2022 | Journal | Graphic Designer
Measuring the City: The Power of Urban Metrics edited by Chaewon Ahn, Carmelo Ignaccolo, and Arianna Salazar-Miranda is the 16th edition of Projections, the peer-reviewed journal by MIT Department of Urban Planning and Studies. A limited-edition print run of the journal was available in Spring 2023, and was designed by Jola Idowu in conjunction with the Projections editors.
2022 | Journal | Co-Editor | Collaborators: Meriam Soltan, Ardalan SadeghiKivi, Antonio Pacheco
Thresholds is the annual peer-reviewed journal by MIT Department of Architecture. The milestone 50th issue provided the opportunity to publish new articles in addition to significant contributions from previous editions. These past articles were reinvented through a system of annotations and conversations by both their authors and newer commentators. Please see below for an excerpt from the editor's note.
What is a moment in time if not a marker between past and present? We might be surprised to find that what comes before and what follows any given instant are often not so different from one another—time and events have a way of finding a certain consistency, a rhythm and flow that can tend to resist change. But then, suddenly, all hell breaks loose. The power goes out; dams break; tires go flat; governments collapse. To quote a statement famously attributed to Vladimir Lenin, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Meant to reference the punctuated equilibrium of history and to give primacy to the chaotic tumult of revolution, it bears noting that inflection points can happen by other means as well. For Thresholds 50: Before | After we parsed history for subtle moments of massive change, for instances where the beginnings of upheaval and long-running transformations might be found. Our goal? To look at a collection of in-between moments that hint at the future and remind us that the past is sticky, persistent, and, in many ways, always with us.
Available at MIT Press.
2020 | Book | Unpublished | Author
In the advent of the COVID-19 epidemic, Jola Idowu illustrates the anxieties and pressures of a new architecture student by cataloguing her journey of making a studio project for a YMCA in DUMBO, NYC. Inspired by the isolation and personal reflection forced on her and her classmates by the pandemic, Jola Idowu investigates the nuances and actions of the creative process. Idowu adapts the format of a children’s book to paint a simple but complex narrative that speaks to the emotional and physical labor of not only architects, but all creatives. She tracks her use of software, precedents, and conversations with other classmates in order to trace how exactly an architectural project comes to be. By recording her inspirations, reflections, and wayward thoughts, Idowu writes a story on the mundane, and sometimes chaotic, work of making something worthwhile.
2020 | Book | Unpublished | Author
“A Home.” explores the binary of domestic spaces as both a place of knowledge sharing and a site of subjugation by generations of women past and present. The book takes the perspective of the domestic from the point of view of two generations of diasporic women coming to terms with the absence of their cultural and familial history. Here, the home becomes a place to form new relationships, transforming the domestic into a space for habitable experimentation. For the author, this experimentation comes in the form of the home as the beginning of a new familial structure that in its novelty is a reminder of what is forgotten or left behind. This desire to look back instead of forward is what draws the author to the story of Orpheus who must tragically accept a devastating loss and only renews his suffering as he tries to reach out to what is gone. The author herself goes on a mythical journey through her house, with Orpheus as her guide, to examine the generational and gendered relationships between the people, places, and things that define the histories of her black, female family home.
Part essay, part poetry, part memoir, and part architectural analysis, Jola Idowu breaks down the architectural object that serves as the cornerstone of American society through the lens of her childhood home in Chicago. The book is composed of a series of poetic letters to and images of the different people, places, and objects that form the tangible and intangible value of her home. Through these methods, Jola Idowu ruminates on what her home holds, what it lacks, and the other “homes” she has lived in along the way. The recipients of these letters range from the personal to the humorous, from the past to the future, with letters addressed to her deceased grandmother and sisters, her blanket, a piece of suya meat, her church, and more. Nothing is too mundane, and nothing is too forgotten, in this unique and subversive reflection on the intersection of architecture and domestic life.
2019 | Book | Unpublished | Co-Author | Collaborators: Zachariah DeGiulio and Wendy Wu
Much of the literature on American bunkers and consumer culture has examined the bunker as a result of the fears of the Cold War among the general American populace. But what happens when the anxieties of covert enemies and the end of American democracy becomes just another old war story in post-9/11, post-Trump America, whereby the monster under the bed is no longer specific and tangible, but rather is characterized by diffused threats such as climate change that permate our everyday existence?
Hole Earth Catalog assembles a kit of parts to understand this shift in consumer culture, by analyzing the plans of contemporary mass-produced bunkers. The authors argue that these plans show the impossibility of these bunkers’ use for shelter beyond a few days, revealing the ways in which the preparation for the catastrophe supersedes the catastrophe itself for those who commission the design and construction of these underground shelters. By also tracing the history of bunkers during the Cold War, the authors display how while previously the state provided the images through which the possibilities of catastrophe were rendered, today, those images are produced through forums, blogs, and advertisements that create open-source architectural communities.
2018 | Essay | Author
In graffiti, the writing is the art form and the cityscape and urban objects are the canvas. Each part of the work is a facet of the other, with their meaning and forms interacting and conflating towards a point in which one is irremovable from the other. The city surface which holds the social, political, and economic connotations of the site becomes both the material and the medium which produces the work, in that the work is always constructed in relation to the cityscape. Therefore, the form and effect of graffiti extends past writing, producing a gestalt object that includes the social and temporal interactions of viewers and the work. The gestalt of graffiti highlights that writers are able to form a critical relationship with the urban environment and urban bureaucracy that is built not purely on antagonism and fear, but also on reliance.
Interviewer: And how did you decide where to tag? Was it like a very – did you have a process of where you wanted to do tagging or was it just wherever?
Interviewee: It was more of a bunch of impromptu – more trying to find the right opportunities to get away with doing it, so then you start to pick up a keen awareness of public space and also how people behave in public or selective viewing, so I just started to know I could do tags in front of people and they wouldn't see it just because they wouldn't be expecting to look for it, to begin with.
Interviewer: Oh. So you could tag on the sidewalk and people would kind of not pay attention?
Interviewee: Mm-hmm.
Interviewer: So, when you tag in front of people, was that, I guess, a sort of place that was more viable or more sought after than, I guess, somewhere else where people couldn't see it?
Interviewee: Yeah, 'cause you're getting more foot traffic.