II - Scholarship

Disrupt/Displace:
Translating Territory
Figure 1. Disrupt/
Displace. Installed at
Iowa State University
(ISU).
Shelby Doyle
Iowa State University
Leslie Forehand
Iowa State University
Disrupt/Displace was both a Venice Architectural
Biennale session and a “Report from the Front”
on the Dakota Access Pipeline: simultaneously a
critique, a performance, and a proposal presented
in four parts: AQ1 PART 1: Searching for the
Front (Iowa), PART 2: Constructing the Front
(Iowa), PART 3: Reporting the Front (Venice),
PART 4: Assessing the Front (Venice). Alejandro
Aravena’s curatorial statement for the 2016 Venice
Architecture Biennale, “Reporting from the
Front,” provided context for Disrupt/Displace, which
emerged from doubts about the possibility of
political resistance in the practice of architecture.1
As a project Disrupt/Displace serves as a tool for
understanding both architecture’s complicity in
perpetuating spatial forms of political oppression
and as a method that enables architects to resist
disciplinary nihilism and defensiveness when
confronted with intractable political issues.
Alejandro Aravena’s concept for
the Venice Architecture Biennale,
“Reporting from the Front,”
provided both the inspiration and
methodological framework for
Disrupt/Displace. At the project’s
inception, thirty Iowa State
University (ISU) architecture
students were challenged with
establishing a front as defined by
Aravena:
There are several battles that need
to be won and several frontiers
that need to be expanded in order
to improve the quality of the built
environment and consequently
people’s quality of life. More and
more people in the planet are in
search for a decent place to live
and the conditions to achieve
it are becoming tougher and
tougher by the hour. Any attempt
to go beyond business as usual
encounters huge resistance in the
inertia of reality and any effort
to tackle relevant issues has to
overcome the increasing complexity
of the world. . . .
REPORTING FROM THE
FRONT . . . [is] about bringing
to a broader audience, what it is
like to improve the quality of life
while working on the margins,
under tough circumstances, facing
pressing challenges.2
Over the span of two months, a
project emerged from a series of
conversations, design proposals,
and map-making culminating in a
Biennale Session—an invitation
from the Venice Biennale for
educational institutions to propose
and present a three-day workshop.3
Students from ISU identified a front
in the American Midwest: the Dakota
Access Pipeline (DAPL), which
transports crude oil from the Bakken
production areas in North Dakota
to a storage hub outside Dakota,
Illinois.
In this project, the DAPL
is a tool for understanding
architecture’s complicity in perpetuating
spatial forms of oppression,
specifically the disruption and
displacement of the environment
and indigenous populations caused
by energy infrastructure. Disrupt/
Displace establishes a method for
resisting disciplinary skepticism
and defensiveness that might
naturally emerge from this complicity,
favoring instead the pursuit of
dissident practices as a countervailing
force to accepted ways of
planning and executing projects
(Figure 1).
The following “report,” or
search for a project, is a record of a
two-month dialogue about the DAPL
as a means to draw out the complexities
and complicities of architecture’s
relationship to the norms and
conventions associated with those
who wield political and economic
power. Most tellingly for Aravena’s
challenge, what emerged from this
dialogue were intense doubts, shared
by students, faculty, and reviewers
alike, about architectural practice as
an effective means of maintaining—
to say nothing of improving—quality
of life in the face of a powerful and
relentless combination of political
and economic interests represented
by the DAPL.
When conventional political
routes are unavailable to architects,
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Doyle and Forehand
JAE 72:1
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