#2 Notes on Niche
Nesting in that cavity we carve out of life
Last week, while at the dentist’s office, filling out a new patient form, I came across the line that I dread most. It’s a question that narrows life down into the economy of a single line: “Occupation.” The blank space below it is always just long enough for a single word. There’s something cruel about the brevity disguised under its practicality, no room for digression or nuance. I am, of course, aware that this question is simply meant to assess potential risk factors for oral health based on lifestyle habits. (It is also far from the first thing I’d wish to change about the dental healthcare system.) But my frustration reflects the many other lines that feel too short or boxes too small.
Out of habit, I wrote “architect,” but prepared to elaborate—that I’ve been engaging mostly with editorial, curatorial, and research projects—in case the question is repeated during small talk. And it does, at the end of the appointment, just before my dentist escorts me to the reception desk. What follows is the familiar choreography of clarification. The corridor feels like a miniaturized passage of my career journey, and my hallway performance rehearses the idea that there is more than one way to operate within a field: that writing or editing is also a form of architectural practice as much as designing, drawing, or building. It produces architecture as much as a plan or section does.
This incident left me circling a term that has lately haunted my conversations and pops up regularly in contemporary discussions, and that is “niche.” Most recently, having just started this newsletter, my relationship with this word resurfaces every time I have a conversation with someone about it. Of course, they want to know what it’s about, so there’s the struggle to categorize, but beyond that, I read or hear advice everywhere that one needs to have a niche in order to be “successful” in such a practice. And to possess a niche, one must carve out a precise and discernible area within a certain field or by converging multiple fields. It does suggest a multiplicity because your niche would be the point of many intersecting lines, but somehow, it is more fraught with over-determination. The truth is, I feel like everyone’s been asking everyone to find their niche these days.
Niche’s semantic and spatial connotations are interesting; it further multiplies its meaning. Most directly, I’m engaging with its meaning that refers to “a specialized area of interest.” It is usually a small, specific practice or subject in which one has interest or expertise. It’s also a “place” where one is best fitted, like finding one’s niche in something, or as its ecological extension suggests, the functioning role of a species in a certain habitat or environment. Niche exists in the architectural vocabulary too. The term refers to a recess or cavity within the thickness of a wall, usually semicircular or arched, built for the purpose of placing and displaying a decorative object like a statue, bust, or a vase. It derives from the French word nicher, meaning to nest.
Evoking both security and constraint, a niche is a place where you belong, but it’s also a limit, a boundary. There’s something incredibly generous and beautiful about thickening that line of the wall to create a “nest” within it, but I sometimes can’t tell if I’m the one carving out that space, or the statue residing quietly in it.
As I nest my thoughts in this term, I once again realize how I operate in between the architectural and the writerly. However, I do have a lot of resistance to this word, specifically in the way that it is utilized and imposed today: the exercises in which one is asked to constantly fit into, find, or be bound by a “niche.” To make this point, I feel that I need to talk more specifically about its relation to two other things conjoined in one word. That is “discipline.” Here, I’m firstly referring to “a branch of knowledge, typically studied in higher education,” but later, it will hopefully become clear how it is not too disconnected from its other meaning, “the practice of training and correcting people to obey a certain set of rules.”
As a starting point, we may confront the idea that disciplines, as branches of knowledge, are constructed frameworks. In his book World Systems Analysis, the economic historian and sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein writes out the “problem” around this:
… we have studied these phenomena in separate boxes to which we have given special names—politics, economics, the social structure, culture—without seeing that these boxes are constructs more of our imagination than of reality. The phenomena dealt with in these separate boxes are so closely intermeshed that each presumes the other, each affects the other, each is incomprehensible without taking into account the other boxes.
Wallerstein’s position is an extension of outlining the mistakes of representationalist thinking. He continues by pointing out that “we have been arguing that the separate boxes of analysis—what in the universities are called the disciplines—are an obstacle, not an aid, to understanding the world.” It is a “protest against the ways in which we have thought that we know the world,” and that the understanding of a phenomena does not start after a word is invented for it, nor does it stop where the borders of that particular discipline are drawn.
It was while I was studying architecture that I first began observing the aspects of this boundary-making that trouble me in conversations around “niche” as well. During reviews, juries, or crits, the one question we would encounter without exception—permeating every discussion about a project, especially if that project hinted in any slight way at an escape into the peripheries of the discipline—was: “But how is this architecture/architectural?” Sometimes, it would not even be about the project itself or what it was trying to say, but an effort to maintain what “Architecture” is, in the ways it has been defined for us. Investigating the many angles—social, environmental, political, psychological, philosophical—of any architectural project was important but not as important as making sure it was “architecture” first. The efforts to make sure a project or research stays within the neatly drawn lines and boundaries of the discipline often overshadowed the importance of its expansion—recognizing that an architectural problem is also a social, feminist, environmental, political one.
“How is this architectural?” is a profound question to ask, but not when it carries the concern to delimit its bounds and discipline (in Foucauldian sense) what counts and what does not count as architecture. It is a profound question to probe and permeate the realm of other tightly packed boxes. It is also an opportunity, in Deleuzian terms, for the “lines of flight”—breaking away from established boundaries and reconsidering them as openings, fluid and transitional zones for movement. And, in my opinion, the most significant queries, whether in the form of research, project, or writing, are when it is not easily or straightforwardly clear which discipline they sit in. Because if one removes the framework of disciplines overlaid onto our vocabularies and tools of measurement, things start making more sense, as they appear more connected.
The designer, educator, and critic Andrew Santa Lucia connects in his essay, “Disciplined in the House of Tomorrow,” these two meanings of “discipline”: “The term discipline was used as a way to discipline the school—to keep it in line.” And he further discusses:
“When one starts referring directly to the ‘discipline’ of architecture, it becomes the focus and in some ways places everything outside of it—another crack at autonomy. The hardest part for me was knowing that this world was broken; that white supremacy and settler colonialism and neoliberalism were the laws of the land; that things mattered so much outside of the practice of architecture.”
This is the way in which I critique the urge or coercion to find a niche. It becomes the starting point, rather than something that comes out from a process of exploration. It is seen as a necessity to operate in society and thereby taming and controlling creative fluidity. I’d like to make a clarification though, which is that I’m not at all against the wonderfully personal nests that we are each drawn to carve and flourish in. My problem is that it doesn’t start from oneself, but that it starts from the preconceived and prescribed notions or categories. Or that it starts from the necessity to fit, even if it means that to that end, you create something of your own.
In that regard, you don’t find or create a niche—you don’t have to because you already have it within yourself. And what’s considered not having a niche—having too many disparate interests that you can’t categorize or describe into one thing—is niche itself. Niche is not defined by abstract categories or disciplines; it is already present within what ignites your passion. Your process of becoming is niche itself, not the other way around. If seen this way, niche has the potential to overcome what disciplines do. It can focus on the act of carving the nest, and not the objects placed into readily made cavities.
Have a nice Sunday!
Thank you for reading,
Melis