138. Fronts: Military Urbanism and the Developing World with Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller

Original Drawing by Tori Haynes

This week, we are joined by Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller, who are both principals at AGENCY. Kripa and Mueller recently published their book Fronts: Military Urbanism and the Developing World, which starts our conversation and dives into immigration, migration, and questions the climate change emergency.

Timestamp Outline 

2:24    space.city

5:21    P.O.S.T (Project for Operative Spatial Technologies)

6:10 How did you end up in El Paso?

9:03    How did you read Trump’s Wall? The hardware of the wall as an architectural project, and the “how” in the construction of the wall

13:21 Race & Modern Architecture - Irene Cheng, Charles L. David II, Mabel O. Wilson

16:07 Colonization and war is dystopic immigration. Urban operations training sites?

20:43    The gold standard and requirements of the urban operations training sites

24:06 How do you produce, understand, and use patterns? How did you get interested in this as architects?

33:29 How do you connect nationality immigration, borders, and what works?

35:48 Imaginative representation in work and documentation: walk us through making the invisible visible

41:34 The climate emergency: how do you move from war, borders, and immigration to climate?

44:38 Data collection methods: access to data vs. how data is collected
”You traffic both accuracy and inaccuracy as technologies of architectural thinking” VP

53:49 What is the motivation behind all of you work?