From the architect. Honestbee is an online grocery delivery service based in Singapore, with operations in Singapore and other parts of the Asian region. Located in a former industrial warehouse space, the office is designed to accommodate around 120 staff members, with the aim to create an open and collaborative environment that blends the functions of work, play and community. A complex of spaces are arranged around 2 volumes inserted into the space, one containing a series of meeting rooms and library, and the other a small theatre; creating a variety of situations that allow for different activities to occur, from more tradition desktop work spaces and meeting rooms, to casual seating areas and informal little nooks, to small plaza-like spaces. There is also a series of enclosed and secret rooms waiting to be discovered. Many of the casual interstitial spaces are designed without a predetermined programme to allow a certain flexibility and spontaneity to occur. The whole complex is unified by the generous splashes of colours throughout and the presence of the existing waffle slab ceiling that is left exposed.
Entrance The entrance is along a common corridor, with the entrance door set in from the bounding wall to create a small foyer space. The foyer space is finished with stained timber panelling and yellow back-painted glass, with a neon light to mark the entrance. This space is deliberately kept dark to contrast with the brightness and colours of the interior, to create a sense of surprise when one enters for the first time.
The Meeting Block When one enters the premises, one is confronted with a block that contains the reception, meeting rooms, a library alley, and various hidden Skype rooms that are behind concealed doors. There is also a ladder in one of the hidden rooms that contains a ladder that allows access to the roof of the Meeting Block. A corner of the Meeting Block is cut away to create a circular plaza space, between the Meeting Block and the office spaces.
The Office The office is designed with an open concept with daylight flooding in from the windows at the side. A variety of types of workspaces are created to catered to the work habits of the different individuals. Beside the standard open benching, there are standing height desks, booth style workspaces allowing for close collaboration, and arched niches for people who prefer to a more private setting for their workspace. A glass meeting room punctuates the office allowing for transparency through the whole space. A hexagonal array of tube lights spread across the ceiling ties the whole office space together.
The Pantry The pantry area consists of a small kitchenette and also a coffee stand that opens at certain times to serve coffee to the office staff and also to the other occupants of the building. A reconfigurable seating area is situated in front. The pantry caters for daily lunch and can function as an event space. There is also a small “outdoor” area at the end of the pantry that is open to the fresh air outside.
The Theatre A small 25-seater serves as a media room and also as a seminar room for staff training. Internally, the theatre is cladded in navy colour acoustic panels with the stepped flooring in a bright blue carpet. The theatre seats, recycled from an old theatre in Singapore, form the central focus of the theatre. Externally, the volume containing the theatre is cladded in a patchwork of veneer panels. The front of the theatre can be opened up to let the space in the theatre flow into the pantry just outside. This allows for the “stage” area to be extended outwards or for the theatre to function as additional seating for the pantry.
Unprogrammed Spaces Many of the common corridor and interstitial spaces are deliberately designed to be quite generous, and without program, allowing for spontaneity and creative input from the user in deciding how to utilise them. Things like, townhall-style gatherings, hackathons/makeathons, recreational activities, festive decorations (like a big christmas tree) etc, can easily happen in these spaces.
Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill’sVeterans Memorial Coliseum in Portland, Oregon has been on the chopping block for some time now: since the city’s NBA team moved to the Moda Center (known also as the Rose Garden) next door in 1995, the building has struggled to find the funding necessary for maintenance, and since 2009 calls have been made for the demolition of the iconic modernist structure. The threat reached peak levels last October, when the Portland City Council nearly voted to approve a proposal for demolition before ultimately denying it by a narrow 3-2 margin.
One of the Pacific Northwest’s most significant examples of International Style architecture, the Memorial Coliseum was selected for both its historical value and engineering feats. The arena has played host to over 5,000 events in its 56 years, including performances from the Beatles and speeches by Barack Obama and the Dalai Lama, and features an innovative structural system that places the building’s entire weight onto just four concrete columns, intended to provide spectators with unobstructed views of the city through the building’s glass envelope.
via City of Portland Archives
“We believe this mid-century masterpiece is poised to once again become a symbol of Portland’s highest aspirations,” said Brian Libby, member of Friends of Memorial Coliseum, a local coalition dedicated to preserving the VMC. “This building’s potential in its intended open-curtain configuration, with a 360-degree view from your seats to the outside, has remained hidden away even from Oregonians who have spent their lives attending the Coliseum. We’re inspired to renew its possibilities and build on its design’s cultural and economic value.”
