Boundary crossings: architectural confrontations with infrastructures of power

Borders, boundaries, thresholds: those are key notions in an architect's conceptual toolbox. Architects are trained to think about the placement of borders, the definition of boundaries, and the formulation of thresholds. In fact, some may argue, in bordering lies the essence of architectural practice. The project of architecture is about drawing the lines between what is to remain on the inside and what is to be kept on the outside; it determines what is to be enclosed and intimate, and what is open and shared. The impulse to border and establish thresholds responds to the purpose of working with or against nature to ensure those on the inside are protected from the outside, the menace of the wild exterior. But our messy needs for entanglement with different spaces, times, and conditions of being have complicated and obscured, for better or for worse that is to be debated, the clarity of borders, boundaries, and thresholds in architecture. Not only our endeavours to connect with pasts, presents, and envisaged futures but also with multiple places, infrastructures, and technologies have propelled complex responses to projects of boundaries and boundary crossings.

The boundaries we build to separate us from others, (un)like us, outside multiply as we seek sameness and protection on the inside, abandoning the necessary difference that actually enables our survival through companionship and collaboration. We instrumentalise boundaries to escape our own conditions of existence embedded in sounds, smells, and matter; the most striking manifestation in modern times must be the rise of the private bathroom and the flush toilet, the ultimate infrastructural boundary that conveniently removes from sight and smell our bodily waste, only to reunite it with that of the collective again a bit further down the drain.¹ The infrastructuralist movement urges us to reinspect the boundaries between physical structures, corporeality, sensual capacities, and the systems that support them, casting light on the socio- and bio-political implications of architecture and its infrastructural boundaries.²

When boundaries multiply, they expand and link together across scales: from the door to the next room, to the outside, to the next block, to the neighbourhood, to the margins of the city, and to the border of a country. They are imbued with questions of difference and, with that, questions of identity. Boundaries are, of course, instruments of categorisation, differentiating and separating what belongs within and what belongs outside; thresholds then are checkpoints that control what comes in and what goes out. Such categorisations work across all dimensions of our experiential world, from the categories of race, gender, and age to income and place of residence. Whether material or metaphorical, the instigation of boundaries and thresholds organise divisions and transitions from one category to another, from one space to another, and from one state to another. Their capacity to partition and segregate, notwithstanding their susceptibility to be traversed, renders boundaries versatile mechanisms of authority, as the categorisation they enable can serve the purposes of othering across all categories of human and non-/more-than-/other-than-human identity. Othering, across all definitions and readings of the concept, is always and prominently entangled with the processes of hierarchisation and the aims of control and oppression.³

Border thinking challenges architects to critically engage with borders, thresholds, and boundaries as dynamic and contested spaces, prompting a revaluation of design principles, power structures, and the cultural contexts in which architecture is situated. The contributions contained within the following pages examine the power relations embedded in spatial configurations, critically interrogating the role of surveillance, control, and discipline in shaping physical as well as sociocultural spaces. They charter the intellectual landscape that unfolds when architecture confronts the complexities of colonialism, transnational exchanges, gender dynamics, religious symbolism, and educational environments.

Starting with the questions of settler colonial sovereignty through violence legitimised by the state apparatus, Jasper Ludewig urges us to ‘unlearn whiteness’ not only in seeing ‘its invisibility at the centre of modern ideas’ but also in ‘the disaggregated but decisive interfaces of colonial jurisdiction’. Infrastructural development in the Queensland colony, he argues, was a symptom and instrument of colonial authority until the law deemed itself illegitimate. Ludewig identifies architecture as an instrument of facilitation, managing territorial jurisdiction through borders, buildings, settlements, and extractive technologies.

Concerned with the crossing of ideological boundaries and the transfer, adaptation, and dissipation of design knowledge and principles from one socio-political context to another, Christina Crawford and Alessandro Porotto make a case through the design and construction of a low-income housing project. They show ‘how the first federally funded public housing in the US was also a synthesis of early twentieth-century European mass housing accomplishments’, linking 1930s Vienna with Atlanta, USA.

Over in Chile, Amarí Peliowski and Alicia Olivari draw on ‘memory as a critical category that allows for the imbrication of individual and collective experiences of the past’ to argue that recollections of collaborative work and social issues during the period before the military coup made a generation of architects more alive to issues of gender and gender equality. The focus on ‘collective work’ and the subsequent shift towards more individualist work ethics has revealed a ‘regression in labour conditions’ of women architects in Chile. As working conditions for women worsened, so did support for socially-driven architecture. The metaphorical boundary here is set in time, at the point of Pinochet's coup d’état. It marks the abrupt transition between two periods characterised by very different sets of rules and patterns.

It is the physical, material boundaries and the ‘atmospheres’ that they produce as a precursor to human cognition, perception, and emotion that is at the heart of research of the final three papers in this issue. Pablo Martinez Capdevila identifies the ‘hypothetical features of the ideal mosque’ in juxtaposition to Alberti's ‘canonical architectural object’. In rejecting ideas of finiteness, Capdevila argues for an archetype that represents ‘an unrepresentable God’ reflected in ‘immaterial, contemplative, and seemingly endless’ — unbounded — atmospheres. The attitude of students towards school — the bond between them and the school as a socio-spatial entity — is unravelled in Chrystala Psathiti and Kerstin Sailer's enquiry. How a structure is ‘filled with life’, they argue, cannot be explained by looking at form alone and requires the analysis of social codes. Their findings suggest that the ‘synchronic co-presence in space which brings everyone together by means of co-visibility in space’ is important for positive feelings of attachment. Last but not least, Carlos Lerma, Júlia G. Borràs, Jose Vercher, Ángeles Mas, and Enrique Gil discuss yet another set of ‘boundaries’. They demonstrate that understanding a building's becoming from conception to its final form through the lines and rules that bound its structure is central to designing interventions towards the adaptation and reuse of modern architecture.

From the delineation of physical structures to the metaphorical demarcations of identity and power, architects navigate complex terrains where design principles intersect with broader societal constructs. Through critical engagement with border thinking, architects are challenged to interrogate not only the tangible manifestations of borders but also the underlying power dynamics and cultural contexts that shape them. As evidenced by the diverse range of enquiries presented in this issue, from the examination of settler colonial sovereignty to the transfer of design knowledge across ideological landscapes, the study of borders in architecture offers a transformative lens through which to decipher the layers of meaning and significance inherent in spatial configurations. Our earlier ‘call to arms’ in research and practice is here responded by deepening scholarship through the lens of boundary-crossing, where architecture's role in making and unmaking different boundaries will continue to shape our environments and interactions.

Notes

1 See Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, ‘Toilet Architecture: An Essay About the Most Psychosexually Charged Room in a Building’, PIN-UP, 23 (Fall/Winter 2017/2018) <https://pinupmagazine.org/articles/toilet-modern-architecture> [accessed 22 February 2024]; and Sarah Jewitt, ‘Geographies of Shit: Spatial and Temporal Variations in Attitudes Towards Human Waste’, Progress in Human Geography, 35.5 (October 2011) <https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132510394704>.

2 John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

3 Henk van Houtum and Ton van Naerssen, ‘Bordering, Ordering and Othering’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 93.2 (2002) <https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9663.00189>.