What is our commons and how should it be renewed, sustained, enlarged, drawn down, and/or extended to others?
—J.K. Gibson-Graham

The creation of instituting society, as instituted society, is each time a common world (kosmos koinos), the positing of individuals, of their types, relations and activities; but also the positing of things, their types, relations and signification—all of which are caught up each time in receptacles and frames of reference instituted as common, which make them exist together.
—Cornelius Castoriadis

How can architectural and design practice cope with current economic crisis? Do we consider multiple practices of design ranging from office practice to education and everyday co-existences? Although many architects and designers still base their practices on the office and depend on the neoliberal global market, some are forming collectives that exchange labour as well as creating practices based on a transversal methodology. The economic crisis may empower large-scale offices, but the Occupy movements, their search for alternatives to austerity, and trans-local solidarity networks are opening new paths of practice for design. The Kyoto-based RAD practice (Research for Architecture Domain) describes the need for future architectural practice: ‘The forces of economic crisis that influence the built environment, the difficulties of co-existence of small offices and young architects, the consideration of criticality towards institutional policies and mass architectural mainstream offices are some of the urgent reasons that small offices search for new types of practices.’ Many young architects from different geographies have started to form such research-based collectives that no longer follow usual architectural design practice, instead engaging communities, creating experimental ad hoc design tools, curating exhibitions, running educational workshops at a trans-local level and utilizing a knowledge of architecture to engage with various fields. How can they remain outside a neoliberal creative system that can absorb such practices easily via the comparative advantages to be gained by further exploiting the labour force and new cognitive subjectivities? This remains an important question. It is my guess that safeguarding the ethical and political stances of commoning and continuing to play with the transversal methodology of ad hoc practices that can modify institutions could empower an architecture and design that wanted to create alternatives and remain on the other side.

Traceable Renovation Workshop (2013). Courtesy RAD

A transversal methodology would respond to the need to build a common vocabulary relating to labour, pedagogy, commons, archives, institutions and the urban that is connected to our struggle and resistance to conflict in our everyday practices. This need stems from spatial practices in conflicted urban spaces: it is a need not only for a language that relates to the constrained environment of the recent socio-political and economic crisis, but also for a language capable of rebuilding a collective consciousness that can convey our communal coexistence. The question is this: how can self-organized, self-regulating networks and collective structures such as the urban Occupy movements inspire economic models, especially when the generation and redistribution of wealth is involved? And how can the urban spaces in which these networks and structures emerge under exceptional conditions serve as “common knowledge” based on the practice of “commoning”? Nowadays, the discussion is focused on precarious working conditions and their effects on cognitive labour.

Currently, our understanding of the nature of precarious labour is mostly based on a time/work frame that leads to labour exploitation and lack of employment security, but these conditions do not necessarily correspond to our varying experiences of different work types. Rather, precarious labour and conflicts concerning production take on totally different dynamics depending on which autonomous structures and networks they take place in. We can witness some examples of this in different geographies, where autonomous structures and collectives whose labour is based on relational collaboration and self-organization are being actively pursued and developed. There are practical cases of self-organized labour structures managing well on their own, not only to sustain production but also to maintain fluid networks of creative collectivism and collaboration, even though they may be limited to a certain extent by local territorial circumstances. For instance, the RAD architecture collective I mentioned before share a small room with their members in Kyoto, where they realize participatory preservation projects relating to old housing in common with the local communities. This preservation practice not only empowers the local community, it also allows RAD to re-invent ad-hoc preservation methodologies with different materials and common knowledge. In addition, they are involved with other research projects in Europe and other parts of the world; RAD architects can hardly pay their rent but continue their multiple collective practices while individually pursuing different types of design. Most of these groups and networks are involved in urban pedagogy based on the tools of empowerment and self-learning, teaching, acting, research, reclaiming alternative urban space, social media, urban farming and reclaiming citycentres threatened by aggressive real estate development plans. Additionally, they undertake daily activities, collaborating with temporary workers, the homeless and disenfranchised communities to create support structures for these groups. Apart from their autonomous structures, they also try to create criticality models connected to new forms of social relations and commoning.

