react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture

Full volume

How do we imagine the places where we are? How do we construct them and construct images from them? Drawing on a diverse set of scholars whose work draws attention to the local as a theoretical apparatus for art and architectural history and practice, this volume centers histories of, and critical approaches to, local placemaking and its imaginaries. The city of Santa Barbara, where a critical mass of our editorial team is located, underpinned developmental conversations for this issue, implicit in the way we posed questions about the local, the contingent, the vernacular, and the small. Here, we take local architect Jeff Shelton’s underpass renovation project on lower State Street as a point of departure for imagining beyond an apparently unified vision of “beautiful” Santa Barbara. Through the project’s playful destabilization of Santa Barbara’s “California Spanish” style, the plurality of the town comes into view, shattering its unified aesthetic vision into disarranged facets. This fracture is suggestive of a kaleidoscope, which we take as an analytic for considering Santa Barbara’s urban fabric across space and time. By suggesting dimensions not immediately apparent to the eye, the kaleidoscope evokes the diverse content of contributions to this volume. Articles in this issue address the plurality of place in historical interpretation and social praxis by investigating how local places and things evade categorization, disaggregate the seemingly cohesive, and create structures for community formation and minority agency.

Bound to one another by a single strip of umber ribbon, three pairs of inscribed Atlantic scallop shell-bound pressed seaweed albums rest in the collection of the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Algae, also named ‘seaweed’, ‘sea moss,’ or the romantic if scientifically inaccurate ‘ocean flowers,’ in the nineteenth-century came to be understood as simultaneously ancient, ubiquitous, divine, and curious. It became a fascinating material for early naturalists to collect and for Victorian coastal visitors to lovingly dry and press into delicate albums. As environmental anxieties over increased industrialization, resource exhaustion, and climatic instability in the Victorian period surface in coastal New England, this small, handheld set of three scallop-bound seaweed albums represent a single group’s position within these webs of theoretical discourse. I argue that ecological practices of algae collection formed spaces where gender boundaries could be both enforced or transgressed, where picturesque coastal tourist activity collided with natural history exploration, and where the boundaries between romantic, deified Nature and middle-class white leisure activity meet an enlightened, colonial taxonomy. As a souvenir of personal sentiment, though, this scallop album trio and its inscriptions reflect the lived reality of the three named women inscribed on its pages: Genie M. Lovell, Mrs. T.R. Green, and M.R. Hinckley. Therefore, I argue that within these layered relations, this portable album of natural illustrations exposes the intimate, affective labor through which oceanic imperialism was naturalized, embedding global regimes of classification within personal memories of a seaside New Bedford in transition.

Arranged to take up the entirety of the page, the delicate tendrils of seaweed specimens look as if they were fresh from the seawater of the Pacific Ocean they emerged from some 150 some years ago. Carefully laid out and adhered to paper, their colors are a gradient of reds and soft pinks. Looking closer, some of the delicate ends of the preserved plants are yellow. These striking pieces of unidentified marine algae were collected on the coast of California between 1875 and 1886 in an area called Mishopshno by the Chumash, and renamed Carpinteria by the Spanish in 1769. The preserved “sea moss,” as they were often called at the time, are part of a larger album created by Juliette Fish. Born in Iowa, Fish traveled with her family at the age of sixteen to the newly formed state of California via covered wagon in 1862. She began her practice of “seaweeding” around 1865. Fish gathered these marine plants on her family’s land on the beach in Carpinteria, which was later acquired by the state in the 1930s. Her albums are one example of materials, categorized outside of the “fine arts,” that records an aspect of local placemaking.

Tulare Lake, California, once the central source of water for the San Joaquin Valley, has reemerged in the popular imagination as a haunting reminder of California’s changing relationship with water, environmental extraction, and regional identity. During the unprecedented rains of 2023, Tulare Lake expanded to fill its nineteenth century perimeters and reached media attention as “a phantom lake,” returning to claim its ancient land after years of colonization. The socio-spatial phenomenon of Tulare Lake is a story that can be traced back centuries through entangled livelihoods, infrastructures, farming and folklore. This article discusses two dynamic ethnoarcheological models enacted at Tulare Lake, California, and the analogous contested site of Lake Texcoco, Mexico City, which reactivate a migratory potential of place-making, territorialization, and archival practice. In the multi-temporal epistemologies of these charged and complicated sites, their work demarcates the lakebed as an interstitial and migratory space built from multiplicities of community, materiality and belonging. 

Faye Dowling asks what historiographies can be revealed in the unstable ontology of a lakebed. Her approach to Mexico City’s Lake Texcoco is mediated by Colombian artist Adriana Salazar’s multimedia project, including a 2014 field photograph of the empty basin. Salazar’s work reveals an alternate ethnography, allowing the lake to divulge its multiple temporalities and celebrating what Dowling refers to as the unanchored and indeterminate qualities of a lake. In this response, I use Dowling’s idea of the unstable lake to place Lake Como, the alleged birthplace of landscape photography, as a site resistant to fixity through the photographs of Como resident Antonio Nessi.

