CityLab: Is Beige the New Black in Architecture?

Why are cafeteria walls set up in the ornate, Tiffany-domed Chicago Cultural Center, home to the biennial’s main exhibit? It turns out that Preissner and Andersen are in good company. Many of the projects here are similarly interested in elements of architecture that are boring, banal, or ugly. In various acts of image rehabilitation or re-contextualization, this festival makes a home for outcasts and weirdoes, often stigmatized in design because they just aren’t weird enough.[...]

“Visions of Another America” is one of an entire category of projects at the biennial that use collage and aggregation to tear down hierarchies and widen the circle of serious architectural consideration. This idea, of transparently re-appropriating architecture for use in other architecture, is itself outside the canon, as architects have historically dreaded admitting their ideas aren’t only peerless products of singular genius. [...]

There is a populist advantage to not explaining history from an assumed position of authority (in architecture, usually a bespectacled and suited white man). But that risks the loss of a sense of coherent narrative the broader public needs to understand. The biggest danger with exhibits on the color beige and glazed tile is that visitors will see elements of their own lives on stage, but might not know how to connect it to a larger story. The question of whether there is a larger story to tell will be, explicitly or implicitly, on the mind of many biennial curators and visitors to come.

read the article and see the photos 

The Atlantic: Why Was Chad Included in the New Travel Ban?

Chad’s inclusion on the list of countries deemed security risks to the U.S. is additionally difficult to explain given its role over the past 15 years as a key counterterrorism ally. In April, U.S. forces participated in annual counterterrorism exercises with their counterparts from around the world in Chad. Chad’s inclusion in the list was met with astonishment in the country, and not only because this close counterterrorism partnership: The country has mostly managed to avoid the kinds of terrorist attacks that have afflicted its immediate neighbors like Nigeria and Mali.

“Chad sits in a very tough neighborhood,” Lauren P. Blanchard, a specialist in African affairs at the Congressional Research Service, told me. The country is a relative oasis of stability. It hosts French and U.S. forces, is engaged in fighting al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in Mali, was critical in pushing back Boko Haram in Nigeria, and plays host to the Multinational Joint Task Force, the regional military effort to fight Boko Haram. [...]

The U.S. State Department, in its most recent country terrorism report from 2016, acknowledged Chad’s financial challenges in providing “external counterterrorism assistance in Cameroon, Niger, and Nigeria,” but noted that Chad “engaged in major external military operations in … neighboring countries,” as part of the Lake Chad Basin Multinational Joint Task Force, which includes Benin, Cameroon, Niger, and Nigeria. Chad, the State Department reported added, was also contributing to the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali. Additionally, the report pointed out that terrorist incidents in the country had fallen due both to “proactive security force presence” and a split within Boko Haram. [...]

Terrorism aside, Chad certainly has its problems. These include an authoritarian government under President Idris Déby, politicization of the armed forces, and widespread poverty despite the country’s oil wealth. But the country—and the wider region—remains a key focus of Western counterterrorism efforts. Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, who until recently was commander of American Special Operations Forces in Africa, called the Lake Chad Basin, which encompasses Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria, “ground zero” of the war on extremism in Africa. Blanchard told me “Chad is very important in figuring out movement between ISIS elements in Libya and Nigeria—they have to go through Chad or Niger.”

read the article

The New York Review of Books: Germany’s Election: Choosing the Unspeakable

The apparent calm of the election belied the real concerns of the German public, concerns evident in the election results. Merkel began her campaign late and then barely campaigned; she gave plain speeches that rarely mentioned her opponents. To the eyes of the public, the two major parties seemed nearly identical. This provided the AfD with an opening to be the opposition. If people turned to a party that said the unspeakable, it was partly because very speakable things weren’t being said at all. [...]

“Merkel and Schulz: they agree,” read a headline after the one TV debate of the election season, in which the two candidates seemed to bat canned answers back and forth. The four other parties that will enter the Bundestag, or Parliament—in addition to the AfD, the economically liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), the Greens, and the far-left Die Linke—were relegated to a follow-up show the next evening. Merkel and Schulz barely discussed the eurozone. Education and NATO spending did not come up. [...]

