Issue 4
ISSUE
STORY TYPE
AUTHOR
12
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
October 7, 2024
What It Means—and What It’s Worth—to Be “Light”
by Julie Lasky
12
PERSPECTIVE
September 23, 2024
Redefining “Iconic” Architecture and Ideals
by Sophie Lovell
12
PERSPECTIVE
September 9, 2024
Surrendering to What Is
by Marianne Krogh
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
August 26, 2024
Sometimes, Democratic Design Doesn’t “Look” Like Anything
by Zach Mortice
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
August 19, 2024
What Does Your Home Say About You?
by Shane Reiner-Roth
11
BOOK REVIEW
August 12, 2024
Is Building Better Cities a Dream Within Reach?
by Michael Webb
11
PEOPLE
August 5, 2024
The Value of Unbuilt Buildings
by George Kafka
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
July 29, 2024
Future-Proofing a Home Where Water Is a Focus and a Thread
by Alexandra Lange
11
BOOK REVIEW
July 22, 2024
Modernist Town, U.S.A.
by Ian Volner
11
PEOPLE
July 15, 2024
Buildings That Grow from a Place
by Anthony Paletta
10
URBANISM
June 24, 2024
What We Lose When a Historic Building Is Demolished
by Owen Hatherley
10
PERSPECTIVE
June 17, 2024
We Need More Than Fewer, Better Things
by Deb Chachra
10
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
June 3, 2024
An Ode to Garages
by Charlie Weak
10
PERSPECTIVE
May 28, 2024
In Search of Domestic Kintsugi
by Edwin Heathcote
10
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
May 13, 2024
The Perils of the Landscapes We Make
by Karrie Jacobs
10
PERSPECTIVE
May 6, 2024
Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence
by Jarrett Fuller
9
PERSPECTIVE
April 29, 2024
Why Can’t I Just Go Home?
by Eva Hagberg
9
PEOPLE
April 22, 2024
Why Did Our Homes Stop Evolving?
by George Kafka
9
ROUNDTABLE
April 8, 2024
Spaces Where the Body Is a Vital Force
by Tiffany Jow
9
BOOK REVIEW
April 1, 2024
Tracing the Agency of Women as Users and Experts of Architecture
by Mimi Zeiger
9
PERSPECTIVE
March 25, 2024
Are You Sitting in a Non-Place?
by Mzwakhe Ndlovu
9
ROUNDTABLE
March 11, 2024
At Home, Connecting in Place
by Marianela D’Aprile
9
PEOPLE
March 4, 2024
VALIE EXPORT’s Tactical Urbanism
by Alissa Walker
8
PERSPECTIVE
February 26, 2024
What the “Whole Earth Catalog” Taught Me About Building Utopias
by Anjulie Rao
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
February 19, 2024
How a Run-Down District in London Became a Model for Neighborhood Revitalization
by Ellen Peirson
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
February 12, 2024
In Brooklyn, Housing That Defies the Status Quo
by Gideon Fink Shapiro
8
PERSPECTIVE
February 5, 2024
That “Net-Zero” Home Is Probably Living a Lie
by Fred A. Bernstein
8
PERSPECTIVE
January 22, 2024
The Virtue of Corporate Architecture Firms
by Kate Wagner
8
PERSPECTIVE
January 16, 2024
How Infrastructure Shapes Us
by Deb Chachra
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
January 8, 2024
The Defiance of Desire Lines
by Jim Stephenson
7
PEOPLE
December 18, 2023
This House Is Related to You and to Your Nonhuman Relatives
by Sebastián López Cardozo
7
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
December 11, 2023
What’s the Point of the Plus Pool?
by Ian Volner
7
BOOK REVIEW
December 4, 2023
The Extraordinary Link Between Aerobics and Architecture
by Jarrett Fuller
7
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
November 27, 2023
Architecture That Promotes Healing and Fortifies Us for Action
by Kathryn O’Rourke
7
PEOPLE
November 6, 2023
How to Design for Experience
by Diana Budds
7
PEOPLE
October 30, 2023
The Meaty Objects at Marta
by Jonathan Griffin
6
OBJECTS
October 23, 2023
How Oliver Grabes Led Braun Back to Its Roots
by Marianela D’Aprile
6
URBANISM
October 16, 2023
Can Adaptive Reuse Fuel Equitable Revitalization?
by Clayton Page Aldern
6
PERSPECTIVE
October 9, 2023
What’s the Point of a Tiny Home?
by Mimi Zeiger
6
OBJECTS
October 2, 2023
A Book Where Torn-Paper Blobs Convey Big Ideas
by Julie Lasky
6
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
September 24, 2023
The Architecture of Doing Nothing
by Edwin Heathcote
6
BOOK REVIEW
September 18, 2023
