Under the cover of early morning’s darkness on January 14, 2019, dozens of riot police flanked by military tanks descended upon a seemingly ordinary home in West Oakland, California (2). Having stood vacant for years, this three bedroom home was now being squatted by a small group of homeless mothers and children. Faced with no safe alternatives, these parents united as Moms4Housing, bringing neighbors and friends together to directly reclaim housing for the Oakland community from big banks and real estate speculators (3).

Just a few days before the first case of COVID-19 was discovered in the US, the violent eviction of these families portended the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people who lost housing since the onset of the pandemic. As we write, temporary aid and emergency moratoriums put in place have more or less expired, leaving 30 million plus Americans at the brink of eviction (4).

The pandemic has acted as a multiplier, scaling existing inequalities to new extremes. The surreal scene of disproportionate force leveled against Moms4Housing is only the latest manifestation of the dark energies at work. A long lineage of trauma haunts Oakland and every corner of this country. Racist housing covenants, red-lining, predatory lending and speculation, violent removals and foreclosures are some of the many spectres that continue to shapeshift and reappear...(5).

Over the past year, we have come to see the rituals, incantations, illusions and various acts of magic as legitimate worldbuilding strategies. Deployed intently and politically, these super-natural acts have served as a useful lens for understanding these unmooring times.

When classes moved online and we moved into our homes full-time, our spatial experience collapsed into the single container of our domestic sphere. Magical thinking guided us through the year as our bedrooms and apartments provided the backdrop for life to play out. The production of this journal distorted and blurred with thesis projects, graduations, new jobs, hospital stays, mental health crises, deaths, births, and everything else...Through it all, we witnessed closely how our everyday experiences emerged from a flowing choreography between animate and inanimate, matter and life. The Home, through its rooms, doors and walls, is where these mundane rituals become calcified.

For us, Moms4housing casts light on the powerful illusion that housing is a privilege afforded through meritocracy, rather than a basic human right. Especially now, to be denied a home is not only to lack access to a fundamental space of magic-making, but also one that structures practices of safety, care, and stability.

Housing, and its persistent and deepening state of crisis, reveals the vast entanglement that produces buildings. This complex web of relationships and systems spans from freelance designers, architecture firms, engineers, real estate conglomerates, activists, developers, planning policy, tech companies, to displaced residents…To contend that architects may not be the chief arbiters of space means embracing a sort of powerlessness, an unfamiliar softness. How do we reckon with the agency of the ghosted ‘entourage’ that dot our renderings? What happens when we let housing-insecure moms, self-taught builders, artists, or construction laborers take the lead instead? How can we co-create with those otherwise barred from entry into Architecture proper, to become vulnerable to the publics we serve? What can an architecture of mutual aid look like?

Existing at the frayed edges and rich margins beyond dominant realities, what is often deemed as ‘magic’ defies logic and offends western enlightened sensibilities. In a time where we can no longer imagine the end of capitalism, each act of mutual aid, altruistic support, and community fortification, therefore, is a magical act of defiance. While precarity under this system and its disproportionate inequities may appear inescapable, Moms4housing raises the question: who will we choose to be vulnerable to, Wedge-wood Inc. or each other? (6)

Scalability requires that project elements be oblivious to the indeterminacies of encounter; that’s how they allow smooth expansion…(It) is not an ordinary feature of nature (6).

Architectural practice is grounded in abstraction; at its core is the creative act of scaling. Legibility in drawings emerges by referencing a shared ruler. Even the production of a typical house embodies endless transmutations of raw material into scaled, discrete forms. Forests and quarries transform into dimensional lumber and bags of concrete, while the upper crust of the earth is excavated and standardized into beams, bricks, screws and nails to hold it all together. The assemblage of a home—or any building—is an exercise in defying and defining nature through the magic of architectural scale shifting. In short, we scale to worldbuild.

However, just a few degrees beyond our usual purview, these same supply chains that materialize our designs point to a scale of things that is beyond any individual grasp. The pandemic era affirms our inability to process massive scale on an daily basis. For instance, the exponential growth of viral things, the biological or memetic types, the sheer number of pandemic victims who are dead and dying in this country (535,000 lives and counting), the magnitude of Jeff Bezo’s wealth (200 billion and counting), or even the amount of money he managed to accumulate in a single day last year (13 billion), are mundane encounters that saturate our lived reality but remain distant and incomprehensible (7, 8, 9, 10).

Set in the 2020’s, Octavia’s Butler’s Parable of the Sower drops in on a California in full collapse, a charred landscape ravaged by pyro-maniacs. President Donner is elected on the promises of dismantling science and bringing jobs ‘back.’ Meanwhile, those who can afford it live in walled enclaves, while others succumb to chattel labor in corporate towns, or are left to fend for themselves in a landscape of ecological and social ruin (11).

As we enter into the 20’s, we enter an era that has been long planted on our collective timeline as decidedly of the ‘future.’ Yet our present-future brushes up with Butler’s past-future, imagined 30 years ago now, with a shivering clairvoyance. For us, this temporal slipperiness has been a hallmark of our experience of these ever more cursed times (12). Time and time again, we found ourselves caught in the act of esperar, suspended in a limbo between hope and wait, tangled up in the past, present, and future.

As much as COVID-19 rewrites our engagement with space, it also specifies our relation to time with its long-haulers, quarantines, and ever-blurring work from home hours (13). Like the pandemic, Trump is masterful at warping these two dimensions. His tenure alone seriously challenges notions of linear progress, buoyed by repeated referents and nostalgia for a revisionist past ie. “Make America Great Again...again...again.” (14) On top of this, his worldbuilding power has been capable of transformation on various physical scales: a pizza parlor became a child sex dungeon, the immense US-Mexico border flattened into a single hashtag #buildthewall, planetary climate change reduced to a political hoax propagated by a rival nation (15,16).

Bottlenecked by time and resources, we are often told that there is not enough. But in making this journal, we have tuned into a parallel reality of abundance. Long abandoned sites of infrastructural waste are reclaimed as spaces of care and emergent pedagogy. Pop-up fridges packed with free food are finding permanent sites on the sidewalks (16). For every unhoused person in Oakland, there are four vacant homes (17).

The local legacies of the Black Panther Party, the civil rights movements and mutual aid organizations like Moms4Housing teach us that to fight powerful illusions and dark magic, we must conjure our own. If anything, the pandemic affirms that monumental jumps to alternate worlds can happen overnight. The trillions of dollars of relief conjured out of thin air and the speed at which quarantined life became normalized make clear that big change is possible fast.

For the elite, the possibility of escape takes the form of bunkers and spaceships. But for those of us committed to life on earth together, how will we thrive in ruin? What will we do with our extra time, resources, money, attention: our abundance?

While our senses have been sharpened to the magic in the air, we are still struggling with the impossibility of relaying and reflecting on the past 400 days—from first imagining this journal to handing you this copy. Our deepest gratitude goes out to our community of supporters and collaborators who guided us with immense patience and care in this durational exercise in co-creation. It in this same spirit that we share with you these stories that have changed us over the last year.