22 October

Respondent: Francisco Gallardo (FRAUD)


Idealizing the Inkas: José
Sabogal to las barriadas


MADELEINE AQUILINA
University of Michigan


José Sabogal, Vista del Cuzco y Sacsahuamán. 1945. Charcoal on paper
55 x 64 cm. Collection of Isabel María Sabogal Dunin Borkowski.


My paper links two instances when the “past” was put to work in twentieth-century Peru—artistic representations of Pre-Hispanic architecture and the proliferation of self-built housing in the capital city. In the first half of the twentieth century, Peruvian artists like José Sabogal heralded pre-Hispanic architecture under the umbrella of the indigenismo art movement. As Sabogal and other indigenistas glorified the Peruvian past as a source of nationalism in the present, native populations in the Andes struggled to make a living under feudal property law and migrated to Lima. In the absence of readily available housing stock, these migrants built their own homes in zones that came to be known as barriadas. By the 1950s, urban planners and politicians documented barriadas in architectural periodicals, thenational press, and several sociological reports. Although many experts saw the barriadas as a plague, government reports imply that barriadas revived the "lost" Inka value of mutual aid to the modernizing metropolis. Both Sabogal’s architectural depictions and mid-century urban discourses instrumentalized the Inka empire to essentialize indigeneity and avoid the pernicious issue of Peru’s neocolonial land tenure policy. My talk will present key objects of my in-progress dissertation to theorize the tension between representation and material politics tha conditioned post-war housing conversations in Lima.


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Reassembling Landscape Lifecycles


EMILIA HURD, JULIA SMACHYLO
University of Victoria, University of Connecticut




In an epoch defined by massive ecological, geological and climatic changes, the role of landscape architects and allied disciplines becomes increasingly important. Not only do these realities re-frame the way that we conceive and design projects to deal with increasingly uncertain times, but they challenge us to find other means to have a positive impact. Our proposed talk will present design-based research on the end-of-life phases of the built environment, bringing a critical lens to the ways in which we conceive and construct the built environment and serves as a way to assert the end-of-life as an essential design consideration and point of speculation in the formulation of constructed projects.

Drawing from scholarship that provides a critical lens into the end phase of projects with reference to the built environment (Hutton 2019, DeSilvey 2017, Easterling 2014), this presentation builds upon work first supported by the Landscape Architecture Canada Foundation (2019-2021). This work explored a variety of processes that define, analyse and contrast the ways in which the built environment becomes reduced to its essential elements, returning to the earth. As an extension of the LACF-funded work, we present two small scale design test plots - design competitions - where we investigated strategies that document materials used and wastes produced and propose flexible and adaptive strategies.

We argue that undoing - the removal, demolition or transition from one material state to another - should become integral to the design disciplines of architecture and landscape architecture. Through “reassembling, this research investigates alternative approaches to consider the inevitable in the built environment, advocating for an extended designer responsibility to the territorial and temporal life cycles inherent in their built constructions. This work seeks to understand the role that a full life cycle approach can have in achieving truly sustainable built projects and landscapes.


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