contributed to the
fun of existence. “Women aren’t as they used to be” was a handy peg for
them to hang escapades upon, a blanket reason for refusing to accept any
discipline. That was the substance of their feminism.
As for their politics they were hewed from the politics of their fathers
and their class. They were defensive for the most part. They had heard of
the exigent demands of labor, they had seen their fathers irritant under
“Bolshevik legislation”—in their own shrewd minds (and many of them
had the shrewdness common to smallness) they knew that all their luxury
and their personal license, their expensive clothes and schools and motors
and unlimited charge accounts were based on an order whose right to exist
was being challenged. They roused to its defense, boisterously, giggling,
and yet class conscious.
Helen did what she could to palliate any trouble the club might cause.
She pressed on Mrs. Brownley the need of not antagonizing possible and
prospective members of the party by anything that appeared as
snobbishness. Mrs. Brownley agreed astutely, starting post haste on a
scheme for organizing the stenographers of the city and mapping out a
scheme whereby the employees of the large department stores might be
drawn into Republican groups. She urged Helen to talk to the Junior
Republicans and Helen did it.
She noted Barbara among the rest, handsome in yellow linen and yet
looking tired and worn. The artificial penciling under her eyes was circled
by deeper yellow brown hollows, and her restlessness and lack of interest in
the whole proceeding were conspicuous.
“What a world weary face that child has!” thought Helen.
She remembered one of Mrs. Brownley’s confidences about Barbara’s
engagement and idly asked Allie about it.
“Is Bob engaged to Ted?”
“Oh, Lord, who knows!” said Allie. “She’s had an awful row with him,
but she’s got his ring. I don’t know what they fought about. And she’s such
a fool, for she really is crazy about him and he knows it so he doesn’t pay
much attention when she rows.”
She stopped as Barbara came towards them.
“I’m going up to town over night. I wonder if you and Mr. Haynes
would take me up? Have you an extra seat? I’ll be a fine chaperon.”
Helen frowned a little. She disliked the insinuation, just as she disliked
Barbara, but the girl’s request could not be refused gracefully.
“I’m sure Jerrold will be glad,” she said rather coldly.
“When’d you decide to go to town, Bob?” asked Allie.
Another girl joined the group, overhearing the last remark.
“I think she’s going up to keep a watch on Ted. One of the girls saw him
with that pretty Thorstad girl one day at a hotel—the girl there’s been such
a lot of talk about.”
Helen felt herself change color and as she tried to get quick control
caught sight of Barbara’s face. It was almost white, but not as if white from
shock or pain—rather an ugly white, lips compressed, eyes lifted angrily.
“I don’t consider myself in the least responsible for Ted’s company,
Mildred,” she said sharply.
 “Aren’t you afraid to stay alone in the house with just Mathilda?” went
on Allie.
Barbara looked her contempt.
“If you are there,” Allie went on, “call up Mrs. Wilkins and tell her I’ve
got to have those new white skirts by noon Wednesday. If she doesn’t get
them here I won’t pay for them.”
“Write her your grouch,” said Bob, graciously, “I’ve got my own
errands.”
They left Barbara at the portico of the big stone house where the shades
were drawn down and the windows closed.
“Are you sure you’ll be all right here?” asked Helen.
“Oh, yes,” said Bob, “the housekeeper’s here and father’s going to take
me back to-morrow night after I get my shopping done. Thanks so much for
taking me up. And I do feel so guilty—”
But Jerrold speeded the motor and the sound of her voice was lost.
“What a lascivious little mind she has,” he remarked as they drove on to
Helen’s house.
“And malicious, I think. It’s odd. Her parents are really kindly on the
whole. And Allie’s just a nice clumsy child.”
“Whatever hereditary influences might have made this girl, they’ve been
completely choked,” said Jerrold. “She’s pure and simple environment—
rotted by it just as she might have rotted in a slum somewhere. The only
thing that has survived her complete subordination to money and luxury is
old Brownley’s acquisitive instinct—and God help the person who thwarts
that!”

It was a considerate invocation if it had done any good, for at that

moment Barbara was preparing to destroy any obstacles which lay in the
path of her acquiring Ted.
She went to the telephone in her mother’s room and called Ted Smillie’s
house. He was not in. She tried two clubs and finally located him.
