Committee on Design

 View Only

Community HTML

Via Aequalitas

Quick Links

Who we are

The Committee on Design (COD) was founded to promote design excellence among members of the AIA, the broader design community, and the public at large, both nationally and internationally.

2024 COD Conferences

Arkansas

April 3-7 | 21c Hotel | Bentonville and Eureka Springs - Registration is sold out.

Brazil

Thu, Oct 17 - Sat, Oct 26, 2024
Sao Paulo > Brasilia > Rio de Janerio.  Registration will open in late April.

2024 Sponsorships

Download the prospectus for Arkansas and Brazil opportunities.


2023 COD Conferences

Last year, COD held two domestic design conferences investigating The Authenticity of Place.  The first conference was held in New Orleans, LA.  View the short video of the venue tours and download the conference program book. The second conference was held in Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN, September 21-24, 2023. Download the Minneapolis guidebook and view the conference video

  • 1.  Cities and their Monuments

    Posted 08-16-2017 11:59 AM

    Cities and their Confederate Monuments 

    When the US President asked where the monument removal would end and if George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would be next, he certainly spoke for many Americans who ask the same question, possibly the majority of Americans. For them the Confederate monuments in many cities are just decoration which one passes daily like so many flowerpots. White Americans are still the majority in most States and they are quite comfortable without poking around in what seems a distant history. But this view lacks a deeper understanding and empathy, i.e. the ability to put oneself in somebody else shoes. It lacks the basic insight that for African Americans these same Confederate monuments are a thumb in the eye every time they see them as well as for everyone else who is glad that the Civil War ended with a Union victory. An op-ed of the LA Times written on occasion of the New Orleans monuments expresses this point:
    They are ideological symbols meant to assert power over our public spaces, a fact that became palpable during a contentious City Council debate on the removal plan. When a gray-haired preservationist in a bow tie stood up and gave the finger to removal advocates, I understood that those statues, just part of our landscape, high up on plinths and columns, have been giving the finger to the majority of New Orleanians for generations. Giving the finger to the people who create our vibrant culture and drive our economy, to our celebratory and joyful customs, to the true heart of a diverse, if sometimes fractious port city. To our past and our future.
    For those fellow Americans the monuments are not just decoration but they have a meaning and purpose which all artistic beauty cannot conceal. For them the heroes of the Confederacy are an ongoing justification of the injustices they had to endure as a minority, solely based on their skin color and ethnic background. Everybody knows, that discrimination based on skin color is unfortunately not a distant past and is still relevant in 2017. Or they are a reminder how confederate secession attempts were treason on the original idea of the American Revolution.
    The double horse Jackson-Lee statue is loaded on a flatbed truck Tuesday
    night. 

    In 1967, 22 years after the end of WWII, many, if not most, Germans lived pretty comfortably in their post-war Wirtschaftswunder and saw little reason to poke around in questions of German guilt. It was the year when Alexander Mitscherlich wrote the book "The Inability to Mourn", a book in which the psychoanalyst took psychoanalysis from the level of an individual and transferred it to a nation which he diagnosed to be in some kind of paralysis when it came to digesting the enormity of their past.
    Creating systems of denial and forgetting, the Germans chose not to deal with the past. As a result the German psyche never freed itself from Hitler because it did not go through the rituals that true withdrawal demanded. (A review of the Inability to Mourn)
    As having become a young adult in that period in Germany I remember how this book along with the revolt of my generation staged in the streets of Paris, Rome and Berlin broke open this inability of G... Read Full Article


    ------------------------------
    Nikolaus Philipsen FAIA
    Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects
    Baltimore MD
    ------------------------------
    2024 HRC Taliesin West


  • 2.  RE: Cities and their Monuments

    Posted 08-17-2017 08:23 PM
    As someone who was shocked upon learning of the plan to remove the Civil War monuments in New Orleans, I'm still struggling to reconcile this issue. We seem to be on a path to purging the world of anything that doesn't agree with the particular worldview of liberals. As a card carrying liberal I'm not sure where I stand on this, but I have to say that the argument that a statue in a public square oppresses black people and the Union victors on a daily basis isn't very convincing. It's not like there are annual celebrations or events centered on these public monuments to remind everyone that a great injustice was inflicted on Southern whites. Perhaps we actually need a reminder in the form of these monuments that unspeakable acts were performed in the name of the Confederate cause?
    In any event you've opened an interesting can of worms and I will be curious to see how long it's allowed to play out n this forum.

