Eye on the Triangle

Scrimble 0:02
You are listening to "Eye on the Triangle," WKNC's weekly public affairs program from the campus of North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Any views and opinions expressed during "Eye on the Triangle" do not represent NC State or Student Media.

Evie Dallmann 0:19
This is Evie with WKNC and I got to chat with Kofi Boone from NC State's College of Design about his work in environmental justice and design as a collaborative effort between WKNC and NC State sustainability stewards. So he talks about his book empty pedestals and the themes around it largely

Kofi Boone 0:41
so the book came from several years of work that predates the summer of 2020 but it was actually the summer of 2020 and George Floyd that triggered a lot of communities to look at aligning this more critically. So they're allowed to take downs and things that nature. But the book started before that book started, and we had to do a conference on campus, and we had a lot of guests coming in around the country, and I was asked to provide short presentation to them to get them oriented to the cultural landscape of triangle. So what are some of the culture issues that are specific to Raleigh, Durham chapel, Hill, and so there were a lot of themes in there, but it was right after the Confederate monument in Durham was taken down. So as sort of a cheat code, my presentation started with looking at how the three different communities in the triangle addressed Confederate monuments at that time, since, like 2016 27 years now. So in Durham's case was taken down. Everybody know who took it down? Nobody was prosecuted. And everybody kind of walked away, bringing that kind of this Durham's personality, sort of edgier and definitely minority majority cities. So the value system here is very different. In Chapel Hill, at that point, with the signing Sam monument on campus, they were spending over $100,000 a year and graffiti. There were resistance movements to that monument going back to the 1960s but at that time, what they decided to do is offer what they call the counter narrative, or another Memorial, to kind of acknowledge the groups that felt marginalized by the Confederate monument. And so there was a table with small figures there offered a sort of a counterpoint that monument is actually still there Simon Sanders and in Raleigh. In Raleigh, it was the legislature changed the constitution to make any alteration to the Capitol grounds of felony, and this was in response to Bree Newsome climbing the flagpole in South Carolina previously, after the murder perpetrated by Dylan Roof, so Raleigh preemptively protected it. Chapel Hill offered sort of a different kind of monument. Durham took it down. So that showed the range of different approaches that people use when then Mayor Mitch Landrieu decided to take them all down overnight in New Orleans and gave an incredible speech that he gave his permission to republish in the book about why. So this grew into a research paper that was an international research paper that was sponsored in a German journal, because, in the same way that we grapple with monuments to colonialism and to the Confederacy in America, they grapple with, for example, the legacy of the Nazi Party, and they grapple with tyranny and monuments to dictators in Europe. And so they saw their saw connection there, and that's what led to the book, was looking at not just the monuments themselves, but the monuments as a form of speech, which is to say that they are embodiment of certain values, and ask the question of, what is the role of that in the places that need to be shared by all of us? And the early part of the book talks about where they came from, how they proliferated. I think a lot of people are aware of the statues, but if you add in street names and building names and other place names across the country, you're talking about 1000s and 1000s of places that still exist, and it really features what people did in the aftermath of taking them down. So what designers did, communities, philanthropies, institutions, to offer different ways of celebrating the community that's there. And in some cases, discovered that. So the presence of those mining was suppressing those communities from really sharing their stories publicly, and the removal of those led to an incredible amount of solidarity and cooperation between different communities telling different stories and so, so that's that's where the book came from. How that relates to me, is when I moved to the south from Michigan, we have a term that we call landscape blindness, being blind to things in the landscape, not paying attention to them. And when I came down, I didn't pay much attention to federal money. Mentioned any of that stuff as a person that grew up in Michigan, my whole take on the Civil War was the year one brother she lost. That's the end of the story. All of a sudden, stuff was just ridiculous. I did not understand until I lived here the deep impact that a lot of those symbols have on communities, even hundreds of years after the Civil War. So that was awakening for me in terms of my background. In high school, I wanted to be a professional musician, so I went to a performing arts high school called Interlochen Arts again, which is in northern Michigan. Detroit, at that time was about a million people, very urban area. Interlaken is isn't even a town, it's just a school of about 500 kids, literally in the middle of woods. So that was the first time that I was kind of surrounded by nature, nothing urban. And it was there that I learned that I had sort of a love of nature. I love the environment. Was encouraged to explore it, and that's what led me to University of Michigan to get an undergrad in natural resources. But I was really recruited there by the head then the head of the landscape architecture program, Kim polikowski, who was encouraging me to go on the grad school and they are masters at landscape architecture. And it was while I was at Michigan and I got introduced to the topic of environmental justice, because at that time, some of the most prominent scholars in the world on that topic were there, being able to take classes with them, work on research project with them and get some first hand experience with it. And so at that time, there wasn't a lot of overlap between design and environmental justice. They were very separate. Environmental Justice, in some ways, was mostly about community activism and law, and there really wasn't a place for design. And so what I've tried to do since I've come here is to find ways to weave those two together to see if design and planning can play a role in advocating for and supporting issues of environmental justice. But I do think fiction does matter. I think when we think about issues in environmental justice, especially its birth as environmental racism, which was point due to the one kind of PCD protest, the birth that's now regarded as administering environmental justice movement started, was really the incredible I don't power between people that were glued in and people that were affected. So on one hand, there needs to be a certain level of pragmatism and reality such that people who are advocating for justice, but tools are accessible. They understand how the system works, they leverage it to their advantage. So there's a pragmatic side to it, for sure, but there is also a visionary side. A lot of these communities that face these challenges have to imagine a better future, even if they don't know how to get there. So from that standpoint, fiction helps us. Imagination helps us to say we do need pragmatic strategies that we can apply, but sometimes we need to think about what's possible in a very different way. Be constrained by current rules and regulations, current barriers, but imagining a just and beautiful and equitable future sometimes means we have to use our imagination. We have to think about things that we normally wouldn't do. And I think that it's those two pieces that also connect to design, because I think the way that we try to teach here is that, yes, what you're going to result in will be something that will have a tangible, material impact on the world. So where you put a walk, where you plant a tree, where you create places to sit, where you decide to have to do what you decide to protect, if you decide to change your construction. Those are all real material things. But before we get to that practical thing, there's millions of ways that we could arrange all those needs and yield themselves and. Has to be driven by the imagination. It has to be driven by a sense of optimism and sense of vision. So fiction plays an incredible and I would say most specifically, there's a whole genre called Climate fiction, where science fiction writers have been writing about climate change for a long period of time, envisioning these different alternative futures that have influenced how different social scientists, other scientists, have thought about how you get their get from where we are to where we are, or at least a cautionary tale to show people, if things continue without disruption, what we're really going to face as a planet. So fiction is very important

