[00:00:00] Introduction to Architecture and Its Fluidity

[00:00:00] Bayo Akomolafe: It does help us think of architecture, not as something already fully done. It's not fully made itself. It's not categorical. It's not a final tool. It's constantly being upended itself. By microbes, by pandemics, by insights from plant medicines, from different kinds of things. So architecture is not a tool that we wield ourselves. That's a very humanist response. We don't wield architecture. We are wielded by architecture as well. And architecture is an ongoing conversation. 

[00:00:38] Welcome to Third Space

[00:00:38] Sola DaSilva: Welcome to third space. I am your host. Sola DaSilva. I am an architect and storyteller. And third space is where we have meaningful conversations about architecture and wellbeing. Giving you the tools to design a life that works for you. I'm passionate about creating a world that is inclusive and full of beautiful spaces that truly reflect our humanity and inspire us to be our best selves. I'm so happy that you're listening. Let's get into it. 

[00:01:13] Guest Introduction: Dr. Bayo Akomolafe

[00:01:13] Sola DaSilva: My guest today is Dr. Akomolafe. He's a celebrated international speaker and post humanist thinker. He's an author and a teacher. Bayo Akomolafe is the founder of the Emergence Network, an initiative that seeks to convene communities in new ways in response to the critical civilizational challenges we face today as a species. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. He's the father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi. He's the grateful partner to Ije. He's a son and my Nigerian brother. I am so excited to have him on the show. 

[00:01:55] Exploring Human Emotion and Connection in Architecture

[00:01:55] Sola DaSilva: I started exploring human emotion and connection as it pertains to architecture. When COVID happened, a lot of the social structures that we had in place kind of fell away. There is a problem of social isolation. People are not feeling connected to each other. And we see this play out in politics. We're so divided. And I'm looking at that problem from an architectural standpoint and from the standpoint of how do the spaces we create either bring people together or separate them? 

[00:02:34] Architecture as Physical Psychology

[00:02:34] Bayo Akomolafe: Yeah, that was um, a helpful framing and it invites a lot of playfulness and thought to navigate the complexities of noticing that architecture is a form of psychology. I've always felt that architecture is a form of psychology. I dare say it's physical psychology. You're not dealing with the client per se you are given a psychotherapeutic context. You're not dealing with the client per se, as much as you're dealing with the environment that is also the human. So in my thinking, in my work, I mean, I dabble in processual thinking along with people like [Alfred] Whitehead, Gregory Bateson , Karen Barad, and processual thinking just basically, thinks about the world as process instead of a proliferation of already made things. The world is processual. The world is performative. In that sense, the human is the environment. It's not that we are in environments, it's that we are our environments. The closer we look, we are not divorced from highways and texture and color and furniture. There's even something called furniture psychology, right? We're not divorced from any of these things. We don't even have emotions per se. As I often like to remind people, we are enlisted in fields of affectivity. We're enlisted in fields of feeling together. And there are lots of other examples that I can share to support the idea that architecture is psychology writ large. 

[00:04:12] Dissociation and Modernity in Architecture

[00:04:12] Bayo Akomolafe: So that of course brings me to this other piece about dissociation, that modern civilization, white modernity is an architectural process. Colonization is architecture. It's not reducible to design, but there is a major part of it that is attributable to design. Like how we communicate, how we feel, how we eat, how we see each other, how we're seen by others, it's all a part of architecture, and I don't want to limit architecture to the physical, the digital is also architectural, right? How we communicate, for instance, our social algorithms and our social media is part of architecture. Where I position my laptop in the house, how I think about communication, how I say to my family, I'm going for an interview, and how I remove myself from their midst, all of that is part of the digital space. The distinction between in real life and digital is usually very suspect to me. And so you can begin to understand maybe in some small doses how dissociation and separability becomes more and more paramount. How politics feels very tribal. It feels deeply tribalized and weaponized. There are no longer differences within, it's differences between. And so there is a tendency towards essentialization and categoricity. We want to think of ourselves as already fully made, and then the others on the other side are others because they're pathological and they need saving and they need to be included in our own circle of correctness. I think some of this owes its potency to how modernity is framed and what modernity is doing. Modernity is the paradigm of stable identities. The more we move in that direction, the more we start to hold this burden of our separation and what to do with it and architecture has always been a part of this. 

