The collective towns in Iraqi Kurdistan embody how the design of the built environment performs as device for political action. Imposing the idea of homogenized modernisation without any historical perspective they crop up as the materialization of the totalitarian state apparatus for infuse political plans on the ground. Setting terms and conditions over populations, design featured a key role applying political control based on territorial management, successive land reforms, massive relocation of resources, complex production structures and strategic enlargement of reproductible schemes followed by several organized layout systems of collectivisation.

Daratoo, Kurdistan, Northern Iraq. Collective towns are still organised around a perpendicular grid as they were initially designed by Saddam Hussein. Photo: Leo Novel

Designing a model of state-owned land and forcing Kurdish tribal population—geographic and economically based on agriculture— to drift from their hamlets towards the urban areas, the Iraqi government ensure an atmosphere of dependency, of mandatory essential state-supply, dismantling local communities and production networks. Thus, razing Kurdish culture and local praxis through systematically destroying villages while enforcing evictions and depopulation, the modern rhetoric of optimization and services emerged as “solvent” reorganization, where entire communities previously settled on the mountains, had been relocate to settlements on plain lands, without agricultural and farmland activities. Drawing an homogeneous landscape of territorial units —designed on modulated patterns, gridded with perpendicular roads, uniformed neighborhoods, regular plots and generic typologies— called Mujamma’at (gatherings places) or Collective Towns, totally dependent from the State.

Although the Iraqi government claimed to have set services and supplies for them, the Kurds already had those facilities on their villages and rather than to stay in the new towns, they preferred to go back. It was after this first generation of massive relocated people “inspired” by progress and other rhetorics of a modern lexicon, that the second generation of Collective Towns — envisioned now as a political tool for struggle — became, according to Francesca Recchia, a new kind of “open air prisons”, due to its isolation by a buffer zone and strict clampdowns to go back to their native villages. In physical terms, the urban design was focused to encourage control and reorganisation, and since that moment became an imperative, destroying thousands of villages and displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians to towns which facilitate the control by military tanks, to patrol over straight streets (where visibility and surveillance are clearer than on steep road hamlets). Thus, design boost rural communities transformation into easier urban targets.

Daratoo, Kurdistan, Northern Iraq. Collective Towns have now become fully urbanised and fully serviced with electricity and sanitation. Photo: Leo Novel

Daratoo, Kurdistan, Northern Iraq. A man stands at a wide crossroad in the collective town of Daratoo. Photo: Leo Novel

As explained on Leo Novel’s photo essay, authoritarian systems enforce order through urban design, but it’s on the daily interactions, cultural expressions and activities, where the possibility of subversion relies. Recently, the expansion of Collective Towns into urban cores is encouraging upcoming scenarios for Kurdish urban development. Architectural variations start appearing overlapped into the original homogeneous, standardized housing systems. Organic and spontaneous alleys and labyrinth street systems are internally recolonizing the urban space, slipped into the regularity of the grid. And people are reoccupying the street by recovering their traditional behaviour and ways of inhabiting. Sometimes subversion starts by the simple means of taking home activities outside, to make them visible on the public sphere. This simple gesture enhances the possibility of sudden forms of spatial negotiation. Instead of massive changes, small actions. No political submission but collective subversion.

Collective towns where initially disconnected from main cities; the fast pace of contemporary urbanisation, however, is turning them in important urban cores. Photo: Leo Novel

Francesca Recchia wrote: “The design of space is neither neutral nor innocent”. It is a political operation.

—Leonardo Novelo, architect and founder / editor at INPUTmap.

/// Book review and reflections based on Devices for Political Action.: The Collective Towns in Iraqi Kurdistan, by Francesca Reccia and Leo Novel [dpr-barcelona, 2014]
/// More about Francesca Recchia’s work at kiccovich.net
/// Mora about the photographic work of Leo Novel at leonovel.com

