With Lunch 14, the editors of Lunch Journal wondered if they could use the frontier story itself to decenter its power.
The journal is divided into 4 sections. Edges explores the form and possibilities of the edge itself, and unravels the hard binary condition of the frontier. Wild flips the narrative around, picking apart established categorisations of wild and tame to deny their separate-ness. Metrics examines methods of observing and quantifying themselves as tools for gaining new understandings: the map creates 'the frontier' so to change the way we map or measure is to change the frontier itself. And finally, Culture takes on the 'us' and 'them' of the frontier, shifting our perception of this as a binary divide to a growing rhizomatic network of beings: where the meeting of cultures does not mean appropriation, erasure and dominance but a hope for generative complexity.
The promised land lies just over the horizon; that's what we told ourselves. This great unknown, the frontier, has taken many forms throughout history: the silk road, the wild west, the space race, the human genome project. Anywhere unknown was hostile, yet full of promise. That romantic notion of the frontier persists, but the undiscovered open land, waiting to be claimed – it's already discovered, already occupied. The frontier of the past doesn't care – its skies are wide and its memory narrow.
Author Biography:
Sam Johnson
received his Master of Architecture from the University of Virginia,
where he was a Dean's Honor Teaching Fellow. His research focuses on the
effects of historic districts on social equity in New York, where he
lives and works.
Hutch Landfair is a recent
graduate (M ARH 2016, M Arch 2019) and current lecturer at the
University of Virginia. His research exists at the intersection of
history and design with a focus on collective memory within the built
environment.
Sherry Ng recently graduated with a
Master of Architecture from UVA, where she was a Dean's Honor Teaching
Fellow. Her research focuses on the decline of American suburban publics
and their future possibilities. She currently lives and works in New
York.
Taryn Wiens is a Master of Landscape
Architecture candidate at UVA, and co-leader of ManifestA (the UVA
School of Architecture student group for equity in design). Her research
focuses on broad conceptions of land management, maintenance, and the
politics of landscape material transformations.
Other contributors:
Weaam
Alabdullah, Margaret Baldwin, JT Bachman, Sean Burkholder, Sekou Cooke,
Laura Diamond, Peter Del Tredici, Alex Felson, Maddie Hoagland-Hanson,
Richard Hobbs, Sara Jacobs, Leah Kahler, Kevan Klosterwill, Perry
Kulper, Karen Lutsky, Shiqiao Li, Erin McLean, Leigh Miller, Rozana
Montiel, Jeffrey S Nesbit, Jesse Ng, Nicholas Rajkovich, Office of
Living Things, Alexander Robinson, Aisha Sawatsky, Katie Stranix, Jonah
Susskind, Rodrigo Valenzuela, Mary Velez, Alex Kachun Wong, Joy Zedler,
Zihao Zhang, Shurui Zhang.
