Misappropriating Camp’s Walls: From the Japanese American Camps to American Camp

Item

Title
Misappropriating Camp’s Walls: From the Japanese American Camps to American Camp
Description
This thesis reexamines the site of the Japanese American Incarceration Camps of World War II as a site of architectural precedent. The Camps occupy what has become a quiet chapter in the history textbook, often regarded as an eccentric aberration within American history. Yet they embody the constructions of the American mythos, a mythos based in camping the frontier, a mythos of American Camp. American Camp is and has been fundamental to the construction of the country and to the actions that have shaped the landscape. Built on a notion of occupying and colonizing an empty frontier, American Camp is a recurrent condition across the American landscape, from exterior to the nation’s borders as military base camps, to within as both a form of recreational leisure and as the site of growing wealth inequalities and housing dispossession. American Camp, in all of its associations with the temporary occupation of space, represents a paradoxical construction of America that both resists and reinforces American notions of permanence and of rights and access to space by individuals.

I use the Japanese American Incarceration Camps as a case study to construct the spatial device of misappropriation that allows for the reclaiming of site within the context of spatial dispossession. Misappropriation allows for the establishment of a self-determined site from which to orient and direct oneself and allows for the use of non-architectural precedents within architecture, calling attention to limits the field has traditionally defined itself within.

This thesis conceptualizes space through the lens of postcolonialism and critical race studies, and theorizes ways in which architects may explore histories of dispossession as a way to create spaces that inhabit these histories and their associated conversations. This inhabitation is important to developing architectural practices that are rooted in critical examinations of space by inviting into the discipline conversations that have traditionally been excluded from it.

To better examine camp as an architectural phenomenon and to bring it into the purview of the architectural practice, this thesis uses the walls that make up camp as a synecdoche for architecture. Using the conditional statement, if it is a wall then it is architecture, this thesis considers the architect not just as a sculptor of space but as an agent capable of addressing and participating in the political narratives that surround and affect our relationship to space. The walls of camp, and by extension their architecture—from our primary case study to a close reading of the different strands of American Camp—become the medium through which space is seen as an act of construction by a political agent, and thus works to bring attention to the political agency of the architect.
Creator
Kaneko, Richard Hiroshi
Subject
Camp
Incarceration
Internment
Japanese-American
Misappropriation
Wall
Architecture
American studies
Asian American studies
Contributor
Haber-Thomson, Lisa Anne
Date
2021-06-11T07:03:36Z
2021
2021-05-19
2021-05
2021-06-11T07:03:36Z
Type
Thesis or Dissertation
text
Format
application/pdf
application/pdf
Identifier
Kaneko, Richard Hiroshi. 2021. Misappropriating Camp’s Walls: From the Japanese American Camps to American Camp. Master's thesis, Harvard Graduate School of Design.
28541591
https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37367889
Language
en
Item sets
Graduate School of Design