Common Ground
Felipe Correa, Uros Novakovic, and Peter Sealy
Common Ground_August 2025
A Conversation with Felipe Correa,
Uros Novakovic, and Peter Sealy
August 2025
A sidewalk may be thought of as belonging to a conceptual system that regulates its overall qualities and characteristics—it is the product of a collective will, expressed through zoning bylaws, past and present.
A sidewalk is transformed by the particularities it meets: It is bordered by individual buildings and lots in diverse use. We experience sidewalks together with their surroundings, engaging not just their physical presence but also the smell, sound, and atmosphere around them.
There are many ways to understand the place of sidewalks, and many ways to design them. This summer, AWW editors Mai Okimoto and Sebastián López Cardozo caught up with Felipe Correa, Uros Novakovic, and Peter Sealy to shed light on some of these questions.
Mai Okimoto (MO): Each of you practice at different scales—the region, the neighborhood, the block, the lot—and through different media: writing, images, various representational styles, and physical buildings. How does your engagement with sidewalks take place in your work?
Felipe Correa (FC): Sidewalks are always at the forefront of discussions across many different scales of urbanism, but they can never really be defined on their own. They're always defined by something else: by the adjacencies that surround them, by the political climate that structures a particular kind of open space—or the lack of public space altogether.
So, in my practice, I’ve always found the sidewalk to be a crucial element, but never a singular one. It always has to do with how you conceive its adjacencies, its densities, its activity, and its civic dimension. Those are the things that bring together a broader set of issues and conditions, and they’re what give the sidewalk its specific quality.
In many ways, to design a good sidewalk, you have to design everything but the sidewalk. You have to work at a larger scale, because it’s all those other systems that shape what the sidewalk becomes.
The idea of the sidewalk is actually very new. It only emerges when the street becomes occupied by other forms of mobility beyond walking. It’s also interesting to look at the sidewalk in relation to the longer history of that space—the space it occupies within the street’s cross-section.
Uros Novakovic (UN): Something I learned when I was working in the UK was that they don’t use the word sidewalk. They use the word pavement instead, which comes from a slightly different history.
The reason sidewalks emerged in North America is because people were gradually restricted to the sides of the road. That became the only place we were allowed to be, because the largest portion of the street—the right of way—was given over to cars. And that didn’t happen just because cars emerged as a new technology. It happened through lobbying by automobile companies, and eventually through legislation.
There was a time when jaywalking didn’t exist as a concept. People could walk wherever they wanted, and cars had to navigate their way around us. That’s no longer the case.
So it was this kind of legislation that brought about what we now call sidewalks—something separate and defined, as opposed to just part of the street.
Peter Sealy (PS): My way of exploring a city is always by walking it. That means there are some cities I’m almost destined to fall in love with, simply because they can be walked. Others, for various historical or climatic reasons, are not good for exploring on foot—and that creates a completely different relationship to them.
A couple of thoughts on the sidewalk—or interests, I should say, come to mind. I’m a historian of architectural media, particularly architectural photography, and I’ve always been drawn to traditions of street photography—representations of the city created through movement. But notice, we call it street photography, even though many of the iconic images were actually taken from or on the sidewalk. There is also what I learned from Professor George Baird’s interpretations of Hannah Arendt—her ideas of the public realm and the space of appearance.
For Arendt, the separation of public and private spheres–which she felt was essential–had been increasingly blurred by modern societies. Public space–with its potential for civic “appearance” in the form of political action (words and deeds)–had been subsumed into the commercial satisfaction of materialist desires. Adapting Arendt’s notion to architecture and urbanism, Baird insisted that this “space of appearance” must be tangible and material. Public space for Baird needs plurality, mobility, and history; it is “rough space,” where one is vulnerable.
In both street photography and in Baird’s readings of Arendt’s work, the boundary between the street and sidewalk is often blurred. At what point are we referring specifically to the sidewalk? And what does that imply—that it’s raised, that it’s to the side, that it has a different legal status? Or are we really talking about the action of walking in the city, which often takes place on the sidewalk, but sometimes (and maybe most powerfully), happens on the street itself?
Sebastián López Cardozo (SLC): If the sidewalk is “crucially important but never singular,” as Felipe put it, is that ambiguity a strength or a weakness?
For instance, when you’re designing a building, there’s rarely a dedicated “sidewalk designer.” Everyone contributes to it indirectly—through edges, transitions, thresholds. What does it mean to work on something so central and yet so distributed?
UN: I think Felipe made a really good point—that we hardly ever design the sidewalk itself. We design the things around it, which in turn define its qualities.
But instinctively, I want to push back a little. Sometimes we do need to design the sidewalk directly, and we rarely get the chance. As a practice, we’ve never had a sidewalk commission. I’d love to do one—just a sidewalk, on its own terms. There’s a lot of potential there.
Several of us have touched on this—maybe Peter most directly with the idea of the space of appearance—but the sidewalk, in a civic sense, is where we interact with others. It’s where we negotiate space, present ourselves publicly, and become part of a shared experience. It’s a really fascinating part of daily life.\
My office, for example, faces a sidewalk on a small side street in Toronto. It’s a residential street and fairly quiet, but the things that take place are incredibly varied and often very personal. Just a few hours ago, I witnessed a couple, who I presume had recently broken up, exchanging their dog. They had a small argument right in front of my window. And I was part of that moment, just by virtue of it happening on the sidewalk. That’s the magic of it. We’re all part of a body politic, simply by being there.
Office Ou storefront in Toronto, Canada. Photo by Sebastián López Cardozo.
Thinking again, I’m reminded of the sidewalks in Prague, where I grew up. All the sidewalks there are made of a very particular kind of cobblestones: small, precise stones, much smaller than those used on the street. At first, I just thought it was beautiful—an elegant alternative to the utilitarian concrete sidewalks we have in Toronto.
Toronto’s concrete sidewalks are basically fine, but they fail when something needs to be repaired. A worker has to come in with a massive saw to cut the slab. It’s loud, disruptive, and the whole system breaks down. You can’t have a conversation, it’s unpleasant to walk through, and it interrupts daily life. In Prague, when a repair is needed, a worker shows up with a small hammer. He gently lifts the cobblestones, makes the repair, and puts them back in place. You hardly even notice him. The sidewalk accommodates maintenance without disrupting the flow of the city.