KA2011 – Conference for Japanese and French young architects (2011). Courtesy RAD

HAPS Workshop , Building Traceability Project. Courtesy RAD

Examples of this can be seen in the organization of discussion groups, collective actions, urban movements and general meetings. From this perspective, their work can be seen as a research method for a practice of commoning—of being in common. I think that what is central to the meaning of “commons” is not what we own or share or produce in terms of property, but rather “social relations” that are closely connected to everyday life. According to political economist Massimo De Angelis: ‘Commons are a means of establishing a new political discourse that builds on and helps to articulate the many existing, often minor, struggles and recognizes their power to overcome capitalist society. He defines three notions in order to explain both commons, in terms of the resources that we share, and a way of commoning—that is, a social process of ‘being common’: the way in which resources are pooled and made available to a group of individuals who then build or rediscover a sense of community.

Food sociologist and activist Raj Patel focuses on the role of food in social movements and the forms of solidarity it underpins,whether that be the Black Panther movements that organized children’s breakfasts or the People’s Grocery or Via Campesina. He defines commons: ‘Commons is about how we manage resources together.’ But his argument is not only about managing and sustaining food growing and sharing, but also about how food-related movements should act in solidarity with other movements. Thus the concept of “commons”, as understood here, holds a sensitive position within any given community or public, especially in contested territories or cities subject to the threat of the neoliberal destruction of their built environment. Negotiation and the resolution of conflicting values are key to such commoning practices. As Stavros Stavrides argues, more than the act or fact of sharing, it is the existence of common grounds for negotiation that is most important. Conceptualizing commons with reference to the public does not focus so much on similarities or commonalities but on exploring the differences between people on a purposefully instituted common ground. We have to establish grounds for negotiation rather than grounds for affirming that which is shared.

Alessandro Petti and David Harvey at Dheisheh camp. Photo by Pelin Tan, September 2015

In Decolonizing Architecture, ‘Al-Masha’ refers to common land instead of commons: ‘The notion of Al-Masha could help re-imagine the notion of the common today. Could this form of common use be expanded by redefining the meaning of cultivation, moving it from agriculture to other forms of human activity? [...] How to liberate the common from the control of authoritarian regimes, neo-colonialism and consumer societies? How to reactivate common uses beyond the interests of public state control?’ Based in the “occupied territories” of the West Bank, this practice, which draws on the field of architecture, focuses on the reality of Palestinian refugees creating common spaces and perceiving the notion of the “camp” as a potential space beyond neoliberal citizenship and the dichotomy of public versus private space. In the activities of Decolonizing Architecture, the “common” differs from both public and private space. As we can see in most cities and urban spaces, public and private spaces are under the control of governments. Decolonizing Architecture collaborates with different background researchers, refugees, activists and civil representatives in using militant urban and architectural research methodologies to identify common spaces in refugee camps and former military buildings. Working with the inhabitants of Al-Fawwar camp, for example, they designed a small public space which was then realized by young Palestinian refugees and families. A space for the exchange of everyday life experiences and local engagements can be the most important form of resistance against colonization.

Campus in Camps, an educational platform initiated by Decolonizing Architecture and younger-generation Palestinian refugees in Dheisheh Camp, is contributed to internationally and locally by artists, architects and researchers from different fields. The “Concrete Tent” project, a concrete meeting place built with the participation of the camp designed and produced by Campus in Camps, aims to create a communal space for collective learning. Tent also references a collective political past of the Palestinian refugees who settled first in the tents that have now been transformed into concrete buildings. The concept of the tent also presents and preserves the heritage of these camps that are now somehow urbanized. Furthermore, Campus in Camps renders explicit the role of architecture in these communal acts: ‘Architecture is able to register various transformations that make the camp a heritage site. And in camps every single architectural transformation is a political statement. Therefore architecture registers political changes.’ The process in building this concrete tent was interrupted by a family who disagreed with the land-use agreement: ‘After ten days, one member of the large family prevented the labourers from working on the site. The family, the popular committee, and leaders of the camp spent several weeks trying to find a solution. However, this family member stated that, despite the initial agreement to guarantee the collective use of the land for the two coming years, he had now decided to sell it realizing that new attention was being paid to this abandoned land. In a single night all the shelters were demolished.’ After succeeding efforts of the younger generation of Campus in Camps, the tent was constructed again. I think the whole process of conflict in the community is part of the discourse in the camp and preserves it as a continuous decolonizing practice.

The Concrete Tent. Photo by Pelin Tan, September, 2015.

