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Howard East Futures


Student Contributors:
“Reclaiming Blackness through the Land”
  1. Shulan Zhao
  2. Evan Craig
  3. Jeremy Edwards
“Liberation Dance Landscape”
  1. Hajar Alrifai
  2. Josias Agustin-Mendez
  3. JiaJun (Kami) Liu
“Managed Multi-purpose Memorial Campus”
  1. Lanhua Weng
  2. Jenine Shane Mangubat
  3. Miaoting He
“East Campus Reconstruction”
  1. Devorah Kopciel
  2. Samantha Cohen
  3. Joaquim Rodrigues
“A New Hybrid Pedagogy”
  1. Hanna Dinaburg Nozdrin
  2. Orit Samouha
  3. Jiaying Li
“Ritual as Intervention: Inspired by Junkanoo—a Bahamian celebration”
    Bria Miller






Info

Howard East Futures is a compilation of recent student work exploring and presenting the potential of Howard University’s Divinity School East campus in Brookland, Washington, DC.

These case studies were led by architecture studio critics Curry Hackett and Jerome Haferd in Summer and Fall 2020.

This body of work has been compiled in response to Howard’s plans to redevelop the 23-acre site, which we feel deserves more vision and sensitivity to the histories and potential futures for coming generations—especially those of Black and indigenous people in the DC metro area.

We hope this work offers insight on how Black and indigenous groups, as well as members of the Howard and Brookland communities, might contribute to the vision and plan for this precious land.

*Howard East Futures is not affiliated with Howard University, City College New York, or their respective departments of architecture.*
Mark




Arcana Mundi — Economy and Eccentricity



“Profuse strains of unpremeditated art.”
(Shelley)
                 A rock is a perfect metaphor, an allegory in volume. When placed it’s sculptural limits beget a kind of artistic proposition — and when considered with reduced anthropomorphism and ungeologically — produce a ready-made analog to the causation and bounds of our attempts at the understanding of all things.

Here the sculptor has made no concessions; no attempts to curry favor with curators or collectors — pieces wholly outside discourse. And if pressed for an affiliate movement for these “sculptures” (i.e. Cubism, Mannerism, etc.)… perhaps Monism or Cosmogonism? Definitely not Conceptualism or Pataphysics — Actualism?

The analog? Well for sure it is 1:1. Weird; yes — a knot to be admired for it’s curves — not for untying. An emergent surface as thick as it’s mass. 
 
Were it possible for the instances of our minds or world events to be mapped and dimensionally materialized, something similar to a rock would appear — areas of smoothness yielding to pockmarked particularities, density shifts and feathered explosions. What really is the shape of a boom town? A pilgrim’s journey? A section of jungle mayhem? A boring era? The silhouette of a father’s cold slap? The contours of a brief, intense friendship? Comfortably we perceive all of these things as ready to be integrated into ledgers or novels or timelines; but really they are queer crags and striations of unimaginable idiosyncrasy.

So yes, the reflective, reasonable yield of our mind has much symmetry (computation, cataloguing, narrativizing, etc.) but it’s actual shape is no shape, but unfolding chaos and singularity visible only to our particular time-scale. Our species-wide symmetries and quantizations are basically improvisations white-labeled onto directionless infinitude attempting the constant creation of navigable Dimension.

So, look intimately at a rock, walk around it, get up close to it, savor it’s complexion and composition as you would any painting or temple and see it as the faultless mirror that it is — a truly perfect sculpture.


ABSTRACTION AND EMPIRICAL ILLUSTRATION
We live our lives made up of a great quantity of isolated instants. So as to be lost at the heart of a multitude of things. (From the Double Dream of Spring, 1970.)




  1. Gavrilo Princip’s last grocery list written
  2. The time that alligator ate that fish
  3. When the Yongzheng Emperor found that weird dust bunny under his throne
  4. The great earthquake of Alexandria
  1. The invention of expectation in literature
  2. When the heaviest cacao fruit fell in Takalik Abaj
  3. Animesh eats his first Fly Agaric mushroom
Running on Cargo