Ben Barsotti ScottCV, Contact
Hello!  I’m Ben Barsotti Scott. I’m a historical geographer, teacher, and landscape architect in New York City. I’m currently researching a series of human blockades at domestic US military sites in the final years of the US war in Southeast Asia.

I’m also one half of a writing and curatorial project called Bad Little Brother. You can learn about our 2018 exhibition and read some of our writing below.

See the syllabus for my 2022 course on contemporary architecture theory here and the syllabus for my 2025 course on cartography, public space, and contemporary statecraft here. Read testimonials from some of my recent students here.

I write occasionally for architecture and geography publications like the New York Review of Architecture, Critical Planning Journal, LA+, and Journal of Landscape Architecture.

You can see my full CV here and you can contact me here.
The 1972 People’s Blockade
2024—present
RESEARCH

My dissertation research centers on the 1972 People’s Blockade of Arms to Indochina, a semi-centralized campaign of human blockades at domestic US naval ports, munitions plants, and military rail lines, protesting the United States’ air wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

If you were involved in a blockade and are interested in telling me about your experiences, or if you were active military on a ship, train, or other site that was blockaded by civilians around 1971-2, please email me here. 


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Mapping the  People’s Blockade    
2024—present
RESEARCH

I make maps during both the research and writing phases of my dissertation work on the People’s Blockade. These maps combine historical data culled from USGS maps, departments of transportation and other state agencies, and historic aerial photography with contemporary elevation data. In some places, I include anecdotal information from blockaders I’ve interviewed—for example, the location of the campground from which participants mounted blockades near Naval Support Base Bangor in Washington State. In other places, I incorporate archival information like blockaders’ hand-drawn diagrams of blockade sites or written accounts of their actions. 

Each map requires a slightly different workflow, but they all begin with ArcGIS, or sometimes Google Earth, and finished in Adobe Illustrator.

These images represent works in progress—please do not distribute them without asking me first


Monmouth County, New Jersey, circa April 1972. Site of the first blockade actions.
Drawn by Ben Barsotti Scott from historic maps from the Monmouth County Planning Board (1971), New Jersey Department of Transportation (1972) and United States Geological Survey (1964, 1969) and contemporary data from the New Jersey Office of GIS (2025) and New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (2026).

The longest running iteration of the People’s Blockade happened near Naval Support Base Bangor, in Washington State. The diagram below situates the Bangor base, Hood Canal, and blockaders’ campsite in the regional context of the Puget Sound and Kitsap and Olympic Peninsulas. Organized independent of the AFSC or any other national organization, these blockades confronted six commercial freighters carrying munitions from the Bangor base to the US war in Southeast Asia and one US Navy support ship, the USS Sacramento. Blockaders established a campsite at the base of the Hood Canal Bridge, the retractable bridge through which ships passed as they departed for the Pacific. Blockaders rotated lookout duty, alerting the group when they saw ships sitting low in the water at the Bangor base, evidence of their nearing full of cargo. 


Drawn by Ben Barsotti Scott from historic maps from the United States Geological Survey (1962) and contemporary data from the United States Geological Survey (2026), Washington State Department of Transportation (2022) and King County (2026).
This diagram tracks the camera movements in two passages of an experimental film compiled by Bangor blockader Jack Nilles, a University of Washington physicist. Nilles documented the group’s actions and internal dynamics with a handheld Super-8 camera. In 1973, he compiled his footage into an experimental film, now digitized and accessible here. Rather than orient the viewer immediately with a full shot of the canal and its surrounding terrain, Nilles intersperses short pans across the canal with his own footage of blockades, moving and still images of the campground, and still photographs of the munitions transported by the Navy and its contractors. This diagram shows Nilles’s tight framing of those pans, which center the camera on the Hood Canal and admitting only the most critical elements of its shorelines: the base, the bridge, and the campsite (visible at minute 2:07—just south of Termination Point). I understand this fragmented and hyperlocal attention to the Hood Canal as evidence that Nilles organized his film primarily for a local audience. The film situates the US war in Southeast Asia insistently at one of its most important points of departure and suggests that military production has been installed as a permanent fixture of the homefront economy and domestic landscapes of Western Washington. My dissertation situates this local and insistently material approach to US warfare within a larger ethics of the local I identify in the People’s Blockade and its related materials.

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Citizen Scientist 1 Returns
2023—2026
WRITING

An essay on waste, reclamation, and settler aesthetics in Newtown Odyssey.

Following my review (see below) of Newtown Odyssey: An open-air opera for, about, and on a creek, I conducted interviews with the opera’s composer and librettist. Those interviews informed my fortchoming article “Citizen Scientist 1 Returns,” which explores the character Citizen Scientist 1 as a paranoid figure of settler colonization. I argue that Newtown Odyssey depicts the intimate connections between waste and reclamation, both of which may function as territorial capture under settler colonization. Forthcoming Spring 2027 in LA+.

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Anti-Assimilationist Landscape
2017—2023
RESEARCH

Through a study of two series of landscape photographs by twenty-first century American artists, I proposes a theory of “anti-assimilationist landscape”: a politicized rejection of the pictorial conventions of landscape and the systems of land ownership, gender, and nation-building they sustain. Collier Schorr and David Benjamin Sherry make landscape images in sites with histories of gendered settler-colonial and white supremacist violence. I argue that their works function as both interpretation of those sites and a queer reclamation of them, enacting a politics beyond the liberal-democratic notion of citizenship and the fascist notion of ‘blood and soil.’ Arguing for its applicability to landscape architecture theory and practice, I contrast this anti-assimilationist mode to the turn-of-the-millennium concept of ‘eco-revelation,’ proposing instead a queer aesthetics of obscuring and the potential of ‘becoming illegible’ as an environmentalist practice.