Evie Dallmann 10:40
opposition to fiction. I was looking back at some of your previous like work, and then also you mentioning working at Michigan with these kind of leaders, pioneers, like important figures in environmental justice. And you know, I was looking back at the disembodied voices, piece the three black towns, visual identity, empowering place in the Carolinas. I'm curious. You know, you tying in maybe these previous forms of research into this book, or, you know, kind of those fears, and yeah, just thinking about your previous work as well.

Kofi Boone 11:17
That's a good question. I mean, I think there's lots of different places where we can make impact dealing with environmental justice issues. I think when we often think about it, it's probably how we should start to think about it. Environmental racism came from dealing with the burden of harm due to tox. So you know, initially, things like PCBs, soil and the water. Now it's air quality, the urban heat island effect. It's a lot of you know, exposure risks that are immediate, harm that are happening in communities. And that's something that I learned a lot about in college, continues to be true, but the lane that I think I occupy is helping communities build their capacity by amplifying their voices and helping them visualize that they belong in the landscapes that they have underlying idea with it is that if you feel that a place has meaning and that you belong there, you're probably more inspired to fight for it, and more inspired to protect it, and more inspired to nurture it and to grow it. So a lot of those articles have really been about looking at places where on the outside, you wouldn't think that people would have an attachment to them, or that they have a place or role in them, but they actually do, and once that's uncovered, it helps people to generate the energy required to build the coalitions, to chase The resources to fight the harm. So there's a thread that's the common thread between the ones that you listed. A lot of them are in the realm of cultural landscapes, which is to say, you could all go to a landscape together, and there wouldn't necessarily be anything there that would indicate to you, if you weren't a part of it, that there was anything unique or special about it, but people who did right, either they have ancestors that interacted there, or have other knowledge, is tied to the place it does. And so the ability to start to give that language, to give that methods, to then learn how to connect that to action strategies like, once you collect it. What do you do? So how did that type to the book? I think with the book, we attempted to break the book into three parts. The first part is sort of laying the groundwork, focused mostly on history, both archival research and like public history, you know, documents, but also lived experience. I think one of the strongest essays in the first part comes from Blair Kelly, who's now at UNC. She authored a really great book called black folk that's won a bunch of awards since our book came out. But her chapter talks about her mother, who grew up in Richmond, Virginia, which was intended to be the capital of the Confederacy, had a war and monument Avenue, which at that point had the second largest Confederate monument in the world, after Stone Mountain Georgia, but the Robert Memorial Monument, which has since been taken down. But her Blair did not grow up in the South, but the chapter is really about her mother talking to her as a child, helping her navigate. Richard, so these are places that you can go. These are places you can't see this go that way and see that go that way. So it kind of revealed that the only way that you would know that stuff is, if you live here, you would have no idea from outside the perspective of. So the first part is archival. The second part are a bunch of case studies. Like, what do people do in the aftermath of takedown? You know, in various arenas, everything from, some people mobilized and dealt with political strategies. Some people got a lot of money and put in new monuments. Some people decided no monuments. Nobody should get a money. You You know, there's a wide array of alternatives. The third part really is lessons learned in trying to translate what was presented in the book into tools that other communities that are facing these challenges to consider, you know, the kinds of questions that you ask, the kinds of information that you might look out for, the kinds of people that you need to connect with that change so, so that it gets more in terms of a method saying that would help people. How

Evie Dallmann 15:49
do you see way finding? And then, you know, public landscapes and this subjective reality. It's very intimate too. Like, who are you learning it from? And I also would love to tie it back to, I'm particularly interested in chapel Hill's approach and this counter narrative and kind of like saying, like both stories, and maybe your opinion on that. And, yeah, I'm thinking those kind of themes together.