So that’s my thought on actually designing the sidewalk. I’d love to design one that isn’t too precious—not as elaborate as the cobblestone streets of Prague—but something that still has that capacity to integrate repair seamlessly into urban life, the way a good sidewalk should.
FC: When I said we design everything except the sidewalk, what I meant is that we rarely design it in isolation. Yes, we do design the sidewalk, but always in relation to other elements around it.
Uros, your comments reminded me of another fascinating aspect: not just the design of sidewalks, but their long-term management. And who manages them can vary dramatically from city to city.
Take New York, for example. Whoever fronts the sidewalk—typically the building owner—is responsible for building it according to city standards. But if a new building goes up, that developer is also responsible for redoing the sidewalk, maintaining it over time, and even covering liability if someone falls.
So the sidewalk becomes this complex legal apparatus. That legal dimension—the history of ownership, maintenance, and liability—adds another layer to how we conceptualize the sidewalk.
SLC: In New York, you could say the culture informs the policy, which in turn informs the sidewalk. There’s a clear connection there.
MO: Peter noted the blurred boundary between the sidewalk and the street earlier, and Felipe’s comment about property owners’ responsibility for the sidewalk maintenance makes the connection between sidewalks and private buildings hard to ignore, too.
It seems that while sidewalk has systematic qualities that independently regulate its overall characteristics, it’s also transformed by its local adjacencies—how it adjoins, or overlaps with, the street and the public on one side, and private space on the other. I’m curious whether there are certain physical or material characteristics that emphasize one overlap more than the other.
PS: There are countless factors—historical, cultural, economic—that shape sidewalk design far more than any kind of universal functionalism. Even something as basic as materiality varies enormously. In one place, cobblestone might be standard; elsewhere, it’s poured concrete. Dimensions shift. Accepted practices shift. And the degree to which the sidewalk is treated as an autonomous realm—versus the degree to which it merges with adjacent buildings or is encroached upon by private development—varies dramatically.
Mai’s use of the word systematic comes to mind here. Because on the one hand, the sidewalk clearly is a system—it has common design standards, and the ability to walk uninterrupted makes it as much a system as the subway, the sewer network, the street grid, or even an elevator.
And yet, at the same time, it’s deeply negotiated. Nowhere is this more apparent than when it snows. In cities like New York, Boston, or Toronto, sidewalk clearing is the responsibility of the adjacent property owner. In others, like Montreal, the city handles it. But even there, you quickly learn which streets are considered important—and which aren’t.
The same dynamics show up in design, especially in elements like benches, trees, newspaper boxes, and other forms of street furniture. These belong, at least in part, to the sidewalk’s design. And they reveal a lot—you can immediately tell which areas are designed to provide comfort, and which ones treat the sidewalk as an afterthought, or even as something to discourage public use.
FC: I think factors like culture and climate are incredibly important. But I’d also add something else: the particular moment in time, or historical period, in which attitudes toward the street have taken shape. Those attitudes have shifted dramatically.
Take, for example—and I know it’s a bit of a cliché, but a good one—Barcelona and the work of Ildefons Cerdà. Cerdà’s Eixample plan is one of the first truly global surveys of urban blocks and streets. And what’s remarkable is that, in developing that plan, Cerdà actually traveled extensively—which, in the mid-19th century, was no small feat. There was no Google Earth. He visited cities around the world like Buenos Aires and New York, and physically measured blocks, streets, and sidewalks.
In that sense, the Barcelona block wasn’t a collage or a copy; it was the result of what we might call a best practices study. And within that, the sidewalk was treated as a unifying civic element—a social condenser of sorts—that brought differences into alignment. The wealthy and the less wealthy shared the same sidewalk. It functioned as a kind of commons, a shared civic space with a strong egalitarian ethos.
Now compare that with a more recent example: downtown Minneapolis. Business leaders and local architects— influenced by Victor Gruen—conceived an extensive network of skywalks over six miles long, connecting buildings in the downtown core. And the effect is the opposite of what we see in Barcelona. These skywalks construct a segregated world, where those with particular jobs or economic means move mostly through interior spaces, elevated above the street.
Interior view of IDS Center in Minneapolis showing the relationship of the walkway system to the covered court. Photo by Felipe Correa.
Yes, that system responds to climate—Minneapolis is bitterly cold—but the consequence is clear: those who can afford to use the skywalks avoid the public sidewalk entirely. And those who can’t are left at street level. The division is visible and material.
You see a similar phenomenon in downtown Houston, but for the opposite climate. There, extreme heat and humidity have led to an extensive network of tunnels and internal connectors. Again, those with access avoid the sidewalk entirely.
So yes, climate plays a role, but so do cultural values, economic systems, and historical moments. And ultimately, I think we’re losing something. There’s a publicness the sidewalk provides—a civic dimension that historically brought people into contact with one another—that I fear is disappearing in many contemporary cities.
UN: There was a similar plan in Toronto back in the ‘60s or ‘70s for an elevated walkway around Nathan Phillips Square, but it never really took off. And Toronto might be fortunate in this regard. Our underground pedestrian network is actually very extensive. It runs through much of downtown, but it’s so labyrinthine and confusing that it can’t function as a full replacement for the sidewalk. It hasn’t supplanted the street as the primary way of moving through the city.
PS: Speaking of publicness on the sidewalk, I’m reminded of the Admiralbrücke, a bridge in Berlin where people tend to gather in the summer. There’s a great pizzeria nearby, and people bring beer and sit outside. The bridge has sidewalks on either side and a lane for cars in the middle.
The most comfortable way to sit? On the sidewalk, with your legs stretched out into the street—so every time a car comes by, it has to honk. The driver waits, and then thirty people all move their legs at once.
To me, this is ephemeral, but also really beautiful. There’s a slight element of danger, but it’s manageable. It’s not a pedestrian realm that’s completely dominant, but it’s not the realm of the automobile either. It’s a negotiated space, not just in terms of geometry, but through presence. The formal boundary between sidewalk and street is clear, but it’s softened by collective behavior. That negotiation, especially in the context of Berlin, feels meaningful.
Admiralbrücke (Admiral Bridge) in Berlin, Germany. Photo by Jonathan Janssens / plattenbaustudio, June 2016.
MO: In the examples we’ve heard so far, it seems the public is potentially contested. Felipe brought up a useful distinction between publicness and civic identity earlier: are streets and sidewalks themselves losing their civic identity, even as they remain public?
FC: I think it’s been happening throughout the 20th century—but just to clarify, I actually believe it’s publicness itself that’s disappearing.
By that I mean we’re increasingly seeing large-scale urban projects developed through public-private partnerships—often structured around business improvement districts or special zoning districts—that, in effect, privatize public space. These frameworks make it easier to finance urban development, especially in a world where the economic model has shifted: where private capital, rather than public infrastructure, now drives urban growth.
A good, if overused, example is Hudson Yards. The idea that you could have a superblock in Manhattan where the streets are, for all practical purposes, privatized would’ve been unthinkable in the first half of the 20th century. Compare that with Rockefeller Center. It’s essentially a megastructure in section, but composed of discrete blocks connected by genuinely public space at ground level. So yes, I think publicness—understood as shared, open, accessible space—is disappearing, and I find that deeply problematic. These spaces matter. And we saw just how much they matter during the pandemic, when many of these so-called public-private spaces were closed to avoid liability. That made it very clear which spaces were truly public, and which were not.
Aerial views of Hudson Yards (top) and Rockefeller Center (bottom) visualizing the relationship of each project to the Manhattan block.
As for the distinction, publicness refers to accessibility—the fact that a space is open to everyone. Civic identity, for me, is about something more. It’s a space so well-constructed and well-designed that it not only serves the public, but also becomes a source of public pride. It reflects an investment in shared life. That’s what I mean by civic—not just public in function, but formally and symbolically public as well.
UN: I wonder whether the 20th century was the exception rather than the rule. Maybe what we think of as “public space”—with its open, accessible, civic qualities—really only emerged during a specific historical window.
If you look back at 19th-century London, many of the so-called public squares, like the garden squares in Bloomsbury, were fenced off, controlled by private trusts, and closed after 6 p.m. They weren’t truly public. So maybe what we’re seeing now isn’t a new crisis, but a return to earlier patterns.
FC: That's a fascinating point—and I think it's important to distinguish between different kinds of space.
What I was referring to earlier is specifically the privatization of streets. That, for me, is the more concerning trend. We're now seeing increasing numbers of private streets—spaces that once formed the connective tissue of public life—now being treated as assets or amenities.
PS: You could take this a few different ways. One is to argue—and maybe we need to take this seriously—that we actually got a more generous public realm from the robber barons of the 18th and 19th centuries than we’re likely to get from Google, with its Sidewalk Labs proposal in Toronto, or from Hudson Yards.
Or perhaps we should emphasize historical continuities—the persistence of certain modes of ownership and exclusion.
I’m reminded of that Robert Venturi quote: “Americans don’t need piazzas because they have television sets.” I realize I’ve just introduced piazzas in a conversation about sidewalks, but I mention it because on one level, it reflects an anti-urban tendency in American culture—one that goes back to Jefferson, or even earlier, depending on how you trace it. But on another level, it raises the question: What exactly do we want from a public realm?
Do we want a physical space where we can confront each other, be in proximity, argue, show up in person? Or has the public realm long been mediated—from the printing press, to television, to Twitter? Maybe it hasn’t been a purely physical agora for centuries.
Still, I’d argue that we’re now seeing some of the political consequences of removing politics from the sidewalk and relocating it entirely to social media. That shift may be killing off the kind of public space that Baird or Arendt described—or maybe, just maybe, it will provoke a backlash.
Will it get us anywhere? Who knows. But maybe ten years from now, we’ll be walking around with newspapers, discussing editorials in the park—deliberately, because we’ve seen what the alternative looks like.
SLC: If it’s true that sidewalks are moving in these different directions, on one hand toward privatization, and on the other toward increasing digital mediation, what happens when we do design a sidewalk?
We talked earlier about how sidewalks are never really singular—they’re always shaped by the systems and environments around them. So what happens if you install a sidewalk in a space that doesn’t have that surrounding support—no density, no adjacent uses, no active edges?
Maybe the broader question here is: where are sidewalks headed in the future? Especially in relation to things like technology, culture, and privatization?
UN: I want to be optimistic, especially responding to Peter’s point about the possibility of a backlash. I’m not sure “backlash” is quite the right word, but I do feel that in my own life, the sidewalk has become a more attractive space—even a space for political conversations, and those conversations are completely different from what happens on Twitter.
It’s actually kind of remarkable how many people with different opinions you can meet just by being on the sidewalk. There’s a barbershop next door to my office with a couple of chairs and a table out front. People sit there. I sit there. And we talk. And it’s a great experience. Everyone’s living in their own ideological bubbles online, sure. But when you talk to them in person, you realize they’re just normal people. You find things in common. It’s meaningful.
So maybe the agora or the piazza isn’t coming back, but the sidewalk, at least on my little street, feels vibrant and very much alive. And I think that matters. Every coffee shop with a couple of tables out front seems to thrive here in Toronto. It’s almost underrated how important that everyday public edge is.
FC: I think the shift of so many aspects of public life into a kind of public sphere (in the Habermasian sense) has had a huge impact. It’s no longer tied to physical space, and that change has reshaped the sidewalk and the physical character of the street.
One very visible effect—especially here in New York, but also in many other cities—is that ground-floor retail is dead. On the one hand, you could see that as the end of the sidewalk. We've lost a critical adjacency that traditionally activated public space.
But on the other hand, it’s opened up new possibilities. We're now seeing all sorts of pop-up events, independent stores, and culinary festivals that could never have afforded ground-floor space before. These uses bring a level of energy and experimentation that wasn’t possible when only banks and pharmacies could afford the rent.
So yes, while the traditional sidewalk-adjacent storefront is vanishing, new forms of public life are emerging in its place.
