Barcelona's Interstices - essay #1

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essay #1 open questions: observing design through geography

open questions: observing design through geography

essay #1

This first essay intends opening up the critical reflections that animate this research in order to introduce it. Showing some jangled nerves and innovative approaches to current architectural practice, it argues that spatial awareness is the key for another revolutionary practice to flourish. In this sense, geography as a genuinely ambiguous discipline will be the leading lens through which to explore such awareness. Finally, a brief introduction to the choice of Barcelona as both a test field and an edge reality will set the takeoff lane for this research work. introduction: architecture ≠autonomy One thing I have learned in five years of architectural education is that architecture is not an autonomous fact. Or better, despite the fact that much architecture has been built on the idea of autonomy, erecting an iron curtain around itself did not produce any waterproofing of its practices and products from the surrounding environment.

Realistically, architecture seems to be a pretty social product and not the unique creation of a solitary and enlightened genius, being possible thanks to a complex network of encounters, relationships and agreements, therefore relying on the twists and turns of a definitely social corpus. It appears evident how subjected it is to political, economic and so social dynamics. Think about it: how many designs fail along of such conditions1, however brilliant in terms of pure form or material? It appears however that this obviousness is not that obvious in contemporary architectural practice: architects seem to struggle against

it conducting autonomous campaigns. Since, for example, already Reyner Banham (1996) was berating the profession for its retreat into a rarefied and self-referential world, this seems quite an enduring issue. Further discussion will enlighten different positions which constistently aim at challenging this issue.

However, it is not central to our argument to acknowledge if architects did it on purpose or how they did it. In fact, our concern is that architecture is and has to be understood as a social discipline, conscious and interconnected to such dynamics in order to be practiced through engaging with and not retreating from them. Such tactics of isolation are in fact a great misunderstanding, condemning architecture and architects to centuries of worries and headaches, peaking with the apparently unsolvable irrelevancy that seems to afflict our profession.

Before moving on to sketching aspects and debates over such contemporary gaps and defaults, I must clarify that I do not obviously claim any primacy in locating the issue of 17

isolation as the core question in architectural concerns. In this sense, the work of Jeremy Till and prominently his book Architecture Depends (2009) has been the spark lighting the huge amount of fuel that I have stockpiled through the observation of the surrounding world (in architectural as well as ordinary manners), practical experiences inside and outside academia and endless debates with close and diverse friends, colleagues and professors. Moreover, significant inspiration and encouragement comes from a network of lively and experimenting architectural practitioners called New Generations 2, gathering at the moment of writing over sixty young architectural firms from seven European countries and mainly organising debates and events in Europe, fostering collaboration and shared knowledge among young architectural practitioners. some architectural concerns Building from the premises sketched above, I will attempt to underline a few questions which have been functioning, and still do, as the foundation layer of this research.

Let’s start in a very practical way. The most evident issue that architectural students and practitioners face today is unemployment. If statistics that populate mainstream media are not realistic enough, personal stories might be more effective. These range from very common situations of chronic underpaying to periods of salary-free collaborations that generally last for months or even years in the worst cases. Not even free internships are easy to find nowadays, as competition 18

is intense and some architectural firms even pretend to be payed by students in order to work for them. At least inside architectural academies and schools, this is becoming a vicious mixture of psychosis and resignation: “people feel puzzled about where to go next” (Hall, Massey, & Rustin, 2013, p. 20) in an increasingly crisis-led professional world. In fact, equally extreme dynamics extend to the most advanced and prominent design environments, as contractors win competitions reaching 80% of discount over the initial price. Needless to say, architectural competitions gather thousands of participants, both among students and practitioners, while the winner is always one and only one.

Rather than a paralysing issue, although a concerning one, the exposed question of unemployment has always stimulated reflection and critical questions among me and others which I have come to discuss with. Throughout the many speculations and comparisons, one central question continuously reappears: does the world need architects? This one usually strikes very strongly, since it addresses in a very direct fashion the ethical and cultural dimension of our profession.

