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.

The term ‘participatory urbanism’ has become a buzzword recently, and several publications focused on participation and participative processes had been published in the past years. Thus, what is the reason to make one more publication about this topic? Is still any interest on the topic or themes left to discuss? Perhaps is precisely because of that, within all the noise that emerges when a term starts getting trendy and overexposed, when it’s important to find those spaces that allow serious discussions to get in deep and to have a critical debate. This is the spirit of MONU #23, entitled Participatory Urbanism, where the pros and cons of participation are confronted.

Markus Miessen has already written that participation can be a nightmare, when it gets trivialised, commodified or adopted by governments to take less responsibility on their actions. As Miessen explains, “Supported by a repeatedly nostalgic veneer of worthiness, phony solidarity, and political correctness, participation has become the default of politicians withdrawing from responsibility.” In this critical context, on the most recent issue of MONU it’s possible to find several thought provoking written pieces and projects which permit to have a wider overview of different interpretations of participation both in architecture and urban design, even challenging the preconceived notions we have about architecture.

On an interview with Bernd Upmeyer, Jeremy Till argues that in participative practices one moves into new forms of the commons and shared spaces, which from the start can be understand as a contradiction to the standard premises of architecture, based on individualism and control. The social responsibility of the architect and its political implication should be in the core of a real participatory process, according to Till. Nevertheless, the process itself can be used as well just to fulfill the architect’s obligations. But even with this fact on sight, at this point there is an optimistic approach that it’s defined by the idea that there is still hope for architects, there is special knowledge they can share and bring to the table, based on social and spatial skills that can be used to empower new forms of social constructions.

Participation as a process of confrontation is also described by Gonzalo López on his essay ‘Towards a New Urbanism’, where he’s focused on the different possible scales of urban movements to develop a theory about Open Source Urbanism, a concept that implies a direct involvement of the citizen. This is a shift from traditional large-scale urban planning into new ways of thinking, understanding and working in and for the city. Some of the movements remarked by López—tactical urbanism, co-housing, collective architectures, among others—are exemplified by the projects published on the same issue, such as the case of the alternative urban practices at Ostkreuz [Berlin], described by Nina Gribat, Hannes Langguth and Mario Schulze as a site for experimentation,—within a series of failed development plans—that have settled the ground for a new civic modus operandi, based on sharing services and social economic networks. It is important to note that the political and economic limitations are revisited in this essay, to avoid the simple or superficial fetishization of this kind of practices and to discuss as well its failures, problems and governmental manipulation. What is described as an ‘Absolute Present’ can be summarized by the way that terms like ‘flexibility’, ‘self-responsibility’, or ‘entrepreneurialism’ are used to justify projects developed under precarious conditions.

‘Make City’ in Times of an ‘Absolute Present’, by Nina Gribat, Hannes Langguth and Mario Schulze

What Is Affordable Housing? toolkit, CUP.

The work of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) is a remarkable example of how to take the participatory approach to a long term process. Founded in 1997, the CUP is a nonprofit organization initiated by a trans-disciplinary collective, including backgrounds on architecture, history, public policy, political theory, and graphic designers, that work together to visually communicate complex urban-planning processes. Damon Rich, one of the founders, talks about the motivations to start this project and how education has been a leading issue on the evolution and success of their work. The pedagogical approach makes possible to move from theory to action, developing projects which deal with important urban subjects—public housing, air quality, waste, and water, among others—taking them along with neighborhood organizations and advocacy groups, and are used to educate others.

‘The Utopia of DIY Urbanism’, by Uta Gelbke

If participation is a battlefield, as Damon Rich says, by reading this issue we are reminded that participatory processes, DIY projects, and collaborative approaches are the product of infinite negotiations between different actors, as Uta Gelbke explains in the case of the Holzmarkt Cooperative in Berlin. It is located between the Spree river and Holzmarkt street, where the Bar25 can be found a few years ago. This is a site basically known as a ‘hipster village’ and the the group that founded the Bar25 wanted to start an alternative attempt of self-organized project, including places devoted to serve organic food, cultural events and more. That’s how the Holzmarkt Cooperative was created in 2012, supported by professional planners and legal advisers, along with the Swiss pension fund Abendrot Stiftung, which provided the financial resources. The current importance of the area and the success of the project, are used here as a clear case study of how civil society empowered itself in order to be legitimized as an urban agent.

However, this is also a perfect project to remind the inherent contradictions of participation and to not romanticize all participatory processes per se. It’s important to remember that this kind of development often tends to generate the same kind of homogeneity and social limitations that the initiators tend to criticize, as the authors clearly state.

The richness of this issue of MONU lies in the fact that an agonistic overview is presented. Not a romantic, easy description of participation, but a negotiation full of dissent in it’s own pages, where the theoretical essays create a dialogue with the projects, sometimes contradicting each others, other times, complementing the information. At that is, at the end, the best way to escape from the nightmare of participation.

—Ethel Baraona Pohl, editor at Quaderns.

/// We want to thank Bernd Upmeyer for sharing MONU with us. All the info and the TOC of MONU #23 ‘Participatory Urbanism’, can be found at monu-magazine.com

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

To be out of place has several interpretations, and this is the richness of the exhibition, that has succeed in becoming that kind of network mentioned by Rancière which is seeking for a new understanding not only of the state of the art in design and architecture, but a new understanding of the world we live in. Dealing with many uncomfortable topics, the visitor can explore how design responds and interacts with the contemporary notions of economy, politics, food, desire, and some other human obsessions that are often missing in museums or galleries.

The idea of using a door that is at the same time the entrance, the exit, the full, and the empty [created by Belgium artist Koenraad Dedobbeleer], can be understood as the manifesto of the exhibition itself: to be out of place is to lose contact of the usual place to occupy an unknown one.

Liam Saint-Pierre, The Reinvention of Normal, 2015.

Johanna Schmeer, Bioplastic Fantastic, 2014.

The need to discover that unknown field that can be a fertile ground to unlearn from all preconceptions, rules and habits, is in the basis of many of the exhibited projects. The Liberator, Defense Distributed’s 3D Printed Gun, pushes to the limits the current notions of ethics, economy and politics; but at the end is a project that clearly represents the contradiction between legality and legitimacy: The release of the 3D printed files in May 2013 was followed by several US governmental censures and investigations, a fact that makes you think why if in some countries you have the right to buy a gun, you’re not free to make it by yourself? Ethics vis-à-vis with economics.

In a similar position we can recall Home, a collaborative film by San Francisco-based Holly Herndon and graphic designers Metahaven.

“I can feel you in my room
why was I assigned to you?
I feel like I’m home on my own
and it feels like you see me.”

With this provocative words, the tandem has done what Herndon calls her “definitive NSA break up anthem,” in a video where she is singing while dozens of computer icons scroll past her. This is a way to research and perform how the NSA revelations have fundamentally changed the relationship between a person and her computer. It’s again a dilema and dichotomy between two opposites, the public and the private.

We had the opportunity of briefly exchange some thoughts with Rosa Pera about her outlines for the exhibition:

Quaderns: You have a background as curator in the field of art, as independent curator and also as director of el Bòlit, a center of contemporary art. From this experience, which are for you the main differences of working in the field of art and working with designers an architects?

Rosa Pera: From a curatorial approach, I don’t think there is any difference; I’m interested in the different ways to investigate and to transmit questions and ideas about different issues from a contemporary point of view, whatever the field of knowledge they are coming from. As there is not only one way to practice contemporary art, depending on the medium or according to political attitudes or critical charge, there is also a rich panorama of practices in design and architecture, including strongly speculative proposals, like design fiction or object oriented ontology.

Beyond this, the research processes are different and I think it is really interesting to provoke situations in which these practices can engage in stimulating conversations. As Rebecca Solnit points out, the scientists transform the unknown into the known; as she explains, they are like fishermen capturing fish from the sea while, in contrast, artists will submerge you into the dark blue water. I think that designers are often swimming and fishing, sometimes also into the deep.

Marc Ligos, Hang Lamp, 2009.

Quaderns: The main statement of the exhibition, of being ‘out of place’, refers to the need of losing contact from our comfort zone to start discovering or rediscovering other fields for actions can also be understood as losing contact with your context and reality, thus, not responding in an appropriate way to the current needs of society. Can you elaborate a bit more this statement, please?

Rosa Pera: Acting out of your comfort zone leads to other forms of investigating and communicating, maybe to open up a dialogue with contexts and audiences that usually are traditionally connected to other fields. On the other hand, more than not responding to the current needs of society, I’m referring to projects that are rooted in spaces where they are not subjected to conventional protocols, ruled by principles that resist or fight against them. Sometimes these kind of projects are proposing other ways to act, unexpected or unpredictable, following positive and constructive new prospectives and imaginaries to face the future.

Quaderns: In the exhibition, you have several pieces that are not useful in a pragmatic way, rather than that, each piece is like a manifesto on how to use design as a critical tool. Do you think that design has the same power as art (which has a long history as an activist and critical field) to communicate this critical approach?

Rosa Pera Yes, absolutely. And if they are engaged sharing ideas and contrasting different points of view, the results could be extremely stimulating. And curators and museums have a long way to walk with them, to discover new ways to approach the present and think about the future all together, making it accessible to diverse audiences.

—–

To be out of place is the feeling that you have when discovering more than 45 projects that take you on a time travel through human history, from biogenetics, to politics, economy, fear, anger, joy, and desire. And only after taking the time travel that brings you out of place, the possibility to come back and look with renewed eyes to our daily reality, becomes authentic again. That’s the magic of this curatorial approach, that can have a real impact beyond the design field. It has a real impact in the way we understand that terra incognita that’s is our world.

—Ethel Baraona Pohl, editor at Quaderns.

/// We want to thank Rosa Pera for kindly answer our questions and for showing us the exhibition. You can follow her at @rosapera
/// The Out of Place exhibition is the result of the work undertaken by the curator team headed by Rosa Pera and a team of five professionals representing the different disciplines of the FAD: Pau de Solà Morales, Ana Domínguez Siemens, Albert Martínez López-Amor, Jesús-Ángel Prieto and Juan Vidal. With Sol Polo as Assistant Curator.
/// The exhibition will be open until October 31th, 2015 at Disseny Hub Barcelona. You can follow more info at: @fadbarcelona #foradelloc

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.

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 their own words:

“It is a practice in which a deep understanding of territorial politics, and aquatic resources, designed atmospheres, and an expanded notion of environment are driving forces to generate future landscapes.”

This strategies and policies are explained using LCLA Office projects as a tool for better understanding how micro-tactical interventions can be a catalyst for change at a larger scale.

Tactical Archipelago. LCLA Office

We’re not going to describe here the projects included on the publication, as they are well documented at LCLA Office web-site, but to highlight the theoretical framework of the publication which includes interviews with Geoff Manaugh and Mason White, and afterword by Charles Waldheim.

Reading the very personal conversation between Luis Callejas and Mason White, it’s easy to understand the roots of the immanent presence of landscape at the core of a high percentage of their projects, where the limits of urbanism, landscape and architecture become blurred and diffuse. The work of his father Rodrigo Callejas and specially the series “Paisajes Agredidos” has a strong influence on Luis’ interest on the effect that certain devices and objects have on the landscape, that currently it’s possible to see on projects like the Tactical Archipelago or the project Weightless, developed with his former studio Paisajes Emergentes [Emergent Landscapes, is also a wordplay with Paisajes Agredidos].

The non-built environment around Medellín was more important than the architectural heritage as a basis of influence for the first projects developed by the studio. Their first projects were deeply speculative and driven by a positive skepticism, perceiving landscape as an architectural and technical device, with a notorious fascination for buoyancy, lightness, ephemerality, and weightlessness.

Weightless. Paisajes Emergentes.

The way that LCLA Office uses some of their project as manifestos against the seriousness of architecture is thought provoking. The utopian approach behind some of their proposals have also more philosophical roots. The role of utopian isolation is also a liberation from some controlled limits, as we can see in projects like La Carlota Airport Park or the Serrana & Quitasueño —based on the idea of an island within an island within an island—, which are just two examples of this desirable condition of isolation in a wide range of proposals.

About “islands and atolls”, Luis Callejas explains:

“Going back to geographic categories, I think the atoll is a better term to frame my interest in contained unpredictability. I like the determinacy on the external figure —the figure defined by the beach is clear, yet it is vulnerable to erosion and wear. At the same time the liquid interior gives me a perfect frame for vital and amoral play with live matter as a design medium.”

Other important presence on Luis Callejas’ work is fiction. The kind of fiction that uses technology, ecology, culture, representation, storytelling, and environment as a framework to develop architectural projects. As pointed by Charles Waldheim, we can talk about Callejas as a curator of atmospheres.

This understanding of emerging islands as future fragments of past continents can be found embodied in several small details along the book. Based on the way that projects are fragmented and interconnected through the interviews and the fluidity of representation, we can say that this issue of Pamphlet Architecture is an archipelago of ideas.

—Ethel Baraona Pohl, editorial team Quaderns.

/// We have published the work of Luis Callejas on Quaderns #262 Parainfrastructures
/// More info about LCLA Office on their web-site.
/// To buy Islands and Atolls, Pamphlet Architecture #33, go here.