[00:06:33] Sola DaSilva: You use the word dissociation.

[00:06:36] Bayo Akomolafe: Yes.

[00:06:38] Sola DaSilva: Can you explain what you mean by dissociation? 

[00:06:44] Bayo Akomolafe: Well, it's, I don't want to use the sense, the psychopathological sense of dissociation. I mean it in terms of a delinking, a moving away from, a moving away from something else. In the very popular sense, we might think about dissociating from another. As I said, in trying to distinguish between differences within and differences between, we are in our search for categoricity, pressured by geological forces and political forces. There is this tendency towards categoricity and what I mean by categoricity is we think in terms of final, essential, or essentializing, , thought pieces. We think your identity comes from within and nothing else can challenge or move or shake or jar that identity because it's within. It is inside, transcendent, and there's nothing else we can do about it. But, you know, that's an anthropocentric gesture. Many of these concepts connected to each other in a constellation of thought, but to think in terms of the categorical is to delink ourselves from the world is to cut ourselves off from others, is to not notice, for instance, that we maybe I can put it in very architectural terms for you to understand. 

[00:08:15] The Intersection of Autism and Architectural Design

[00:08:15] Bayo Akomolafe: We're building a house in India, my wife and I, and we told the architect to do curves. There's hardly a straight line in that house. To inspire this team that's doing the work, we sent them pictures of the Aurora Borealis. I wish I could show you a model of it, but the house is completely wavy. At some point, my wife thought, I don't know if this is practical until she saw a 3D model and fell absolutely in love with it. But the whole house is almost like a dance. And the reason why I wanted this to happen is because our son is autistic and there is some research that connects architecture with autism. I remember telling the architects that I do not want you to start from asking questions like how many rooms. It's not about the rooms. It is about the experience. I want you to focus on experience. That you're literally carving and cooking experiences in how you shape the space and to such a magical partnership and collaboration with them. I was speaking about autism and architecture. I can't remember where I read this, but that straight lines are often violent to autistic children. But curvy lines are warm and hospitable and inviting, and I just read a piece yesterday about an architect complaining about urban architecture and how we've gotten lost into this, he called it boring, that most popular urban architecture is just boring, just straight lines and rectilinear forms and frames and that he's missing curves and the dancing lines that produce new kinds of subjectivities. That's what I mean, that we are not cut off from our environment, our environment is producing us. Yeah, that's what I mean by dissociation. 

[00:10:17] Challenges of Practicality and Capitalism in Architecture

[00:10:17] Sola DaSilva: Part of architecture that makes it boring, so to say, I think is the supposed practicality, functionality or efficiency of it. People will often say you want something that you can construct easily, quickly, and cheaply. And so that oftentimes doesn't leave a lot of time for that exploration. And we're seeing the industry moving towards more modular construction and if we see that proliferate, which we probably will, we're moving away from that nuance because you're trying to manufacture something really quickly and for a decent amount of money and make a profit. I don't know how we solve that other than looking at the bigger question, which is capitalism and the way our economic system works. How practical is it for every single family to have their own home designed in the way they want it? Just when we look at the way real estate works today and people are dealing with a housing crisis, how practical would it be for us to really go into that kind of specificity in design? And I don't have an answer for that, but I would like it to not be that way, if I could at least say that. 

[00:11:40] Bayo Akomolafe: I think all of us would. I think we don't want to see people on the streets. We want people to be housed and beyond our good intentions and especially political ambitions to make that happen it seems there's always something in the way of actually getting from here to there. I'm by no means any close to any resolution myself but I'm wondering about the capacity of our settlement building processes to accommodate bodies in their fluidities. It's one thing to build structures and it's quite another thing to build hospitable spaces. Because in the attempt to expand the circle of inclusivity, we often would sterilize and reify the others, the subaltern, the minority. You've just given a very practical example in the practical, logistical, decision making processes around how do we build cheap and fast to accommodate the crisis of homelessness, for instance. there is the resorting to modularity. Just make it simple and square and put it right in there. And that is inexpensive, but it's expensive ontologically. 

