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Abstract
On January 6, 2021, Donald Trump summoned a mob of angry supporters from across the country to Washington DC, where they were to join the president at a “Save America” rally. The premise for the rally was Trump’s oft-repeated and patently false claim that the 2020 presidential election had been “stolen” from him. In a speech given at the Ellipse, Trump incited the crowd, warning “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”Footnote1 Provoked by his incendiary rhetoric, the enraged crowd marched to the US Capitol Building, demanding that Vice President Mike Pence and Congress reject Joe Biden’s victory. Their intention was to disrupt the Electoral College vote count by Congress that would ratify the election results, and they did so by breaching, vandalizing, and looting both the grounds and the US Capitol Building. Five people died as a result of the storming of the US Capitol and more than 140 people were injured, with the insurrectionists causing upwards of thirty million dollars in damages. In the days following the insurrection, the shock and awe at the televisual and social media spectacle of the riot registered globally. The building stories that follow will consider these events from the vantage point of the architecture that housed them, utilizing architectural representational conventions to consider the roles that the built environment played in the insurrection.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Marc J Neveu and Lisa Findley for their generous invitation to contribute to this Building Stories issue, and am deeply honored to participate in Marc’s final issue as JAE’s executive editor. I had the privilege of collaborating with Marc and the amazing editorial board he assembled for eight of his sixteen issues as executive editor, and read with delight as the subsequent eight issues just continued to get better and better. Marc, you are a talented editor, a wonderful collaborator, and a true friend, and I am so happy to participate in this issue, and to celebrate your incredible contributions in shaping disciplinary scholarship, pedagogy, and discourse.
I would like to thank Lucy Liu and Matthew Bohne of PROPS.SUPPLY for a wonderful and productive collaboration on the images for this essay. We were united in our desire to tell this story without aggrandizing or extending the rioter’s fifteen minutes of fame. Lucy and Matt possess both conceptual agility as designers and skill and latitude as image makers, and I look forward to future collaborations with them both. This collaboration was made possible by support from RISD’s 2050 Fund and I am grateful to Patricia Barbeito, RISD’s dean of faculty, and Scheri Fultineer, RISD’s dean of architecture and design, for so generously supporting this endeavor.
Notes
1. Sam Cabral, “Capitol Riots: Did Trump’s Words at Rally Incite Violence?” BBC News, February 14, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55640437.
2. Robert A. Pape and Keven Ruby, “The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists: We analyzed 193 people arrested in connection with the January 6 Riot—and found a new king of American radicalism,” The Atlantic, February 2, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/the-capitol-rioters-arent-like-other-extremists/617895/.
3. François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), xv.
4. See Emil Kaufmann, Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier: Ursprung und Entwicklung der autonomen Architektur (Vienna and Leipzig, 1933).
5. Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 12.
6. Shelly Tan, Youjin Shin, and Danielle Rindler, “How One of America’s Ugliest Days Unraveled Inside and Outside the Capitol,” The Washington Post, January 9, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2021/capitol-insurrection-visual-timeline/.
7. Uri Friedman, “Don’t Erase What Happened at the Capitol,” The Atlantic, February 13, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/dont-erase-what-happened-capitol/618017/.
8. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1974), 338.
9. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, 337.
10. Friedman, “Don’t Erase What Happened at the Capitol.”
11. Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, 18.
12. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1911), 302.
13. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 8.
14. See Luke Mogelson, “A Reporter’s Footage from Inside the Capitol Siege,” The New Yorker, January 17, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/news/video-dept/a-reporters-footage-from-inside-the-capitol-siege. See also Luke Mogelson, “Among the Insurrectionists,” The New Yorker, January 25, 2021,.https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/25/among-the-insurrectionists.
15. Mogelson, “A Reporter’s Footage.” AQ: I have assumed the first reference in footnote 14 is intended here and in next note.
16. Mogelson, “A Reporter’s Footage.”
17. See Stafford’s discussion of physiognomist Johann Casper Lavater in Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), 107ff.
18. Charles L. Davis II, Building Character: The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style (Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 49.
19. Theodore R. Johnson, “Raphael Warnock and the Solitude of the Black Senator,” The New York Times, January 20, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/20/magazine/raphael-warnock-black-senators.html.
20. Katie Rogers, “Protesters Dispersed with Tear Gas So Trump Could Pose at Church,” The New York Times, June 1, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/us/politics/trump-st-johns-church-bible.html.
21. John Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1992), 5.
22. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (St. Petersburg, FA: Black & Red, 1967), 2.
23. Debord, Society, 2–3.
24. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1984), 35–36.
25. Lauren Strapagiel, “Assistants Carrying Ballots Has Gone Viral But The Captions Are Wrong,” Buzzfeed, January 8, 2021, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/laurenstrapagiel/viral-photo-of-senate-chamber-assistants-is-incorrect.
26. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 128.
27. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 2.
28. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–77, ed. C. Gorgon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 194–96.
29. Foucault, Power/Knowledge.
30. Foucault, Power/Knowledge.
31. Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus: And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 11.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Amy Catania Kulper
Amy Catania Kulper is an architect, theorist, and curator whose teaching and research focus on the intersections of history, theory, and criticism with design. She is currently an associate professor of architecture and department head at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Kulper’s writings are published in Log, The Journal of Architecture, arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, Candide, The Journal of Architectural Education, and numerous edited volumes. Kulper has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Architectural Education where she has acted as the design editor for six years. In March of 2017 she received the Distinguished Service Award from ACSA for her work on the journal.
Lucy Siyao Liu
PROPS.SUPPLY is a design studio that pursues architecture, publishing, and cultural research. The studio’s propositions revel in the complexities of our existence caught between matter and data, manifesting tangible worlds and narratives to grapple with the transformative effects of technology on society, culture, and the built environment. PROPS.SUPPLY was founded by Lucy Siyao Liu and Matthew Bohne. Lucy Siyao Liu is an artist and architectural designer based in New York. Her work explores human systems devised in the past and present to comprehend scales of environment and ecology. Matthew Bohne is a designer based in New York. His drawings, installations, and performance work examine the construction of contemporary rituals of collecting and ordering.
Matthew Bohne
PROPS.SUPPLY is a design studio that pursues architecture, publishing, and cultural research. The studio’s propositions revel in the complexities of our existence caught between matter and data, manifesting tangible worlds and narratives to grapple with the transformative effects of technology on society, culture, and the built environment. PROPS.SUPPLY was founded by Lucy Siyao Liu and Matthew Bohne. Lucy Siyao Liu is an artist and architectural designer based in New York. Her work explores human systems devised in the past and present to comprehend scales of environment and ecology. Matthew Bohne is a designer based in New York. His drawings, installations, and performance work examine the construction of contemporary rituals of collecting and ordering.