You can read the article in Journal of Landscape Architecture: “Anti-Assimilationist Landscape: Becoming Illegible as Queer Resistance to State Power.


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Maps, Power, and the Digital World
2025
TEACHING

In Fall 2025, I designed and taught an undergraduate seminar on contemporary theories of mapping, cartography, and political power. A full list of readings is below.

                   

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Unrestrooms
2018
EXHIBITION
Unrestrooms, an unfinished survey of gender and public space was an exhibition of recent architectural investigations of the gendered space of the public restroom. It opened in March 2018 at Front/Space, a noncommercial storefront gallery in the Crossroads district of Kansas City, MO. The exhibition was curated by Bad Little Brother (Ben Barsotti Scott and Julie Shapiro) and featured a site-specific installation that rendered the standard dimensions of public toilet stalls in outrageous, glittering tinsel. Projects were solicited through an open call. The exhibition was organized into three themes: “Queering Architectural Type,” “Rest and Unrest,” and “Can ‘Tactical Urbanism’ be Queered?” The exhibition included a reading room with resources on gender in architecture, case studies in public restroom design, and information on local LGBTQIA+ resources.

On March 31st, 2018, Bad Little Brother and Front/Space partnered with the Kansas City Center for Inclusion to present a panel discussion on inclusive restroom design. The panel brought together local architects and activists to discuss recent developments in inclusive restroom design, with a particular focus on ensuring access among trans and gender non-conforming users.

In conjunction with Unrestrooms, Bad Little Brother self-published our 2018 interview with Jordan Martins, executive director of Comfort Station Logan Square, an arts organization housed in a former public restroom featured in the exhibition. You can read the interview here.

Press: “At An Exhibit in Kansas City, Designers Begin Solving America’s Public Bathroom Problem” (KCUR)


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Contemporary Architecture Criticism and Theory
2022
TEACHING

In Spring 2022, I designed and taught an advanced undergraduate seminar on contemporary architectural theory. 379-AH Contemporary Architecture Criticism & Theory at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). You can access the full syllabus here.


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After the Hyperprofessional
2020
WRITING
A provocation written with Julie Shapiro as Bad Little Brother.  You can read the full text here. Laurie Anderson once advised: “Write your own manifesto....Just make sure you use a pencil, so you can always get it... you know... right.”

 Professional design under global capital has produced a category of architectural designer-as-technocrat, which we can call the hyperprofessional, whose contributions are not only aesthetic but administrative. More than just a charismatic schmoozer, the hyperprofessional is a sort of anti-democratic social practitioner. He capably navigates the political systems of the neoliberal city; more importantly, he capitalizes on their very opacity to developers, politicians, and the general public. Posing as a uniquely adept interpreter of the parameters of urban public space, the hyperprofessional establishes himself as an indispensable intermediary between developers, city agencies, and (in scare quotes) the community.

The success of this figure shows us that professional architectural work has already decoupled from architectural licensure. The hyperprofessional has no need for licensure, except as a tool wielded tactically by a subordinated local practitioner. His aims are global and licensure is always local. Ironically, this figure demonstrates that interpreting and navigating regulatory systems can be both sustaining work and aesthetic practice. The hyperprofessional funnels these goals through the existing structures of global capital; can an anti-capitalist design invert his proprietary attitude, sharing and receiving knowledge freely rather than guarding it jealously?
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Yes, It Can Be Done!
2016
EXHIBITION
Between 1950 and 1980, the US National Park Service added 168 park units to its system, and more than doubled attendance at its sites nationwide. This remarkable expansion included the reimagining of the role of NPS in urban and suburban areas. NPS’s establishment in 1962 of the National Capital Region, around Washington, DC, reflects a new investment in planning parks parks at a regional scale (with an eye for urban and suburban accessibility). Similarly, the 1960s saw a reassessment of programming and management of Washington DC’s parks, as National Capital Parks (also managed by NPS) sought to better serve Washington’s Black population.

The exhibition Yes, it can be done! charted this moment of tumult and optimism through three case studies: Anacostia Park, in Southeast Washington, DC; Greenbelt Park, in Greenbelt, Maryland; and Grant Village, in Yellowstone National Park. Together these parks illustrate shifting attitudes towards conservation and visitor engagement in the mid-twentieth century United States. The exhibition approached urban, rural, and suburban national park design as Cold War-era statecraft, animated by and animating national sentiments of security, belonging, and formal equality.

This was the first exhibition of works from the Benjamin C. Howland papers, which were donated to the University of Virginia in 2016. I was the exhibition designer and curator. In 2015, I led the effort to document all materials in the collection before their donation to the Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.


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Simple Made-Up Machines
2018
COMPETITION ENTRY
In 2018, Bad Little Brother (Ben Barsotti Scott and Julie Shapiro) collaborated with fashion designer Peggy Noland to propose a fantastical machine for construction on an open lot in Los Angeles’s Silver Lake neighborhood. Our proposal received an honorable mention from the commissioning organization, Materials and Applications.

Simple Made-Up Machines is an inefficient system for building, operated by outsized and outrageous workers. It is leisurely, roundabout, luxurious, and entertaining. Like a Rube Goldberg machine, it sets chains of events in motion. But it is not entirely linear. It drags. It is distractible and spontaneous, sometimes repetitive and additive. Like a spiderweb, it traps. Like camp humor, it transforms.

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