Kofi Boone 16:19
Yeah, I think with way finding. I think a lot of people think of it as, for example, signage. So an airport might be the perfect example, which is using colors and symbols and patterns to direct people who are a little bit anxious, a little bit nervous, in a new place, and they kind of find their way through. And so that's that's sort of a way that a lot of people think of way finding with regards to the landscape. And it's interesting because I just got back from MIT to give a lecture in honor of a very important scholars passed away named Kevin Lynch, who pioneered tools, that talked about what's called mental maps, cognitive method that in our own heads, we have maps of places. And the reason why he was really interested in it, he was studying it in the 1960s This is an era when cities were going through what was called Urban Renewal, and there were resources to put in three ways to carry down buildings up new buildings, for a lot of reasons, but there was a concern that part of it might inadvertently harm communities by misunderstanding how they operate, how the function of how to see them. So a lot of his research came from working with people, particularly in Cambridge, to get them to communicate to him, translate to him their mental maps. So when they're walking around Cambridge, what do they pay attention to, how they didn't know they're in their community, and how they know they moved to another one? What do they consider good, bad or indifferent? And it created this language that goes beyond science. So, for example, some people recognized where they were because everything on that block had a certain kind of door or a certain kind of on it, or a certain kind of window display. Some people recognize where they are based on landmarks. You know, this is a church steeple, you know, where I go to worship, or this is a giant tree, you know that we've had a festival, or anything. So there are lots of things in our landscape that feed into these mental maps that actually are how we really navigate places when we know that. So bringing that back to Chapel Hill in the book Silent Sam was located pretty intentionally, you know, silent Sam silent meaning the silent century is not the only sculpture that has the shape. And what we learned research was that there were companies even in the north that had essentially a mold, you know, that had the form of a silent Sam, and they would just crank it out, like the car, you know, and sell it to whoever wanted to buy it. So the silent century was the idea of, yes, the the hot civil wars over there. This century is watching, you know, and keeping, keeping watch until being called upon to get back into duty. So that was the intent of it, and the fact that it faces, frankly, street, and it anchors the big open space. What is it used to? It's going big open space that you have to move past it to get into campus. That was all really intentional in terms of way back, in terms of who's allowed to enter, who's not. With regards to the counter monument, what's interesting about it? It's known as the monument to the unsung founders. There was a movement on campus to document the involvement of enslaved African people and the construction of UNC. It was a big university wide effort, and it resulted in sort of public artwork. Is the exact opposite. It's a table. And I think the intent was good in terms of a meeting place, everybody's in the same level table supported by small figures that are meant to evoke the esthetic of enslaved African people. Problem with it was that they're the perfect height for a foot rest, and so what people do when they sit there is actually put their feet on these figures, and immediately people saw it as a point of disrespect. So the idea that the counter minding it has an idea counter narrative is interesting here, in this case, the execution of it and the fact that it really didn't have a lot of input on people, I think limited its impact quite a bit. And so even in absence of Sam, it's now gone, people still share the same concerns about the monument to the unsung founders, and I think part of it is, again, sort of way finding from the standpoint of, how does the landscape let me know what is acceptable behavior in this space, and if you're trying to honor people, it's probably disrespectful. But there is a role for design thinking. There is an expertise with that. There's a great level of trust that's required in terms of working with communities or clients have some trust in the designers, and that's why we try and be rigorous, is to make sure that with that trust, that we're honoring it by giving it our best. So this isn't saying that everything needs to be designed by community, but it does say that there's simple phrase a lot of communities will say. It's like nothing about us, without us. So it's about finding a way for the people that you're trying to respond to to have a voice and impact, and where you diverge. Say, for example, there's a consensus to do X, but everything in your professional wheelhouse tells you to do Y. You know you have an obligation to before committing to doing anything to create a situation where you can talk about trade offs that are being made based on different decisions. So designers have found, particularly with a lot of our students. Think a lot of them assume that everybody understands the design process and design that everybody starts with. You know, what's the problem? How do I find all this information about why it's a problem? Who's affected by the problem, and then you pivot, and then you're like, what's the best way to solve this particular problem? What are the alternatives that we need to consider? How do I make decisions about which alternative is the best when I pick one? How do I move that through to completion? I think everybody thinks that way, but they don't. And so with community work, it's about trying to find those moments. The first was about establishing trust. That's the first part is it's very difficult to work with somebody that you don't trust. And sometimes trust building can be very slow. Sometimes go backwards. You can raise trust before the data. But there are things we can do to build relationships, such that when we have to make decisions, we have a level of comfort with one another, such that we can have these difficult conversations about the trade offs and different decisions with interdisciplinarity. I think it's important, because although I think landscape architects can do a lot, you can't do so. With regards to the projects that are case studies in the book, some of them were architects, some of them were historians, some of them were people who worked in philanthropies. Some of them are faith based leaders. Some of them are landscape architects, but in all those cases, the ways that you help people tell their stories, talk about their histories, seek information archives, build relationships with decision makers, help to inspire and encourage people to come out and participate in public forums. We're not always the best at that, and so in some ways, that's it's better, you know, to team up with folks who can do those particular things. So I think the complexity of these issues is sort of beyond the wheelhouse of a single profession, so finding ways we can all work together can work with regards to the cases in the ranges of them, some of them are more on the political side. So you know, one of the early cases in the book is paper monuments in New Orleans that was proposed by Brian Lee, who's an architect as Prophet New Orleans, Sue Mobley, who's a researcher at Monument. Monument level is a national organization that tracks all monuments memorials across the country. So she's a historian. So that's an interdisciplinary combination. What they did was after the take down the. Of all the Confederate monuments in New Orleans, they convened people from those communities in the places where those mountains were taken down, and started with conversations saying, you know, what do you think? What do you think about space? And what they uncovered was that there were all these stories that included people in the neighborhoods that told more of a robust description of how those neighborhoods operated that were suppressed by that monument. The presence of that monument prevented the celebration right now for tremendous other stories, and they followed more of a political activist standpoint, where they started with essentially political broadsides and posters, so a graphic design piece where they created these posters that told these stories and put them up all over the place. And they use that as a way to get a sense of which stories the community wanted to move forward into proposals for permanent public space. And so that one kind of followed more of a an activist track and was really a grassroots, bottom up kind of process at the other extreme, and this is where it kind of diverges from purely Confederate monuments, but dealing with broader issues of oppression.