“Yes, it is Bob. I came up—oh, to see a dressmaker. No—just to-night.
No—I’m tired and hot. I don’t want to dance. You come over here. Why, of
course it’s all right. Do come. Well, I’ll make you some lemonade and we’ll
have a talk. Of course. Eight—that’s fine.”
 But it was nearly nine before he came. Barbara had found a black dinner
dress which became her, and she had thrown open the windows of the
second floor library to the cooling evening air. She had found some supper
for herself, a casual, icebox supper but for her guest she had made
sandwiches. Also she had hunted long and wearily for some key which
would open the wine cellar and failed to find any. But there were lemons
fortunately and she had, as she promised, made the lemonade. By eight she
was all ready for him—waiting, in repose. By nine she was tense. In that
empty hour she had much time for thinking and her thoughts did not rest
her. They roused her to a nervous tension which was manifest in the quick
gestures so unlike her usual pose of lazy indifference.
He rang at last and she slipped down the stairs to let him in. A single
light burned in the hall cluster.
He looked down at her from his admired height, smiling without
eagerness.
“Where did you drop from? Nowhere? I was going to go down to see
you next week.”
“I had to come up to town to see about some clothes.”
He laid down his hat and turned to her.
“All alone?”
“All alone,” answered Bob coolly. “Even the housekeeper’s gone to see
a sick sister and won’t be back until morning. I guess the caretaker’s in the
basement—at least I told him to stay there.”
“You going to stay here alone all night?”
“Why not? It’s safe as a clock. Bars on mother’s windows and all the
front of the house. Safety locks on the doors. Nothing stealable in the house
and a telephone and house phone in my room.”
“All the same it’s—”
“Unconventional? By this time you ought to know I’m the most
unconventional person on earth. Women don’t bother about conventions as
they used to. We don’t need chaperons at our elbows, thank goodness!”
He smiled appreciatively.
“Let’s go upstairs to the library,” said Bob, “and tell me what you’ve
been doing.”
 He followed her obediently and they settled themselves in two great soft
leather chairs drawn up to a little table, the tray of sandwiches and
lemonade between them.
“What’s new?” said Bob.
“It’s dull as can be. Nothing stirring.”
“Who’ve you been seeing?”
“Pretty much of nobody. A few stalemates around the club. That’s all.”
“Then why stay in town? Why don’t you come down to join your
mother? It’s really not bad at Nokomis this year. Dot Lodge has two girls
from New York visiting her that are pretty snappy. And we’ve gone in for
politics. Formed a Republican club.”
“Oh, Lord!” exclaimed Ted. “Torchlight processions and all that? Going
to purify politics?”
“Maybe—can’t tell.”
“Maybe not, probably.”
They scuffed around in tawdry repartee, going swiftly through a few
motions of convention that seemed to cling to them. But shortly he was
sitting on the arm of her chair and then he had her held more closely. For a
while she let him fondle her, her cheeks growing hot. Then she returned to
her line of attack.
“If it’s as dull as you say here you ought to be in the country where we
can make it less dull.”
“Can’t. Lose my job if I do. The old man said that he’d make no
distinction in the office this summer. Me and the hallroom boys—we’ve got
to do our eight hours.”
“Sure it’s that? Sure it’s not some girl holding you up here?”
That pleased him.
“So you came up to see me because you’re jealous, did you? Little cat!”
He caressed her as he spoke and she did not seem to mind what he said.
“No—I’m not jealous. But perhaps I’m lonesome.”
“Not this minute you aren’t.”
She seemed to purr.
“Well, this is nice,” he repeated.
 “I wish we could stay this way forever. Isn’t it fun to be away from every
one?”
For answer he kissed her.
“I suppose you’re dreadfully shocked by my unconventionality,” said
Bob, “but I don’t care. I despise conventions. I think women have a right to
do as they please. Anything they please. Women aren’t slaves as they used
to be.”
She lay back, invoking her vulgar license in the name of the hard won
liberties of women, corrupting the words she spoke.
“Look out what you say,” said Ted. “Look out, young woman and don’t
get me to take you at your word.”
She shivered ecstatically.
“Ted,”—the time seemed ripe, no doubt—“do you care for that Thorstad
girl?”
“Who—Freda Thorstad?”
“All the girls are talking because you were seen at some hotel with her.”
