Tasked with designing an elephant sanctuary in the broadest sense, I considered the English idiomatic expression “elephant in the room.” Every city has its elephants: those people made at once hypervisible by their otherness and invisibilized because of an inability to confront this difference. That is to say, the elephant is the subject of a thousand eyes—of innumerable surreptitious glances—diverted when the gaze is returned. elephant in the room turns this gaze back on itself, demanding that the observer observe the patterns and politics of their own looking. It forces the observer to encounter those rendered awkward or cast aside by taking them to the city’s hidden layers—to back alleys, under bridges and highways, to the ends of the subway system—where the elephants are often made to dwell.

Harvard GSD
Mack Scogin, Helen Han

elephant in the room