Part road-movie, part fictional distillation of a life in architecture: Rear View is a six-part experimental column by Jing Liu, architect and co-founder of the Brooklyn-based design firm SO-IL. The subjects and spaces described in these little journeys move between the poetic and banal; along the way, we are asked to consider what we find en route as well as everything we bring with us. In the fourth instalment, our traveller experiences almost exquisite levels of dissonance and reflection within the intimate bounds of domesticity.
A dining room faces a garden crowded with three young birch trees, a tall bald mulberry usually laden with purple fruits in early summers, a lopsided sour cherry, an elegant weeping willow, a peach tree so old it resembles a withered bonsai and the stump of a tree of heaven recently felled to curb a lanternfly epidemic.
In their shade cluster thorny roses, berry bushes and climbing hydrangeas, a Japanese flaming maple bush, yellowing English ivies and dried perennials. The garden backs onto a construction material storage yard piled with blue insulation foam in stacks as high as fifteen feet, like giant icebergs floating in an asphalt sea. Beyond that, red and blue cranes along the harbour. And beyond that, the Manhattan skyline.
Back inside, a genteel dinner is about to be served. The guests are a former client, who used to be an investment banker and his wife, who was once a school teacher.
“The ESG1 index is not doing great right now. The building industry needs to step up. What are architects doing about that?” The past client asks, opening a bottle of grenache from a biodynamic winery in southern France. Dark red berries and purple fruit. “By the way, this winery is the first B-Corp certified in Europe. A Brit doing British wine in France. Apparently the soil was so chemically saturated that it took the owner five years to remediate.”
“Let’s decant a bit longer,” says the former teacher, filling water glasses instead. “America epitomises extractive carbon culture. This whole continent is founded on the genocide of indigenous practices and people, repopulating the land with slaves, and depleting it of its last fruits and nutrients. Now, the only way to retain the amassed value on this impoverished land is to keep pumping carbon, cheaply extracted elsewhere, into it. Architecture is just a tool in this mechanism.”
Economically and historically speaking, she thinks to herself, architecture is dead. The only mode left, which can never be smothered completely, is expression.
The traveller sprinkles thinly-sliced Ponderosa lemon rounds with sea-salt flakes, placing a spoonful of fagioli e tonno — made with line-caught tuna and organic cannellini — on top. Economically and historically speaking, she thinks to herself, architecture is dead. The only mode left, which can never be smothered completely, is expression. It needs to express a different relationship with carbon, which is to say, one of life. But whose lives? In what state?...
“Oh! The extra virgin oil from our place in Tuscany, as promised. Just arrived last week. Here, drizzle them with it,” the past client passes the bottle to the traveller, grinning, “But that’s what we need good designers for, right? You can make sustainability sexy.”
“Depopulation and degrowth are necessary for decarbonisation,” she responds.
Two small medallions of Wagyu filet mignon from a Vermont ranch are seared on a ridged cast-iron griddle, with hand-harvested Maras salt and fresh pepper. “You know, I can’t eat meat at home anymore. My family has all turned against it,” the past client sighs, then shoots back. “The degrowth economy can’t pay for your retirement.”
Have we really imagined what a decarbonising century looks like? The bodies of Asian women, having propelled the carbon century, are being retired.
Odd characters, misfit moments, and irreconcilable experiences cohabit our homes. So why should the discourse of designing domesticity be reduced to pragmatism? For Elisabeth Beer and Brian Janusiak’s home, SO–IL embraces dissonance, cheap and shiny things, incongruous circulation, and misuses throughout.
He's right, the traveller affirms to herself quietly, decarbonisation is a moral paradox. When the world was marching to the drum beat of neoliberalism, the wombs that brought the human engines — five billion by estimate and more than half of them in Asia — to life, breasts that fed them, and hands that cared for them were not allowed to retire. Her grandmother, for instance, who survived the Nanjing massacre and single-handedly raised three children through the Mao era, also raised the traveller and her cousins in her old age — while the parents worked away from home, propelling the carbon century. But her mother, who went through three abortions and divorced, lost her job in her thirties. And most of her cousins, despite being lucky to have work, don't and won’t have children — because they can't afford it. Have we really imagined what a decarbonising century looks like? The bodies of Asian women, having propelled the carbon century, are being retired. Economy and history shy away from paradoxes and death, that which can upon us prematurely but nevertheless an essential part of life. Architecture however, could wrap around life and all of its mysteries and paradoxes, like in Man Ray's riddle, where a sewing machine and an umbrella find themselves wrapped together in a blanket on a table.
Architecture could wrap around life and all of its mysteries and paradoxes, like in Man Ray's riddle, where a sewing machine and an umbrella find themselves wrapped together in a blanket on a table.
On her own dining table, the traveller puts out an unglazed white ceramic plate with white flowers embossed on it “Would you please take the mason jar of rainbow carrots and fennel out of the fridge? They are lightly pickled with home-made Shiso vinegar.” The gentle green-and-mauve of the fennel bulbs counters the vibrancy of carrots on the white plate.
The former teacher sniffs the grenache and pours a glass for each of the party. The past client flips the filet, while the traveller trails a few stalks of broccoli rabe through boiling water, before placing them on the griddle next to meat. Water drops fall on the griddle; the steam envelops the meat for a fleeting moment, whispering tenderness. Broccoli rabe is one of the few vegetables still in season at this time of the year; its deep, strong greenness seduces the traveller whenever she passes the farmer's market. Finally, they are anointed with Tuscan olive oil.
“We can eat now,” says the traveller.
Bio
Jing Liu is an architect in practice; as co-founder of the New York-based architecture firm SO-IL, she has working on a wide range of projects both in the US and abroad for more than 15 years. Liu has led SO–IL in the engagement with the socio-political issues of contemporary cities. She brings an intellectually open, globally aware, and locally sensitive perspective to architecture; projects range from artistic collaborations with contemporary choreographers to masterplan and major public realm design. Liu believes strongly that design should and can be accessible to all, and that architecture offers us an open platform to nurture new forms of interaction. To that end, Liu sees community engagement and collaboration across disciplines as central to her role as the design lead.
Notes
1 ESG (Environmental, social and governance) investing evaluates a company's ethical and sustainability impact when considering potential investment [online].
