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“Disrupt/Displace: Translating Territory,” an article by Iowa State University faculty Shelby Doyle, assistant professor of architecture and the Daniel J. Huberty Faculty Fellow in Architecture, and Leslie Forehand, lecturer in architecture, has been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, Volume 72, Issue 1: A/To Project. “Disrupt/Displace” was both a 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale Session and a “report from the front” on the Dakota Access Pipeline — simultaneously a critique, a performance and a proposal in four parts: Searching for the Front (Iowa), Constructing the Front (Iowa), Reporting the Front (Venice) and Assessing the Front (Venice).

Alejandro Aravena’s curatorial statement for the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, “Reporting from the Front,” provided context for “Disrupt/Displace,” which emerged from doubts about the possibility of political resistance in the practice of architecture. As a project, “Disrupt/Displace” serves as a tool for understanding architecture’s complicity in perpetuating spatial forms of political oppression and as a method that enables architects to resist disciplinary nihilism and defensiveness when confronted with intractable political issues.