Jared Macken is an architectural designer and theorist who researches the intersection between architectural form, the city, and cultural production. He received his Doctor of Science in Architecture from the ETH-Zürich in 2018, his Master of Architecture from the University of Illinois Chicago in 2011, and his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design from Wichita State University in 2002. He is now Assistant Professor of Architecture at Oklahoma State University where he teaches design studio and elective courses that research the typology of the town center as manifested within the small town in Oklahoma. His master’s thesis at the University of Illinois Chicago was published as the award winning book The Western Town: A Theory of Aggregation (Hatje Cantz, 2013), and completed with generous support from The Graham Foundation. He previously taught at the ETH, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Kansas, and Wichita State University.

“Collective Housing in Taos: An Architectural Inquiry Across Time”
will explore, analyze, critique, draw, and ultimately learn from the diverse forms of collective housing found in and around Taos, New Mexico.

This summer students will research Taos’s rich contribution to collective housing, including but not limited to:

1. Taos Pueblo, 1325 CE–Present
2. Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, 1200 CE–Present
3. Taos Earth Ships, 1970’s
4. Valverde Commons, 2006
5. Taos Town Square, 1796–present

Each of these structures have become important cultural spaces for the communities who built them. In the case of Taos Pueblo and the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, the community has inhabited and cared for these spaces for hundreds of years, providing the class with case studies that connect contemporary issues related to housing shortages and climate change to a deep cultural history. In addition, we will look at case studies from architecture’s history, including but not limited to:

1. Ivan Leonidov’s Town of Magnitogorsk, 1930’s
2. MVRDV’s Mirador Housing, 2005
3. OMA’s Nexus World Housing, 1991

We will also learn about architectural tools of representation and analysis, which will help us better understand these structures at two scales: the unit of aggregation or the individual; and the whole or the collective. We will use the drawing coupled with field trip observations as the main method of research.

For more information, email Dr. Jared Macken:
jared.macken@okstate.edu

This research deconstructs the cultural phenomenon of the rodeo through the lens of architecture by tracing its history, analyzing its structures, and examining the ideologies that are projected onto them. Viewed this way, the rodeo can be understood as a cultural space that challenges America’s colonial history and demonstrates how under-represented communities have embraced the rodeo and made it their own.

The origins of the rodeo in the U.S. can be traced back to the emergence of wild west shows in the mid 1800’s. During their inception, wild west shows constructed a setting that recreated the acts of colonization, specifically propagating the myth of manifest destiny. They accomplished this feat by constructing structures that orchestrated interactions between humans and animals, while providing viewing platforms for spectators, thereby constructing a spectacle out of an expansionist narrative. These interactions simulated events that would normally occur unobserved by an audience in the prairie, but now retold the history of America’s westward expansion at the very time that this colonization effort was taking place. Over time, the wild west show’s performance spaces were adapted by communities in both rural and urban areas, giving birth to the modern rodeo, which perpetuated this cultural space’s colonial underpinnings.

The structures used in a rodeo demonstrate high degrees of control to receive, corral, and release animals into an arena where they interact with human performers and are observed by human spectators. While the form of these structures—animal pens, chutes, bleachers, parking lots, and concession stands—allows them to support specific functions, the voids between create spaces of opportunity, places where freedom of movement and impromptu interactions give rise to cultural production. Instead of reinscribing traditional “cowboy culture” and rehearsing the ethos of manifest destiny, these rodeo spaces can be appropriated by different cultural groups and identities to choreograph their own simulation of society. These simulations, embodying the values and ideology of identity groups, challenge some of the core elements of the mainstream image of the rodeo. While the structures create very specific effects—unpredictable interactions between humans and animals—they are indifferent to the varying ideologies projected onto them. For instance, the All-Black Rodeo, the Women’s Rodeo, the Native American Rodeo, and the Gay Rodeo promote inclusive communities where a wider range of ideologies are given a chance to participate in rodeo events.

Today, the rodeo has become a substructure; underrepresented communities and subcultures project their own identities onto the grounds using the indifferent structures to create speculative spaces to build their communities. Within this context, this paper calls into question the relationship between architectural form and function, and the role this plays in shaping society through the manifestation of ideologies within culture. The cultural spaces of the rodeo can then be used as a critical lens by understanding the relationship between the architectural structures of the rodeo, and the ideologies of underrepresented and suppressed communities that transform the rodeo into an inclusive space.

An Architectural Exhibition
that Analyzes Towns in Oklahoma Through the Lens of Architecture

The exhibition “The Legend of the Town Center: Ordinary Form, Radical Ideology” critically examines the historical narratives and architectural forms that made colonizing what was once designated “Indian Territory” possible. This process of colonization—the taking of Tribal land, the erasure of Tribal culture, and replacing it with new pioneer narratives—was accomplished by designing and constructing towns that were used, in conjunction with land runs, to impose new power and ideologies on this territory. The exhibition explores, analyzes, and critiques the histories of towns in Oklahoma, in particular the main streets that were at the center of the communities that made these towns possible. The exhibition starts to revise staid historical narratives that do not accurately portray the motivations behind colonization, while at the same time highlight moments where the ideals of underrepresented communities have been suppressed. What results is just a beginning, a starting point for retelling this particular phase of America’s expansion through the lens of architectural knowledge and methodologies.

This exhibition is the research of Assistant Professor Dr. Jared Macken. For more information or questions, email him at:
jared.macken@okstate.edu

Exhibition Location:
Edmon Low Library
Peggy V. Helmerich Browsing Room #205

Radical Ideologies, Ordinary Form

The photo above shows the model that was constructed with students from ARCH 4100 (Spring 2023) called “A Monument to Ordinary Architectural Parts.” This semester we will build similar models as a way of finding, analyzing, and exaggerating architectural parts from Oklahoma towns. These models will also help us better understand how architectural form is both a product of and generator or cultural space. We will also search for moments where these spaces were constructed by underrepresented communities.

Course Abstract:
The “Legend of the Town Centre” explores, analyzes, critiques, and learns from the towns in Oklahoma and adjacent prairie states through the history of the town centre, a ubiquitous architectural typology that spans the history of the city. We will use history as a conceptual genealogy, architectural discourse as theoretical guide, and typologies as source of form and inventive methodology. The class will identify case studies from the state and then decipher how they contribute to architectural discourse on the city. Case studies will include homesteads, main streets, county seats, and ghost towns and their individual structures spaces.

Main Streets and Architectural Form
At what moment do individual structures become a larger form? At what stage of development do these conglomerates of architectural form constitute a city? What kind of architectural links allow this to happen? This course will explore the relationship between single architectural objects that comprise what architect Fumihiko Maki calls “collective form” of the city. This year, the course will focus on the architectural elements that create links between individual objects, and how these elements transform into a collective form. Our main case study will the main streets across the state, including the amazing individual structures and comprise them.

Understanding the Towns of Oklahoma
Through the Lens of Architecture

The “Legend of the Town Centre: Ordinary Form Radical Ideology” explores, analyzes, critiques, and creates speculative models from the towns in Oklahoma by way of the history of town centers—a ubiquitous architectural typology that spans the history of the city. This examination utilizes architecture as a disciplinary lens for viewing a special moment in the history of America’s Expansion: the formation of towns just before, during, and after Oklahoma became a state.

As such, history is utilized as a conceptual genealogy, architectural discourse as a theoretical guide, and typology as a source of form and for inventive design methodologies.

The exhibition looks at four town typologies that materialized sometime between the 1850’s and 1910’s. It examines case studies from these typologies as a way to understand the role architectural form played in manifesting the ideologies of the communities that developed the state.  In addition, the exhibition used architectural discourse to decipher how these towns make new contributions to the history of architecture and the city.

This exhibition comes from research that has been conducted through different academic collaborations with undergraduate students in the School of Architecture. The course ARCH 4100: The Legend of the Town Center initiated this architectural inquiry. Honors Credit students and a Wentz Scholar have also made contributions, creating a discursive conceptual dialogue that explores complex ways that architectural discourse can be both enhanced by case studies from Oklahoma but also used as ways of understanding these architectural and urban forms.

The exhibition is organized by two methods of research and representation:

1. Case studies of town typologies
2. Speculative and conceptual representations that provide images and models of these towns, depicting them in ways that we can never fully see in archival historical artifacts.

There are very few photos of these towns, and we never get a wholistic view of them through a single archival source. These depictions create artifacts that transport us to these towns. For example, detailed plans and architectural models are used to fill in these representational gaps, allowing us to visit these towns through architectural modes that represent the towns at the height of their development. These drawings and models act more like historical fictions than history books. These drawings are based on fact but also use architectural discourse and design methodologies to create speculative and conceptual images of these towns.

Towns in Oklahoma were constructed with “Ordinary Architectural Parts,” or seemingly banal elements of architecture that were used to create main streets. This fascinating use of architectural form that is first unassuming but then radical, cultural, and interactive reorients our perception of the history of the main street. This analysis discovers and highlights alternative historical narratives embedded in the construction of Oklahoma towns, exposing how they constributed to America’s westward expansion, but also highlights the histories of underrepresented communities. These speculative realities provide new implications for how architecture functions as a medium and messaging device in contemporary culture.

November 2023

‘We lie, as Emerson, said, in the lap of an immense intelligence. But that intelligence is dormant and its communications are broken, inarticulate and faint until it possesses the local community as its medium’
John Dewey

‘Change life! Change Society! These ideas lose completely their meaning without producing an appropriate space. A lesson to be learned from soviet constructivists from the 1920s and 30s, and of their failure, is that new social relations demand a new space, and vice-versa’
Henri Lefebvre

In 1903, the town of Boley emerged in the middle of the prairie in what the United States government called “Indian Territory.” The town was founded as a utopian community based on the simple idea that its inhabitants—freed African American slaves of the Muscogee Creek Nation and adjacent Southern states—could live in freedom and make a home. The town was located on the sovereign lands of Native Americans and grew out of an intersection of different historical events: the legal end of slavery, the lack of racist segregation laws since the territory was not yet a state, and the necessity for founding a town that was inclusive of Black Americans. By 1907 the town was thriving when the Black educator and intellectual Booker T. Washington travelled to Boley by train and extolled this cosmopolitan town of 2,500 people. While the idea that unified the town’s community was radical at the time—a whole town constructed by Black Americans seeking freedom and a place to call home in the midst of a prairie beginning to fill up with all-white towns—the form of the town was ordinary. Boley constructed a typical main street comprised of individual storefront businesses, each representing a different member of the community, aligned side-by-side forming a street.

Today, the town of Boley barely exists. That main street that Washington visited can only be experienced through disparate visual data from digital archives such as archival photographs, essays, books, articles, census statistics, and first-person oral history narratives to name a few. Digitized resources are integral to preserving the memory of towns like Boley, especially given Washington’s description of this compelling urban space founded on a radical ideology. More importantly, these resources allow us to discover the speculative potential of towns like Boley, whose histories and narratives were actively suppressed. However, many times these digitized artifacts are disconnected and represent a fragmented view of the important histories they represent.

This project explores one project that unifies digital artifacts using architectural modes of analysis and representation to create new speculative experiences. This research uses disparate digital resources related to this historically significant town of Boley, Oklahoma to create new artifacts though composite drawings. These new artifacts consolidate all the digital resources that describe the physical characteristic and social interactions of the town. Architectural discourse becomes an important tool of analysis when used with modes of representation to reconstruct an image of Boley’s main street as it would have been experienced by Washington in 1907. This new image then speculates on how the form of the town intersects its radical social ideology. In the process, this new imaginary deconstructs the typical historical narrative of the state—that Oklahoma and the American West was formed by individual white Western European “Pioneers” who were realizing the myth of “manifest destiny”—and allows this new suppressed narrative of the African American experience to rewrite the history of American Expansionism.

This semester the ARCH4100 course focused on the main streets (and similar urban forms) of Oklahoma and studied the way individual structures link with  other individual structures to form this ubiquitous collective structure. Our research discovered the ways that even the shrinking small town can contribute to architecture’s discourse on the city.

For instance, the axon in the poster above depicts the Paseo Arts District in Oklahoma City. The pink areas show the unique miniature plazas or niches created by little setbacks in the aligned storefronts. These niches are cultural spaces that help transform Paseo into an arts district.

Radical Ideologies
Ordinary Form

The image in the poster above is a speculative recreation of the “All-Black Town” of Boley, Oklahoma depicted as a model that imagines an alternate history. The Spring 2023 semester of ARCH 4100 will research how towns like this one formed. In addition, the class will explore how the community’s ideologies were linked to specific architectural forms of the main street, revealing an alternative historical narrative that explains how the state was developed as America expanded its territory west.