What the “Liebes Look” Says About Dorothy Liebes
by Debika Ray
6
PEOPLE
September 11, 2023
Roy McMakin’s Overpowering Simplicity
by Eva Hagberg
6
OBJECTS
September 5, 2023
Minimalism’s Specific Objecthood, Interpreted by Designers of Today
by Glenn Adamson
5
ROUNDTABLE
August 28, 2023
How Joan Jonas and Eiko Otake Navigate Transition
by Siobhan Burke
5
OBJECTS
August 21, 2023
The Future-Proofing Work of Design-Brand Archivists
by Adrian Madlener
5
URBANISM
August 14, 2023
Can a Church Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis?
by Alex Bozikovic
5
PEOPLE
August 7, 2023
In Search of Healing, Helen Cammock Confronts the Past
by Jesse Dorris
5
URBANISM
July 31, 2023
What Dead Malls, Office Parks, and Big-Box Stores Can Do for Housing
by Ian Volner
5
PERSPECTIVE
July 24, 2023
A Righteous Way to Solve “Wicked” Problems
by Susan Yelavich
5
OBJECTS
July 17, 2023
Making a Mess, with a Higher Purpose
by Andrew Russeth
5
ROUNDTABLE
July 10, 2023
How to Emerge from a Starchitect’s Shadow
by Cynthia Rosenfeld
4
PEOPLE
June 26, 2023
There Is No One-Size-Fits-All in Architecture
by Marianela D’Aprile
4
PEOPLE
June 19, 2023
How Time Shapes Amin Taha’s Unconventionally Handsome Buildings
by George Kafka
4
PEOPLE
June 12, 2023
Seeing and Being Seen in JEB’s Radical Archive of Lesbian Photography
by Svetlana Kitto
4
PERSPECTIVE
June 5, 2023
In Built Environments, Planting Where It Matters Most
by Karrie Jacobs
3
PERSPECTIVE
May 30, 2023
On the Home Front, a Latine Aesthetic’s Ordinary Exuberance
by Anjulie Rao
3
PERSPECTIVE
May 21, 2023
For a Selfie (and Enlightenment), Make a Pilgrimage to Bridge No. 3
by Alexandra Lange
3
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
May 8, 2023
The Building Materials of the Future Might Be Growing in Your Backyard
by Marianna Janowicz
3
BOOK REVIEW
May 1, 2023
Moving Beyond the “Fetishisation of the Forest”
by Edwin Heathcote
2
ROUNDTABLE
April 24, 2023
Is Craft Still Synonymous with the Hand?
by Tiffany Jow
2
PEOPLE
April 17, 2023
A Historian Debunks Myths About Lacemaking, On LaceTok and IRL
by Julie Lasky
2
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
April 10, 2023
How AI Helps Architects Design, and Refine, Their Buildings
by Ian Volner
2
PEOPLE
April 3, 2023
Merging Computer and Loom, a Septuagenarian Artist Weaves Her View of the World
by Francesca Perry
1
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
March 27, 2023
Words That Impede Architecture, According to Reinier de Graaf
by Osman Can Yerebakan
1
PEOPLE
March 20, 2023
Painting With Plaster, Monica Curiel Finds a Release
by Andrew Russeth
1
PERSPECTIVE
March 13, 2023
Rules and Roles in Life, Love, and Architecture
by Eva Hagberg
1
Roundtable
March 6, 2023
A Design Movement That Pushes Beyond Architecture’s Limitations
by Tiffany Jow
0
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
February 7, 2023
To Improve the Future of Public Housing, This Architecture Firm Looks to the Past
by Ian Volner
0
OBJECTS
February 7, 2023
The Radical Potential of “Prime Objects”
by Glenn Adamson
0
PEOPLE
February 20, 2023
Xiyadie’s Queer Cosmos
by Xin Wang
0
PEOPLE
February 13, 2023
How Michael J. Love’s Subversive Tap Dancing Steps Forward
by Jesse Dorris
0
SHOW AND TELL
February 7, 2023
Finding Healing and Transformation Through Good Black Art
by Folasade Ologundudu
0
BOOK REVIEW
February 13, 2023
How Stephen Burks “Future-Proofs” Craft
by Francesca Perry
0
ROUNDTABLE
February 27, 2023
Making Use of End Users’ Indispensable Wisdom
by Tiffany Jow
0
PEOPLE
February 7, 2023
The New Lessons Architect Steven Harris Learns from Driving Old Porsches
by Jonathan Schultz
0
PERSPECTIVE
February 7, 2023
The Day Architecture Stopped
by Kate Wagner
0
OBJECTS
February 7, 2023
The Overlooked Potential of Everyday Objects
by Adrian Madlener
0
ROUNDTABLE
February 7, 2023
A Conversation About Generalists, Velocity, and the Source of Innovation
by Tiffany Jow
0
OBJECTS
February 7, 2023
Using a Fungi-Infused Paste, Blast Studio Turns Trash Into Treasure
by Natalia Rachlin
Untapped is published by the design company Henrybuilt.
PERSPECTIVE
05.30.2023
On the Home Front, a Latine Aesthetic’s Ordinary Exuberance