Another example of commoning practice could be the Istanbul-based collective of many young architects, Architecture for All (HerkesiçinMimarlık), which formed a practice of multiple designs, preservation and formats. Working with local people in villages in Southeast Anatolia to re-design schools with found or cheap materials is one of their practices. Their simple social architecture does involve social empowerment, but as in the case of the Dheisheh camp, their practice is more about creating a new discourse based on different knowledge, labour exchange and ways of commoning.

With reference to the practices of ad hoc and potential instant alliances mentioned above, it is important to consider how the labour exchange strategies applied operate. They are generally based both on immaterial and physical labour, there being no separation between these forms of labour production. Here, the alienating aspects of immaterial labour disappear and the surplus is handled on the basis of ethics rather than capitalist market imperatives. In this context, community economies and surplus dissemination processes, in the sense implied by economist/geography researcher J.K. Gibson-Graham, are of particular importance. For political collective action requires ‘working collaboratively to produce alternative economic organizations and spaces in place.’ Additionally: ‘The “collective” in this context does not suggest the massing together of like subjects, nor should the term “action” imply an efficacy that originates in intentional beings or that is distinct from thought. We are trying for a broad and distributed notion of collective action, in order to recognize and keep open possibilities of connection and development.’

Mesudiye Peyzaj Atölyesi. Source: herkesicinmimarlik.org

In short, collective action requires the ethics of a community economy. In fact, I would articulate this more as an act of ethics of locality that meets the needs suggested by our everyday knowledge and the experience of safeguarding our livelihoods in both urban and rural spaces. The relational network established as a result is more of an instant community that chooses to think and discuss together than it is a normative structure. Self-organization is not a simple hierarchy based on certain labour activities and their division but, conversely, a work/labour structure that allows one to be a farmer in the morning and a graphic designer in the afternoon. To reiterate Stavrides’ astute analysis, collaboration is about negotiation not affirmation. It is about debating critical issues in an urban space, where space itself is a pressing and compelling concern. Creating a collective, non- clerical political action in urban space is not about the organization or the event itself, but about co-existing and functioning together to achieve commoning. This is rooted in a reconsideration and realization of our practices of collaboration, alternative economies, autonomous networks, self-organization and surplus strategies, all of which differ radically from the reality of the neoliberal policies and logics of production currently being forced upon us.

We find ourselves at a stage in global history where local movements consisting of self-organized collectives are attaching themselves to translocal networks capable of creating rhizomatic dissemination and surplus. At the same time, the Occupy movements in different cities have introduced a realm of communal practice of difference that has gathered together pre-existing collective resistance practices. The anti-globalization protests that followed Seattle and continued with the Occupy movements are characterized by unique forms of solidarity, by translocal networks and by various types of transversal knowledge and pedagogy. Architecture for All created architectural drawings of ad-hoc structures in Gezi Park and along the barricades during the Gezi resistance. During the resistance, examples of in situ and instant architecture in Taksim Square and Gezi Park included a temporary mosque, a mobile food collective run using simple materials, and atent which served as an ever-expanding open hospital. Makeshift markers represented the borders of each section, which expanded or contracted according to people’s needs. More often than not, performative architecture is experienced during a”state of emergency”, under conditions of conflictual urbanism, instant architecture and practices of radical spatial resistance. These relational resistance structures led Architecture for All to create the #occupygezi architecture initiative, in which they claim: ‘We need new definitions for architecture in situations when architecture is removed from architects. Each unique structure that we encounter in the streets and Gezi Park has its own in-situ design and implementation process.’

#occupygezi architecture

According to philosopher Simon Critchley, ‘We can talk about Occupy. Occupy is not revolution—it is rebellion—but it is very interesting and it has made a very different set of political tactics available. Occupy is something very familiar to many of the people on the anarchist Left. [...] I believe in a low-level, almost invisible series of actions, which at a certain point reach visibility and then really have an effect. As Gramsci would say, politics is not a war of manoeuver or frontal assault on power. It is a tenacious and long-lasting war of position. This requires optimism, cunning and patience.’