An article written under "The Talent Agent" persona…

A Place to Stay:
A Study in Subverting Infrastructure and the Master Plan

This semester students worked on a collective project to submit for the Schindler Award, an international student competition held every year. In 2014, the competition was sited in Shenzhen. The studio started with the conceit of throwing a wrench in the already well-greased network of the city. In this case, the students inserted the plan of Paris, the classical city, into the finely tuned 20th Century city of Shenzhen. Each student had to reconcile a different part of the collision of these two antithetical plans of the city. The result was a 7 foot by 7 foot axon/planametric/sectional drawing that was not quite a master plan.

Creating New Cultural Dialogues through Design

Support for this work is provided by a Rocket Grants project award, a program of the Charlotte Street Foundation and the University of Kansas Spencer Museum of Art. Funding is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

The strange structures felt much better and even safer since they found the courage to talk to each other. After all, they would see each other in the vacant parking lot every day. Now the parking lot is a little less strange since the other inhabitants of the city see them conversing. They are now acquaintances! Lean-tos, sheds, even the old vacant store want to be their friends now!

This project consists of two transient or itinerant structures, characteristics not typically associated with built architecture. These architectural Strangers come to the city from some other location and confront each other in a vacant parking lot—one of the most open yet isolating places in the American city. While inhabiting the void of the parking lot, the Strangers become critical of it. These structures will be either welcomed, perceived as suspicious, or completely ignored.

A Shift from Monolithic Body to Coherent Disparate Parts

In the middle of the twentieth century the city was conceptualized within architectural and urban discourse as a body. Architecture was then thought of as having an organ-like solution to repairing this body, which was thought of at various times in the twentieth century as being deficient. With this metaphor came a city-based design project that attempted to reign in post-war city expansion, one of these identified deficiencies. The results were varied, but at its core this new city was so predetermined that it rarely allowed for the original free spirit of the early metropolii. Or so it has also been argued. The foundation of these ideas can be traced Le Corbusier’s insertion of a city within a building, the monolothic Unité D’habitation, an attempt to make sense of the city as it changed through heavily programmed monumental objects.

The plan above starts to reimagine Le Corbusier’s idea of a city within a building by disemboweling the architectural body of Le Corbusier’s Unité, allowing the programmatic form to spill into the prairie of Kansas. As a result a new relationship between architectural form and programmatic use emerges, a shift from a body with organs as well as organs without a body to a characteristically different cultural form: the organs without a body. Within this formal modality of small-scale organs, architecture no longer focuses solely on a priori programmatic use. Form no longer follows function. Instead the organs that once were contingent upon a predetermined wholistic form allow for a new in-between that does not need a monumental object-like coherence to survive culturally in part because these organs allow for existing constituencies in the city to define hierarchical use. At the small-scale these organs functions more like stage sets that can be defined by inhabitants and entities in the city.

What emerges from the prairie is not a monumental object, but a collection of architectural and cultural characters.

*An inversion of Deleuze’s “How to Build Yourself a Body without Organs.”

Architectural Project in the City: The Town Centre

In 1960’s England, a new architecture project on the city emerged within discourse and practice: the town centre. This book examines a specific set of case studies from four different regions of England, each example designed by Owen Luder. These case studies reflect discourse of the time, challenged the field of architecture’s modus operandi, expanded architectural discourse, and created an urban architecture that engaged with many constituencies of the city.

One dominant motivation behind the emergence of these projects was the rebuilding effort in England which focused on reconstructing bombed out city centres. By the 1960’s, local and national governments increased land-use permits for privately funded commercial spaces in city centres, a shift from housing and school construction efforts immediately following the war.

Simultaneously, Luder started his first practice in the early 60’s, and quickly partnered with developers and investors, creating a perfect storm of conditions for building town centres—money, resources, and vision.

These projects have been type-cast as megastructures and brutalist projects. This research extracts Luder’s project from these categories and reinserts them into architectural discourse. Luder’s town centres choreographed specific architectural disciplinary effects thereby creating new atmospheres and experiences in the city, specifically when it came to shopping. This was accomplished by engaging with the Townscape movement, another misunderstood discourse in English architectural history. Therefore, this book also spotlights the origins of Townscape as a form of radical picturesque, as described in 1949 by the founder of Architectural Review, I. de Wolfe. The emergence of this discourse on the radical picturesque in post-war England paved the way for Luder’s project and fostered direct connections with key theoretical figures writing about Townscape in the 60’s.