Domestic settings that embrace rasquachismo simultaneously claim space and build communal knowledge. Why aren’t more architectural historians looking into it?

A house with objects and toys dangling off of it behind a fence
Photo: Kathryn O’Rourke


In 2006, as an undergraduate studying Christian sites and relics, I was taken by acts made in the name of transmission: embarking on long pilgrimages to find healing from sites of martyrdom; viewing bodies, clothing, or hair from virtuous beings past to receive their miracles; bringing home statuettes of saints to pass on their powers to family. We preserve these sacred rituals so that they might continue imparting their wisdom, yet these items and expeditions are made by humans and could, in another time or context, be considered commonplace.

I still find myself thinking about ordinary objects and actions made significant—not by religious events or holy men, but by everyday people. Lately I’ve been drawn to the notion of rasquachismo, a word (pronounced ras-kwa-cheese-mo) with many Spanish translations. Much of rasquachismo literature indicates that it describes an attitude, an ethos, while its root word, rasquache, describes something “vulgar, poor, or of a lower quality, status, or value,” as scholar Laura G. Gutiérrez puts it in an essay about the subject. For her, rasquache is also “associated with a person who has some of these characteristics and who is resourceful and creatively inventive out of a necessity to make do.”

Most Chicano or Latine Americans, and those who have spent time in Latine communities, will recognize the rasquachismo aesthetic: It regularly appears on the home front, both privately and publicly, where making do manifests as houses painted in bright colors, reusing coffee cans as flower planters in backyards, and plentiful interior decorations made from quotidian objects, among other D.I.Y. embellishments. But it can also be elderly women chatting on their stoops or the neighborhood watch, as poet and cultural activist Roberto Bedoya argues in his 2014 essay “Spatial Justice: Rasquachification, Race and the City.”

All these interpretations are valid, and share a throughline that is perhaps most palpable in domestic settings: Rasquachismo, as I’ve come to understand it, is a means for the underdog to build civic power. It is a quality built of grit and space, and it is assertive not only in its color or material accumulation, but through its transmission.

A makeshift chapel under a wooden deck
(Photo: Anjulie Rao)


Though rasquachismo has a recognizable appearance, its definition is slippery. Who’s saying the word and to whom, and about whom, determines the word’s meaning. Chicano studies scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto has penned several essays about rasquachismo, including his famous “Rasquachismo: a Chicano Sensibility” (1989), which paints a vivid portrait.

“To be rasquache is to be unfettered and unrestrained, to favor the elaborate over the simple, the flamboyant over the severe,” he writes. “In the barrio, the environment is shaped and articulated in ways that express the community’s sense of itself, the aesthetic display projecting a sort of visual biculturalism.” To him, any number of objects, acts, or relationships could be rasquachismo: “Sometimes I think that all Chicanos are rasquache except you and me, and sometimes I wonder about you!” Slippery, indeed.

Also layered into the term is its connection with a working-class sensibility. Curator and educator J. Gibran Villalobos, whose work for the National Museum of the American Latino Act informs the Smithsonian’s forthcoming National Museum of the American Latino, sees rasquachismo as directly connected to social status. “It’s a recognizable aesthetic only after we understand the circumstances that have led to it,” he told me. “When I think of rasquachismo, I might think about it as the socioeconomic conditions that lead us to make those choices that then are reflected in the aesthetics of what we see.”

That means that rasquachismo might look different depending on the city or region. It might change depending on, say, a pandemic, a recession, or an inflation crisis, shifting one’s capacity for making do.

A red deck with pinwheels on it.
(Photo: Anjulie Rao)


But there’s something particularly powerful about rasquachismo when considered through the lens of where and how people live. The decorative aesthetic that manifests on houses and lawns—often on view for all eyes to see—becomes a means to transmit a socioeconomic condition outward, to claim space and to communicate the power of those conditions to outsiders. Something sacred, and monumental, is transmitted through rasquachismo.