The central issue of the campaign, migration, barely came up at all in most of the speeches by Merkel and Schulz. Merkel herself hardly mentioned the subject in her campaign, as if hoping the issue would simply go away. The CDU’s “strategy was to not talk about it, hoping in vain that voters wouldn’t realize it,” Dr. Timo Lochocki of the German Marshall Fund told me. 

read the article

The Atlantic: The Misunderstood Roots of Burma's Rohingya Crisis

Tensions between the Bengali-speaking Muslims and Buddhists in Rakhine state have existed for decades—some would say centuries—but the most significant inflection point came in 1982 when Burma’s junta passed a law that identified 135 ethnicities entitled to citizenship. The Rohingya were not among them, though they had enjoyed equal rights since Burma became independent from British rule in 1948. Almost overnight, they were stripped of their citizenship.

In the years since then, the Rohingya were persecuted, steadily lost their rights, and were the victims of violence. The worst of this violence erupted in 2012 following the rape of a Buddhist woman allegedly by Muslim men. That prompted massive religious violence against the Rohingya, forcing 140,000 of them into camps for internally displaced people. International pressure resulted in the military government agreeing to grant the Rohingya a reduced form of citizenship if they registered themselves as Bengali—not Rohingya. Although many Muslims in Rakhine state were previously indifferent to how they were labeled, the years of oppression, combined with the type of citizenship they were being offered, made the offer unpalatable. [...]

For the Burmese government, the word Rohingya is particularly fraught. This is because if the government acknowledges Rakhine’s Muslims as members of the Rohingya ethnic group, then under the 1982 citizenship law—ironically, the same measure that stripped the Rohingya of their citizenship—the Muslims would be allowed an autonomous area within the country. And therein lies the crux of the problem: The Burmese fear a Rohingya autonomous area along the border with Bangladesh would come at the expense of Rakhine territory. The Burmese military, which has cracked down on Rohingya civilians, views this as a possible staging area for terrorism by groups like ARSA.

read the article

The Atlantic: Angela Merkel Reorients Germany

Why was Angela Merkel just elected to a fourth term as German chancellor? Ahead of Sunday’s election, the German journalist Robin Alexander offered one explanation. Since the economy is thriving and the nation’s politics are relatively placid despite the disruptive rise of a far-right populist-nationalist party, many Germans think they’re living on a “ship of stability and around us it’s very stormy.” Consider: Vladimir Putin changed Ukraine’s borders by force; Donald Trump, who “in German eyes behaves like a madman,” was elected president of the United States; Britain voted to exit the European Union; and France, had Marine Le Pen won this year’s presidential race, might have left the bloc as well, destroying the entire EU project. [...]

The United States has served as a model for German democracy and as a guarantor of German security, both through NATO and America’s nuclear-weapons arsenal. The European Union has allowed Germany to become a leading power in Europe while maintaining good relations with its neighbors—as Puglierin put it, “to breathe and to feel well in our own shoes.” In Brexit, the EU will lose its second-largest economy and its strongest link to the United States. In Trump, Germans have confronted a leader across the Atlantic who has wavered on defending NATO members, demanded that Germany pay more for U.S. military protection, challenged certain aspects of liberal democracy, championed the very nationalism that European integration was designed to transcend, and dismissed the EU as a “vehicle” for German power. At first, after the one-two punch of Brexit andTrump, Germans had “the impression that our world crumbled,” Puglierin said. [...]

In a telling debate before the German election, representatives of the country’s six main parties were asked which of four nations—the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Turkey—was Germany’s closest partner. Two chose the U.K. in a show of European solidarity. Two picked the U.S. because transatlantic relations were most important, though they explicitly excluded Donald Trump, the “outrageous U.S. president” who “is insulting the whole world and endangering the world with his tweets,” from the partnership. One—the emissary from Merkel’s party—wondered why he couldn’t pick France. Another made no selection whatsoever. When the moderator asked whether any audience members thought Trump was a “reliable partner for Germany,” two lonely hands went up.

read the article