“Let them talk, the silly fools.”
She released herself a little.
“Where is she, Ted?”
“Why?” He began to tease her, and her lack of control showed instantly.
“You know she’s disappeared. Why did she go and where did she go?”
“Why should I know?”
“You do know,” she countered.
“I said nothing of the sort.”
Pulling herself loose, she confronted him. Every thwarted undisciplined
desire in her raged at the frail control maintained by habit. Her eyes, no
longer sleepy, blazed at him.
“You know where she is. The creature has gone off somewhere to hide
herself and her shame, I suppose. The abandoned hussy. I know all about it,
Ted. I found out all about it.”
He became a little surly and yet curiosity seemed to pique him.
“You know all about what, Bob?”
 She was losing control completely now. The confession, abasement, she
had worked up to was not forthcoming.
“Where is she?” she stormed. “Where are you keeping that girl?”
Her face had changed from that of a pretty girl to that of a furious,
uncontrolled shrew. Her shrill voice tore through the empty room, struck
against the silence.
“Hush,” he said sharply, “don’t yell like that, Bob. Don’t be a fool.”
“I won’t have it. I won’t have you making a laughing stock out of me.
Before everybody—everybody’s talking, laughing at you—at me. You’ve
got to give that girl up. You’ve got to! Pay her off and let her go away and
hide till it’s over.”
The vein of caddishness was rich in Ted. He looked at her coolly—
calculated her hysteria, made her maddeningly conscious of his
imperturbability. Turning away, he lit a cigarette.
“So you won’t answer me!”
“I really don’t know what you mean, Bob. You hurl a lot of accusations
at me and in the same breath you want a lot of promises. I don’t know what
you’re driving at, my dear.”
“Then I’m through with you,” she said, viciously.
An impolite smile glimmered at the corners of his mouth.
“Oh, in that case—” He turned to the door.
But she did not have strength enough to let him go. She followed him,
distressing now in her abandonment which was not even held together by
anger.
“Ted—you know I care—how can you—how can you?”
He turned and appraised her. It was obvious now how much of her
charm was in that thrown aside pose of indifference, lazy mockery.
“You told me you were through with me.”
His voice was quite cold, stiff. It brought her to him with a rush, her
arms thrown about his neck, cheek against his, hot, panting.
“I didn’t mean it, Ted. Really, I was just about crazy. I won’t talk about
that girl—about anything. Let’s just be as we were when you first came in.”
“I didn’t start all this,” he answered sullenly.
 She urged him back to his chair, pulled things into some semblance of
order.
“There, let’s be comfortable after all the melodrama. Here you must eat
some of these sandwiches. I made them myself.”
She poised herself on the arm of his chair and played with him.
“You can’t understand how a girl feels,” she told him, “under a lot of
foolish teasing. They all know I’m fond of you—a little anyway” (that fell
cold)—“and they take it out of me because I’m honest and not a flirt.”
Ted chuckled. “Not a flirt.”
“You know what I mean. A girl who has been brought up as I have—
can’t let herself go the way other girls of a different class can. I can see that
those girls have an advantage. We’re just as—we’re just like they are only
they’ve been brought up differently.”
She paused for a moment in her fumbling, in the pleading to be admitted
to the class of women of easy virtue whom she fancied held her lover in
their toils, trying to convince him that she was ripe for abandonment. But he
would not help her. He looked at her rather curiously—that was all.
Sighing she rested her head on his shoulder.
“It’s so nice to have you here.”
“But it’s getting late, Bob. I’ll really have to go.”
She threw a restraining arm across his chest.
“Go where?”
“I have to get back—” he said vaguely.
It was time for her last card. Actuated by that vivid fear of his possible
destination, perhaps, she relaxed completely in his rather unwilling arms.
“Don’t go—don’t go at all to-night. Let’s just stay here—together.”
She could feel him stiffen and looked up slowly, languorously, slyly at
him. But she should have known what she would see—should have known
that so easily played a game would not be worth the candle of compromise
which would bind him so much more to her. He was too sophisticated to be
attracted by unsought abandonment.
“Look here, Bob,” he almost shook himself to be free of her, “you’re not
quite yourself to-night. You’re a bit tired and you’ll be better for a night’s
sleep. I’ll have to run along now. Don’t come down. Good night.”