BLC Students: 2012 BLC student symposium

2012

BLC STUDENT SYMPOSIUM

Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures is an interdisciplinary research area concentrating on the examination of the physical, cultural, and social aspects of the built environment. The program serves students enrolled in the architecture and history of art doctoral programs at the UW Milwaukee and Madison campuses respectively.

blc student symposium

Wednesday, May 16, 2012 | 9:00 AM - 1:30 PM | Architecture Resource Center, AUP 146, School of Architecture and Urban Planning, 2131 E Hartford Avenue, Milwaukee WI 53211, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee

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Schedule

9:00-9:05 AM Introductions and Welcome

9:05-10:00 AM Session 1

Reviewers

Andrew Kincaid, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Joseph Rodriguez, Associate Professor, Department of History and Urban Studies Programs, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Presenters

Rowan Davidson, ?Even at the Bar you aren?t Free:? Spatial Control in a Milwaukee Tied House

Ashkan Rezvani Naraghi, ?Spatial Reflections in the Marketplace: Brady Street in the Past Hundred Years?

10:05-11:00 AM Session 2

Reviewers

Andrew Kincaid, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Joseph Rodriguez, Associate Professor, Department of History and Urban Studies Programs, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Presenters

Lee M. Abbott, ?The Strategy of Belonging: Inscriptions of Agency on the Post-Katrina Landscape?

Daniel Cochran, ?Malleable Monuments: Alterations to St. Hedwig's Catholic Church and the Reshaping of Communal Identity?

11:05-12:00 AM Session 3

Reviewers

Jasmine Alinder, Associate Professor, Department of History and Urban Studies Programs, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Lane Hall, Professor, Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Presenters

Chelsea Wait, ?Home Craft and Card Games: Making the Home a Public Space?

Ching-In Chen, ?Mutated Mob: the anti-Chinese riots of Milwaukee?

12:05-1:00 PM Session 4

Reviewers

Jasmine Alinder, Associate Professor, Department of History and Urban Studies Programs, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Lane Hall, Professor, Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Presenters

Garrett Dash Nelson, ?Milwaukee River: Building or Landscape??

Kateryna Malaia, ?The Change of Main Fa?ade: Social Production of Urban Boundaries along Brady Street?

1:00-1:30 PM Lunch and Wrap up

Abstracts

Spatial Reflections in the Marketplace: Brady Street in the Past Hundred Years

From Fordism to postmodern economy, capital has always found its appropriate place in cities; marketplace is one of the most prevalent representations of capital in urban spaces. Capital is not always represented in a fixed and unique way in marketplaces. As David Harvey argues, capitalism is capable of generating a seemingly infinite range of outcomes out of the slightest variation in initial conditions or of human activity and imagination. From production spaces to production of spaces and from cultural spaces to cultural consumption spaces we can find different ways in which capital is represented in urban spaces.

Brady Street, as a historic marketplace, has provided a suitable niche for capital during its history. From an ethnic enclave to a counterculture center, and from the urban blight of 80s to conspicuous consumption of recent decades, Brady Street has always maintained its role as a significant retail street in Milwaukee. In this article, I argue that representations and the constitution of the marketplace on Brady Street have changed throughout its history. These changes can be tracked through a careful examination of the changing nature of businesses on this street during each decade of the 20^th Century. Using archival sources such as newspaper advertisements, manuscript census and city directories I demonstrate that despite its seemingly idyllic character, Brady Street has been a crucible of larger transformative forces of the economy and creative reconfigurations of the marketplace.

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Ashkan Rezvani Naraghi is from Tehran, Iran. He has studied architecture for his undergraduate and urban design for his master?s studies. He has worked as an architect and urban designer in his hometown for seven years. Currently, he is completing his Ph.D. in Urban Studies at UWM.

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Mutated Mob: the anti-Chinese riots of Milwaukee

In her influential essay, ?Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,? Erica Hunt outlines the projects of dominant languages, wedded to common sense, which serve to anestheticize us, contain us and encode that containment within our bodies. This project explores the struggle and challenge of writing which reconstructs ?our recovered histories ? filled with tales of the wounded,? histories which, according to Hunt,? have been omitted, replaced and substituted. This project will investigate the evidences regarding an episode of Milwaukee's ?forgotten? history, the 1889 anti-Chinese riots, which occurred after two middle-aged Chinese men ? Hah Ding and Sim Yip Ya ? were arrested for allegedly taking sexual liberties with white and underaged women. This project aims to investigate the difficult attempt to reconstruct this history as a re-configuration while struggling with/against the ?nostalgia for a lost culture or a sense of unity.?