[00:13:00] The Unheralded Gifts of Decay

[00:13:00] Bayo Akomolafe: I often like to explore the unheralded gifts of decay. I remember speaking at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in their architecture department and I spoke about blackness as dis-architecture. I'm playing with words here, but I'm also gesturing towards the idea of of decay as a spaciousness that design knows nothing about. There's something about my experiences going into the favelas in Brazil and the slums in India, nothing romantic, I do not wish to romanticize some of the gritty, hard realities, in those spaces, but it is also possible to speak and notice the fluency of other worlding projects that are possible in those spaces. You might think about a favela or an Indian slum, a slum in Chennai, for instance, as downright decrepit and something to be pulled out, weeded, and maybe an urban, a new urban project, or monument, or some urban sprawl, a new highway there, but there are livelihoods there that call into question some of the priorities and privileges we take for granted in the city. I remember leaving one slum, once, many years ago, maybe almost 10 years ago, and I said to myself, there's much more joy here than I find in the high rise buildings, which are taking over the Indian space, real estate projects are just the main thing now, I said there's a lot more joy here than in those spaces. It's also interesting to know that the children in the slums were reportedly the least affected by the COVID pandemic than the children who were contained within the buildings. There's a lot of, um, there are hidden dynamics, Erin Manning might call it a minor gesture. There are hidden dynamics, hidden transcripts here. There's a different kind of politics at work in decay that I do not know that architecture conceptualized as design and conceptualized as an anthropocentric gesture can accommodate. 

[00:15:25] Intangible Aspects of Architecture

[00:15:25] Sola DaSilva: The question that comes to my mind is that these things are intangible. Decay and all of these things that you just mentioned are not measurable. And I think that's maybe the challenge because architecture cannot measure these things. How do you measure emotion? How do you measure bad vibes? There are places I walk past and every time I'm just like, Ooh, I don't like how this place makes me feel. How do you know that you're doing the right thing as a designer? How do you know that this is the appropriate emotion that people will feel in the space and everybody will react to a space differently. Maybe perhaps in fairness to architecture, they're trying to go with things that are more stable versus things that are shifting and fluid. But the reality is we are fluid. 

[00:16:21] Bayo Akomolafe: I want to distinguish between quantifiability and tangibility. I think joy, dissociation, sorrow, grief, the things that we want to experience as we navigate the complexities of life, they are very tangible. They're maybe not available for the ways we measure the world, but they're quite material. The distinction between materiality and physicality might be helpful here too. Joy is material. It's a material force. When you're happy, we know because there are literally material signals. There's movement, there's affect, there is a pull, there's push. So feelings are material forces. They may not be physical, but they are material. Just a some conceptual distinction here that, that might help what I want to say about this. 

[00:17:15] Architecture and Morality

[00:17:15] Bayo Akomolafe: Architecture is always part of a moral sphere. By that I mean morality is a coalitional project. It's all the ways that we build settlement. Like notions of right and wrong are not pre installed things in our bodies. we learn and practice and are practiced into networks of conscience making. Let's just put it that way. Simondon, Gilbert Simondon might have called it a pre conscience. He didn't call it that. I'm just thinking along with Simondon and calling it a pre conscience, that we think of morality as a network and think of architecture as part of that network. What architecture does is to build stability. It's the stability building moral gesture. And the way it does this is to clear the fields, is to plant a home, is to help bodies situate themselves there. It travels along the pathways of neurotypicality. It says this is how to live properly. This is how to live properly. This is where you eat and this is where you drink. So there's a whole lot that happens with design. The questions you're asking, the questions you're dancing with go beyond morality. The questions you're indebted to right now that you have brought to the fore of our conversation have to do with, okay, how do we provide for homes? How do we measure these things? How do we know if we're right or wrong? I think those are moral questions, but we have to go beyond morality to address the limitations of architecture, because you're literally dancing at the edges of architecture. You're dancing at a place where architecture cannot go. And that's the reason why I said blackness is dis-architecture. It's a place where architecture cannot tread. I've often told people that architects can anticipate doors in houses. They know where to put a door and they know where to put a doorway and they know where to put a handle and all of that. They know where to put all that, but what they cannot anticipate are cracks. A crack is not part of a blueprint. If it's part of a blueprint, then maybe it's some artistic statement, but a crack is never designed. A crack is the excess of buildings. It's the building telling you, I will have my own way. I have my own intelligence and I will spill beyond your design and beyond your blueprint. 