The National Trust for Historic Preservation lists National Treasures as “threatened buildings, neighborhoods, communities, and landscapes that stand at risk across the country.” While the building is already listed on the National Register of Historic Places, inclusion on the National Treasures list allows the trust to provide the funds, organization, promotion and legal action necessary to protect places of history and significance. The designation does not ensure preservation, however – while many projects have been saved by the organization, such as Cincinnati’s Union Station and Chicago’s Pullman Historic District, others have still been lost to the wrecking ball, including Bertrand Goldberg’s iconic Prentice Women’s Hospital in 2013.
For now, the Veterans Memorial Coliseum is still fighting an uphill battle. A study published last year by the city showed that even spending the $35.1 million to $142.9 million necessary to upgrade the facility would not make the arena profitable, and the city’s growing demand for housing has made the site even more valuable to potential developers. The struggle between historical value and functionality is not one easily resolved, but with its new status as a National Treasure, the VMC may yet stand a fighting chance.
Thus, few years ago, an annex was built against the original building and two prefabricated buildings were set into the playground to gain more classrooms.
The project takes advantage of the qualities of the site to link the existing and new built elements. The old granit building create an interesting front built, but the successive extensions compromise the readability of the school.
Thus, the new project aims to identify the existing building as a new school, and create an extension that willl make a link between landscape and the old refurbished building.
Temple University’s new library designed by Snøhetta, in collaboration with Stantec, is now under construction after a groundbreaking ceremony in April. The 21,000 square meter (225,000 square foot) building is adjacent to what will become a future campus quadrangle that is currently occupied by other buildings slated for demolition. The library sits at the intersection of two major pedestrian pathways, Polett Walk and Liacouras Walk, attesting to the University’s hope that the facility will be a new social and academic heart for 37,800 students.
Courtesy of MIR & Snøhetta
According to the architects, with a diversity of spaces and emphasis on collaborative and social learning, the library challenges the outdated inward-emphasis of research institutions. One of the cutting-edge technologies that will be employed in the library is an automated book retrieval system. The process will reduce the area required for 2 million-plus volumes and give that space back in the form of collaborative learning environments and other academic needs.
Courtesy of MIR & Snøhetta
The library will house many partner programs and student resources that include a writing center, digital scholar’s studio, innovation lab, math and science resource center, immersive visualization studio, makerspace, graduate scholar’s studio, classrooms, reading rooms, group study rooms, a café, 24-7 zone, and offices for administration and staff. Described by Snøhetta as “porous,” the building will allow for visual connections across entry areas, offering easier access to resources.
Courtesy of Snøhetta / Methanoia
The building’s roof will include a 4,300 square meter (46,000 square feet) green terrace with stepped seating and a garden of perennials and ornamental grasses. The building will also include a stormwater collection system for the plants, providing year-round water management.
Courtesy of Snøhetta / Methanoia
Courtesy of MIR & Snøhetta
The library’s fourth floor includes browsable stacks of 200,000 volumes and a main reading room with uninterrupted views in three directions. An oculus allows users to gaze down at the building’s atrium, adding a circuitous quality to the user experience. The third floor includes a reading room as well as flexible space and reservable study rooms. An event space on the building’s ground floor can seat about 120 people for lectures, conferences, and other gatherings. Canopies at building entrances are meant to provide shelter, social space, and the opportunity to host outdoor classes. The library’s automated retrieval system will be on the lowest level.
Courtesy of Snøhetta / Methanoia
Courtesy of MIR & Snøhetta
The building is scheduled to open in the fall of 2018.
From the architect. This Project is set as an urban strategy to solve the public uses plot existing in the south access to Santa Pola town, conforming a kind of ‘door to the city’. The roads linking Santa Pola and Elche towns are running through an area exclusively shaped with industrial buildings, just at the very front of the public plot and the entrance to the city itself. So, this Project had to realise its nature as a landmark, and was settled as an organic and uniform ensemble of building pieces and spaces.
Main use comprehends the new Bus Station, placed in the most prominent point of the plot, next to the roundabout, and directly visible from all points. Likewise, a wide green area is placed next to the road, to emphasise its public role.
Formally, the main station building is composed as a floating huge deck, which must provide shadow and protection to the waiting platforms, settled under this deck together with the ticket office ant services, and an oil station and shop in its back side. The main deck has a void in the central area to provide a kind of garden, whose purpose is to provide light, reference point and to serve as a boundary between different uses and spaced.
