Vol. 8 Presenter: Ayumi Date
Presenting
Release and Rejection of American White Dominance
Anglo-Saxon subjugation and prevailing haunting attitudes and trends in Santa Fe architecture and building preservation
Summary
I am an architect and proud woman of color—secure of my identity, my 30-year career and of my fine American education. For over 50 years without being dominated, duped or scared, I now find myself within a strange and unfamiliar territory in Santa Fe. I feel unsafe, unwelcome and haunted by ghosts of the past. Not only have these things veered me off my directed and familiar path, but they have derailed me personally and my career as an architect. This timely forum on “Ghosts” may be my effort to reconcile and examine these lingering ghosts of Santa Fe. New Mexico may be referred as the “land of enchantment”, but in reality, it has become the “land of entrapment”. For a minority majority state, never have I seen and felt such white dominance and white male privilege. Both take my breath away.
“The people of your culture cling with fanatical tenacity to the specialness of man. They want desperately to perceive a vast gulf between man and the rest of creation. This mythology of human superiority justifies their doing whatever they please with the world, just the way Hitler's mythology of Aryan superiority justified his doing whatever he pleased with Europe. But in the end this mythology is not deeply satisfying. The Takers are a profoundly lonely people. The world for them is enemy territory, and they live in it like an army of occupation, alienated and isolated by their extraordinary specialness.” —Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
Bio
Ayumi Date is an American and international architect, interior/environmental designer, lecturer and a wabi sabi warrior*. Cofounder of the New York office of Point Design, an award winning international retail design firm as well her own Manhattan residential design atelier, Studio 5R; her work has been published and recognized globally. She holds a Master of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley and a Bachelor of Science from the Department of Design and Environmental Analysis at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. A 2016 transplant to Santa Fe, she was born and raised in New York to expatriate parents; she maintains dual citizenship with US and Japan.
*Wabi Sabi, the Japanese philosophy for a perfectly imperfect life, accepts anomalies and life’s realities. Being mindful of aesthetics and the pristine, the appreciation of the authentic rather than the perfect becomes our conscious way of making life decisions, how we navigate through our environments and in turn, enabling us to experience each other with beauty and grace.