    ------------------------------
    Eugene Ely AIA Emeritus, LEED AP
    San Jose, CA
    ------------------------------

    2024 HRC Taliesin West


  • 3.  RE: Cities and their Monuments

    Posted 08-19-2017 07:38 AM
    Postscript
    Since my last posting I've read arguments in other forums that have made me understand the argument against statues to Confederate figures/causes a little more sympathetically. But I remain conflicted about the notion of rewriting or sanitizing history. 
    In any event the issue of whether a statue stands or falls is WAY DOWN my list of priorities of issues facing the world today.

    ------------------------------
    Eugene Ely AIA Emeritus, LEED AP
    San Jose, CA
    ------------------------------

    2024 HRC Taliesin West


  • 4.  RE: Cities and their Monuments

    Posted 08-19-2017 11:35 AM
    It is difficult if not impossible for a white person who has white privilege (an accomplished scholar or an 8th grade drop out) to begin to understand the situation.  But perhaps we can attempt to gain a small insight. Consider it was your ancestors who were hunted and gathered and sold into slavery. All of his family, history, possessions are gone in a blink of an eye. Your great grandfather is placed in a ship chained below 3 other rows of captives who's excrement falls onto him from above. Grandfather is whipped and starved, cleaned up and stood naked to be purchased. Your grandfather... continue the story yourslef... but now every part is YOur grandfather, your grandmother is raped repeatedly and sold away, Your grandfather trys to follow her and is captured tortured and killed. don't stop, consider all of the power is held in the hands of people of color, your whiteness is identified everywhere you go. You stand out immediately. YOu are disrespected both by the oppressors and the persons who want to help the "little white boy" even after you have finished your architectural training. A war frees your people but you are still expected to step off the sidewalk when a person of color walks by. To drop your eyes 100 years after the war, if a woman of color walks by, who is prevented from drinking from a fountain, from moving into neighborhoods that are 'redlined; years later. YOu pass statues and flags of the oppressors flying above the public buildings everyday. You remember the murders, the rapes the tortures to your family by the people who are honored by these symbols of oppression. Think of Your mother, your grandfather, your children. You are senior partner in a major Architectural firm who takes a jog in sweat clothes and is looked at suspiciously, or perhaps you ran past a crime scene - fill in the blanks. YOur children ask you why the symbols of oppression remain and YOU do nothing. YOur children, Your family, Your professional business.   As for the art, why not remove every statue and place it in a museum collection rotated out every 10 years or so and display them as art along with the images of the context of slavery. Show the slave markets of New York City as well as the markets in the South. Give no one (except the oppressed) a free ticket to remove responsibility. But also show how despite the evil that we all (the oppressors) are accountable for, we struggle to overcome our demons. In that way we we keep the history, we keep the art, and we place them - not in a position of continued oppression - but in a place of reflection of the horror, like the Holocaust monuments. A last point, I lived in a town that I learned later had been a German Bund Camp at one time. It was a very rural place that is now developed. Should we Fly the German -American Youth Movent Flag to honor those who served there as a bit of history?  As Architects we should be promoting the idea of building museums for the purpose proposed above.

    ------------------------------
    Roger Keller AIA
    Owner
    Keller Architecture
    Upper Black Eddy PA
    ------------------------------

    2024 HRC Taliesin West


  • 5.  RE: Cities and their Monuments

    Posted 08-19-2017 06:56 PM
    As a whitey who grew up in middle to upper-class Australia, I come from a position of privilege.  

    As a woman I do not, and so it is easier to emphasize perhaps around what public spaces communicate as a reflection of our collective values. 
    I have spent the last decade working in the US on public and institutional spaces, including the design of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.

    I would like to take the opportunity to contribute to this forum the work of Sam Durant and his, "Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions".    

    http://samdurant.net/index.php/project/proposal-for-white-and-indian-dead-monuments/

    Unsurprisingly, the great majority of the monuments honor whites. The layout of the monuments and memorials on the National Mall will reflect this discrepancy by a separation into two groups. The monuments to the white dead will be located on either side of the reflecting pool that runs between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. The monuments and memorials to the Indian dead will be installed on the lawn area directly in front of the Washington Monument. The proposal calls for this separation in order to foreground certain aspects of the way history is produced, to raise the question of who controls history and whose interests it serves. - An excerpt from the website's project description by Sam Durant.

    I was taught the importance of 'specificity' when it comes to understanding place by Lucinda McLean of NMBW in Australia.  Public spaces and designers of public spaces should continually ask who is sitting at the table.  If they look like you, chances are someone, or many people are missing from the process.   

    I'm not advocating for the removal of anything, but rather for the creation of places that reflect narratives relative to us all with aspirations for empowerment of all people. 





    ------------------------------
    Bridget Basham Assoc. AIA
    OWAPD Member and EQxD regular
    Designer at HKIT Architects, Oakland CA
    ------------------------------

    2024 HRC Taliesin West