Elevations
There is a second volume with a similar composition, using metallic claddings as the main material to conform façades. This volume is laid down twisting its lines and so allowing public spaces and gardens to appear in first place. This second piece is used to provide space for commercial and city servies.
The theme for this year’s Venice Biennale is largely an invitation for architects and designers to expand and think beyond architecture’s traditional frontiers and to respond to a wider range of challenges relating to human settlement. With news of political crises continuing to fill the headlines of late, Aravena’s theme challenges architects to respond. One such response comes from Lucas Boyd and Chad Greenlee from the Yale School of Architecture. They believe that:
While [places of worship] do not provide a basic need for an individual’s biological survival, they do represent a fundamental aspect of not only an individual’s life beyond utility, but an identity within the collective, a familiar place of being—and this is something that we consider synonymous with being human—a requirement for the persistence of culture.
The two students came up with proposal designs on churches, synagogues and mosques that can be quickly built as “Pop-Up Places of Worship” in refugee camps. By presenting immediately-recognizable sacred spaces that are transportable and affordable, Boyd and Greenlee highlight spaces for worship as an absolute necessity in any type of human settlement. Through this process, the students also determine what, for them, is “necessary” in a religious structure.
Courtesy of Lucas Boyd and Chad Greenlee
With limited resources as an assumed condition, the process of designing these pop-ups has been one of reduction. This process appears to be conveniently in line with the Boyd and Greenlee’s view that the architecture of religion is inherently excessive—diluted, exaggerated, and misinterpreted through the natural passing of time. In determining specific elements to remove from their structures, the designers were rather unapologetic about their subjectivity. They quote Rafael Moneo’s thoughts on designing religious space from his essay in the book Constructing the Ineffable: Contemporary Sacred Architecture:
The architect cannot rely on a shared vision but must risk his or her own version of sacred space.
For Boyd and Greenlee, the absolute necessity for the project, perhaps above function itself, was iconography. They were guided by questions such as “what does a synagogue/chapel/mosque look like? What are the critical formal pieces that help to connect a religious structure to a particular faith and which of these elements could hypothetically be removed and [the building] still retains its reading?”
Courtesy of Lucas Boyd and Chad Greenlee
The first of Boyd and Greenlee’s subjective decisions was to determine the scope of religions for which they would design these structures: Islam, Christianity and Judaism. In recent years, multi-faith spaces have been the go-to typology in addressing the many different religious needs of the public; often, these spaces take on an abstract neutrality. The designers of Pop-Up Place of Worship admit that this direction “would shrink the scope of their project, and also lessen the risk of offending through cultural definition,” but a multi-faith space would not have been coherent with their views of cultural pluralism, as there are specific symbolic identifiers associated with every religion. In other words, the project rests on the idea that mosques, synagogues and chapels are identifiable because they look different from one another. But while the team has made the clear decision to design specific structures per faith, they have chosen not to differentiate between various sects within each religion; these structures would simultaneously accommodate Catholic and Protestant Christians or Sunni and Shia Muslims. So, while the reductive notions behind each structure are dependent on highlighting the religious differences between people, at a smaller scale, their architectural utopianism hopes that various religious sects will find unity in their similarities in these structures.
Largely looking at the historical developments for each typology, Boyd and Greenlee have come up with the following structures:
Chapel
Courtesy of Lucas Boyd and Chad Greenlee
Resembling a basic gable roof tent with a cross-shaped framework, the Christian Chapel is perhaps the most successful iteration, for it is most recognizable. This ease of representation, according to Boyd and Greenlee, can be attributed to Christianity’s rich history of expressing their religious belief through architectural means. The question “what does a church look like” is perhaps the easiest to answer. If we compare with each other Brunelleschi’s basilicas, Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, SOM’s Air Force Academy Chapel and even Tadao Ando’s Church of the Light they all retain stereotypical familiarity with one another. For Boyd and Greenlee the gable shaped tent, which was been designed to be as tall as possible, communicates the historic vision of Christianity’s “home-church” as well as the faith’s desire to communicate ascendance unto the heavens. The large cross-shaped supports drive the message home.
