Creativity in Modern Heritage

Informatics, UIUC / Science and Technology in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, The Cyprus Institute

The Nicosia International Airport (1968)—a modernist terminal sealed within Cyprus’s UN buffer zone since 1974—is physically inaccessible. Our research team had sufficient documentation to make a virtual reconstruction, but everything that made it a place belonged to other people. The team embedded the virtual model in a museum exhibition, where visitors could reshape it as part of daily operations.

What the team initially posed as architectural questions became social history through recursive public engagement: the team populated a restaurant in the departures lounge with seats and customers. Visitors corrected the assumption: the space was staff-only, gradually claimed by workers. That correction opened deeper knowledge: how ground crew had converted a space under the passenger ramp into an unauthorized smoking lounge. Through a phone-based recording channel, visitors questioned why the reconstructed signage was Greek-English only, surfacing a history of Turkish Cypriot exclusion that predated the terminal itself.

Propositional modeling formalizes a design-research methodology for public-engaged scholarship. Its core dynamic is intuitive in architectural design: a scale model on a table pulls expertise from everyone who encounters it. This research brings that dynamic into interactive software (games, virtual environments, digital tools), so that what communities already know can enter the record through the artifacts researchers build.

Industrial Design, UIUC

This paper examines the American Moslem Society (AMS) Mosque in Dearborn, Michigan, as a vernacular building case study for rethinking modern heritage as a dynamic and contested process rather than a fixed architectural artifact. Established in 1938 by early Arab Muslim immigrants, the mosque has undergone multiple transformations that reflect shifting patterns of migration, religious authority, and community formation in the United States. Drawing on archival sources, spatial analysis, and fieldwork, the study approaches the mosque as a material archive, focusing on both its built environment and the everyday practices that have shaped its use, through which evolving meanings of Muslim identity in Dearborn have emerged.

Focusing on the post-1965 period, the paper traces how new immigrant communities reconfigured the mosque’s spatial and institutional order, including the formalization of ritual practices and the introduction of gender-segregated circulation. At the same time, overlooked material traces, such as the displacement of the original cornerstone, point to earlier histories of women’s participation and flexible, community-centered practices that have become less visible within the mosque’s present form. By situating the AMS Mosque within the framework of critical heritage, the paper argues that buildings such as the AMS Mosque challenge preservation frameworks that privilege formal integrity and singular narratives. Recognizing such buildings as heritage requires interpretive approaches that engage with transformation, absence, and contested memory, expanding preservation beyond static notions of authenticity.

Media and Film Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

This paper traces the unruly “reediness” that flourishes across a toxic landscape shaped by decades of informal e-waste processing in Guiyu, China—one of the largest e-waste recycling centers in the world—through a series of works by Chinese environmental artist Long Pan. The reeds that grow along Guiyu’s polluted riverbanks are hyperaccumulators, plants that absorb and concentrate heavy metals at levels far exceeding their surroundings. Through her processes of collecting, extracting, and transforming these plants, Long asks a fundamental question: how might we construct an archive of toxicity in the aftermath of remediation, in the absence of institutional archives for toxic histories that remain difficult to narrate and are rarely recorded?

By placing Long’s work in dialogue with state-led environmental restoration projects that also deploy hyperaccumulating plants, I identify two ways of reading toxic heritage across different scales: the scale of perceivability and the scale of concentration. First, Long’s artistic practice renders toxicity perceptible by transforming microscopic chemical accumulation into visible and material forms through processes of mediation and representation. Second, I reconceptualize concentration not only as a biochemical process but as a material and political-economic condition of extraction. I argue that hyperaccumulation operates not only as a botanical process but also as a political intervention into land relations shaped by infrastructural conditions that unevenly concentrate toxicity and value.

Art History, UIUC

In the early 1990s, more than 3,000 negatives made by photographer William Richardson Mullins came under the care of Appalshop, a documentary media workshop that has operated in eastern Kentucky since 1969. Known by locals as “the Pictureman,” Mullins owned a series of studios near Jenkins, Kentucky, during the 1940s and 1950s and had photographed people living in the Cumberland Plateau region for decades prior. Though federal photographic surveys like the Farm Security Administration and the Boone Report visually defined the inhabitants of coal-mining towns in Central Appalachia as impoverished and isolated, Mullins’s photographs offer alternative views of people living in the region and demonstrate a familiarity with community, history, and ritual. This way of making images is also reflected in the work of Appalshop filmmaker Elizabeth Barret, the first researcher to investigate Mullins’s archive.

This paper considers poet William Carlos Williams’s notion of “ground-sense” as not only a framework for evaluating Mullins’s photographs and Barret’s research but also a methodological orientation that prioritizes material and durational relationships with the physical ground of a place (and those who inhabit it) in order to resist extractive practices—photographic and otherwise.

Landscape Architecture, UIUC

This paper examines the development, reception, and ongoing debates over Thamesmead, a housing development in the marshy banks of the Thames in southeast London, perhaps most well-known as the iconic Brutalist backdrop for key scenes in the film, A Clockwork Orange. When it was conceived in the 1960s the 1,300-acre site was to house 60,000 Londoners and move industry, businesses, and people from overcrowded quarters of central London into an “integrated social community” designed by architects of the Greater London Council and constructed with modular concrete panels. Thamesmead was, in the words of one of the bureaucrats administering its development, going to be the “most desirable, forward-looking, and generally happy communities” in London. Yet, and perhaps unsurprisingly, this did not come to pass. Limited by a lack of transportation links into central London, Thamesmead’s subsequent history, privatization, and recent new developments, demolition, and construction raises key questions about preservation of modern buildings, the role of the state, and the economic and social pressures of life in cities.