This fragmented investigation of the cultural landscape of the March 1889 anti-Chinese riots in Milwaukee will take the form of a mututed broken-city text, a choral rendering of the many iterations of bodies within this space. This ?critifictional docu-assemblage? is constructed in the style of the theatrical jazz aesthetic, theorized by Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Lisa L. Moore and Sharon Bridgforth in Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project, and follows in the footsteps of and takes inspiration from fellow engaged writers ? Jai Arun Ravine, Kenji Liu, Craig Santos Perez, C.S. Giscombe, Mark Nowak, Aurora Levins Morales, M. Nourbese Philip and Martha Collins.

Illustration: Anti-Chinese riot, 1886, Seattle, http://www.historylink.org/ __________________________________________

Ching-In Chen is author of The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press) and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press) and Here is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets (Achiote Press). Her work has been published in anthologies and journals including Verse Wisconsin, Quarterly West, and A Face to Meet the Faces: an Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. A Kundiman and Lambda Fellow, she is part of Macondo, Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation and Theatrical Jazz writing communities. She has worked in the Asian American communities of San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside and Boston. Currently, Ching-In plays flute with Milwaukee Molotov Marchers as part of union organizing and direct action efforts, and is the Managing Editor of cream city review. She was recently awarded a Publicly Active Graduate Fellowship and a Norman Mailer Center Poetry Fellowship. www.chinginchen.com ___________________________________________

Malleable Monuments: Alterations to St. Hedwig's Catholic Church and the Reshaping of Communal Identity

This paper examines the art and architecture of St. Hedwig?s Catholic Parish located on the corner of Brady and North Humboldt Streets in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I focus in particular on three phases in the life of the building: its initial construction in the late-nineteenth century, and two periods of significant alteration in the mid-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. These phases are often described in various church documents and historical literature about the Brady Street area as renovations or structural modifications to what is perceived as an otherwise unchanging, monumental structure that serves as the beloved home or shelter of the local Polish-Catholic community. These descriptions are in keeping with many contemporary theoretical approaches that emphasize the social construction of space but view the space itself as simply the physical setting, albeit sometimes quite exotic, for the performance of ritual.

In this paper I consider these three phases in the life of St. Hedwig?s through the lens of a more dynamic model of sacred space that highlights the intersubjective relationship between the space and the individuals who experience it. I approach the materiality of the building as not only a reflection of the community?s social structure and cultural values at a particular point in time but also a means for the projection of these aspects of communal identity to both a public and private audience. In other words, the materiality of the church is an active and continuous participant in the construction, articulation, and perpetuation of the complex identity of the community that gathers there. While the art and architecture of this sacred space is always involved in the process of identity formation and world making, moments or phases of significant alteration provide particularly salient opportunities to explore this relationship in depth as these moments are usually diligently recorded not only in the material but also the textual record. A close examination of this evidence suggests that the materiality of the church building was altered because the cultural identity it served to create and perpetuate was no longer aligned with the identity of the community. I argue that members of the community undertook extensive alterations at significant expense and great personal sacrifice in repeated attempts to reshape or realign the building both to reflect new cultural values and also to perpetuate these values among future generations of the community.

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Daniel Cochran is a first year doctoral student in the Department of Art History at UW-Madison. He studies the classical and late antique Mediterranean world with a focus on the intersection of art, architecture, and ritual in the creation of sacred space. His other interests include architectural appropriation, representations of divinity in early-Christian art, and the history of scriptural interpretation. Daniel earned a B.A. in Religious Studies and Classics from the University of Rochester and an M.Div. from Harvard University Divinity School. In addition to his doctoral studies, Daniel holds the position of Theologian in Residence at the Crossing Campus Ministries in Madison and teaches fly-fishing classes for the Orvis Company based out of Manchester, Vermont. Daniel hails from the great state of Rhode Island but currently lives in Madison with his wife Lauren and their 15-month-old daughter Avanelle Jane.

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The Change of Main Fa?ade: Social Production of Urban Boundaries along Brady Street

At the very beginning of its history Brady Street held different meanings for its dwellers. Prior to the arrival of Polish immigrants in the second half of 19^th century, what we now know as Brady Street, served as a northern frontier of the city of Milwaukee. From the year of 1865, when the first Polish community settled at Milwaukee?s North East, the street served as a boundary between German neighborhoods on the south side of the street and new Polish developments on the north side.