[00:19:44] I think there are always going to be critical challenges and limitations to how far we can extend our reach of homing people, of stabilizing bodies within neurotypicality which is what white modernity wants to do. But at some edge, we need to start having questions and conversations about what lies beyond design. 

[00:20:07] Beyond Design: The Promise of Monsters

[00:20:07] Bayo Akomolafe: This is what Donna Haraway would call the promise of monsters. What lies beyond wellness, what lies beyond measurements? So I don't think my anxiety is around how we measure everything. Like, how do we measure this? How do we measure that? I think that rapid cyclicity is what we're stuck in. And now we are met by a crisis that seemingly resists resolution. And then we need other kinds of movements, other kinds of gestures here. 

[00:20:37] Sola DaSilva: Okay. I want to read a line from, uh, your book... and it says on page six, "the shore performs the ocean, a co-constitutive mutuality that makes doubtful the prospects of xenophobic havens where the pure are inside and the Gentiles are outside... the inside and the outside are not easily divided." And I highlighted that because that sums up, in my view, the idea of separation that I see oftentimes played out where we forget our interconnectedness. I think we forget that we are connected to the natural environment. We separate ourselves from other people. I think that's why we have some issues in the way we design buildings. I think that there's room even now within the way we design buildings to incorporate a little bit more of that interconnectivity that we already know exists. 

[00:21:38] Bayo Akomolafe: Absolutely. I agree. But we're speaking about the outer limits of what our technologies can do while noticing that it can do much. We can proliferate much. Speaking about the division between inside and outside. Yes, the only sense in which there is an inside is in a sense that we co-perform the inside. There is a very solid book about the transmission of affect that I feel is a beautiful read that suggests that emotions are not inside, you can come into a room and feel the emotions in the place. So that already disrupts the idea that there's a neat line cutting between what's properly inside and what's properly environmental. We're constantly trafficking with the environment. It does help us think of architecture, not as something already fully done. It's not fully made itself. It's not categorical. It's not a final tool. It's constantly being upended itself. By microbes, by pandemics, by insights from plant medicines, from different kinds of things. So architecture is not a tool that we wield ourselves. That's a very humanist response. We don't wield architecture. We are wielded by architecture as well. And architecture is an ongoing conversation. 

[00:22:55] Final Thoughts and Conclusion

[00:22:55] Sola DaSilva: So my final question that I ask all the guests is what is your third space?

[00:22:59] Bayo Akomolafe: I've been writing for some time about a third way, and that is the way beyond the binary. And if I had time, I would tell you stories about a trickster in Yoruba mythology. We are connected because we are both Yoruba. Of course, he was made into a devil but Èṣù, the trickster and how Èṣù's number is number three. His number is three, because it's number three that breaks through the binary. When I think of third spaces and a third way and a third politics, I'm not thinking about a synthesis of the former two. I'm thinking about something transversal, something that cuts through the ways that we have defined the world. My third space would be my son in his autistic vibrancy. There's something about the way that he shows up into the world that pulls the rug from under my feet, challenges my ambitions, challenges my notions of mastery, and continually puts me on my toes, or on my knees most of the time. My son is my third space.

[00:24:03] Sola DaSilva: Perfect. Thank you so much for your time. It's just been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you. 

[00:24:09] Bayo Akomolafe: Thank you. 

[00:24:10] Sola DaSilva: Thank you for listening to this episode of Third Space. Be sure to like, subscribe, and share. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Send me emails, DMs. Adios, friends. Until next time.