In a 2021 retrospective of Wallace Neff’s long and prolific career as a residential architect, historian Eleanor Schrader praised him for “[his] ability to combine Spanish, Tuscan, Mediterranean, Islamic, and other design elements […] seamlessly into something he called ‘The California Style.’” Neff gained recognition for his celebrity commissions, many of which were located in the picturesque Benedict Canyon, a luxury Beverly Hills neighborhood with mature trees and winding streets.

The Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California Santa Barbara hosts an archive of Neff’s work, which is integral to Southern California’s canon—a canon shaped more by the industrial wealth of Hollywood elites than by the agricultural enterprise of migrant workers. Yet, Benedict Canyon was named by and for Edson A. Benedict, a farmer whose family made settlement on the land and built a house thereon. This paper uses land entry files—in other words, U.S. General Land Office records that document the transfer of public lands to settlers—to reconstruct and recenter Benedict Canyon’s early residences in Southern California’s architectural history. It argues that although these early residences were designed and built by and for non-professionals, they, too, are integral to the region’s turn-of-the-century imaginary.

The historiography of Southern Californian architecture is marked by divergent interpretive frameworks, oscillating between celebratory narratives and noir critiques. Historians and architectural historians have long grappled with the region’s heterogeneous built environment, shaped by successive waves of settlers, immigrants, and, more recently, exiles and émigrés who made California their adopted homeland. Despite their differences, most accounts underscore the state’s stylistic pluralism and the incorporation of diverse architectural vocabularies drawn from multiple cultures and geographies into its cultural landscape. 

Nestled between two University of Chicago buildings, stands Henry Moore’s bronze sculpture, Nuclear Energy, which commemorates the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi’s scientific achievement of the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Placed purposefully on the site where the creation took place, the sculpture not only signals a direct locally minded recognition of its spatial history but remains inextricably linked to global sites elsewhere through its implicated technological and discursive resonance that has transpired since the proliferation of atomic as well as nuclear matters. Since the monument’s positioning on the institution’s campus in 1967, the piece of public art has been returned to and activated by a wide range of artistic and civic communities. This paper introduces how these ensuing interactions, those between the monument and its visitors, can alter the evolution of a public work of art’s cultural heritage. It is simultaneously the sculpture’s attachment to proximal and distal relationships, to those physical and discursive sites elsewhere driven by atomic as well as nuclear cultures, that elucidate the capability of scalable, intersectional, and transnational connections. Nuclear Energy, then, is a case-study in how public art and public collectives might enjoin in memory work to redirect and alter ongoing narratives with new spatio-historical messages for a radical future.

This response article expands Lucas Gómez-Doyle’s discussion of Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy (1967) by examining how multidirectional cultural sites generate forms of community through sustained engagement with material objects. While Gómez-Doyle emphasizes the sculpture’s capacity to connect multiple histories, geographies, and political concerns, this essay shifts attention toward the social processes that emerge around such activations. Drawing on museum studies and a pedagogical exercise conducted within the Art, Design & Architecture Museum Internship Program at UC Santa Barbara, the article argues that monuments, classrooms, and museums can all function as infrastructures for collective reflection. Across these distinct settings, objects and sites become anchors through which individuals gather, interpret shared experiences, and negotiate unresolved histories together.

In Milwaukee, residents discuss and formulate care for their neighborhood as a counternarrative to the dominant stereotypes that are sadly perpetuated in ungrounded studies of urban problems that fail to give real people agency. Urban Milwaukeeans’ histories are overshadowed by towering narratives of urban racial segregation, freeways demolition, deindustrialization, and most recently, housing crises and police brutality. Those narratives exist within a network and continuous timeline of neighbors gathering to address these problems by activating spaces in which to share food, supplies, stories, support, and strategies. Care is important as a foil––but it cannot be romanticized. It emerges from local histories, cultural values, and social hierarchies. In order to expand the study of neighborhood care, I call attention to how it is situated in local histories and social values. This article explores this formulation of neighborhood care through a case study from my dissertation fieldwork with attention to historical forces and corresponding oral history excerpts to better analyze how collective care emerges in a specific place through a collective understanding.