At the same time, I think the street section itself—the physical cross-section of the public realm—is undergoing a profound shift, driven both by politics and by technological change. Over the next 20 to 30 years, I think we’re going to see a dramatic re-articulation of the street through the arrival of autonomous vehicles. A recent book by a former student of mine, Evan Shieh’s Autonomous Urbanism, makes a compelling argument: we shouldn't wait for technology to dictate the shape of our cities. Instead, we need to proactively define the kind of civic landscape we want, and then determine how autonomous vehicles can fit into that vision.
So for me, now is the time for design to be ambitious. We should begin to imagine—even hallucinate about—what kinds of new public spaces might be possible over the next two or three decades given these technological transformations.
PS: Occasionally, we get these brief moments—a city marathon, a Christmas parade—when we actually challenge the street section. And I think that’s the larger point Felipe is raising: we’re at a moment where we can either wait for technology—like autonomous vehicles—to bring a new revolution (as the car did between 1919 and 1950), or we can take a more active stance, like the people on that bridge in Berlin, sticking their feet into the road and reclaiming space.
The way we divide public space is insane. The poverty of space allocated to the sidewalk, compared to the generosity lavished on the car, is indefensible. And now may be a unique moment to challenge that. But I’ll take my turn to be the pessimist. Imagine if every sidewalk were as wide as a single car lane—what would that change?
UN: The real issue is political. It's a struggle over the street, and we’re going to have to stick our feet into it—as the Berliners do—and take back the space.
PS: Maybe this isn’t the right place to end, but there’s something we haven’t touched on yet—and it comes from Baird, particularly in his writing on the space of appearance.
He’s part of that generation of urbanists in the ’70s and ’80s responding to the anti-urbanism of the 1950s and ’60s—responding, perhaps, to the collapse (or at least the exhaustion) of the modernist urban project, and trying to recover and reassert a public life rooted in the street.
One way Baird defines public space is as a space that carries a certain degree of risk. That’s because, drawing from Arendt, he sees public space as the site of action—not just movement, but political appearance. In his book Street Photography, he illustrates this through photographs: everything from people going about their daily routines to images of political protest. These are all examples of action in the public realm.
And I think this raises a difficult but essential question: What degree of risk are we willing to accept in public? How do we perceive that risk? That’s a political question, and we’re seeing it play out right now.
You see it in the debates about the New York City subway. You see it in Toronto, in how people talk about unhoused individuals in subway stations. You see it in Los Angeles. And you see it in how we talk about order and disorder on the sidewalk. Disorder on the sidewalk has become a politically charged issue, and that’s precisely because sidewalks are public. They’re where we see one another. They’re where we encounter things we may not want to see.
Is this a tension we should accept as part of what makes sidewalks valuable? Or is it something we try to regulate away?
UN: I think you’re touching on something really important, Peter. In most of our lives—in the car, at home, at work, on our phones—we’re sheltered. But on the sidewalk, anything can happen. It’s unpredictable. There’s a real sense of danger, or at least of encounter—of meeting the Other, which you can usually avoid just by turning off your phone. And I think that’s crucial to understanding what a sidewalk is.
Part of why I feel so optimistic about the sidewalk as a space for encountering others is because all the other forums for public discourse, especially digital ones, have become surveilled and constrained. Sidewalks, by contrast, still offer a kind of free space. You can talk without your words being recorded. It’s also a little dangerous—someone could punch you, I guess!—but that risk is part of the vitality. It’s freeing. It’s liberating to speak and let the words disappear.
SLC: That idea of risk, or maybe a more everyday term like uncertainty, seems central. At home, on your phone, even in your car, you’re in a kind of capsule. You control the inputs. But out on the sidewalk, you’re exposed. And it reminded me of something I read earlier today in Eric Klinenberg’s Palaces for the People. He describes how, in places where people start to feel unsafe on the street, they begin to bunker in. They retreat into private space. So that uncertainty disappears—but so does the social world.
FC: I think ultimately, publicness only really becomes meaningful when the urban conditions support it. Sidewalks depend on density, on the people and the cosmopolitan context around them. There’s nothing more terrifying than being out on a sidewalk at 3:00 a.m. alone.
And to the broader point about the disappearance of public space, I think what we’re actually starting to see in major cities is a shift. Cities are beginning to invest in their public realms again. Because as everything else moves to non-spatial spheres (remote work, online platforms, private messaging, etc.) people need physical places to encounter one another.
PS: Should we think of this in a Cerdà kind of way? That is, say there’s a certain range of behaviors that animate a public realm. Beyond that range, either in terms of content or intensity, should things be excluded (because they alienate others, or drive them away)?
Or do we want to defend a more radical idea of publicness—one where the sidewalk’s value lies in its absolute openness, in the fact that it reflects and reveals the state of the world around it?
Felipe Correa is the founding Partner of Somatic Collaborative, a research based design practice in New York City. He is the author of multiple books including São Paulo: A Graphic Biography and Beyond the City: Resource Extraction Urbanism in South America.
Uros Novakovic is a Founding Partner of Office Ou, a Toronto-based practice for architecture, landscape, and strategy. Everyday, Uros can be seen on the sidewalks of Bloor Street West and St.Clair West.
Peter Sealy is an architectural historian who studies the ways in which architects constructively engage with reality through media such as film and photography. He directs the undergraduate Architectural Studies program at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty.
Sebastián López Cardozo edits for Architecture Writing Workshop and works as an architectural designer in Toronto.
Mai Okimoto edits for Architecture Writing Workshop and works as an architect in Houston.
Navigating Narratives
Joël León Danis, Athenea Papacostas, and Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco
Navigating Narratives_September 2024
A Conversation with Joël León Danis, Athenea Papacostas,
and Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco
September 2024
For the fifth issue of Architecture Writing Workshop, Talking Places, the editors convened a roundtable on the intricacies of narratives and storytelling in architecture, bringing together perspectives from art and design, architectural history, and curatorial practice.
The myriad stories of those who build, inhabit, and interact with spaces provide a more nuanced understanding of how architecture operates in real life. This perspective challenges the tendency to view architectural narratives through a singular, often detached lens. Through various mediums—from exhibitions and walking tours to oral histories—the conversation that follows offers a path to redefine how we relate to, narrate, and design the built environment.
Editors Sebastián López Cardozo and Lauren Phillips moderated the discussion with Joël León Danis, Athenea Papacostas, and Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco. (This roundtable has been edited for length and clarity.)
