One [book] whose sentences and images have been rattling around in my brain since I began reading it a few weeks ago is “Atlas of Another America,” by Keith Krumwiede, an architect who teaches at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and MIT.
It is that rare thing in architecture: a book of satire. (Its subtitle is “An Architectural Fiction.”) It lays out the history of a place called Freedomland, an imaginary new town that brings together Thomas Jefferson, garden city planner Ebenezer Howard and the back-to-the-land collectivism of 1970s Northern California. Krumwiede cribs the basic designs of the houses in Freedomland from the big U.S. home-builders: KB Home, Toll Brothers, Meritage Homes and the like. But then he reconstitutes them, stringing or mashing them together to form an odd new kind ofcommunal housing.
Let me begin by saying that because it never really lets its guard down as a piece of satire, “Atlas of Another America” is a tough book to ask questions about! I'm genuinely curious about your approach but asking on-the-nose questions seems to risk missing the point in a massively obvious way. It feels like interviewing Stephen Colbert — I'm not sure if you're going to be in character. When you do readings and lectures promoting the book, do you do it as Keith Krumwiede the architect and academic or as the impresario of Freedomland?
Actually, there is only Keith Krumwiede, the impresario. Seriously, though, that’s been something that I’ve struggled with as I prepare for some lectures this spring. Right now, I’m leaning toward doing a full Colbert, putting on my seersucker suit with a straw fedora.
What prompted you to turn your work in the direction of satire?
After the recession started, it seemed that every architect was responding by proposing better houses, or should I saymore architecturally beautiful houses. From my perspective, this missed the point entirely. It seemed to me that super-homes made from the monster houses of the boom years was the perfect vehicle through which to explore the contradictions inherent in our collective consciousness while at the same time imagining other possible ways that we could live, and live together. That was the birth of Freedomland.
What I found exhilarating about the process was that I was able to hold opposing views and philosophies in the space of the one project. I could use exaggeration, a classic tool of humor and satire, to inflate these already large houses into even larger, grander and consequently even more absurd domestic piles while at that same time suggesting that these palaces could be a model — tied as they are to lost strands of thought in the history of American housing — for new forms of shared living.
Why do you think satire is such an unusual register in architecture?
Architecture, it could be argued, is about putting things in order, cleaning things up, making them right. Satire, as a kind of fiction, often does just the opposite. There’s a quote that I use in the book from [New Yorker staff writer] Larissa MacFarquhar that I really love where she says, “Fiction is about creating foolishness and practical difficulties and allowing them to tangle and fester until they are beyond repair.”
If forced to choose, would you say the book is the product more of your disillusionment with residential architecture and patterns of living in the U.S. or with the way we (architects, critics, academics) think or write about that architecture and those patterns?
It’s certainly both but more the latter. And actually, I wouldn’t say it’s disillusionment; it’s more about frustration in both cases. I’m a bit of a misanthrope so I have no illusions any longer about how people, citizens or architect-citizens, will behave.
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