Synagogue
Courtesy of Lucas Boyd and Chad Greenlee
If the chapel was the easiest to represent, the synagogue was much more of a challenge. Boyd and Greenlee explain how they found it difficult to identify a specific typology for a synagogue due to the regional differences between pre-existing examples, and with no contemporary model to look to, the pair looked towards the architectural lineage of the Israelites. But without an icon to take from, is the resulting design still iconic? Composed of taut fabric walls over a square base with various entry points and an opening over the centre, the pop-up Synagogue focuses on the interplay of the center and the perimeter which represents the layered and hierarchical rituals and rules pertaining to Judaic practice.
Mosque
Courtesy of Lucas Boyd and Chad Greenlee
The functional requirements and the frequent daily use of the mosque when compared to the other typologies made the structure most difficult to design according to Boyd and Greenlee. They were conscious of the incredible reduction that they would be undertaking in a faith that had many rituals and whose structures thus took on particular forms due to these functions. While iconography remained the ultimate goal for the pop-up Mosque, there were many rules involved with the design such as symmetry, maintaining a longitudinal axis oriented with the Qibla, and a square or rectangular plan. Boyd and Greenlee accommodated for these requirements while creating an iconic look by arranging multiple modular bases with vaulted forms, as rectilinear shapes. Within a highly geometric design language, they have also adorned the floor surfaces with geometric designs.
The work of the architect concerns not only the product but also the packaging of each project—the way the idea is presented. For these pop-up structures, Boyd and Greenlee hope to deploy the structures as a building kit with a matching instruction pamphlet, which imply a do-it-yourself simplicity and a universality of application. These structures can be absorbed into the “kit-of-parts” that make up the UN’s protocol for designing refugee camps. These entertaining pamphlets also expose the long history of the typology of “Pop-Up Structures” as agents for spectacle. It could be argued that this project makes a spectacle out of camp living, like an extension on the theme of poverty fetishization. It could also be argued that, for the sake of the iconography which they have made central to the project, Boyd and Greenlee might also be guilty of exaggerating and misinterpreting religious architecture for the sake of an image—in direct contradiction to the principles which underlie the concept. However, both of these criticisms would be made at the risk of overshadowing this project’s potential. These pop-up structures are novel in their typology; they carry a message that, beyond emergency shelters, schools, medical and community centres, there is a new domain through which the architect can lend their benevolent hand to the people.
Courtesy of Lucas Boyd and Chad Greenlee
Encapsulating storied religious traditions within tents of middling sophistication demonstrates the ability of architecture to operate under well-informed pragmatism. While essentially offering a pared-down form of religious space, the designers hope to imbue the same community-building aspects that are associated with places of worship in sites which have greatest need for it. At its worst, the project can be seen as a collection of mildly sufficient ad-hoc structures that highlight the necessity of religious practice in human settlements at every level of sophistication. At the project’s best, these structures could serve as vehicles for people to connect with each other—people who, from a distance, would be lured by immediate visions of “home”, “salvation” and “hope” that is communicated by the iconic formal qualities of these pop-up tents.
When you declare you want to be an architect, no one tells you how long and difficult the process is. No one tells you that you’re going spend 4-7 years in school, and no one tells you that have to pass seven, or six–or however many exams NCARB says you have take–grueling exams that could take years to complete. Oh, let’s not forget the thousands of specific experience hours required to begin taking those exams (wait, did they change that, too?). No one told us, that’s for sure. Maybe that’s a good thing, because otherwise our webcomic, Architexts, would never have come to be. Laughter is the best medicine, after all, and we’re glad to have the opportunity to spread some laughter to our fellow architects.
When you add it all up, becoming an architect is not easy, and it’s not uncommon to wonder if you may have been easy to be a doctor instead. But, we are architects, not doctors. While we often don’t get the notoriety, praise, or billable rate of other professions, there is something special about what we do that makes it all worthwhile. Hopefully.
As the first South American selected to curate the Biennale, Alejandro Aravena was excited as he delivered the latest news on “Reporting from the Front,” the XV International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, which opened its doors to the public on May 28:
“The Biennale, the invited architects, as well as the curators, did not intend to do anything other than open a debate in which architecture can be used to improve quality of life through the sharing of knowledge. This debate holds more significance since we are speaking at the Presidential Palace because it conveys the message that these issues are important. Thank you so much for the opportunity and the chance to be here.”
The President’s presence at an event like this is a symbol that consolidates a chapter of progress and achievements in Chilean architecture. In the last two decades, Chilean architecture has positioned itself in the world as a force to be recognized, and Chilean architects are now obtaining international recognition, which would have been unimaginable a few years ago.
