AR / Aki Ishida / Lantern Field and Contested Cultural Identity:

Introduction

What can the practices of architecture and museum curation bring to the education of an architect? Design-build projects, where students working alongside faculty and community-based clients, design and build a structure, pavilion, or an art installation, have become an integral part of architecture school curricula.[1] Also called ‘live’ projects, they often serve as a vehicle for both service and pedagogy. [2] Besides imparting syntactical knowledge in construction details, fabrication, managing of client expectations, and negotiating the complex budgetary and legal constraints of the professional world, how can design-build projects challenge pedagogical conventions or proffer questions concerning cultural milieus that emerge through community engagement?

Reflecting upon Lantern Field [ 1 ], an art installation by faculty and students of Virginia Tech for the Smithsonian Institution, affords critical examination of an impermanent design-built project as a form of pedagogy, practice, and criticism. Situated in a museum charged with a contested history of Asian identity in the West, a transdisciplinary team of students and faculty created an art installation that transmuted discoveries from architecture, music, and computer engineering. The project educated both students and public about Japanese culture by interpreting the traditions of lantern festivals and craft in Japan. It did so in a space of Western gaze, in a building designed to house collections of Asian arts amassed by an American industrialist James Lang Freer in the early 20^th century. These contexts raise contemporaneous questions regarding Japanese American identity, as well as authenticity and Palestinian American literary critic Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism, or a discourse of the image constructed about the East through a Western worldview, which presents the East as exotic, vulnerable, and feminine.[3] Using the conventions of a museum typology, the installation entwined architectural practice, public engagement, education, and curation to reexamine representation of cultures and counter stereotypes.

Installations by Architects as a Platform for Pedagogy and Practice

Over the past few decades, series of installation by architects—larger than sculptures but smaller than buildings and often temporary—have enabled architects to experiment with new materials or fabrication techniques. SHoP’s Dunescape of 2000, commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York as the inaugural project of their Young Architects Program,[4] is one notable example in a series of installations by then-emerging architects who have since become international figures. Architecture practices such as FUTUREFORMS[5] in San Francisco have built interactive installations and temporary structures to experiment with fabrication tools, software, sensors, and actuators clients may not be ready to in a permanent. More recently formed firms such as Hannah[6] and After Architecture[7] have focused on biomaterial assemblies, robotic-based fabrication, and 3D printed buildings. While this form of practice has also come under scrutiny for producing short-lived structures that sometimes exploit student labor and result in large amounts of material waste, installations by architects have facilitated experimentation and pedagogy, and diversified architects’ practice.[8], [9] Furthermore, these projects often serve as a preliminary step for, and an ephemeral microcosm that embodies the same approaches and tenets of more permanent buildings by, an architecture office.

The proliferation of these installations converged with increased interest on a national level for community-based art project. Since 2011, the National Endowment for the Arts, the independent US federal agency funding art and art education, has funded Creative Placemaking projects that “integrates arts, culture, and design activities into efforts that strengthen communities”[10] by partnering with local organizations and institutions. These art project would spark economic growth, make streets and public spaces safer, and bring together a diverse population around a place. Such initiatives have brought awareness to the arts across the nation as an accessible means to make meaningful gathering spaces, a platform on which to question and construct community and cultural identities.[11] These projects underscore participatory co-creation, resulting in process that is more inclusive and engaging.

Lantern Field combines the hands-on pedagogy with an experimental practice (building upon the instructor’s body of work in similar interactive installations using light and sound) and a form of participatory creative place-making. It also borrows from artists such as Allan Kaprow, who in the 1960s directed events he called Happenings, or spontaneous performance in which the audience became performers, as well as Yoko Ono, whose serial work Wish Tree [ 2 ] invites participants to write and tie wishes to a tree. Accordingly, by situating an installation within a national art museum, Lantern Field became a highly visible setting to question and reexamine multiple Japanese identities in the West. It turned a national museum into a platform for pedagogy, practice, and criticism by figuratively and physically by moving cultural learning out of classrooms and galleries and into a garden, a symbol of life and renewal. French philosopher Jacque Rancière writes in Emancipated Spectator that participatory performing art blurs the boundaries between actors and spectators.[12] Likewise, viewers of Lantern Field become makers, and when even a deeper engagement occurs, cultural critics.