Society's cage was designed by Dayton Schrader, who's an architect for Smith group, so primary national firm. What it is is a three dimensional data visualization the rates of murder of black people. And it's portable. It moves. It's not in one fixed location when they first created the same the first place they laid it out was on the National Mall in Washington, NC. Thank you, Washington. The floor has QR codes and has quotes and information, so you kind of occupy this data visualization of this training, and you can order it online. You know, they'll ship it to you or set it up wherever it goes to different festivals and events. It pops up all over the place. So this idea that the monument or memorial can be mobile, but also be tied to Athena has given it as power and given its popularity and any more traditional ones where it's a fixed location, it's designed as a place to encourage people to reflect and to gather and celebrate that one, Xena Howard, who's practicing at Perkins and Durham Xena, among other things, was the right hand woman To go through line as they worked on the Smithsonian Museum back in Michigan, Washington, DC. So a lot of, if you go there, in that museum, a lot of that stuff she actually did, but what she worked on was commemorating the community that was destroyed in urban renewal period after World War Two, and communities were being wiped out for infrastructure new elements, in this case, of black community, and in that case, church, Sycamore Hill Baptist Church, which is the last major institution, anchor in this place, so created essentially a permanent memorial that celebrates the history of that Church's connections to the people in the broader community. Creates a public space, works as a beacon and a gateway. Image into Greenville, North Carolina, soon as you cross the tower rivers, the first thing you see, and that thing is built, you know, Psyched last so there's lots of approaches, there's lots of ranges, but we hope that through that reach, people get inspired to think about it in different ways.

Evie Dallmann 28:45
How you see experimentation and speculative design fitting into like our traditional, tried and true ways of making space?

