My initial encounter with Marta Staņa (1913–1972) and her work in architecture occurred in 2002 when, as a young architecture journalist, I had the opportunity to interview Latvian-Australian architect Andrejs (Andrew) Andersons (born 1942), who hailed from Riga. During our conversation, Andersons highlighted Staņa’s remarkable work, which, to my surprise, was not widely known in contemporary architecture circles at that time.

Further investigation revealed that Staņa was better recognized among artists and designers, many of whom had been her students at the Riga Art and Design School and the Art Academy of Latvia. Andersons’s insights inspired me to delve deeper into Staņa’s story, prompting me to conduct interviews with her contemporaries who were still alive at the time. Additionally, I visited the Latvian Museum of Architecture, where a portion of her archive is housed

In the years that followed, I dedicated myself to research and had the privilege of curating an exhibition showcasing Staņa’s work. The exhibition Behind the Curtain. Architect Marta Staņa, held in 2010 at two venues in Riga—the Kim? Contemporary Art Centre and the Dailes Theatre—focused on her public buildings and architectural competition entries. However, there remained a folder containing newspaper clippings and notes about her smaller projects, including private homes, summer cottages, exhibition designs, illustrations for magazines, and even designs for gravestones. I put this folder aside to explore in the future. It is also essential to know that many of her design proposals, books, photographs, and personal belongings remain in the possession of individuals residing in the houses she designed. Some documents were lost during the restructuring of archives belonging to Soviet-era organizations, and some of the recollections of her contemporaries lack supporting documentary evidence. Nevertheless, thanks to the gradual digitization of museum collections, it has become possible to compile a relatively comprehensive list of her works.

For example, the small Tukums Museum preserves a furniture set consisting of a chair, a dining table, and a sideboard, along with a rug, wall art pieces, and metal candlesticks. This set was displayed in 1962 in the annual design exhibition held at the Latvian National Museum of Art, a highly popular show, the design of which Staņa also contributed to. Her innovative approach of presenting individual furniture pieces organized in sets, juxtaposed with traditional and contemporary crafts, ceramics, and textiles, was praised by her students and critics alike. This unique integration of modern furniture within the broader context of various art forms as well as architecture was a characteristic not only of the exhibitions she designed and co-curated but also of her own designs.

In 1963, she provided the design for an exhibition of work by her close friends and collaborators Erna Rubene (1910–1990), a respected master of traditional crafts, and Margarita Melnalksne (1909–1989), a ceramic artist. For their show, Staņa designed the general layout and furniture stands and created furniture pieces, such as tables and cabinets, to provide context for the entire exhibition.

Having designed the Dailes Theatre (1959–77) in Riga, the most celebrated public building in the mid-twentieth-century modernist style in Latvia, Staņa is one of a few Latvian architects whose main architectural work built during the Soviet occupation has retained its original shape and function. Among her other notable projects are a sleek cinema extension, innovative residential building typologies, schools, private residences, and summer cottages. Unfortunately, apart from the Dailes Theatre building, all of these structures have been modified to meet contemporary functional and energy efficiency requirements. While Staņa’s legacy encompasses a significant number of ambitious projects, ranging from high-rise office buildings and apartment blocks to schools and cultural venues, many of these exist solely as blueprints and architectural competition proposals.

After earning a diploma from the Jelgava Teachers Institute, Staņa initially pursued a career in teaching before enrolling in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Latvia in 1936. Upon graduating from the Faculty of Architecture in 1945, she was offered an assistant position under Professor Ernests Štālbergs. However, the tumultuous events of the time, including the repatriation of Baltic Germans, the initial Soviet occupation, subsequent deportations, the German occupation and persecution of Jews, and the subsequent emigration of Latvians to avoid the consequences of the Soviets’ return in 1945, greatly disrupted the established architecture school. The academic staff faced complete reconstitution, and Staņa became a member of the faculty during this process. She stood out as a talented young architect and a protégé of Štālbergs. Moreover, her previous teaching qualifications made her the sole professional educator among the other faculty graduates and other possible candidates for the job. Unfortunately, the academic community in the field of architecture, already weakened by the circumstances, suffered another blow when Staņa and her professor were dismissed from their positions at the University of Latvia during the academic purges of 1949–50. Immediately after that, the Faculty of Architecture was also closed, completely destroying the national school of architecture. Architecture was further taught at the Faculty of Building Construction at Riga Technical University.

During most of the 1950s, Staņa was engaged in a significant project for the remote fishermen’s kolkhoz, a newly made Soviet collective farm, in the coastal village of Skulte (Zvejniekciems), now part of Saulkrasti city. Her involvement included designing a master plan for the village, encompassing various facilities such as a workers’ club, a school, and a low-rise housing complex for teachers. The kolkhoz, which emerged from a prosperous fishermen’s cooperative that had been nationalized by the Soviets, possessed substantial resources and ambitions, enabling the commissioning of an entire village.

Initially, Staņa’s early proposals for the village adhered to the obligatory Stalinist architectural style prevalent at the time. However, in the mid-1950s, she embraced a newfound liberation inspired by the sweeping modernisation throughout the Soviet Union. This shift allowed her to explore innovative approaches in her designs. One noteworthy project that exemplified this progressive mindset was the school in Zvejniekciems. Developed immediately after the club, showcasing the canonical Stalinist architecture, the school design offered pioneering qualities, such as a horizontally arranged layout, with distinct volumes dedicated to each function. Abundant natural light flooded the learning spaces, creating an inviting environment. Furthermore, the school offered direct access to the surrounding nature, fostering a harmonious connection between the built environment and the outdoors.

Following her victory in the Dailes Theatre building competition in 1959, Marta Staņa joined the State Design Institute in 1960, where she dedicated herself to the ongoing design of the theatre until her final days. Her proposal with the main foyer’s horizontal volume situated on the second level remains unique within the context of Riga, where historical architecture predominantly prevails. By incorporating wide windows in foyers and designing a hall capable of accommodating 1,000 audience seats, Staņa introduced a fundamentally new architectural and theatrical experience opening it up to the city. Unfortunately, in line with the typical constraints of the Soviet economy, the construction of the theatre spanned 18 years due to changes and material shortages. However, despite modifications made throughout the design process, the architect’s original idea remained intact. The architecture of the theatre encompassed not only the building itself but also the surrounding public space, which underwent renovations in 2023 by MADE architects. This serves as a rare example of a building constructed during the Soviet era that has not only retained its original purpose but also complies with modern standards of public space and accessibility.

During her tenure at the institute, Staņa actively participated in numerous local and international design competitions, earning the admiration of colleagues for her ability to swiftly translate ideas into drawings, proving her talent for architecture and exceptional artistic skills. Among other notable works during her time at the institute were experimental apartment blocks characterized by spacious balconies, efficient utilization of space and natural light, and unconventional arrangements of facade panels. Additionally, outside of her official working hours, she passionately designed private homes and summer cottages for her colleagues and friends. These projects, created on limited budgets, exemplified Staņa’s remarkable ability to work harmoniously with available, low-quality materials, often repurposing leftover resources while maintaining a connection with nature.

For most of her projects, Staņa also provided interior design ideas, including furniture, lighting, and textiles. Staņa’s passion for illustration led her to collaborate with magazines, where together with her friend Erna Rubene she shared their expertise through illustrated advice on modern living. Her artistic skills and a keen eye for design were instrumental in providing practical and visually appealing suggestions to readers.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Staņa also dedicated herself to teaching, primarily within the interior design departments of Riga Design School and the Art Academy of Latvia. Although teaching may have held a lower status in terms of prestige, it was highly regarded by students who valued her unique guidance and expertise. Staņa’s educational method incorporated the concept of working with space and its objects as a cohesive ensemble, showcasing her approach to complex and rational thinking. She consistently encouraged her students to strive for excellence, offered constant encouragement and provided inspiration. Although she did not receiving any awards during her lifetime, her students, such as stage designer Andris Freibergs (1938–2022), who has mentored a new generation of internationally acclaimed stage designers, attest to the enduring effectiveness of her teaching methods and her talent as an educator: “I was so taken by her. I joined the interior design department of the Art Academy because Marta Staņa started teaching there.”¹ Many young designers had the opportunity to prove themselves by contributing to Staņa’s architectural projects, for example, in Zvejniekciems, where both the club and school buildings display graduation works, such as stained glass windows, ceramics and textiles, of Riga Art and Design School students.

Staņa died of cancer in 1972 and her career as an architect was relatively brief, lasting less than twenty years. Her work is characterized by a distinct clarity of vision, scope, and bold lines, skillfully incorporating people in motion and elements of nature. She viewed architecture, both in practice and education, as a unified approach to space, where architecture harmoniously interacts with the surrounding environment, interior spaces, and art objects within them. Staņa has not left a written theoretical legacy. Even in discussions held at the Latvian Association of Architects, she participated with simple, rational comments. She also helped her colleagues practically, even working in several teams during one competition. Staņa was not able to see the Dailes theatre building completed, nor was she able to live in the house and work in the studio she designed and started to build for herself by the Baltic Sea. Many of her ideas remained only as drawings. “I was born too soon. No one can build my ideas,”²she has said.

The assignment of roles to female architects was one of the many architectural histories explored during the 2019 exhibition A Room of One’s Own at the Estonian Architecture Museum³ in Tallinn. The curators raised questions about authorship in architectural collaborations and the distribution of awards in the field. In 1967, Staņa completed a mandatory biography questionnaire before her trip to former Czechoslovakia. She confirmed that it would be her first trip abroad and that she had never received awards for her work. While the Soviet labour market maintained equality between men and women, awards and participation in such trips were privileges reserved for male colleagues with prominent positions and Communist Party membership.

Regarding work placements, every architecture student was guaranteed a job at one of the State Design Institutes. However, not everyone managed to secure a position at the prestigious City division, which offered the opportunity to work on large public buildings. Women architects were often sent to remote locations, the countryside, or employed in other industries, such as road design. Female architects also played valuable roles in competitions, yet authorship and recognition frequently favoured male leaders. For instance, in 1963, an article⁴ in the magazine Māksla reported the participation of the Latvian team in the international competition for the monument in Playa Girón, Cuba. Similar to other competitions, a team of renowned professionals was formed, later working on Staņa’s idea. However, the accompanying photograph only featured her male companions. In that same year, one of the authors, Ivars Strautmanis, highlighted this competition as a personal achievement in the newspaper Rīgas Balss⁵, without mentioning other team members. Both articles in this case reflect the male perspective of the author, photographer, and editor. Such articles, omitting co-authors, reinforce the perception of authorship, perpetuating it in subsequent publications and conversations to this day. Additionally, it was common practice not to invite female team members to present projects on television or in documentaries, which were abundant to promote Soviet propaganda through culture. When women managed to appear on screen, they were often given the role of attractive background or exhibition visitors.

However, Staņa did not require an official title to earn recognition and praise from art and cultural circles. Her projects may have been unrealised or small in scale, budget, and impact on the official architectural agenda, nevertheless, her position on the periphery led her to work on cultural projects. These projects, though modest, have recently become accessible for examination thanks to the digitalization efforts of museums and archives. It has been a tremendous pleasure to discover footage of the interior she designed for the editorial office of Māksla magazine or blueprints of storage cabinets created for the Museum of Literature and Music while writing this article and adding two more works to her portfolio. In the Soviet Union, architects were not rewarded with prizes or bonuses for empowering the female community, designing museum cabinets, or experimenting with houses for private clients using leftover construction materials. Staņa’s architecture, indeed, exemplified empathy and embodied the paradigms of our time, transcending the boundaries of the 20th century.

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There is a chasm between classical and contemporary Southeast Asian art—as there is between specialists in the former and the latter. On the one side is the devotional object, iconographic signification, politico-religious context, and material means—largely bound together today as in the past century by a scholarly investment in the empirical reliant especially on archaeological investigation and connoisseurial skill. On the other is theoretical exploration, where artistic and art historical practices meet to sound objectivity as a means not of abandoning the pursuit of truth but of reinforcing it, to query codification, and to push boundaries of interpretive foreclosure. Attempts to bridge the chasm are engineered, usually from the contemporary critical edge, through constructs of continuity and change, indigeneity, alternative modernities, and decoloniality—all frequently underpinned by deference, sincere or feigned, to classical knowledge—and harnessing the subaltern to the past through anthropological research. I have tumbled into its depths more than once. Here, rather than hoisting myself up to peer obliquely over the edge of the past, as I am wont to do, I am trying to eke out an existence within, probing where meaning might take root underground—between the two.

Taking “tradition” as a starting point strikes me as an increasingly anachronistic gesture, be it on the part of the artist or the art historian. The gesture is premised on the image of a static-dynamic tandem in which contemporary art is a site of research into fixed things. The premise effectively denies the multiple contemporaneities of historical objects even as it seeks to reactivate them. From the subterranean vantage point I am attempting to sustain, where roots take hold but also grow and branch, historical conditioning proceeds from the work of art as much as precedes it. The materials I am considering here are as historical as they are contemporary, and as contemporary as they are timeless insofar as they all comprise dynamic sites of practice-led research. I see that they theorize in themselves. And their work is never done. If the artworks embody theorization-in-the-making, they do not—indeed cannot—reify history or theory.

This means taking underground culture literally: seeking at once the point of view of the ancestors, buried as they are and yet made to regulate social order by virtue of their very assimilation with the enduring earth, and that of the disruptors of normativity, those who, shunted beneath the surface, are made to bolster the foundations of normativity itself. Still, mingling to make a scene that can be seen now and again, these perspectives all hold the promise of a breakthrough. At stake in exploring this common ground are, from my point of view, important dimensions of the practice of art history today as it might probe the imbrication of the normative and its challenge at the heart of the work of art, old and new.

Two artworks will ground me. At first glance, the one is on the order of a prototype: an iconography-cum-narrative reproduced in sculpture, painting, and performance with scant variation over time; the other, a film, is by contrast an original work that explores inheritance of and in art. Appealing to Hubert Damisch, we might call the iconography a “theoretical object.”¹ The iconography has, in Damisch’s terms, “emblematic value”: it is a staid model that exceeds history not only in historical terms as it endures through repetition over time but also in theoretical terms as a site of ever-unsettled and unsettling exploration of its essential referent—in this case, the gendered aesthetics of figure and ground. The more apparently original work teases out the like emblematic value of its subjects.

Artworks

My first theoretical object is the Māravijaya scene as it typically appears in Cambodian art from the eleventh century to the present (fig. 1). I have worked extensively on this and related iconographies elsewhere, and will only summarize below the narrative and interpretive points most pertinent to discussions here.² The Māravijaya, or “Victory over Evil,” is an episode in the life of the Buddha. The young Siddhartha has rejected the domestic world of the palace, the harem, the parents, the wife and child, to seek he does not know what—something more or less than the mundane. After a long period of searching for the right path, he finds himself meditating in a final approach to Awakening. A demon named Māra, the embodiment of Evil, comes to challenge Siddhartha to the throne on which he sits. Remaining nearly impassive, the Buddha-to-be reaches his right hand down to call the Earth to witness. This moment in the story is denoted by the bhūmisparśa mudrā, the hand gesture of “touching the Earth.” The Earth bears witness to the future Buddha’s accomplishments over past lives. This proves that the future Buddha’s wealth of merit exceeds that of Māra, and in such, confirms the former’s right to the throne. In the process, the Earth is shown to bear—to conserve and to reveal on demand—ancestral history in a Buddhist sense in which one is one’s own ancestor via the cycle of rebirths known as the saṃsāra. The means by which the Earth bears witness varies across time and space. In textual accounts, the Earth quakes at the future Buddha’s touch, and sometimes takes the form of a woman. The latter is the case in much Southeast Asian visual representation, and nearly systematically in Cambodian art. More specifically, a voluptuous woman with long wet hair appears out of the Buddha’s pedestal; she is standing or dancing, and wrings out her hair, making it into a weapon with which she drowns Evil.

On the one hand, the normative binary constructions could not be clearer: the prince rejects the mundane to achieve transcendence, with women—wife or Earth—as his foil, which is to say, as the pedestal on which he appears a transcendent figure, the Buddha. On the other hand, the iconographic ensemble works to deconstruct the very normative structures it nonetheless promotes. The phallic attributes of the Earth figured in the pedestal are oddly matched by the Buddha figure’s embodiment of ambiguous gender. He has shed manhood to become a “Great Man” (Mahāpurus) sublimating (hetero)sexuality in ways that align them with the non-binary if not also the female sex. In formal terms, the Earth Goddess sometimes becomes a figure in her own right, outgrowing the Buddha’s pedestal as it were to stand atop her own. The iconography is bound up in Southeast Asian “cadastral religion” as analyzed by Paul Mus:³ the iconography establishing the Buddha’s sovereignty over the Great Earth, who is shown to attest to his superiority, functions also as a macrocosmic affirmation of mundane practices of territorial organization.

The second artwork, which I will argue also calls the Earth to witness in probing analogous theoretical objects, is Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s 2015 essay film Letters from Panduranga (fig. 3).⁴ The thirty-five-minute single-channel video is a measured contemplation of the Cham people and heritage of south-central Vietnam. The work grew from an activist response to Vietnamese government plans to build nuclear power plants in Ninh Thuận province, Cham ancestral lands once known as Panduranga. The Vietnamese government installation would have caused yet another displacement of a people subjected to multiple colonialisms over the course of the second millennium. The Cham were once synonymous with Champa, a loose confederation of principalities located in what is now central and southern Vietnam from the fourth to the seventeenth century. The gradual expansion south of Vietnamese governance in the second millennium ultimately effaced Champa and displaced the Cham people. The shift in the ethno-political organization of the region was concomitant with a complex religious shift that saw some Cham communities embrace Islam on the back of centuries of Hindu-Buddhist practice embedded in a matrilineal kinship system. The ancient Cham material culture linked Cham peoples to their ancestral lands even as monuments fell into ruin and people moved on—or perhaps because of such transformations. From the nineteenth century, French colonial authorities worked to restore Cham temples and statues not to any contemporary owner deemed rightful, but rather as testimony to the universal value of the art produced by an ancient civilization discovered and recovered by modern colonial power. This is the landscape in which and about which Nguyễn Trinh Thi made Letters from Panduranga. As a Vietnamese citizen-artist, she seeks with her film to restitute some degree of dignity to the Cham people and places she meets.

In formal terms, the film develops through an intimate narrative exchange—a feminine voice and a masculine voice exchanging orally what seem to be the “letters” of the film’s title. The feminine voice begs seamless elision with the filmmaker, while the masculine voice conveys a sort of alter ego, in which a similar elision is nonetheless tempered with différance. The velvety texture of the two voices accompanying the camera in slow-paced trial-and-error shots of people, landscapes, and things envelops viewers in the collaborative contemplation of field encounters and techniques for engendering and adequately recording them. With notable exceptions, the filmed subjects look back at or beyond the camera but say little.⁵

Letters from Panduranga, Take 1

In an analysis of what she will finally call “an aesthetics of matriarchal potentiality”⁶ in Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s essay films, May Adadol Ingawanij alerts viewers to a fine line between repressive and progressive impulses in the assimilation of women with land: “The association of women with background and silence may superficially resemble a colonial trope of visualizing the landscape of conquest.” But Nguyễn, she argues, “complicates the commonly problematized binary, of female/background/non-speech and male/foreground/speech” by evoking a competing association, this time of artists with women, both “silenced by censorship and relegated to the background in modern Vietnam.”⁷ I want to supplement this historical commentary with further consideration of ways in which the complication of the binary engenders Letters from Panduranga’s visual and vocal fields. As the female/background/non-speech is made to emerge into the foreground of the work of art, the subject positions of artist and filmed subject are subtly exchanged. It is nonetheless the background that is foregrounded, the female who is figured, non-speech that is made to be heard. That is, the exchange does not operate a simple inversion of the binary, in which the ground becomes wholly figure and the figure wholly ground. Nor does the film arrive at a resolution fixing subject positions in their proper place. The exchange is ongoing: subject positions vacillate. Though to my knowledge we never actually see them, in the voice, the artist themself is alternately foregrounded and backgrounded, as is the woman/land/silence filmed. They are shown to be resilient and made to be so in the showing. The artwork draws from an underground power, which at the same time, it creates. The power that it makes seen is one characterized by its capacity to relinquish its own hold. The fine line between the progressive and the regressive separates the two contrary motions while also binding them. And it is this relation at work between the normative and its challenge that I see the artwork to probe as it effectively calls the Earth to witness.

There are many stand-ins for the silenced, buried woman in Letters—notably men: old Cham men whose emasculation by the consecutive colonization of Vietnamese, French, and World Heritage regimes shows on their dignified, weathered faces; Vietnamese deminers whose emasculation is hidden in plain sight by the blatant cover-up of regressive labor exploitation in futuristic garb that, along with their undeniable bravery, makes them tragic superheroes; a shirtless, beer-guzzling Cham intellectual whose emasculation finds casual, noble expression in a learned citation of Nietzsche on the joke that is life perfectly void of irony; and the Vietnamese artist’s own male counter-ego whose gentle and wise narrative voice matches her own. Still, if the women in Letters are made to show potentiality in resilience, the men are made to show resignation.

This is to say that in the hands of the artist, the binary holds the seed of its own deconstruction. The Cham/women/land are called to witness, and they do, but they do not speak back to take back; nor does the artist speak for them. Yet, in the call-and-response the artist plays out, she is more than one person, one sex, one ethnicity. The unrelenting acknowledgment of the unbridgeable gap between the artist and their subjects holds the promise of exchange and in such, uncannily and fleetingly unites them. The “matriarchal potentiality” lies then in the background as it is given form.

Letters from Panduranga, Take 2 (Clip 1)

The female narrator-filmmaker’s “favorite place to be” in the Ninh Thuận region of Vietnam is “the cemetery of the Cham Bani, who mix Islam and Brahmanism with local traditions.”⁸ A wide-angle shot of a full, tall tree against a gray sky introduces these words. The nearly two-and-a-half-minute passage that follows takes place in the cemetery in the middle of Letters from Panduranga. The camera pans from the treetop down. Birds sing. A mountain range comes vaguely into view in the distance. Reaching the ground, the camera pulls in to pan the foreground of boulders on a sandy surface before cutting to a woman standing on the sand among neat rows of rounded stones (see fig. 2). The background is now a low building and distant water. The woman is a bit rounded too, hair tied back, oval face, dark eyes, a long scarf draped over her shoulders with the lengths pinned down under either arm, hands clasped under her belly, a taut top, a long full skirt billowing in the wind. The camera lingers on her among the stones. Holding still for the full-frontal portrait, she seems to teeter. She averts her eyes briefly. The narrative voice continues, “Sometimes I lie down among all these stones.”

A colleague’s query brought into focus my obscure sense of the uncanny interplay between voice and image here. He asked, “Was the woman standing in the cemetery the filmmaker?” In contrast to the enunciation of the “I” elsewhere in the film where the narrator explicitly reflects on her difference from the Cham, this phrase, “Sometimes I lie down among all these stones,” suggests an identification between the narrating subject and the subject filmed. Pictured lying in the landscape, the narrator collapses the distance elsewhere made so apparent between herself and her subjects. Yet, the narrated image jars: the woman is actually pictured, that is to say filmed, standing. The resolution of this enigma follows but is no less jarring. The film cuts to a close-up of a pair of stones. The narrative voice continues, “The Cham Bani have the tradition of burying the dead on the chest of their deceased mother.” This is the first of fifteen cuts to different pairs of stones. “At each spot under a pair of stones, there might be a dozen skeletons lying on each other’s chests,” the narrative voice continues.

When she lies down among the stones, and when she pictures herself doing so in words, the narrator, it turns out, is identifying with the dead. It is a striking gesture of agency—lying down with the dead, where agency is defined as the ultimate form of passivity. In herself making like the dead, the narrator imbues a like passive agency to the stones lying on the sand as to the living woman standing among them. Any line between living and dead, as between the filmmaker and the filmed, is blurred. The camera cuts and lingers on each pair of stones just as it had on the woman. The stones also hold still under the gaze—which is to say they are made capable of movement. Do they flinch? Or do we? Once we are made to look, each pair appears different, in size, color, and positioning. They have character.

The burial image is odd: How are the dead made to lie on the chest of their deceased mother? Does the whole body not lie atop the whole body? The chest functions metonymically, that is, the pairs of stones evoke the ancestral mother’s breasts as a stand-in for the whole abstract body—ancestor and land, time and space as one.⁹ Silence ensues. The camera opens up, from one pair to show the following sequence of pairs; and out, to show many rows of pairs stretching to the horizon. The stones have taken the place of the standing woman. Was the woman standing in the cemetery a ghost?

Letters from Panduranga, Take 3 (Clip 2)

Otherwise uncanny is the incorporation of Hanoi’s Statue of Liberty into a Buddha statue in the wake of World War II and the filmic account of this historical event (fig. 3).¹⁰ This is another take on the return of the repressed, where Nguyễn makes us see a palimpsest of narratives embedded in a single image. On one register is the “perfect study of the ‘destiny’ for the ‘colonial remnants’” as the artist-narrator’s alter ego tells it in this passage. The Hanoi Statue of Liberty, a small-scale version of the French gift to America, would become the city’s own beacon of freedom. Locally named bà đầm xoè, the “Open-Dressed Dame,” in an insider’s tongue-in-cheek critique of Western expressions of freedom, the Statue of Liberty had once stood atop Turtle Tower in Hanoi’s Hoàn Kiếm lake. She was taken down and melted down after the war as the Vietnamese gathered strength against the French seeking to reestablish colonial authority in “‘Indochina.” In literally recasting this quintessential embodiment of Western power as a Buddha statue—that is, as a quintessential embodiment of Eastern power—the repressed emerged victorious.

