Mariana Pestana + Suzanne O’Connell: The Decorators

THE DECORATORS

MARIANA PESTANA AND SUZANNE O'CONNELL ON COLLABORATION

WITH COURTNEY FOOTE

Inspired by the community ethos of crowdfunded initiatives and open-source sharing, The Decorators approach architectural design as a project with many active participants. When engaging public space, the London-based practice consults the broader community, often using unique ways to initiate conversation.

Their built interventions are usually temporary, ranging from a scaffold restaurant on the fringe of a market, to a public canteen imbedded within a disused Magistrates’ Court. With projects lasting between one to six months, the provisional quality furthers community engagement, as the time span of the architecture reflects public need. Described as ‘urban rehearsals,’ The Decorators aim to create spaces that are at once sites of experimentation, yet also moments of storytelling, giving the public an opportunity to narrate possible futures for their city.

This ability to incorporate numerous voices in a design is informed by the diversity of their own team, as the Decorators explain to Inflection how different disciplines can work together in practice:

I: I’d like to talk about the collective, which we’ve identified as transdisciplinary. How were The Decorators formed and how are these disciplinary intersections important?

MP: We came from four different backgrounds; interior design, psychology, landscape architecture and architecture. We met at Central Saint Martins at an MA program called Narrative Environments, which was a program that already nurtured interdisciplinary collaborations.

I think that the transdisciplinary quality of The Decorators is really important, because it has always made us doubt the practice methodologies implied in our own disciplines. We had all worked to some capacity before, so it has been very important to constantly reassess our learnt approaches to a particular project by having an exchange of ideas. When we think about the evolution of the term multidisciplinarity, it’s usually the idea that you have different disciplines working together yet each keeps the boundaries of their own discipline. Interdisciplanrity means there is a coexistence of two disciplines, so you’re working on your own while working near another. Transdisciplinarity means that you cross – ‘trans’ actually means to cross a border. So it means that you’re already operating in some other territory. I quite like the idea of crossing disciplines because it defines the movement in-between. To never be fully in your own discipline, not quite doing something else, but constantly negotiating a place in-between. It’s where you’re in no particular territory.

SO: Because we’re working within the public realm broadly speaking, that’s a complicated experiment with lots of different types of people and lots of different types of voices. I think that it’s very necessary to have different approaches because public space in itself has many people operating within it. I think that’s one advantage of the way we’ve been working.

I: I was hoping you would talk about social engagement, as it is an element within many of your projects. Ridley’s in Hackney for example was a restaurant within a market, but at the same time it was a curated event.

SO: Architecture doesn’t need to exist in isolation; it has a place to create social interactions. So the thing with Ridley’s was we didn’t really know what we were going to build or what we were going to do, but we spent a period of time – three or four months – at the market, talking to people.

We were trying to understand the day-to-day rituals and the day-to-day interactions that happen there. We wanted to avoid being an isolated structure restaurant on the site. We wanted to find a way to interact and be part of those day-to-day social dynamics.

The Decorators, Ridley's Temporary Restaurant, London, 2011. Photograph by Dosfotos.

That’s how the restaurant came into form – it relied heavily on the market. Those who came to dine at the restaurant had to go and shop at the market and collect some of the produce that we had on our shopping list. A very simple thing we noticed at the market was that there was no restaurant using the produce. The restaurant was a very simple insertion. All of the different resources and things that we needed were already there, so the architecture was just an add-on to support the social interactions.

MP: We usually operate by making temporary structures and then inserting them into a particular site. We are less interested in playing with the formal elements, even though they are a really important part of the project as well. In Ridley’s the table was obviously an important aspect of the project as it played with the program.

A lot of our projects actually ask ‘what if’ questions regarding program. What if there was an element – an architectural piece – that got inserted into this market and changed the economic dynamic of the site? What if it nurtured social interactions, and what if it opened up the field of what those social interactions could be, and who’s involved?

I: I actually came across a pecha kucha talk that you gave Suzanne, where you suggested that The Decorators aim to create systems or scenarios that bring collaborators together. How is that conversation maintained with other sectors, like local government or private enterprise?

SO: There is this constant back and forth dialogue between what the role of the professional or practitioner is in creating community. Like, what right do we have to go into a place and make suggestions about how to help build a community or a place? Obviously that feeds into us being in dialogue with the broader authorities, like local councils, landowners, the mayor’s office, etc.

The main thing I keep coming back to is integrity. The vibe of the outsider is that you are not caught up in the everyday, so that you can potentially step out and see the broader picture. We try and keep relationships in the same area, rather than just responding to a tender that has come through the government portals. We know what tender is coming up and we potentially seek funding ourselves. We self-initiate projects, and we try to continue in the same area that we’ve been working.

I: In reference to works like Crisp Street Market, which was very sensitive to the community that housed it, how should designers manage exiting facilities in the environment when they’re contributing built works?

MP: I’d say that’s really crucial to the work we’ve done so far. A lot of the initial work is about spending time in a particular place and doing research and getting to know the different actors within a particular community. With Crisp Street, for example, we spent several months getting to know both the small and large cultural institutions that were developing very interesting programs and events. This was happening behind walls, however; it wasn't necessarily visible. A lot of our work was about identifying what those – we could call them micro institutions – are, mapping them, and through the realisation of the program, bringing them to the surface to make them visible. We did that, for example, through a radio program.

SO: In a lot of our projects we try to use a bit of a Trojan Horse. We ask ourselves: “How are we going to go in? How are we going to start those conversations and gain key insights that enable us to understand a place?” This time we decided to do the radio show and by having those associated props, people just felt that they could talk to us. We used a series of methods to start conversations, whether that was listening in, and using that as a way to talk to people or actually arranging interviews. We used the insights gained from those interviews to then decide what our design interventions were going to be, and what kind of extra programming we were going to do.

Specifically the local café was quite interesting because all the seats were really close to each other so you could really hear people’s conversations. This one guy was boasting about his gold medals for boxing, and then I noticed there were boxing clubs in the area. We then held a boxing event and built all the elements that we needed. That gives you the trajectory of how we lean and understand a place.

I: That’s an interesting research strategy: to overhear the dynamic of a certain area and then build the program from it.

MP: Exactly, and it goes back to your first question on transdisciplinarity. There is something quite important about the permeability of the team. By enlarging the pool of collaborators, the Lansbury Amateur Boxing Club became a part of the team; not just an element of the program, but an active collaborator.

I: We are interested in how a practice's dynamic works with transdisciplinary collectives. How do the different professions, which each have their own inherent practice methodologies, come together and work through a design problem?

SO: Collectively in our shared disciplines we’ve merged and blurred. We’ve being doing stuff that’s not traditionally architecture, for instance I’ve be transcribing interviews and then trying to decipher insights that come from that. But as we’ve developed as a business, we’ve had to clarify roles a little bit more. In the development of our practice artistic methods are still used, but we have separated out a little bit more to be more sustainable.

MP: Overall, we have a non-hierarchical structure and that’s very important for us. There is place for everyone’s voice, and even when we work with other collaborators we try to keep that non-hierarchical structure. It can be a little unproductive in terms of how decisions are made, but we believe that it’s important. Even that difficultly is an important aspect of the work. By constantly discussing something we will eventually find a solution. Even if there is a number of voices, and often they can be conflicting, we believe that process of discussion will lead us to the best solution.

SO: Yes – the impotence of argument! We’re very comfortable with not agreeing with each other and exhausting a problem. In a company with more traditional structure with set roles, you wouldn’t have that flexibility or those interrogative conversations. We have a flat structure: ‘the collaborative.’ It is very important to the way we work.

Opposite above, left + right: The Decorators, Ridley's Temporary Restaurant, London, 2011. Photograph by Dosfotos.

Opposite below, left + right: The Decorators, Crisp Street on Air, London, 2013-14. Photograph by Dosfotos.