This article examines the rapid transformation of many Sub‑Saharan African villages into emerging small urban centres, focusing on the case of Nyandiwa, a fast‑growing settlement on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria. Despite its demographic expansion and its role as a service hub for surrounding rural areas, Nyandiwa remains an informal and unplanned settlement, where traditional social structures coexist—often uneasily—with the pressures of urbanisation. The article presents a participatory design experience developed within the Master’s Thesis Laboratory Architectures for Developing Countries at the Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria, directed by the author. Over the past decade, the Laboratory has engaged students in co‑design processes with local communities across Sub‑Saharan Africa, in partnership with NGOs and municipal institutions. In Nyandiwa, this approach led to a series of design proposals, including a project dedicated to the fishing communities whose livelihoods depend on the omena value chain. The project integrates architectural support structures—drying facilities, processing rooms, communal spaces, and a pier—with a contemporary reinterpretation of Luo spatial traditions, aiming to strengthen local autonomy and economic resilience. Although not yet implemented, the project exemplifies the educational, social, and transformative potential of participatory design in contexts marked by informality and structural vulnerability.

This article examines the architectural material dissolution but ontological liveliness of Casa Galamba in São Pedro de Moel, Portugal, through a dual narrative that operates simultaneously on physical and epistemic planes. On the material level, we document concrete dissolution—salt corroding concrete, wood surrendering to Atlantic moisture, tiles cracking under winter storms. On the epistemic level, we reveal how this decay symptoms a deeper erosion: the loss of "sufficiency literacy," the existential know-how of inhabiting limits as plenitude. Through ethnographic documentation across three generations, we trace temporal compression from 120 to 15 annual days of occupation, a pattern often misread through market logic as economic failure. Yet a methodological rupture—occurring precisely when the guardian daughters' testimonies revealed love as epistemological practice—transforms our analysis. What conventional economics interprets as financial naïveté reveals itself as sophisticated alternative literacy: the capacity to read dwelling not as property but as verb, to recognize sufficiency where speculation sees only scarcity. A child's bare feet reading waxed floors embodies this literacy's final transmission—tactile knowledge accumulating in a body that will witness its extinction. Using São Pedro de Moel as method, we demonstrate how specific local dissolutions illuminate global patterns of coastal commodification and dwelling's transformation into asset. The article contributes to architectural theory by proposing "archaeology of the inhabited present" as methodology for recognizing epistemological resistance—competencies the Anthropocene urgently demands, where true literacy reads not scarcity but the sufficiency that makes life whole.

Digital methods like Geographic Information Extraction from Texts (GeoExt) promise novel perspectives on place by liberating spatial data from unstructured text. Yet their chain of abstractions relies on assumptions that seem fundamentally opposed to critical understandings of place as porous, contested and always in excess of its representations. This paper focuses on the place of Glenferrie: the area I grew up in in Melbourne, Australia. Drawing on Donna Haraway and Karen Barad’s perspective of diffraction, and Sophie Niang’s method of scavenging, I use Glenferrie to articulate a method for representing places that repurposes existing processes for text analysis and GeoExt, without reducing the complexity and chaos of place. This mapping exercise explores the tension place exhibits between global/local, universal/particular and objective/subjective binaries to uncover the contradictory landscape of indigenous, colonial and immigrant histories of Glenferrie, while also revealing the contradictory elements of GeoExt and cartographic tools themselves. Place and method are read through each other through diffractions of three components of a typical GeoExt process: toponym disambiguation, the location of place in text, and visualisation in Cartesian and cartographic space. In doing so, I demonstrate diffraction as a practical method for re-envisioning the relationship between computational abstraction and the complexity of place, showing how methods that can seem to suffocate the local and the human might instead become generative, experimental and world-enriching.

Mountains, rivers, screens, wires…the natural and the video mechanic activate one another in Shigeko Kubota’s (1937-2015) video sculptures. The Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation’s Workshop and Video Artspace in Beacon, New York presented a selection of six works made between 1976 and 1996 during its open studio exhibition in Upstate Art Weekend from July 17 to July 21, 2025. The exhibition highlights Kubota’s formal and conceptual innovations in presenting natural landscapes through television monitors and sculptural forms. The assortment of landscapes shown narrate Kubota’s journey of place-making as she moved from her birthplace Niigata, Japan to Tokyo, and later, New York City. 

Despite how they are sometimes articulated, histories are rarely singular stories. Shaped by overlapping social, political, and economic forces, dynamic cultural geographies, and historical agents with conflicting interests, histories are stories with a nearly endless capacity for telling and retelling. The historian’s challenge is to tell these stories without foreclosing this complexity. In The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra, Joseph Godlewski confronts this challenge by adopting a theoretical framework of entanglement to analyze the spatial history of Calabar, a port city in southeastern Nigeria, from the sixteenth century to the present. Refusing a singular understanding of Calabar’s history, Godlewski uses entanglement to tell a history of linkages, between local and global, past and present, spatial and socio-political, that presents the spatial history of Calabar as one of multiple intersecting temporalities and geographies. Drawing upon a wide range of archival sources, Godlewski centers the spatial dynamics of Calabar to bring the city into architectural discourse, demonstrate its centrality to the construction of global modernity, and illustrate its spatial paradigms as sites of Black identity formation.