Sebastián López Cárdozo (SLC): Why do stories matter?
Despite being a highly effective and often preferred vehicle for transmitting information, the use of narrative in formal and academic writing is often seen as subjective and perhaps not taken as seriously. How do we address these concerns? And is there an opening for personal writing to play a larger role in communicating architectural intent and experience?
Athenea Papacostas (AP): As director of the Museum of National Housing (MUNAVI) in Mexico City, I worked with RIWA Architects to build a narrative about housing that aimed to change how people relate to their home, and place more importance on the decisions they make in their daily lives. The curation process not only considered people’s role as renters or home buyers, but also as members and caretakers of their community.
Welcome section on MUNAVI’s permanent exhibition. Photo by GLR Studio. Courtesy of Espacio Cultural Infonavit.
I also have an ongoing project that is centered on my own spatial memory of the houses I’ve lived in, the process of leaving one for another, and how this shaped my experience of the city. This project led to an open event with a series of clay models, where I invited the visitors for a conversation. I asked them about the number of times they’ve moved, characteristics of their homes that have stood out, and their memorable experiences. The open dialogue changes the broader narrative about housing; we realize that it isn’t just about the size or location of the home, but also about the people we share the space with. It has social, economic, and emotional components—everything comes together in the domestic space.
Clay models at the performance opening on March 5, 2023 at Laguna, Mexico City. Photo by Laura Orozco.
Joël León Danis (JLD): There's a tendency in the discipline to over-academize how we talk about space—and this creates a barrier to those outside of it to engage in shaping how space is understood and described. Everyone experiences architecture and everyone has their own story to tell, and personal stories are just as valuable as any other stories we tell ourselves about buildings. They can help us reflect how architecture can better support the narratives people want to experience, versus a prescriptive or deterministic architecture that only supports a single interpretation.
With the Toronto Society of Architects (TSA), we held a Pride event this year, where thousands of people shared their experiences of queer spaces. Maybe only a handful of these stories had explicitly architectural components—and yet all the stories happened in architecture. The question is, can we use this kind of information to better understand how to design spaces—to encourage positive stories and prevent negative ones?
Attendees share their memories at the Toronto Society of Architects booth at the 2024 Pride StreetFair. Photo by Kurtis Chen.
Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco (ISO): Oral stories have been fundamental in architectural history to challenge a canon privileging a controlled, hermetic narrative that tends to erase the voices of those who actually inhabit spaces. Dominant histories privileging architectural archives often sidelined the fact that producers of space are not just architects. In the same sense that geographical constraints, policies and legal mandates produce architectures, the construction worker, domestic worker, third-generation inhabitants, draftsmen, and many more bring their own forms of experience to bear on the production of architectural space.
It’s interesting to compare storytelling and oral histories versus histories that are only based on archival evidence. It raises questions about how that archive was constructed, who owns it, who is tasked with its preservation, and so on. As a historian, I've been working to bring oral accounts into my work to address these concerns, without, however, leaving behind the archives to compliment oral histories—it’s a balance. And, ultimately, it’s important to admit that every story comes with an author and a certain kind of position—inherent subjectivity is not something we can avoid.
JLD: And what becomes a place’s dominant story can’t necessarily be controlled by those who created the space. A symbol of democracy in one era can become a symbol of a totalitarian regime in the next.
There is a building in Venezuela from the tail end of the dictatorship (built late 1950s) called El Helicoide. It’s a ramped, helicoidal project that allowed people to drive up to shops. It features a Buckminster Fuller dome at the top and it’s been said that Salvador Dalí offered to adorn its interiors—it was a symbol of prosperous Venezuela. When the dictatorship fell, democracy didn’t want to touch that building.
El Helicoide was never finished, and it remained a shell of a building for about 40 years, hosting a variety of uses. Then along came the country’s current government, and it became the headquarters for the Secret Police, a place where people are incarcerated and tortured. The building has represented different values to different people at different times—so it’s important to contextualize stories we hear about it. The architecture hasn’t changed, and it is still spectacular, but now it is very strange to tell people that you love it, because its current use is so terrible. Its narrative has evolved beyond the control of the architects, who could not have imagined that the little shops they designed would be used to make cells for prisoners.
El Helicoide building in Caracas, Venezuela, designed by Pedro Neuberger, Dirk Bornhorst and Jorge Romero Gutiérrez. Photo by Damián D. Fossi Salas.
Lauren Phillips (LP): There are many instances of architecture coming up with a solution, dropping it off in a community and assuming that people will figure out how to use and occupy that space in a “successful” way. Particularly when it comes to community-based projects, architects might construct a possibility based on their own imagined narrative. There’s an arrogance in believing that designs speak for themselves. Is there a role for narrative in communicating how spaces are to be used—almost as an architectural users’ manual?
AP: You use the word “manual,” and I love them—even the Ikea ones, they're wonderful. They help us put together our sense of how we can enable things to happen. However, they are also a cold way of communicating, especially when compared to storytelling. Storytelling and verbal communication can be much more impactful in communicating how a space’s use is envisioned. The written word is very important, but it cannot wholly replace conversations and the rapport that develops out of dialogue.
ISO: Any building is an accumulator of stories. It never stops—the plan is always accumulating different lives and different histories, sometimes antagonistic histories. So perhaps the idea of a fixed manual is too prescriptive for the many ways a building’s narrative will evolve over its lifetime. Architects are really good at pretending to design for eternity and to hang on to the illusion that the plan dictates the narrative. But I think there’s a different way of perceiving space—one that involves recentering the voices of those that are actually living in it.
The architect Enrique Ortiz, speaking of his work with Cooperativa Palo Alto in Mexico City, said the community is his school. That is something incredibly telling and humbling, as it redefines what the architect is—more of a service provider as opposed to a canonical figure that imposes his or her ideas.
Left and Right: A street and and andador (pedestrian road) in Cooperativa Palo Alto, the first cooperative in Mexico City with 221 houses and approximately 1,400 inhabitants. 2022, Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco.
Center: The first house built collectively in Cooperativa Palo Alto mid 1970s, Courtesy of Cooperativa Palo Alto.
SLC: When we talk about the process of communicating narrative, how much does the medium matter? We all work with different media, whether we’re talking about essays, exhibitions, oral histories, or architectural design. How do different mediums affect the process of telling a story?