Similarly, architect Rory Hyde (2012) has researched this theme documenting the crawling alterations that young practitioners are impressing onto our discipline. When interviewed, he argued that the point of departure of this innovation is that “we constructed such an exclusive professional fortress of accreditation, institutes, awards and even our own discourse, that we lost touch

Barcelona’s interstices: opening up architectural practice

Cirugeda stating on contemporary architecture.

with other people and adjacent disciplines�3, urging for a professional reframing. Also, I would argue, we are not endowed with important connections with society in general, both in terms of relevancy (which percentage of housing is globally designed by architects?) and under the perceptional point of view: it is not astonishing that architects are imagined exclusively busy with formal novelty and fussy detailing. form, appearance and idolatry Together with Hyde, I do share a concern over form. Or better, I am concerned over the predominancy of form, image and material in architectural production as this casts significant shadows over the important consequences that architectural interventions certainly have over space. Form is a real obsession for many architects: it is enough to browse some of the most commonly available magazines to understand it. As they mostly showcase glossy projects in a rather advertising style, the notion of consensus seems to have substituted the one of critique and the texts adorning photographs and sketches are generally overlooked. Also, a quick search over the internet will show thousands of results displaying magnificently presented designs but typing into research engines such as Google Scholar will not reveal many articles published by architects.

This focus on image becomes evident as well when discussing the more or less recent sustainable turn in architecture: as resources deplete and the global environmental decay demand a decisive stance, ethics seemed 20

to re-emerge in our profession coloured in green. However, high-end technology and bright discourses often hijack these profound issues and, to overstate the case, reverse sustainable do into sustainable look.

Moreover, I am sure this is not an exclusively recent issue, as the history of architecture is packed with enduring concerns over the supremacy of form over function and the opposite, of linguistic expression in architecture and militant mottos discussing the more, the less or even the bore.

Architectural stars have been spreading their personal word since decades, may it be a strict discipline or inspired poetics: unfortunately, though, other architects were pretty much the only audience listening to such discourses. It would be difficult to argue that such reflections did have a strong impact on the rest of the world.

However, let it be clear: our aim is not to exclude appearance for its predominancy over sense: this would simply invert and therefore replicate this problematic imbalance. Certainly, we are not against aesthetics per se. Rather, the argument here is that appearance is just one part of the problem, therefore its counterpart is worth being addressed specifically.

Do architects have a role in society just as many other so-called advanced professions do?

The currently enduring financial-economic crisis just makes these issues more evident: when budget disappears, architects are left with nothing to do. Certainly architecture has quite always been depending on substantial amounts of finance and creative professions are the first ones to be ignored in times of

Barcelona’s interstices: opening up architectural practice

shortage, however the above discussion is meant to show that a strong distance remains between architectural practice, production and concerns and the “outside world”. The intention of this research is to work with such distance towards its reduction.

In conclusion, it seems to me that such individualisms in architectural practice have prevented architects from acknowledging, and properly dealing with all the other, socalled external mechanisms which have a role in making architecture happen. These are normally overlooked as hitches, bureaucracy and mindless requests hampering pure poetics, as decades of architectural brainwashing has so efficiently taught us.

Actually, such mechanisms correspond to other forces which, just like we do, contribute in shaping the physical world in which we live in. Such statement becomes particularly evident when looking at cities. welcome to the urban revolution Today, cities benefit from a certain reputation in contemporary culture. Rising interest in cities and urbanism is evident in many forms: citizens discuss urban issues in public fora, bookshelves are packed with popular literature in regard to cities and a growing number of proactive individuals address urban questions through the internet. Cities have become central in many peoples’ lives.

In fact, as Saskia Sassen (1991; 1994) has thoroughly reported, cities have gone global and are now central with regard to economic activity; as journalists, politicians and academics so insistently assert, we now essay #1

live in an “urban age”, since more than half of the global population now lives in cities for the first time in our history (UN-Habitat, 2007; UNFPA, 2007); and a renewed desire for urbanity combined with environmental concerns is evident from what is widely known as the re-urbanisation phenomenon.

However stimulating this interest might be, we should not avoid underlining a few issues it engenders. Specifically, the “urban age” thesis has been put to scrutiny by radical geographer Neil Brenner (2013), who claims it is a statistical artefact and a chaotic conception, therefore involving risks to be hijacked in policy debate with regards to urban poverty, public health and greenhouse emissions. More generally, Brendan Gleeson (2012) has labeled as urbanology the discipline, if we can call it this way, growing out of this generalised appeal towards the urban, ironically following the opposition between astronomy and astrology. In fact, much of this pretended knowledge of the urban threatens longstanding and historically conscious approaches within the social sciences, relying as it is on conceptions as positivism, naturalism and determinism.

Needless to say, these are mistakes which social scientists in general, and geographers in particular, have so painfully managed to overcome and invert in the last fifty years, thus rendering the new urban commentary a horrible return to the starting line. Finally, the renewed desire for urbanity, be it defined as back to the city movement (Smith, 1979) or Urban Renaissance (DETR, 2003), has been acknowledged for almost automatically involving processes of gentrification (Lees, 21

Increasingly popular literature on cities.

2008): the displacement of a traditionally poor or working class urban population by the incoming higher class dwellers. city life is the cities’ life Despite the multiple contradictions that this purported urban revolution carries in itself, cities are our arena of choice for grasping (understanding would be hyperbolic), challenging and reimagining the urban.

In fact, cities are probably the most effective site in showcasing what danish architect Jan Gehl (2011) calls life between buildings, a well-chosen expression to define human and non human activity, interactions and patterns within the urban environment as Bruno Latour (2005) has thoroughly taught us to perceive them. Our focus shifts from the materiality of such environment made of concrete, glass and steel to the provisional nature of such practices.

In an extremely intricate weave, many aspects of daily life intersect and interfere in the urban realm, ranging from economic relations to diagrams of power through daily patterns.

In fact, cities are intuitively understood as frames for spatially extended economic exchanges at an enlarged scale, involving constantly working production lines, huge machineries, substantial volumes of merchandise being displaced and processed, a constant movement of international agents, dazzling financial flows and rich apparatuses for managing and supervising such activities.

Also, they are the sites where political power is materialised at the institutional scale with essay #1

all its paraphernalia: buildings, documents, procedures, mean of transportation, meetings and phone calls. If these processes certainly contribute in shaping the urban environment, we need to resist the tendency to view such forces as abstract, impersonal (and therefore immobile, permanent) or detached from our personal everyday lives.

Such processes, and the modifications they produce, are in fact constituted by a myriad of practices, intended as stable material bodies of work (Vendler, 1995), just as strolling on a sidewalk or shopping in an open-air market is. Cities are constituted by such practices: spatio-temporal porosities, constantly moving far/close relationships, provisionally assembled communities of action, knowledge networks and a crawling ecology of major and minor institutions.

Once again, I must make clear the essential contribution of two particular authors in revealing such surprising and stimulating facts: Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift’s famous Cities: reimagining the urban (2002) has been a personal bible over the last months. I share with this work the constant amazement for the phenomenality of life taking shape, the holistic approach to such life and the relentless concern for a need to experiment and reinvent. one project among projects In such kaleidoscopic urban world stand the architects. This assembled superposition of flows, networks and processes should underline how architects, who are normally considered as the ones producing urban 23

space, are actually a part (eventually a small one) responsible for the final output. The architects’ one is a project among projects.

Arguably, a whole city is not only a place in which to live but a constantly changing project as well. Moreover, as resulting from the contact between the above discussion and the formerly exposed architectural concerns, it is not absurd to think that the architects’ one is the last among such projects, being the one of shaping the material output (again, appearance) of what has been defined by other agents among them.

Quite fortunately, I believe, a growing number of lively experimentalists is beginning to trespass such boundaries, extending their practices to other fields.

Poaching (Rajakovics, 2012), in fact. They often combine many professional fields and practices, producing unique hybrids such as the whole-earth architect, the civic entrepreneur or the community enabler (Hyde, 2012). These usually deal with very specific issues and scenarios, as specialisation becomes increasingly important in the search of a personal profile (Bokern, 2012).

However, despite generalist approaches are not the only available solution anymore and the specialised ones’ skills are often external to traditional architectural practice, this does not mean that new generations of architects have forgotten construction. Rather, as dutch architects’ Space&Matter4 explicitly declare when interviewed, they need to “do everything to do with architecture”. In other words, they find that they need to deal with rather external issues, such as programming, advertising, advocating and funding in order 24

to finally reach the concrete construction phase. This has been called dealing with dark matter by historian Wouter Vanstiphout5, addressing through both practice and tuition the changing relationship between architecture and politics, economics, power and society.