Kofi Boone 28:54
That's a good question. I mean, I think with speculative design, it's a slippery slope. I think it requires a lot of trust with whoever you're working with to be open to a way of expressing things that they may not be familiar with. So if it's a speculative design that, for example, like you work with the community you know, like they want to remember something and their first thing, well, how do you want to remember and say, well, statute, you know, of course, if it's a person, I want to statue a second person. You know, some people go, Okay, it's great. It's just got statue per person. From a speculative standpoint, you could be like, Okay, well, what is it about them you're seeing, yeah, what's their role? What are some of the bigger ideas behind why you really enjoy celebrating this person, and then start to deal with different ways of celebrating aspects of this folks, and that could produce some conflict, because I think in some cases, some people may already have a. Sure in their mind of what they think they'd like to see. So to offer something that's different requires, you know, a lot of trust and relationship building and conversation. In the case of the landscape, we focus a lot on settings that enable different activities to occur. So it's very rare when you hear a landscape architect talk about an object, we'll talk about a place to gather or say a festival or a celebration. We'll talk about the place that you can be quiet and reflective and sort of separate from the kind of be in touch with the we'll talk about, you know, what happened on the land at the time that a particular event heard or a person was alive, and are there cues in the landscape that let us know, like really old trees or different types of qualities of that landscape that manifest that way? So speculation, I think, is necessary, because that's what helps us advance, helps us move forward and deal with present reality is we can't just keep repeating the things from the past, because the things in the past emerged from a certain context, and our context has changed. But how we do so, I think here's be handled carefully and seriously, and I think you know, really, for the examples that I can think of, it's set an expectation that this is an opportunity for us to think about it differently and to take baby steps towards it. So maybe before doing the physical transformation of the landscape, it could be an activity, it could be gatherings, it could be things that are mobile, that are temporary, that have a time stamp, and then learn from it, right? Learn how that has an impact. And then, if it's impact on people in your life, then it can move towards being more and more permanent over time. And there are lots of examples.

Evie Dallmann 31:52
Yeah, I'm thinking about, like, um, this idea that, like, you might never make everybody happy, like someone will always have something to say about it. And I'm thinking about, like, this idea of activities, they're more temporary. And I'm curious, do you think there's a way that we can, like, encourage people to think about our landscapes as more temporary, like, open to change and commentary and involvement in them, and really, like empowering, and in that same way I'm thinking about, I really love how you're, like, highlighting trust, and I'm curious how you might build that, and how that works with that, and then also this network of people to contact to make these changes, and thinking about networks and webs of communities. And I think that ties into the trust and hopefully evolves into these feelings of empowerment, of change.

Kofi Boone 32:47
Yeah, I mean, with trust building, there isn't like a magic formula to it, but I do think there are things that we can do that you know, can help with the situation. So I think a lot of communities and other folks may feel that when they're working with people that are different from them, and the expectation is to create something that the whole process about extracting as much information from those people as fast as possible. And in that situation, people may not feel like there's a reciprocal part to it, which is to say, I want to do in their park with some sort I get hired by the city, I'm going to do it. Got a year to do it. It's going to take eight months just to do the construction drawings for it. So in that year, I've got four months to go from nothing to a design in order to allow the rest of that process to occur, which means I probably have about a month to engage so in a traditional approach to that. That means I would try and move as quickly as possible to get as much information as possible, to inform that and that have built resentment and community rethink that the end product is worth it, right? So we know that we're asking a lot of questions. We want you to come to a lot of meetings. We want to get a lot of feedback and do all the stuff. You know that there's a burden. You know, you got kids, you got school, you got other stuff you gotta deal with, and there's 1000 other things you can do with your time, but just trust us, in a year, it'll be worth it, and it's all built, and a lot of communities don't agree that anymore, but then one is more of a reciprocal relationship, which is to say, yes, we'll give information, but what can you give us back in exchange, even before we Get to the final product. So building in these loops and cycles of reciprocity, sometimes it's not even monetary material. Sometimes it's helping people with small things. One thing that helped us, for example, in several projects to get young fan. These are children, which sounds crazy, but the idea that a lot of people just won't go because they're, you know, caregivers, but acknowledging that reality with them kind of well, it shows you kind of understand who we are and what we need. And sometimes this language when we worked with particularly American Indian communities and indigenous communities, we've had to change our whole vocabulary, because we don't see the world the same way, and so the use of terms that recognize their world views and their values as we work is a sign of respect. So that helps to build a sense of trust that these people cared enough to know that, you know, we look at the world this way, we speak about it this way, and they're willing to, yeah, in some cases, people are just really material. They're kind of like, look, we need to hire 10 of our teenagers to work on it, and you can get paid, you know, and it seems transactional, but that commitment indicates that we're not just there purely to extract information. We're there to actually contribute to life community. So it varies, but I think that in some cases, it's about really, really honest about what you need on both sides before you start and seeing how you can accommodate that a long way. It's about producing things that have benefit to community partners before the end, so don't have to wait until the end, until they see something. And really, it's about a lot of as much as you can being honest about the process so that people don't get surprised about patents. So those are some trust building things. I got lost. I forgot your question.