JLD: I don't think the medium of storytelling matters so much as far as how stories are produced, but each medium has a different power of transmitting a story. Architecture is probably one of the worst mediums of communication, in part because it lacks the kind of shared language needed for meaningful engagement.
When we do walking tours with the TSA, we’re constantly thinking of how to build this shared language—to foster the ability to notice and read the stories embedded in buildings. Because the walking tour is a medium that lends itself well to conversation, it can be especially accessible.
A big part of the tour guide’s job at the TSA is to help people become comfortable talking about their built environment. Understanding a building’s history and how to access it is key to this. And it doesn’t need to be intimidating— these histories can be easy to understand once you remove some of the jargon that surrounds a lot of architectural talk.
ISO: As a discipline we’ve struggled to mainstream ways of talking about architecture that go beyond aesthetic responses. It is exciting to see that starting to change, and to see storytelling as a vehicle for widening that conversation. But apart from writing, drawing and other forms of visual representation are beautiful ways to tell stories.
I experienced this while working with Cooperativa Palo Alto, a community that lives in an intergenerational way with a high degree of nuance that is difficult to describe in words. For my own research process, I've been trying to redraw a few of their houses over time. Words can’t always communicate certain parts of the experience—in particular how the experience of a space comes into being.
AP: The medium also depends on the audience, right? Who do you want to reach? Do you want to reach other architects? Or the people living in Cooperativa Palo Alto? Depending on who you want to reach, you might (or might not) write an essay that is overly long and technical. I also agree very much that we have a plurality of tools and forms of representation.
It reminded me of an experiment which involved working with my own memory, the houses that I lived in, and the memory of those spaces. After I’d made models out of that process I thought, well, I should also do drawings. While I was doing the drawings, I recorded myself describing them. So I had the voice notes as well as the drawings and models.
As an extension of the project, I asked my girlfriend to describe the first house she lived in. She closed her eyes and started describing spaces, and I started drawing. Sometimes she described the furniture, other times a detail. When she opened her eyes, she asked: “How can you draw someplace you’ve never been?”
SLC: As a storyteller, whether you’re writing, speaking, or drawing, it seems the first component in shaping a narrative is to have a firsthand experience that you need or desire to communicate. But the intention behind that act of communication—is it meant to stand in or take the place of a firsthand experience on the part of the audience? Or should it spur them to go and have a firsthand experience of their own?
ISO: That's a very good question, and it's a difficult question. I'm working on another research project right now, related to the struggle for housing rights for elderly sex workers, where I’m trying to situate oral histories. I have struggled with it because, on the one hand, I don't want to speak on behalf of anyone—but on the other hand, I have a strong desire to communicate their histories. So there is a difficulty in trying to bring their voices into the conversation while also keeping my critical distance.
It sounds perhaps contradictory, but bringing oral accounts involves getting closer to your interlocutors. You don't visit them only one time, but many. You spend time with them that isn’t written about. You’re building a social relationship with them. And that's really where the trust of them sharing their stories comes about. But in that process you get very close to their lives. And then, when it’s time to write (at least in my experience) I felt like I really needed to come back to the paper by distancing myself again. Because it's still important to try to maintain a certain objectivity that also allows for the introduction of counterarguments.
In the end, there's a position—an argument that I’m trying to construct. With Cooperativa Palo Alto I realized, for example, that there can be counterpositions. At Palo Alto there were two accounts of how that space was produced: one from the people who were living there, and one from the people that had left that space, now called “the dissidents of the cooperative.” I was trying to contextualize the disagreement as well as look through other mediums such as records of legal proceedings.
My hope was to produce an article like that doesn’t just represent one version of the story told through one set of oral histories, but shows a relationship of these positions to other positions, the scope of the debate, and an understanding of a complex context. When you get so close to people, you feel a certain loyalty. But sometimes loyalty means bringing the frictions and complications to light. One can be merely an advocate, or one can ultimately allow their voices to be strengthened through a degree of struggle, of wrestling with the counternarratives.
AP: The first temporary exhibition at MUNAVI centered on the home environment. We opened the museum to the public and invited them to contribute through their own objects. We asked people to tell the story of their objects and explain how they made them feel at home.
Curating these objects and their stories was an emotional experience—everyone in the curatorial team related to at least one story, or two, or three. But some stories were more difficult to relate to. We had items from all over Mexico, from religious items to sports paraphernalia and books. If those contributing had written half a page about their object, we carefully selected one or two sentences for display. We wanted to represent the similarities and differences of how people live, and how they choose to make their house a home. The exhibition became a great medium for that.
Temporary exhibition, “Objetos que hacen hogar,” 2023. Photo by GLR Estudio. Courtesy of Espacio Cultural Infonavit.
JLD: Some of the stories we tell ourselves about the places we live in are not constructed on facts, and yet that doesn't make them any less valid. In the broader context of helping tell the story of a place, we have to unpack where it comes from and why it matters.
In the tours I co-lead at TSA, we often talk about the role of Georgian architecture in establishing the Britishness of Toronto. That’s an objective story—that is exactly what the British tried to do. And it doesn't stop people from feeling incredibly emotional because they didn't realize that a building they perhaps lived in or saw in their neighborhood has a whole other political layer. For people that did not fit into the story of Toronto’s Britishness, Georgian architecture tells an entirely different story—one marked by colonization and the erasure of Indigenous culture.
We also tell a lot of stories involving newly built projects, and sometimes we've had the architects come on the tours with us. What we say about buildings is not exactly what the architects might say or think about them. In some cases they are interested to hear how we interpret the building and respond positively. Other times, it’s more unsettling and we get pushback.
Tours are a good medium for bringing together the complex and conflicting narratives we inhabit. But when we edit, curate, and tell a particular story, we’re also building our own narrative. At the end of the day there is an argument to how we do this. We make a choice about what buildings or spaces we talk about, and how we talk about them—it’s one story, a narrative among many.
Joël León Danis is an architect and Executive Director of the Toronto Society of Architects. His work has been shaped by a strong interest in public policy, community building, and the critical dialogue between the architectural profession and the public.
