Projects

“Walter Burley Griffin and Architectural Discourse”

Walter Burley Griffin is the third main Prairie School architect, along with Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1914 he was offered the deanship of the School of Architecture, University of Illinois, and learned he had won an international competition to design a new capital for Australia at Canberra. He moved to Australia, and later to India. This project concerns the architectural discourse on Walter Burley Griffin from the perspective of postcolonial studies and the critique of orientalism. Griffin’s work in three different cultural and architectural milieux continues to make it difficult to connect his corpus in a coherent whole. From Chicago, Griffin looks like someone who left just as his architectural career was getting going. From Australia, Griffin is sometimes viewed as the person who brought architectural modernism to the Antipodes. From India, Griffin looks like another crosscultural misunderstanding.

“’Samu Teleki’”

“Samu Teleki” refers to the hand-painted logo on the open truck I rode in carting downscale tourists from Nairobi to Lake Turkana. Sámuel Teleki was the first European explorer to see the large lake in northern Kenya that he named Lake Rudolph after crown prince Rudolph of Austria in 1888, and which was renamed Lake Turkana in 1975 after the main African group living there. This project discusses Lake Turkana through three successive lenses: travel/exploration, ethnography/archaeology, and tourism. Regarding travel/exploration, Teleki’s discovery occurs during the so-called “scramble for Africa.” Archaeologically, Lake Turkana is the “cradle of mankind” where the Leakey’s made their path-breaking finds concerning human origins. Even low-end Kenyan tourism to Lake Turkana includes stops at a couple of game parks. Safaris are Kenya’s main international tourist attraction, and they include swanky safari lodges, animal watching, plus evening tourist performances by resident “natives,” typically Samburu.

“Long Ago in a Land Far Away: Israel, 1989”

Combines meditations and reflections, vignettes and conversations; written as a pastiche of things seen, read and heard.…In Beirut, a Druse militiaman pokes his AK-47 rifle into a reporter’s car window, and asks straight-faced: “Who shot J.R.?” …As I turn the corner, acrid smoke. The raised flower bed in front of the museum is on fire. How does a garden catch fire? I ask the guy in the ticket booth. He replies, “Someone tossed a cigarette.” Sure, I say to myself…Levi Eshkol, former Treasury Secretary: “What we need is a Secretary of the Colonies.” “But we have no colonies in Israel.” “I’m Secretary of the Treasury, yet we have no money.”… Arab-Israeli waiter in South African Jewish fish restaurant. Quiz him in Hebrew on where we’ve seen him before. The American embassy? The Hilton? There he was nasty, whereas here he only orders for us (“you don’t want that wine, this is the one you want”). With the tip I murmur a furtive “as-salāmu ʿalaykum.” On the way out, he eyeballs me, to thank me for the generous tip or the greeting? Don’t be ridiculous — for the tip.