Season 2 Episode 04 Podcast Transcript

Interview with Logman Arja

Episode Title: Transforming Local Communities: Instrumentalizing Architecture and Technology

Host: Grace Aaraj
Audio Engineer and Editor: Mary Anne Funk

Cue Music

Begin Intro:

Grace Aaraj: Welcome to Design For Spatial Justice Podcast Series launched by the University of Oregon’s School of Architecture and Environment. 2020 changed the way we live and how we connect with one another. This season, we recorded episodes from our offices, home offices and living rooms, sometimes surrounded by a baby born mid August 2020. She is mine and her name is Joy.

Through our remote discussions among colleagues and friends, we are bringing you insights from design for spatial justice fellows who taught on campus or remotely from other parts of the world, and from sponsors who made the design for spatial Justice initiative possible.

We are talking to you from and about Beirut, Oregon, California, Michigan, Namibia and Sudan. Our spatial justice realities and concerns could be your own as well. With each episode of the podcast, you are brought a little closer to understanding spatial justice and how it is practiced and taught.

Episodes were prepared with hope, pride, but also frustration by the injustices we are surrounded with. This is Grace Aaraj Design For Spatial Justice Fellow 2020 and 2021 and for the upcoming episodes, I am excited to be your host.

End Intro

Fade Music

Begin Episode:

Grace Aaraj: In this episode of the podcast of Design For Spatial Justice from the University of Oregon, we’re happy to have with us: Logman Arja. Logman is a Sudanese architect and educator born and raised in Darfur, Sudan. His interdisciplinary research focuses on sustainability, ruralism and rural architecture. He is very much interested in instrumentalizing architecture and technology to help transform local communities and impoverished society, especially in developing countries. Currently, he is leading efforts to adopt the technology of additive manufacturing in Sub Saharan Africa to give a long term perspective for the development of sustainable and replicable housing solutions, and rural micro infrastructures. Hi, Logman, very nice to have you with us.

Logman Arja: Thank you, Grace, I’m glad to be here.

Grace Aaraj: As a Design For Spatial Justice Fellow, in your own experience, how do you define spatial justice, what do you think the components of spatial justice is and why do you think we need it?

Logman Arja: If we’re thinking about this space, as a product of architectural imagination, it has to includes a lot of parameters and things that makes that space have a functional academic institution that embodies how we can glorify other voices, how we can glorify diversity. I don’t look at it as different skin tones, nationality, language, sexual whatever, I definitely see diversity as something that transcends this labels. For instance, you and I have a different life experience. If you want to foster this kind of dialogues, we need to have a space that bring different perspective, different opportunities. And because we have different life experience, our perspective, our way of thinking, our way of looking at things tend to be different.

Grace Aaraj: If you could remove all barriers and constraints, what project would you do, and would you want to be known only by that project?

Logman Arja: I have a desire to build an equal industrial park in a rural context. This is not just a fantasy or just simple desire, this is the kind of work that I have been actively working, trying to enforce the concept, trying to project the model to the developing world, because I think it has tremendous opportunities to provide economical incentive and infrastructure to the rural communities that I come from.

Grace Aaraj: A lot of our conversations, you mentioned the word rural, and in at least one instance, where we were reviewing the work of your students for equal industrial parks, you defined ruralism and I think the way you defined ruralism is very interesting and relevant to us as part of the humanity trying to achieve many of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Logman Arja: I think it is a field that I clearly see. It’s somehow often overlooked in our architecture discipline. There is rarely or seldom, if ever, that there is studios that teach rural architecture. I think, because the perception that architecture has some connotation, or correlation with power and privilege and money, other than things that works with the grassroots and people on the ground, maybe also the perception that there is not enough money in the rural, let’s say, context.

Logman Arja: Saying this, because I think that part of me has this kind of delusion that architects only see architecture in the urban centers. So I want to look at other environments that is not yet been fully explored, perhaps. And it’s also a market that I come from. I embody some of its philosophy, some of its way of living. I have immense knowledge, because I’m a product of that environment. There is a thread that sort of connecting all the works that I do. I want to look at opportunities to instrumentalize architecture and technology to help transform local communities, the communities that I come from.

Grace Aaraj: So looking at your path, so far, if one was to ask you to give advice on how to be able to achieve diversity in your pursuits, what will be your advice to them?

Logman Arja: I would say, it should start with a love and passion of what you do. If you like what you’re doing, you can ultimately find moments to engage all the things that you love and bring them to your productivity.

Grace Aaraj: So Logman, what do you think are people or events who actually inspired you or affected your path so far?