Athenea Papacostas is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural agent who studied architecture (UNAM), museum studies (ENCRyM), and dance (RAD). Based on the exploration of concepts such as authenticity, proximity, joy, and affect in the spaces we inhabit, her practice moves between materialities, performance, and relational art.
Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco is an architect, historian and educator whose work is interested in Latin American histories of housing rights. She is an Assistant Professor of Architecture, and Co-Director of the Architecture program at Bard College.
Sebastián López Cardozo edits for Architecture Writing Workshop. He works as an architectural designer in Toronto and is a co-editor of Nueva Vivienda: New Housing Paradigms in Mexico (Park Books, 2022).
Lauren Phillips edits for Architecture Writing Workshop. He is a Lecturer at Huckabee College of Architecture at Texas Tech University.
What’s in a Name?
Ajay Manthripragada, Alex Oetzel, Letícia Wouk Almino
What’s the Matter with Canon?_September 2023
A Conversation with Ajay Manthripragada,
Alex Oetzel, and Letícia Wouk Almino
September 2023
For Architecture Writing Workshop’s third issue, What’s the Matter With Canon?, the editors convened a roundtable to explore how the changing perceptions of the architectural canon shape the modes of comprehending, organizing, and representing architectural knowledge.
How does a cultural product from the past, as is the canon, remain relevant to the myriad cultures and values around the globe—and the buildings they produce? Architecture’s inherited canon is variably understood as a defined set of architectural works and as knowledge that is (re)assessed and selected to be passed on to future generations. Depending on who you ask, the canon is either dismissed altogether—its legacy ignored—or, increasingly, reexamined through the lens of how we produce and organize contemporary architectural knowledge.
Editors Pouya Khadem and Mai Okimoto moderated the following discussion on architecture’s canon with Ajay Manthripragada, Alex Oetzel, and Letícia Wouk Almino. Discussants draw on experiences from their studies, teaching, and practice. (This roundtable has been edited for length and content.)
Mai Okimoto (MO): What is canon? Does it refer to buildings—or can it be used to describe ideas? Are works described as canonical synonymous with great work? Is this term still relevant to our field today?
Ajay Manthripragada (AM): It's a big question. I'm interested in the way you're phrasing the term "canon" without the article "the." You're saying "canon," as opposed to "the canon" or "the canonical." I'm wondering if that indicates something about an interest in its redefinition or rethinking.
By definition, the canon is a Western construct. The origin of the idea—that there's a body of works to which everyone refers and agrees upon their excellence—is derived from the concept of the canonization of saints in the Catholic tradition. In an academic context, whether it's literature, art, or architecture, the canon became construed as a body of creative works. For me, that's important to acknowledge because it has a different relationship to authority.
Letícia Wouk Almino (LWA): It’s a complicated term—and increasingly less relevant. I find it difficult to use the term at all. It’s a word that is not easily dissociated from its classic definition as a particular set of Western works. With a greater diversity of people teaching at institutions and bringing in voices from all over the globe, we're transitioning away from the singular way of thinking about architecture. One way in which this is happening is through the language we use to discuss architecture—through a new set of terms to address the complexity of perspectives and modes of practice.
Alex Oetzel (AO): I don’t think the shift in attitude toward the canon, on its own, is novel. The discipline has always been dealing with cultural transformations and changes in values. What matters is how the changes are happening, who has influence, and what are the tangible outcomes...
AM: Figures in other disciplines (literature for instance) have been unabashed about defining the canon by definitively selecting a group of works. It tends to be more nebulous in architecture—the canon is implied and rehearsed over many iterations and repetitions of certain examples in academia, and, for my set of interests, in the discipline of formal analysis. There's a kind of reciprocity between the definition of the canon and formal analysis. They support each other.
I agree with Letícia—we don't have to use the word, but I appreciate aspects of what it represents because it allows us to collectively have a conversation about what we value.
LWA: I am also a disciple of formal analysis. It was preached to me, and that's how I and a lot of people learned architecture, following a lineage of academics who have also been taught this way. Naturally, you would be narrowly limited to a specific subset of buildings that can be formally analyzed; there are only certain schools of thought that allow you to talk about architecture in this way. The more I think about your question, the more I realize that the problem of the canon is a question about architecture education. If we change the conversation, we'll be open to discussing different types of buildings that don't fit within the rules of formal analysis.
AM: I agree; these are important points. As we expand the references, we also need to completely reconsider the tools by which we look at them. There is a body of representational strategies that we can leverage, adapt, and change as we look at other aspects of architecture. However, I've come to see a flaw in the argument: Why do we need to draw them at all? Why draw a plan of a building conceived outside the logic of a plan?
AO: I think our attitudes towards the relationship between canon and education are most visible in classrooms. I recently taught a studio at Ohio State University (OSU) about high-rise hotels. Before moving to the design phase, I prepared a list of over one hundred precedents of skyscrapers across history for the students to study the formal typology and its history. We started in Chicago where the first skyscrapers were built, but I encouraged them to branch out. The quantity of towers meant each building analysis had to be very quick, and encouraged a non-hierarchical study of the typology’s historic range and collective characteristics, rather than in-depth formal analyses of specific buildings.
MO: To Alex’s point, there’s value in rethinking how we approach precedents. We have access to more information compared to fifty years ago when architectural knowledge came from fewer sources such as print publications. It’s also interesting to think about formal analysis and how it lends itself to books and exhibitions. I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are on the changing nature of media and how that's shaping the way we're recognizing certain works.
LWA: This ties back to what Ajay mentioned about formal analysis as a tool of representation. It has its limits: it only works for buildings that have been drawn or documented. For me, this is quite exclusionary. The types of buildings that have been published are the ones that architecture institutions have historically favored through funding and resources—and are often buildings by architects who are savvy about self-promotion. In order to move away from the narrow scope of the canon, we need to diversify the ways in which information is passed down. In other words, we need educators who can develop new methodologies to confront the ever-expanding landscape of information and introduce students to varied perspectives. The unfortunate default is to reference parts of history that are the subject of easily-accessible, published materials.