Furthermore, for Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Occupy movements are characterized by taking pleasure in the other body and by an empathy for other alliances. In my opinion, we cannot and do not speak of a new activism anymore; but we do speak about an uncommon knowledge that we create, a new instituting power and a collective labour. This can be linked back to the practice of Decolonizing Architecture and its participants’ intention of questioning the “commons” from the perspective of Al−Masha: the form of research ‘is collective, relational and active.’ In this context, I think concepts such as “participation”, “agonism” and “hegemony”—concepts we often use in practicing radical democracy–are transformed in the process of more layered, conditional and foundational negotiations that question our values, relations and ways of acting in the society of today. The differences between institutional knowledge and its production can be challenged accordingly with a view to creating a co-existence which is at once active and fictive and which touches on everyday and urgent realities. When Decolonizing Architecture describe the ideas behind their actions, they say they seek‘to establish a different balance between withdrawal and engagement, action in the world and research, fiction and proposal.’

In conclusion, the main dilemma faced is how to develop and sustain ad-hoc practices that are based on heterogeneous economics, ways of commoning, collective ethics of collaboration and action labour against economic austerity and its political discourse? The concept and practice of commons and communing need more detailed analyses of political struggle, its history and the relative conceptualization of different geographies, bothwithin and beyond the EU and in different conditions of labour/surplus production. Architectural and design practice that is deeply but partially rooted in capitalist labour exploitation and market-based surplus dissemination could bring its own emancipative practice with its own design methodologies. Conflict and agonism would be parts of this practice in local co-existences.

—Pelin Tan, sociologist and art historian. Associate professor at the Architecture Faculty, Mardin Artuklu University, Turkey.

/// This text was first published in the e-Book Adhocracy READER (dpr-barcelona and the Onassis Cultural Center, 2015).
/// By permission of the author and the publisher, we reproduced it here. You can freely download the complete e-Book, following this link.

Following that review, we received a text that architect Quilian Riano wrote expanding on thoughts from the same event. Riano is a designer, researcher, writer, and educator currently working out of Brooklyn, New York; and founder of DSGN AGNC. This text can be understood as a response to Wolfe’s text and more important, it opens the discussion by sharing a different point of view and strengthens the conversation about issues so important in the current moment as capitalism, economy, politics and architecture. Here is Quilian Riano’s text:

“It has to be said that historically, the connection between capital and architecture has not been so mysterious; architects in the not so distant (European) past actually did build their practices around their overtly formulated economic positions.”
-From Peggy Deamer’s introduction to Architecture and Capitalism

Last week, during a public conversation at the Storefront for Art and Architecture for the book launch of Architecture and Capitalism, I said that “all design is a political act.” This made blogger Ross Wolfe cringe in an opinion piece about the event here in Quaderns. In his piece, Mr. Wolfe consistently ignores the context for the event and many of the remarks from that evening. I will, however, take this as an opportunity to give just such context to my remarks and expand on what I meant.

First, I invite everyone to see the entire discussion online and to read a short post I wrote after the event summarizing and expanding on my thoughts, here on Architecture and/or Capitalism Conversation.

The discussion began with moderator Peggy Deamer bringing up a claim she made in the book regarding the Marxist distinction between superstructure and base. In the introduction, she claims that architecture primarily functions in the superstructure, in the “realm of culture, allowing capital to do its work without its effects being scrutinized.” In the conversation, she posed the question of whether urbanism, because of its more clear ties to the economy, resides more in the base. All panelists promptly dismissed the binary as unhelpful and perhaps even dangerous. As part of my response, I stated that is important to keep in mind that both architectural and urban form are the result of political and economic forces.

As we continued to discuss that statement, it became clear that we were all troubled by how the role of capital is almost completely obscured in architectural practice. In architectural offices, designers make decisions every day while ignoring potential political consequences, such as labor conditions and environmental impacts. We then talked about the need to confront this willful ignorance.

When I said that all design is a political act, I meant it both as a statement and as a question to provoke further discussion. Why is it important to state such a seemingly obvious point? Because architecture is not often discussed that way, especially in academia or in practice. I often go to reviews where students and faculty only discuss the formal aspects of projects, ignoring all social and political conditions produced by or enabling the work. This is in part because the post-functionalist ideas popularized by Peter Eisenman are now the predominant ideology of architecture schools, especially in the U.S. This ideology claims that architecture should only work within formal discourses, rejecting any political discourse in what can be seen as an over-reaction to the failure of heroically humanist discourses of the late-modernist period. Eisenman has gone as far as to claim that “Liberal Views Have Never Built Anything of any Value.” These views are so ingrained in the field that even emerging practitioners espouse them as given truths as seen in a recent interview with Jimenez Lai who said: “When people talk about being more than just architects, about solving other world problems —affordable housing, carbon emission, landscape urbanism—in my mind, they’re effectively forfeiting the very thing they’re supposed to be an expert on. If we’re not going to cultivate formalism, who will?”

Image of a Peter Eisenman-designed house with glass slot in the center of the wall continuing through the floor that divides the room in half, forcing there to be separate beds on either side of the room so that the couple was forced to sleep apart from each other. ArchDaily

Furthermore, most often professors and practitioners who talk about larger political processes at all do it with the ironic detachment that has at times has been the modus operandi of one of the most prominent architectural practices, Rem Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture. In fact, one of my favorite essays in Architecture and Capitalism is “Irrational Exuberance: Rem Koolhaas and the 1990’s” by Ellen Dunham-Jones — you can read an excerpt of it in Places Journal. In the essay, Dunham-Jones says the following about Koolhaas’ ironic flirtation with capitalism:

“Nonetheless, over the decade, his writings and designs contributed significantly to shifting design discourse away from critical theory toward post-critical, non-judgmental research, and from autonomy toward engagement — albeit engagement largely with the elite beneficiaries of the New Economy, now often described as “the 1%.” From our contemporary perspective, it is thus worth asking: What is Koolhaas’s legacy vis-à-vis progressive practice?” (Page 151)

In the current context of architectural production, politics are either ignored and not thought to be important for form-making or referred to ironically, without any real consequence.

From Content, by OMA/Koolhaas (Taschen, 2004). Places Journal

What I am concerned with is ways in which we can begin to ask political questions in architectural studios in academia and practice. I will posit that the first step is a reaffirmation that all architecture formalizes invisible forces and ideologies. A similar sentiment was expressed humorously and concisely by Slavoj Zizek in a Vice interview. In discussing postmodern companies and bosses that try to hide their power by dressing and acting casually, Zizek says that “the first step to liberation is to force him[/her] to act like a boss. Stop acting like a friend and give me orders.” Similarly, one of the first steps we need to take towards liberation is to recognize capital’s power lest one get seduced by the seemingly casual air of boutique architectural practices and tactical urbanism salons. Only then can we begin to have a conversation on how architecture can begin to formulate alternatives.

Presently architects who ask questions of the role of capital are labeled as political or activist architects. These monikers obscure the fact that we are all involved in the complex capitalist processes that produce a building, a space, a city. No one producing form can claim innocence.

Do we then need to stop practicing as architects? No!

Recognizing that current architectural practice is inextricable from capitalist processes can inject political discourse back into the discipline. Many architects, artists and designers are beginning practices that reject unrealizable utopianism and instead take on existing systems of power. These practices seek to understand and illuminate systems of power in order to change them. A project that attempts to enact such change, from outside of architecture, is Strike Debt! a project started by artists that effectively intervenes in the U.S. debt system.

This project points towards the potential of designing actions that are intentionally shaped by political forces and in turn are designed to push back on those forces. The Storefront was filled to capacity for this event, showing that architects, in fact, want to engage in critical political discourses. Perhaps this also signalled a clear dissatisfaction with the notion that we can do nothing in the face of a complex global capitalist system. A reaction against the notion that we cannot act critically on the city. There may be a time for a more fully utopian moment — for a revolution —but for now we can use design to illuminate systems of power and strategically act on them.

—Quilian Riano. Designer, researcher, writer, and educator currently working out of Brooklyn, New York. Founder and principal at DSGN AGNC. Masters of Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Bachelors of Design (Summa Cum Laude) at the University of Florida, School of Architecture.

/// Header image courtesy of the Storefront for Art and Architecture
/// More info: Architecture or/and Capitalism, Storefront for Art and Architecture.
/// Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, edited by Peggy Deamer

“On the occasion of the book launch of ‘Architecture and Capitalism’ edited by Peggy Deamer, Storefront presented a forum where some of the book contributors and other leading figures in the discourse around politics, economy, architecture and the city presented and discussed some historical and contemporary references on how alternatives have been articulated in the past and how we might be able to articulate them today.”

We were lucky enough that our friend Ross Wolfe, author of The Charnel-House, attended to the event and send us the following review:

Film still from the documentary Money and speed.

Last night’s book launch for Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present drew a large crowd to the Storefront for Art and Architecture in Lower Manhattan. The precise relation of the event to the newly-released Routledge collection was obscure, however. Of the four featured speakers —Thomas Angotti, Peggy Deamer, Quilian Riano, and Michael Sorkin— only Deamer and Sorkin contributed pieces to the volume. Deamer, the prime mover behind Architecture and Capitalism, wrote the introduction; Sorkin was responsible for its pithy four-page conclusion. Effectively bookending the discussion, then, the book’s themes entered into the conversation in a largely oblique fashion. For the most part, the talk was limited to generalities.

Some of the topics focused on by the speakers were fairly familiar, by now standard fare for reflections on architecture’s role in society. There was reference, of course, to the supremely compromised position of the architect within the existing system of capitalist reproduction. Given the present constraints encountered in the profession, Sorkin and Angotti pointed out, designers are typically bound to the whims of their clients. What little leverage can be mustered during the building process is usually a function of the “name recognition” of their firm. Otherwise, architects have very little say in how their visions are eventually realized, unless they stipulate specific guarantees beforehand [making it far more difficult to secure a contract in the first place]. If they don’t follow the instructions or meet the expectations of their employers, in most cases, all funding is cut off and the commission is lost. Questions concerning the supposed ethical obligations of the architect were also raised in this connection. Should architects refuse to lend their name to certain kinds of building projects? Prisons featuring cells for solitary confinement were listed by Sorkin as obvious examples, along with military installations with facilities built-in to serve as torture chambers. Deamer brought up the extraordinary conditions of exploitation suffered by the workers mobilized to construct, for instance, gleaming skyscrapers in Dubai. Not only the living labor involved in their assembly, Riano added somewhat vaguely, but also the dead labor embodied in the materials assembled.

Besides these scattered considerations, more theoretical issues of interpretation were also touched upon. Included here was some debate regarding the relationship between the material “base” of social production and the ideological “superstructure” it supports — that controversial architectural metaphor supplied by Marx over 150 years ago. While Sorkin dismissed this thought-figure out of hand as a vulgar Marxist holdover, Deamer interestingly suggested that there was an isomorphism that placed urbanism closer to the “base” and architecture closer to the “superstructure” in terms of the self-understanding of each field. Riano and Angotti rejected the notion of a stark separation between the two, pointing out that the two spheres often impinged upon one another, but failed to address the substance of Deamer’s contention. Though her argument could have probably been articulated more forcefully, Deamer did gesture in the direction of a key distinction between urbanism and architecture: a striving toward autonomy in the latter that is absent in the former. Urbanism deals more directly with the naked economic realities of real estate and the concentration of capital at the municipal level, despite entertaining some quaint delusions about its ability to act in the public interest. Architecture is closer to art in its pursuit of an autonomous ideal, although it requires marshaling significantly more resources to realize its object. There is more attention to form and abstract tectonic and stylistic considerations in architecture than city planning. Mention was also made of the building principles prioritized under neoliberal capitalism, as zoning laws seem predisposed to favor increasing property value for high-end real estate. Centrally located, spectacular design proposals receive preferential treatment as potential sites for capital accumulation. Sorkin repeatedly expressed dismay at architects’ propensity to “monetize air” by encouraging speculators to invest in costly buildings that will likely sit empty for years before seeing a return. To correct this corrosive trend, he recommended policy solutions that would reduce income inequality through a progressive tax and reform the building code to better serve the city’s inhabitants.

Cover of the book Architecture and Capitalism, 1845 to the Present.

A few members of the audience could be seen squirming, however, as some of the panelists’ remarks were further specified. Stressing the importance of the utopian dimension in architecture as a way of thinking outside the limits imposed by capitalism, some slippage occurred in the terms used by the speakers. “Utopia,” one casually remarked, “is simply another name for what we used to call socialism.” Responding to this apparent parapraxis, someone from the audience challenged the discussants during Q&A: “Isn’t it possible that we might be able to work within capitalism to make the world less ugly? Couldn’t there just be a more beautiful capitalism?”

Thomas Wensing, a Dutch architect who was in attendance, quickly interjected: “They already have that. It’s called OMA.”

On the whole, the quality of the evening’s proceedings was wildly uneven. Without a doubt, Sorkin was the highlight of the event. He alone was able to distill the essence of the questions at hand and concisely formulate a response. Deamer was flatfooted and awkward throughout the majority of exchanges, and Riano seemed incapable of dealing other than in gross platitudes [including the cringe-inducing refrain that “all architecture is political”]. Even then, it is unclear whether the measures Sorkin was hinting at pointed beyond capitalism in any meaningful way. Consulting more architects and urbanists in policymaking decisions will hardly improve matters; in any case, capitalism cannot be designed away. For the very same reason, however, the decision of some architects to withdraw from objectionable ventures is unlikely to change what are by most accounts structural or systemic problems. At best, it might help them sleep at night. Perhaps the takeaway from all this is not that the panelists were simply tiptoeing around the task of giving an answer. What was more unsettling, in all probability, was the tacit recognition that the present impasse of architecture —as of society in general— no longer seems to elicit an immediately practicable answer. Toward the end, Angotti more or less said as much: “Back in the ’60s, or better yet the ’30s, when there was a real labor movement, we had a readymade answer to the question of what needed to be done. Nothing like this exists today.” This, and nothing else, was what was being avoided: not the question, but the lack of an answer.

—Ross Wolfe. Writer, critic, translator. Author of the forthcoming book, The Graveyard of Utopia: Soviet Urbanism and the Fate of the International Avant-Garde, scheduled to be published in the next few months by Zero Books.

/// More info: Architecture or/and Capitalism, Storefront for Art and Architecture.
/// Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, edited by Peggy Deamer

UPDATE: This review has been responded by Quilian Riano on the post From Affirmations to Disruptions: Understanding Design as a Political Act and followed by Ross Wolfe on his own blog The Charnel House. For more updates about this interesting debate about architecture, capitalism and politics, you can follow @quilian, @rosswolfe and @Quaderns.

Here is the video of the presentation:

In a back-to-back series of short presentations, [bracket] editorial advisors and contributors Neeraj Bhatia, Fionn Byrne, Michael Chen, Leigha Dennis, Sergio Lopez-Pineiro, Geoff Manaugh, and Chris Perry discussed some of the collection’s most innovative soft proposals—a diverse set of projects ranging from sonic urbanism to repurposed pay-and-display whose softness lies in the way that they propose “systems, networks, and technologies that are responsive, adaptable, scalable, non-linear, and multivalent.”

This book studies the strategies used by architects to secure commissions, sell projects and erect buildings. Although their modus operandi might seem to be mere marketing techniques, the economic conditions in each stage of a project that determines the final result cannot be overlooked.
Selling strategies are not taught in school, since it has traditionally been considered that architects cannot market themselves. Nor are they discussed among practicing professionals, since no one is willing to reveal his recipes for success. Therefore, there is no specific bibliography in this area, although architects have always been excellent salesmen for ideas.

California is a place for opportunities where results matter more than theory. Everyone working there uses strategies to secure profits. Most of the architects in the study were born or developed their careers in the area: Gehry (who lives in Santa Monica), Gensler (who lives in San Francisco), Ma (who is dean of USC), Jerde (who works in L.A.), Koolhaas (who created Amo on the basis of a project for the Universal Building in L.A.), Jobs (who founded Apple and worked in Cupertino) and Page and Brin (the founders of Google in Palo Alto).
The inclusion of software architects in the list of building architects may come as a surprise; however the change undergone by architecture justifies it. Nowadays, corporations do not commission buildings to represent them, but rather strategies to improve their brands, efficiency and sales. Offering these is also the work of today’s architects.

Nowadays architects are designing fewer buildings and focusing on designing strategies. Let’s begin to study them. We shall discover how they work and where can they take us. We are certainly going to need them to convince society that we can still be useful.

AUTHOR

Eduard Sancho Pou is the head of an architecture studio where he combines his work as an architect with his strategic consultancy activities. In the past, he was the director of Barcelona Centre Arquitectura, where he organized architecture exhibitions, colloquia, and conferences attended by international architects. He has also been an architectural consultant with the Swiss multinational Holcim, for the announcement of the Holcim Architectural Awards. Sancho Pou holds a doctorate (cum laude) from the Polytechnic University of Barcelona. He is currently a member of Cercle d´Arquitectura Research Group (UPC) and teaches to Phd students at the same university.

More info: Graham Foundation and arquia/próxima