The block between Brady Street, Franklin Place, Hamilton Street and Humboldt Avenue (former Racine street) was especially important for early Polish community on the North East side. The first Polish Catholic church was erected in 1871 on the corner of Brady and Franklin, facing Franklin place. Soon after the first Rectory building was constructed north of the church. Following the church and rectory, the Polish community built a school and a house for the School Sisters of Notre Dame. All these buildings originally faced Franklin Place. This fact seems to be contradictory to the contemporary idea that Brady Street was the main axis along which the neighborhood grew, that this street was the main point of attraction in the area.

In this paper I argue that during the second half of the 19th century Brady Street was an edge between German and Polish neighborhoods, not the central corridor as it is considered today. However, Brady Street was still an important transportation axis of the East side, a crowded crossroad of cultural contact. Based on the evidence from Sanborn Maps, St. Hedwig?s Parish Records and streetcar maps, this paper recreates a cognitive map of everyday activities of the residents of early Polish neighborhood. The paper then demonstrates how production of space along Brady Street was framed by a sense of social and ethnic belonging, experiences of cognitive boundaries and senses such as sounds, smells, touch and sights.

Illustration: Old St. Hedwig?s Church facing Franklin Place before the construction of new building, 1870s.

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Kateryna Malaia is a first year PhD student in Architecture (BLC Program) in the University Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She holds Bachelor of Architecture (2009) and Master of Architecture (2011) Degree from National Academy of Arts and Architecture, Kiev, Ukraine. She is interested in the development of Eastern European urbanism after the collapse of Soviet Union. Her particular focus is the deep transformation of post-socialist urban cultural landscapes through the lens of changing architecture and urbanism tendencies. This focus not only emerges from Kateryna?s theoretical background, but is also connected to the time she spent as a practicing architect in Kiev, the third largest post-Soviet city of Eastern Europe. Other interests include art and architecture of Russian Modernism, mechanisms of urban memory and forgetting, insurgent urbanism and place making.

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Illustration: Wisconsin Hist Soc, http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/u?/maps,76)

Milwaukee River: Building or Landscape?

The distinction between a ?building? and a ?landscape??encoded into the very name of the BLC Program?creates a foundational classificatory scheme which architects, urban theorists, geographers, and historians use to organize and describe the material world. It is a complex distinction which overlays and is overlain by other theoretical dualities such as human?natural, social?environmental, static?dynamic, and others. This paper reflects on the experience of searching for an object called the Milwaukee River to serve as an artifact for study. It argues that the river, not only in its obviously human-modified elements, but in its basic existence as an artifactual object, constitutes a kind of building, especially when we emphasize the processual verb-form of the word ?building?.

This of course does not deny that some water-carrying feature of the natural environment existed long before human settlement, and long before the name ?Milwaukee River? was first pronounced; instead, it prompts a consideration of how objects in the world maintain a consistent ontological identity for us over time. The water, the soil, the rocks, and all the other aspects which constitute the river are materially different in 2012 than they were in 1850 or 1400; indeed, they will be largely different in May 2012 than they are today in April 2012. Both the substance and form of the river are constantly, infinitely modified. A recognition of this dynamic, ever-malleable quality challenges us to ask whether a stable object called the Milwaukee River even exists, or whether the river exhibits instead a processual existence?that is, an existence of constant building in which a twinned human and physical shaping of the world engage in a constantly-ongoing process of restructuring.

This paper will consider four vignettes in which human action has struggled, through representation and engineering, to invest the river with a stable object-existence. It will depict the building of a cartographic river, a commercial river, a recreational river, and an ecological river at four stages in history. In all of these cases, the process of building does not signify a one-off process of construction, but rather an infinitely-iterated struggle to produce not only a specific configuration of materiality, but also to produce the category of existence which lurks behind it.

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Garrett Dash Nelson is a doctoral student in historical geography at the University of Wisconsin?Madison. He studies the union of landscape history and social ideology. His current research project deals with the joint production of landscape change and futurist ideals in late 19th century and early 20th century New England. He holds an MA in Landscape & Culture from the Department of Geography at the University of Nottingham (2011) and an AB in Social Studies from Harvard University (2009).

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Home Craft and Card Games: Making the Home a Public Space

Novels such as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle have established a certain story about austerity and grueling labor in the lives of the immigrant working class life in early twentieth century America. This notion has been complicated by writings such as Kathy Peiss' Cheap Amusements, which reveals that the working class had time for recreation, and that it was a common practice for many hard-working men and women alike.