Evie Dallmann 36:52
I mean, I think that's, that's really perfect, especially like, I like that there's modular approaches. Each community is going to be something different. And also this holistic approach of, like, kind of like practicing the preach. Like, you know, the idea is to build community. Well, it's like, well, it's not this fixed thing that we're going to build. It's the whole process, and thinking about process art in that way, in the same vein as this idea of time and shared space. So obviously, landscape architecture, architecture, monuments. There are these kind of obviously spatial ideas. Do you see a way that they relate to temporal as well, and time and and how architecture more broader question, architecture relates to temporal ideas, to, you know, those two dimensions, and if there's a third one as well, but I don't know about that one too.

Kofi Boone 37:46
Yeah. I mean, that's really good question. I'll offer a little bit from the book. One of the contributors to the book was a guy named Dale Upton. Del Upton is a renowned architecture art critic. He's been writing for as long as I've been alive. I was really honored to have him contribute to the book. In the book, he talks about the Calhoun memorial in Charleston, South Carolina. Calhoun notorious Confederate governmental leader, said some of the most unbelievably racist stuff all the time, but had a giant monument in his honor. And Dell starts to talk about it of its type, the type of monument it is, is very similar to monuments during the Roman Empire. And you'll find that a lot of the symbolism of Lincoln or Washington DC go to like Jefferson Memorial and Lincoln Memorial and other elements like that. They are essentially creating American versions, like Romans, but rules, the material, scale, weights, figures, like all that stuff straight out of the Roman Empire. So in a way, you know, when you associate that kind of language with Rome, Rome never thought it was gonna fall. No, this is here forever, ruse, granite, losing metal for taking care with the whole conference. So it sends a signal in terms of the temporal part that they picked in essentially what they would consider China's ways of building tied to connecting what's happening then in New South. That's how they saw themselves. Now, was interesting about Dell's chapter there, he said, Now, in the Roman Empire with memorials and miners, in particular, they got vandalized. They always got beat up. That's something we don't I didn't really start writing about it. That's not necessarily common, but the. His argument is that, no, you know, all these things are supposed to get defaced and broken down, and new regimes come into transition. So this idea of trying to pretend that could keep something harmony, this is a total waste of time, in which case, it opened up the door to how people reacted after a murder of George Floyd, and why they went to my first place, and use those as targets for frustration in her eye. So, you know, in his story about the Calhoun Memorial and China to the Roman Empire, and then connecting it to No actually, this thing when you're supposed to face change. Anyway, I think that's the whole thing. I think whatever you put with regards to a spatial language, if you're referencing ancient empire, contemporary things that are important to us, yes, you can do that. But also the chaos factor, how over time, communities change their perceptions and change their attitude as a level of agency, power awareness, in which case, down changing, in a way kind of is an ecological way of thinking about it, which is, with regards to the landscape. Landscape always checked out. We'll always change. We're in a state of mind, so anything we do to try and stop and slow that down,

Evie Dallmann 41:36
things you've learned through interacting with multitudes of communities, diverse voices and maybe like things you've learned about your own view that you've channeled into ways of change. I'm especially thinking about this idea of changing language, and that being a vernacular landscape and a possible bridge between communities. And I'm thinking about the Impressionist movement and about how their whole thing is. We don't see the world the same. And there's a beauty in that, and there's a fleeting nature in that. So tying may be larger thematic ideas to also personal anecdotes.

