Notes on Acting Up

Abstract

Part open letter, part personal narrative, this essay argues for two mediums that have—in the experience of the author—been derided as less-than-scholarly in architecture education: quilting and collage. By inviting us to embrace messiness, nostalgia, and radical juxtaposition, quilting and collage offer timely alternatives to 90-degree corners and orthogonal projection. Rather, they invite us to embrace new forms and spaces of knowledge production and collaboration, with real liberatory potential for design education. Lastly, I outline the nuanced complications of teaching at a Historically Black institution (as an alum of one), and what is lost when we prioritize traditional forms of architectural representation.

Keywords:

• material culture
• radical pedagogy
• collage
• quilting

Notes

1 See Patricia Cafferky, “Planning for Anti-Displacement Development: An Affordable Housing Study in Central Falls,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, June 2021, https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/138917.

2 Merriam-webster.com, s.v. “collage,” accessed July 30, 2023, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/collage.

3 Dark Matter U (DMU), is a BIPOC-led network that emerged in the wake of the BLM protests of 2020 to call the discipline to embrace more radical forms of knowledge and practice. Many DMU courses have been deployed in several design schools, with some pairing HBCUs with PWIs. See their essay “Collective Pedagogies,” in JAE 76.2 “Pedagogies for a Broken World” (Fall 2022). See also www.darkmatteru.org.

4 Fred Moten, “THE CASE OF BLACKNESS,” Criticism 50:2 (2008): 177–218, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23128740. See also MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019).

5 Vanessa Kraemer Sohan, “‘But a Quilt Is More’: Recontextualizing the Discourse(s) of the Gee’s Bend Quilts,” College English 77:4 (2015): 294–316, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24240050.

6 Beretta E. Smith-Shomade, “Appropriation,” in Keywords for Media Studies, ed. Jonathan and Laurie Ouellette (New York: NYU Press, 2017). 14, Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/book/59004.

7 Amy Frearson, “‘We Banned Renders’ from the Design Process Says Tatiana Bilbao,” Dezeen, December 4, 2019, https://www.dezeen.com/2019/12/04/tatiana-bilbao-banned-renderings-architecture-interview/.

8 See the winning submission the Subjective Waters studio, which earned the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) Creative Achievement Award, on the 2023 Architectural Education Awards website, https://www.acsa-arch.org/awards-archive/2023-architectural-education-award-winners/.

9 Dan Hill, “The Incomplete City,” But What Was the Question? (blog), June 29, 2016, https://medium.com/butwhatwasthequestion/incompleteness-7adad1d58a3d.

10 “Students Reveal Cultural Potential of Public Space,” University of Tennessee, Knoxville College of Architecture and Design, February 2, 2022, https://archdesign.utk.edu/culture-public-hackett/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Curry Hackett

Curry J. Hackett is an award-winning post-disciplinary designer, public artist, and educator. His practice, Wayside, braids Black aesthetics, kinships with nature, and pop culture to engender spaces of joy and abundance. Hackett’s work and writing have appeared in Bloomberg, Metropolis, Washington Post, eflux, and Architect Magazine. Hackett began his academic career in 2019 at his alma mater Howard University, and is a core member of the anti-racist design collective Dark Matter U. His philosophy of design education is one of care, messiness, nostalgia, and fun. In 2023, Hackett won the ACSA Creative Achievement Award for his “Subjective Waters” studio, a collaboration with his students that explored water’s role in Black culture and geography. Other iterations of this research have garnered recognition from JAE as an inaugural fellow, the Graham Foundation, and Washington Project for the Arts. Currently, Hackett is completing the master’s of architecture in urban design program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.