Logman Arja: I can think of one big jump step that I was able to make, which is coming to the United States and getting greater exposure and opportunity to learn about the discipline to learn about architecture, to mingle with people, to see things, to see my own country, my own architecture from difference. I think that’s the turning point in my career and my perception, the way I see architecture, the way I see the world, the way I see everything has shifted dramatically since I ended up here in the United States. I wouldn’t say that’s only for my architectural learning and architecture as a career, but also of who I am.

Logman Arja: So I think my journey to the United States has helped me to see the true sense of myself. For that reason, I began to write a book. The book is a personification and a depiction of my confusion, having the opportunity to live and engage with architecture in two distinct worlds and civilizations. The book is also a dialogue between the two characters of myself and also by extension, it’s a dialogue across civilizations and styles.

Logman Arja: The house that I grew up in, somewhat like a compound, and it’s made of multiple huts, and those huts were built from the straw. My perception of living into that rural environment, to this day has evolved many times, from despising to recognizing, to glorifying and also this attitude, or perception shift, in a way coincided with my move and study architecture in the United States, because I live in different housing topologies. It’s totally different than the architecture of my village. The houses here ranging from private single house to communal residential, so I get a lot of exposure to two distinct worlds and sort of engagement in architecture.

Grace Aaraj: So now to the more fun questions, what’s your favorite music?

Logman Arja: I definitely enjoy Arab music. But I sometimes also need something that to shake me up a little bit. So I enjoy rock’n’roll in the Western world. My dad grew up listening to Western music, even though I didn’t speak the language back then, I find some connections to the melody to the rhythm.

As for as the Arabic music, I think I enjoy Om Kalthoum songs and Fairuz. I also enjoy country music, especially when you are taking a road trip. Here in the United States, engaging with the landscape, engaging with the rural America, and having a country music, that’s a very, very interesting and intimate experience that I enjoyed over and over.

Grace Aaraj: Do you have any favorite food?

Logman Arja: Food from home. Especially when it comes to Sudanese food, sudanese food is unique, because the way the country positioned itself geographically located. It’s a gateway to Africa, from the Arab world, if you will. It’s a little bit of Ethiopian food, but it’s also a little bit of Egyptian, Moroccan’s food, and Lebanese food.

Grace Aaraj: Do you have a specific dish that you like, a recipe you want to share?

Logman Arja: I was able to replicate some of the eggplant dishes. I cook them in variety of ways. I think includes obviously, eggplant and olive oil, peanut butter, some onion, lots of garlic and dill.

Grace Aaraj: The eggplant recipe sounds really delicious. Maybe I should try it.

Grace Aaraj: So let’s play this game where I give you a word and you tell me what this word is and isn’t.

Grace Aaraj: Home

Logman Arja: Is everything. And it is not a?

Grace Aaraj: Well, mathematically if home is everything.

Logman Arja: Yeah,

Grace Aaraj: it’s not possible for it not to be something.

Logman Arja: Yeah, exactly. That’s

Grace Aaraj: Because it’s everything.

Logman Arja: Yeah, I don’t know why I was stuck there.

Grace Aaraj: So I’ll give you a pass for this because basically if home is everything, then there’s no way to find something that it isn’t

Grace Aaraj: Ruralism?

Logman Arja: My passion in architecture: isn’t urbanism

Grace Aaraj: The book you are writing?

Logman Arja: Is phenomenological. Isn’t other book.

Grace Aaraj: That’s a good slogan for marketing: my book isn’t another book.

Grace Aaraj: Logman the practitioner?

Logman Arja: Is inventive and innovative: isn’t  known yet.

Grace Aaraj: If you look to your future self, maybe in 50 years, what do you wish, you can tell that person that you’d become?

Logman Arja: I would say, I wanted to find a way to make the way we do architecture have some popular movement, or ingredient, if you will, how to kind of mobilize people who neither read nor write or haven’t made up to the universities, but yet they still possess an enormous amount of knowledge. So if we can incorporate those people and mobilize them and work with them, in their context, in their knowledge, in their communities: that’s the thing that I wanted to do.

Logman Arja: I want to see architecture as a catalyst. Not only a building or a shelter, but something that transcends to intervene and enhance people’s lives, bring them together, provide job opportunities, provide or drive capital to the rural environment. So the way I see this equal Industrial Park is a paradigm to revitalize the rural economy. Do I have a clear roadmap for that? I don’t think so. But maybe that’s what I’m trying to figure it out.

I think that would be a project and legacy that I would be very happy if I would accomplish it.

Cue Music

Begin Outro:

Grace Aaraj: Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Design For Spatial Justice Podcast Series.This is Grace Aaraj, your host signing off from Beirut, Lebanon, and Mary Anne Funk, our editor from Portland, Oregon. The music you hear in every episode is by Chicoco Radio—all the way from the waterfront settlements of Port Harcourt Nigeria.

Fade Music

End Episode