On another register is the filmic excavation of this story and its standing woman. The images accompanying the narration invite analysis on the model of that undertaken by the film itself, zooming in and out to discern detail, assess context, and performatively consider development of method. The passage is framed by a study of stone specimens. Someone—presumably the male speaker—holds an earthy rock up to the camera. A glass jar, with what looks like a plant rooting in water, is out of focus in the background. The hand holding the rock mirrors the camera, both unsteady, as the rock is brought in and out of focus. A small light beam abruptly illuminates its surface, which is reddish, rough, grainy. This is one of a series of specimens presented in the same manner: the presenter puts the first rock down and puts another to the same test, before then presenting a sequence of black-and-white colonial postcards also made to come in and out of focus. The particular “study of the ‘destiny’ for ‘colonial remnants”’ comes into focus as the camera homes in on the fuzzy details of one postcard featuring an engraving—Vietnamese people going about their lives on the ground. The camera moves up the card surface to reveal a tiny statue atop a building set at the far side of a lake; the narrator points her out—Hanoi’s Open-Dressed Dame—as he tells the story. The camera pulls out to show the bigger picture: a larger statue in the foreground rises above the people first shown close up. They are all set in a park. Seen from behind, the larger statue mirrors the tiny one across the lake. The man and the woman are both standing on high pedestals. They appear to face each other, communicating in the common language of their bodies standing straight and tall extending skyward—for Liberty with her hallmark right arm raised to hold a torch aloft; for her counterpart, a flagpole held to his left. The flag envelops the figure from behind to effectively expand his body in a dramatic manner: the pole appears as an extraordinary extension of his left arm. A screenshot of another postcard view of the Open-Dressed Dame rising above Turtle Tower islet across the lake, but this one, a sepia-colored photograph, is placed on top of the first, covering part of it. The camera flits between the two, highlighting different details. When the camera zooms out, we can read the postcard legend: “AUTOUR DE LA STATUE DE PAUL BERT A HA-NOI” (Around the statue of Paul Bert in Hanoi). Paul Bert was the resident-general of Tonkin and Annam for a short few months in 1886. The 2.85-meter replica of the Statue of Liberty was erected in a park at the symbolic heart of colonial administration in Hanoi in 1887. It was displaced in 1890 to make room there for the new statue of the deceased resident-general. Press reports at the time record local anger at the erection of the Open-Dressed Dame atop Turtle Tower, a monument commemorating the fifteenth-century legendary defeat of Ming Chinese colonizers and the foundation of a new dynasty to lead the independent Vietnamese state.

The humiliation can also be imagined through contemplation of the statue that took its place. Viewed frontally, the sculpture depicts Paul Bert with his right palm pressing down above the head of a Vietnamese man appearing to cower at the Frenchman’s feet.¹¹ This “statue of Paul Bert” is actually a sculptural ensemble. The grand figure of the resident-general is made to stand out by the smaller figure at his feet, a figure that is, then, effectively part of the resident-general’s pedestal. Here, we see an earlier iteration of how “the colonized nations were called upon to testify to the superiority of the colonizers” in the public exhibition of “art,”’ to quote Thomas McEvilley on the symbolic work in the famous 1984 exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern at The Museum of Modern Art.¹²

It is as if the colonial sculptural ensemble is a warped reiteration of the Māravijaya—or vice versa: unperturbed in their sovereignty, the men call to witness those who have gone to ground. The point is not to reduce the one artwork to the other in the name of the universal, to diminish colonial violence in eliding it with Buddhist order, or to equate two historico-culturally distinct expressions of Enlightenment leading to Liberation. Rather, it is to highlight the complex engendering of figure and ground at work at this nexus of historical settings. As history has it, many statues were incorporated like relics into the victorious postwar Buddha. But it is the French statue of Liberty that Nguyễn Trinh Thi calls to witness here to attest to the victory of the Vietnamese and in the process, now, to attest also to her own history. The filmmaker makes her reemerge from within the Buddha before our eyes, standing, right arm aloft. Like the woman in the cemetery of the Cham Bani—the filmmaker-narrator?—she too teeters in the faintly shaky hand of the presenter and the camera(wo)man. We know she has been melted down and yet she reappears, barely, like a ghost. The passage ends with the natural specimens brought back into focus.

The story is loosely reconstituted by the narrator’s alter ego as an exemplar of the truth beating fiction at its own game. Fiction, he reflects, can bring on a closer approach to the real in introducing a distance from it. The fiction the artist conjures is effectively surreal, a true story that appears so outrageous as to appear unreal. Like the shirtless Cham intellectual in Ninh Thuận province citing Nietzsche on the joke that is life.

Deep thanks to Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Nguyễn Hoàng Hương Duyên, Wong Binghao, Panggah Ardiyansyah, Pamela N. Corey, May Adadol Ingawanij, Vandy Rattana and the members of the Harvard University Collective on Gender, Religion and the Arts of Asia, for their interest and support in the development of this essay.

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Muslim gravesite-shrines dot the rim of the Indian Ocean, where they lie nestled in the culturally and geographically textured meeting point of water and land. This essay is concerned with the shrines that connect the Malay world, across the vast oceanic expanse, to southern Africa. The Malay world, in this instance, is the archipelagic region constituted by Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. The essay highlights shrines to two individuals in particular—Habib Noh in Singapore and Tuan Guru in Cape Town—and explores them as visual markers of sacred geographies and histories.

As is the case with other Muslim shrines, the figures they honor are regarded as awlīyā’, the term in Arabic for those who enjoy a closeness to God and serve as the guardians of believers. Many attribute the power of mediating between mortals and God to a walī (singular of awlīyā’). Hence, the term is frequently translated into English as “saint.”

Habib Noh and Tuan Guru are also both looked upon as keramat. This Malay term is derived from the Arabic karāmah, or the miracles attributed to a walī. Keramat means an otherworldly potency in Malay and refers to both the figure buried in the grave and the site itself. For centuries, Muslims as well as people of other faiths have offered votive prayers at such potent gravesites. Belief in awlīyā’and keramat draws from Sufism (Islamic mysticism) and is popular among Muslims but viewed with caution by religious authorities.

Built Archives

Keramat can be regarded as the built archives of both sacred geographies and histories. Geographically, they serve as built archives because they mark in the landscape a form of popular veneration. The shrines draw the eyes of viewers to low-lying visual markers of long-standing sacred sites that are human in scale rather than monumental as in the commemorative structures of nation-states.

Historically, keramat are the built archives of migration and exile in the Indian Ocean. Habib Noh and Tuan Guru began their journeys from the west and east, respectively.¹ The former arrived in Singapore in the nineteenth century as part of the Hadrami diasporic networks that expanded out of Yemen into the Indian Ocean. Tuan Guru was forcibly shipped from the island of Tidore, in eastern Indonesia today, to Cape Town by the Dutch East India Company in the eighteenth century. When Tuan Guru and other political leaders were exiled to southern Africa, they brought with them the practice of keramat veneration.

Keramat become visually compelling built structures when they are regarded not in isolation but rather in close relation to the landscape. Habib Noh inscribes histories of popular veneration and oceanic journeys amid the tall and hypermodern cityscape of Singapore while Tuan Guru inscribes the same in the natural landscape that rises dramatically around Cape Town.

Tuan Guru

The music begins with gentle and soft notes on the piano and is soon met by drumbeats that gradually make their presence known. Abdullah Ibrahim, the Cape Town–born musician, is on the piano and gradually builds up the pace and intensity of his playing. The drums fall into the background before returning in a rapid and vigorous battle march; they take center stage. The piano steps up its pace on an ascending scale to spar with the drums. Both instruments play to the finish, and the piano brings it all to a close softly, before coming to an abrupt stop.

Abdullah Ibrahim’s “Tuang Guru,” a variation of “Tuan Guru,” is a jazz composition created in the mid-1980s and synonymous with the Islamic leader who was exiled to Cape Town.² The Dutch met with resistance as they expanded eastward into the Malay Archipelago in the competition with other European powers for control over the spice trade. Tuan Guru and the other leaders who opposed the Dutch were removed to Cape Town, the Dutch outpost at the southern tip of Africa, to keep them at a great distance. Abdullah Ibrahim’s composition is not always an easy or melodious listening experience as it sonically re-creates the forced exile of Tuan Guru and the remaking of his life in another world.

Tuan Guru (1712–1807) played a foundational role in the establishment of Islam in his place of exile and came to be commemorated as a keramat after his death. He established the first mosque in Cape Town and transcribed several copies of the Qur’an from memory for the use of Muslims.³ Besides these and other accomplishments, he is remembered for the miracles he performed.

The visual experience of Tuan Guru’s keramat is closely tied to that of the striking landscape of Cape Town, as the shrine is located on a hill above the city center, facing the iconic Table Mountain to the south and the Atlantic Ocean to the west (figs. 1, 2). This is the setting of a notable number of paintings and photographs from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some of which were reproduced on postcards that were widely circulated.

The shrine once had a thick, low white wall with corner pillars along its perimeter, like a miniature fortress, with trees around it (fig. 3). At present, the wall has been replaced by a half-built brick structure that recalls the pyramidal tombs of eastern Indonesia, where Tuan Guru came from. A few palm trees are found nearby. The shrine has retained its human scale throughout the changes it has undergone.

The aesthetic of the gravesite is inseparable from the cemetery in which it is located. Tuan Guru’s shrine comes into view upon stepping through the arched concrete gateway into the burial ground. Countless gravestones dot the hillslope that rises up from the gravesite; these are very old as it is the site of one of the earliest Muslim burial grounds in Cape Town. The cemetery is aptly named “Tana Baru,” or “New Land,” in Malay.

Tuan Guru’s gravesite contrasts with the understated Muslim gravestones on the hillslope beyond, some of whose inscriptions are no longer legible and others that are practically submerged in the earth (fig. 4). The keramat serves not only to commemorate Tuan Guru as a pioneering Islamic figure but also to offer a collective name and visual marker to the forgotten dead, many with origins in the Malay world.

The presence of the keramat in the cemetery overlooking Cape Town is not only a visual and historical marker of the forced transplantation of Tuan Guru and countless others. The gravesite is within reach of the people who reside in the area and thus also a place where they are able to pay their respects to their forebear.

Habib Noh

Like Tuan Guru, Habib Noh was buried on high ground overlooking the sea. The latter is said to have chosen the particular spot in Singapore because it was where he often spent time in contemplation before his death in 1866.⁴ The British East India Company established an outpost on the island in 1819 and, in time, decided that Mount Palmer, the hill that once rose above Habib Noh’s favorite spot, was suitable for the construction of fortification for the defense of their harbor town. The British leveled part of the hill for this purpose, leaving the area around Habib Noh’s gravesite untouched.

According to one hagiographic account, Habib Noh was born in 1788 on a ship from the Hadramaut bound for Penang.⁵ People of Hadrami ancestry, like him, were part of multilingual and transcultural diasporic networks and became well-known religious adepts, miracle workers, traders, and diplomats across the Indian Ocean. Many were descendants of the Prophet Muhammad and thus carried the honorific “Habib” before their names. Their skills and exalted genealogy had been highly valued by a number of coastal polities of the Malay Archipelago for a couple centuries already. Thus, Habib Noh arrived in a world in which he cut a somewhat familiar figure.

Habib Noh is believed to have come to Singapore in the year the British established their trading outpost, and over time, he developed a reputation as an Islamic ascetic who through his extraordinary devotion to God, was given the gift of performing miracles. He is said to have used his powers to assist the sick as well as the seafaring merchants and crews of the bustling harbor.⁶ By the time of his death, Habib Noh had become well-known not only in Singapore but also across the Malay world, and people visited his gravesite from far and wide out of veneration.

The motif of a keramat overlooking the sea was idiomatic of awlīyā’ across the Indian Ocean. Habib Noh’s gravesite thus symbolically connected Singapore to an expansive sacred geography across the watery domain. An early twentieth-century image of the keramat shows a seascape with ships in the distance. The seascape disappeared from sight when land reclamation works were undertaken in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and a highway was constructed in the late twentieth century; the maritime connection to the expansive sacred geography was thus severed.

The architectural features of the keramat are a blend of the cultural influences that have been present in Singapore since the nineteenth century. The large dome at the top is representative of Islamic architecture across the Muslim world, and the columns recall classical European buildings (fig. 5). In broad terms, the structure today remains the same as it was more than a century ago. However, the louvered wooden windows and what appear to have been whitewashed walls have been replaced by glass shutters and olive-green tile walls.

The visual experience of the keramat has changed radically in the past 150 years. The infrastructural expansion begun in the nineteenth century has been carried on into the twenty-first century. The cityscape of Singapore—a wall of concrete, steel, and glass—fills up the sky near Habib Noh, and today, the shrine sits on a small plot of land with the highway on one side and a train system under construction on the other (fig. 6).