As a result of such transformations, defining a strictly architectural domain is becoming increasingly difficult. Awan, Schneider and Till have been proposing to this matter the expression spatial agency (2012), extending the field to a more ample domain as they do not consider buildings to be the universal and best solution to certain spatial problems.

Instead, the means are very varied, from activism to pedagogy, publications to networking, making stuff to making policy: architecture has begun to be opened up and its practice is changing, possibly through the acknowledgment of its non-uniqueness in a complex and increasingly unstable world. spatial awareness: architecture through geography Following the path being currently marked by such innovative practices and approaches, it seems to me that awareness can be read as the basic condition and the most powerful instrument for revolutionary architectural practice to flourish. Formerly perceived as external, questions such as funding, bureaucracy and political consensus begin to be acknowledged as rather internal and in need to be dealt with. However, these processes require comprehension and study, on-field experience and, most of all

Barcelona’s interstices: opening up architectural practice

for architects, a certain explorative, curious and “thirsty” approach. And there it comes geography.

Geography is an ambiguous discipline. Far from being a weakness, as it has been taught to me by Francesca Governa, such ambiguity allows us to experiment approaches, to trace non-banal descriptions and to deny a strictly functional perception of such discipline. It is an explorative practice which, just like any exploration, benefits from uncertainty.

This exploration is however directed towards something and is intentionally conducted.

That is, it works with certain research objects and does it with certain conscious intentions through reflexive practice, which is a strong component of geographical, and intellectual practice in general. In fact, operating in a cartographically known world, the physical dimensions of which are of course always changing but mostly explored, geography had to recalibrate its goals and approaches many times, hence the richness of intellectual strands: human, radical, feminist, cultural geographies are just some currents of such unsettled ocean. It has been asking itself: Why Doesn’t Geography do Something?

Knight (1986) was, through this title, urging geographers to do something useful, the main concern being geography’s possibility of being useful without enacting it. If the answer is not immediate, it seems to me that responding to this dilemma through the engagement with the public (however stretched and exploded concept this is) has been marking many paths , especially the one of radical or critical approaches to geography. essay #1

If this is evident in Harvey’s strive for a people’s geography, the same stance towards reflexivity becomes more than clear in one of his many essays’ title: What Kind of Geography for What Kind of Public Policy?

(1974), stressing the problematic nexus between geographical inquiry and policymaking, between critique and operativeness, between intellectual action and political power. Moving from the specific relationship with public policy to geography in general, if a purely critical approach is impossible because unusable, at the same time a strictly operative approach seems to lack any commitment and ethical stance. Rather, recapturing the argument over ambiguity as a resource, a “moving radicalness” seems to offer the opportunity to both criticise aspects of current processes and operatively deal with them (Governa, 2014).

Together with a certain geographical approach we share another aspect: geography is built on problems, in an attempt to “make normal representations not only strange but even unacceptable (Castree & Wright, 2005).

In fact, despite I have so far been framing the discussion around dissatisfactions in architecture, the reader should not imagine that this research is being developed as a self-referential practice. The survival of architecture as such is not a sufficient goal, since, again, isolation is the central issue and matters of “opening up” the discipline should not be pursued per se. In fact, if we have described cities as places of encounter, surprise, exchange and contact, obviously this is just one of several aspects: a simply 25

observational practice reveals that we are daily surrounded by social inequalities, enduring contradictions and dissatisfactions.

It is our matter of concern to work with such issues, dealt with both critically and operatively through this “moving radicalness” and in order for our practice to be actively involved, ethically informed and therefore, hopefully, socially relevant.

Summarising, a geographical approach (indeed this specific one) is advantageous for our critical reflections over architecture due to its manifold features: it is fertile because ambiguous, it is naturally explorative, it is strongly reflexive and it aims at re-representing reality through the acknowledgment of problematic questions.

Most importantly it does so in relation to space, field which happens to be central in architecture as well. We can put it this way: we are trying to reimagine our way of doing architecture through its encounter with geography in space. packing luggages towards Barcelona I will not be discussing extensively processes, facts and features of the city of Barcelona, as the audiovisual material showcased in this research work is itself a text and not only optional to these written texts. Therefore it should speak, or made speaking by itself.

