Goat rodeo: practicing built environments

“Architecture” seems to be failing everywhere but its extremities. Goat Rodeo: Practicing Built Environments is a 110-page pamphlet comprised of 54 critical vignettes written by eight distinguished contributors—Phillip G. Bernstein, Carol Burns, Joseph G. Burns, Renee Cheng, Carrie Sturts Dossick, Billie Faircloth, Kiel Moe, and Michael J. Monti. This august group met periodically over five years to explore the nature of the problems facing allied professions in the building industry. Midway through their efforts to structure a joint writing enterprise, they chanced upon “The Goat Rodeo Sessions,” a Grammy Award-winning album produced by Yo Yo Ma, in collaboration with bluegrass masters Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile. The writing group immediately seized on both the concept and name of Ma and company’s project, defined in the Urban Dictionary as “a chaotic situation, often one that involves several people, each with a different agenda/vision/perception of what’s going on; a situation that is very difficult, despite energy and efforts, to instill any sense or order into…about the most polite term used by aviation people…to describe a scenario that requires about 100 things to go right at once if you intend to walk away from it.” In the same spirit, this octet of contemporary educators, practitioners, and engineers—drawn into common cause by radical changes in our understanding of the relationship between acts of building and the systems of matter and thought that surround them—offers the reader a lively, hybrid polemic driven by the unlikely juxtaposition of highly practiced instrumental styles and vocabularies. Each writer interprets the contemporary scene of design and building within a framework delineated by eight topics: education, research, equity, information, energy, infrastructure, technology, and collaboration. The resulting discourse questions what needs to change before the building industry can achieve a quality described by Bennington College President Liz Coleman as “discipline without department.” Convened and edited by Daniel S. Friedman, designed by Jack Henrie Fisher, and produced by Fried Fish, in concert with Other Forms, a mobile research and design collective working in the multiple intersections of architecture, graphic design, and publishing.