As AAP’s students relocated or sheltered in, away from campus,

While we’re excited to see members of our community(?) mobilize to create masks we feel wary of wholly celebrating these amazing actions or sliding into self-congratulation. 

Why did we not have an adequate supply of PPE or ventilators in the first place?  What kinds of technological access are privileges, usually used to what ends? (Who has an army of 3D printers, and what were they used for before this?) What safety nets exist for arts workers, whose jobs were already so precarious? Will AAP shift its curricula and overall practices to better reflect this well-known reality; will this knowledge be honestly shared with its art students?

[screenshot of ig story of mfa post] These may all be other matters for another time)

We return to the first of these questions, to poke at these architects a bit more. We rag on architects and architecture as a larger practice all the time. We have spent so long in close proximity with them, as friends and family, that it only feels right that we make fun of an industry that seems to think of itself as a super important omnipotent force godsent to solve all of society’s problems through designing buildings or something, we don’t know.

http://www.reades.com/pdf/deararchitects.pdf

[This is a generalization, but let’s be honest - architects proposing a cost-based housing solution to a problem caused by a larger history of cost-based housing has not worked yet, just an example. Do you know an architect who’s defeated the many problems rooted in …….]

Not that a global art industrial complex (or whatever) or art in general are exempt from being problematic, problematized, but AAP has done a good job of covering its efforts, especially from faculty and alumni, to contribute to the overwhelming lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers around the country. 

[Note: though PPE is in short-to-no supply for practically all essential workers and communities which have been oppressed by/within America (there is significant overlap here) AAP’s efforts have been focused on healthcare workers in New York City.]

So, depressed, unproductive, and sidelined, all without 3D printers to participate, we fell into a speculative rabbithole to ask: 

How were architects already complicit in the issues that are rapidly being made apparent by this ongoing crisis? If architects and their projects play any part in displacing communities, increasing socioeconomic insecurity and the stratification of wealth, wouldn’t this place them at more risk of exposure to COVID-19, decreasing their ..... (TO BE CONTINUED.)