The spot where Habib Noh chose to be interred has remained in place in a landscape that has probably seen some of the most radical transformations in Singapore’s recent history (fig. 7). It is located on a knoll, which once abutted Mount Palmer on the southern coastline of the island, and a short distance from the buzzing financial center. Mount Palmer has been mostly leveled, and the historical harbor Habib Noh once overlooked has become reclaimed land. The keramat is the only remaining visual marker of a sacred geography and oceanic history whose traces have been erased.

The persistence of the shrine might perhaps be attributed to the respect with which it was held by British and Singaporean authorities. Rather, the stories that circulate by word of mouth and appear in hagiographies attribute its persistence to miraculous powers. For instance, heavy machinery is said to have failed when, in the 1980s, construction was begun on the highway to pass through the sacred site.⁷ Work resumed only after a ritual was performed and the highway was redesigned to skirt the keramat.

The Sacred in Our Times

Tuan Guru and Habib Noh lie on opposite ends of the Indian Ocean, separated by thousands of kilometers, and their biographies and historical contexts contrast sharply. There would appear to be little reason to compare the two. The transplantation of the popular practice of keramat veneration from the Malay world to southern Africa, however, allows us to view the disparate sites within a single frame.

Set against Table Mountain and the hypermodern cityscape of Singapore, respectively, Tuan Guru and Habib Noh are visually striking built archives of popular Islam. The focal points of these contrasting landscapes are the keramat themselves. Each is only a speck in the landscape on the scale of continents and oceans, but each is nonetheless potent. The keramat are repositories of devotion to God and miracles as well as oceanic histories whose visibility in the landscape matters. Whereas the sight of a mosque could inspire piety or awe, seeing a keramat is to connect with memories of a gifted human being, one who offers intercession between mortals and God.

To write about the sacred geographies and histories of keramat is not to claim primacy for them by privileging them as a particular set of built archives. Others have walked the earth and sailed the seas before them in Singapore and Cape Town. Tuan Guru and Habib Noh inscribe in the landscapes of these cities a time in the last millennium when the popular veneration of Muslim shrines was as ubiquitous across the Indian Ocean as Islamic networks were. The keramat are visible representations of this long-standing sacred geography and history within urban landscapes that have been transformed as radically as their political and social lives by colonial and national states.

Tuan Guru and Habib Noh open the doors of our imagination to other ways of understanding human relationships with the world, and to a much-needed mitigation, if not rethinking, of developmentalist ambitions. The sacred thus continues to assert its presence in our times.

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“Our nations and countries are colonies no more. Now we are free, sovereign, and independent. We are again masters in our own house.”¹ Dressed in a crisp military uniform and Muslim kopiah, President Sukarno of Indonesia delivered these words in his opening address at the 1955 Bandung Conference (or Asian-African Conference), a lectern dividing him from two floors of seated delegates and scores of international journalists crowding the room’s side aisles (fig. 1).

Although this evocation of “our own house” acts as a literary flourish that likens homeownership to the decolonization movements that swept the globe in the aftermath of World War II, it also contains a literal dimension. Sukarno’s “own house” was, in a sense, the physical venue where his words rang out. It was the same hall to which he made passing reference five times in the course of his speech and within which the Bandung Conference’s plenary sessions were held.² Originally constructed in 1895 to house what was a primarily Dutch social club called the Sociëteit Concordia, the structure was rebuilt and enlarged in the ensuing decades, before being selected by Bandung Conference organizers as a key meeting venue (fig. 2). It was then quickly renovated, freshly painted, and renamed the Gedung Merdeka (Freedom Building). Recast in this way, it served to represent the homecoming of Sukarno’s postwar governmental forces, who, once again, were “masters in [their] own house”—a house to which they invited international delegates, to “discuss and deliberate upon matters of common concern” in the “first intercontinental conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind.”³ This was the founding premise of the Bandung Conference, as Sukarno explained in his opening address at the Gedung Merdeka.

However, to characterize the aim of the conference as self-determined, anti-imperialist decolonization is to engage with the event as both a historical record and a mythos. Plenary sessions and closed-door meetings did indeed address political and economic interests, but recent scholarship has examined the ways in which on-the-ground realities diverged from stated goals. Robert Vitalis has scrutinized transcripts, direct outcomes, and the positions of different delegations, comparing them to first-hand reportage and public memory to expose various Bandung generalizations as mere “fables.”⁴ Robbie Shilliam has argued that self-determination, as pursued at the conference and by its participating delegations, followed colonial blueprints.⁵ In the realm of visual culture, Christopher J. Lee has analyzed the event’s intimate, seemingly informal photojournalistic street photography and how it actively participated in mythmaking.⁶ Naoko Shimazu has framed the conference as a “theatrical performance” that “staged” the city of Bandung to be full of symbolic meaning legible to Western audiences learning about the event from its press coverage.⁷

This essay adds to the visual cultural discourse by foregrounding architecture—namely sites instrumental to the Bandung Conference, including the city’s airport, main thoroughfares, and two meeting venues—as material enablers of the event’s renown, from both near and far and as both fact and myth. In their glistening renovations and renamings, these architectural sites reveal the conference’s engagement with decolonization to be highly symbolic and intentionally so. Rather than burying the material remnants of Dutch East Indies colonial rule in the city of Bandung, conference organizers repurposed the spaces and structures of past regimes, creating new associations between architecture and its use and ownership while maintaining the visibility and legibility of this repurposing.

Conference as Stage and Curtain

If the Bandung Conference is to be viewed as a “stage” on which diplomacy was performed, to borrow Shimazu’s rich lens of analysis, then the city’s airport is the setting of Act One.⁸ Events of public interest began upon arrival, not upon the start of plenary sessions days later. This much is clear, based on the formidable volume of press coverage of the airport itself—from photographs to interviews to speeches—and the fact that these media outputs are in line with the high visibility of international diplomatic outings and the publicity they engender.⁹

Elsewhere, however, this architectural setting stood as more than a dependable backdrop. One month prior to the opening of the Bandung Conference on April 18, 1955, and then daily throughout the event’s duration, the Indonesian government published the freely distributed, English-language Asian-African Conference Bulletin, which functioned equally as magazine, government-sanctioned reportage, and speech transcript. “Bandung is Ready,” the bulletin’s second issue declares. This bold, cursive-font headline and its accompanying descriptions of the preparations taking place citywide are visually bookended by two half-page images: an interior view of the Gedung Merdeka during an inspection tour led by President Sukarno and Secretary-General Ruslan Abdulgani, and “Bandung’s Air Port Andir” photographed from the air, its runway just visible below the plane’s left wing (fig. 3).¹⁰ As the last issue published before the conference opened, this volume also features a who’s who of national leaders via organizational charts and short biographies, as well as a summary of related press coverage. Since the publication is laid out like a photo book introducing readers to the conference’s most visible cast of characters, both human and architectural, it confers high recognizability to the Gedung Merdeka and Andir Airport (now the Husein Sastranegara International Airport), counting them among the list of prominent people and places associated with the conference.

These two photographs are noteworthy for their relative emptiness. The architecture of both locations, namely the Gedung Merdeka’s cruise liner–like Art Deco stairwell and Andir Airport’s runway, feature in the foreground, and despite the prominence of the figures in the former image, there exists a balance in visual composition between animate people and inanimate architecture. Thus, straight from the pages of the official bulletin-of-record of the Bandung Conference, one detects the intent to fashion architecture not simply as empty containers but rather as instrumental sites—or “stages”—signaling the city’s readiness to host international delegations.

A functioning airfield since decades past, when it served the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army Air Force, Andir Airport was renovated alongside other conference sites in the four months leading up to April 1955, although the decision was made to retain its name, a straightforward reference to the village of Andir. The most significant alterations targeted its diplomatic decorations, with airport crews installing the national flags of conference-attending delegations in a neat row along the runway (fig. 4).¹¹

Across the city of Bandung, event organizers deployed flags in a similar fashion, draping architecture and public spaces in photo-op-appropriate symbols of the nation-state. These flagpole rows make a vivid appearance in The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956), a prominent first-person account by Black American writer Richard Wright:

“We drove past the conference building and saw the flags of the twenty-nine participating nations of Asia and Africa billowing lazily in a weak wind; already the streets were packed with crowds and their black and yellow and brown faces looked eagerly at each passing car. . . . Day in and day out these crowds would stand in this tropic sun, staring, listening, applauding; it was the first time in their downtrodden lives that they’d seen so many men of their color, race, and nationality arrayed in such aspects of power, their men keeping order, their Asia and their Africa in control of their destinies.”¹²

The “color curtain” Wright evokes is a metaphor for Afro-Asian solidarity.¹³ Based on shared postcolonial experiences and concerned “beyond left and right” political positions, this “color curtain” grouped the twenty-nine participants together as a cultural bloc. While Wright considered this unity to be an energizing potentiality as well as a personal imperative, he nevertheless acknowledges that a solidarity on the grounds of race and religion—“brown, black, and yellow men”—“was the kind of meeting that no anthropologist, no sociologist, no political scientist would ever have dreamed of staging; it was too simple, too elementary.”¹⁴ Moreover, scholars like Brian Russell Roberts, Keith Foulcher, and Nina Kressner Cobb have critically studied Wright’s 1955 Indonesian travels alongside his optimistic narratives in The Color Curtain, proposing frameworks for engaging with Wright’s work as a deeply personal account reflective of his own political, racial, and national identities.¹⁵ In other words, historical scholarship has revealed The Color Curtain to be less a measured assessment of the Bandung Conference itself, in duration and legacy alike, and more an encapsulation of Wright’s worldview and hopes for the enduring spirit of the conference.

Perhaps, then, the rows of flags raised across Bandung could be considered their own form of color curtain. Placed at the Andir Airport, in various hotels, and both inside and outside of meeting venues, these lines of graphically bright textiles were fitting decorations for the conference and, simultaneously, intentionally oversimplified symbols of its participating agents. These physical curtains of bold color gave visual coherence to Wright’s hopeful if simplistic conception of the event’s twenty-nine delegations as a “color curtain” of solidarity.

Sites of the Conference: Renaming

Driving from Andir Airport to Bandung’s city center, as visiting delegations, members of the press, and Wright would have done, visitors encountered wide architectural vistas flanked on either side by motorcades and crowds of onlookers. American Unitarian minister Homer A. Jack, another governmentally unaffiliated visitor writing in the first person from Bandung, described the city as all “scrubbed and painted,” with its meeting venues “entirely rebuilt,” although the latter description is an exaggeration of the truth.¹⁶ In reality, conference organizers arranged for renovations, not outright rebuilding, across the city in a four-month-long lead-up to April 1955.¹⁷

Key renovations occurred at the Gedung Merdeka, the venue for the conference’s major speeches and plenary sessions; the Gedung Dwi Warna, a secondary meeting hall where the Economic, Cultural, and Heads of Delegations Committees held closed-door sessions; colonial-era villas, repurposed as residences for heads of delegations; fourteen hotels, including the Savoy Homann, a grand luxury resort designed in 1939 by Dutch East Indies-based architect Albert Aalbers; as well as public landmarks, such as Bandung’s central mosque, railway station, and aforementioned airport.¹⁸

With the exception of Andir Airport, the Gedung Dwi Warna, and individual villas, all of these structures are located in a compact zone in the city center, which the Joint Secretariat of the conference referred to as the “AAC zone,” short for “Asian-Africa Conference zone.”¹⁹ Renovations to the area consisted of intensive cleaning, painting, street-vendor removal, and renamings. Jalan Alun Alun Barat (West Square Street) became Jalan Masjid Agung (Great Mosque Street), while the central thoroughfare cutting across the AAC zone, known formerly as Jalan Raya Timur (Great Eastern Street), became Jalan Asia Afrika. Under Dutch rule, Jalan Asia Afrika was home to governmental buildings, hotels, and other upscale structures, and if plans to move the colonial capital from Batavia to Bandung had materialized before World War II, this wide avenue would have served as the equivalent of the Champs-Élysées for Bandung, dubbed the “Paris of Java.” The Gedung Dwi Warna, just like the Gedung Merdeka, also underwent a reinvention by way of repurposing and renaming. Formerly a colonial governmental office for administering pension funds, the structure also served as a military headquarters during the Japanese occupation. Its new 1955 identity as the Gedung Dwi Warna (Two-Color Building) references Indonesia’s red-and-white post-independence national flag, in keeping with the liberatory theme of conference-related renamings (fig. 5).