Just when we thought that the peak of international success for Chilean architecture was the selection of Aravena as the director of the International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, he was then awarded with the highest recognition an architect can aspire to: the Pritzker Prize.
All of these successes point to Chilean architecture being at its peak, and this version of the Venice Biennale should be a barometer of the true impact that Chile is having in the world. In this article we present projects from a younger generation of architects. Thanks to their talents, use of technology and understanding of their local context as background for an international context, they have managed to stand out from the crowd through a resounding architectural discourse.
An important part of the Chilean architecture success in the world can be attributed to the possibilities the internet and specialized media have provided. David Basulto has been literally reporting “from the front line” for 10 years, when along with David Assael he founded Plataforma Arquitectura in 2006. Based in Santiago, Chile, the website later became the most viewed architectural website in the world, operating today under the name ArchDaily. Due to his views, criticisms and specializations, Basulto was invited by the Nordic countries to be the curator of their pavilion, one of the most important in the Giardini.
To Latin Americans, Finland, Sweden and Norway seem like idyllic countries, where basic needs are covered and discussions about the problems faced in Latin America seem to be non-existent. Due to this, Basulto presented “In Therapy,” an architectural reflection on where these consolidated societies are headed, but that still poses specific social and cultural complexities.
Around the corner from the Nordic countries pavilion, is the one from the United States. The curators Cynthia Davidson and Monica Ponce de Leon have selected a number of speculative proposals for a specific location in Detroit, within which the project A(n) Office, composed by V. Mitch McEwen and Chilean Marcelo López-Dinardi is displayed.
The central exhibition, “Reporting From the Front,” will be displayed in both the Giardini and the Arsenale. For the exhibition Aravena invited architecture offices from around the world to present their work and methods for contributing to improve quality of life. In the Arsenale, an architect from the University of Chile and Harvard University, Felipe Vera, is presenting his studies of the world’s largest temporary settlement, the Kumbh Mehla. Together with Indian architect Rahul Mehrotra, they will question the importance of the permanence of urbanism and architecture, through a pavilion that has been built with the same elements that are used to build a complete city every 12 years that houses 5 million people for the celebration of one of the most important religious festivals in India.
If the Chilean saying “Talca, Paris and London” originated in order to position Talca, a city in the central valley of Chile, as one of the large urban powers in architecture, the saying is not that far from reality. Thanks to the interesting teaching model developed by the School of Architecture at the University of Talca, which teaches its students self-management and the importance of finding harmony with local communities and its rural context, Talca has become a fascinating example for the world.
In Venice, we can see these unique teaching methods in “Swimming Upstream,” in the Chilean pavilion, curated by the director of the School of Talca, Juan Roman, and his academic assistant Jose Luis Uribe.
In addition, as part of the International Exhibition organized by Alejandro Aravena, Grupo Talca, an architectural firm composed of Rodrigo Sheward and Martin del Solar, will rebuild the iconic Mirador Pinohuacho. The Pinohuacho viewing point was built to save the forests of southern Chile and boost its tourism. The Vasquez family, who are dedicated to wood craft, commissioned Sheward 10 years ago to build the viewing point. That same viewpoint, which was built near Villarrica, was taken down and re-built in Venice.
In contributing to this decentralization of good architecture produced in Chile, we could say that architects Pezo Von Ellrichshausen are one of the greatest exhibitors, with an interesting production created from southern Chile, in Concepcion. Their work is recognized throughout the world and since they won the 2014 MCHAP award for Casa Poli, they divide their time between their workshop in Concepcion and classes in Chicago. The Vara pavilion is located at an important place outside the Giardini.
All of these projects are added to the proposals of architects like Cecilia Puga, Teresa Moller and the firm comprising Mirene Elton and Mauricio Léniz, who from the Giardini and the Arsenale will also be ambassadors of Chilean architecture in Venice for the next 6 months.
From the architect. Founded in 2008, the Joachim Herz Foundation is one oft he largest foundations in Germany. With resources of 1.3 billion Euros the main objective is to promote education, science and research.
Since the 1970s, a former coffee roastery was the office of Joachim Herz, an entrepreneur from Hamburg. Germany. In the 1990s, he modificated the old roasting-tower into a modern office. After his death in 2008 the tower remained the heart and home of the Joachim Herz Foundation.
The new headquarter was built in 2014 on the site of the old coffee roastery. The production halls were teared down, but the 25 m (82 ft) high roasting-tower remained and was integrated into the new ensemble both creatively and functionally. The 3-storey building surrounds the roasting-tower like a meander, that creates a stimulating tension between the old tower and the new house.
The new building is divided into an eastern and a western part, which is connected by a bridge in the second level. Thereby a semi-public patio arises. From here you are able toenter the 2-storey entrance hall. On the ground floor you find function rooms, an auditorium, conference rooms and a library. In the western part of the ground floor the cafete- ria opens up to a generous lake terrace and a newly designed garden.
The offices on the upper floors have corridors with glass partition walls and room-high windows which creates a generous atmosphere with natural light. The intervisibility with the courtyards, the consistent materials and the reluctant color scheme give a calm atmosphere.The facade manufactured of precision precast concrete segments give the building a spatial depth.
After the existing buildings were demolished the outdoor installation were transformed into a 700 m2 (7.535 ft2) garden with a large lake.
The following interview with Adrian Lahoud was first published by Volume Magazine in their 48th issue, The Research Turn. You can read the Editorial of this issue, Research Horizons, here.
The political left has had a rough few decades; everything just seems to be going in the other direction. Instead of romanticizing what it would be like “only if,” we’d better get to work on figuring out how to turn the engine of progress around. Volume spoke with Adrian Lahoud about the stakes of architectural research within the academy today and how it might contribute to moving towards the horizons of the left.
VolumeYou recently launched a Masters of Architecture degree in Research at London’s Royal College of Art (RCA). What were your motivations?
AL There are many motivations. Firstly, knowledge has come to take on a different importance in contemporary economies, which leads to changes in the infrastructure of knowledge production, since they are no longer confined to institutional settings in the same way. The relation between the institution and the field demands reinvention – this is fundamental. Second, we have a greater sense that alternative forms of knowledge are crucial and that epistemic diversity is an important arena of social struggle. Third, the distinction between the abstract and the concrete is more difficult to sustain when the most abstract forces make claims on the most intimate spheres of human life. Consequently, we must see theory and practice as related forms of action – reality has its own abstractions, which must be theorized and vice versa – every practice is latently theoretical while theory is never without its own practical implications.
The choice of emphasis for us is purely tactical and pragmatic. Fourth, the separation of technical, empirical or quantitative research from qualitative research – something that is consistently reflected in the status and the organization of labor within architectural education and architectural practice – must be overcome. The frontier of scientific calculation is ceaselessly shadowed by the colonial expansion of the market into new territories. Systems of calculation and quantification can’t be extracted from the ethico-political paradigms they are called on to serve – as we see in the relation between the technosphere and biosphere, or between financial debt and human subjectivity. Finally, and most importantly, we recognize that there is an urgent need to grasp the propositional nature of design in a new way, to see its capacity to re-organize social struggle by displacing demands articulated in speech or in language into forms, into systems of spatial organization, into materials, graphic forms of representation, etc. Design is always a provocation to re-align the coordinates of a problem, to re-organize dialogue, and crucially, to contribute an impersonal form to systems of power.
Academic institutions are the traditional site of research. Yet you see research being carried out in practice, as a practice. What does it mean to reflect this view back into the academy?
The key question is to create new forms of encounter between the academy and its outside, whatever that might be. Institutions have different distributions of potential and constraint, which allows a certain amount of freedom to engage with challenges outside of the institution according to alternative logics; to constitute new kinds of questions or to create alternative entry points to existing ones. The RCA is a unique context. It is unbelievably agile with a history of design innovation on one hand and this very liberating anarchic anti-establishment energy on the other. And yet ironically, it feels less indebted to its history and therefore less burdened by the arcane filiations that organize dispute in so many other schools.
Perhaps the greatest advantage that institutions confer is the ability to sustain inquiry over long periods of time. Innovation takes time, having something important to say takes time, and so there is still a possibility within the institution of constructing a project, an arc of research that brings new thoughts and actions into existence. This is something that is more difficult in the profession. Even if there are more and more attempts made to do it, the constraints are different. It is a matter of thinking: knowledge for what and for whom? How do we know what we know, and why do we know it?
Nonetheless, we encourage live projects, projects that take existing demands, questions, and situations as their starting point, projects that whose speculative ambition is sharpened against some kind of resistance, some kind of test. What it means to say that something is ‘live’ is simply that the site of knowledge production exists in an encounter between the institution and its outside, and that this outside puts every claim at risk. In our view, the problem for architects is not only to interpret the world but to change it, and in order to change it, understanding the institutional constraints imposed on the architects and architecture itself becomes an important point of reflection. To enter into research at the RCA then is to cultivate a critical perspective on the institution, its pedagogy and the production of architecture.
What sorts of practices and concerns are you aligning the program with?
Architectural research is directed to both disciplinary and extra-disciplinary spaces of action. In the first case we take the inherently projective nature of the architectural project as a heuristic whose purpose is to re-organize existing social and political questions through design. In the second, we acknowledge the urgent need to bring architectural knowledge and spatial intelligence to bear upon legal, activist and humanitarian issues.
To this end we have decided to launch with three focus areas. Sam Jacoby is running the City Design section which is directed toward the design of new cities with a renewed seriousness, where a social and political imagination is cultivated to break the stranglehold of existing templates. David Burns is running the Architecture & Media focus, which will look at the role of new forms of media, calculation and visualization on the environment using live case studies of environmental transformation, climate change, urban conflict and migration. Finally, Godofredo Pereira is running the focus on Social Movements, which is really the very first research project of its kind. In architecture the imagination of the left has, for the last twenty-five years, been organized according to the master metaphor of top-down vs. bottom-up, with the left aligning with so-called bottom-up and grassroots movements that organize themselves around concepts like participation. Leaving aside a certain historical amnesia here, the automatic attribution of a moral value to anything participatory or collective isn’t just part of the problem; it’s what sustains it. How is it that a couple generations of architectural imagination have been colonized by these kinds of tropes? But already one can sense that things are changing. We have no choice but to become less afraid of scale; the planet has become a design problem.
The question of scale goes to the question of what tools are necessary for a (research-based) architect.
In my personal research on the question of scale, I was interested in the way architects use scale to describe problems or questions rather than systems of proportion. For example when architects say domestic scale – even if they don’t know it – they are referring to histories of gender construction, to the emergence of the nuclear family, to the sexualization of childhood, etc. I was interested in the way that these problems become part of a kind anonymous, common inheritance that structure architectural knowledge and architectural labor. They become ‘common sense’ formulations that act like gravitational force fields on our attention. There is an entire vector of power that extends from here to being told that we are supposed to answer certain kinds of problems because they are supposed to be the most relevant, which is something we should be suspicious of because it’s a kind of intellectual slavery.
There is something of profound political importance within pedagogy, which is to bring students to the point where they can construct a question that refuses the form of the question as it is given or presented by common sense and common knowledge. Architecture and urban design is littered with common problems: ‘sustainability’, ‘vibrancy’, ‘well being’, etc. The acceptance that these questions are either relevant or well posed often astonishes me. And yet a well-posed question is an incredibly powerful thing in that it acquires an impersonal form, passes into anonymity and continues to solicit attention and labor. So the art, in this case, is to understand how architecture is able to raise problems in an entirely unique way, and to deploy this potential productively.
Insofar as the problem, as you’re saying, prefigures its economy of solution, to what extent should it be a point to critique the concept of a ‘problem’ itself?
So in the history of epistemology and philosophy, what is a problem? Traditionally speaking, a problem is always a kind of negative situation, where our job is to conceive of a better situation – the solution – and figure out how to go from the bad to the better. This has been described very elegantly in the work of Patrice Maniglier; he points out that in the 20th century French epistemological tradition, there is an attempt to formulate a positive concept of a problem and a gradual shift in the terrain of judgment to emphasize the aspect of power I mentioned above. This moves a problem from being either true or false to being relevant or irrelevant. More importantly, it allows us to see the problem as a positive differential agent, a generative force rather than a lack. I always say that good problems are precious things to waste; that what you actually want to do is keep the problem alive, just on new terms.
So instead of problem solvers, architects should perhaps see themselves as conflict reorganizers. What are the implications of this?
You don’t take an ethical position when you treat your job as fixing the world, making it a better place. An ethic emerges when you take sides; not only on what you want to improve but also what you’re prepared to make worse. So, you know, there’s a beautiful phrase by the Invisible Committee: “to acquire the art of conducting conflict”. Isn’t this is basically the definition of urban design or architecture? I mean, that’s really what you do: conduct conflict, according to alignments you’re more-or-less aware of, more-or-less committed to. Obviously projects never reconcile all of the conflicts inherent to a problem; all they do is hold them in a new state of coexistence, it seems to me that if we start with this as our opening assumption, a number of things will follow.
What does it mean to conduct research in architecture along these lines?
To conduct research in this way means to place focus on the relation between architecture and forms of life. Now this is a kind of commonplace assertion. Architecture has always been motivated by this idea, which at its very least speaks to a belief in some kind of traffic between the environment and the soul. But it’s also one of the great intellectual voids in scholarship, to which various fig leafs both large and small have been applied. I find that extraordinary, that the very basis of the discipline of social and political instrumentality is so poorly theorized and misunderstood, caught in a dialectic of either total deficit or excess. To escape the dialectic we should acknowledge the profound contingency of all architectural interventions and see the building entangled within systems of control, of incentives and punishments that secure its function and on which its instrumentality politically depends. So at the very moment where more built material is coming into existence than ever before in human history, we are in the curious position of having to re-invent or even re-discover how to make a claim about design and its relationship to life. And I think that if we start looking at this carefully, we find ourselves having to pay attention to the emergence of new protocols of life, new institutional forms, new social tendencies through the frame of an architectural project.
Huaxi Village (China). Image Courtesy of Panoramio/udo54
So it’s in this sense that social movements become a subject for architecture research.
They are not the only ones, but they are particularly interesting, and architecture has been slow among other fields to realize this and to try to harness the promise they contain. A fascinating question emerges: How can we rethink processes of urbanization from the perspective of social movements, such as the ones that have taken place around the globe in the past decade? The last time this happened and at a large-scale was mid-20th century, during the postcolonial and post-independence movements. I think the really genuine question now is to ask: what are the other options for an urban project? To say that urban design is condemned to operate within the spaces made available by private capital is not enough; this is a time of systemic crisis. This is why we are forming a new network of people working on social movements from Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Jordan, Palestine, Spain, Greece and Portugal, to see what the consequence of these new forms of life could be for the built environment. If architecture is always contingent on a field of forces, then our role is to distinguish between the spaces of sedimentation and the spaces of sensitivity, to decide where to deploy our efforts, and to ask whether new contexts for design are emerging. Architecture has something very precious to contribute, to help create new vectors for desire and to give these vectors some durability.
The emancipatory question is always not one of revolution but of the day after.
In a globe where 50% of capital is tied up in real estate, the really interesting thing is to flip the question about urban design around and ask: what is a social movement? Something that is neither captured by the state form or by local politics but works transversally to all of them, even if it adopts both forms when pragmatically required. But exactly how they operate is absolutely specific and unique. Only after understanding that can we ask: what would an urban design or architectural practice of contemporary social movements look like?
There’s an amazing acknowledgment in a lot of contemporary social movements that the built environment needs to be thought in new ways that are in line with their political motivations, foregrounding questions of social and spatial justice. It’s a really interesting moment in history; we’re not the ones asking these questions. Not the only ones at least. So what would it be to organize and operationalize a critical perspective within the parameters of urban design, to set into motion processes directed towards alternative political ends? That is to say – an alternative that is beyond its reduction to real estate speculation.
What are the sorts of research outputs or design objects do you see as contributing to social movements of the left?
You know, the phobia of social engineering in architecture is a joke. It imagines a natural state of life, but we live in the most highly engineered societies; from our technologies to our souls, everything has been through a long process of design and manufacture. Timothy Mitchell has this beautiful phrase: “the future’s engineering works”. The idea is that futures need infrastructure to bring them about. What are those infrastructures? Well, much like physical infrastructure such as rail lines and roads, the future is engineered into existence by legal contracts that commit you to deliver things at a certain time, promises that you secure against assets, guarantees of return on investment, certain kinds of financial models, etc. So the design object or the output is not our immediate concern; our immediate concern is to see if there are spaces in the world where the future’s infrastructure is being designed in another way. We want to locate ourselves in these spaces. So it is not like the future is a question of architectural outcome A or architectural outcome B, yet. Rather, it’s to acknowledge that societies are organized to secure future A and prevent future B. So the contemporary struggle is not a struggle over outcomes, not yet; it’s a struggle over the infrastructure of security.
It’s contract-phrasing A versus contract-phrasing B. We need utopian lawyers, basically.
[Laughs] This has nothing to do with Utopia, though. The propositional role of design is to displace the form of the problem, to have it articulated according to space and materiality and organization. Utopian/dystopian thinking recapitulates the old problem/solution dialectic. The idea behind taking the social movement rather than the idea of the community as the problem, as the question of urban architecture, is because they represent a disturbance in established forms of working. We want to try to see what’s possible if we align ourselves with those conditions.
Sig Nordal 