Lantern Field during the National Cherry Blossom Festival

Lantern Field is an interactive installation designed by Japanese-born architect and educator Aki Ishida in collaboration with students and faculty from Architecture, Computer Science, and Computer Music at Virginia Tech. It was designed over the spring semester of 2013 and installed on April 6 and 7, 2013 during the National Cherry Blossom Festival in the courtyard of the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C., a part of the National Museum of Asian Art. Lantern Field involved public participation on two levels: the making of paper lanterns and in the activating of the light and sound once the lanterns were installed. During a day-long public workshop in the Freer courtyard [ 3 ], the museum visitors folded the mulberry paper lanterns under the guidance of the design team. The event opened the museum’s central courtyard, which has only been accessible for viewing but not for other activities,[13] to the public for collective making and reflection on the installation. The field of lanterns grew over the course of the day as they amassed on a bamboo frame [ 4 ] suspended beneath the vaulted ceiling of the loggia facing the courtyard.

The surfaces of the folded papers and the plaster ceiling captured the mutable brightness and hues of natural light during the day and electric—artificial—light at night [ 5 ]. As people walked under the lanterns, sensors detected their presence and activated a gradated shift in light that oscillated between tones of white and deep magenta [ 6 ]. The visual experience was accompanied by the sound of bamboo chimes that intensified the longer people lingered. The multisensory installation coalesced expertise and ideas that could only manifest through transdisciplinary creativity and teamwork.

The ephemeralness and delicate luminescence of the artwork reflect the Japanese tradition of hanami, or flower viewing [ 7 ], a ritual started in the Heian Period (794‑1185) and is mentioned in the Tale of Genji, a classic literary work from the 11^th century. The custom began with members of the Imperial Court viewing cherry blossoms while drinking sake and feasting under the trees and writing poems reveling in the fleeting beauty of the blossoms. The ritual spread to the warrior class, then in modern times, to a wider sector of Japanese population.

The practice of flower viewing was brought from Japan to the United States along with a gift of trees. The National Chery Blossom Festival, held in Washington, D.C. every March to April, commemorates the gift of cherry trees from Japan to the United States while celebrating the friendship between the two countries. In 1912, Mayor Yukio Ozaki of Tokyo gifted 3,000 cherry trees to the city of Washington, D.C.. Helen Herron Taft, the US President’s wife, and the wife of the Ambassador of Japan planted the first trees along the Potomac River’s Tidal Basin, which, with views of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument, has become the focal point of the Festival. The National Cherry Blossom Festival, which was first held in 1934, grew out of this simple ceremony. The ritual of cherry blossom festivals in both countries share similarities. In March when the air is still chilly, the cherry blossoms signal the beginning of spring and is often the first occasion in which people dine and drink outdoors. Although the flowers peak for a period of only two-weeks each year, the resonance of their ephemeral beauty remains as an experiential artifact. For the Japanese, the blossoms symbolize the temporal beauty of all lives. Each year in Japan, the timing of cherry flowers in bloom is carefully forecasted by meteorologists and followed attentively by the public. This practice has been adopted in the US, where the bloom around the Tidal Basin is carefully tracked as if a seasonal betting game.

Charles Lang Freer and His Art Collection

The Freer Gallery, together with the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, form the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. The gallery was founded in 1906 by Charles Lang Freer, a Detroit-based railroad car manufacturer and a self-taught art collector. After amassing his wealth, Freer retired at the age of 45 and dedicated himself to studying and collecting Asian art through his travels to Asia.[14] The museum has augmented the collection of 9,000 objects he donated with new purchases since 1921,[15] reaching 26,000 objects in 2018.[16] In addition, he created an endowment to support “the study of civilization of the Far East.”[17] The collection includes items from Japan, Korea, China, India, Iran, and Egypt, among others. Additionally, it contains work by Western artists collected by James McNeill Whistler, most notably the Peacock Room (1877) [ 8 ], a dining room designed by Whistler and British architect Thomas Jeckyll to house Whistler’s collection of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain collection. Freer purchased and trans-located the room in 1907 to his home in Detroit; it was moved to the Freer Gallery upon his death.[18] Such background makes the setting of Lantern Field poignant and appropriate, as it stresses the urgency for alternative representation of current and future Asia.

The collection also includes paintings by American artists of the Gilded Age, such as John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer, and over 1,200 works of art by Whistler himself.[19] Notably, these artifacts are examples of Japonisme, a French term coined in the late nineteenth century to reference the wide popularity and influences of Japanese art on Western artists, representing Japan through the Western lens. While heavily influenced by Japanese paintings and ceramics, Whistler never visited Japan. Furthermore, his belief in ‘art for art’s sake’ contradicted the role of art in Japanese culture, in which art is integral to everyday life.[20] He took inspirations from Japanese art, such as the seafoam green of the Peacock Room color or the kimono-like garment worn by the Greek model Christina Spartali in the painting The Princess from the Land of Porcelain in the Peacock Room, but his interest was in exoticism, not accurate representation, of Japan.[21]

Charles Lang Freer, along with Isabella Stewart Gardner of Boston, were two of most prominent American collectors of Asian Art in the early 20^th century. Following the widespread Western enthusiasm for Japan in the late 19^th century, Gardner and many of her friends were entranced by Asia. Their deep curiosity and extensive network of collectors and intellectuals of Asian arts—including Okakura Kakuzo, the Japanese scholar most known as the author of The Book of Tea (1906), and Ernest Fenollosa, a Harvard-educated historian of Japanese art who taught at the Imperial University at Tokyo, and their peers—contributed to the making of elite American culture around 1900.[22] Freer’s purchases were advised by elite art dealers in Japan[23] as well as an extensive network of American intellectuals on Asia, including Fenollosa. According to Freer’s terms of the Deed of Gift, only the objects in the permanent collection can be exhibited in the gallery, and loans from the collection are prohibited. For this reason, works by contemporary artists or works not in the Freer collection are exhibited in the adjacent Sackler Gallery. The temporary nature of the Lantern Field enabled it to be installed in the building’s courtyard.

Multiple Representations of Japanese Culture

Art historian Noriko Murai and curator Alan Chong characterize the multivalence of Gardner’s collection as “collectively reflective of the American cultural imagination of “Asia.”” Though advised by experts on Asian arts, Gardner never became an expert herself and collected a constellation of artifacts that ranged from valuable artwork to quotidian objects.[24] The Japanese identity associated with Asian art collections from the early 1900s is of a specific kind that differs from that of most Japanese living in Japan in the past or present, or the Japanese Americans living in the United States today. The cosmopolitan intellectuals such as Okakura of Japan and Rabindranath Tagore of India who influenced the taste of American collectors of Asian art around this time, including Freer and Gardner, were charismatic cultural intermediaries who were privileged, highly educated, and multi-lingual. From their privileged, masculine perspective, they constructed a specific image of Japan that persists today in the West.[25]

Mirroring the representation of Japan cultivated over a hundred years ago in the United States, the National Cherry Blossom Festival collectively reflects a multitude of Western imaginations of Japan over time. The cherry trees represent an image of Japanese culture which, despite it becoming more known and accessible today than in 1900, carries a hint of foreignness for many Westerners; it is often constructed in their imagination based on stories and indirect knowledge. Most North American knowledge of Japan today is based on what they glean from popular culture, such as the fantastical worlds of Studio Ghibli’s anime films, combined with the stereotypes firmly cemented in Western imagination in the early 1900s, including Puccini’s opera Madam Butterfly (1904) and Whistler’s paintings, which persists. The opera Madam Butterfly, a story of a geisha who commits suicide when her lover, an American soldier, returns home to marry a white woman, has spurred criticisms for reinforcing a stereotype of Japanese women as being erotic, submissive, hypersexualized, and exotic.[26] For architecture students outside of Japan, their images of Japan is a fragmented collage of characters drawn by Hayao Miyazaki; work of contemporary Japanese architecture by Japanese practitioners, including Pritzker Prize Laureates Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Tadao Ando; and artwork they encounter in museums, including early 1900s paintings depicting Western female figures wearing pan-Asian garments.

Perhaps then it is fitting that the Lantern Field, designed by a group of architecture students, nearly all of whom neither had first-hand knowledge of Japanese culture nor had visited there, was situated in this place of blurred, contested Asian identity. One could debate whether the Freer Gallery’s collection represents Japan accurately or authentically, though that is not the fruitful argument here. There are many identities of Japanese culture, particularly outside of Japan. Murai and Chong also aptly state in their book on Isabella Stewart Gardener’s collection, “The transnational careers of these figures [the cosmopolitans like Tagore and Okakura] challenge us to define culture not as a predetermined monolith but as an evolving process of interpreting differences and affinities.”[27]

In response to those who say that globalization is making cultures homogeneous, British American Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argues for the possibilities of pluralistic cultures that maintain many identities.[28] In the United State where the Anglo-Saxon culture dominates, we must resist assimilation of less dominant cultures, he writes, [29]as that African American or Asian American is an important social identity in the United States.
Appiah asserts that elements of identity, which includes gender, creed, country, color, class and culture, do not remain static and with passing of time, one may become more dominant than others: “All these dimensions of identity are contestable,” he notes, “always up for dispute.”[30] This mutable, non-monolithic identity pertains to an individual as well as for a nation.

In the realm of architecture, Amale Andraos in the book The Arab World: Architecture and Representation critiques the myth of authenticity and essentialist reduction of the multiplicity of Arab cultures in the contemporary architectural production in the Middle East.[31] Arab cities are being designed, often by European and American architects, with a “montage of signs and symbols…essentializing an entire society,” without a deep understanding of the complex make-up of the people in that group. She argues, “The concepts we enlist, the contexts we shape, and the content we produce matter…To engage in its complexity is to acknowledge the renewed urgency of historical knowledge while also embracing the responsibility to project much needed alternate futures.” In other words, she calls for those with intimate knowledge of Arab culture to step up and construct alternate futures, and for all who are designing in the Middle East to become educated on the complex contexts in which they design.

Similarly, without the participation of those who understand the nuances and complexities of Japanese culture, an event like the National Cherry Blossom Festival is at risk of essentializing Japanese people and their culture. Partnering with their long-term sponsors such as the Japan Foundation and the Japan America Society of Washington, D.C. is one way to help ensure representation of multiple identities of Japan, including performing artists (from contemporary to traditional) Japanese American families who have been here for generations, and Japanese expats. Partnering with a Japanese-born American architect to install an artwork with participatory public workshop is another to shape a less reductive, more pluralistic representation of a culture. Lantern Field at the Smithsonian presented an opportunity and responsibility for those who have insights into complexities of Japanese culture to represent nuanced identities different from those postulated by Freer and his cohorts.

Freer Gallery’s Architecture by Charles A. Platt

The prominence of the Freer Gallery gave Lantern Field a highly visible platform in which to engage the public. The Freer Gallery is situated on the southside of the National Mall, a 146-acre lawn in Washington, D.C. where iconic monuments, including the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, are situated along with ten other Smithsonian’s national museums. Freer selected Charles A. Platt, a New York-based architect who was also a landscape architect and a painter, to design the museum that would house his collection. Construction began in 1916, and the building was completed in 1921, 18 months after Freer’s death. The museum opened to the public in 1923. Designed in Italian Florentine Renaissance palace style, there are 18 sky-lit galleries on the ground floor, with a central garden courtyard on axis with the entrance. The lower-level houses offices, library, study rooms, storage, and an auditorium.[32]

The rusticated granite facades facing the Mall to the north and Independence Avenue to the south serve as the formal and public faces—disciplined, geometric, and relatively closed off to the outside, with only small, punched windows at basement level. In contrast, the loggias fronting the courtyard presents its private face—informal, lush with trees, enlivened by a fountain, and ever-changing with seasons. Until the 1970s, live peacocks (paralleling the Peacock Rooms in the museum) roamed the courtyard, adding to the other-worldliness of this secluded garden. Two loggias with arches flank the east and west ends of the courtyard, which served to circulate air through the galleries before air conditioning and provide a space of contemplation while moving from a gallery with Japanese art to another with Korean, or from Indian to Chinese. This introspective, sensual qualities of the courtyard provided a suitable setting in which to create a delicate, ephemeral lantern installation.

Platt, with his background as a painter, obsessed over the illumination of the galleries, which were daylit from the ceiling as much as possible, supplemented by electric lights within the skylights.[33] The Lantern Field’s illumination design likewise combined daylight and artificial light, bringing out the ever-changing qualities of the folded paper lanterns as the light in the loggia and courtyard shifted. Unlike Platt’s skylit galleries, the lanterns were illuminated gently by daylight reflected upon the loggia walls and vaults [ 9 ]. As the sun set, the artificial light placed along the loggia floor projected the light upward towards the vaulted ceiling, then reflecting downward onto the suspended paper lanterns [ 10 ]. Light reflecting off the white Tennessee marble walls and floor and the plastered ceiling created a softly illuminated space within which the light-sources were rendered ambiguous.

Asian American Experience

Lantern Field, envisioned and directed by a Japanese born American architect working with American students and collaborators could be understood as a Japanese American work, distinct from what a Japanese designer working in Japan might create. This Asian American identity of the work shares similarities with an increasing number of Asian American authors whose works have been widely read and popularized. These authors include, among a host of others, Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Vietnamese American novelist; Hanya Yanagihara, an American novelist and editor of Japanese descent; Jhumpa Lahiri, an Indian American novelist; Michelle Zauner, a Korean American musician and writer; and Ocean Vuong, a Vietnamese American poet. They each present their Asian culture from a combination of first-hand experience and second-hand stories they hear and read. As a result, they experience what W.E.B. Du Bois called double consciousness,[34] in which one simultaneously sees through the eyes a predominantly white society and of an Asian. This distinguishes their voices from those who are native, such as Haruki Murakami or Banana Yoshimoto of Japan. Their experiences as hyphenated Americans are characterized by conflicted feelings of both alienation and intense connection to their culture through their family’s customs, gestures, language, and rituals, particularly through their parents and extended families. Unlike European counterparts who immigrate to the US, because of their Asian ethnicity, they continue to retain their otherness in the eyes of Westerners even generations later, which intensifies their Asian American identity.

Seeing one’s culture misrepresented in popular culture such as a Hollywood film or a festival drives these authors to tell a different story from their perspective. Viet Thanh Nguyen speaks of being propelled to write his novels, including the Pulitzer Prize winning The Sympathizer, since seeing Vietnam often depicted with deep sexism and racism in books and films.[35] Similarly, seeing one’s culture misrepresented in visual art or architecture motivates Asian Americans to embrace the responsibility to construct their own cultural identities instead of accepting the interpretations by others. Vietnamese American poet Ocean Vuong says that his book sales surged following the Atlanta spa shooting of 2021, in which eight women of Asian descent were killed. While he is clearly uneasy with the idea of profiting from a shooting, at the same time, his books help people understand the victims’ experiences from an Asian American perspective. Similarly, a work of art can catalyze critical discussions and enable the students and the public to glean how Asian identifies have been constructed through art in this country.

Observations from the 2012 National Cherry Blossom Festival made evident the missed opportunities to engage families and children in craft workshops offered at such places as the National Building Museum. Japanese culture, with its traditions of handicrafts that can be made precisely but using inexpensive, readily available materials such as papers and wood sticks, is ripe with potentials for public engagement. Introducing American families to Japanese art and culture and be more imaginative and dynamic than a conventional origami workshop. The idea of a lantern making workshop for the Lantern Field emerged out of such criticism. Additionally, by having a designer with knowledge of Japanese art and design, creative and novel interpretations of Japanese aesthetics in an American context would be possible. While authenticity was not the goal, a project leader who was raised in Japan can serve as a cultural interpreter for the team to whom the rituals and artifacts were less familiar, and prevent gross misrepresentation of a culture, or an unintentional mashup of pan-Asian cultures. While Lantern Field is rooted in traditional Japanese craft and rituals, the traditions are liberally interpreted for a present-day context outside of Japan.

Museum as a Platform for Critical Pedagogy

Lantern Field was a decidedly educational experience created in collaboration with a museum,[36] facilitated by an interactive, ephemeral artwork made with public participation. It interrogates the role of curatorial practice to engage a group of faculty and students for a collective learning experience. By applying practice to education, architect-educators create platforms in which to ask indeterminate technical, cultural, and socio-political questions around an array of issues. The Freer Gallery’s partnership with the Festival, which is attended by 1.5 million people each year, exponentially increases the audience and expands the demographics of the museum visitors.[37] Over the weekend that Lantern Field was installed, over 22,000 people visited the museum,[38] which amplified the responsibility and impact of the team to project alternative cultural identities.

Architecture schools have partnered with non-profit organizations for decades. For example, the First-Year Building Project at the Yale School of Architecture began in the 1967. The students have built community centers in the Appalachia in the 1960s, to recreational structures in the 1980s, to more recent affordable housing in New Haven, Connecticut, where Yale is located. By designing and building an art installation that existed for a only one day, how did this experience impact the education of architecture students? Some impacts are similar to what they might learn in designing and constructing a building. The students produced multiple design schemes and reviewed them with the client/partner, then iterated based on the feedback. The project required structural integrity and coordination of multiple infrastructural systems, including lighting, sound, and ultrasonic sensors. Because the museum prohibited use of hardware that left permanent marks on the building, the bamboo structure had to be suspended from aluminum poles that were held by tension against two walls. Since the public workshop was limited to six hours, the bamboo frames were brought to the museum partially prefabricated and assembled at dawn in the courtyard.

Every design-build project demands that students understand the context in which they build—the physical, social, and cultural context of the town, the block, or, in this case, the museum and the Festival. In designing the Lantern Field, students were introduced to the Japanese craft of paper lantern making, the rituals of flower viewing, examples of festivals that involve collective making, and light and darkness in Japanese spaces, including reading the classic architecture text In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki. They also studied Platt’s plans and sections of the museum, imagining how people would move into and around the loggia to step underneath the lanterns. However, the problems of cultural representation in art and architecture, as well as Orientalism and Japonisme exemplified in Freer’s collection and the artwork by Whistler and his peers, were not critically discussed with students at the time, and should be if the project were to happen in the future.

During the workshop [ 11 ], the students took turns teaching the museum visitors of all ages how to fold the paper lanterns according to the design and hung them from the bamboo frame. By demonstrating the paper folding steps and explaining the traditions of lantern festivals, they reflected on what they themselves were learning. Therefore, on a small scale, the students gained experience in working with a team that required precise coordination and collaboration. Robert A.M. Stern, former Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, describes the significance of design-build projects by students, which also applies to this art installation: “While group dynamic and the sense of social responsibility embedded in the Building Project are crucial to its success, it is an act of seeing a design through to construction that has the most profound effect on the training of fledging architects…In learning by doing, the study of architecture moves from abstraction to reality in ways that anticipates professional practice.”[39]

Perhaps more importantly in the context of this article, a project like Lantern Field can be what Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freier and American theorist and social critic bell books call a practice of freedom; art creates a dialogical space where teacher, students, and the museum visitors collectively confront difficult questions around cultural identity. Paolo Freier advocates for “problem posing” as opposed to “banking” mode of education in which the teacher “fills” an empty vessel with knowledge.[40]^, [41] Emphasizing “praxis”—action and reflection upon the world in order to change it. Freier argues for students and teachers to become the co-creators of knowledge. A project like Lantern Field poses a problem and a platform, and the museum visitors—the public—join the students and teachers as the co-creators and learners. Museums can not only be a place to reflect but also to act, to intervene through an art installation, and impact how we construct our own cultural identity. Museums of national stature, such as the Smithsonian, are authoritative shapers and disseminators of cultures they represent. It is critical, therefore, that those with first-hand cultural knowledge participate in representing cultures that museums project out into the world.

Conclusion

Reflecting ten years later, these issues of cultural appropriation and misrepresentation of Asian cultures in the United States would now be foregrounded if this project were to happen today. The rise of anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic revealed an uncomfortable truth, that Asian Americans are perpetual outsiders in the United States. Black Lives Matter, an anti-racism movement that started in 2013 following several highly publicized police brutality and racially motivated violence against Black people in the United States, also amplified discussions around identities around race and ethnicity. While many remain uncomfortable and defensive in speaking of race and identities, these recent events have brought out the conversations around race out in the open, including classrooms. Looking back, it would be prudent to introduce the students to the issues of cultural identity and representation of Asian cultures in the West. To have a discourse would be a critical step forward in preparing future architects for the global contexts in which they will design. For example, could the design of lanterns confront the work in Freer’s collection more critically, to spur discussions of appropriation and representation? Are there ways to bring more awareness to Orientalism in the collection and could a participatory installation help to counter Orientalism? The answer would be yes, and the need for an educated, thoughtful response is exigent.

A design-build project can raise pedagogical questions that challenge conventions and cultural assumptions and prepare architects who not only are equipped with technical and practical skills gained from a live project, but also to think critically about the socio-political contexts in which architects design today and in the future. Representation of cultures outside of their homes, including in art and architecture, remain complex and contested. As the daylight and electric light in Lantern Field became blurred and rendered the sources of illumination ambiguous, cultural identity is mutable and context dependent. Representation of such subtle complexity is possible and urgently needed in a world that tends to view things black and white. As minority groups grapple with their identities, museum installations constructed with public participation present opportunity and responsibility to collectively challenge and reexamine ever-changing cultural identities.