According to news coverage and the reminiscence of Secretary-General Ruslan Abdulgani, President Sukarno took an active and personal interest in Bandung’s pre-conference architectural preparations. Beyond the fanfare and photojournalistic coverage of him inaugurating renamed sites, he also personally selected conference venues and made decisions regarding the “inspiring” design directions their renovations should take.²⁰ Sukarno’s time in Bandung far predated the conference and can be traced back to his adolescence. In 1921 he enrolled at the Technische Hoogeschool te Bandoeng (now Bandung Institute of Technology) to study architecture and civil engineering and then, after graduation, he established his Bandung-based architectural practice Sukarno & Anwari.²¹ One of his teachers in Bandung was Dutch architect Charles Prosper Wolff Schoemaker, who designed the Sociëteit Concordia’s 1921 enlargements and renovations.²² Sukarno and Schoemaker maintained a close friendship throughout the 1930s, and they continued to correspond even after Sukarno assumed the presidency of post-independent Indonesia.²³ His choice of the Gedung Merdeka as a conference venue thus tapped into his architectural expertise and can be seen as a public endorsement of his former mentor (fig. 6).

Returning, then, to Sukarno’s opening address at the Bandung Conference, his analogizing of participant delegations as “masters in our own house” is heavy with autobiographical gravity.²⁴ He was deeply familiar with the vast chasm in operational use between Bandung’s colonial past and its conference present, having had a hands-on role in both eras, in architectural practice and diplomatic preparations, respectively. The city’s 1955 renovations and renamings preserved—and indeed cosmetically airbrushed—the visual forms of the former society while self-consciously reconfiguring its architectural venues to a new world order. However, another metaphor of homecoming and liberatory struggle brings clarity to these aims. More than two decades after the Bandung Conference, in 1979, American civil rights activist Audre Lorde admonished that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”²⁵ In 1955 Bandung, dismantling was never the goal.

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As the entrepreneurial co-founder of the Société Zin, a modernist design company, Farhat contributed to the visual aesthetics of civic spaces during the formative period of Tunisian socialism and state feminism. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the artist created numerous murals and decorative programs to enhance the architectural environment of newly built schools, hotels, factories, banks, and government buildings. This essay introduces Farhat’s key role in sustaining a mural tradition among Tunisian modernists, and describes a selection of the artist’s monumental designs in which her characteristic hybrid creatures predominate. Crafted in ceramic tiles, paint, stone, iron, and wool, Farhat’s artistic corpus portrays animated scenes of laborers and artisans, geometric patterns associated with textiles and pottery made by women, nude female bathers, coastal motifs, and elements of industry. Hybrid organisms composed of flowers, birds, and artisanal symbols populate these fantastical environments. Many of the monumental works remain in situ across Tunisian civic spaces, serving as muted backdrops for the activities of students, teachers, tourists, laborers, and bureaucrats. What subdued histories might Farhat’s composite creatures, made up of anthropomorphized artisanal motifs associated with femininity, reveal? 

A nude woman bather floats along a current of stylized motifs, forming the focal point of a ceramic tile wall designed by artist Safia Farhat circa 1963. Decorating the reception area of the Hôtel Skanès Palace, located on the waterfront of the coastal resort area of Monastir-Skanès, the bather turns her oval eye toward passing guests and employees. The curvature of her breast and fingers mirrors the undulations of waves (fig. 1). She emerges from an imaginary seascape of floating elements: the rooftops of mosques, zigzags from carpets, triangular fish, flowering plants, and jewel-like biomorphic shapes. Two inset panels depicting gazelles and mythical composite creatures rest against the backdrop of deep blue and coral tiles. A few kilometers away, along the same beachfront, Farhat composed similar designs for the stone panels that decorate the bar in the restaurant of the Hôtel les Palmiers. Situated in a hotel adjacent to the presidential palace in the city of Monastir, the bar’s counter features two rows of geometric and biomorphic designs (fig. 2). Farhat’s evolving iconography may be characterized by such fantastical motifs drawn from women’s textiles, tattoos, jewelry, and ceramic wares. These designs germinate and sprout in Farhat’s decorative programs in Monastir’s secondary school and civic assembly hall, as well as in other sites across Tunisia. The artist’s composite creatures and artisanal motifs animate her compositions and reveal the entwining of gender, labor, and art during the 1960s.¹

Safia Farhat worked across several professional domains as she sought to breathe new life into art forms associated with women’s artisanal production.² She created these decorative programs in the post-independence environment of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when family law reform in 1956 enacted a regime of state feminism, while broader initiatives aimed at women’s social and economic development endorsed the transformative power of creating art.³ As larger numbers of women enrolled in secondary school and pursued higher education, in particular at the École des Beaux-Arts in Tunis, feminist narratives drew on the symbol of the woman artist to promote female creativity and independent thought, and to serve as a gauge for societal progress (figs. 3, 4).⁴ Moreover, the nationalist quest to establish a Tunisian modernist aesthetic gave momentum to the ennoblement of art forms subordinated as “handicraft” under the French protectorate. By the early 1960s, art forms such as weaving and ceramics came to represent possibilities for enhancing women’s social, economic, and intellectual autonomy.

A professor of decorative arts at the École des Beaux-Arts, Farhat joined Abdelaziz Gorgi (Tunisian, 1928–2008) to become the school’s second Tunisian instructor in 1959; Gorgi taught ceramics from 1956 onward (fig. 5). Both artists were also members of the École de Tunis, a group of Tunisian, French, and Italian painters who increasingly turned to craft-based mediums in their explorations of material and heritage. As professors, Farhat and Gorgi shaped a beaux-arts curriculum that sought to elevate art forms categorized diminutively in colonial discourses as feminized craft. They sought to instill in a new generation of Tunisian students creative, entrepreneurial approaches to the modernist reinvention of art forms connected to local patrimony, as well as the confidence to propose innovative designs executed using craft processes. Under Farhat’s leadership, students in the atelier of decoration gained new perspectives on reviving “artistic craft” through field trips to artisanal centers. She also partnered with the National Office of Handicraft, and specifically weavers in the textile ateliers, to teach technique and design. A feminized bureau whose workforce was 80 percent female, the National Office of Handicraft attracted thousands of young, unmarried women into its pilot training programs because “handicraft,” especially weaving, represented an acceptable profession for lower-class women who, past primary-school age, sought opportunities for education and employment. Farhat’s experimental pedagogy endeavored to support collaborations between artists and artisans, and to cultivate female relationships across social classes.⁵ As she undertook teaching and administrative responsibilities that integrated art and artisanal production, she simultaneously trained a new generation of women creators who would go on to bridge institutional divides.

In 1963, Farhat and Gorgi co-founded a design company, the Société Zin, that put their pedagogical approaches into praxis. This company took its name “Zin” from the Arabic word zīn, which denotes beauty, decoration, and the power to enthrall. Together, Farhat, Gorgi, and their collaborator Claude Béja designed and delegated orders for decorative programs that often overlapped with architectural commissions mandated by law. Specifically, the One Percent Law, reinstated in 1962 by presidential decree, required that a portion of every civic building’s budget be allocated to decoration.⁶ This law underscored president Habib Bourguiba’s emphasis on the arts as a product of societal and cultural advancement. It also enabled participating artists to capitalize on the so-called development decade as the government commissioned artworks for the building of dozens of centralized, state-run offices, the tourism and hotel industry, the redesign of Monastir (Bourguiba’s natal city), schools, and impermanent displays for trade fairs. New construction, concentrated in the capital and coastal regions, centered on tourist and bureaucratic infrastructures. Artists, frequently members of the École de Tunis and their artisan collaborators, were subcontracted to decorate civic buildings, producing more than a hundred murals, mosaics, obelisks, friezes, and tapestries in wood, ceramic, iron, glass, stone, and wool in the decade following the law’s reinstatement. A journalist with the newspaper La Presse elaborated the mission of the Société Zin: “Their goal, they tell us, is to attempt to renovate Tunisian decoration with a utilitarian intention in seeking to employ as many artisans as possible. We have an array of artist-artisans in Nabeul, Ksar Hellal, Kairouan, Hammamet, and elsewhere, such as ceramicists, stonecutters, nattiers [plant-fiber weavers], weavers.”“⁷ Commissions for decorative programs not only created the conditions under which artistic collaborations across social classes could occur, but also brought visibility to these relationships.

Due to its strategic importance in the Ten-Year Plan, which underpinned Tunisian socialism and the Bourguibist struggle against underdevelopment, tourism was an early and vital source of artistic patronage.⁸ The Tunisian Tourist Hotels Company (Société des Hôtels Tunisiens Touristiques, or SHTT) was a public corporation established in 1959 to build a tourist infrastructure. The Société Zin facilitated many decorative projects for SHTT hotels by providing clients with architectural plans and proposing designs for decorative programs. Depending on a project’s size, scale, and medium, Farhat and Gorgi hired collaborating artisans for its execution and employed iconographic references to dramatize the budding artisanat artistique (artistic craft industry). Hotels also purchased handmade objects such as rugs, ceramic vases and ashtrays, and wrought iron candelabras to complete the decor. The tourism industry promoted the concept of uplifting the artisan, stating in its bulletin, “In Tunisia as elsewhere, the craftsman must learn new skills to become both an able technician and creative artist. The 20th Century has assigned him a new and appropriate role: that of enriching daily life by beautifying useful and functional objects.”⁹

The blend of fantastical, animate elements and symbols of feminine labor, which characterizes Farhat’s ceramic tile wall in the Hôtel Skanès Palace, in fact threads her decorative commissions of the period. In partnership with Gorgi, Farhat designed the reception area of the Hôtel l’Oasis in Gabès and the restaurant-bar of the Hôtel les Palmiers in Monastir to be self-referential. Both seafront hotels feature ceramic tile murals, pierced ceramic walls, and sculpted stone decor that whimsically echo their particular decorative characteristics. Farhat’s stonework in the Hôtel l’Oasis, though now partially dismantled, includes fragments of geometric and vegetal motifs abstracted from women’s textile designs and tattoos. In one panel painted by an unknown renovator, a tattooed peasant woman holding a pomegranate wades through knee-deep water (fig. 6). Schools of fish bearing delicate geometric and floral patterns dart around her ankles; these oval creatures resemble the opaline shapes drifting through the bather’s seascape in the Hôtel Skanès Palace. Above, the fronds of a palm tree turn into resplendent jewelry-like patterns, accentuating the triangular fibula pinning the woman’s dress; similar fibulae spring to life in other compositions.

Other examples of hybrid artisanal creatures are visible in Farhat’s bar in the Hôtel les Palmiers, built by presidential architect Olivier-Clément Cacoub for the hotel adjoining Bourguiba’s summer palace (fig. 7); her stonework depicts animate fibulae and geometric and biomorphic designs similar to those in Gabès and Monastir-Skanès. Highly stylized triangular fish and aquatic creatures (like phytoplankton) swim and float across the bar’s frontispiece. These auspicious symbols re-create the orderly structure of a woven grid. Linear motifs, like small propellers, protrude from the triangles; the “arms” and “hands” of the central anthropomorphic design suggest feminine patterns and a bridal motif found in weaving (fig. 8). In addition, Farhat and Gorgi decorated both hotels with pierced, undulating ceramic walls in vivid orange and in pale turquoise and green. In the Hôtel les Palmiers, Gorgi’s luminescent screen of gazelles, horses, and birds morphing into flowers separates Farhat’s bar from the dining-lounge area and encircles the restaurant (fig. 9). The installation of these artworks in new spaces of economic and ideological power situated them in development discourses, especially, as Tunisian scholar and artist Aïcha Filali (born 1956) has articulated, during a period when hotels officially served as “windows into the country.”¹⁰ While tourism constituted one significant source of patronage for Farhat, she also created monumental works featuring hybrid creatures for state offices and factories.

Farhat’s stone monument L’homme et le travail (Man and Work), which she designed in 1964 for the entrance to the National Institute of Productivity in Radès, amalgamates motifs that exemplify their collective inscription in the institutions of economic and gender reform (figs. 10, 11). Sculpted in low relief by stonecutters from Dar Chaabane, this triangular post displays images on three sides. The composition on the first side depicts a stylized male figure in profile sniffing a mashmūm (bouquet of jasmine buds), which he grasps with pointed fingers. On the second side, a sturdy plant, rooted firmly in the ground, sends up curling leaves and a flower bud, which cups a fish. One bird, which stands atop the flower, is personified with flowing hair and a large, oval-shaped eye. An arched doorway frames these hybrid creatures. On the third side of the post, archetypal plants grow in three-dimensional layers above a cogwheel, a symbol of Bourguibism. Farhat’s iconography elicits the sociocultural and agricultural programs of the National Institute of Productivity, the developmental aims of which she interrogated through her own collaborations with artisans and art students.

