Reimagining Risk

By Noah Chasin

Mortgages are not inherently sexy. As some of us learned the other night, however, the process of demystifying them has a certain frisson that shouldn’t easily be dismissed. Damon Rich of the Center for Urban Pedagogy spoke about the history of mortgages– from the term’s French derivation (it translates to ‘death vow,’ and I have to admit I was alternately fascinated and horrified to finally discover the etymological justification for that silent ‘t’) through the HUD scandals of the Reagan years, to the animadversions concerning today’s sub-prime rates. None of us should have been surprised to learn of the socioeconomically and racially motivated collusion between government and banking institutions as far as mortgages and foreclosures are concerned. Rich painted a vivid (if protracted and slightly frenetic) picture of the vampiric (his word . . . stolen from Marx, no less!) presence of capital unmoored from its connection to the labor that brought it to fruition, and made excellent parallels between that ‘dead labor’ and the ‘black hole of architecture,’ that chasm into which falls the monies of buyers turned owners turned sellers turned buyers, ad nauseam.

The lecture presaged an eventual exhibition that Rich will undertake with MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. I found it hard, frankly, to imagine how the incredible amount of historical information would be condensed into a digestible exhibition format, and Rich’s lengthy presentation (notwithstanding his apologies for speaking too slowly) and even more accelerated barrage of visuals made it difficult to keep it all in focus. What emerged, however, was a brilliant and insightful grasp of the equivalence between the architecture of cities and the architecture of the economy. Each has a tangible facet (built structures and, until recently, the gold standard, respectively) and yet each also has an invisible, dematerialized essence that serves as its absent foundation. The economy, facilitated by the federal government in tandem with the institutional system of banks, trades funds electronically that effectively exist only as pixels on a computer monitor. The actual capital is in constant flux, flitting electronically from bank to bank, investment firm to investment firm. Likewise, architecture can (with some creativity) be seen simply as the agglomeration of forces exerted by a series of imbricated parties (owners/developers, landmark commissions, community members, mortgage brokers, contractors, oh, and architects!) that coalesce, with great effort, into the specter of a building.

Rich’s coup was to uncover the resiliency of these similar systems and to expose the way in which prospective homeowners take such dematerialization for granted, resting assured that despite the untraceable nomadism of money and the ultimately tenuous nature of ‘ownership’ (when, during the course of a mortgage’s maturation, does one actually own one’s home, other than after the final payoff?). But of course, we are a nation for whom the banality of debt is such a commonplace that these fantasies are easily understood. After all, it’s the system, and we’re too weak to change it. Or are we? Rich’s videos—the ‘bank-in’ in Chicago (where disenfranchised citizens decided to belabor the tellers with useless requests in response to the bank’s refusal to explain their complicity in profiting off of sub-prime mortgages) or the story of the suckered couple who bought new construction by assuming a demanding mortgage, only to find the house shabbily constructed and the loan irrevocable—show that rising up against the system is the only way to change the status quo. We live in a nation beset by complicity and assume that things we don’t understand are impervious to our control. So we ease into old age carrying debt, having slingshot our nest egg into the virtual vacuum of the financial stratosphere, ensconced in our ephemeral houses as they rise up, like our money, to disappear into the firmament.

Noah Chasin is Assistant Professor of Art History at Bard College and Visiting Assistant Professor in the M.S. in Urban Design Program at Columbia’s GSAPP.