AM: It is not a new idea that the expanded set of references cannot be understood autonomously as material realities in the world without understanding their deeper cultural and ritualistic significance. Therein lies a very fundamental problem in our premise: Looking at the architectural complexities of these buildings and gaining a deep knowledge of their cultural significance (particularly in the context of a design studio with its limited timeframes) substantially increases the risk of having misrepresentations, misunderstandings, and misinformation. They cannot be reduced to an elevation from which we then borrow. I don’t have an answer to the problem, but perhaps we have to open up to other forms of representation that are completely outside of the conventional drawings and models.
AO: I recently encountered Audrey Bennett’s essay, describing the history of the golden ratio from its origins in Africa to its use by the Bauhaus. The golden ratio (that celebrated, geometrically-derived divine proportion) was presented in my early architectural education as a Western (specifically ancient Greek) invention. According to Bennett, its origins are much older and applied throughout different cultures and regions from informal Sub-Saharan communities to Napoleonic Italy. Her analysis of the golden ratio is an example that shows how each generation’s understanding of the canon is heavily influenced by how their predecessors conceived and shared knowledge; possibly reduced or misremembered. Perhaps through rethinking the tools and framework of our studies, we might begin to notice forms that are shared across cultures and see ideas that are lost or misremembered by previous generations.
I’ve found myself feeling the time and curriculum constraints of what you can cover in a semester-long studio. Besides the logistic constraints, there are also limits to my own knowledge and subjectivity as an instructor. There are acts of exclusion and emphasis that happen as a result of limits of my body, mind, and time.
Pouya Khadem (PK): Even if studio resources and timeframes were to expand, is there ever a point at which everything can be comprehensively and, let’s say “democratically” studied? Is there any realistic circumstance under which no building is excluded from study?
AM: Is selecting which buildings to teach an exclusionary act? Yes, but I don't think that's necessarily a problem in itself. The methods by which we adjudicate need to change, evolve, and expand, but judgment is a part of discourse and pedagogy. The way that I've been addressing this in my seminars is to encourage students to bring projects to the table and argue for their excellence. These works can be from any source as long as the students can make the case for their close study. This opens up possibilities for authorship and criteria. The idea that there can be a body of counter-canonical works that also can be theorized (in this case according to the students' arguments) is very interesting to me.
PK: There are many useful things that we’ve inherited from this methodological framework we call the canon, and of course, we’re not talking about entirely throwing that knowledge away. Like any heritage, however, the canon and the way it is broadly understood carry the cultural values and assumptions of a certain time and place.
AM: The canon is a cultural inscription, but it claims to be otherwise. It claims that a work's greatness is inherent, independent of personal opinion. But, of course, that is impossible. The matter of assessment is always someone's opinion, and this is a paradoxical condition of the canonical. It claims to be dispassionate but by definition, it isn't. In this same paradoxical tension, I find some educational value. If we accept that the canon is a false construct, then we can keep defining it, redefining it, and using it to our advantage as an educational and cultural tool.
LWA: I continue to find a problem with referencing the term or even referencing architecture knowledge as a set of works that we need to talk about. It would be more productive to reframe the canon just as one element of architectural history. We keep returning to certain buildings and architects because they were influential to a certain subset of architects. When I teach, we discuss who these people were because architecture history is not just about the buildings. It's necessary to teach the good, bad, and ugly about the influential people of the past. Instead of canon, which implies a set of works divorced from history, it's more helpful to think about the conditions, cultures, and the influence of the people behind those works as irreducible from a specific moment in history. We're shifting away from seeing the architecture scene as an aggregation of singular works by singular geniuses. We don't all have to have the same set of references or foundational principles. Why do we need to discuss the canon as something more than a moment in history?
AO: It's worthwhile to think about a work of architecture as a point of reference—one of many—that brings us to the approximation of all the narratives built around it, its circumstances, and the people who were involved in the process of realizing it.
MO: We have been exploring the shifts in how the canon is taught and discussed. Does this shift ultimately manifest in the built environment—for example, via students that go on to work at architecture firms? Or are these kinds of changes merely happening within academia?
AM: I would answer this in relation to Letícia's points about letting the term go—implying the canon itself is going to be relegated to history. In that imagination, it would still continue to influence what we see in the world, even as a historical fact against which we work. There will always be a specter of it because it was so instrumental in the development of what we understand as a discipline. I'm on the same page as Letícia and Alex, that we should no longer think of it as a body of works to which everyone has to refer. Hopefully, the result will be a more diverse and richer reality in terms of what constitutes great architecture and who produces it.
AO: In my own work, I listen to clients and users describe their preferred way of living and then study ways to translate or materialize their needs using architectural modes of representation. For me, it's important to include them in the design process. This experience is particularly rewarding because it places me face to face with stakeholders who are not coming from years of architecture education that calibrate their references, and can freely engage in conversations about architecture from different perspectives. They don’t have nor need to have extensive knowledge of architecture.
LWA: There needs to be a fundamental shift in the way that we evaluate what is a good work of architecture. Within the tradition of formal analysis, there's almost no need for the building to be built in the first place to be considered good. How do we continue to talk about what is a good work of architecture beyond the narrow conversation around what is a formally good building? What is it like to live in a building? Who are the users? I hope we can develop a framework that allows us to talk with rigor about these topics in academia. It will change how non-architects perceive the built environment, and the conversations happening in architecture schools will become more accessible and relevant to them.
Ajay Manthripragada is the 2023-24 Lily Auchincloss Rome Prize Fellow in Architecture at the American Academy in Rome. Prior, he was Design Critic in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Alex Oetzel is an architect and educator, typically located in Ohio. She works (more or less) at Moody Nolan and Ohio State University while serving on the AIA Ohio Board of Directors. She enjoys writing for the New York Review of Architecture, attending summer school with the Architecture Lobby, and celebratory donuts.
Letícia Wouk Almino is an architect, artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. She has taught architectural studio and drawing courses at Barnard College and Pratt Institute. Her artwork has been exhibited at 411 Gallery, Pratt SoA Gallery, and at the Center for Architecture.
Pouya Khadem edits for the Architecture Writing Workshop. He works as an architectural designer in Houston.
Mai Okimoto edits for the Architecture Writing Workshop. She works as an architectural designer in Houston.
Speaking of Writing
Scott Colman, Sydney Shilling, Brittany Utting
Who Gets to Write?_January 2023