However, it is worth to outline at this point a few questions that have led me to choose such destination in order to ground my research.

Barcelona is widely known for having 26

radically transformed itself in the last thirty years, moving from being a derelict postindustrial city to reigning as the mecca of tourism, sport and culture. This has led scholars and intellectuals to define the selffashioned notion of Barcelona model (see Montaner, Álvarez, Muxí, & Casanovas, 2014), meaning an intervention strategy focused on tourism, on the organisation of large scale cultural or sport events and on the boost of service sector activities. Such tactics have proven to be highly influential as deindustrialisation stroke on European and generally Western world cities: such model has been impressed over many different contexts, de facto becoming a paradigm. As urban marketing, even materialised in pop songs sponsored by the local municipality and published on the web, is a central practice for communicating how attractive and successful Barcelona is, its regeneration model is still internationally acclaimed today by architects, planners, politicians and economists as a milestone in urban design.

This approach has, however, been subject to intense critiques by academics, intellectuals and political parts. This seems to me quite natural, as it is deeply related to economical globalisation and neoliberal approaches to the city the contradictions of which we all have in front of us. Namely, such urban policies are grounded and developed through win-win rhetorics, concealing the politics of winners and losers which are actually involved in every transformation of reality. Doesn’t regeneration do good do everybody? Stressing this particular contradiction, Barcelona has been labeled as

Barcelona’s interstices: opening up architectural practice

Frames from the videoclip of Living Barcelona.

ciudad mentirosa by catalan anthropologist Manuel Delgado (2007) while, more generally, the limits of such tactics have been thoroughly underlined (see Charnock, Purcell, & Ribera-Fumaz, 2013). Moreover, these development processes have a central role in the growing social upset: the local population is suffering from increasing transportation costs, the privatisation of large portions of urban space and the constantly growing touristic pressure6.

Briefly acknowledging such past transformations and contemporary conditions should be enough, as this is not a dissertation about Barcelona. Rather, this city is the test field and at the same time a founding element towards the experimentation of a nonrepresentational research practice. In fact, our operating field is exactly this widening crack between neoliberal urbanism and its downsides, exploring the contradictions that this clash engenders. La ciudad de los arquitectos (Moix, 1994) stands today on the edge of an abyss: now is the right moment to challenge such conceptions of the urban environment and to reinvent them.

Moreover, our approach implies the need to maintain a subtle balance between the study of representations (what has been said by others) and, reminding geographer Carl Ortis Sauer, a “blank sheet” approach (what the field presents in terms of research questions). To overstate the case, travelling towards Barcelona has been the very start of this research, and questions did come to emerge most importantly once there.

In conclusion, let this general discussion be sufficient for the moment: stating too 28

much at this point would be pointless if not counterproductive. Images and sounds will reveal specific features of Barcelona’s interstices and following essays will unravel research methodologies, characters and theoretical implications of such spaces.

Endnotes 1

See theoretical contributions and case studies

published by Failed Architecture, an Amsterdambased cross-disciplinary platform researching urban failure.

2

See the full interviews on the New Generations

website.

3

Rory Hyde interviewed by Mark Minkjan from

Failed Architecture.

4

Dutch architects Space&Matter form part of the

New Generations network.

5

See the interview conducted by Rory Hyde on the

Australian Design Review website.

6

see the brilliantly done documentary entitled

Bye Bye Barcelona directed by Eduardo Chibàs.

Available on Youtube.

Barcelona’s interstices: opening up architectural practice

This essay is part of a series of five, which together form the research work entitled: Barcelona’s interstices: opening up architectural practice. Essay #1 – Opens questions: observing design through geography works as an introduction; essay #2 – Dealing with the urban: theory, method, tools discusses the theoretical and methodological framework employed in this work; essay #3 – Interstice as shifting space unravels possible debates over complexity, instabilty and layering towards urban space; essay #4 – Challenges at every scale: from economics to politics explores key theoretical questions regarding the formation of contemporary urban space; essay #5 – Personal practice: immediate reflections on future paths concludes this work exploring directions for future architectural practice. essay #1

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