This paper examines entertainment for the women of Polish immigrant working class in New Deal Era Milwaukee in the form of card parties. For these women, enjoyment was more often found at home, instead of in certain building types such as taverns and movie halls. In their leisure time, these women took up the craft of hosting??other women and neighbors. Hosting involves a temporary inversion of the home from private to public space by rearranging rooms and creating a presentation of home and family. In Milwaukee's Brady Street neighborhood, Polish women entertained in many ways??most regularly within a taxonomy of three kinds of card parties: intimate games amongst female friends, open house card contests, and church card parties. Each event involved an exhibition of craft, from handmade prizes to a crafted home and family. In this way, women asserted themselves in the community, even at a time when housewives were presumed to be submissive and selfless. My central argument is that these parties were a way of displaying pride, as well as a social network among housewives working in disparate locations.

This paper is comprised of three sections: the context of the Brady Street neighborhood, a presentation of my oral history research, and spatial analysis of the transformation of the home during these parties. Through oral history interviews, archival research, and historical mapping, a landscape of entertainment, as card parties, emerges from this neighborhood.

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Chelsea Wait is a first-year student in the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Doctoral Program. Her research focuses on issues of art, craft, architecture, public space, and social justice through methods of public history and material culture. She earned a B.S. in architecture in 2008 from Ball State University, where she focused on design-build architecture and art installations. Her background is strongly informed by her travel experience in South Asia.

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The Strategy of Belonging: Inscriptions of Agency on the Post-Katrina Landscape

Belonging is the story we tell about our relationship to place. Stories about catastrophes, natural or man-made, explore the disruption of those relationships. In the years since Hurricane Katrina, piecing together people?s relationship to ruined sites and spaces along the Gulf Coast involves shaping the frames and scenes of stories. Likewise, encounters in the environment and with the storm?s lingering debris have shaped the narrative directions given to post-Katrina story-telling.

My paper takes up belonging at the sites where Hurricane Katrina lingers. ?Katrina? lingers as a story and as a condition of the landscape. Rebuilding landscape and belonging involves reinvesting the ruined landscape with meaning and stories. Post-Katrina stories are concerned with, I will argue, the degree to which the survivors and residents (however constructed) are successfully empowered, given agency, or deliver themselves from harm?s way. As the moment of calamity recedes into history, though, stories from a ?new? New Orleans have begun to emerge. These stories feature new protagonists who narrate their encounters with Katrina?s remnants -- blighted buildings, blocks reclaimed by nature -- that persist though officially the city appears to have recovered.

My project endeavors to show how belonging is secured through narratives of agency. It is an agency that, in extolling individual or collective empowerment, relies on neoliberal ideals of state withdrawal and self-preservation as keys to the redevelopment of the post-Katrina city.

My presentation presents three encounter-narratives with the post-Katrina material world where inscriptions of agency are work: Natasha Trethewey?s meditation on race, development, and shore erosion on the Mississippi Gulf Coast; a tale of untamable overgrowth in the Lower 9th Ward; and a ball-pit playground currently being built inside an abandoned house in the Marigny neighborhood. Taken together, I ask what stories do the material objects of the disaster tell and how do stories about these objects inscribe (and prescribe) the possibilities for belonging and agency in a post-disaster setting.

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Lee M. Abbott is a doctoral student in the English - Modern Studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His research follows the discourses of rebuilding, self-help, and empowerment in post-Katrina disaster narratives. Lee plays drums in the Milwaukee Molotov Marchers and is an activist in the teaching assistants union, the Milwaukee Graduate Assistants Association. He teaches courses in composition and cultural studies in the UWM English Department

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?Even at the Bar you aren?t Free:? Spatial Control in a Milwaukee Tied House

A ?Tied House? is the common name for a tavern or bar linked to and strictly associated with a single brewery. Common across turn-of-the-century America and especially Milwaukee, these establishments offer a unique blend of traditional public space and a controlled, profit-driven environment. This combination introduces questions of power and use into a supposedly democratic and familiar space. This paper examines Regano?s Roman Coin Tavern on the East Side of Milwaukee as a case study of this building type. A detailed spatial analysis of Regano?s coupled with a socio-economic history of the tied house show that taverns were controlled public spaces. Such an understanding will illuminate a broader trend towards a society and leisure culture dominated by capital control and could bring into question popular academic theories regarding ethnic identity and public spaces of late 19th and early 20th century America.

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Rowan Davidson is a PhD student in the Art History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His background recently includes architectural practices in the Chicago area. This professional experience combined with more academic concerns led him to the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures program in 2011. Having an interest in housing design and the social and cultural reflection of architecture he hopes to study late 19th and early 20th century modern design broadly and Midwestern housing types in particular.

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