Kofi Boone 42:13
So our college, for example, college design center of Black Mountain College, which is a descendant of the Bauhaus, and Bauhaus had a lot of strengths, so one, it was really leaning into embracing the power of at that time, industrialization and technology didn't have to be the enemy apart. Could actually make it more accessible, more affordable, and more people harness those courses together, and then so that was what they were really looking at, was through all these sort of craft traditions of art that predated industrial revolution, they were having a very optimistic stance of, well, What if we harnessed industry to make art cheaper, quicker, more available, to make so that with architecture, textiles, ceramics, you know, everything. So it was sort of, you know, the optimistic side of modern is, you know, in terms of, like, how can we bring more, make it more available and accessible, more people, and not just have it be a privilege of and that's why the college was here. It was supposed to be an exponent of modernism in North Carolina, the idea that that was our role, but post modernism, you know, and the idea that, yes, you know, it's pie and ideals, but the way it was making things secure, more generic, more machine like and really didn't get the nuances of different things. They're different scholars who predicted, you know, that rising modern Civil Rights Movement, employment, suffrage, I could just name it, colonialism, like, you know, modernism didn't have much to say about that. It was very clear that was having different impacts and different opinions. So the post modern movement was attempting to kind of push back and say that these other people have voices. And so the challenge now is like, well, if everybody has a different voice, what do we really have in common? Where are the places that we can share common understandings or build common understandings such that we can work together based on that. And I think that's really the current initiative that we're all facing with regards to art movies with communities. I think it's the frustrating part is that we want to say we have what you might call best practices or methods that no matter where we go anywhere on Earth, and this is actually how I was taught in school, which I've been realizing it's not right, but at that period of time, designers were almost like Green Berets, airborne folks, Marines, like you could just drop them anywhere on Earth, and we're. The matter of time they could kind of figure it out, because whatever we were being taught, those things didn't change based on where we were. And I think now the people that I really respect, they have a very strong point of view. If they don't hide who they are with their thinking, but they don't begin by telling people what to do, they begin by listening and sensing what's there and adapting to it. And so there's some principles, and there's rules, and there's things that we know, know from experience, but every encounter, especially first encounter with the community, is starts from zero, starts from, I'm not going to come and tell you what. I'm going to come and listen to which one, and then I'll respond. And then it turns into this dialog, so to speak, of learning, right? So the designers and active learning, along with the community partners and we have tools. We have techniques, their thoughts about base ways to do that. NC State has an incredible history, particularly between hearing San on Randy Hester and several others, they really developed the methods that we still use to this day to engage with communities from a theory standpoint, but in terms of application of communities, it's the learning curve, right? It's the idea that the the expectation we meet is not to solve the problem as fast as possible, it's to understand one another and to build rapport and to have short term wins like wait till the end. So something great happens. They can get things early. Their bills are momentum and so yeah, with regards to communities, I think that's it. That's the idea that we always start from zero. We always start from listening, and then we respond, and then they respond, then if it works good, becomes a really healthy dialog.

Evie Dallmann 47:03
Closing words, closing thoughts.

Kofi Boone 47:08
Yeah, well, I appreciate the time with you for sure. So at the start of sending thanks for that, thanks for the conversation. I think the era that we're in, we're experiencing how quickly things can change. This time last year, I was thinking about issues of sustainability and environmental justice very differently than I it's helped me understand how precarious a lot of things are that are important to us and that matter, particularly with environmental justice, this current administration essentially wiping that entire element out of federal government, that it's really the test of values. In terms of these are values that we really care about as communities, that we have to use every tool at our disposal, is not true, that they continue. So I think what I would share with folks moving forward is to take stock in what you're able to read in whatever role you play in society, do everything we can to make sure the various values are communicated and protected, because it's not promised. It doesn't happen on autopilot. You have to be engaged.

Scrimble 48:29
This has been "Eye on the Triangle" from WKNC 88.1 FM HD-1 Raleigh. Our theme song is "Krakatoa" by Noah Stark, licensed under Creative Commons. To relisten to this or any other episode, visit wknc.org/podcast or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai