APPENDX: Culture/Theory/Praxis

APPENDX: Culture/Theory/Praxis was founded by Darell W. Fields (then a doctoral student at Harvard), Kevin L. Fuller (designer), and Milton S. F. Curry (assistant professor at Arizona State University), with institutional sponsorship from both Arizona State University and the Harvard GSD. The journal positioned itself explicitly at the intersection of race, culture, and design discourse. It’s inaugural issue opened with a provocation: “When three black men congregate, it is usually assumed that they are about to sing, dance, shoot hoops, or start trouble.” This opening framed the journal’s critical orientation, foregrounding questions of race, cultural perception, and intellectual practice. They embrace the idea of being here to start trouble, albeit they claim that “The trouble is not defined by overt maliciousness, but merely by the thoughtful presentation of our ways of seeing.” Recognizing that the diversity of positions and lived experiences at the intersections of race, class, ethnicity, and gender remained absent from the discipline —and were rarely considered for a rigorous critique of architecture, the editors asserted:“We, the editors, are not shouting to be included in the academy –indeed, we are already here. We are more interested in conveying, from our various positions, our insights and experiences from within the discipline in order that these essential positions not continue to be overlooked […] We began looking for a space of resistance and rigorous critique of accepted canons from which new possibilities for the discipline could emerge. We found no such place and began to make one from scratch. These circumstances make APPENDX not only possible, but necessary. […] Needed is a journal that will provide a place to redefine scholarship as an inclusive, rather than exclusive, endeavor.”

The journal was organized into categories that framed distinct modes of knowledge, with their sequence varying across issues. Syntax engaged practice; Verbatim addressed theory; and both Precinct and Adjacency are explored culture —Precinct as a familiar, situated context for the editors, and Adjacency as a newly articulated or previously unexplored one. Darell Field’s opening “Black Manifesto” (Precinct, issue 1) was seminal in defining the voice of APPENDX, offering a cultural construction through which to interpret both the inaugural issue and those that followed. Equally significant was Cornell West’s “On Architecture” (Verbatim, issue 2), which established a framework for interrogating the politics of difference and its implications in cultural practices. Under Syntax, more closely aligned with disciplinary constructs, essays by Mark Donohue, Prescott-Scott Cohen, and George Legendre (all affiliated then with the GSD) extended architectural inquiry from within the institution. By contrast, Adjacency ventured further afield, presenting speculative writings on architecture and gender, as well as architecture and sexuality. Despite the editors’ commitment to inclusivity and their intention to add new voices to architectural discourse, the final piece of the last issue was a letter from Lucia Allais expressing alienation from the very language of the journal’s editorials —particularly that of issue 3— whose rhetoric was explicitly embedded in identity politics. The implications of this critique remain open to interpretation, but they raise questions of enduring relevance: how might discourse ultimately pursue a model that strives toward equity and belonging?