Farhat installed friezes in iron and enamel on the facade of the central office of the Tunisian Sugar Company in Béja that invite powerful comparison to her realist mural inside the main entrance (figs. 12–14). The abstract imagery of the exterior friezes consists of stacked lines, zigzags, half-moons, and geometric shapes evoking the core elements and colors of an unraveled tapestry. The dynamic shapes and lines bend, suspending animated crescents and triangles resembling Farhat’s hybrid birds and angular fish. In the building’s interior, the artist painted a socialist realist–style mural depicting male workers holding tools (fig. 15). While at first glance the metallic iron compositions bear scant formal resemblance to the realist portrayal of heroic masculine workers, the thematic content of the murals and the forms and materials of the friezes bespeak the gendering of labor. Artisans and laborers occupied the same discursive fields related to societal advancement. Farhat drew regularly from the symbols, motifs, and materials associated with women weavers in probing the alignment of artistic and economic revivals, and she employed the labor and ingenuity of women artisans in her work. Her triangles, bouquets, and zigzags suggest those found in other women’s artistry, particularly textiles woven in Kairouan and regions of the southern interior, which were targeted by the National Office of Handicraft in its reorganization. Moreover, in official discourses, the laborer (epitomized by the woman weaver) represented the citizen deemed in need of social uplift. In the case of the Tunisian Sugar Company, an ironworker executed Farhat’s designs in a collaborative process between artist and artisan. In evoking the feminized artisanat, Farhat conjured the class-based, gendered division of labor inherent in the production process of the decorative commissions.

Textile motifs comprise the content of Farhat’s largest ceramic frieze, a culminating example of a decorative program in which diverse artistic genres and industries converge. Around 1964 Farhat and Gorgi received a commission from SOGICOT (Société Générale des Industries Cotonnières de Tunisie, or General Company of Tunisian Cotton Industries). At SOGICOT’s main factory in Bir Kassaâ, they merged artisanal and coastal themes for an audience of bureaucrats, designers, and textile workers. Farhat designed a vast ceramic tile mural to wrap around the exterior facade of the building, while Gorgi created a monumental stone obelisk to be set within a courtyard fountain. Farhat’s winding panels portray a mythical world in which feminine motifs are suspended in a watery blue seascape populated by human and animal figures and composite creatures made from anthropomorphized artisanal designs. Across the right wall facing the entrance, these designs interlace female figures, male figures in a boat, fish, flowers, and horses (fig. 16). The left wall bears some of these whimsical elements floating alongside hybrid artisanal creatures; landscapes composed of geometric elements evoking patterns of five (khumsāt), weavings, silver fibulae, and candlesticks (shamʿdan); and men’s bodies composed of geometric-patterned rugs (figs. 17, 18). Composite creatures made of flowers, birds, and textile motifs, patterned into a vivid blue, purple, and red garden, decorate the main entrance (fig. 19).  

Seen as a trailblazer in economic development, SOGICOT was a strong employer of wage-earning women in the 1960s and 1970s. Bourguibist discourses equated the burgeoning industrial textile industry with handicraft, and emphasized its capacity to cultivate an “uneducated” female workforce. As Sonia Maarouf wrote for Femme in 1965, “Yesterday, this woman, who was a custodian of a generation characterized by nomadism, managed to find stability, and today we see her contributing to the building of a new society based on social justice.”¹¹ Sixty-eight women designers, including Beaux-Arts graduates and factory workers alike, were to gain autonomy and professional experience in convergent textile industries perceived as intimately connected to women’s hands and bodies. Farhat’s portrayals of feminine artisanal production, animated by her composite creatures, are discursively linked to embodied labor, constituting an insightful visual record of the interface between fine art and craft in their evocation and materialization of gendered hierarchies of production. These linkages, in turn, delineate the works’ inscription in the infrastructure of gender reform and economic growth, and in an aesthetic of self-referentiality characteristic of the artist’s work of the period.

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The work of Lithuanian-born artist and architect Aleksandra Kasuba (1923–2019) merges architecture, sculpture, and craft, rotating around a central concern with space. Developed over several decades in Kasuba’s adopted home of New York City, and culminating in a last major endeavor in New Mexico, much of this artistic output was recently highlighted in a retrospective exhibition curated by Lithuanian art historian Elona Lubytė at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius. Kasuba’s artistic and archival legacy, which consists of monumental decorative works for public spaces, fabric environments, and models, drawings, and collages of never-realized projects for dwellings, reveals a persistent artistic vision. The conviction at the core of Kasuba’s space-making endeavors—that there is a fundamental correlation between the subject’s formation and the built environment—opens up multiple avenues worth revisiting.

Born into an aristocratic family with progressive leanings, Aleksandra Kasuba (née Fledžinskaitė) attended the gymnasium in Šiauliai, Lithuania, where one of her teachers was the semiotician Algirdas Julius Greimas.¹ Her brief studies in sculpture in Kaunas and Vilnius, respectively, were interrupted by the Nazi and Soviet occupations that ultimately forced many Lithuanians, including Kasuba and her husband, Lithuanian sculptor Vytautas Kasuba (1915–1997), to flee to the West.

After settling in the United States in 1947, Kasuba entered the American art world by presenting her painted ceramic tiles and mosaics in exhibitions organized within the craft community. This early work led to what constituted the great portion of her artistic activities, namely, monumental decorative commissions for public squares and the interiors and exteriors of buildings across the United States. The undulating lines of her signature brick reliefs—for example, the brick relief she made for the Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx (1973)—invoke movement and suggest an optical activation of a flat surface as her primary concern. Through the late eighties, as she was fulfilling commissions that, among other things, provided a stable means of supporting her family, Kasuba simultaneously engaged in what might be called her studio work. Driven by the desire to reimagine what she regarded as alienating architectural and urban structures, Kasuba created alternative sheltering technologies, disrupting the very architectural order with which she was literally engaged in her decorative work.

One of the conventions of architecture that the artist aimed to counter in her own space-making practice was the rigid geometry she believed to be oppressive and unnatural to human nature. She questioned whether “the undoing of the rectangle—a fixture so familiar that we no longer question its presence—[would] undo something essential”²via her breakthrough project Live-in Environment (also known as Space Shelters for Senses), which she erected in her family’s brownstone in Upper Manhattan in 1971. Occupying a whole floor, this structure consisted of several interconnected bulbous compartments shaped by stretched milk-white synthetic fabric attached to the ceiling and ground. This cloth, which was originally designed for thermal garments, became her primary medium in conceiving unconventional built environments. Its tensile properties allowed her to sculpturally mold space directly and to defy such architectural staples as a preconceived plan and ninety-degree corners in favor of context-responsive, easily demountable, organically shaped structures formed by hand in situ. Not only did the artist do away with right angles, impenetrable walls, and flat planes in her environment in favor of curves and translucency, she also incorporated additional stimulants, such as lights, mirrors, odors, textures, and sounds, to further alter how the space was perceived and navigated. The altered environment demonstrated her desire to variously enhance the sensations affecting the physical and mental states of its occupants.³ Determined to go against the grain of established architectural conventions, she found inspiration and references in multiple areas, from preindustrial architecture, art, and technology programs (in which she aspired to partake⁴) to the countercultural ethos advancing the spatial practices and alternative social formations of the time.⁵

Following this prototype installation, which served as the artist’s living space, Kasuba implemented tensile fabric structures in various other spaces, including educational facilities, offices, and exhibition architectures. Some of this work received critical attention—as was the case with The 20th Century Environment (1973), a display for ceramics that was commissioned by the Carborundum Museum of Ceramics in Niagara Falls, New York. Documentation of this structure, which the artist made by arranging the fabric into a soft, curvilinear sculptural enclosure, was later featured in the exhibition Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective at the Brooklyn Museum in 1977, and in Arthur Drexler’s photographic exhibition Transformations in Modern Architecture at MoMA in 1979.

Many of Kasuba’s other projects, such as the stand-alone buildings and habitats that make up a great portion of her legacy, never saw the light of day—beyond drawings, scale models, and collages. One exception is her own house (and two adjacent buildings that served as guesthouses for friends and fellow artists), which she completed in the desert in New Mexico between 2002 and 2005. These constructions manifest the natural world as a source and inspiration of the artist’s formal vocabulary—invoking flower pods, shells, and underwater creatures—and attest to her strong interest in alternative social structures and ways of living.

While preparing for an exhibition in Philadelphia at the Esther M. Klein Gallery at the University City Science Center in 1989, where she had been granted a residency enabling further study of the tensile properties of fabric, Kasuba summed up her visionary explorations: “I am not assessing the results of my work—the world is overloaded with unnecessary things as it is, and I don’t want to increase that pile. Yet the pattern of the development of processes remains sound and strong—I hope . . . I chanced upon some discoveries—or perhaps even transcended certain limits—which, certainly, looks surprising to me too.”⁶ Indeed, what is evident here is that, throughout the years of her experimentations in multiple forms, materials, and scales, the artist sought to understand how the physical environment might contribute to the well-being of its inhabitants.

But also, importantly, through her work, the very fact that the environment is not a neutral container becomes palpable. In an unpublished interview in 1976, the artist recounted her life after dismantling the Live-in Environment, which she had inhabited for more than a year: “I lived in it all that time. I enjoyed it very much. It did not change me. But actually I realized much more fully what it did to me after it was gone. I had to change my hairdo. I didn’t know how to sit. I didn’t know how to talk. I suddenly was completely restricted. And actually I did move out of that place to work somewhere else. But it was quite an experience.”⁷ As experienced by the artist herself, physical space appears here as an apparatus always actively operating on human bodies and psyches. Not unlike the alternative dwellings of the counterculture of the sixties and seventies, which, as Felicity D. Scott asserts, appeared in their own time as scissions within the system, Kasuba’s experimentations, despite largely remaining in the margins of architectural narrative, might appear as exactly such a case of rendering the techniques of power visible, and opening up horizons for building as an act of refusal.⁸

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In the 1970s, a new generation of artists involved in industrial design and architecture in Soviet Estonia was beginning to reconceptualize the practice of art-making. These artists/designers were interested in the surrounding environment—the Soviet reality, with its specific aesthetics—and searching for ways to comment on, analyze, and visualize the changes taking place in both the material culture and the built environment around them. The exciting amalgamation of different disciplines within the practices of several young artists at the time resonate today. One of the notable representatives of this phenomenon is the artist and designer Sirje Runge [Lapin].¹

Runge graduated in 1975 from the Estonian State Art Institute (ESAI).² Though she majored in industrial art, she positioned herself in the 1970s not only as a designer but also as a visual artist. She actively exhibited her artwork, in which she incorporated design principles—and at the same time, approached her design work as a form of art. Indeed, throughout the decade, Runge undertook several design projects parallel to the artworks she was exhibiting and, in one way or another, tried to open up possibilities to synthesize the two. A case in point is Runge’s ambitious thesis project Proposal for the Design of Central Areas in Tallinn. Comprising ideas and plans for a range of artistic interventions in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, it suggests visual, technical, and spatial changes to the city, including ways to alter the cityscape itself and designs for modular structures that could be easily erected within a given space. The diversity of her chosen locations reflects the artist’s versatility and interest in different layers of the urban environment. Indeed, her proposal considers abandoned industrial areas to be as interesting and important to the city’s fundamental structure as its center, the historic and iconic plaza known as Victory Square.³

Up until the day she presented it, Runge was unsure if the defense of her unorthodox thesis would be a success or total failure.⁴ The fact that everything went well is testament to the progressiveness and foresight of the industrial art department. It is noteworthy that the project was re-exhibited on the walls of the ESAI in the mid-1980s. As a student from the class of 1986 recalls, Runge’s colorful, visionary, playful project was in stark contrast to the overly gray atmosphere of late-Soviet Tallinn—visible through the windows of the Institute.⁵

Runge’s thesis imagines and visualizes a more attractive, thrilling, and inclusive urban environment than the actual city at the time. Her suggestions range from repainting houses to enliven the existing architectural system, and thereby create a new, independent aesthetic structure, or layer,⁶ to more conceptual and fantastical ideas. For example, she envisions building cylinder structures that symbolize chimneys in what would be huge installations in abandoned industrial sites, explaining, “These cylinders periodically emit fumes of a certain color. The fumes are harmless and pleasant smelling, and they reduce through their consistency the pollution of the surrounding air. The smoke-producing and air-cleaning chimneys refer to the possibility that by changing the content of industry, we might also change its harmful impact on people.”⁷ Runge has recalled that she did not consult with any scientists back then, hence this idea was purely conceptual, i.e., a way of visualizing the problematics involved with polluting the environment in the process of production.⁸

In addition to repainting houses and altering urban industrial sites, Runge proposes modular structures that would be easy to assemble and un-assemble, move, and reconfigure, as well as monumental objects that could be erected in different parts of the city. These ambitious projects are intended to promote use of unused or abandoned parts of the city or to revitalize areas that do not have a dominant architectural structure—such as slums, parks, or beaches. The function of the modular constructions is both aesthetic and utilitarian. For example, by incorporating multimedia components, like a television screen or radio, they could be used to inform people of news regarding city life. Others might integrate vending machines stocked with essential goods. These playful modular and multifunctional objects encourage new ways of using the city space. For example, it would be possible to climb their different layers to listen to music in a personalized music center,⁹ interact with others, and enjoy light effects. It is also important that these pieces could be reconfigured, or otherwise altered in response to city alterations or changes in the habits of citizens. Ultimately, the goal was to improve city life, because, as Runge explains, since the city is the concentration of material and mental resources of humans, it should first and foremost serve people as opposed to the urban mechanism.¹⁰

Because the environmentally and socially conscious ideology of Runge’s project is characteristic of contemporary Soviet design theories of the 1970s, it offers insight into Soviet design ideas of the period, highlighting the problems inherent to their implementation. The study program of the ESAI industrial art department, which was established in 1966, supported and enhanced Runge’s interest in the artist’s role in a society defined by technical-industrial culture.¹¹

The main reasons for establishing the design study program were the changes taking place in Soviet society. Industrialization and the rise in production volumes in the 1960s created an opportunity and need for new product designs, packaging, and advertising, etc. The department was headed by the energetic and enthusiastic interior designer Bruno Tomberg (1925–2021), whose focus was the universal study of creativity. Inspired by leading design schools of the first half of the 20th century—by the Bauhaus in Germany, and Vkhutemas and the Institute of Artistic Culture in Moscow (INKhUK¹²)—as well as by Le Corbusier and De Stijl and concepts of contemporary design, the work of the department centered on the relationships between design, environment, and society. Within the program, the universal ideals of the Bauhaus were combined with contemporary design ideology based on notions of social responsibility and synthesis.¹³ Tomberg strived to teach his students to integrate contemporary science, technology, and aesthetics in a way that created a harmonious material environment.¹⁴

An important source of inspiration within the department in the beginning of the 1970s was the book Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (1971) by Austrian-born American designer Victor Papanek (1923–1998).¹⁵ Papanek states that because the main role of design is a formation of individuals and societies, a designer must be socially and morally responsible.¹⁶ He advocates that design should be an innovative, creative, and transdisciplinary practice to satisfy the real needs of people and, moreover, that the work of designers should be based on scientific research. He argues that poorly designed objects and structures in fact contaminate the environment.¹⁷

The records of the ninth congress of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design, which took place in Moscow in 1975, reflect a similar emphasis on the need for ethical and ecological design. In that congress, theoreticians of the Soviet technical aesthetics concluded that “contradictions between nature and technology, laws of nature and human activities of production and technology are the results of one-sided and imperfect development of industrialization and the logics of capitalist societies.”¹⁸ It is significant that Soviet design theoreticians made an ideological distinction between capitalist and socialist design objectives. They put forward that the main function of the former was to shape consumer expectations, while that of Soviet design (at least in rhetoric) was to realize the most socialist and progressive ideas.¹⁹ Moreover, they argue that societal relationships under socialism are principally different than those under capitalism. Because the income gap in socialist countries is smaller, there is no need to produce objects that convey social status, and so the focus can remain on creating a more harmonious and humane environment.²⁰

These idealistic notions are fundamental to the rhetoric that design should contribute to the formation of the Soviet people, that is, the Soviet subjects necessary to build up society.²¹ But the economic situation of the 1970s did not support redesigning and modernization of the built environment in the way that was theorized. It was the so-called Era of Stagnation, when Leonid Brezhnev was in power (1964–82) and social, political and economic problems were worsening in the Soviet Union. There was an ever-deepening deficit in consumer goods and materials, and the country was far behind in terms of technological development. Nonetheless, though the overall economic and political situation did not support implementation of the most interesting and progressive proposals for improving the environment or product development, it did not stop designers and artists from envisioning alternative means of production, city planning, and living—as Runge’s ambitious thesis.

Runge’s thesis is testament to her early interest in physical and abstract structures, in relationships and everyday life within the urban space. Her project takes into consideration the perspective of a pedestrian, because in her point of view, the city should be built and evaluated first and foremost with the people who use it daily in mind, taking into consideration not only their physiological-psychological requirements, but also their aesthetic needs.²² The work presents the idea that the urban environment should not define the actions of its users, but instead, exist as an egalitarian, open field that allows for different modes of usage. In effect, by creatively combining design and visual arts, she suggests a new city environment, one that engages people empathically through visuals, sounds and tactile objects, transforming their relationship with the urban setting by making it more actively engaging and integrated. Mari Laanemets has suggested that “Runge’s aim was a specific ‘complicated order’ that was intended to create irrational and chaotic moments within the functional organization of the city and thus result in greater engagement, in a more (inter)active relationship between man and his surroundings.”²³ So, on the one hand, Runge’s proposal suggests a possible solution to an overly standardized cityscape of the Soviet period that created fragmentation, alienation, and pollution in the city center, by making it more livable and putting environmental concerns in the forefront of city planning. On the other, her suggestion for a city space offers a democratic vision of a sustainable space for different groups of people equally taking part in and with equal access to the built environment.

Although many of Runge’s visionary ideas could not be implemented at the time they were proposed, which she herself recognized at the time, the issues that she addresses are still relevant today. The problematics of designing an aesthetically exciting city that is environmentally considerate and provides a space for different groups of people with different needs remains at the very heart of the discussions around urban space. Hence, Runge’s vision from the past remains an inspiration for the future.

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On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite. A year later, Indonesian architect Oei Tjong An’s “Sputnik” pharmacy opened in Semarang, Indonesia, and gave expression to, through a proto-Pop vocabulary, the sense of technological optimism brought about by mankind’s first step toward space exploration (fig. 1). That the Soviets gained the upper hand in this endeavor alarmed Americans. As the Indonesian ambassador to the United States remarked in a 1957 interview: “Within the past month I have been asked repeatedly, ‘What is the effect of Sputnik on the people of Indonesia?,’ ‘Will this give the Asian people a feeling that the Soviet Union is a greater military power?,’” sensing “a fear, almost a panic” behind these questions.¹ The fear, it turned out, was justified—an Indonesian high school history textbook published in 1958 portrays the successful launch of Sputnik as an event that “shocked the whole world,” stating that America “lags far behind, managing to send Explorer I into space only in January 1958.”²

Sukarno, president of newly independent Indonesia, visited Moscow in August 1956 and received a particularly distinguished welcome. The Soviet Academy of Sciences awarded him an honorary doctorate of law, while Moscow State University appointed him honorary professor. “First-class motion picture and television films” were made to commemorate his visit, and these would go on to be “widely shown” throughout Indonesia.³ Four years later, in February 1960, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev returned the visit, spending ten days in Indonesia. When Sukarno “asked the USSR to build a grandiose and quite expensive stadium in the capital city,” Khrushchev was “surprised,” later remembering the exchange as follows: “‘What do you want that for?’ I asked Sukarno. ‘To hold large public rallies,’ he answered. Theatricality was a negative feature of his. Among the leaders of countries I have known, he distinguished himself in this capacity more than anyone else. Nehru, for example, was a completely different kind of man. Of course the leader of a country has to address large public meetings. But Sukarno displayed a particular weakness for that kind of thing.”⁴

The stadium, now known as Gelora Bung Karno Stadium, soon came to symbolize the 1962 Asian Games, held in Jakarta from August 24 to September 4. Sukarno considered the games as a “means of showing his power and of letting independent Indonesia’s beacon radiate more strongly into the world, pushing back the borders of the other newly independent Asian nations.”⁵ The structure was designed by R. I. Semerdzhiev, Iu. V. Raninskii, K. P. Pchel’nikov, and L. A. Muromtsev, architects and engineers affiliated with the Moscow-based architectural collective Mosproekt-2 (fig. 2). Khrushchev held that the construction of the stadium, which upon completion would become the largest in Asia, would be “a question of prestige for the Indonesian nation.”⁶ In a 1973 survey of recent architecture in Southeast Asia, historian S. S. Ozhegov cites the project as a stellar example of socialist construction distinguishing itself from capitalist and, by extension, imperialist construction. He notes that the emphasis is “not on office buildings, banks and hotels but rather on educational institutions, hospitals and sports complexes” that would serve as nodes in new neighborhoods and communities planned for underdeveloped areas.⁷ Indeed, the stadium and the other facilities forming the new sports complex became the centerpiece of what had formerly been a “deserted suburban district,” granting it, in effect, new life.⁸

The Sputnik panic added to the uneasiness that the United States and its allies, struggling for dominance in Southeast Asia, had increasingly felt as a result of extensive Soviet aid to newly independent states in the region. Observing the situation in Burma, British diplomat Paul Gore-Booth remarked that “Communist trade, Communist experts and Communist-designed and erected buildings could be followed by Communist arms, Communist ideas, and ultimately, Communist control of this country.”⁹ After Burma was among the countries that Anastas Mikoyan, first deputy premier of the Soviet Union, visited on his 1956 “Asia tour,” a National Security Council briefing reported that his “good-will junket” yielded “concrete results”—among which was an agreement that made the Soviet Union Burma’s largest rice customer, with four hundred thousand tons offered annually for four years in exchange for “architectural gifts.”¹⁰ However, Burma’s nonalignment meant that in Rangoon, Soviet-built structures would come to coexist with British architect Raglan Squire’s University of Medicine, American architect Benjamin Polk’s Tripitaka Library, and the Chinese-built National Theater, among others.

The Rangoon Polytechnic Institute, designed by Pavel Steniushin in 1958, is a notable example of Soviet architecture in Burma. The general austerity of the building’s form is offset by the expressivity of the roof structure, whose curvature evokes Buddhist temple architecture (fig. 3). Steniushin was associated with GIPROVUZ (Gosudarstvennyi institut po proektirovaniiu vysshikh uchebnykh zavedenii, State Institute for the Design of Higher Education Establishments), another Moscow-based collective that oversaw the construction of university buildings not only within the Soviet Union but also abroad—for instance, in Afghanistan, Burma, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Mali, and Mongolia, among other nations. He would, two years later, in 1960, help conceive the Polytechnic University in Kabul, Afghanistan. In Rangoon, the emphasis was on enlivening an underdeveloped suburban area. Capable of accommodating up to one thousand students, the institute became vital to the life of the district and would soon grow into the “most important center for the preparation of specialists for many diverse branches of the national economy,” including architecture.¹¹ In 1970, diplomat N. N. Sofinskii indicated that “lectures have been given by 90 of our [Soviet] lecturers at different times in the auditoriums of the Rangoon Polytechnhic Institute,” and among those who held visiting professorships was A. E. Korotkovskii, an architect from Novokuznetsk, Russia. Korotkovskii divided his time in the Burmese capital between teaching and design, which included taking part in a competition for a new building for Rangoon University’s Palace of Culture for Students in 1965.¹²

In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, the Khmer-Soviet Friendship Hospital was completed with Soviet aid in 1960 (fig. 4). Its gateway features an undulating roof that, alluding to the “Chaika” swimming pool in Moscow, serves as a reminder that many of the Soviet architects active in Southeast Asia had been previously based in Moscow. As soon as avant-garde groups experimented with novel approaches to design and methods of standardized construction in the Soviet capital, these new ideas and innovations were exported abroad and meant to signify, though not always with success, the cutting edge of Soviet architecture. The hospital, along with the polytechnic institute, required an expert staff for its upkeep, and this became a pretext for the long-term presence of Soviet “advisors” thought to ensure ongoing Soviet dominance in a given region. N. L. Iakobson, architect of the project, was affiliated with GIPROZDRAV (Gosudarstvennyi institut po proektirovaniiu ob”ektov zdravookhraneniia), an entity similar to GIPROVUZ that specialized in buildings related to healthcare and recreation. An entire residential district was planned in conjunction with the hospital, which became its pivot.

A section of the entry on Phnom Penh in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia is devoted to architecture. Here, the Khmer-Soviet Friendship Hospital, along with the Superior Technical Institute of Khmer-Soviet Friendship built in 1964 by S. N. Mikhailov, A. V. Mochalov, and V. P. Naumov, is mentioned in the same breath as the Cambodian modernist architect Vann Molyvann’s 1961 Chaktomuk Conference Hall, 1964 National Sports Complex, and 1960 Independence Monument, a photograph of which accompanies the text. As early as 1965, just four years after the completion of the Chaktomuk Conference Hall, the painter-pedagogue Boris Ioganson’s encyclopedia of world art had already singled out the building, characterizing it as a work in a “contemporary style” combining Western methods learned in Paris with traditional knowledge.¹³ Soviet critics praised Vann Molyvann’s buildings as representing the “national” and, by extension, serving as postcolonial counterparts to the region’s international architecture.¹⁴

At the conclusion of the violent Khmer Rouge rule, which lasted from 1975 to 1979 and is poignantly encapsulated by Tuol Sleng, the high school–turned–prison and torture and execution center where tens of thousands lost their lives, the Soviet Union resumed its interrupted aid to Cambodia, now known as the People’s Republic of Kampuchea. This time, architects were not dispatched to design new buildings but rather to oversee the repair of existing buildings that had suffered damage as a result of politically motivated vandalism and the Cambodian-Vietnamese War. Among these was Vann Molyvann’s National Bank of Cambodia and, offering a striking image that juxtaposes the destruction of “hundreds of Buddha statues” with the dynamiting of the bank, E. V. Kobelev’s 1985 Kampuchiia: spravochnik (Kampuchea: A Reference) explicitly portrays Soviet repair efforts as the reversal of the merciless destruction of material heritage and the erasure of cultural identity committed by the anti-Soviet, Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge regime.¹⁵ Until its dissolution in 1991, the Soviet Union continued to attempt to exert influence in the region, providing, for instance, “considerable economic and military assistance to Vietnam in support of its policy in Cambodia.”¹⁶

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“How can we learn from an organism or a natural process and how can we collaborate to create a co-authored piece of work?”¹ This is how architect and designer Neri Oxman described her approach to design during a recent conversation with Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, in conjunction with the exhibition Neri Oxman: Material Ecology² (Fig. 1). Featuring seven projects and series of projects from Oxman’s twenty-year career, the show focuses on the materials and processes that she has developed along with her team at The Mediated Matter Group—a multidisciplinary group of researchers based at MIT’s Media Lab.³ At the core of all the projects is Oxman’s theory of Material Ecology, which she defines as “the study and design of products and processes integrating environmentally aware computational form-generation and digital fabrication.”⁴ The field, she states, operates at the intersection of biology, material science and engineering, and computer science. Both a design approach and an associated collection of tools and techniques, Material Ecology seeks to bring the built environment closer to the natural and the biological environment. It attempts to create buildings and objects that are alive, directly responding to their natural surroundings and changing as they age.

