University Design Research Fellow
University of New Mexico
School of Architecture and Planning
Sarah Aziz
View of the World from Indiana
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Partner: Propeller
View of the World from Indiana highlights how the American Midwest has long served as an intrinsic, yet under-recognized, infrastructure for a coastal discipline. With the highest concentration of architecture fellowships in the United States, the region has often been perceived as a place scholars go ‘out’ to in their early careers before returning to the coast. Yet, with 44 schools of architecture, 19 fellowships, and several internationally acclaimed cultural institutions—such as the Walker Art Center and Graham Foundation—the “Flyover States” are unquestionably a space of emergence.
The installation comprises twelve “bathtub Madonnas”—one for each Midwestern state—that pay homage to the area’s folk art practices and enshrine a forgotten local building whose lineage can be traced back to canonical artworks. Above these tubs, a sign reading “NOTHING TO SEE HERE,” designed to be seen from passing planes, amplifies the region’s overlooked status in contemporary architectural discourse. Through humor, irony, and historical reflection, the project reclaims the Midwest’s place in the conversation, reminding us that to dismiss it as empty or uninteresting is to overlook a critical hub of architectural pedagogy, practice, and progress.
Meet the UDRFellow
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Sarah Aziz is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of New Mexico. Her background as a second-generation British Pakistani informs her research practice that maps patterns of migration across multiple scales and geographies, starting with her grandfather’s walk from Delhi to Lahore during the Partition of British India. Currently, she is working with collaborators from across the Great Plains to tag, track, and build with tumbleweeds because they defy human-made borders and ask new questions of indigeneity and invasiveness. She holds a B.Arch. from Liverpool John Moores University and an M.Arch. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
2024 Symposium
University Design Research Fellows
Previous Work by Sarah Aziz
Currently, Dollar General Corp—America’s largest small-box retailer—opens around 67 new stores a month, totaling 19,643 stores in the continental United States and Mexico. Dollar General often rents existing buildings that have a footprint under 10,000 sqft, allowing it to avoid the stringent permitting rules its big-box competitors like Walmart and Target face. It’s nimble, fast, and has quietly infiltrated American consumerism and the American landscape. Yet, despite being an “American” institution, most of its products come from Yiwu, a city of approximately 65 million people in the Zhejiang province of China. The project studies the retail empire’s transnational operations to identify the systems that have enabled the invasion of the dollar store empire, and asks: What would happen if architecture canonized overlooked building typologies and places? And what does it mean for architecture to contribute to the construction of a nation’s identity—at home and abroad? Research conducted in collaboration with Lindsey Krug.
A Day Late and a Dollar Short
Tumbleweed Rodeo
Tumbleweed Rodeo excavates and exhibits tumbleweed’s complicated legacies to identify how it helped construct a particular kind of American subjectivity in the Southwest. Through impromptu, Dadaesque performances, design-build projects, and GPS-informed landscape drawings, the Rodeo asks new questions of indigeneity and invasiveness: who came first, and who’s really invasive? The plant intersects everything from President Thomas Jefferson’s efforts to create a nation of yeoman farmers to President Herbert Hoover’s control over wheat prices in World War I and Georgia’s steppe biome degradation during the Russo-Georgian War. By tracing tumbleweeds’ movement from their place of origin to their host country, the slow commercialization and banalization of America’s Southwestern landscapes come into high relief.
During the pandemic, I collaborated with artist and farmer Eric J. Simpson on a 750’-long landscape drawing. We attached GPS trackers to tumbleweeds and released them across Eric’s farm in Shallowater, Texas. Peculiarly, the tumbleweeds’ paths were always contrary to the Jeffersonian grid—the 18th-century rectangular land survey system used in the early US Republic to displace Indigenous peoples. We selected one vector, and Eric and his team hand-sewed thousands of native seeds along it. It grew to be around 10’ tall, and Eric held dinners and dérives inside while students documented the conversations and events. Gradually, migratory birds consumed the drawing.
The Lubbock installation was made in collaboration with Jack Craft.
Walk the Line
Over six consecutive days in September 2020, 110 architecture students from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee circumnavigated Milwaukee’s boundary on foot, by bike, and by car to experience firsthand how the city both affects and is affected by race, class, and climate change. The studio, Walk the Line, functioned as a traveling repository and production line operating from the periphery of the city to survey the intersection between land, the human body, and human activity. By traveling 110 miles around the outermost edge of Milwaukee without ever crossing the imaginary line enclosing it, students understood the pervasive effects of environmental racism as issues that they could no longer ignore. Students cataloged their observations through field diaries and narrative maps, reflected on those annotations with people they met along the way and online, and collectively designed and built 34 site-specific interventions in response. The grass social distancing machine was made in collaboration with Natalie Kuehl.