We made a commitment when we sold our first journal in 2018 to distribute all revenue to First Nations community projects. Since then, sales have been ticking over and we’ve been steadily stashing away the funds.
We are chuffed to announce that we’ve been able to make a $1000 donation to the language preservation program at
Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa
(KJ), an organisation based in Newman and servicing Martu communities in the Western Desert.
Thank you to everyone who has bought one of our journals – Pivot, Agency, Leverage, Commune, Equity – and made this donation possible. Thank you also to Pauline at the
Fremantle Foundation
for your work in facilitating the grant. Happy days!
Starting a new practice and launching a journal has made for an exciting 12 months! Like most big moves these two things are the result of a combination of circumstance, timing and the (naïve) feeling that it was the right thing to do.
191216_Agency Journal_Overview_purple bg
Early on we created a framework for ourselves: we would produce two journals per year, with each issue focussing on a particular word, and we would describe our business as an agency. For an architecture practice this has been relatively controversial – or at least unsettling – and has generated lots of questions in our direction!
So, what better word than AGENCY to focus the second edition of our journal around. As with PIVOT, we started with our own loose meaning, have delved deeper and have learned so much through the contribution of others. AGENCY is both a noun and a verb. To be an agency and to have agency are two quite distinct things, yet for us we are interested in what it might mean to be and do both.
Architects are the ultimate problem solvers. We are trained to look to the future and to ask the question, ‘how can we build something that uses so many resources and so much money if it is redundant as soon as it is finished?’. It makes sense then, that we should use our professional agency to advocate for things that we think are important. In our experience, this is not always in places where we wear the ‘architect’ badge, but rather when we use our skills to seek solutions to problems that are not answered in buildings.
And this brings us to the allure of ‘the agency’. We have always loved the dynamic and collaborative nature of the advertising agency model. It is a world of structured pairings, of freelancers, networks and teams. There is a generosity in the development of ideas and a freedom that comes from being part of a flexible and dynamic team. As an Agency, we are creative thinkers, but we also make a declaration to be part of a team. Sometimes we might take the lead, sometimes we create a team and sometimes we are part of something greater than ourselves. With each arrangement, we find energy from working with others.
To have agency is to find a kernel of power, to pair this with opportunity, to find a way to move (sometimes by stealth) towards a better outcome. It is a way of seeing things differently, of interpreting our past and influencing a better future.
So far so good on The FULCRUM AGENCY front – we thank you all for your support.
“While much work is being done to improve equity and fairness in the workplace, many women face the relentless challenge of balancing their job with the lion’s share of domestic labour and parenting duties.”
In recasting our business, we have had the opportunity to open up a conversation about where we want to place our energy, how we want to spend our time and where we want to make an impact.
One of the things that came up quickly was our shared desire to create a platform for conversation. A conversation that exposes different approaches and views on how we interact with the built environment and offers commentary on issues of social justice, education, equity, art, culture and architecture. Our journal is the start of that conversation.
In each edition we want to invite contributors to help us unpack their experience or reflect on their work as it relates to a specific theme. Perhaps, because of recent experience and the journey of starting something new, we’ve decided to centre the first edition around the idea of the ‘pivot.’
Pivot is a word that has started to creep into commentary about all manner of things; an old word but with new significance. In the brash, confident world of Silicon Valley, it has come to refer to the need to adapt to failure and to shift the experience into new, more positive territory. In short, it is a word that turned failure into a rite of passage for the innovator and made it a strength rather than a weakness. It celebrates those that are not afraid, those that are open to change, are agile and resilient. It alludes to moving at pace, being willing to change direction but keeping up momentum. It rejects the idea of losing face.
Kieran and I have worked together for more than two decades now. In that time, I have come to appreciate that we spur each other on and make each other brave in the face of change. We have been bold in building our working life around our shared values.
With the benefit of hindsight, the bigger changes have happened in roughly five year intervals – that was until last year when we picked up a bit of speed and made a radical shift from large practice to small after only 18 months.
For us, the increase in pace afforded us the chance to refocus our internal drivers and to see where we can make the biggest impact, how we can leverage maximum impact through our efforts. With the reinvention of our practice life, also came the opportunity to confront and define what it means to be an architect and where we think architecture will make an impact in another 20 years’ time.
As our careers have evolved, our appreciation of the breadth of skills of an architect has deepened. The impact of buildings on our environments cannot be understated but nor can the processes and decisions that have led to the point of building. Architecture is far bigger process then we originally thought. Consider, the capacity for collaboration with so many people who are not architects. The capacity to really listen to what they are saying about our past and our future. We embrace the idea of a problem becoming bigger before we can work toward an answer. We think of this as a unique skill that comes from design thinking.
We have had the great benefit of support from our profession, our staff, family and friends as we have travelled (and pivoted) through practice. Many have been on this journey with us for many years and we are deeply grateful and indebted to you all.
In this issue we were overwhelmed by the enthusiasm and speed with which people agreed to be part of our next bold adventure. Either through their conscious decision making or for reasons outside of their control each contributor has in some way engaged in something of a pivot. We hope you enjoy the read!
Somehow, this was the jokey comment that stuck with me the most. More than all the sliding door moments, mental HECS debt recalculations, Mondayitis crises of salary comparison that I’ve had in the decade since my pivot from classroom teacher to graduate architect, this question from my Mum’s old school friend that I bumped in to on a Saturday morning grocery shop pokedsome little thought that from time to time makes me question my pivot.
And while it’s important to take the advice of those close to you before big decisions, trust me, the Saturday morning small talk of your Mum’s friend is not the sort of career advice worth considering. If I had have fretted over the thoughts of others, I wouldn’t be working in a job I love, in a career that fits. While it took a little longer to get here and from time to time I reflect on what might have been an easier path, despite what others might say, I know that my pivot was the right move.
Besides, the answer was only three.”
*Brad Wetherall is Graduate Architect at TheFulcrum.Agency
As women, there are few events that are commonly shared that that make us pivot to the degree that having children does. In an article first published in our journal, ‘PIVOT’ and then re-worked for The Conversation and the Sydney Morning Herald, TF.A Principal Emma Williamson reflects on the sudden gender divide that happened when she gave birth to her first child and the four traps that we easily fall into at home:
In football, a switch or a pivot is a powerful move. It’s when the predictable movement of play is suddenly interrupted. Often by an act of daring or brilliance by one player.
A sudden change of direction literary opens up time and space for that player and their team. Which creates opportunities.
It’s the best players, the most exciting and celebrated that can create these chances, sometimes, seemingly out of nothing. As if by instinct. They spin, weave or trick the other players. They move in a way that is unexpected. Often breathtaking.
As a player, it takes courage to take a chance like this. There is a high degree of risk. The outcomes are unknown. You can be made to look silly. To be embarrassed. To have the crowd and the opposition ridicule you.
But when you take a risk, when you pivot, you have the chance to create something special.
*Dylan Smith is the Executive Officer and Founder of the
Fremantle Foundation
, a philanthropic organisation that focuses on the potential of local giving. Dylan played AFL football for five years with the North Melbourne Kangaroos and Fremantle Dockers.
The roads, pipes and wires that make up the infrastructure of our towns and cities aren’t often considered to have moral dimension. But, as Dr Liam Grealy investigates, we are, quite literally, building inequality into our urban fabric.
In August 2017, ten inches of rain over four hours led to days of flooding in central New Orleans – from the Seventh Ward to Treméto Mid-City to Lakeview. City officials claimed the pump system was working but that rain outstripped capacity. But subsequent revelations of a power-station control-panel fir e offered a partial explanation for the drainage failure. Three of the five turbine generators that power New Orleans’ 120 pumps were already down for maintenance and with one on fire, just one was left to manage the downpour. Sixteen of the pumps were also down, despite contrary initial reports, for which senior Sewerage and Water Board and Public Works Department staff were quickly asked to resign. A ritual sacking provided a swift and visible response to the more complex infrastructural challenges of managing subterranean “vibrant matter”[1].
Pump Station 2
Situated on drained former swampland, below (a rising) sea level, sinking, and adjacent to the disappearing protective wetlands of the Louisiana Gulf Coast,
living with water
is the perennial challenge of the crescent city. Every storm season, flooding elicits memories of the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when the repeatedly-predicted failure of the US Army Corps of Engineers’
“city of walls”
[2]
– that is, levees, embankments, floodwalls, and other rigid barriers – came to fruition. Technocratic explanations for the levee failure, offered in a progressivist vein to promote further construction, elide the
complexly entangled negligence
of regulatory, maintenance, planning, and disaster recovery regimes. They also discount
historical explanations
for the former and ongoing racialization of infrastructural risks, such as access to high ground, the geography of redlining, federal compensation programs, and insurance determinations bearing on who was able to return post-disaster.
When the 2017 floods arrived, the demography of some of America’s oldest black neighbourhoods had already shifted: social infrastructures had been razed and replaced by foreclosure, eviction, gentrification, and short-term rentals for the tourist economy.
Eviction in the Seventh Ward, New Orleans
Eight months later, in Australia’s top end, the remote community of Borroloola faced its own man-made hydrological catastrophe. Indigenous residents called on the Northern Territory Department of Health in April 2018 to blood-test community members following water samples revealing elevated levels of lead and manganese in the drinking water supplies of town camps. Glencore’s nearby McArthur River Mine had previously confessed to poisoning cattle and fish via zinc and lead leached from its dumpsite, generating suspicion over its ongoing role in contaminating local water systems. As Jacky Green narrates in Yee-haw, Money Trucks (2017)[3], “They take wealth from our country, leaving behind a huge open cut pit and toxic waste rock pile for us to clean up.”
In this recent instance, the Department of Health and the government-owned Power and Water Corporation suggested the contamination occurred between the bore and the tap, with corroded brass fittings in the camps’ internal reticulation systems a likely cause. The extensively detailed Town Camps Review (2017) had already recommended urgent upgrades to the camps’ water infrastructure. Yet with assessments made without subterranean investigation, and with incomplete historical records, just what’s down there, when it was installed, and who’s responsible for it, remains opaque. It was almost two months before residents in Garawa 1 camp were advised the water was again safe to drink, with the Department of Health noting that “the problem . . . was more complicated than originally thought.” Community members know all too well that having such issues investigated is hard fought, requiring sustained protest and advocacy in the face of multiple pressing issues that demand their attention. In October 2018 a new water treatment plant was opened in Borroloola, however further extensions are required to service housing on the east of the McArthur River, including at Garawa 1 and Garawa 2 camps.
A new water treatment plant, Borroola
“It’s exhausting to create an event out of nothing”, says one of anthropologist Chloe Ahmann’s[4] (2018) Baltimore informants about the difficulty of representing the cumulative effects of infrastructural slow violence. The distribution of both displacement for infrastructural development – think highway and “urban renewal” projects – and risk of harm – think waste dumps, chemical factories, and mine sites – are never demographically equal, but are instead central to the ongoing reenactments of settler-colonialism’s voracious appropriation of territory and capitalism’s serial frontiers of extraction and abandonment. Such geographies of governance are variously conceptualised by Evelyn Araluen as “cartographies of colonisation” (2018; also see 2019[5]), by Stephen Lerner[6] (2010) as “sacrifice zones”, and by Elizabeth Povinelli[7] (2011) as “economies of abandonment”. They are constituted, in part, by the extension (or not) of infrastructures, as “material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space” (Larkin 2013)[8]. Of course, the construction, use, and maintenance of infrastructures can also dispossess, degrade, and disconnect. Most of the time, residents at the metaphorical and literal coalface of environmental and financial hazards lack a Hurricane Katrina, or a Northern Territory Intervention, to spectacularly expose the slow-to-accrue cumulative toxicities of infrastructural failure. Even when industrial disasters are major events, such as Union Carbide’s Bhopal disaster in 1984, their effects long outlast the cameras, the aid money, academic interest, and even the attention of community organisers overwhelmed by the demands of acute crises and new looming threats. The ongoing groundwater contamination at Bhopal signals what Nikhil Anand[9] (2015) describes as “the work of ignorance in maintaining state institutions”: proof of harm, the designation of culpability, and eventually redress, first require investigation.
This is where the sidewalk ends, Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans
Bringing the harms of infrastructural violence to light is always tough political work, and efforts to do so are confronted by reductionist interpretive habits, or cultural clichés. Poor health is explained by dietary and lifestyle choices, or the dilapidated remote community house signifies tenant damage rather than, as the not-for-profit organisation Healthabitat has shown, a lack of routine maintenance and poor initial construction. We need to acknowledge that infrastructure is always in motion, ageing, and trending toward entropy. It is rarely “completed”, instability is its norm, and functionality requires constant attention: tinkering, fix-work, maintenance, replacement, patches, upgrades, and renovation. Such labour requires government resources, and monitoring and accountability systems that recognise the natural decline of infrastructures, rather than simply attributing breakdowns to users. The recent victory for public housing tenants in the Central Australian community of Santa Teresa – awarded compensation for the government’s failure to ensure their homes were maintained to a habitable standard – shows the potential for redress via public litigation, but also the risks associated with asserting basic legal rights (including countersuits, administrative labour, insecure tenancy, and so on).
Most readers of this essay can probably still take potable and plentiful tap water largely for granted. As many writers have conceived of infrastructure in general – that it becomes visible when it breaks down – so too are our expectations made apparent through disruption: an occasional boil water alert, for example. With a scarce commodity literally on tap, we can forget the already quotidian everyday realities of many global cities – Cape Town, Mumbai, and São Paulo among them – variously characterised by water’s undersupply, privatisation, and rationing. This while future-focused fantasies of being overwhelmed by water and of water’s disappearance have become increasingly central to speculative dystopias in popular culture: of flooded worlds, desert wastelands, and “water knives”[10]. We should also direct our imaginations to how the right to water might be guaranteed under conditions of increasing scarcity. What political work is required to ensure the redistribution of this natural wealth from wasteful industries that benefit a small minority to serve the basic needs of everyone? Such imaginative work must contend with fantasies of water’s infinity facilitated through techno-fixes, such as proliferating desalination plants, and the tendencies of such “solutions” to mortgage the future on behalf of contemporary lifestyles.
Sinkage on O’Keefe Street, New Orleans
All strategies for sustainable futures struggle with the sinking mess of the present. As at Borroloola, the reticulated infrastructure delivering drinking water to New Orleans’ residents has also exhibited levels of lead beyond safe drinking standards. 65-80 per cent of city pipes are almost two centuries old. Shortly before the 2017 floods, the New Orleans Office of the Inspector General found that residents could be exposed to lead by construction projects shaking the metal loose from old pipes. This construction includes a 135mile Federal Emergency Management Agency funded water-line replacement project, which promised to remove the problem it is shaking loose; this in a context where the city admits it doesn’t know the locations of all the existing lead service lines. Given this material was once the industry standard, such ignorance isn’t surprising, but nonetheless requires further government intervention. Thus the legacy of yesterday’s infrastructural promise is today’s public health hazard. Importantly, and despite the identified dangers of the pipes to residents’ drinking water, the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans is only replacing waterlines on public property.
If lead is leaching from and flowing through the pipes, how might we respond to the fact that the state doesn’t know what’s down below or determines that its responsibility extends only to the edges of public land? How might water bind us in ways that thinking about broken infrastructure in our own backyards and elsewhere does not? Writing about Flint, Michigan, anthropologist Catherine Fennell (2016) [11] notes the discursive similarities between the claims “We are all Flint” and “All lives matter”. In practice, such statements convey “the kind of risks that a far-flung group of citizens can recognize as shared, and thus worthy of collective concern and action, and those that will, despite their ubiquity, seem isolated events that will never break the surface of widespread attention.” Where the contamination of municipal pipes is liable to produce “hydraulic publics” (Anand 2017) [12] through citizen science initiatives demanding government responses, in contrast, the failure of housing to also support healthy living practices has been more difficult to articulate and engender such collective demands and actions around. Compared with pipes that leach lead, the inability to access housing, (let alone secure tenancy in affordable housing that supports tenants’ positive health outcomes) is more likely to be explained by individual shortcoming.
In the United States especially, the shift from public housing to the curtailed state provision of vouchers for housing in the private market has also effected a privatisation of responsibility for infrastructural failure. This is evident in the logic of pipe replacements in New Orleans: householders, or in what is now a city of majority renters, landlords, are responsible for replacing pipes from the curb to the kitchen. The privatisation of infrastructural provision and failure, or in Ara Wilson’s (2016)[13]phrase, the “unbundling” of public infrastructure under neoliberalism, exacerbates the contemporary “concrete divide”[14] between the infrastructural haves and have-nots. Often presuming models of home-owner tenants, building science recommendations for healthy homes are typically quiet on the means renters might use to improve their water or their indoor air quality without risking eviction by punitive landlords. Put differently, while affordable housing advocacy might prioritise the issue of domestic infrastructure’s effects on tenants’ health, on behalf of establishing minimum healthy housing standards, building scientists and hygienists must also become advocates of tenants’ rights.
As Fennell writes, “while ‘we’ might all be at risk of ingesting toxins, some of us can spit back the lead soup that leaches from ‘our’ pipes, even as others must swallow the lead dust that flakes off ‘our’ walls.” This is the challenge of infrastructural inequalities: who can spit back what? How can we conceive and respond to problems that are shared, but never evenly? And how do infrastructures themselves give rise to particular kinds of publics and specific potentials for collective action?
Open Your Eyes at the F. Edward Hebert Defence Complex, New Orleans
A version of this essay was originally presented to open the Infrastructural Inequalities public program at Artspace in October 2018 – a collaboration which is ongoing between the Housing for Health Incubator and Snack Syndicate. That event pulled together artists, activists, academics, and other professionals, because facing the challenges of infrastructural inequalities requires responses that are equally creative, collective, critical, and technical. As Sara Ahmed[15] writes, “It takes conscious willed and willful effort not to reproduce an inheritance”, and any work against social reproduction requires a broad coalition, locally organised and institutionally disparate, flexible to internal difference and critique, and open to ongoing reorientation. In the contexts described above, community-led planning and local organising around water monitoring and against further extraction is working towards ensuring the ongoing security of communities in the face of flooding and contamination. As citizens and as allies, we might reflect on how we can contribute to an “infrastructure of dissent”[16], which is a social, intimate infrastructure, and which like concrete can also be “built, material, and lasting”[17].
[1]Bennett, Jane. 2009. Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
[2]Caldeira, Teresa P. R. 2000. City of walls: Crime, segregation, and citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press.
[4]Ahmann, Chloe. 2018. “It’s exhausting to create an event out of nothing”: Slow violence and the manipulation of time. Cultural Anthropology. 33(1): 142-171.
[5]Quoted in Spring, Joel and Munro, Lorna. 2018. Survival Guide. Radio Skid Row. Accessed: https://soundcloud.com/radio-skid-row/sets/survival-guide; Araluen, Evelyn. 2019. To outlive a home: Poetics of a crumbling domestic. Cordite Poetry Review. 1 February.
[6]Lerner, Stephen. 2010. Sacrifice zones: The front lines of toxic chemical exposure. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
[7]Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011. Economies of abandonment: Social belonging and endurance in late liberalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
[8]Larkin, Brian. 2013. The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology. 42: 327-343.
[9]Anand, Nikhil. 2015. Leaky states: Water audits, ignorance, and the politics of infrastructure. Public Culture. 27(2): 305-330.
[10]Bacigalupi, Paolo. 2015. The Water Knife. Vintage Books: New York.
[11]Fennell, Catherine. 2016. Are we all Flint? Limn. (7): https://limn.it/articles/are-we-all-flint/
[12]Anand, Nikhil. 2017. Hydraulic city. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
[13]Wilson, Ara. 2016. The infrastructure of intimacy. Signs: Journal of women in culture and society. 41(2): 247-280.
[14]Gandy, Matthew. 2004. Rethinking urban metabolism: Water, space and the modern city. City. 8(3): 363-379.
[15]Ahmed, Sara. 2014. White men. feministkilljoys. 4 November.
[16]Alan Sears quoted in Brett, Matthew. 2015. Building an infrastructure of dissent. New Socialist. 17 February.
[17]Cowen, Deborah. 2017. Infrastructures of empire and resistance. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3067-infrastructures-of-empire-and-resistance
In 2006 I led a four-month study of Guadalajara, Mexico… my hometown. It began as an exploration of vernacular and utilitarian forms of architecture and their connection to social patterns. As the investigation deepened, there was an evolution in thinking from:
what architecture is (as an object or series of objects)…
to what it does (as a contributor to urban processes)…
to urban processes as constituent parts of larger city systems…
to the operation of city systems as complex combinations of the planned and the unplanned.
This was a real pivot point – the beginning of a transition away from a practice focusing on objects toward a focus on systems and the messy realities of cities as complex assemblages of physical, social and economic structures.
It was the start of a new direction – effecting processes of transformation for the informal cities of the Global South.
Bruno Booth studied science, and then he studied design, and then he became a street artist, and then his art started to find a home within the walls of galleries. At each stage of his artistic evolution, his work has become more personal, more deeply rooted in his experience of the world from the perspective of someone in a wheelchair. With his breakout installation Hostile Infrastructure at Melbourne’s Testing Grounds, Bruno now asks that you, too, suffer (a little at least) for his art.
“When Emma asked me to write an article for The Fulcrum Agencies new journal, we talked about how my practice has pivoted from illustrative graphics to participatory installations. In particular she was interested in how I’ve managed to translate my skills as a painter into producing my current work. Although it looks like I’ve made a radical shift, to me it feels like an extension of what I’ve been doing my whole life. I’ve tried many different things and have had three seemingly distinct careers, but really, they’re all related.
The more I make work about (my disability), the more I’m asked about it. It’s nice. I like talking about it.— Bruno Booth quoted on Broadsheet.com.au
I grew up in a small village in Lancashire. There wasn’t much to do there apart from get into trouble, ride motorbikes (an enjoyable way to get into trouble), go camping if the weather permitted or hang out at friends’ houses getting high and listening to music. It was here that I decided I was going to become a famous musician. I was going to learn to play guitar/learn to rap, form a band with my mates, play our first gig and then decide to sign a record deal with EMI or DefJam. Things didn’t go exactly to plan. I never managed to get that major label deal, but music taught me to be creative, appreciate patterns and gave me a wealth of life experience. What it didn’t give me was a way to support myself, so in my early-20s I made a conscious decision and changed direction.
My second love was Evolution. Learning about Darwinism and natural selection at university was a trip. The idea that every living thing – including the chickens in my garden, the trees out my window and the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park – are the product of an impossible number of tiny, accidental changes over millennia had me hooked. I did two degrees in the Sciences and ended up working as a Hydro-geologist, a pivot that I had not intended and work that I didn’t really enjoy. So, I decided, once again, to make a change.
I started my career in the arts soon after turning 30. I studied Graphic Design at TAFE with the idea that I would work in the industry after I graduated. Again, the best laid plans have a habit of being derailed by life. Studying design introduced me to the world of contemporary art; grand ideas, personal narratives and a desire to communicate experiences. I went to exhibitions, attended artist talks and before I knew what was going on, I had changed direction again.
It’s true that the work I’m making now is a departure from what I was making a few years ago but to me it feels like an organic change. My work now is all about disability, the way people perceive it and the experiences that are awarded to me as a result of seeing the world a bit differently. All the jobs that I’ve done, people I’ve met and sub-cultures that I’ve been a part of feed into my practice. Yes, my work has pivoted, but I don’t see what I’m doing now as an end point at all. I fully expect to pivot again, the one thing I don’t know is when this will happen or what I’ll be doing next. I’ve always liked food so maybe I’ll start my own quince paste empire, who knows.”
I go places, I judge the space, and I think, “This’ll be fine, there’s a step there, but this looks surmountable,” but then I get there, and suddenly it isn’t.— Bruno Booth quoted on Broadsheet.com.au
