ARCH 810
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Over six consecutive days in September 2020, 130 architecture students from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee circumnavigated the perimeter of Milwaukee on foot, by bike, and car to experience firsthand how the city is both affecting and being affected by greater and more complex phenomena such as race, social class, global warming, and climate change. The studio, Walk the Line, functioned as a meeting place, curatorial lab, traveling repository, and production atelier that operated from the periphery of the city to survey the intersection between land, the human body, and human activity. By traveling 110 miles around the outermost edge of the city, without ever crossing the imaginary line that encloses it, students understood the effects of racism, segregation, and economic disparity not as theoretical constructs but as issues that are available to immediate experience. The impact was real, tangible, and difficult to ignore. Students cataloged the nature of their observations through field diaries and narrative maps, reflected on those annotations with people they met along the way and online, and collectively designed and built 34 site-specific interventions in response. The interventions acted as barometers that were capable of recording the effects of the record high water levels of Lake Michigan, racially restrictive covenants in Wauwatosa, eroding sand dunes, and rapidly depleting salt piles on Jones’ Island, and highlighted how these phenomena connect across multiple temporal registers and enact change that is felt across multiple timescales.
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Critics:
Mo Zell |
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Forgotten Mixture is a site-specific intervention for the 810 studio in the Fall of 2020. The site exists within the Milwaukee County park system, as part of the green buffer between the city and the suburbs. The Kinnikinnic River Parkway contains no sidewalks and is bordered by roads, thus prioritizing the car’s experience over that of the pedestrian. The river, buried in the foliage, is easy to miss. Without paths or sidewalks, residents’ zigzag across the lawn and walk their dogs along the unmarked river trail, often alone. The landscape architect who initiated the County Park System design, Fredrick Law Olmsted, said of public parks that “...all classes [are] largely represented, with a common purpose... each individual adding by his mere presence to the pleasure of all others, all helping to the greater happiness of each. You may thus often see vast numbers of persons brought closely together, poor and rich, young and old.” This idealistic vision of parkland is not realized in this space. Our installation takes on the challenge of disrupting the site’s usual programming to allow for engagement with the river and community gathering across the fractured border. In this way, we honor the river’s namesake, Kinnikinnic, derived from the Ojibwe “what is mixed.”
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Project Images (Click to Enlarge)
Student Presentation
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Providing the only structure or shelter at Bay View Park (at least on Dec. 6, 2020), the Six(teen) Cut Suncatcher harnesses the primary elements defining the location: it is a place of movement, the convergence and dividing of the sidewalk and the Oak Leaf Trail, with a path down to a secluded beach area along Lake Michigan, making the spot a transitory one. In the triangular grass area defined by the convergence of these walking paths, atop the ridge above the beach, the dominant phenomena are the trees, the sun, the long shadows cast by the latter shining upon the former, the wind blowing generally from inland lakeward, and the view of the lake itself afforded by the winter disrobing of the thin wooded strip on the ridge. The suncatcher’s wood construction references the grove of trees in which it resides, and the long shadows they cast near the winter solstice, while the raw-manufactured quality of the minimally manipulated materials distinguishes this place of repose from the natural habitat (and derives its name). Pathway followers are momentarily diverted from their linear movement to pause or at least slow down, passing through the suncatcher with overhead-beam-height-induced deliberation, or finding it a bench with a lakeview worthy of their bottom sides. The installation draws attention to itself, sharpening the observation of erstwhile passersby, and instantaneously returns that captured attention and appreciation to the environment around, the lake, the wind, the sun, the trees which give it a location, an identity, and a purpose.
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Project Images (Click to Enlarge)
Student Presentation
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