The Materialecology series (2007) was the first set of objects to materialize Oxman’s approach. Shown for the first time in a museum setting in 2008—during MoMA’s Design and The Elastic Mind exhibition curated by Paola Antonelli (Fig. 2), and acquired into the permanent collection shortly after—the series is composed of four projects, Cartesian Wax, Monocoque, Raycounting, and Subterrain, that explore natural phenomena and the ways in which computation can act as a tool to recreate and enhance them at larger scales.⁵ Each of the objects that make up the series is a demo of the process that Oxman is developing. Raycounting, for example, is a computational code that generates 3D-printed objects by measuring the intensity and orientation of light rays (Fig. 3 and 4). Inspired by nineteenth-century photo sculpture, this process allows the designer to relinquish a certain degree of control, working instead with the computational code, which manipulates the object’s material properties such as thickness and curvature, and with the natural phenomenon, which dictates its shape. The result is a process that creates, as Oxman describes it, “sunshades perfectly suited to their environmental conditions”⁶ and which can be employed at the product and architectural scale (Fig. 5). 

With the Materialecology series, Oxman cemented her position as a designer, in both the practical, conceptual, and historical realms. She stands firmly within the modernist tradition, citing architects such as Friederich Kiesler and R. Buckminster Fuller as key influences (Fig. 6), while simultaneously questioning and expanding it. Modernism, she has said, advocates for static design that is reliant on mass manufacturing, the homogeneity of material properties, and centralized fabrication. Material Ecology in turn proposes a dynamic approach to design in which the merging of computation and nature can allow for mass customization.⁷ While the assembly lines of modernity dictate a world made of parts, Material Ecology envisions a world in which we might not be able to differentiate between what is made and what is grown.⁸ This is Oxman’s idea of a new materiality⁹: one in which the novel computational technologies that emerged during the recent Digital Age allow designers and architects to transition into what she calls the “Biological Age.”

Oxman further frees herself from a classic homogenized modernism—rooted in Le Corbusier’s open plan and the use of steel and concrete (Fig.7)—by grounding Material Ecology equally in technology and craft. “That matter is secondary to shape constitutes the fallacy of design after craft,” she writes, drawing on Gottfried Samper. “By nature, and in its rite, the material practice of craft is informed by matter, its method of fabrication, and its environment.”¹⁰ The idea that craft is able to interweave process, material and form is a key factor in The Mediated Matter Group’s process-first approach to making. The team’s goal is not to produce a beautiful finished object—although each one of their works is indeed beautiful. Instead they begin by developing a technology that will allow them to achieve a material process through which they, and eventually all architects and designers, can create a variety of forms that are informed by and react to their environment.¹¹ This vision echoes architect and academic Malcolm McCollough who, already in 1996, argued that the digital had the potential to restore craft’s relevance within architecture and design. “In digital production,” he wrote, “craft refers to the condition where people apply standard technological means to unanticipated or indescribable ends.”¹² In this context, to craft involves a partnership with technology that can open the door for customization at a much larger scale. 

At the time of McCollough’s writing, however, there was still a concern with whether the digital tools available then allowed for enough direct manipulation—a term coined in 1983 by software designer Ben Schneiderman to describe the interaction between user and software through the computer mouse, and which has expanded to include other forms of dialogue between the two—for the process to be considered craftsmanship.¹³ This has grown less relevant with the development of more advanced technologies, but more important in this case is the fact that Neri Oxman and The Mediated Group easily overcome this concern by expanding the nature of their collaborations beyond those between the (human) user and the digital technology to include other biological agents. Here, animals, bacteria, and robots can be direct manipulators.¹⁴

In the Silk Pavilion II (2019)—a site-specific installation commissioned for the Material Ecology exhibition at MoMA—17,532 silkworms worked together with The Mediated Matter Group to produce a hyperboloid structure, in a process that questions the role of the architect or designer as the sole form giver (Fig. 8). The project was a continuation of the research started with the Silk Pavilion I in 2013, when the team found that, by varying the environmental and spatial conditions, they were able to direct silkworms to spin in specific patterns. More accurately, they realized that when silkworms were able to reach an altitude of 13/15 inches (21mm) they would spin three-dimensional cocoons, but at a lower altitude they produced flat patches (Fig. 9).¹⁵ The primary structure of the Silk Pavilion II, therefore, consisted of a jig made of stainless steel and wire rope with a rotating mandrel (Fig. 10). The secondary structure was a water soluble textile in which the silkworms were placed (Fig. 11). For ten days, the animals moved horizontally over the textile—aided by the rotation of the jig—spinning their silk within a rearing facility in Abano Terme, Italy.¹⁶ As in previous experiments conducted by the group, the density of the silk varied depending on the environmental factors surrounding the structure. A chemical reaction caused by the silkworms’ excretions created holes in the knot fabric, thus releasing some of the structure’s tensile stress, and creating a “metabolic canvas of organic waste.”¹⁷

The process behind this project promotes a fairer and more sustainable method for harvesting silk, which is traditionally harvested by boiling the cocoon to dissolve the adhesive that attaches the silk to the layers below. This kills the larva, disrupting the development of the organism. The silkworms working on the Silk Pavilion projects, on the other hand, were able to complete their life — turning into moths at the end of their spinning cycle and laying eggs, which could allow for the construction of more structures.¹⁸ The research behind it also highlights the increasing importance of collaboration in Oxman’s work. In the Silk Pavilion I—where the shape of the structure was dictated by the designer and inspired by Buckinster Fuller’s geodesic dome (Fig. 12)—the silkworms acted as construction workers; in the Silk Pavilion II, they are not only architects and designers but also artisans. They provide the skilled hand and, through it, are able to determine the shape and physical properties of the result in a process that advocates for a different way of making and building in the context of climate change. “What all crafts share,” McCollough writes, “is not just technique or hard work on form, but also a probing of their medium’s capacity, a passion for practice, and moral value as an activity independent of what is produced.”¹⁹ By rooting their work in craft, Oxman and her collaborators propose an alternative modernism: one in which modern tools and technologies allow architects and designers to step away from the limelight, and instead embrace new, more sustainable, collaborations with animal and robotic hands.

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What should the modern house look like?

This simple question has been central, at least at some point, to the practice of almost every modern architect. There is hardly any other architectural commission that is more personal, loaded, and vulnerable than one’s own house. Architect and client are immediately entangled in one of the most intimate kinds of relationship―and not all such relationships end well. Architects are often accused of imposing their own visions of modern domesticity on their clients.¹ In fact, the history of almost every prominent modern house of the twentieth century involves some kind of face-off between architect and patron, as well as failed aspirations, unfulfilled wishes, conflicting agendas, misunderstandings, grudges, threats, and even lawsuits.² The full story is found not only in hand-drawn sketches, architectural models, and publicity photographs but also in the messier, less classifiable realm of the architectural process―in letters of complaint, in personal diaries, and in legal documents. It is in the in-between that the type of life enabled by a house is truly molded.

Take, for example, the Moriyama House in Tokyo (2002–2005), designed by Japanese architect Ryue Nishizawa (born 1966). At first glance, its layout hardly resembles that of a typical house. Instead of a single architectural enclosure, the Moriyama House comprises ten prismatic volumes, meticulously arranged at right angles to one another and the site. As if mutually repelled by an invisible force, the volumes never touch. Made of thin sheets of steel, they are painted a clinical white. Every opening is square or rectangular, and precisely cut, as if with a scalpel. The architectural representations of the project give the same impression. For example, consider the three-dimensional model, which betrays no signs of life. There are no material choices, tectonic details, or human figures to be seen here. The whole arrangement could be easily misunderstood as sterile, scale-less, maybe even borderline inhumane. Who was this idea of domesticity dreamt up for? What purpose does it truly serve? The architect’s ambitions and fantasies or the client’s wishes and needs?

The client, Yasuo Moriyama, is a middle-age man who has never left Japan―or for that matter, his home city of Tokyo. In the early 2000s, he wrote to Nishizawa, asking the architect to design a house for him. Nishizawa is said to have responded, “You don’t need a house you need a village in a forest.”³ Although one may wonder if this was a professional recommendation or a diagnosis, Moriyama decided to go along with it. The architect’s design called for breaking an overall structure into “units,” which he simply ordered from A to I. Many of the separate parts serve a single function, such as that of living room (Unit C) or bathroom (Unit D).⁴ Five of them, however, are more complete in and of themselves; each including its own small kitchenette and bathroom, and thus functioning as an independent “mini-house.”⁵ Placing the units almost equidistant across the entire surface of the site allowed each mini-house to have its own small garden⁶―a space in which to plant vegetables, hang laundry, or do work out in the open.

At the time of the commission, Moriyama ran a liquor store. Yet all he really wanted to do was be at home, where he could immerse himself in his vast collections of cult films and musical recordings―and, above all, read.⁷ Renting out the five mini-houses on his plot would allow him to give up his store and to spend every day among his favorite things.⁸ When Moriyama’s mother, his only living family member, passed away in 2006, he was left alone in the world, with only his treasured dog to accompany him on regular visits to his family’s nearby cemetery plot.

Not long after, Moriyami rented out the five mini-houses in his “village.” Having been featured in numerous publications around the world, even before being completed, the project had achieved a certain cult status both inside and outside of Japan. Curious architects and students flocked to see it and to take pictures. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that most of Moriyama’s first tenants were younger architects from Nishizawa’s office, and an editor of a contemporary architecture magazine.⁹ Moriyama’s “village in the forest” soon resembled a designers’ colony. Following in Moriyama’s footsteps, many of his new neighbors began to work from home, blurring the line between life and work, solitude and togetherness. Moriyama’s daily life wasn’t impacted only by the architecture of the house, it now seemed also to be taken over by architects.

Soon, the neighborhood-like arrangement of ten parallelepiped mini-houses resulted in an unexpected social network: a new kind of semi-communal lifestyle. Whereas none of the individual units of the house were intended for communal use, Moriyama’s living room (Unit C) soon served as a kind of common room. There, residents often lunch together, enjoy a cold beer on a hot summer day, or screen a film from the roof. As Moriyami has put it, “This space gives you the freedom to do anything you like, and it makes you want to.”¹⁰ Similarly, the network of earth-covered alleyways between the units has become loci for everyday interactions―to chat, drink sake, or light fireworks.

The Moriyama House is an architectural device that facilitates mingling. Its composition encourages reclusive occupants to cross thresholds, to migrate, and to step outside their comfort zones, just by taking a few steps in one direction or another.¹¹ Every such outing is a short promenade across an urban microcosm.¹² In remaining within the bounds of the house for several days at a time, one still ventures outside―even if only briefly, when traveling from one unit to another. Along the meandering garden paths, one catches a glimpse of street life beyond the site of the house: a slow-moving scooter, the postman on his or her rounds, a woman dressed in a traditional kimono and rolling a plastic suitcase. The more one looks into this arrangement, the more its seemingly dismembered scheme becomes less of an architectural imposition and more of a communal life support for the solitary dwellers who have gravitated toward it.

Could it be that this “life in between” is not a mere side effect, but rather the active ingredient in an architectural prescription? In recent decades, the devastating effects of loneliness in Japan, especially among the elderly, have been identified as an urgent, public health concern.¹³ More and more people live by themselves, often without a family member or close friend nearby. Despite their proximity to one another, the mini-houses ensure a level of privacy, with the windows of one unit never directly facing those of another.¹⁴ The disarticulated layout of the Moriyama House thus can be understood as something other than a quirky architectural caprice. Rather, it is an exercise in domestic proxemics―or an experiment in a new type of familial structure―and as such, an architectural prototype for cohabitation, with individuals living alone, yet nonetheless together.

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