Everything spins around Guidi’s 20 by 25cm, full-scale contact prints: the camera was the media of Guidi’s research on Scarpa’s architecture, as the prints are the media that engages the viewer. Being full-scale contact prints the images have colors and details unfamiliar to our contemporary eyes: there is a physical translation – or traveling – of the light at San Vito de Altivole, to its reflection in Brion’s Tomb’s materials, to the negative film on the photographer’s camera, to its direct imprint in the photosensitive paper, and to the eyes of the viewer. Nothing is immediate, and we can learn about these slow travels in Guidi’s text at the end of the exhibition. The words tell how he learned to “see” through the camera, to grasp the physical movement of light between materials, presenting a self-evident reality inexistent before his observation through the lens. This observation affected him, the shade moving through the building, creating forms reminiscent of Klee’s formal theories and abstract compositions, transporting Scarpa’s obsessions towards Guidi’s own. Often visiting the cemetery to see the building under specific light, he was frequently betrayed by the weather, and was thus forced to discover new aspects and produce unexpected images. He mused: “I would have liked to stop the sun every now and then—don’t move!—so that I could run around and record the effects of the same light on the other areas of the cemetery.”

Guidi’s photography allowed him to avoid the traps set up by Scarpa’s own obsession with architectural detail and form; the images are not descriptive, but are inquisitive. It is as if architect and photographer were in dialogue. Neither of them had to dismiss their own ideas about architecture or photography, and the images return the fruits of a respectful conversation.

The exhibition brings another, physical, dimension to this dialogue. The viewer has the opportunity to emerge within the conversation. One enters the exhibit trough an axial corridor that forms symmetrical square spaces with white-washed walls at a 45 degree angle to the hypostyle parking lot. The first group of exhibition rooms has a Greek-cross plan. Thus when entering one room, the remaining spaces are left behind. The photographs are hung at an unusual height, one that forces the viewer’s neck into a slight, though not uncomfortable, downward movement. We are pulled into the amazing colors and details of the photographs, the sequences set for us to follow Guidi’s research and discoveries. When the room sequence is complete, we have to lift our heads up again and, suddenly, the whole scenario changes. The relationship towards the axial space through which one engaged the exhibition has disappeared. Seeing the images has shifted our place; the exhibition has moved us from one place to another. It is an architectural trick: the inner corners of the Greek cross are retrieved 1.5 meters from the outer corners – one wall is smaller than its facing wall – thus, when we think back to the entire space, we are not in the position we were when we entered. Feeling the shift, and contemplating it, makes us aware of the intellectual and physical processes taking place while seeing experiencing the exhibition. Back to the central space one can repeat the experience in the following rooms, and in doing so, placeless, find the required suspended time to join Guidi’s research on Scarpa’s time and place.

This thought-provoking exhibition is preceded by a William Blake aphorism: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” In today’s frenzied world, overpopulated by images and speed, the quietness of this exhibition is decisive. Its tricky laconic title already offers advice: Carlo Scarpa. Brion’s Tomb. Guido Guidi. Once emerged in the exhibition’s rich conversation, where apparently everything is slower, one has, rather, to think faster: time runs faster, images run faster, ideas run faster, the world runs faster, even faster than the sun. No themes or boundaries allowed, just architectural obsessions.

— André Tavares, February 2015

/// All images by Paulo Catrica.

Carlo Scarpa. Brion’s Tomb. Guido Guidi.
Exhibition in the South-Garage of Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon.
December 1st 2014 to March 8th 2015
Curated by Joaquim Moreno and Paula Pinto.

In 1969 Reyner Banham in his book The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment marked the shift between the concept of interior to that of an artificial environment. Technology and new human needs in fact had become an integral part of architecture, defining a new paradigm to describe indoor space, that it was not any longer a concern of the singular living-cell but rather of its internal atmosphere.

The issue 21 of MONU describes the current development and the extreme consequences of what this Interior Urbanism means. As Brendan Cormier emphasizes in his article Some Notes Towards an Interior Archipelago: “90% of our lives are spent inside. Urban life is an interior affair.” This statement manifests the necessity to invert the canonical approach to read and plan cities, unfolding a new possible stream of research which considers how architecture affects our everyday life.

Climate, or the need to erase the atmospheric conditions, is one of the trigger factors of the production of interior urbanism. Michael Piper & James Khamsi in Endless Architecture: Accidental Manifestos for the interior state that “the interior has grown to become an endless type of urban form” which provides an indoor urbanism between the malls of Toronto producing a protected shelter against a hostile climate. The system grew until the inclusion of the public buildings such as the station and the city hall overpassing the threshold of the commercial status of this air-conditioned environment.

As described in the essay of Inge Goudsmit and Adrienne Simons, maybe the most extreme scenario of indoor urbanism is the case of Hong Kong, where for specific contextual constraints such as the tropical climate and the lack of space, not only the city developed vertically but also the public space defined a network of inner connections where common life develops. Assuming as cases, the extremes of Canada and tropical China, it seems that the necessity for a hospitable public environment, despite the climate, is nowadays an unavoidable condition for the contemporary cities. This need for well tempered buildings represents an important factor for the homogenization of architecture worldwide, even stronger than the cultural one.

Nevertheless the quality of this kind of space manifests the always present antithesis between public indoor life and social control. The fact that the interior pathways of Hong Kong became the place of constrained and channeled commercial episodes with no choice for the citizens is described as one of the risks of interior urbanism by Petra Blaisse in her critical claim for wilderness in urban spaces as pointed out in her interview Into the Wild. Both interior and exterior public spaces are assuming in fact the same connotations challenging their conventional opposite characters: if public buildings are assuming the spatial organization of interior landscapes, the exteriors are being ruled more and more in terms of use, as if they were buildings.

If it is true that certain internal conditions are able to create new urban spaces (as in the cases described above) the opposite is also true, that some buildings have assumed a character of indoor urbanity. One example is the article by Jonathan A. Scelsa Enfiladed Grids, The Museum as City, which highlights how museums are taking the configuration and the spatial experience of a city through the wise use of the intermezzo or the connective space between exhibition rooms such as in the work of OMA, REX, Jean Nouvel and SANAA.

This condition of blurring between interior and exterior is well described in the interview of Winy Maas, where the metaphor of a “3D Nolli”, in relation to the Nolli Map (1784) which first represented the enclosed publicly built surface as part of a continuum with the open spaces of Rome, is used as a tool to interpret a new generation of indoor public spaces like the Market Hall in Rotterdam. Scale and urban density, in the words of Winy Maas, are the “activators” of this kind of internal condition where the boundary between interior and exterior is totally blurred.

Reversing the traditional figure/ground opposition defined by Nolli Map, the poché which represents the private buildings unfold another, less porous, dimension of interior urbanism. In Some Notes Towards an Interior Archipelago, Brendan Cormier describes as an urban paradigm, the network of places that hosts the daily life of human beings. Far from the radical scenarios described by Archizoom in the No-stop City, our everyday life is not the one of the free man in an open indoor environment but rather it is confronted with the problems of ownership, differentiation and exclusivity, that define the gradient of permeability of this continuous interior. Visible and invisible boundaries restrict the possibility of wandering. In a moment in which, through the social networks, our lives have become public in almost every aspect, the interior has become the eminent space of privacy and thus intimacy and freedom.

In our opinion this different approach, so widely explored in MONU 21 in all its different aspects, represents a useful tool to overpass the dichotomy between the city as a system and the building as an object. If in fact we assume that there is a unifying field that relates to all the objects which compose the city, the urban dimension is no longer a matter of juxtaposition. 
With MONU 20 about Geographical Urbanism, this issue challenges the scale through which we are used to reading/to interpreting the city: from XS to XXL questions, there is a need to understand urban phenomena defining the new extents for urban life.

— Claudia Mainardi and Giacomo Ardesio. Both of them graduated in Architecture at the Milan Politecnico, they are both part of the collective Fosbury Architecture and they are currently working at OMA in Rotterdam.

In moments of rapid transformation and reflections about the importance of design as a catalyst for social change, BIO 50 invited Jan Boelen —founder and artistic director of Z33 House for Contemporary Art, and Head of the Master department Social Design at the Design Academy in Eindhoven—, to be the curator of the 24th Biennial of Design. Boelen had been researching in the past years about experimental design, and the collaborative territory that emerges around concepts such as social design, scarcity, and new technologies, where design is employed and implemented as a tool to question and transform ideas about industrial production, public and private space, and pre-established systems and networks. Based on these ideas, the BIO 50 chose the concept of collaboration for this year’s edition, where design is a tool to rethink everyday life and possible futures for design.

Matevž Čelik, the director of Museum of Architecture and Design, explains:

“It is necessary to break with the fetishisation of products that has alienated design from production. I believe that BIO should play a role in this field and strive to support creativity in its most delicate and vulnerable stage. This means that in the future, BIO has to increasingly play a research-based, experimental role.”

Among the variety of projects and outcomes, we want to highlight the importance of researching and developing projects related with themes as necessary as Affordable Living, Knowing Food, Walking the City, and Observing Space, among others.

Setting up the container for ‘Affordable Living’. Photo: Tomislav Vidović

The problems about the access to housing have been in the focus of mass media since the real estate bubble came out with the financial crisis in 2008. Many efforts have been developed, such as the work of the Spanish group Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, that’s why it’s easy to understand the importance of working about this issues in a biennale context, not only from the activism field but working with a collaborative approach with activist groups, designers, architects, and policy makers. In a moment when the need for housing is confronted with the fact that contemporary cities seem to be filled with empty, unused buildings, the group of Affordable Living explored the causes and consequences of this topic, and developed strategies and tactics aimed at making contemporary affordable living a reality.

Friction Atlas. A project by Paolo Patelli and Giuditta Vendrame.

Going from the building to the street, as part of the Walking the City group, the project Friction Atlas developed a new concept of dérive, addressed to understand the issue of legibility of public space, of its programs and of the laws that regulate its uses. In a moment when the privatization of public space is ever present in mostly all of our cities, when surveillance elements [such as CCTV cameras] are part of the urban environment, this project looks how the many regulations created by governments discretize human behaviour, and tend to be algorithmic, quantitative and invisible. To transgress this fact, the project was based on drawing 1:1 diagrams, and enacting laws on the public surfaces of Ljubljana, with the intention to make legal prescriptions and loopholes visible, and therefore debatable.

Raw material. Oloop, Hidden Crafts. Photo: Designer archive.

Elements of the project in process. Hacking Households. Photo: Tilen Sepič

A fascinating and thought provoking approach of the BIO 50 Biennale is that the works presented cover a variety of issues as well as different scales. From the big scale of housing and street projects, we can mention as well projects which deal with craft and industrial design. The group Hidden Crafts worked with the aim to discover is there is new life to found in the methods, outcomes and distribution of craft and how to recover, adapt and learn from the craft tradition in Slovenia. The research goes from the relationship between the craftsman and the consumer to the collaboration between manufacturers and designers, with the idea of envision how to use new materials with traditional techniques to create a new knowledge exchange.

A deep research based on the process rather than on the final object has been the leading theme of Hacking Households. The main idea is to look to traditional household appliances and how they are created as a closed system: when something goes wrong, the most cost-effective solution is to throw out the appliance and replace it with something new. In the same way as projects like Open Structures or the transparent tools by Jesse Howard, this team uses 3D printing and DIY circuitry to build upon users’ newfound abilities and opportunities to repair, customize, modify and repurpose existing products, creating a family of appliances designed for disassembly, repair, and modification.

A whole set of ideas, projects and new ways to understand the future of design and architecture can be find on the exhibition BIO 50: 3, 2, 1 …TEST, that is displayed from 18 September to 7 December 2014. So if you have a chance to visit, don’t miss the opportunity!

/// All the info and venues, at bio.si
/// More info to be found at MAO Slovenia and following @BIO_50

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:

La ciutat dibuixada pels arquitectes [laciutatdibuixada.blogspot.com.es] is an ongoing course at ETSAB, which aims to explore urban phenomena in a transversal manner from territorial [geography and infrastructure] to architectural domain [ground floor and domestic realm]. Traditionally, drawing described urban form in both an objective [scale drawing] and sensitive manner [free hand drawing]. In recent years, new technological achievements from other disciplines such as photography, modelling and geo-location radically have created new ways to depict subjective and objective mechanisms taking place in cities -alongside the tools required to synthesis them.

This evolution of representation tools has been instrumental in the construction of new interpretative but also projective models. The image of the city embodies the translation of the urban experience for communication and engenders the re-shaping of the worlds in which people live. Developing a “personal gaze” becomes the basis to re-make territory over again.

La ciutat dibuixada pels arquitectes seeks to experiment with representation tools and formats by means of three academic exercises. First, Unfolding Rambles explores the need to obtain personal records of reality [via own measuring instruments] and translate them into a synthetic document prior to the project. Second, Almanac of Small Data reviews the notion of almanac to propose a polyhedric and collective vision of Barcelona. By measuring and mapping existing conditions using information in a wide range of topics, the almanac will make an assertion about what the future of the city will hold. Finally, Layered Waterfront will complement previous experiences thanks to the construction of a single, synthetic and iconic urban image, i.e., a section of the coastline illustrating the changes experienced over the past twenty years.

Unfolding Rambles
Unfolding Rambles studies this living monument of Barcelona; despite being an area of great symbolic significance for citizens, tourism has deeply transformed and [re]shaped La Rambla. The structural role of the boulevard entails a double approach from the linearity of the promenade itself and its perimeter. Questions arise such as the physical saturation of the space, the guided movement of pedestrians, the poor diversity of ground floor uses [mostly souvenirs and fast food] and the coexistence of locals and tourists.

The exercise goes beyond geographical illustration to unmask invisible urban relationships: where the activity takes place, how public spaces shift according to the time of the day, which are the most crowded areas and places for citizenship’s identification, etc. These other aspects are what we call intangibles. Unfolding Rambles captures the ‘ephemeral’ besides the geometry of urban plots and facades, using novel representation tools from other disciplines [geography, cartography and data analysis] to reveal and realize the hidden urban potential.

The student works are:

DUES GENERACIONS, DUES RAMBLES. Minerva Ramírez Cabello i Lorena Simone Hortelano.
A dynamic space as La Rambla cache static sites (areas to stay or wait for someone, to stop and observe) where different groups coexist according to customs, activities and ways of life. These sites reflect different generations’ behaviour grouped by ranges of ages: youth and senior Rambles indicate common spaces and shared activities.

SCORE. Inés Masó Sotomayor i Cristina Herrero de la Fuente.
Barriers and obstacles in La Rambla block transversal flows. The first representation describes the length, the density/permeability and height of the barriers as seen from the side lanes. The second diagram goes a step further to unveil the negative of the previous vacuum: its rhythm, floor space and density.

URGÈNCY. Marc Anton Ros Gargante i Gemma Torras Rolando.
Diagram describing where to go free and fast at a time of emergency. The permeability of the ground floor in La Rambla is weighted according to the ease of access to toilets’ establishments (May I go to the bathroom?), which link public and private realms.

MONEY, CHAIR AND BEER. Cristina Garcia Nadal i Cristina Rosa Cervelló.
The beer business shapes this urban space. Bars, located on the sides, work during daylight hours enabling a linear activity in the sea-mountain direction. At night, ambulant trade divide La Rambla in sections, each of them associated with a vendor located in proximity to the metro stations. This strategic position, covering also cross trails where beers empty, provokes an unusual transversal performance of La Rambla.

REMAININGS. Maria Múzquiz Barberá i Joana Solsona Bernades.
This cartography, between a skyline and a bar chart, illustrates the years of activity of each establishment. The size and permanence of the business highlights the difference between the two sides of La Rambla. The oldest shops stand as a kind of landmark in the history of the city.

/// Thanks to Mar Santamaria Varas for sharing this project with us.
/// The city drawn by the architects is an optional course lead by Mar Santamaria Varas [coordination 300000kms.net] and Montserrat Ribas Barba and provided by the Department of Urban Design and Regional Planning [DUOT] and Architectural Drawing [EGA] of the School of Architecture of Barcelona [ETSAB-UPC].

Nature has been testing strategies for 3,8 billion years to solve design problems, sometimes even before they appear. The term biomimicry [Greek bios, life, and mimesis, to imitate] means to copy or emulate shapes or functional solutions of certain species of animals, plants and natural systems. Even appeared in 1982, the term biomimicry was popularized by scientist and author Janine Benyus in her 1997 book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. Nowadays the biomimicry community has grown and exchange knowledge and resources in networks such as Biomimicry 3.8 where you can find references on how spiders manufacture a waterproof fiber around five or six times stronger than steel, or how the process of green chemistry lead to electrons in a leaf cell to convert sunlight into fuel.

Similar examples are shown in the exhibition Biomimicry. Design Inspired by Nature in Roca Gallery London [Until 24th May] which was previously held in Barcelona. The general thesis of the exhibition is that any of the problems and challenges faced by architects, engineers and designers have been previously solved by nature and the answers to all our challenges are around in our environment.

Latro Lamp Mike Thompson. Bio-light Philips

The exhibition curated by Ramon Folch Studio shows some commercial products which mimic nature in shapes, functions and systems. From nature we have copied not only its shape [e.g. the hexagon of honeycombs], but also its function [geolocation of bats] and its cyclic and efficient system [a termite nest]. In each of the exposed solutions we can see an improvement for the final product: in some cases it is less friction, and therefore a higher efficiency, while in others it is a better space use. The efficient use of water can be found in products like Lotusan Paint avoiding drops to adhere to the painted surfaces; they run down carrying dirt particles away. Taking care of scarce water, AquaMat emulates the absorbent and hydrophobic structure of the Namib Dessert beetle. Applied to construction, it allows to collect water with a fog harvesting mesh that facilitate the consumption of drinking water in desert environments.

Lotusan paint. Sto Ibérica

In one of its parts the exhibition also included four prototypes of products that are still in pilot stage: Stickybot by Stanford University: a vertical displacement device imitating small gecko toe which interacts at molecular level with surfaces thanks to a series of tiny strands generating a molecular attraction [the Van der Waals force], that only sticks when you pull in one direction. The second is an algae light generator called Latro Lamp by Mike Thompson, where a series of electrodes are inserted into the photosynthesizing organs – chloroplasts – of algal cells, thus generating a small electrical current from algae during photosynthesis. In the same line the project Bio-light by Phillips uses bioluminescent bacteria. In order to make this bacteria glow, you have to “feed” the microorganisms of the lamp with a mix of methane and compound made of waste generating a non-incandescent light by the interaction of an enzyme [lucyferase] with a molecule [luciferin], which emits light. More examples can be found in the Microbial Home project which is a proposal for an integrated domestic cyclical ecosystem.

Gecko toe showing strands that sticks at molecular level generating attraction by pulling it back.

The lectures held in Barcelona presented works of engineering, design and robotics closely linked to the functioning of the human body and perception. Some of the lecturers included Dennis Dollens, Frederic Fol Leymarie and Martín Azua. Stepping aside the presentations which were focused in biomimetic in its broadest sense it was remarkable the work presented by Materfad. This is a center monitoring research and technology in the field of new materials facilitating knowledge transfer between sectors as design, biotechnology, construction, transport and textiles. The technology tracking task allows to detect commercially available materials from one sector that can be applied in other fields. It is the only center on materials in Spain dedicated to innovation through a growing database, consulting and education activities and a showroom where designers can have a sensorial experience of new developments prior make a technical consultation to use advanced materials in their design project.

Photocatalytic Pavement. Materfad showroom.

According to Javier Peña, director of Materfad, we are facing a great opportunity to incorporate innovations in the production processes going from austerity to the abundance of solutions that can be found in nature, to transform our consuming buildings to buildings producing their own energy and materials [like collagen in our body]. In doing so its quite important to adapt education curricula to a new understanding of materials. In recent years we have worked a lot raising buildings and cities but have learned very little things on links between matter, energy and information in nature.

Fabric and textiles. Materfad showroom.

To overcome this situation, Materfad is actively promoting connections with centers like Happy Materials [Prague] and Danish Design Centre [Copenhagen] which whom they have set DAMADEI network to connect design and technology worlds through materials. At present, the network is also expanding to Latin America [Aguascalientes, Valparaiso and Medellin].

Recent advances in synthetic biology reveal the potential of using the basic unit of life [the cell] for product development through nanotechnology. We are starting to develop materials that are responsive to certain inputs [e.g. graphene] but the next step will be to develop multifunctional materials interacting with its surrounding.

Beyond smart materials we will develop strategies to react and evolve like nature. In doing so its fundamental to create synergies through interdisciplinary teams and new mental codes, skills and knowledge to build in a biosynthetic world. The answers are all around us… we should only learn to ask appropriate questions.

—César Reyes Nájera. PhD architect and publisher.
@cerreyes | dpr-barcelona

/// Exhibition [27th February - 24th May] 
Roca London Gallery. 
Station Court, Townmead Road, 
London, SW6 2PY
 | @rocalongallery

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.