Consider the stakes for what this enables and prevents. Among Isamu Noguchi ’ s most heartfelt projects, but not best known, is a series of schools, playgrounds and meeting halls he designed for the Japanese American internment camp at Poston, California, during World War II. As Bruna Mori writes, Noguchi feared that those camps would be permanent. He presumed that the emergency was perhaps not a temporary episode but the new state of affairs for his friends and extended family. As such, the camps would demand more careful design to make them as livable as possible for the unforeseeable future. Of course, at the time, no one could know whether the intern ments were temporary or not, and it is precisely this well-meaning making permanent of the provisional exception that is worrisome. Had Noguchi ’ s proposals been built to their full intended extent, the camps may very well have become more permanent than they were, and perhaps the freedom of the interned was to some degree aided by the lack of design accommodation undertaken to normalize their camp ’ s exceptionality. Today many well-meaning projects enroll design to work, like Noguchi ’ s did, to provide better comfort to those caught within real emergencies, such as refugees, displaced persons, and disaster victims. <sup>70</sup> Without discounting the obvious help that good shelter provides to alleviate the acute misery of such experiences, we must be honest in seeing that accommodating emergency is also how a perhaps illegitimate state of exception is stabilized and over time normalized. If by sponsoring a commission, the perpetrator remains immunized from disruption while the interned and displaced are reformed and reconfigured, then design on behalf of the emergency aids both victims and victimizers. This danger is especially severe if we believe that a declaration of the emergency, and the political reality of its exceptions, is already dubious in its own right (such as an infinite war or terror, an ethnic profile that allows for the suspension of legal rights, or the wholesale capture of an entire country ’ s Internet traffic). Similar soft normalizations are also at work in some of the most easy-to-follow programs for climate change mitigation, including, and especially, those that promote the superi ority of preindustrial economies. Some accept buffering an anthropogenic economy against the tides of its own effects by a minimal decorative alterations, while others spiritualize their basic confusion regarding means and ends and seek solace in folk lore; many combine both in varying guises. Instead we should plot systemic interventions based on deeper scales of operation that might arrest the eventual immiseration of places, species, and landscapes by securing lines of flight for them. “ Restoration, ” yes, but as part of a wider geopolitics of geoengineering. We hope that the short-term self-congratulation of accommodation by innovation can be inverted along its own seams and made successful despite itself. We hope that design can take on a different role from the agent of immunization-through-mitigation on behalf of a bad-faith sovereign and can instead work less in response to the exceptional emergency than on behalf of the emergence itself. This design needs to graduate from forms of practice that defer so much agency to authorities who claim but cannot defend incredible decisions over the arbitrage of exceptions, and needs to stop providing paramedic gestures that give them support.
Earth Layer
103