Hasta la Raiz

For the first time in a long time, this summer I found myself without full-time work. This was an active choice on my part having retired early from professional architectural practice in order to teach, organize, and write more. But within this space I found myself thinking about the cost and opportunity of spare time.

It started when a friend of mine asked me to come to his daughter’s Pre-k class to talk to them about being an architect. I was mortified. While a big part of my life is teaching, it’s at the college level, and even there I struggle with the immaturity of freshman. What was I going to talk to four year olds about?

As much as I struggle with my profession, I settled on reading Iggy Peck architect, and I won’t lie - it was a hit. I couldn’t believe how many questions and thoughts these future architects had about buildings. They asked about fire escapes, building materials, and shared their own designs they had been working on. Even the teachers were in on it. I left the school buzzing and laughed at how nervous I was before I went.

With the ample time I had ahead of me, the next week I looked for other opportunities and settled on working with the Prospect Park Alliance. In addition to supporting the park in other ways, the organization pairs volunteers with basic projects around the park. For the rest of the summer, I spent Thursday mornings pulling weeds, painting lamp posts, and spreading mulch. Some of the work felt impactful, and some of it felt like the gardening equivalent of paper pushing. But after years of sitting at a desk and staring at a screen, it felt great regardless of what we were doing.

The best part though was meeting the other retirees, teachers, jobseekers, and new-New Yorkers. I met park service members new to the city who taught us about forest management in Utah, witnessed a lawyer find a job through a fellow volunteer at the park, and heard stories from a self-proclaimed socialist anti-Zionist who struggled with his own family’s deep affinities to Israel.

In multiple ways, it was a chance to confront the entrenched problems big and small around us. When weeding, we were getting rid of the invasive plants that were choking out the good ones while helping to maintain the infrastructure of the park. If you let these plants go, they not only make the park uglier, but they can easily destroy the things that look and feel permanent. It’s impressive what weeds can do to pavers and park benches if left unattended.

But we were also doing something that feels rarer these days: meeting people we didn’t know. Not only did this give us with spare time on our hands a chance to connect to our neighbors, but actual things came out of it. I assumed that when I no longer saw some of the unemployed folks, they had found a job. And like I mentioned, more than one of these came through volunteer connections.

In other words, when we were removed ourselves from the daily grind of things that appeared more important, we got a chance to look at things a little differently. I think this is something that in our overworked, over-digitized and too-isolated society we’re in desperate need of.

A lot of life is like this. We let problems that seem unimportant fester, until they aren’t. Take social media. What was promised as a utopian form of community has devolved into a cesspool of misinformation, body-shaming, and pointless consumption. Gen Z has higher rates of depression than many before them. Correlation doesn’t mean causation, but social media certainly isn’t solving any problems. The worst part is we all know something is off but continue to participate, hoping someone else will fix the problem. But the roots are deep now, and the task of cleaning up the mess is Herculean.

I think this is a crucial question for socialist politics. That is: how do we afford people more time to pursue projects of care? And how do we incentivize them to do so? I wrote about the idea of mandatory public service for Democracy at Work’s substack, which is one possible path. There are many other ideas. But first we need to collectively decide that material well-being includes not just economic security, but a politics of care and community.

In architecture, we’re taught to value new things above all else. This is fair in a lot of ways. But the line between necessity and vanity is blurred, and the reality is a lot of the economic activity that supports architectural practice today boils down to rich people tired of the way their kitchens look. And we often forget that the things we’re designing aren’t permanent, just like the benches in Prospect Park. What would architecture look like if it focused on maintenance and care?

Others have written about this, but I like the idea of a public office of architecture that residents could tap into for necessary repairs and renovations to their homes, for example. This would do two things: first, it would bring design expertise to people who typically can’t afford it, and second, it would force architects to interact with people and projects they don’t normally have the chance to. For a profession that has become cloistered to revel at projects for and by the wealthy and prop up its own self-referential culture, it’s a chance to make itself relevant and useful to the broader public once again.

Share

One of the questions I kept asking myself this summer was: why do we try to talk ourselves out of doing things that we know will be good for us? And others?

I’m no stranger to service having done AmeriCorps, but it’s easy to feel like I’ve checked the box and don’t need to do more. But nothing could be further from the truth. Every time I didn’t feel like heading to the park to volunteer for a few hours, I was reminded within minutes of why I kept coming back. It’s a psychological (and philosophical) question that keeps churning, but the reality is as humans we’re wired to chase comfort and minimize discomfort. Which is what makes contemporary issues like AI so dangerous, as it removes any of the resistance required for important things like real learning and dialogue. But it also incentivizes us to continually chase new shiny things while neglecting to care for the existing institutions around us.

I think one thing we can all agree on is something needs to change, and soon. While it’s not a panacea, volunteering, service, and the work of care could go a long way to reorient us to not only things that matter, but things that make us feel good about each other.

We should absolutely keep fighting for the 4-day work week, universal healthcare, social housing, and the big policy goals that could transform American society. But at the same time, we better have some ideas about how to fill the time and opportunities that comes with these policies. Otherwise, we’ll be spending all our time weeding instead of building.