It also transcends borders: While the complexities of the American Latino identity are shaped by their distinct origins—Dominican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican, and so on—rasquachismo unites them by transmitting the power of brownness. “Identity is a problematic term when applied to Latinas/os—groups who do not cohere along the lines of race, nation, language, or any conventional demarcation of difference,” the late Cuban American academic José Esteban Muñoz wrote in his posthumous book The Sense of Brown. But “feeling brown,” or being a problem, he continued, “is also a mode of belonging through recognition […]: Feeling an ‘apartness together’ through sharing the status of being a problem.”

This perspective resonates with art historian Deanna Ledezma, who told me that rasquachismo is a “silent nod or communication” to others, a way to create a sense of belonging in spaces where identity is fraught. Ledezma studies domesticana, a Chicana version of rasquachismo, and notes how artist and curator Amalia Mesa-Bains defines it: as a feminist practice primarily done at home—a place, Ledezma says, that Mesa-Bains “recognizes as being ‘both a palace and a prison,’ where women can assert power”—by claiming space through makeshift altars of everyday items and the more public capilla, or small chapels.

Domesticana has traditionally relied on exerting power in the home under patriarchal conditions, but, like rasquachismo, it results from shifting socio-economic conditions that produce the aesthetic. So as women’s economic and social power grew, domesticana made its way outside the home. Ledzema has explored this change through the work of Chicago-based photographer Diana Solís, and has also observed domesticana in intermediary spaces, like window sills. There, Ledzema says, “I saw little plants, flags, and religious shrines. It made me think about the window as this semi-public space, the most porous boundary between public and private.” In other words, these strategically placed altars are a public means of cataloging what happens in private, of transmitting information.

In this way, rasquache decor becomes a tool for building communal knowledge that can, potentially, be used to counteract the too-frequent displacement of brown communities. These silent nods, or as Villalobos calls it, “the squeaky wheel that raises the issues that are seemingly complicated by whiteness,” become a means to build agency and belonging in one’s block or neighborhood—and to fight to keep it.

Living in a time where, as architectural historian Kathryn O’Rourke has pointed out, rasquache neighborhoods are vanishing as a result of gentrification, static wages, and increasing housing costs, you’d think that rasquachismo would occupy a larger part of the vernacular. Why aren’t more architectural historians looking into the aesthetic to reflect on places like San Antonio, where most of its “‘high’ architecture,” as O’Rourke describes it, “was long influenced by Mexican colonial architecture and imagined by affluent patrons as somehow representing Mexican/Anglo bi-culturalism”? And imagine the new modes of understanding, she adds, that might be gained from thinking about buildings in a rasquache way. Too few are doing either. In American cities, rasquache is abundant. As with trees, we often fail to acknowledge phenomena that are right in front of us.

A window with religious figurines in it.
(Photo: Anjulie Rao)


Bedoya, the poet and activist I mentioned earlier, is also a giant in the field of belonging. His work, which utilizes the terms placeknowing and placekeeping, opposes capitalist manifestations of urban interventions like placemaking. That term, he argues, is a project of the white spatial imaginary: policies, architectural projects, and laws created to racialize and dispossess marginalized communities. Placeknowing and placekeeping, however, help people orient themselves to their identities—who we are in relation to a particular space—and to maintain those identities.

“What is your relationship to your neighbors? What is your relationship to the folks coming out of the neighborhood bar?” he asked me a few years ago. “Those relationships are keeping you wanting to keep those things alive […], and to keep that sense of being is essential.” Muñoz, the late academic, called these connections the “brown commons”: the “feelings, sounds, buildings, neighborhoods, environments, and the nonhuman organic life that might circulate in such an environment.” But the qualities that make those elements brown, he pointed out, have the “potential for the refusal and resistance to often systemic harm.”

Villalobos, the curator, believes that brown commons’s resistance to white spatial placemaking is its reliance on rasquachismo’s constantly shifting socioeconomic conditions, making those commons particularly resilient to change. “Latino placemaking is better served when we think of it through the legacy of time, movement, migration,” he says. “What Latino placemaking tries to do is reference the expressive gestures that bubble up and then disappear. That’s why they’re so difficult to grasp onto.” It also makes those gestures difficult to demolish, diminish, or erase.

Today, I continually return to rasquachismo. Though it is a movement that doesn’t belong to me or my identity, my mixed heritage and brown skin are a problem. I am brown visually, but I am also brown in my feelings, in my relation to the world. Unlike the saintly relics or churches from my past studies, I painted my house purple as a means to transmit my existence, and my brownness, to the outside world. The altar in my home is a second-hand IKEA shelf with trinkets from my deceased grandmother’s travels. Rasquachismo’s ordinary exuberance transmits brownness as knowledge, as belonging, as a will to remain a problem—sacred in its own right to exist.