architecture abstraction

Who?

I research military landscapes and the production of heritage, memory, and space. In the summer of 2014, I begin a position as a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in American Studies at the University of California, Davis, working under the mentorship of Prof. Caren Kaplan. I am currently working on a book manuscript based on my dissertation. My study looks at the landscapes for memorializing the 1944 Port Chicago explosion in the San Francisco Bay Area and the subsequent African American work strike to resist segregation in the military. (I'm also preparing two academic papers and a book chapter for a collection from this research project).

I hold a PhD in geography from the University of California at Berkeley, completed with support from a Ford Foundation Fellowship and a Bancroft Library Award. I also have experience and training as an oral historian. I've collaborated on archival research and interviews with the University of California's Bancroft Library Regional Oral History Office, Rosie the Riveter World War II National Home Front project. I hold an undergraduate degree from Cornell University in architecture—a discipline that continues to shape my spatial inquiries and ideas. I have several years of experience in architectural education, criticism, and design.

In 2010, I co-founded an experimental landscape collective called Demilit along with Bryan Finoki and Nick Sowers. We guide tours, organize events, and produce sound and visual art pieces. We have completed works for—among others—the Headlands Center for the Arts, Deutschlandradio (Germany), and the 2012 New City Reader at the Istanbul Design Biennial. Recent articles published together include a piece for Volume (architecture periodical) and a design fiction that was featured in the exhibition Timing is Everything at the UCSD University Art Gallery. I also frequently collaborate on educational programs with Beta-Local, a not-for-profit art space in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Demilit is currently developing experimental projects on surveillance, sounds, and spatial traces.

In my next study, I plan to look at the historical geography of the Spanish conquest in contemporary securitized cities. And in another tentative investigation, I will work on the relationship between military urbanism and the politics of planning for climate change in cities.

Broadly speaking, I study urban cultures, social imaginaries of cities, the history of cities, contemporary architecture, and network culture. I'm interested in knowing about ideas of urban space, and how these ideas propel urban conflicts and changes.

I was born and grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico where I continue to establish cultural exchanges, research, and dialogs. The colonial history of militarized landscapes in Puerto Rico under several empires pushes me to continue documenting a spatial knowledge of everyday forms of violence anyplace else I go.

Top: United Architects' WTC proposal. Bottom: Tarantino's Kill Bill

I was going through some old files and found this image. I used to use it in my classes in Puerto Rico to speak about some of the ideologies of representation. Something about it reminded me about burying the past as if it were ‘done’ (i.e 9-11). Seems appropriate somehow now to raise the issue of ‘what’s next?’

Javier Arbona

Geographer

After abstractions?

Propagate: