Studio Mumbai, house Copper II

Studio Mumbai, “Emotional architecture and architecture of proximity” [1]

Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai was in Porto’s Forum of the Future, last November, as part of the 2015 edition on the topic of Happiness. The Mumbai-based office has gained increasing visibility within the architectural scene of the past few years. This is largely due to a commitment to the use of artisanal materials and construction techniques, and to a discourse that advocates a sense of emotion and proximity with nature and place in an attempt to escape the “normativity imposed by globalization” (as can be read in the presentation brochure). Tradition, modernity, nature, landscape, are keywords of Jain’s lexicon, who graduated from the University of St. Louis, USA, in 1990, and whose career passed through Los Angeles and London before settling in India, where most of his built work is located.

Bijoy Jain’s presentation was consistent with his ethos. Following the modus operandi of many current architectural presentations, Jain entwined images of his personal cabinet of curiosities with photographs of his oeuvre. He devoted special attention to the description of construction details and traditional techniques, often emphasizing the work of artisans on site and evoking an overall harmonious relation between materials, techniques, architect, artisans and nature.

In a world where architecture is being increasingly afflicted by pure techno-logistical automatism and empty prêt-à-porter formalistic experimentations, Studio Mumbai seems to offer that last glimmer of hope and dignity that appears to have abandoned the discipline once and for all. It is thus not by chance that in a recent exhibition catalogue by the Canadian Center for Architecture – entitled Rooms You May Have Missed: Umberto Riva, Bijoy Jain, edited by Mirko Zardini – one can read that Studio Mumbai “proposes an alternative means of production for contemporary architecture and role for the architect in the economy of building”. However, it is precisely within this elated note of glorification that disturbing signs emerge to tarnish such an optimistic portrayal.

Athanasius Kircher, ‘Topographia Paradisi Terrestris’ (1675).

1. Artificial islands – nature, interiority, immunization

The first sign is the recurring appearance of the same type of program, the single-family house (notably generous regarding both dimensions and economy), but also the same kind of landscape, an exotic and wild piece of nature. Even in the case of their own office-house, located in a densely urbanized area of Mumbai, the city itself is presented in an aerial view taken at night, veiled in the quasi-poetic atmosphere of a soft mist (or is it smog?) that tempers the density, chaos and, most importantly, the disturbing inequalities that flourish in a megalopolis like Mumbai. These houses present a version of India that is absolutely idealized, stripped and disinvested of all the social and economic contradictions and discrepancies that dramatically affect and produce its everyday life and territory. [2]

It is not by chance that these houses tend to fold inwards. They act as shelters that either open up to chase fragments of a mystified virgin nature, or enclose themselves inter muros seeking to recreate an original Eden, a miniaturized and idealized Earth like a hortus conclusus [3]. Therefore, contrary to what is being claimed, this is not an “architecture of proximity”, but rather an architecture of distance: it separates and detaches. Paradoxically – and this is Bijoy Jain’s magical touchstone – the effective apparatus of this detachment from the exterior is nature itself, or rather, nature converted into landscape.

The erasure of the exterior is not operated by walls and fences but by the large openings – windows and doors framing those miniature paradises or staging those nature-cloaks. But exteriority is not merely a question of opposition between outside and inside, nor is it simply a matter of genius loci; it is the social, political, and economical circumstance in which every house is de facto inscribed. Exteriority is a condition of togetherness, a relationship with otherness that belongs irreducibly to the human, shaping his sense of community, his own social self. It is not space that is a condition for the possibility of being together, but it is the being together that makes space possible.

The more idyllic this nature-as-landscape is, the more efficient the exorcising of exteriority becomes. But this architecture has no nostalgia for a return to pre-capitalist ideas of community (as in William Morris) or to a status of spontaneous and holistic relation with nature (as with Rudolph Schindler, to name a reference close to the Indian architect). These houses are neither “shelters from the bustle of the city”, in the euphemistic formula of Bijoy Jain, nor the hortus conclusus of a subject who retreats from the world in an act of resistance or exhaustion. They are artificial islands (a sort of singular family condos or gated communities) where fences and walls have been replaced by the eloquent nature-landscape apparatus, subtly detaching the houses from an exterior, which in the particular context of India assumes an especially problematic and disturbing condition.

These artificial islands are not enclaves of resistance against a specific logic of contemporary spatial production, they are softened cosmopolitan capsules, biospheric universes of highly connected networked individuals, artificial continents where an elite with high economic power finds a form of isolation and immunization from the processes of spatial production of which they are primarily responsible. They are systems of immunization that create an artificial, self-sufficient environment while minimizing all outside communication and simulating their own private public sphere. In line with Peter Sloterdijk, we can claim that these houses constitute themselves not only as “integral mechanisms of defense”, but also as “ignorance machines” where “the fundamental right of not-respecting the exterior world finds its architectural formula.”

Unsurprisingly, the reverse of these artificial continents – so cynically frugal – is the slum. The city of Mumbai – built over the years on landfills conquered from the sea – is itself an archipelago of artificial islands surrounded by the great ocean of slums. As always, the flip side of the “ecology of fantasy” is the “ecology of fear and violence”. And in any case, as Lieven de Cauter points out, “where fear and fantasy build artificial biospheres, the everyday is abolished”, immersed as it is in the lonely design of its own self-immunization and self-consumption.

Studio Mumbai, house Tara

2. Artisans, nostalgia, indigence

But there is a second sign, another crack in this Arcadian mise-en-scène: the employment of traditional processes and construction techniques comes with a condescending view of the artisan. The example presented by Jain in his conference in Porto of a woman at the building site transporting – “with such elegance” – a pile of bricks on her head, is a clear indication of this. In praising the gesture’s aesthetic and performative dimension one does not respect the artisan’s know-how – her techniques, modus operandi, authorship or social relevance – but simply romanticizes and fetishizes the condition of being-artisan. If, on the one hand, this approach may be helpful in calling for a lost harmonious relationship with labor – useful to challenge the automation and abstraction of large building sites – on the other hand, it does not do more than soften and naturalize the artisan’s framework of exploitation. Naturally, an entirely different situation would arise if the artisan were mobilized in a process where her emancipation (political and social) or that of her community’s would be at stake, for example, in the construction of a collective building where she would be contributing with work and knowledge and where the architect would act as a technical mediator of this process.

The act of romanticizing the artisan thus accomplishes the same function as the nature-landscape apparatus: if the latter softens the contrasts and inequalities of capitalist spatial production, the former, by sustaining the myth of original happiness in labor, naturalizes the artisan’s indigent social and economic condition, for, once finished the job, she has no choice but to return to the field of slums without qualities and to the eternal destiny reserved to her by the castes and capitalist economy.

Studio Mumbai, house Copper II

3. Studio Mumbai: “an alternative means of production for contemporary architecture”?

The fundamental matter here at stake is not to assess the aesthetic or technical quality of studio Mumbai’s work, but rather to attempt to deconstruct the current critical narrative that legitimizes this practice as “an alternative means of production for contemporary architecture”. Both the praising of traditional techniques and the idyllization of nature have been, for quite some time now, the impetus behind multiple architectural practices who appoint themselves a role of resistance against processes of globalization (for example, Peter Zumthor). This sensitive phenomenological discourse, endorsing a relationship with the world under the umbrella of sustainability and ecology, is particularly powerful because it addresses an essential gap in the relationship between humans and nature that has permeated modernity and globalized capitalist production of space.

But the real ambition of this kind of discourse is far from any real resistance, on the contrary, it fully integrates within the dominant logic of production. It frames our nostalgia for a lost paradise, an original Eden, and it dissimulates the problematic recurrence of a territory impregnated with social inequalities and violent processes of extraction-production-consumption. All the while, its success within the architectural field stems from the fact that it works as a fetish, a “stand in”, replacing that which one cannot have. It gives us the illusion of effectively attending to architecture’s real anxieties, and so it captivates many people: the increasing technocracy of architectural design, its empty formal experimentation, the absence of any content independent of the monetary-economical circuit, its conversion into a lifestyle commodity, its reduction to mere instrument of territorial logistics (from the exhausting icons of the Western world to the urbanizations sans rêve et sans merci in China and Dubai). In short, this kind of nostalgic discourse is the way through which architecture attempts to exorcize the ghosts of its immediate future without giving them, however, any effective solutions.

Architectural practices such as Studio Mumbai certainly produce beautiful images that easily populate our imaginary; they may even provide us with precious indications of how to apply local construction techniques, or they might suggest seductive conceptions of domestic space. But their relevance does not go further. They do not offer any hints, nor any tentative alternatives, nor do they even begin to state apprehensions regarding the role and task of architecture in the present condition. Contrary to what is stated, Studio Mumbai’s architecture does not offer an “alternative means of production for contemporary architecture”, it does not even critically address it. It only fetishizes nature and the vernacular, fully absorbing them into the endless circuit of neoliberal economy, efficiently converting the anxieties and fractures that it itself triggers into new business opportunities. What Studio Mumbai so blatantly displays in those “beautiful” houses is none other than paradise as commodity.

Studio Mumbai, house Utsav. Photography: Studio Mumbai Architects.

4. Towards a critical project and a project of criticism

Such an “alternative means of production” can never be found in an architecture that renounces to critically assess the territory where it is embedded, the space which it transforms and produces. The question begs for a deeper inquiry into the means, discourses and practices through which architecture can probe and challenge the prevailing processes of territorial production, the mechanisms at play (often violent), the forms of life and modes of existence at stake. Only by establishing a dialogue with this problematic exteriority can one hope to address such fundamental questions – the unstable bond between humans and nature and the revival of artisanal constructive techniques – beyond all fetishization.

In order for this to be possible one must challenge the autophagic consumption that now permeates the commonplace of disciplinary discourse: the cult of minute historical fait divers, the deification of authorship and its backstage creative mechanisms and details, as banal as they may be. In so doing, one must thereby overcome this apparent death in criticism (and its replacement by the curatorial and prize systems) by reviving and assembling both a critical project and a project of criticism.

Studio Mumbai, house in Pali Hill. Photography: Helene Binet.

Afterword. At home – in the inner space of the world – with no threshold

It is difficult to accept Studio Mumbai’s houses as models of reflection on contemporary dwelling. We should rather see them as expressions of a crisis of exteriority that currently afflicts the human. A crisis of experimentation with the world as such, an enclosure towards an outside beyond all culturally dominant mediations. These houses float like lonely commodities that serve the consumption of a voluntary self-immunization. They piercingly announce the ultimate rise of the space of immunitas and the corresponding dissolution of its counterpart: the space of communitas.[4]

If, in these houses, all limits seem dissolved that is solely because the entire exterior has already been interiorized. The threshold fades as an architectural element, losing its meaning and potential for openness, its role of in-between space, of liminal mediation and measure between the house and its exteriority, between the self and the other. That which lies beyond the house remains inside. What is at stake in this dissolution of limits (Gr. Peras) is above all the very dissolution of experience, of the house as experience, because, as the etymological root of the word indicates (Gr. Experientia, ex-per-ientia), there is no experience without a “going beyond”, towards an outside, without the crossing-confrontation of a boundary. Experience is always the experience of a limit, of an unknown. And a house is only a house so long as it achieves to be the place of this liminal experience of the outside – experimentation of the world, for the world.

Therefore, once again paraphrasing Sloterdijk, we can establish that these houses are the inversion of inhabiting: they do not install themselves in an environment, they install an environment of their own. «In this mode of experience the horizon is encountered not as boundary and transition to the outside, but rather as a frame to hold the inner world».

In consequence, we can claim that this is not an architecture of proximity as much as one of absolute distance: an architecture without other and without common. It lives simulated and dissimulated by a nature converted into reassuring and mystifying landscape, incapable of positioning itself in a critical and problematic relation with the surrounding territory. The atmosphere of timelessness in these houses is in no way innocent – they exist in a time that is not of this world. Without present, without past and, especially, without future. These houses are thus paradises from which all mankind has already been banished and from which no redemption can be expected. Finally, in the ultimate glorification of this architecture, the discipline consummates its own dissolution, confirming its absolute estrangement from a world that is now only bearable on the absolute condition of not being visible. “D’emporter le paradis d’un seul coup” [“To carry paradise at the first assault”] was the motto that French writer Charles Baudelaire invoked, rather ironically, in his Artificial Paradises.

—Pedro Levi Bismarck, architect and researcher on the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto. Editor of Punkto Magazine.
Translated by Bárbara Costa and Pedro Levi Bismarck.

—–
[1] “Emotional architecture and architecture of proximity”, was the title of the conference held by Bijoy Jain in Porto’s Forum of the Future, 5th November 2015.
[2] According to the World Bank, one third of world population living in poverty is in India: 400 million (30% of Indians), a number growing since 2007. India is a territory stratified and crossed so much by the system of castes as by capitalist processes of spatial production, giving shape to a space where social and economic inequalities are particularly visible.
[3] Expression used by the Indian architect echoing a certain zumthorian geist or spirit. Hortus conclusus was the title of the Serpentine Gallery summer pavilion designed by the Swiss architect in 2011.
[4] Roberto Esposito, Communitas. Origene e destino della comunità. Einaudi, 2006.

“You work in banking?”, asks the manager when I turn up there with six kilos of dirty clothes compressed into a bag advertising the country’s main financial institutions. “I don’t recognise your accent, where are you from?” With every transaction, he subjects me to a short interrogation. A year later he knows my address, telephone number and credit card number; my working times, my profession, the company I work for; my underwear, nationality, type of visa and my love life. Sometimes I discover myself dreaming about having my own washing machine. The other day, as I waited for him to return a couple of shirts to me, I looked at the framed certificates hung up behind the counter. “NYPD Operation Nexus” I read, “This business is a recognized participant in the counterterrorism program named Operation Nexus.” The manager, now back with the hangers, discovers me as I try to note it down. “So, you said you were an architect, didn’t you?”.

In 2012, as a consequence of 09/11, the New York Police Department established Operation Nexus, a nationwide network of businesses and enterprises, including everyday local businesses such as car parks, laundromats and stores, joining together with a common aim: the prevention of a new terrorist attack in the country. Since the launch of Operation Nexus, the police have visited over 30,000 establishments to encourage their owners and employees to use their professional experience to contribute to counterterrorism. For this, they are provided with a list of personalised protocols with which to identify “purchases, meetings or activities that may have connections with terrorism and to inform the authorities of them.[1] In exchange, they receive a framed certificate (like the one in my neighbourhood laundromat) and they become the first alert mechanism to protect the city of New York against another terrorist attack.

Back at home, while I do a quick search online for Operation Nexus, I think that perhaps, I ought to take my dirty washing elsewhere; I also think about how “security architecture” affects our relationship with the public space. In the last century, and especially in the present one, we have been witnesses to what Giorgio Agamben mentions in his book State of Exception as the “unprecedented generalisation of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government”.[2] For the authorities, and equally for the manager at Bubbleworks, we are all a threat to the country, until proven otherwise. Observed online, at airports and also at laundromats, the security measures established to prevent terrorist attacks have converted the presumption of innocence into the presumption of guilt. Like many of the counterterrorism initiatives established since the start of the so-called War on Terror, Operation Nexus and its general framework known as Urban Shield make us all (and especially immigrants) suspects and, also, vigilantes –“Stay alert, and have a safe day”, reminds the voice on the New York subway in every journey.

The terrorist, according to the police, may be anyone who portrays themselves as “legitimate customers in order to buy or lease certain materials or equipment, or to undergo certain formalized training to acquire important skills or licences” which subsequently could be used to facilitate an attack.[3] In this process, as we are reminded by philosopher Étienne Balibar, the stranger is transformed into an enemy and is, all too often, subject to violent repression and institutional discrimination or, simply. to continued surveillance that is a threat to privacy and freedom of expression.[4] No, I don’t have anything to hide, but for months now I have been taking to Bubbleworks only what I cannot diligently wash by hand at the weekends. I understand the importance of protecting national security, but I prefer to feel like I’m under suspicion when collecting my underwear or when seeing what could be a friendly neighbourhood chat becomes a police mechanism for the extraction of information about citizens.

The laundromat example is, probably, the most banal example of how current unrestricted surveillance practices, the result of alliances between the public and private sectors and the economic and political goals that they serve, violate fundamental rights and undermine democracy. Compiling data does not necessarily have to be harmful, but we must pay attention to the power techniques at play, something that reminds us of the declaration signed by academics from all over the world against mass surveillance. spying. Through this letter they request that states effectively protect fundamental rights and freedoms and, in particular, our privacy. “It is protected by international treaties, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights”, they remind us, “without privacy, people cannot freely express their opinions or seek and receive information”.[5] And the fact is that counterterrorism tactics adopted by governments and the military place in evidence the violence inherent to the exercising of power and its capacity to undertake actions designed as much for our protection as the destruction of what makes possible our life in common, including our freedom and our political capacity.

Architecture participates in these processes. One could argue that the situation with respect to Bubbleworks would be resolved by having a washing machine at home. But in New York, their installation is often prohibited by contract and there are people who end up installing one illegally and emptying it via the bathtub. The question goes much deeper and the solution is not to change laundromat, but political action capable of articulating from legislation that regulates domestic architecture to technologies and “security architectures” that built the global “smart” city. The territory drawn up by the War on Terror is located at the intersection between physical and legal spaces, and it is characterised by the growing use of war technology and protocols in the civic space. Its “public security” apparatus tends to be managed by private interests.6 Within this context, sometimes I might forget that everyday I walk under the watchful eye of security cameras and urban surveillance systems, even interiorize the choreography drawn by my body – jacket and shoes off, hands behind my head – like the security checkpoints at airports. When talking on the phone, sending messages and using the social networks, my preferences and movements are stored in the cloud, where I share them with family and friends, and, i passing, with espionage programmes and data compilation companies. My habits are analysed by algorithms that classify me and by laundromat managers converted into police informers. Through a discursive operation, the institutions of power normalise this space of limbo between legality and illegality, law and violence, presenting it as an effective instrument in the fight against terrorism. Emergency becomes the rule and the city, a battlefield.

But if from the institutions of power legal and social hierarchies are being suspended to guarantee security, these measures are contested by opposing civic movements that employ technological innovations to construct spaces of freedom and political action: international networks of anonymous sources for the filtration of classified information; home-made drones that scrutinize the actions of the police; encryption systems for activists, journalists and humanitarian organizations; architectural designs with Faraday-type shields, or simply actions that range from covering the computer camera with a post-it, to refusing to pass through body scanners. This is the space in which our collective coexistence develops, the city as a great celebration of anomie.

In fact, as Agamben reminds us, the term iustitium – the technical designation of the state of exception – constructed like solstitium, means literally suspending the ius, the legal order, which connects the state of emergency with festival practices such as Carnival and other charivaric traditions.[7] “Anomic feasts dramatize this irreducible ambiguity of juridical systems and, at the same time, show that what is at stake in the dialectic between these two forces is the very relation between law and life.”[8] The anomic festival is, following this argument, the space in which we have a licence to suspend legal and social hierarchies and establish new orders, and in which it is possible to undertake “truly political” action, that which, as Agamben proposes, are capable of severing “the nexus between violence and law”.

I didn’t change laundromats. In a city like New York, you are grateful when people take an interest in you, call you by your name, ask you about your friends and family. When they miss you because you are on holiday. With every question, the Bubbleworks manager, in representation of the Administration, was protecting me against the dangers of terrorism while subjecting me to a legalised and standardised violence, structured by the logic of economic neoliberalism and masked behind an informal chat. Hours before leaving the city – and the country – I decided to make my last visit to the laundromat, this time to declare my right to privacy and the danger of surveillance programmes. And, deep down, to prove myself not guilty. When I entered I found my neighbour talking about how he had spent the weekend. I paid for the washing of the dirty laundry, took a photograph of the diploma, and said goodbye with a “see you soon”.

My next house will have a washing machine. Even if it has to be installed illegally.

—Marina Otero Verzier. Head of Research and Development, HNI. Chief Curator with the After Belonging Agency, OAT’16

—–
[1] Operation Nexus, Police Department City Of New York (NYPD), official website of the City of New York, [Consulted: 12-11-2014]. Available at: http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/crime_prevention/counterterrorism.shtml
[2] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trad. Kevin Attell (Chicago y Londres: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 12.
[3] Operation Nexus, Police Department City Of New York (NYPD), official website of the City of New York.
[4] See Étienne Balibar, “Strangers as Enemies, Walls All over the World, and How to Tear them Down”, lecture at Columbia University, 3 November 2011. Available at: https://www.francoangeli.it/Riviste/Scheda_Rivista.aspx?idArticolo=45634
[5] “Academics Against Mass Surveillance” [consultation: 4-1-2014]. Available at: http://www.academicsagainstsurveillance.net
[6] Judith Butler offers a reflection on the consequences of the militarization of the police force in the United States and the Urban Shield counterterrorism programme in her lecture “Human Shield”, given at the London School of Economics on 4 February 2015. Available at:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=2859
[7] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, 41, 71.
[8] Ibid., 73.

One side of the discussion of defining practices of communing is creating alternative and unorthodox ways of educational methodologies. However, the issue is not easy: How this is possible? in what local conditions and extraterritorial constraints and which tradition of architectural history?… Especially, compared to social sciences and other fields; architectural education is more problematic as the market outside of neoliberal urban arena is pressing young students and graduates. At the other hand the problem is that acquiring and referring to social sciences does not necessarily help creating a radical method of architecture but remaining in the field of social sciences. In that sense, other issue to think about is that small self-organized architectural practices are not able to enter academies in terms of permanent relation rather than only “workshopping”.

Photo: Miguel de Guzman, imagensubliminal.com

Photo: Miguel de Guzman, imagensubliminal.com

A set of questions emerges: What to teach? In what ways? How such practices of constantly inventing pedagogies would effect the “instituting” program in our faculties. As an active, participatory archiving project, Radical Pedagogies not only gives a research on the alternative history of architectural education but also opens such questions on the genealogy of methodology and instituting practice of self-reflexive architecture education. The radical questioning of the architectural discipline is deeply rooted in architectural education that still resist to go beyond studio work, traditional design methodologies, crossing multiple disciplines and considering trans-local territories. Nowadays, the gap between theory and practice has being challenging in a Deleuzian perspective. The trans-disciplinary thinking by borrowing cross-methods, new media that provides performative visual representation tools and engagement as a militant researcher in everyday life in order to experience other “knowledge” or the multiplicity of knowledge production urge us to alter our research methods. In the future, when we speak of recent methodologies and modalities of pedagogies in architecture faculties; space of “Reaction” that what Radical Pedagogies proposes in its research, could be a potential of understanding of ongoing political friction with the education. Reformulating forms of reactions in syllabuses, design studios or politics of academic structures of architecture faculties will lead to inventing new pedagogies. Furthermore, not only established architects or studios/offices but also tons of alternative collectives that create practice as reaction in different territories provides great potentials for alternative design pedagogies for faculties which is always dismissed.

Photo: Miguel de Guzman, imagensubliminal.com

Radical Pedagogies research project is inspiring for active archiving run by an institution that maybe can push further to establish trans-local realms of platforms that can go beyond an institutional research project but can reinvent itself an instituting method itself.

I feel we are still behind Giancarlo de Carlo’s visionary educational practices and aims; but hoping to reach and go beyond soon.

—Pelin Tan. Sociologist, Associate Professor and Vice-dean of Mardin Artuklu University Architecture Faculty, Turkey.

/// All the info about Radical Pedagogies can be found in radical-pedagogies.com
/// More photos of the Radical Pedagogies exhibition and the event held in Venice for the Monditalia Weekend Specials, at imagensubliminal.com
/// Here you can see an interview with the research team of Radical Pedagogies:

This year, from 3rd – 17th of July 2014, in collaboration with the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Barcelona – UPC BarcelonaTECH, the AA Visiting School will research the topic of “Bodega, Enological Metabolism”. The program can be described with the following texts:

Bodega – Enological Metabolism

The programme is again revolving around the idea of working on associations that exist between wine and architecture, furthermore to search for their interdependence and the influences that they may have on one another. The workshop this year will be the occasion to discover the fascinating cultural patrimony left by the Catalan modernist architects of the so called “Wine Cathedrals” in southern Catalonia.

Emerging as a peculiar building typology in the early 20th century, the modernist winery seems to articulate a reciprocal relationship between wine and its process of making, between the apparatus and the structure, between the content and the container. Can these buildings be understood as machines? How do structure, materials and spatial organisations relate to the process of wine making? What are all the interlaced systems and strategies that exist within these delicate yet astonishing constructions and their context?

The workshop will run as two parallel experiments occurring simultaneously along the two weeks of the course. One as an exploration on the senses, using wine as raw material, will happen as 1:1 performing installations, empirically testing and provoking unusual sensorial reactions on the body. The other, initiated from a methodological understanding of constructive, structural and spatial affinities of the modernist bodega, will lead to the design of new models, or even buildings, for a contemporary winery. Using digitally advanced techniques, these latter explorations will take the form of large scale maps and physical models.

Live Sensorial Laboratory

Wine awakes our sense, such as taste or smell, but what other sensorial reaction can it trigger?

The jargon of the enologist, when he describes taste as a sensorial experience, is all but tangible, yet amazingly precise. He needs to employ the metaphor to relate physical images and sensorial reactions.
Wine does carry images, its taste evokes particularities of the context in which the fruit grew, the flavour reflects the climate, and the colour witnesses its fermentation and aging, the soft smell nuances refer to olfactory perceptual memories… Our body is therefore capable of detecting, through its senses, this endless range of details embedded in the complex process of winemaking, while our mind often seems not to sense it at all…

Playfully creating a “mise-en-scene” with wine, students will explore sensorial experiences that the liquid is not known to usually provoke. We will take the wine out of the glass, into the space, into the air, confronting it to light, heat, wind…
This part of the work will run as a continuous experiment, starting on day one, ending during the final presentation of the workshop!

A corner of the ETSAB will be set up as a “laboratory” where white and red will be predominant. The student, acting as an artist, or a scientist, will be dressed in white and, equipped with photographic, filmic or graphic means, will invent new machinic devices to discern and enhance special nuances of the wine. We will design decanter-like pieces to trigger new or hidden effects that wine can have on our senses.

Winery: Content and Container

The title refers to the inherent symbiosis that exists between wine making and the edifice as its host. The winery is a machine where interlocked mechanisms perform through time, it’s unclear where the building stops and the winemaking starts, the content and the container can therefore no longer be identified and furthermore, dissociated.

The core exercise of the workshop will depart from an onsite cartographical analysis of the wine cathedrals of the modernist movement. We will read the bodega as a set of interlaced systems, occurring in time, orchestrating all the aspects of architecture and wine making: space, structure, light, climate, services, circulation, machines, processes, and transport. With the data collected during the field trip, students will have to describe graphically the way in which they understand these systems and relations. The outcome of this analysis will be formalised as drawings or maps, test models and form-finding experiments, that attempt to dismantle or dissect the systems that compose the winery.

These drawings will come together into one large map which will form the ground for the construction of a large collaborative model both integrating fragments of the historical winery and audaciously propose its reinvention.

We will tackle drawing and model-making with the contribution of digital tools, may they help us to think about cartography, about design, about making… Parametric design will be part of the learning agenda of the workshop. Support in drawing, 3d-modelling, parametric modelling, physical fabrication will be provided by a team of experts.

The results, as models and drawings, will be presented on the last day of the workshop to a panel of experts from the architecture and enological world, in a public presentation preceding the keynote lecture.

/// More info at AA Visiting School Barcelona

“In architecture we can identify a number of processes that bear a great similarity to this botanical process. Preexisting structures, physical or otherwise, are grafted with the new proposal, generating a building that brings together and harmoniously fuses the characteristics of what already exists and what is new. We can find this grafted architecture across the centuries in a great many examples. However it is in the last quarter of the 20th century and the early 21st century where we find a great number of projects in Catalan architecture in which proposals of different types and scales achieve brilliant results.

Grafting transmits the idea of a new organism that combines the strong points of its original components and is more vigorous than either of them on their own, an idea of renewal and growth.”

In order to visualize this concept, they have selected16 projects, that in different ways, share a contemporary attitude of understanding architecture. Some of the selected projects are:

Caldereria petita, housing renovation. Calderon – Folch – Sarsanedas Architects. ©Rodrigo Díaz Wichmann

Cultural center Casal Balaguer. Flores&Prats Arquitectes. © Adrià Goula

Mostly all of the projects are from the 21st century and are therefore vibrant proof of the vitality of this way of approaching things. It is also interesting to see that this attitude is one of the hallmarks of Catalan architecture, and Catalonia is one of the places where it has been developed with the most vitality and diversity.

The projects selected are presented through the process each architect followed in the phases of drafting and constructing the building. They are unique processes allowing us to see firsthand how analysis and decision-making develop through sketches, diagrams, drawings, photos, models, texts and more. Each project must be self-explanatory, making use of all available resources.

Public space Teatre La Lira. RCR Arquitectes. © Hisao Suzuki

The complete list of selected projects is:

—Reforma de la Casa Bofarull (1913-1933, Josep Maria Jujol, als Pallaresos)
— Apartaments a les golfes de La Pedrera (1953-1955, Francisco Juan Barba Corsini, a Barcelona)
— Restauració de l’església de l’Hospitalet (1981-1984, José Antonio Martínez Lapeña i Elías Torres Tur, a Eivissa)
— IES La Llauna (1984-86, Carme Pinós i Enric Miralles, a Badalona)
— Caldereria petita, rehabilitació d’habitatge entre mitgeres (2001-2002, Calderon – Folch – Sarsanedas Arquitectes, a Gelida)
— Museu de Can Framis (2007-2009, Jordi Badia BAAS Arquitectura, a Barcelona)
— Espai públic Teatre La Lira (2004-2011, RCR Arquitectes (Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem i Ramon Vilalta) i Joan Puigcorbé, a Ripoll)
— Apartament Juan (2011, vora arquitectura (Pere Buil i Toni Riba), a Barcelona)
— Auditori a l’església de Sant Francesc (2003-2011, David Closes, a Santpedor )
— 3 estacions de la Línia 9 del Metro: Amadeu Torner, Parc Logístic i Mercabarna (2008-2011, Garcés – De Seta – Bonet Arquitectes (Jordi Garcés, Daria e Seta i Anna Bonet) i Ingeniería Tec-4 (Ferran Casanovas, Antonio Santiago i Felipe Limongi), a Barcelona)
— Espai transmissor del túmul/dolmen megalític (2007-2013, Toni Gironès, a Seró (Artesa de Segre)
— Clínica Arenys – can Zariquiey (2006-2013, Josep Miàs Arquitectes (Josep Miàs), a Arenys de Munt)
— Centre cultural Casal Balaguer (1996 – en procés, Flores&Prats Arquitectes (Eva Prats i Ricardo Flores) i Duch-Pizá Arquitectos (Ma José Duch i Francisco Pizá), a Palma
— Restauració paisatgística de l’abocador vall d’En Joan a Begues (2002 – en procés, Enric Batlle , Joan Roig i Teresa Galí, al Parc Natural del Garraf),
— Torre de 94 habitatges de protecció oficial (2012 – en procés, Josep Llinàs, a L’Hospitalet de Llobregat)
— Projecte de revitalització del districte d’Adhamiya (2012 – en procés, AV62 Arquitectos (Victòria Garriga i Toño Foraster) i Pedro García del Barrio – Pedro Azara, a Bagdad).

Auditorium of Sant Francesc church. David Closes. © Jordi Surroca

An important detail to be mentioned is that, for the first time, there will be on exhibition some facsimile reproductions, in real scale, of the plans and drawings that Josep Maria Jujol did for the Bofarull House, which are part of the Jujol archives.

/// Header image: Renovation of the Bofarull House [1913-1933, Josep Maria Jujol, als Pallaresos] © Guillem Carabí
/// All the info about the exhibition can be found on the web-site Venezia 2014

[This is an extract from a series of interviews conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Kazuo Shinohara.]

Hans Ulrich Obrist: In our last interview we discussed the “beauty of chaos” and “progressive anarchy”. This time around I’d like to ask you about the “mathematical city”. Designing a city generally involves all kinds of calculations and planning. But once built, it is very difficult to calibrate the city that exists. In this sense, the concept of the “mathematical city” sounds both paradoxical and extremely interesting.

Kazuo Shinohara: I majored in mathematics before studying architecture. Therefore, for me, thinking about mathematics is almost the same as thinking about architecture. It is like two sides of the same coin. I first started to talk about the “mathematical city” around 1967. At that time I had completed the House in White and my thinking was still deeply related to Japanese tradition. So, I started to say that the composition of a city should be based on the abstract and the neutral, which both include mathematical thinking. In short, I was now talking about something completely the opposite of Japanese tradition. These two directions are not in direct confrontation. But they do have an ambivalent relationship. The concept first provides a reason for small houses to exist; and then an opposing aspect emerges, so that the huge urban space of the city itself surfaces.

Until the 1960s, I had no direct experience in handling a city, and I said simply that the city could be left in chaos. In other words, we could only describe a city as an aesthetic of chaos. After that, I stated that the composition of a huge city could not be controlled without mathematics. It was impossible to achieve a real city composition by formal means, as was fashionable at the time. It was useless. And then, some ten or twenty years later on, chaos theory appeared in the field of mathematics. Therefore, my point of view, i.e. that the composition of a city has a complex mathematical nature, was given theoretical support by mathematical progress after a decade or two. Since chaos theory in mathematics was very new at the time, the rest of the architectural community reacted coldly during the 1970s and 1980s. Then, the theory suddenly became highly influential. My own vision, which I had stated around 1967, was perfectly synchronized with it. It was a mathematical approach positing that very state of confusion, or lack of unity, as its essential significance.

House in Yokohama by Kazuo Shinohara. Photo by Enric Massip-Bosch

HUO: In your opinion, what is the ideal model for living?

KS: The central concept of modernism in the 20th century has been to unify. One of the concepts was an “international style”, by which architects tried to unify everything making use of its clarion principles. To take an extreme example, the Bauhaus even tried to coordinate table linens.

Now we’re approaching the 21st century and I am writing a series of articles, which say that the “un-unified” will assume superior value over humdrum unity. Restoring disjunction will become more important during the next century. After World War II, Tokyo had become a heap of ashes, and many progressive Japanese architects thought that they could completely transform it making use of Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin. They were dreaming. But I didn’t agree with their view. I stated that there is beauty in chaos. That was in the early 1960s, forty years ago. Nobody agreed with me, it was such an un-avant-garde idea for those times. The area surrounding Shibuya station was a typical example, with its sprawling, inconsistent, messy and natural conditions. But in fact, ten years later, a newspaper interview with younger people and foreign tourists asked them what they considered the most exciting area in Tokyo. Many answered, “Shibuya”. However, for progressive architects, Shibuya had always been one of the most ugly spots in Tokyo.

HUO: Could you tell us about your ideas of myth and chaos?

KS: In every myth, wherever it derives, there is a chaotic state. A great deal of energy is wasted. And, at first glance, that seems a negative loss. However upon reaching a certain level, it will be condensed into a powerful force. To achieve this, one must jettison all the force so far expended when this energy is sublated. What is created at that moment is a new first order. Take the example of an older period when ancient empire is the first order. But as this order gradually expands, it begins to break up. Then, a chaotic state starts to seek the next step. Through a repetition of confusion and conflict, the next order will appear. Thus, I can also say that chaos is a force or activity that advances toward the future. But, intentionally, I try not to use such words, because they sound too vague for what I want to convey. Anyway… although I do not know how the mechanism works, concentrated energy is actually converted into order whenever I introduce extraneous matter. The word “stimulation”, or “intervention”, might be better.

Kazuo Shinohara house in Yokohama, 1984. Photograph: Terutaka Hoashi

Interpreter: In scientific fields, and especially in complex systems, they use the word “emergence”, not “generation”, when describing something new. Your term is thus very close to science.

KS: I wanted nothing to do with the city when I was young, and that fact gives me a unique stance. But after working with smaller spaces that I tried to purify or to unify, I was able to take an opposite approach in my thinking. However, whatever I design, the world itself does not become beautiful. Formerly, I succeeded in generating opposition and I frankly stated my attitude as a “manifesto”. Since I examined our chaotic situation from an opposing point of view, by means of small houses, I gained an understanding of the structure of chaos. And I would like to add one more important point. I may design individual buildings but I am unable to design a city. In my opinion these are two completely separate things. People, culture, and climate generate cities. Not individuals. That was the biggest mistake made by Modernism.

HUO: What can you say about the self-organizing city?

KS: Oscar Niemeyer designed Brasilia as a very beautiful city, which is also well organized. At the same time, a slum area grew up, where the construction workers were living outside the designed area of the city. Soon after the city was completed, people began to prefer this older area to the new part because it was more comfortable. This is a typical example of what Modernism tried to eliminate. If a city becomes over orderly, you can always uncover an opposite and contradictory system. Therefore, there is clearly some other more complex structure of the city at work. Brasilia itself has a perfect design, but when a residential zone springs up alongside it, this latter is regarded as agglomerative or confusing. My idea is just the reverse. My small houses have a clear principle, whilst Tokyo is itself confusion. But we should be wary in construing the meaning of “confusion”, which isn’t the same as “disorder”.

HUO: When I talked with Cedric Price, he suggested that we use the word “city” too frequently and with so many different meanings that we are losing the original sense of the word. It becomes ever more blurred. So, it might be better to create a new term instead of “city”. If you have any good ideas, please tell me.

KS: I do not use the word “city” that much these days. In Japanese there is the notion of machi. I prefer this concept; it is closer to the term “neighborhood” or “district” in English.

Kazuo Shinohara, House in White, 1966. Photograph: Hiroshi Ueda.

HUO: What exactly is this notion?

KS: There are so many houses everywhere in Tokyo. And these houses will generate a street. The important point is that a street doesn’t generate houses. Houses make the street. So, to be more precise, machi implies houses producing the street as “house-scape” or as townscape.

HUO: Is that something organic?

KS: Well, for example, Europe’s older towns came into being naturally. And I do not know what the process was; a situation where houses stand beside each other as a matter of course is really something that just happens. This situation generates a street. In this sense, a street is no empty thing, in terms of figure and ground. Thus houses become the figures, so I prefer this view. That is why I use machi or “housescape”.

HUO: So is the line more important than the points?

KS: Rather, the façade line of the houses. I recall whole small villages I saw in southern Spain. In those little villages, the street seemed like a floor and the houses on either side like walls. I felt surrounded by white walls, and I liked that feeling very much.

HUO: You have written about chaos in the city, and at the same time you have influenced a couple of generations of architects when it comes to designing small urban houses. Would you tell me more about this?

KS: It is hugely important to understand the process of designing a tiny work. On the one hand, there are so many tall buildings around us, such as in Shinjuku, but they possess no power. Then there is the tiny house I constructed on a small budget making use of inexpensive materials, and somehow this tiny house exerts influence. A French architect based in Bordeaux who had seen this House in Uehara published was so impressed that she came all the way to Japan to study it. I perform experiments within a tiny space. I put extraneous elements into that tiny space to see what will happen. It is like a scientific experiment, and it is great because you can follow the process visually. It’s like the theory of elementary particles in physics, where a particle reflects the structure of the whole world.

/// Header image: House in Yokohama by Kazuo Shinohara [model]. Photo by Enric Massip-Bosch.
Special thanks to Enric Massip-Bosch for his wonderful contribution with the photographs of Kazuo Shinohara, Office and own house in Yokohama, 1984.
/// More info about the work of Kazuo Shinohara can be found in the latest issue of JA+U, Kazuo Shinohara Complete Works in Original Publications.

In the past weeks we have witnessed a big controversy about the MoMA’s Folk Art Museum building demolition, the new project by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and the most recent news about MoMA’s plans to preserve the 63 panels of copper-bronze alloy, which are three-eighths of an inch thick and hung on a supporting armature. Described at the New York Times by saying that “Some look like lunar landscapes, others like lava flows.” what is undeniable is that, among other considerations, this façade has been a landmark in New York City on the past ten years. Just published two days ago, also Geoff Manaugh critique of architect Frank Gehry at Gizmodo has been on the focus of different critics and readers, complaining about the banality of the text, which mostly focuses on the building’s form and use of materials.

What is common in both cases is the importance of the materials used on the skin, which both in Gehry’s buildings and the #FolkMoMA, is metal. This are only two recent debates and discussions that make us think that the project Stainlessness by Etienne Turpin and its accompanying publication The Architecture of Mineralization is quite relevant in the current moment.

The Architecture of Mineralization is a special edition broadsheet publication, featuring a short essay and a set of four prints which present the story of labor movements in North America and show how they have shaped the cities of Sudbury, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. As we can read:

“While processes of urbanization have all but erased these struggles from our cities and left only ambivalent monuments to mark the past, contemporary architectural “capriccios” of The Architecture of Mineralization assert the centrality of labor as a force capable of transforming the nature of cities, the culture of America, and the geologic deep-time marked by the Anthropocene.”

Turpin’s interest on the Anthropocene [an informal term that serves to mark the evidence and extent of human activities that have had a significant global impact on the Earth's ecosystems], has led him to publish the book Architecture in the Anthropocene, where he tries to develop a deep research about the fundamental ambivalence on the value of the concept from the point of view of both cultural theory and design practice. An important part of the impact of the Anthropocene can be found on open pit mines, one of the techniques used to extract minerals fro the Earth’s surface. Thus, with this work, Etienne Turpin wonders about the importance that metallic surfaces have as cultural artifacts and why metallic surfaces are still synonymous with progress.

Original prints (Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Sudbury) by Etienne Turpin.

He adds on The Architecture of Mineralization:

“The more polished, refined, expansive and contiguous these metallic surfaces, the greater their representational carrying capacity for our most lauded but least considered civilizational values —stainlessness.”

It’s interesting, thinking about the #FolkMoMA controversy or remembering the big impact of some Gehry’s buildings —such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, with its titanium cladding—, which has been the role of the architectural practice on the cultural acceptance of shiny-metal-shapes as a form of economic or political progress.

The impact of extraction is presented on the the traveling exhibition of the same name, and so do the research to determine whether or not the Anthropocene satisfies the necessary criteria to state that those changes are most precisely associated with so-called Homo sapiens. These changes include the rise of agriculture and attendant deforestation; coal, oil and gas extraction; the combustion of carbon-based fuels, among others. The evidence of human action by the act of extraction on Earth’s landscape is deeply related with architecture and the materials used to build the cities we live in. The relationship between the capital forces of the companies that own the extraction mines and urban growth is direct, and it’s a relation of power. At this point relies the importance of this project, to make us re-think this relationship and our inherited cultural ideas of what “progress” means.

—Ethel Baraona Pohl, editorial team Quaderns.

/// Stainlessness exhibition is represented by Alexis Bhagat / Sound&Language Distribution. More info, here.
/// More info on Etienne Turpin’s forthcoming book Stainlessness by the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press.

The annual theme ‘Money’ is divided in three competitions:

- Territories. Jurors is David Garcia, founder of MAP Architects.
- Culture & Society. Juror is Pedro Gadanho, curator of Contemporary Architecture in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art MoMA.
- Environment. Juror is Keller Easterling, architect and writer from New York City and a professor at Yale University.

/// MAGNETIC NORTH, the Arctic lands [From Greenland to Iceland, via Svalbard].

On Monday Dec 9th 2014 [7pm CET] the winners of the Money-Territories competition will be announced on an event at Lauba. During this event, a number of interesting international guests including Mason White, Miha Turšič & Dragan Živadinov from Ksevt, Marko Peljhan, David Garcia of MAP Architects, Ethel Baraona Pohl & Cesar Reyes Najera of dpr-barcelona and Tomislav Pletenac, will take us on a journey through mistic spaces of Earth and Universe as a final event in the Territories Competition Era.

After results announcements a round table discussion on the topic Culture and Architecture of Extreme Environments will take place. Also the second competition of the series Culture & Society. Building Without Money: Create a Space for Cultural Exchange. [juror Pedro Gadanho of MoMA The Museum of Modern Art] will be launched.

/// There will be live streaming for those living abroad Zagreb. More info on twitter @_ThinkSpace_ and Facebook on Think-Space.

There are a number of speculative projects that rely on housing research contexts sometimes difficult to imagine. In the same way that Aristide Antonas designed a house for the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, inspired on book Violence, in this case we have a project designed to provide housing to Judas Iscariot, in an exercise of architecture that seeks to re-think the role of Judas in the history of Christianity.

Its author, Cristian Valenzuela describes it as a sequence of movements and atmospheres to be traversed, proposes the transformation of Judas betrayal into his sacrifice, transformation to be enacted and personified by whoever submits to the rules of this space.
The house is proposed as an enclosed rectangular block to be found in the desert or the mountain.

We know the popular and historical animosity toward Judas, and it seems interesting to find a project that instead of punishing certain human attitudes, attempts to transform them through architecture. Details such as the reduced height of the chamber, aimed to create the feeling of burden, are part of this purpose, while transmit the feeling that the body will translate bowing the head down. There is another chamber devoid of any light, with the space to be revealed as a forest of pillars, some of them made of fresh cedar, the rest of charred wood. According to Valenzuela, the withdrawal of the sense of vision will put the body on different relationship with the surrounding space. Time and movement throughout the chamber will depend on complementary senses… It will not be possible to leave unstained.

With a graphic very similar to the one instituded recently by San Rocco magazine, with simple but powerful lines, creating the kind of axonometric that Massimo Scolari relates to a type of representations which are manifestations of the ideological and philosophical orientations of different cultures.

The complete project here: