AArchitecture 35 – Compromise

AArchitecture 35 Issue 35 is a joint piece of research on the topic of compromise. Issue 35 is interested in COMPROMISE as a collective of moments of common exchange between recognised parties, of compliance, conformity or consent; In the collection of unpredictable effects they produce as they escape individual content and evolve through different compositions of give and take; in the way they question principles of cohabitation and play with formulated consistencies; in the pressures, arguments, confrontations, conflicts, hypocrisy and possibly certain violence that they contain; in what is at stake and what is given up and lost in the process of configuration; in their moments of fragility and aspirations to stability; in the instant that they deviate from the initial terms of the concord, subject to the implications of chance and to the transitional realities that surround them; in the many different ways through which our disciplines, especially architecture, can contextualise compromise, consider its active and adaptive power and understand both its constructive and destructive agencies.

Compromise

Patricia De Souza Leão Müller begins to introduce her work, We will never compromise, a strategic motto that has kept a century-old multinational afloat followed

by Miraj Ahmed, who claims ‘resistance is necessary’ in Moderately Compromised, where he examines a set of physical negotiations or potential interplays between the picture and the painting, as a material object, the means of support and as a space for display.

Johanna Tagada (Penser, Manger, Partager) asks ecological questions through practical encounters with her textile habitats, while Eléonore Grignon revisits our individual habits and collaborative practices. A series of changes and barters follow under the same logic – as a Boolean Equation in Dear Alexa, an account of contemporary forms of engagement by Sophie Lanigan and in Ego Death, whereby Richard Leung asserts that in certain instances, the discipline of architecture unwittingly cultivates a repugnancy towards compromise in order to give authority to a hyper-individualised figure of the architect. Through his illustrations of the Green Belt, Jonathan Halls anticipates the need to conciliate tensions between housing schemes, population growth, cultural formations and contradictory ideologies present within the parameters of the London’s Metropolitan Green Belt, whilst Gian Andrea Diana captures the handshake, the conventional and decisive gesture of understanding and accordance. LAWuN detects a chink of light, at the magical moment, in the AA when ‘the carpet has been pulled from under the feet of an ingrained timetable’, reclaiming the school’s structures of learning by restructuring Open Week. The Future is Now gives note on William Lim’s ongoing research on the need for a shift in land acquisition policies in areas of dispossession in a Southeast-Asian postcolonial context: the need for new tools of compromise which states should employ in the build of global cities. Anna Sofie Hvid and Peter Møller Rasmussen portray the Danish agricultural state in Rural Compromise, a homogeneous production surface which has absorbed the spatial contrasts and conflicting narratives of pastoral imagination, industrial ambition, capitalistic aspirations and (de)sacralised logistics of the welfare state for the sake of the spatial continuum. In Cyan Youth, Marienne Barthelemy reflects on the fragmented nature of photography as a compromised medium in its inability to be complete, in a photographic project on the grace and magic of childhood set in Buffalo, New York. In a style of a ‘rally’ of going back and forth and bouncing ideas of each other, and in their art concepts, Michael Ho and Chiyan Ho close the issue by reassessing the nature of compromise in Ping, Pong– whereby they explore compromise as a prerequisite – a necessary condition to make an exception to a rule– or as a form of tension that underlies the process of altering an object.

Compromise manifests in different forms and provokes alternate sets of tensions and reactionary forces. Within the various articles, resistance is in parallel to a sense of cooperation and collaboration. It is not a coincidence that the prefix co- (meaning together) is ubiquitous in these pages, strongly implying and emphasising a mutuality and commonality in various terms and themes which recur and are constantly reiterated throughout this issue. Issue 35 endeavours to neither minimise constraints and the imposing of limits on the subject, nor does it offer a confining definition for such a fragile term. Rather, as a collective piece of research, it aims to offer a set of directions: contacts, statements, contracts, habits, conditional acts of design, gestures, or convenient resolutions that embrace the vigorous nature of conciliating contradictions.

AArchitecture is a magazine edited by students of the Architectural Association, published three times a year.

Student Editorial Team: Lola Conte, Diploma 4 Avery Chen (Jiehui), Diploma 14 Eva Ibáñez, Diploma 4

AArchitecture 35 Term 1, 2018 – 19 www.aaschool.ac.uk

Editorial Board: Alex Lorente, Membership Eva Franch i Gilabert, AA School Director

© 2018 All rights reserved

Design: AA Print Studio, Michela Zoppi Illustration: Patricia de Souza Leão Müller, AA Graduate, Holy Fool Studio www.holyfoolstudio.co Printed by Blackmore, England

Published by the Architectural Association 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES Architectural Association (Inc) Registered Charity No 311083 Company limited by guarantee Registered in England No 171402 Registered office as above

’ promise er Com v e N l il eW ller tock: ‘W ouza Leão Mü Birkens de S ia ic tr a P

Moderately Compromised

Miraj Ahmed, Agonistes 1, acrylic on canvas diptych with Acrow Prop, Rum Factory, London, 2016

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RESISTANCE IS FUTILE…

Miraj Ahmed, Agonistes 1, acrylic on canvas diptych with Acrow Prop, Rum Factory, London, 2016

Miraj Ahmed

... this is what the bad guys say in the movies – particularly the Borg (Star Trek). The seemingly unstoppable, oppressive forces that threaten us or prevent our freedom and progress are ever present but resist we must. We resist the forces of entropy in our everyday lives – the ravages of time, gravity and decay – and act to maintain order and encourage preservation.

Entropy is everywhere and whether it becomes social or political, it inevitably becomes physical. I am interested in the play between the creative impulse of making and the physical forces that seem to undermine it.

Resistance is Futile is an on-going project that began in the 90s but intensified as a series of interventions at the Rum Factory, Project Space Wapping and Camberwell Space, London, between 2016 and 2018.

The installations comprise a series of paintings and sculptures exploring themes of precariousness and entropy. Paintings are compressed into place using construction acrow props, or take support from wooden struts and friction against wall features. In this scenario, paintings acquire a three-dimensional life by connecting to other objects and specific locations in a space. The processes embedded within the work allude to fragility and violence, natural forces, compromise and negotiation.

Miraj makes work that includes painting, drawing, photography and installation.

His selection of specific media is appropriate to several recurring themes that are rooted in his interest of observation, perception, and phenomenological experience.

An on-going interest in the void and the relationship between binaries such as light and darkness, creation and entropy and the domestic and the cosmic (which encompasses all scales). Miraj playfully explores subtle subversions of ordinary objects and space and attempts to transcend them. He has exhibited In London and abroad. He was a painting prize finalist in the 10th Arte Laguna Prize at Arsenale, 2016, Venice and is currently exhibiting at the John Moores Painting Prize exhibition 2018, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

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Miraj Ahmed, Resistance is Futile, acrylic on canvas with adjustable support prop and acrylic /graphite on canvas diptych. Rum Factory, London, 2016

I learned from the principles, techniques and labour involved in creating the ‘grounds’ for a picture – the stretching of watercolour paper by soaking and the shrinkage in drying or the stretching of canvas over a wooden frame to provide a taught but giving surface.

Developed in Venice during the Renaissance, where ship sailcloth was plentiful, canvas provided a good alternative to timber boards or plaster frescoes that were prone to the damp and ever changing environmental conditions. Stretched canvas proved to be an ideal ground for painters, offering a certain give and take for the application of pigments through chemical and physical negotiations. Further work goes into the

framing and support of the painting for protection and display to allow us to commune with it. Creation is thus a series of problems to be solved and compromises to be made – sometimes chaotic and messy. Despite this, our relationship to painting is essentially respectful and we see them as objects of craft and beauty embodying the highest impulses of human beings: so much so that to damage them is akin to hurting a person or a culture.

The term vandalism was coined to describe the rebellious destruction of artwork, and museums are very aware of the risks to their paintings being spoiled – so much so in the case of the Mona Lisa, that she is protected by bullet proof glass.

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Miraj Ahmed, Agonistes 1, acrylic on canvas diptych with Acrow Prop, Rum Factory, London, 2018

Destruction has many motives, from the political to the existential, and art is very prone to being its victim.

Destruction as a creative process in art is not new.

One can argue that sculpting in stone, metal or timber requires forceful removal. But the act of destruction itself as part of the concept of a work appears in art during the late 19th and early 20th century. Exploration of transgression and entropy can be seen in the work of thinkers such as Alfred Jarry with his ‘Pataphysics,’ George Bataille in his notion of the ‘Informe’ and as a persistent feature of Dadaist art. Later, the artist Lucio Fontana, the well-known canvas slasher, turned the cut into a thing of beauty. The cut alludes to canvas as skin

and conveys a physical experience – the cut records the knife and transfers the painting from the 2D picture plane to 3D space.

In the Resistance series, I have stopped short of breaking through the skin, but compromise the surface of the painting through a process of ruin – a kind of selfsabotage. First, the painting can be ruined by erasing or blanking out (but leaving parts intact) – a process of voiding. And then the act of ‘disrespect’ by leaning or placing something against it explores structural and spatial potential, calling into play a negotiation between the picture (let’s say the content), the painting as a material object, the means of support and the space

Miraj Ahmed, Duct, acrylic on canvas with adjustable support prop, Rum Factory, London, 2016

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of display. This involves a kind of bricolage tactic – using found objects such as planks and battens as well as ready-made objects such as acrow props and adjustable support poles. The compressive action of builders props and poles are used as an alternative to hanging.

There is a contingent and improvisational aspect to the work – whereby the props and paintings are used to test a space. The engineering devices that we use to support and build, are seemingly too crude and brutal for the light and delicate paintings. My method of installing the assemblage is careful and measured, with attention paid to the geometries involved; diagonals, horizontality or verticality in relation to walls, floor or ceiling. They enter into a dialogue, a comedic performance. Corporeal experience is ever present here – pushing, pulling, friction and weight. Precariously propped canvases may fall and break, compressed canvases are distorted and stretched further – almost to tearing point.

Resistance is necessary.

Miraj Ahmed, Lean Prop, acrylic on canvas with adjustable support prop, detail, Rum Factory, London, 2018

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Miraj Ahmed, Lean Prop, acrylic on canvas with adjustable support prop, Rum Factory, London, 2018

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On double page, Johanna Tagada, detail of Penser, Manger, Partager – Nidi Gallery, Tokyo, 2018. On the right, Johanna Tagada, Penser, Manger, Partager, embroidery on cotton, 2018

Text by Eléonore Grignon, originally written in French.

Newly edited by and for AArchitecture

Johanna Tagada (b.1990, Strasbourg, France) is a painter and interdisciplinary artist based in London. She studied Fine Arts and Textile Design at Haute école des arts du Rhin and, following her studies, she has assisted artists Yoshitomo Nara and Ming Wong for selected projects. Tagada’s practice is comprised of painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, film, photography and writing, often concealing ecological messages, and rendered in soft and delicate methodologies. Solo exhibitions include Take Care (Nidi Gallery, Tokyo 2018) and Épistolaire Imaginaire – Merci (Galerie Jean-Francois Kaiser, Strasbourg, 2017). Group exhibitions include To Hide, TO Show (Mama Gallery, Los Angeles 2015) and Inaka no Hana (Nidi Gallery, Tokyo 2017). In 2014, Tagada founded the positive and collaborative cultural project Poetic Pastel in order to help restore respect for and appreciation of nature. Her first book is to be published by InOtherWords in 2018.

Eléonore Grignon (b. 1994, France) lives and works between Paris and Marseille.

Eléonore studied textile design at ESAAT Roubaix, and recently completed a BAin Fine Arts at Ecole Supérieure d’Art et de Design Marseille-Méditérranné. Interested in permaculture, naturopathy and collaborative work, as well as aspiring to develop a practice as an artist and editor, she assisted Johanna Tagada in summer 2017, and joined the Poetic Pastel projet soon after. Eléonore Grignon recently contributed to the publications Journal du Thé - Contemporary Tea Culture and Rakesprogress Magazine.

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PENSER,

MANGER,

PARTAGER, an ode to life Compromise 9

Johanna Tagada, detail from the archives of Penser, Manger, Partager, 2017

A METAL GONDOLA ENCLOSES A GAS RING THAT IS LIT, KEEPING A LARGE BOWL OF WATER ON THE BOIL. CAMPING GEARS IS SCATTERED AROUND THE GONDOLA IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER. STACKED AGAINST THE WALL ARE CARDBOARD BOXES, MOST OF THEM OPEN, CONTAINING DEHYDRATED CHINESE SOUPS WHICH VISITORS ARE FREE TO ADD THE BOILING WATER TO AND EAT. THIS PIECE [...]

REMAINS AROUND THE EDGE OF ANY DEFINITION: IS IT A SCULPTURE? AN INSTALLATION? A PERFORMANCE? AN EXAMPLE OF SOCIAL ACTIVISM? NICOLAS BOURRIAUD, RELATIONAL AESTHETICS

The historian Nicolas Bourriaud refers to a piece

by Rirkrit Tiravanija presented at the Venice Biennale and Bourriaud’s questioning makes me think of Penser, Manger, Partager, the second textile installation work of artist Johanna Tagada. Born in Strasbourg in 1990, Tagada is a French painter and artist working in the fields of drawing, sculpture, installation, photography and video.

Her work as a whole is often composed of cycles resulting from daily life, travel, research and exchanges with her audience. The most striking example to this day is undoubtedly her project Épistolaire Imaginaire (2014–2017). Here, Tagada’s artistic practice recursively conceals ecological messages that the artist expresses through gentle and delicate methods, wishing to share positive feelings as well as encouraging more compassionate behaviours.

The first work of the artist’s cycle of textile sculptures is titled Le Refuge (2016, organic cotton and waxed ropes) and is defined as a place of sharing, dreaming, relaxation, love, rest, prayer and memory. This new piece named Penser, Manger, Partager (French for to think, to eat,

to share) whose final form is that of a habitat, is similar to Le Refuge in its structure and function. However, this project differed in its pedagogy and commitment; Penser, Manger, Partager is rooted in the artist’s on going questioning and reflection on the environmental issue, highlighting matters related to our daily diet and consumption patterns.

By launching a call for participation on her website and on various platforms, the artist collected donations of plant-based textiles of which their owners had no use; white cottons and linens. At the core of this initiative also resides a social aspect. The different fabrics can be compared to a vessel for our collective memory, this is truly reflected in the clothes and textiles recovered over the duration of this project. Since the winter of 2015, Johanna Tagada has dyed the samples in a natural way using the peelings and pit of fruits and vegetables that she and her family consumed daily. This slow and patient approach to ecological dyeing combines durability and serendipity. From the beginning, Tagada has adopted a humble attitude towards the practice of plant dye

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Beyond the ecological and sustainable essence of the work, ‘Penser, Manger Partager’ is a textile sculpture – both a peaceful haven and participatory space for learning and educational – that frames a delicate metaphor expressive

of the technical action of assembling textiles and the action of bringing people together. We’ve the significance of the encounter and the discovery of the other as two points of focus. The public thus enters and takes a place within a poetic and intimate architecture and is encouraged to participate: associating, assembling – untying and reconnecting. With the emerging sensitivity of her oeuvre, which words cannot describe or define but which only the soul can feel, Johanna Tagada invites us to be fully present to oneself and to others at every moment.

Penser, Manger, Partager is a way to engage or to continue a conversation that all our societies are facing: one of the most pressing issues of our century, the ecological crisis. It is important to note that France, the artist’s country of origin, recognizes global warming and the necessary urgency of direct action. The artist gives us a means to see and appreciate the diversity of wealth that nature offers through a palette of pastel pink and a play of light and transparency of textiles that is reminiscent of human skin and its folds or commissures, its traces of time passing.

Having assisted the artist in her studio in London in July 2017 – a phase devoted to the assembly of the tent – I was close to its construction. During this period, many breakfasts and meals were shared, all part of a plant-based diet as this lifestyle adopted by the artist is known for limiting the environmental impact. In parallel with the days spent at the atelier, I was reading Graham Burnett's Permaculture. Permaculture, or permanent culture, etymologically owes to two Latin words: ‘permanent’,

Johanna Tagada, Sketch of Penser, Manger, Partager, pencil on paper, 2017

Johanna Tagada, Penser, Manger, Partager, 2018. Photo Jatinder Singh Durhailay

and this process allowed her to create the patchworks necessary for the finalization of the tent. Penser, Manger, Partager calls for awareness of the depletion of resources, in the heart of the tent is embroidered a quote in French from the United Nations which translates…

‘90% of fish stocks have disappeared compared to 1950. At this pace, if nothing is done, all stocks will be collapsed by 2048, called the year of the last fish.’

This embroidery holds a double symbolism. Firstly, it relays the urgency of our actions to preserve a future on Earth and, second, highlights a need to decrease the rhythm of our lives. Embroidery is recurrent in the Tageda’s work, and it is this precise and delicate action allows the artist to embroider her truth. As François Mathey, former curator at the Museum of Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris wrote in 1977, ‘Unlike the lace that borders, pare, highlights, the embroidery falls this innate need to fill the page, to invade the original space, to adorn it with signs. Like the painter. But the method is similar to the work of the insect, the spider and the bee, all stubborn patience, demanding to perfection, meticulous to the point of absurdity.’

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to persist indefinitely, and cultura, a set of practices that support human life. Permaculture is thus based on three principles: respect for the Earth, respect for people and the sharing of resources. This philosophy addresses all areas of life in an evolutionary way and, in practice, wishes to path a way toward self-sufficiency and envision a global approach to the land and humans that highlights interrelation and mutual interconnection. Hereby, it echoes Tagada’s holistic approach and its efforts to link multiple aspects of our lives in food, health, nature and human relationships.

I discovered later that the textile work of Johanna is autobiographical, continuing work previously undertaken by her grandfather, and in love with his Alsatian permaculture garden. Permaculture thus resonates within the installation piece by its philosophy both in substance and in form. The tent is thought of as an expansion of the nurturing nucleus and it’s blossoming happens by ways of the diversity of human interactions: to receive, to share, the messages can resonate in and around us.

The experience is one to be lived: sitting in the tent, textile walls protecting us from the outside, our personal experience within Penser, Manger, Partager is projected outward as a poetic stroll through life.

In a quest for sincerity, benevolence and altruism

– both toward individuals and nature – Johanna's approach is respectful and happy. Tranquility is so dear to the artist. Referring to Matisse, the artist once told me that she wants this sculpture to provide some relief for the mind. She says that she photographs as a painter, sculpts like a painter and arranges like a painter and I observed that this sculpture is contiguous to her previous paintings: Pensées (vegetable juice and paints, 2014 to 2015) and Two for One (oil painting on C-type print photographs, 2014 to 2016). These paintings relate two of the three verbs of the tent, to think (Penser) and to eat (Manger).

The installation finds its underlying origin in painting, evolving the palpable textile, its physicality and its volume within a room to paint a poetics of space. A dialectic from within and from outside is present. Through the tent, the barrier between volume and modular architecture becomes porous and a two-way conversation takes place.

The installation can be thought of as an investigation of soft and mobile architecture, the former in relation with our contemporary ease to travel and to be in transition between places.

As Johanna likes to say, she plants a seed. A sweet future is engaged by this work and I wish it beautiful destinations. I cannot help but wonder; in 2050, how will Penser, Manger, Partager be perceived?

Johanna Tagada, details of Penser, Manger, Partager – Nidi Gallery, Tokyo, 2018

Johanna Tagada, details of Penser, Manger, Partager – Nidi Gallery, Tokyo, 2018

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Johanna Tagada, Take Care Opening, Penser, Manger, Partager, 2018

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Sophie Lanigan

Sophie Lanigan recently completed the MA History & Critical Thinking at the AA and is about to enter the Undergraduate School. Her interest is toward invisible and intangible infrastructures of power which manifest in the digital landscape, in particular blockchain, AI and machine learning. She is one half ofAGENDA Lord and Lanigan, attempting to disrupt traditional methods of architecture by questioning the agency of practice and the place of research to engage politically with the 21st century.

AGENDA’s first built work, Temple, was a pavilion installed on a Sydney-side beach.

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Dear Alexa, Thanks for putting orange juice on my shopping list. In return I will adapt to living a Boolean equation so that you can understand me.

I will compromise on the following: Andy Warhol for BitCoin BitCoin for Currency Currency for the Market The market for data Data for privacy Privacy for convenience Convenience for connectedness Connectedness for news News for the feed The feed for alternative facts Alternative facts for real life Real life for second life Second life for hard capitalism Hard capitalism for seductive capitalism Seductive capitalism for lust Lust for Erica the Bot Erica the Bot for Feminist Gains Feminist gains for Alexa’s subservient yet soothing tone Compromise 15

Alexa for memory Memory for bit rot Bit rot for the cloud The cloud for space Space for neoliberal development Neoliberal development for self-worth Self-worth for likes Likes for a democratic crypto-topia Democracy for power Power for all All for one FAANG FAANG for FAANG

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Richard Leung

Richard Leung is co-founder of Generiek, a Belgium and Hong Kong-based architectural studio. He has previously worked in offices in Switzerland and London. As Generiek, he has been building a series of houses in the Flemish landscape, which also forms part of an ongoing research on the Flemish territory. Richard is a graduate of the AA.

death

Whenever a conversation within the architectural community arrives at the word ‘compromise’ it is typically met with disdain, with attempts to circumvent and bypass this unnecessary obstacle. It is often viewed as the tarnishing of an immaculate idea that the architect has conceived of; whether it be the actual limitations of the physical world, or the conflicting demands of the clients, or those pesky engineers making changes to our plans and section. In some discussions, the very notion of compromise is regarded with an aversion akin to the plague. Rather than dwelling on the act of compromise and what it entails, this piece seeks to address the issues that arise from such an abhorrence and aversion of the compromise as is perpetuated within our profession.

Unlike artists who can cite creative purity as their prerogative, the role of an architect is intrinsically bound to compromise; concessions and negotiations are inevitable when designing for someone else. Certainly, we can argue to an extent that architecture can in some form or another claim ideological purity – through theoretical essays and papers, etc. – and yet the inherent connection to the physicality of our built environment demands that we negotiate these ideas within the realm of real space. Compromise itself forms the basis of this collaboration with other parties in the translation of an ideology into reality, but why is it met with such negativity within the architectural profession?

Perhaps, the crux of this issue lies with the dissolution of responsibilities traditionally championed by the architect in charge to other parties involved within the project.

Consequently, the paradox of the architect emerges.

Within this gradual erosion of responsibilities, and in obvious subservience to larger and more influential powers, the architect is still posited within the project hierarchy as an authoritative lead. Thus,this results in a drastic disparity between perceived authority and the actual authority of the architect within an architectural project.

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In response to this phenomenon, a tendency within the profession emerges. Increasingly, we turn towards design as a source of justification for the profession’s relevance within the process of architecture. External to the profession and its learned eyes, design becomes something of an enigma, an arbitrary concept that cannot be quantified. It is at this critical moment that, to put forth a case of convincing design, the architect becomes the design itself. The role of an architect is reduced from a learned purveyor of spatial compositions into a saleable caricature.

Inherent within the transition into the designer is the need for the creation of the architect’s design niche – a singular and unique persona. However, this piece does not seek to target the existence of a design large per se, but rather, with this seemingly popular adoption of the persona of the designer as a status quo of how we conduct ourselves as professionals we must interrogate the effects it has on the profession as a whole.

The fundamental essence of the designer is the uniqueness and the exclusivity of the design. The architect in the role of the designer, is thereupon posited as a protagonist of a vision. The stronger and purer this design vision is projected onto third parties, like clients and the public, the better the design is seemingly perceived. Thus, for the preservation of the strength of the vision, any notion of collaboration and compromise becomes skewed as some form of tarnish upon the purity of the design.

The architect as the unique visionary of a pure design thus evolved into the standard perception of the role of the architect. The nasty bits, the back-of-house bits of planning permissions, of tender packages, of discussions with engineers and contractors – all of which involve collaborative work and compromise – are consigned to irrelevance when speaking of the role of the architect.

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Mentioning it in the same sentence as the word design becomes almost a taboo. In adoption of the role of the architect as that of the designer, we become increasingly estranged from the need to collaborate.

Ironically, it is precisely through our reliance on this need to project our expertise with the framing of ourselves into the persona of the designer, that we relinquish the very thing that could subvert the obstacle that has been placed in front of us; of actual leverage (of actual influence) within the running of the project and within the domain of the architectural project. What initially gave us a competitive edge within the market forces of the architectural industry has turned into the Achilles’ heel of our profession collectively.

The continual adoption of this stance on relying on the image of the designer will aggravate the pigeon-holing of our profession into a mere PR puppet; our services employed only as a superficial marketing poster-child.

It ends up being a toxic cycle, the more we rely on this image, the more it amplifies the problem in the first place, driving more architects to refine their act of the design and inflaming the core of the problem.

Continually and increasingly, this moulding of ourselves into the designer as a persona is being standardised as the modus operandi of the architectural profession.

However, if we truly are to resolve the issues surrounding the increasing impotence of our profession, we have to reject these notions of grandeur, and to start accepting that compromise and collaboration are processes rather than obstacles. Only through the discarding of this constructed image of the designer can we truly make the first steps to reclaiming the architectural authority we have lost.

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Compromise

21

INTERVENTIONS

Green Belt Properties

Jonathan Halls is an artist, illustrator and activist. His work explores the intersection between environmentalism, conservation and social justice by questioning what we value in order to create dialogue and realise collective responsibility. Growing up in Hayes, Bromley, on the border of the Green Belt, he spent his childhood in the edgelands of London, neither rural nor urban. HIs practice draws on this physical world and the diffuseness of its boundary, utilising drawing, installation, workshops, writing and speaking to toe the line between the academic and the intimate to create conversations. www.jonhallsillustration.com

Having grown up in Hayes on the edge of London, next to the Green Belt. I see the value of nature but also the demands of society. My work draws attention to this tension. This series of images, of my experiences in the Green Belt, look at man’s interventions in the wild. Owing to two separate projects, Interventions (2017) looks at the effect of human progress and development on the environment, focusing on my local Hayes Common; Green Belt Properties (2017), is a fictional real estate company drawing attention to all that would be lost in the privatisation of land.

Jonathan Halls

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Collision 23

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Compromise

25

Images, in order of appearance: page 22 Desire Line, Interventions, 2017 Fragmentation, Interventions, 2017

Green Belt Properties, 2017 Light, Interventions, 2017 Ken + Joan, Interventions, 2017

There is a tension in London’s boundaries between housing, culture and ideology, complicated by the planning parameters of London’s Metropolitan Green Belt. Green Belt Properties (2017) is the result of a yearlong inquiry into how we shape the world in the Anthropocene. Looking at Hayes Common as a case study, this drawing is based on a real installation that took place in the summer of 2017. Hayes Common is a result of the compromise between landed gentry and locals, formally established in 1869 to protect the land from housing. I would draw borders around plots of land, each an eighth of an acre, to reveal the richness of life and the many homes of animals that would be lost in the process of making a single home. The installation and this drawing aim to start a conversation on what we wish to value as a society in relation to the issues we currently face from housing and inequality to climate change and biodiversity loss.

GREEN BELT PROPERTIES

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Collision 27

Gian Andrea Diana is an Italian-Ecuadorian student at the AA. Complementing his architecture studies and experience in the UK and Mexico, he has also worked as a Private Chef, an Artist’s assistant and collaborated on numerous projects including with a furniture designer in Brazil and Christo’s The Floating Piers. Following his Part 1 work experience he returned to the AA and joined Diploma 18 with whom he travelled to India, a trip inspired by performance and the Tribe, a context within which he captured the image in Le Corbusier’s Open Hand monument.

Square

Compromise

YOU’RE LATE

Diagonal

Le Corbusier Centre, Chandigarh, 29/10/2017, 10:03 AM ‘You’re late.’

Open Hand We have missed the tour twice consecutively now. The Capitol Complex is within our sight, yet remains inaccessible. We are allowed to spend a few hours unsupervised in the Open Hand monument. We inadvertently land in the Home of Performance, protagonist of our investigation, the context inviting us into the square space. We measure, draw, live and perform the square.

A tutor and a student draw its diagonal line, the space of compromise guiding them towards each other. Their handshake in the centre seals an instant of understanding, peace and accordance.

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Performance

Handshake

Gian Andrea Diana

29.1 0.2017

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David Greene and Eddie Farrell facilitate AALAWuN including the 2018 platform – Channel pavilion lawun.blogspot.co.uk

Compromise or Questioning At the same time that the AA is engulfed by the tensions of assessment, of the reviews and the tables, something strange happens to the building. A sort of liberating madness takes hold. The building is subject to a liberation of sociability as students who have spent most of the year huddled away in unit hubs, darkened corners and one-to-one laptop dialogues suddenly spring to life, out into the corridors, stairways, halls and vestibules of these houses. With this comes life and the vitality of youth, a ‘fuck it’ kind of freedom that has spent most of the year harnessed and closeted behind the keypad on each unit door.

Of course, this final surge is another unit driven exercise, only this time the boundaries are not drawn so clearly from the start and allows an infectious freedom to bleed across borders.

From somewhere the plan is delivered, explaining how approximately 700 students will suddenly spill out their wares in and across the Bedford Square site in unit designation. But ahead of a defining projects review, a rare moment of beautiful chaos occurs whether anyone is aware of it or not.

To begin, giddy from the formal completion of term tasks, students sprawl around the building smiling and chatting. Then the sawing, cutting, singing, drilling, swearing, measuring, shouting, confronting, negotiating, motion, speed, constructing, possibilities, chance happenings, improvisation, cross pollination, and laughter begin, don’t forget the laughter. What, study can’t be fun? Serious study can also be funny?

All this and more takes place, and all because – for a couple of days – the carpet has been pulled out from under the feet of an ingrained timetable. Here, many see a rare glimpse of themselves; not something they are trying to be or an image of themselves, pure and simple, untapped potential and looking to take their future elsewhere.

Of course, the initial uprooting is soon put in its place as partitions go up, sectioning off open space.

Lines are drawn between units – my pink half of

the drainpipe, separates next door from me – the chance to compromise or question the plan are avoided as order is restored. Some of the chat and laughter remains, but then suddenly that's it; everything is in its place and everyone is off, the building is empty until everyone turns up again next year to do it all again.

It is in those few days of madness that AALAWuN detects a chink of light – a moment that would allow the other to be given a serious voice in the mix. It is an opportunity to show that the AA is still a leader in risk taking and is serious in its often-quoted claim to push and challenge the bounds of architecture. It is in this moment that the AA itself can push the architectural structures of learning.

A previous Director introduced two pauses in the academic calendar, Open Weeks in Terms 1 and 2 when classes are suspended. These pauses are intended to ‘open’ the school as works-in-progress across the AA are open to scrutiny and debate. Currently, these potential out-times are filled to a great extent with continuing unit crits, tutorials and travelling at a time that, as AALAWuN understands it, should be set aside for non-unit work.

AALAWuN suggests that these pauses need now become re-dedicated to the Open Weeks’ original mission. Through the construction of school-wide collaborative action this mission could be invigorated by designing what one might call performance architecture, using the theatrical and multimedia possibilities of the pantomime and review to address every aspect of architecture, written, built, presented and performed by the students and staff of the AA. The AA has always prided itself on offering something different as a place to study and a structured and serious event of this kind would set the AA apart from any other school in the UK. While other schools obsess with the grading, the AA expands on a student’s learning through a serious and crossunit dialogue that expands upon the broader aspects of architecture, communication and technology explored here at the AA.

Compromise 31

William S.W. Lim

William S.W. Lim studied at the AA before continuing his graduate studies at Harvard University. Since 1957, he has designed modernist structures in Singapore and Malaysia, some of which have become seminal models for commercial development in the city. He is also a founding member of the Singapore Heritage Society, Chairman of Asian Urban Lab, and President of the AA (Asia). Currently, William writes and lectures on subjects relating to architecture, urbanism and culture in Asia as well as on current issues relating to the postmodern, glocality and social justice.

The Future

ON GLOBAL CITIES

The Euro-American model of world economic development that dominated in the post-Cold War period of free market is now being seriously contested; by the combination of global climate crisis and the development and application of robotic technology and artificial intelligence. The world is presently at a critical stage of great uncertainty and instability, our future clearly unpredictable.

‘The safest prediction is that reality will outstrip our imaginations. So let us craft out policies not just for what we expect but for what will surely surprise us.’→ 1 Since the late 20th century, the advent of global cities with their aggressive form of neoliberalism has become

the unchallengeable norm everywhere, including developing countries as well. The phenomenon of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ executed with the vast surplus capital from multinational companies and the super-rich, has resulted in mass displacement of locals in existing urban centres, and extensive squatter settlements in developing countries. This has resulted in also an increased income disparity both within and between countries. The escalating debt burden of the developing nations is clearly unbearable.

Tools of Compromise: State control over the distribution of surplus capital and effective urbanisation should become a crucial tool to diminish inequalities.

AArchitecture 35 32

ON LAND GRABS, DISPLACEMENT AND HOUSING

The acquisition of local land by colonial governments to set up vast cash crop plantations and foreign firms has been a centuries old practice. In recent decades, with growing surplus capital, this ‘land grab’ strategy has spread and expanded globally. This is now the core strategy for the establishment of global cities– resulting in a profoundly harmful displacement of locals in their own traditional cities to build offices, shopping malls, and unaffordable housing catering to multinational operations as well as wealthy residents and international investors.

A huge growth in the numbers of rural migrant squatters has also created immense challenges and instability, in the global cities within developing countries. Furthermore, these ‘land grabs’ have greatly increased the burden of indebtedness, particularly in the developing countries.→ 2 With few exceptions, there is a housing crisis that

has become worldwide in scope. It is especially acute in major global cities –such as Hong Kong and New York where rentals that cost over fifty percent of the average income are clearly unaffordable to locals. A commodification of housing has reduced housing’s central purpose to solely generating profit.

A Need for a Compromise and a Shift in Perspective: There is a need to propagate the perspective that housing is primarily for creating homes, and not considered merely as real estate. The definition of a home is not limited to the space of an individual house or apartment unit, but extends to local neighbourhoods and communities. The solution for housing, as well as for slums and squatters, should be based on committed social and political ground up policies with wide support from the local residents.

ON THE ALTERNATIVE TO BEING ‘MODERN’

After several centuries, the challenges faced by the West have resulted in the creation of a set of constantly evolving, broad-based community accepted values. This was only due to several uprisings and revolutions, which required incredible sacrifices from countless committed activists and individuals. The misguided imposition of these values carried out without careful adaptation or application in the non-West, including previously colonised nations, have proven clearly ineffective and have culminated in a hypocritical consideration that these peoples are persistently in the state of being ‘not yet ready’. In this context, we wish to broadly identify two contesting examples – Singapore and China.

Chua Beng Huat has through a vigorous process examined the rejection of Western style liberalisation in Singapore, which we have interpreted to be what Noam Chomsky termed ‘totalitarian democracy’.→ 3 The Singaporean government executed in its early days socialist-inspired massive land acquisitions, and has committed till our present day and age to provide public housing for eighty percent or more of its local citizens.

The programme anchors the economic stability of the majority, and manages to forgo detrimental land

grab-schemes that is practiced in most other global cities.

However, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong most recently pointed out that ‘society will fracture, country will wither if widening income inequalities create rigid and stratified social system’ in Singapore.→ 4 In the last few decades, China has made incredible progress on all fronts. It has been successful in greatly reducing poverty, and has provided general improvements for the majority. The state has controlled and directed its vast surplus to productive uses and infrastructure development. Much still needs to be done to reduce the income gap and to help the migrant urban poor.

It is a challenging task for China to achieve its ‘dream’ to overcome injustice and inequality for everyone, notwithstanding the giant steps the country is taking in getting there. Many ASEAN countries, together with other non-West countries, have deviated from the Western model of being modern.→ 5 These states, unlike nations in the European Union, have important different deviations from each other, and it is therefore important for the present dynamic in ASEAN to effectively continue with tolerance and respect for each other.

Compromise 33

ON NEW CHALLENGES TODAY

The impact of new technology, including robotics together with artificial intelligence, is greatly underestimated as changes are often unexpected, and are furthermore set to take place exponentially.

Its impact is uneven, depending on levels of economic development and varying between different countries.

In more advanced economies, it inevitably leads to a large displacement of the workforce, as manual labour is replaced by computerised labour. The immense dislocation of workers will generate many painful changes in the economy. The critical challenges, as a panelist in a recent international conference has stated, is ‘we are hurtling down a path... of creating a ‘useless class’, where there previously was a working class,’→ 6 or alternatively a firm commitment to retraining the displaced for new and unexpected jobs in a dynamic people-oriented society. For the poorer and developing countries, there is a coupling of both positive and negative impacts. On one hand, a major adverse impact may be the result of production restructuring in certain labour intensive industries, such as in textiles. On the other hand, a positive impact is the rapid and increased pace in the spread and adoption of knowledge in every field – ranging from health, education to technology.

Countries with a dedicated leadership, irrespective of their deviations from the Western model of modernity,

will greatly benefit. Some of these examples include India, the Philippines, and Vietnam. These positive impacts will quickly provide great stimulus for accelerating economic growth. In addition, the successful examples will provide hope and inspiration for the changing agents in other countries, as the long waiting time to realise the results of change will be substantially shortened, and the process less painful.

There has been a paramount shift as in today’s precarious yet exhilarating times. The values and lifestyles of people have been greatly affected, by the countless swift changes arising from the challenges of the worldwide climate crisis, the essentiality of sustainability, as well as the development of artificial intelligence and robots. There is an optimistic attitude towards dramatic changes of technology and artificial intelligence that are now taking place. A swift economic growth of many developing countries and the potential use of substantial global capital surplus for mutual benefit should be envisaged. An adjustment in focus towards measuring satisfaction and prosperity beyond wasteful consumerism and material wealth should be employed. Tackling issues of excessive consumption and pollution in order to establish a more equitable world with the possibility of eliminating extreme poverty and injustice.

ON CRITICS AND THINKERS

In recent decades, an aggressive neoliberalism movement, attributed to an escalating surplus generated by multinational companies and the super-rich, has led to the dominance of neoliberalists and the expansion of neoliberal thought in global cities everywhere; they appear unstoppable. It is in this context, four critics and thinkers on selected major issues have been identified.

They are Saskia Sassen, Rem Koolhaas, David Harvey, and Noam Chomsky.

Saskia Sassen strongly argued that the spaces of the expelled need to be conceptualised and identified, stating that they are many, (and) are growing and diversifying.→ 7 These spaces urgently need to be challenged and corrected for the benefit of the entire citizenry.

Rem Koolhaas’s manifesto and the subsequent response that followed it stressed the need to proclaim

the death of starchitecture, postulating that new forms of contemporary architecture are no longer relevant.→ 8 There is a critical necessity to practise preservation in order to enhance The deeper understanding of our history, culture, climate and environment.

David Harvey stated that the complexity and contradictions of surplus capital flow has resulted in an irrational consequence of endless capital accumulation excesses.→ 9 This will require corrections by viable political alternatives and inclusive people-oriented solutions.

Noam Chomsky challenged committed intellectuals to act their roles and to correct the imbalances today of distorted racial, cultural and class biases of popularism, stating that intellectuals are typically privileged; privilege yields opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibility.→ 10

AArchitecture 35 34

is Now

at Melbourne, 2 Sep 2017.

on growing social divide’, The Straits

7 Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality

Technological Upheaval by Expecting the

indonesiaatmelbourne.nimelb.

Times, 6 Feb 2018.

and Complexity in the Global Economy,

Unimagined’. In The New York Times, 2

edu.au/out-of-the-Rubble-jakartas

5 Kishore Mahbubani, ‘How Strongmen

Belknap Press, 2014: p. 222

Sep 2017. www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/

-poor-and-displaced-seek-a-vehicle

Co-opted Democracy’. In The New York

8 Rem Koolhaas, Preservation is

business/economy/get- ready-for-

-for-their-voice-

Times, 13 Sep 2017. www.nytimes.com/

Overtaking Us. Columbia, 2014: pg. 77

technological-upheaval-by-expecting-

3 Chua Beng Huat, Liberalism

2017/09/13/opinion/strongman-world-

9 David Harvey, The Ways of the World.

the-unimagined.html

Disavowed: Communitarianism

democracy.html

Oxford University Press, 2016.

and State Capitalism in Singapore.

6 Chia Yan Min, ‘Technology could

10 Noam Chomsky, Who Rules the

Jakarta’s poor and displaced seek

Cornell University Press, 2017.

deepen inequality as workers are displaced’,

World?, Metropolitan Books, 2016: pg. 20

a vehicle for their voice’, In Indonesia

4 Ng Jun Sen, ‘PM Lee sounds warning

in The Straits Times, 15 Sep 2017.

1

2

Sendhil Mullainathan, ‘Get Ready for

Ian Wilson, ‘Out of the rubble:

Compromise 35

CYAN YOUTH THERE IS THE DESIRE TO SHOW EVERYTHING, TO TELL EVERYTHING – THE DESIRE THAT LED ME TO PHOTOGRAPH IN THE FIRST PLACE. BUT PHOTOGRAPHY IS MADE OF FRAGMENTS. I HAVE FOUND ITS BEAUTY AND ITS POWER IN ITS INABILITY TO BE COMPLETE, IN THE CONSTANT COMPROMISE BETWEEN INFORMATION, LIGHT, COLOR, AND GESTURE.

This summer, between 6am and 3pm, while their mother worked in a day care the children were old enough to care for themselves in a small residential complex. They ate the breakfast prepared by their mother at dawn, went to the shared playground, had friends come over to play, and checked in with their mother over the phone every few hours. During those nine hours the complex belongs to the children.

Marianne Barthelemy

‘Cyan youth’ is a segment of a project on the grace and magic of childhood as experienced by Empress, Icess, Solemon, and Raziel, four siblings between the age of 7 and 11 living with their mother in Buffalo, New York.

Marianne Barthelemy is a photographer and filmmaker with a great interest in people and light. Her work focuses on social justice, community and youth issues. Currently, she is collaborating with Lola Conte on a project about the impact of incarceration on families in France and is preparing an exhibition at the Bibliotheque Nationale Française for her project So our children grow wings about African American homeschoolers in New York.

AArchitecture 35 36

Compromise 37

Rural Compromise WHEN I WRITE 'PARADISE' I MEAN NOT ONLY APPLE TREES AND GOLDEN WOMEN BUT ALSO SCORPIONS, TARANTULUS AND FLIES, RATTLESNAKES AND GILA MONSTERS, SANDSTORMS, VOLCANOES AND EARTHQUAKES, BACTERIA AND BEAR, CACTUS, YUCCA, BLADDERWEED, OCOTILLO, MESQUITE, FLASH FLOODS AND QUICKSAND, AND YES - DISEASE AND DEATH AND THE ROTTING OF FLESH. EDWARD ABBEY, DESERT SOLITAIRE: A SEASON IN THE WILDERNESS (1968)

PROLOGUE

Two large paintings hang centrally in the Danish parliament that depict a pastoral landscape not far from an art museum called Fuglsang Kunstmuseum.

These commissioned works, painted by the Danish artist Olaf Rude in 1949, are the result of a rural compromise.

Initially Rude had only painted red cattle grazing in the landscape, but farmers from Jutland protested.

For them, the representation of a typical Zealandish breed of red cattle was unsatisfactory.

As a compromise, Rude changed the color of the cattle– the paintings depicted both the black and white breeds from Jutland as well as the red cattle of Zealand.

INTRODUCTION

→ 1

There is a high-tech pig farm financed by investors and questionable Bank loans producing 120,000 pigs per year for the global food market. There is a crematorium in the hinterlands of a provincial city processing 8,000 human bodies per year, turning the released energy into heating for the local state school. There is a remote art museum with a countryside view, which is recapturing the pastoral narrative of rural Denmark for some 20,000 visitors per year.

From high-tech agriculture and logistical interface→ 2 to nature as a pastoral narrative, the rural is a hybrid

Peter Møller Anna Sofie Hvid

space shaped by conflicting ideologies and narratives.

Bodies, human and non-human, traverse these shifting geographies and mental territories, as the examples of the pig farm, the museum and the crematorium will show.

In this text we wish to investigate how the Danish rural is being reconfigured into one homogenous, monocultural space – a production surface in the agriculture state – absorbing the radical rifts that are visible in this territory on both mental and physical grounds. We ask whether the Danish rural is spatially compromised, caught in-between narratives mobilized for contrasting political and aesthetic ends, and bound to an acceptance of standards that are ecologically, socially and economically lower than desired for the sake of the spatial continuum.

Characterized by an ancient process of transforming the land into a continuous exterior of planned and measurable equality, the Danish rural is a space facilitating the smooth movement of machines, goods and bodies and it has proven both manipulative and yielding thanks to its geographical and geological composition. ‘Denmark is and stays an agriculture state,’ stated vice chairman of the Danish Agriculture and Food Council Lars Hvidtfeldt in 2017.→ 3 Indeed, 62 percent of the Danish geography is farmland. But the sector, which stands for a steeply declining 8.2 percentage of the GDP was recently estimated to be indebted by 4.5 times more than the value of the entire sector (the highest debt of any agricultural industry in the EU).→ 4 Moreover, Denmark holds some of the world’s poorest nature in terms of biodiversity,and social erosion is widespread in most rural parts of the country.

Peter Møller Rasmussen is a Danish architect and lecturer at the Danish Royal Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture.

Anna Sofie Hvid is an artist currently studying Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University.

Together with architect Anders Abraham, Peter Møller Rasmussen and Anna Sofie Hvid founded Dræ - Ruralagentur (2018), a research based architecture studio engaged in developing spatial concepts for the Danish rural.

AArchitecture 35 38

FARMERS, BY STATISTICAL PROBABILITY

The crisis of the Danish rural is, as elsewhere, a well-established and widely addressed phenomenon in political debate – the dominant themes being an increasing demographical imbalance connected with urbanization, ecological crisis and economic instability in both agricultural and rural real estate. There is, however – particularly in Denmark’s urban population – a widespread tendency towards a rural nostalgia; a longing for time and space long passed, unaltered by modernity and the misdeeds of progress, which have now been rendered suspect in the light of the Anthropocene. Ecologist’s movement narratives and imagery of a pre-industrialised rural produced by urban advertising companies resonate beautifully with childhood memories of summer holidays spent with grandparents who were, by all statistical probability, farmers. To a certain degree, the idea of the Danish rural takes form of a lost paradise to the city dweller, they might even feel intimately connected to it through family history, Et in Arcadia ego. More often than not, the adventurous few who defy the demographical tendency and move to the countryside are overwhelmed by the discrepancy between the pastoral ideal and its rural reality. Deeply rooted in a Protestant ethic, the contemporary Danish rural oscillates between paradise and perpetual sin with the industrialized farmer as its all-too-familiar protagonist. Criticised for his relentless farming, yet hailed as a symbolic figure in the formation of the Danish state, the farmer resembles a repentant sinner in want of his final salvation.

Thus, the Danish agricultural sector understands itself as a success story. Going back to the Protestant reformation, where the Danish peasants rebelled against the ruling class of clerics and aristocrats, the peasantry has consistently played a central role in forming a decentralized, eventually democratized state based on liberalism, self-governance, and education for all.

Throughout the 20th century, agriculture has also been a main contributor to the rise of the Danish welfare state.

Its economic growth is related to the rationalization and optimization of the land, recalibrated as a blueprint for the organization of the welfare state.→ 5 Cherishing liberal ideologies, the Danish farmer stands for a professional pride in relation to the paroles of industrialization and modernity; to grow, to maximise yield, to apply and refine technology and to instrumentalize reason in favour of production. Not all imperatives of modernity are welcomed, though, as Danish agricultural organizations often point to legislation, control

and documentation as an explanation of a heavily declining sector. Supported by a neo-liberal government in the early 2000s, entrepreneurial farmers were given a window of opportunity and started to engage increasingly in financial speculation, meeting their stressed budgets with investments in Swiss Francs, arable land in Romania, sophisticated speculation in EU agriculture subsidies, et cetera. The capitalization of Danish agriculture became apparent by the 2008 financial crisis, where land prices dropped more steeply than real-estate prices in Copenhagen.→ 6 Widely ignored in the pastoral critique of the highly modernized and efficient (but also indebted, ecologically irresponsible and antisocial) agricultural sector is the fact that by now the entanglement between agriculture, financial capital and the Danish banking sector makes Danish agriculture ‘too big to fail.’ By design or by default, Denmark is indeed an agriculture state and the scientific, industrial and financial ‘revolution’ in Danish agriculture eventually turned the farmer into an alchemist, coalescing biology, chemistry, capital and geography into one seemingly homogenous space.

At last, paradise could be represented as a single, spatially ordered landscape for humans to use for their own purposes.

The land supported the practice of the farmer, while the welfare state – with its concern for taxation of land and the definition of its own domain of social control – relished the capacity to define and produce a space with fixed spatial co-ordinates. The compact geography that constitutes Denmark (42,000 square kilometres) has been poetically summed up in the metaphor of a single and delightful ‘garden.’ → 7 This pastoral interpretation of Danish geography is not, however, necessarily in opposition to the agriculture state’s aspiring towards a rationalized and yielding land.

As Leo Marx has pointed out, such a vision of a pastoral utopia and an anxious awareness of an industrialized reality are closely related: ‘They illuminate each other’.→ 8 The ‘machines in the garden’ of Denmark, to use Leo Marx’s vocabulary – i.e. the pig farm, the art museum and the crematorium – might be seen as interruptions of this pastoral scenery, but in a quirky way they function as vehicles of the production of the Danish rural.

Compromise 39

AArchitecture 35 40

MACHINES IN THE GARDEN

I

II

In April 2017 FM Pork ApS inaugurated the first of four pig farms, an ensemble which is going to facilitate the biggest pig meet production in North Europe and produce 120,000 pigs per year that, bred in Denmark, will be processed in Poland. Supported by EU District Development Funds, private investors – and state subsidies – the pig farm is introducing new approaches to environmentally responsible farming: though not certificated as organic farming, the manager bluntly claimed it to stand as ‘the most environmentally-friendly produced pig meat in the World.’ → 9 With a reduction of antibiotics as well as a circular manure management, the local head of The Danish Nature Preservation Society, Palle Ystrøm, has welcomed the project. He was on the advisory board of the project. ‘There are a lot of positive things to say about their farming practice’ (Ibid), says Ystrøm about FM Pork ApS to a local newspaper.→ 10 The newly opened pig farm unit near Haslev, Zealand, has taken over the name Sofiendal (Sophie’s Dale) from an old farm, which now lies in juxtaposition with the brand-new buildings.

FM Pork ApS Sofiendal consists of three interconnected rectangular stables. With pitched roofs as well as pitched roofed porches where trucks and workers enter the buildings, the architecture denotes a low-brow postmodern aesthetic. Around the corner, the 19th century buildings of the old Sofiendal are visible. Sofiendal shares faith with many older farm houses made vacant in the process of upscaling farming areas.

These houses are literally rendered worthless, paradoxically, in the light of the capital flowing into this locality. There is an awkwardness in relation to the way in which new and old buildings in the rural co-exist: there seems to be a gulf of more than time between them– the precision, the efficiency, the ambition that characterize the new buildings through invested capital is unable to resonate with the somewhat immeasurable vulnerability of the old.

At 3:15pm on the January the 25th, 2008, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark arrived at the endless sugarbeet fields on the flat islands of Lolland-Falster for the inauguration of the newly finished art museum, Fuglsang Kunstmuseum.

Financed through EU District Development Funds, private investors and state subsidies, Fuglsang Kunstmuseum both financially and spatially resembles the Sofiendal pig farm. A streamlined, white, modernist building, Fulgsang Kunstmuseum playfully engages architecture as an alien citation amid the surrounding rural landscape of sugarbeet fields. Visitors, who may come here to enjoy the countryside view from the exhibition rooms, find themselves surprisingly in the centre perspective of a Euclidean geometrical space consisting of modern architecture and symmetrical lines of sugar beets bent towards the distant horizon.

The museum’s collection of 19th and early 20th century art works depict a rural reality on the brink of industrialization and the increasing control of space. The conquest of real geographies, as occurred just outside Fuglsang Kunstmuseum up until the 1970s – hectare-by-hectare of land reclamation from fjords, moors and sea – was preceded by a change in the mental territory, and the perception of space as something increasingly malleable, effectively renderable, and therefore capable of domination through human action and capital.

The early industrialization of Danish agriculture meant the abstraction of geographies into one geometric and homogenous land.

It made time and space shrink, literally the relation between the investments and the energy necessary to work the land, and the amount of land which could be worked within a certain timeframe.

The remnants of this progress is now preserved in museums, like Fuglsang Kunstmuseum, as nostalgic artefacts. Their presence do not fit into the production environment of the agriculture state but necessarily feed into the link between pastoral representation and national identity.

Contemplating the shifting perspective from the art works adorning the museum’s walls to the views overlooking the sugar beet fields, it seems that, in the regime of progress, the present and the future both hold a privileged position over history and the past. Like a Hegelian ‘synthesis’ of all times into the present – which is the most progressed state – older times and orders are reduced to fragments of accumulated historical debris from earlier stages.

III It could be argued, that the desacralisation of Danish nature extends to the human body itself.

Opened in 2014 in the hinterlands of the provincial city Ringsted, the largest crematorium in Denmark processes 8,000 bodies per year. The energy released in the cremation process is turned into district heating for the local state school.

Logistically managing death in an area covering Zealand and Lolland-Falster, the crematorium was realized as a joint venture between the Danish protestant state church (Lutheran-Evangelical) and the welfare state system under the argument of a more efficient and above all environmentallyfriendly cremation process.→ 11 The crematorium, which is situated in a carefully crafted rural landscape with valleys and patches of plantation, receives bodies from within a radius of 150 kilometres. Bodies are transported to the crematorium (four in each transporter) and each coffin has a discrete bar code (which is related to the CPR number or Central Person Register number), → 12 by which the transportation workers can independently check in the coffin to the crematorium 24 hours a day. Through a special app, workers in the crematorium itself can trace the coffin through the whole process of cremation.

The surplus of hot water, which is produced in the process of cooling down the smoke from the cremation, is distributed to the local state school as district heating.

Strictly speaking, it is not the heat from the cremation itself which reaches the school in the end. However, the local population welcome the symbolic effect of using surplus heat from the crematorium. The caretaker of the school in question says: ‘You know, the children at the school, they think it’s beautiful that they get the last warmth of their uncle or aunt, or whomever is being cremated over there at the crematorium.’

The Danish Council on Ethics→ 13 (a nongovernmental board which advises the state in ethical questions) stated its stance on the controversial connection between crematorium and district heating, declaring that they ‘don’t find it indecent to reuse the heat from the cremation process for district heating.’ On the contrary, there are ‘good reasons, especially environmental reasons’ for this optimization of the cremation process.→ 14

Compromise 41

RURAL COMPROMISE

The concept of ‘compromise’ has conflicting definitions and resonates differently according to the situation. A compromise can mean to give up, but it can also mean to consider the needs and interests of the other. Either way, within the logic of a compromise, a reality (and not an ideal) is produced. The Danish agriculture state produces a rural compromise which absorbs the spatial contrasts of pastoral imagination, industrial ambition, capitalistic aspirations and (de) sacralised logistics of the welfare state and merges them into one homogenous space. Thus, the different narratives of the Danish rural could be seen as an array of aesthetic apparatuses which are contesting the establishment of different realities but end up feeding into the same, spatially flattened compromise of one homogenous continuum. The three examples of the pig farm, the art museum and the crematorium seem to us to be examples of a reduction of complex spheres into manageable ‘machineries:’ pigs as industrial products, set apart from the natural world and the time and space outside of the stable units; the physical landscape of land

and capital collapsed into its abstraction, so that the previous realities of the rural are reduced to handy museum artefacts of little but anecdotal relevance to the present; the phenomenon of life and death being translated into questions of technical transformations.

On a field trip to the Danish rural, we are simultaneously fascinated by and anxious of the various transformations that we were witness to. We traverse shifting geographies and mental territories that are increasingly abstract in the landscape of the agriculture state. A question emerges: how we can negotiate the rural compromise anew without addressing it from within this homogenous continuum?

A more promising compromise in the Danish rural would be that of several possible orders of meaning a reality of co-existing, in which the visible layers of near and distant pasts would be granted significance to our everyday life, in which nature could be perceived as something not rationalised, in which the bonds that link humans to the environment could be perceived as a deeper reality.

AArchitecture 35 42

EPILOGUE

Central in the Danish parliament hang two large paintings of Olaf Rude.

The paintings hang as an ironic reminder to the Danish agriculture state and suggest that its status as a compromise should ideally be witnessed as a traceable complexity and not as one homogenous, monocultural space.

‘going out into the nature.’ Since both

5 Nielsen, Jørgen Steen, Hvad skal vi

overskudsvarme-fra-ligbraending-

adopted the term ‘rural’ as a description

nature and countryside resonate

med landbruget? (2016)

varmer-skole-op

of something related to the countryside

differently than ‘nature’ and ‘landet’

6 www.nationalbanken.dk/da/

12 The CPR-number, which is mandatory

and agriculture. The common Danish

we choose here to use the more natural

publikationer/Documents/2011/03/

for every Danish citizen, is used in all

term for countryside is ‘landet’, equivalent

term rural.

udviklingen%20p%C3%A5%20

relations between the state and the

to the English term ‘land’ and meaning

2 Bratton, Benjamin (archinect.com/

ejerboligmarkedet.pdf

individual, from tax to health care and

both [1] geography and [2] territory.

features/rticle/150052196/ new-ground-

7 L.R, Jensen Jeg ved hvor der ndes en

library loans, etc.

The term nature (Naturen, in Danish)

ii countryside-2030)

have så skøn (1890), Højskolesangbogen

13 Interview with caretaker at Benløse

is essentially related to the concept of

3 www.lf.dk/kontakt/presseforum

(2006), p. 361

School Søren Niland. Interview and

‘landet’ both as a geography and a specific

kommentarer/2017/danmark-er-og-

8 Marx, Leo, The Machine in the

translation by the authors.

territory: meanwhile, Naturen is both the

bliver-et-landbrugsland)

Garden (1964), p. 30

14 www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/

ecosystem and a specific site of the land.

4 www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland

9 www.tveast.dk/artikel/gods-vil-

overskudsvarme-fra-ligbraending-varmer

As a specific site, ‘naturen’ is equivalent to

faktatjek-baeredygtigt-landbrug-

lave- kaempe-produktion-af-svin-med-

skole-opa

the English term countryside. The

overdriver-landbrugets-betydning,

kun-lidt- medicin

English idiom ‘going to the countryside’

www.dst.dk/da/Statistik/nyt/

10 Ibid.

translates in Danish to ‘gå ud i naturen:’

ytHtml?cid=19738

11 www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland

1

The Danish language only recently

Compromise 43

Michael Ho and Chiyan Ho, Round Robin, Figure Composed, 2017

AArchitecture 35 44

Michael Ho and Chiyan Ho

Michael Ho and Chiyan Ho have been collaborating as artists since 2017. They met in 2012 while studying at the Architectural Association (undergraduate) school; at present they are commencing their final year in the AA Diploma Course. Michael was born in Arnhem Netherlands and has previously resided in Germany, while Chiyan was born in Hertfordshire, UK and has resided mainly in UK.

Ping, Pong

Michael Ho and Chiyan Ho, Shovel, 2017

Michael Ho and Chiyan Ho, Table, 2017

‘ROUND ROBIN’ (2017), IS A SERIES OF FIVE REACTIONARY PIECES THAT ARE A RESULT OF A SEQUENCE OF PRACTICE ‘PING PONG’ GAMES PLAYED BETWEEN THE TWO ARTISTS; THE PRIMARY AIM OF WHICH IS TO CREATE A ‘STANDING’ SCULPTURE.

Compromise 45

Michael Ho and Chiyan Ho, Round Robin, Figure 3, 2017

The rules are simple: 1 Each person picks five pieces of scrap wood.

2 Starting with a primary piece, both alternate and take turns to add the pieces of wood together to create a ‘standing’ sculpture.

3 This process is repeated in the next phase of the game, each phase progressively reduces the pieces of wood picked up by one.

Michael Ho and Chiyan Ho, Round Robin, Figure 4, 2017

Shovelled (2017) underscores a certain sense of playfulness but also has allusions of underlying tension; on one hand the alteration of the found object has removed its original function, but on the other hand such a revision gives it a new sense of balance and symmetry, enabling it to stand at equilibrium in on its convex side; an unconventional position.

Two sides of the same table (2017), is a play on the English saying, ‘two sides of the same coin’. Following this principle, only one side of the coin can be exposed or visible to a single viewer at one particular moment whether it be the obverse or the reverse side. An exception

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Michael Ho and Chiyan Ho, Round Robin, Figure 5, 2017

to this line of logic is made through the intersecting of two pieces of a split table; both sides of the table top are now revealed and visible to the viewer. The table is neither nor.

The backdrop and inspiration for much of the Michael and Chiyan's art collaboration is found in the chaos of London. They are serial scrap vultures, often found scouring the streets for abandoned objects, ranging from broken shovels to forgotten tables. Their work explores the poetics of banality and conversely, the sublimity of everyday objects and events constituting everyday life.

By re-using and re-composing new and old objects, new relationships and interpretations are established.

Michael Ho and Chiyan Ho, Round Robin, Figure 2, 2017

The thought process and conception of new ideas always involves the two of them in tandem.Their method of working together is similar to the analogy of a Ping Pong 'rally' game; all the elements of the ‘rally’ are included and worked into the concept or art piece that is being created.

This creative drive becomes a kind of reciprocal process, in which the two alternate in feeding ideas into a direction that the 'rally' could possibly lead to. The experimental nature of the Architectural Association has also played a huge role in sculpting their way of thinking, particularly in how they establish relationships and dialogue between different subject matters.

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Michael Ho and Chiyan Ho, Round Robin, Figure 1, 2017

AArchitecture 35 48

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Insecurity

Security Next Issue

In this issue COMPROMISE as a collective of moments of reciprocal exchanges commences with Patricia De Souza Leão Müller’s We will never compromise,Page 1 a strategic motto that has kept a century-old multinational afloat. Miraj Ahmed portrays how ‘resistance is necessary’ in Moderately Compromised, Page 2 while Johanna Tagada’s Penser, Manger, Partager, Page 8 and text by Eléonore Grignon, emphasise an inherent need to revisit our individual habits and collaborative practices. Sophie Lanigan’s Dear Alexa Page 14 is an account of contemporary forms of engagement, and in Ego Death, Page 17 Richard Leung speaks of certain instances whereby architecture can unwittingly cultivate a repugnancy towards compromise, in order to give authority to a hyper-individualised figure of the architect. In his illustrations of the Green Belt, Page 28 Jonathan Halls anticipates the need to conciliate tensions and Gian Andrea Diana concurs with a handshake– the conventional and decisive gesture of understanding and accordance. LAWuN reclaims the AA’s structures of learning in Compromise or Questioning, Page 30 and in The Future is Now, Page 32 William Lim’s ongoing research demands for new tools of compromise and a shift in perspective on land acquisition policies.

Marienne Barthelemy reflects on the fragmental nature of photography in Cyan Youth, Page 36 and Anna Sofie Hvid and Peter Møller Rasmussen portray Rural Compromise, Page 38 in the Danish Agricultural state which absorbs a range of spatial contrasts and conflicting narratives. To wrap off this exchange, Michael Ho and Chiyan Ho explore compromise as a prerequisite, in their ‘rally’ like art collaborative in Ping, Pong, Page 44 as a necessary condition to make an exception to a rule and as a form of tension that underlies the process of altering an object.

Edited by students at the Architectural Association