Brutal Utopias (2023)
An essay on the struggle to define social utopia through architecture that traces resistance to urban renewal in the 1970s and its aftermath.
In 1968 architect Ralph Rapson was charged with designing one of the largest urban renewal projects in US history, a utopia constructed entirely of concrete. The plan faced one problem: the neighborhood they wanted to demolish was home to a counterculture with its own utopian vision. Tracing a remarkable story of resistance to urban renewal and its aftermath, Brutal Utopias uses archival material, participant interviews, and motion graphics to understand the dreams of modernity—and their violence—at the moment they were starting to crumble. It reflects on these dreams by engaging the current residents of Rapson’s brutalist buildings, the East African refugee community, as participants in the filmmaking process. In revisiting this history, Brutal Utopias grapples with questions we face today: how do we design cities and for whom?
Upcoming Screenings:
Regis Art Center, Minneapolis, October 12, 2023
Cedar Cultural Center, Minneapolis, March 15, 2024
National Building Museum, Washington, D.C., July 24, 2024
Stadium:
An Essay on the Future Past
(in production)
A feature-length exploration of the stadium as indispensable to the management of urban life on an increasingly volatile planet.
Starting with the contention that the stadium and its analogous architectural forms are indispensable to the management of urban life on an increasingly volatile planet, this essay film constructs a genealogy of the use of stadiums in times of war and other “natural” and man-made crises. What is of interest to me is not simply this history of what we might characterize as the biopolitical uses of these sites, but the manner in which the stadium comes to embody the spatial contradictions of capitalist modernity in ways that are both endemic and ever-changing. The material conditions that produced the stadium and its and design and placement within urban centers lay the groundwork for which it becomes ready-at-hand to contain, discipline, and house bodies that have become otherwise unmanageable. A speculative and dystopian exploration what the stadium’s architectural unconscious might mean for its, and our, future.