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Volume 45 Learning is good, learning is the future! But what should we be learning, and how should we be learning it?

Who – and what – are we learning for in the first place?

‘Real-life’ doesn’t start once learning stops: learning has become a condition of life itself. Volume takes a first dive into the mechanics and horizons of learning.

Learning

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Editorial Arjen Oosterman

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Radical Pegagogies

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Letter to the editors Peggy Deamer The education revolutions Ying-Tzu Lin A revolutionary suggestion Behemoth Press (Introduction) Elia Zenghelis

65, 77, 83, 130, 135, 143

Global Learning Volume & Jonathan Hanahan

118 Power-play Ben Schouten interview

66 Alchemy of the classroom dpr-barcelona

124 Dream

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Decolonizing knowledge Alessandro Petti

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reviews, replicas and resistance Fake Industries interviewed by Timothy Moore

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he book of aesthetic T education of the Modern School Priscila Fernandes

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Y et how great it is; the human future?

Frans-Willem Korsten (A response to Priscila Fernandes)

Learning as a problemoriented form of practice common room

School in exile Alessandro Petti I will learn you architecture!

Reinier de Graaf Global Tools of learning Silvia Franceschini Can the arts save our kids?

Lilet Breddels

102 Schools of knocks Nick Axel & Leonardo Dellanoce

Deep: Your browser is more than what it seems Jonathan Hanahan Time confetti Jack Self

136 E-learning:

The emergence of the precarious automaton Franco 'Bifo' Berardi

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Colophon

Permanent learning

In 2000, the so-called ‘Millennium Development Goals’ were adopted by the UN, one of which was primary education for all. This was in the wake of the post-historical years that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, in which a ‘Yes, we can!’ mentality was present (long before we had even heard of America’s first black president). Poverty, famine, malaria, and more – all problems that we can and should solve as global commu­ nity; that was the spirit. In light of the program, this year’s results have been evaluated. Some goals prove to be tough, but education scores rather well. Not yet 100%, but if we can believe UN statistics, today 93% of all children between 6 and 12 receive primary school education.

Education is a double coded project. On the one hand it seems that as a consequence of the concept of universal human rights that every child has the right and is given the opportunity to be educated.1 On the other hand there is the reality that education is essential for economic progress, both on an individual level and for society as a whole.

These, in part, explain why education is not only a right but compulsory in a large part of the world, and why societies would want to invest in education at all.

It is a mix of protection, allowing the adult in the making to ‘unfold’, and of molding an adequately functional, responsible and capable citizen, and worker, equipped with the correct knowledge and ideas. In principle every child is supposed to endure this period and process called ‘school’, to absorb what society considers of importance, no matter their cultural, social or economic background.

School creates a common ground. And despite all sorts of innovations in ways to teach, the military analogy of the drill of the classroom cannot escape us.

In the poorer parts of this world, realizing primary education for all is a major challenge, requiring major investments relative to their national budget. In richer countries, the emphasis has been on creating an ever growing (work)force of highly educated citizens.

The project of education is so successful that one wonders if it is reaching its limits.2 If the majority has a bachelor or masters degree in their pocket (in Korea, Japan and Russia for instance, over 50% of the age group 25–34 has finished a form of tertiary education3), will the economy be able to absorb everyone now and in the future (not to mention the rapid advent of robots taking over more and more skilled jobs)?

In the historic development of society, from its agricultural form to that of information (by way of the industrial), schooling has been and continues to be instru­mental. But now we have seemed to enter a more complex phase in which economic, medical and techno­

logical developments have shaped a somewhat different reality. We work longer, we’re supposed to be flexible, to reinvent ourselves mid-career. In short: we have to learn continuously; to be educated is not enough. But don’t we already have éducation permanente as model, as an integral part of professions such as medicine, law and (to a certain extent) architecture? But this is because there is a responsibility to keep up to date with contem­ porary advances. The learning we see developing today has more to do with society’s demand for flexibility mentioned above, with how to perform as a professional, and with the merging of the technological realm with the private sphere.

And it doesn’t stop there. Learning is no longer exclusively human.4 We see learning systems develop and ‘smart’ materials that are able to respond and adjust.

On many levels reality has become dynamic, and these dynamic realities tend to interact as well.

It may not be an exaggeration to say that learning has become a condition, a condition that is hard to escape.

Before, you would receive education and learn by yourself.

It was one’s personal choice to learn. This is no longer the case. Learning is as inescapable as education was and is. Cultural scientist Joost de Bloois summarizes this as: “the demand for lifelong learning becomes the obligation for continuous adaptation, for continuous mobilization”.5 The focus of this issue of Volume is on what learning entails and on ways of learning, mostly in relation to archi­ tec­ture: conditions, methodologies, practices. In an issue to come, the attention will placed on the systemic world and the architecture behind ‘intelligence’. But that’s for later. For now let’s end with a quote from Franco Berardi in this issue: “We should rethink the process of edu­ca­tion and of professional formation in view of the opti­mi­zation of social good instead of the maximization of profit.”

PS: The pages of Volume’s predecessor Archis were perforated near the spine so they could be torn out.

We once had the brutality to tear out a few pages of the magazine in advance for the Perversity issue. Not every reader equally appreciated this demonstration of the issue’s theme. In this issue we’ve gestured to pre-read the issue for you and highlighted certain phrases and notions that someone was attracted to, rather than to the essence of each contribution. Maybe this is less annoying. Hopefully it even stimulates to create personal narratives out of the material we included. A learning experience perhaps?

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he start of compulsory education goes back to the 15th century T in Western Europe when it was motivated by creating pious citizens by their ability to read the bible.

2 As contradictory as this may sound, but in some societies (like the Netherlands) the growing percentage of higher educated people goes hand in hand with a small, but also growing percentage of poor or illiteracy.

3 source: OECD 4 We’re aware that the animal world learns too, based on experience, but we can safely say that the learning humans do has a different quality.

5 In his ‘lunch-box lecture’ at Utrecht University on 25 March 2015 De Bloois sketched the political context of the university today.

He was invited by protesting students whom demanded a more content-driven policy from the board, as opposed to an almost exclusive focus on management and finance, At: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Osx2BiQMHcI.

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Arjen Oosterman

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Volume 45 Design: Jonathan Hanahan

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Photo: Rudolf Ter-Oganezov, Interview Russia

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Protestors outside the Taiwanese Ministry of Education building, where activists forced down razor wire barriers by hand that had surrounded the building for weeks, pushed back the police and occupied the yard space in front of the entrance.

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Credit: Ying-Tzu Lin

LACIDAR at the 7th WARSAW UNDER CONSTRUCTION Festival 2–5 The Radical Pedagogies Project, Beatriz Colomina and Evangelos Kotsioris with Ignacio González Galán and Anna Maria-Meister 6–7 Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, 1952–83 8–9 Delft University of Technology, 1967–71 10–11 University of Belgrade, 1970–80 12 National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1972–76 13 Technical University of Berlin, 1967–74

14–15 Student Architecture Congresses of Australasia, 1963–71 16–17 Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, 1958–71 18–19 University of Baghdad, 1959–68 20–21 Szczecin University of Technology, 1965–94 22 Tange Lab, University of Tokyo, 1948–73 23 The Hara Laboratory, University of Tokyo, 1972–78

24–25 F+F School for Experimental Design Zurich, 1971–78 26 Environmental Communications, 1969–82 27 The Halprin Workshops, 1966–71 28 University of California Berkeley, 1972–80 29 The Women’s School of Planning and Architecture (WSPA), 1975–81 30–31 CalArts and the Woman’s Building, Los Angeles 1971–75

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1 Giancarlo de Carlo debates with Gianemilio Simonetti as protesting students take over the Milan Triennale in May 1968.Â

Photo by Cesare Colombo.

2 Students march on the streets of Rome with shields reproducing covers of seminal books in protest against the latest University reforms. Rome, 2010.

Source: AFP Photo/Alberto Pizzoli

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students to include other mediums to resolve the proposed exercises, most of which were expected to be solved in a threedimensional space. With this he aimed to stimulate the students’ visual imagination, creativity and intellectual capabilities.

From 1970’s Hansen together with his students started developing exercises that took the form of a dialogue, what Hansen would call “group exercises”. It was here where Hansen’s theory revealed its full potential and subverted the traditional (as well as modernist) elements of artistic communication.2 With these exercise being developed in nature or the studio, students were encourage to collectively construct a visual dialogue based in existing facts, creating a personal statement that would let the following participant carry on with this dialogue and eliminate the traditional roles of author / recipient.

One of Hansen’s main challenges at the Academy of Fine Arts was transforming the teaching method, a transformation that would run parallel to an architectural transformation of the Academy’s space, creating a structure not based in the figure of the studio master but in a horizontal system in which students could freely discuss with their teachers. This was his main fight till the end of his career when he left the Academy in 1983, pressured by his colleagues.

Oskar Hansen’s influence is key to understand the practices of various generations of Polish contemporary artists and architects.

Oskar Hansen’s Open Form theory and teaching methods are followed at the Bergen School of Architecture.

Thread

Participative educational democracies Soledad Gutierrez, Aleksandra Kędziorek Region Central Europe Who Oskar Hansen What Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts Where Warsaw, Poland When 1952—83 Keywords Open Form; processes; subjectivity; visual games; performance Coordinates 52°14’21N 21°0’54”E Contributors

Oskar Hansen presented his Open Form theory at the CIAM Meeting in Otterlo in 1959 and continued to develop it through projects on various scales: from the design of exhibitions to his Linear Continuous System, a project for decentralized cities conceived as a network throughout Poland and the European continent. While the territorial aspirations of Open Form may suggest that it was a model for total planning, its main interest was in developing strategies of indeterminacy, flexibility and collective participation. For Hansen architecture was supposed to expose the diversity of events and individuals present in space.

Focusing on the process, subjectivity and creation of frames for individual expression, architecture was supposed to become an instrument that could be used and transformed by its users and adapted easily to their changing needs.1 From 1952 Oskar Hansen aimed to relate all these ideas to his students at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts’ Sculpture Faculty, encouraging them to pursue art practices beyond traditional disciplines. In order to do so and willing to apply the Open Form ideas of frame composition and subjectivity, he developed, first as responsible for the ‘Solids and Planes Composition Studio’ (1952–1970) and then at the ‘Visual Structures Studio’ (1971–1980), a series of didactical instruments for the students to learn not art but a visual language. These instruments gave leeway to Hansen’s 6

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1 Oskar Hansen, ‘Open Form’. In: brochure of the exhibition at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), 10 July 2014 – 6 January 2015. Curated by: Soledad Gutiérrez and Luckasz Ronduda in collaboration with Aleksandra Kedziorek.

2 Ronduda, Lukasz, ‘Visual Games’. In: Aleksandra Kedziorek and Lukasz Ronduda (eds.),

Oskar Hansen: Opening Modernism. On Open Form Architecture, Art and Didactics (Museum of Modern Art Warsaw 2014), pp. 281.

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1 Oskar Hansen at AICA congress in Wroclaw, 1975, © Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts Museum.

2 Students in Oskar Hansen’s Studio doing the Great Number exercise © Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts Museum.

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Oskar Hansen_Soviet publication of his curriculum

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Students in Hansens workshop, 1960s.

5 KwieKulik, Game on Morel’s Hill (group action), 1971. © KwieKulik Archive

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pedagogical space of science, design, engineering and aesthetics, giving equal weight to both speculation and realization.

The central scientific pillar of this approach was demographic analysis. Rendering social data into form became a key component of some of the Lab’s most notable projects, including the 1960 Tokyo Bay Project, the MIT Boston Harbor project and pavilions at the 1970 Osaka World Exposition. Though anchored in data, students were tasked with understanding architecture within a dynamically changing urban framework. In order to understand the city’s mani­ fold properties, Tange Lab fashioned a set of strategies to situate architecture within an expanded array of media and disciplinary approaches with a special emphasis on presenting work to popular audiences.

The Tange Lab broadly impacted Japanese architectural production. The most familiar are the Metabolists who adopted Tange’s scientific analogical thinking and expanded it into a total design philosophy. The group’s infatuation with biology, their innovative use of media and a consistent devotion to demographic analysis through the 1970s further influenced generations of architects beyond Japan.

In Tange Lab, architectural education was gleaned by focusing on the point where science and design meet. Today, Japanese archi­­ tecture programs remain closely tied to schools of science and engineering and continue to be structured around the ‘lab’ format with a single designer-cum-pedagogue orchestrating the curriculum.

Tange’s pedagogical compromise between the once severely frag­ mented camps of design and engineering encourages us to once again examine the line between the two fields and question its edges.

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Postwar modernization labs in the East Matthew Mulane Region East Asia Who Kenzō Tange What Tange Lab, University of Tokyo Where Tokyo, Japan When 1948—73 Keywords teaching by building; architectural laboratory; synthesizing; pre-modern japan; modern west; demographic analysis; teaching with audience Coordinates 35°41’22”N 139°41’30”E Contributor

The Tange Laboratory (Tange kenkyūshitsu), is the formal name given to work conducted at the University of Tokyo after Tange Kenzō assumed a professorship there in 1948. The lab was home to both theoretical projects and Tange’s own large-scale commissions.

Students were given the opportunity to concoct their own inter­pre­ tations of concepts and contribute to design and construction issues encountered in their teacher’s work In the late 1950s Tange Lab was the crucible for the formation of the Metabolist group.

Neither classroom, nor seminar, nor atelier: it was the initiation of the architectural laboratory.

Since its introduction into the Japanese university system in 1873, architecture has been institutionally embedded in engineering.

This was born out of an early conception of architecture as ‘construc­ tion’ (zōka) and heightened anti-seismic concerns. However, this close relationship grew contentious in the 1950s as modernist-leaning architects sought more expressive forms that were counter to the concerns of seismically-minded engineers. Tange’s contribution to this debate as a teacher drew from the logics of the lab environ­ ment to combine scientific methodologies with problem-specific design work, all the while keeping aesthetic and historical concerns, particularly those of pre-modern Japan. The result was a hybrid

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The Tange Laboratory.

2 Kenzo Tange with his students from Tokyo University, who were integrated in the Tange Lab. 3 Flow program diagram by Tange Laboratory student Yamada Manabu for the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, 1958.

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by Hara into distilled ‘lessons’ in his book 100 Lessons: Learning from Villages, released in 1987.

At a time of rapid postwar national urbanization and industri­ alization, an architectural pedagogy grounded in the study of villages abroad was unprecedented in Japan. Accelerated endeavors of building and commercialization had peaked in the 1960s, mirrored in the frenzy and aspirations of large-scale work by Japanese architects at the time. Hara was highly critical of Expo ‘70, an epitome of such impulses designed in part by his teacher, Kenzō Tange, and viewed it it as an overly capitalistic demonstration of corporate interests. He wrote at length in numerous essays against these efforts and what he deemed as the drive behind the oppressive and individualistic tendencies of modernism. Hara reasoned that since humans are intrinsically social beings who live in groups, it was crucial to investigate the existing and thriving social orders of village communities in order to depart from the failures of modern architecture and reconstruct the discipline.

While these intensive surveys were concentrated during the 1970s, he would continue to travel with his students, notably Kengo Kuma, Riken Yamamoto, and Akira Fujii, to areas around the world until his retirement from professorship in 1997. For his numerous students and followers and for architectural pedagogy in Japan, Hara’s work would expand institutional focus beyond the classroom, the academic studio, and even the laboratory to encourage working and learning in the world itself.

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Postwar modernization labs in the East Lily J. Zhang Region East Asia Who Hiroshi Hara What The Hara Laboratory Village Surveys and Dwelling Group Domain Theory at the University of Tokyo Where Tokyo, Japan When 1972—78 Keywords village; dwelling; group; morphology; ethnography Coordinates 35°41’22”N 139°41’30”E Contributor

The Hara Laboratory, Hiroshi Hara’s research division at the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Industrial Science, conducted extensive surveys of villages and vernacular settlements around the world from 1972 to 1978. Hara was among the first and fore­ most of architectural educators in Japan to shift focus beyond the country’s borders for spatial investigation, specifically with an ethnographic methodology. Through in-field observation, docu­ mentation, and interviews, Hara and his students visited over 200 villages in nearly forty countries, including areas in the Mediterranean, Central and South America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and West Africa, as well as within Japan and some of its remote island settlements. In Hara’s view, these communities across the globe were not ‘natural’ or arbitrary forma­ tions but manifestations of detailed planning, management, and control. Hara’s team took note of the physical, spatial, and social attributes and configuration of each village and assigned particular importance to the dwelling as the determining unit of organi­za­ tion for the overall settlement. Villages and dwellings were analyzed and categorized into ‘morphologies’, and evaluated their material, form, spatial organizational patterns, and social and geographical context, among other aspects. Their research, titled ‘Dwelling Group Domain Theory’ (Jūkyo Shūgōron), was featured in five special issues of SD magazine published from 1973 to 1979 and compiled

images

1 Exterior fire pit for cooking in village courtyard, Duko, Ghana, with Hara’s student taking field notes at far left.

Source: Jukyo Shugoron 5, SD Special Issue no. 12, 1979, p. 133.

2 Hara’s students, Kengo Kuma in back, with equipment for village surveys in Africa.

Source: courtesy Kengo Kuma.

3 Overall travel map from 1972 to 1978.

Source: Jukyo Shugoron 5, SD Special Issue no. 12, 1979, p. 9.

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dpr-barcelona Ethel Baraona Pohl & César Reyes Nájera

Alchemy of the classroom

To be an Architect

The 2013 film The Competition follows an employee from Jean Nouvel’s office, a ‘head of projects’, navigating his level on the conventional pyramid of organizing contem­ porary architecture offices.1 The image of this man, suffering from the pressure of the genius-boss, trying to respond to deadlines with the effort of sufficiently trained and motivated young architects working behind him, neatly draws one of the professional glass ceilings that most accredited architects can expect in their working life.

This inherent scheme of suffering-when-practicing goes back to academic education, where students are subjected to endless working hours to learn the skills to do little more than efficiently configure space. With regards to architectural practice and education, the first reaction is to think this is ‘business as usual,’ but why does it work this way? When we each decided to study

architecture we were motivated more or less by similar reasons, namely: to do something creative, to work on a different range of projects with different skills, to have a multi-disciplinary background and financial stability.

The image of striking projects and a list of outstanding mentors would guide us through the exhausting path to become an architect. Inspiration was triggered by university leaflets that used words like: ‘exciting’, ‘inspiring’, ‘provocative’, ‘boundary-pushing’, ‘highachieving’ and some ‘environmental’ additions to be ecologically sensitive.

The image of Howard Roark, the individualist genius in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead,2 is still uncon­ sciously promoted in most architecture schools. This ‘praise of the Self’ floods into our interior lives and pushes us through endless nights of designing and drawing in a surprisingly never-ending race.

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Universities cultivate a practical body of knowledge, except the type of practice that architectural education fosters today isn’t good for much more than selfexploitative idolatry. For decades now, the university has been seen as a fortress of antiquated ideas, buttressed by the culture of professional accreditation. Ethel Baraona Pohl and Cesar Reyes Najera from dpr-barcelona ruminate about the limits of our disciplinary language and gesture towards another pedagogical form, one based on naïveté, trust and the collaborative production of knowledge, for the expansion of our world.

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In praise of Excellence

What are the motives behind choosing any specific school?

With some variations you may find surveys and reports that highlight factors like teaching quality, employment rate, student satisfaction, cost, location, academic reputation, program, and faculty/student ratio. Following contemporary trends, entrepreneurial rankings have become something valuable,3 however the single and most important motivator is the university’s reputation, especially when looking through the eyes of potential employers.4 A closer examination of such methodologies reveals that rankings give a measure of excellence, but also of endogamic self-reference. They are full of charts and facts and figures,5 but it’s difficult to find a single trace or connection with the actual education of the future professional and the context where they are intended to develop his or her practice. It seems that academics are more concerned about having an impact in indexed journals than having any impact in society. It’s possible to argue that this is precisely the way to ensure high quality education for future professionals; but maybe that’s the point to be questioned. Do we have the academia we deserve? If our answer is based in terms of commodities or exchange, then it could be yes. But it is rather evident that there is still a gap or disconnect between academia and society, which at the end of the day is our field of work.

Not without irony, this search for the best archi­ tec­tural education occurs in a world where most of its built realizations are still vernacular.6 We could argue that those ‘best’ schools are preparing leaders to build the future urban environment, but several inconsist­ encies like real estate bubbles, precarious labor conditions and inequality insist on presenting us with a different reality and questions the convenience to prepare pro­ fessionals for such a disconnect.

Now, our society is undergoing profound shifts and changes – we have seen it in industries as diverse as music, publishing and transportation. Yet universities and academia continue to operate according to entrenched archaic models. Economic growth throughout the twentieth century transformed academia itself into a commodity system, in which not only education but also our social and cultural reality responds to the same political and economic logic. Following Bernard Rudofsky, we can see that “part of our troubles results from the tendency to ascribe to architects – or, for that matter, all specialists – exceptional insight into the problem of living, when in truth, most of them are concerned with problems of business and prestige.”7 Is it time to quit drinking from the fountainhead of excellence?

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Burning the desks

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Arthur Rimbaud always defended the need of creating new languages – an alchemy of the word – to understand and decode the world.8 Perhaps this is something to learn in architecture faculties, where the lexicon is still domi­ nated by the same words of the past century – innovation, accreditation, excellence – the same words that are often used by business and marketing schools; a kind of language that might not be useful anymore to break down the quality/quantity dilemma in the architectural field.

Jane Jacobs argued that ‘accreditation’ is an indirect legacy of the United State’s Great Depression matched with growing post-war economies. High unemploy­ ment levels, repeated rejections and its burden of shame strengthened the idea of having a job as the most cul­tur­

ally valuable product. From the 1950s, when stagnation lifted, the main cultural goal became the assurance of full employment through development and a growing economy.

Understanding that economic development in any field was dependent on a population’s background of knowl­ edge, academic administrators reasoned that “the more of this crucial resource their institutions could provide and certify, the better for all concerned.”9 This belief was definitely supported by the cultural ideal of nuclear families in their own support of their descendants to get better jobs and living conditions than their parents.

“All universities possess their own subcultures, and so do departments within universities, varying to the point of being indifferent or even antagonistic to one another, so a generalization cannot describe all accurately.

But it is safe to say that credentialing as the primary business of institutions of higher learning had gotten under way in the 1960s. Students were the first to notice the change.”10 This somehow explains the pedagogical burst of initiatives and radical reactions in the second half of the twentieth century that questioned academia as part of its wider critical position to the whole system.11 These alternative pedagogical experiences seemed like healthy reactions that could somehow invigorate and renovate to the system of academic education.

According to Giancarlo De Carlo, the university protests that exploded in the late 1960s were the most important event since the end of the second World War.12 De Carlo was especially talking about faculties of architecture, which, in his own words, “had long been dominated by an academic body interested only in pre­ venting new ideas from penetrating into the school.”

How to subvert that situation? During those years, architecture students were questioning not only the hierarchical and endogamic structures inside the faculties, but more deeply the reasons for being an architect.

It’s not an easy question, after all.

The Ignorant Architect

The architect has usually been related with those in power, as we have learnt that building is an expensive practice; something commonly highlighted in syllabi and programs to attract more students. Now check out the program of the architecture institution where you studied, are enrolled or affiliated with. Their means, purposes and methods are basically and still based in tectonics, history and general physics. But beyond the traditional programs, what about new fields of intervention that somehow relate architecture with places, relations between people and the challenges of our times to come such as urban data driven design, social physics, urban politics, cura­ torial practices, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, literature and other fields of action that describe the complexity of the environments we inhabit? Moreover, the number of practitioners that are already exploring such fields or disciplines is significant in this regard.

Means of exploration are often driven by a mix of curiosity and necessity but also by the necessity to discover new ways of living. This sort of forced emanci­ pation recalls the intellectual experience that Jacques Rancière writes about in The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. The book describes the pedagogical experience of Joseph Jacotot, a French teacher who created a method of “intellectual emancipation” that demystified the authority of the teacher as one who knows and imparts that to students

Volume 45 A Victorian classroom

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SCHOOL IN EXILE

Since the first appearance of Palestinian refugee camps after the Nakba, the Arabic term to indicates the exile of two-thirds of the Palestinian population in 1948, their architecture was conceived as a temporary solution.

The first pictures of refugee camps showed small villages made of tents ordered according to grids used for mili­ tary encampments. As the years passed and no political solution was found for the plight of the displaced Palestinians, tents were substituted with shelters in an attempt to respond to the growing needs of the camp population without undermining the temporary condition of the camp, and therefore undermining their political right of return. However, with a growing population, the condition in the camps worsened. The precariousness and temporariness of the camp structure was not simply a technical problem, but also the material-symbolic embodi­ment of the principle that its inhabitants be allowed to return as soon as possible to their place of origin.

Thus, the camp becomes a magnetic force in which politi­ cal powers try to exercise their influence, and the refugee community vehemently opposes any attempt to nor­ malize it. Every single banal act, from building a roof to opening a new street is read as a political statement on the right of return. Nothing in the camp can be con­ sidered without political implication.

Within this context, in June 2011, the UNRWA Infrastructure and Camp Improvement Program, directed

by Sandi Hilal, decided to intervene in the conception and realization of a girl’s school in Shu’fat refugee camp.

For the first time, a site specific and ad hoc design, not a pre-conceived and fixed architectural scheme, was produced.

Shu’fat refugee camp was established in 1965 and is currently inhabited by 20,000 Palestinians refugees that were expelled from fifty-five villages in the Jerusalem, Lydd, Jaffa and Ramleh areas. The political context that surrounds the project is extremely deteriorated. The Shu’fat camp is almost entirely enclosed by walls and fences built by Israeli governments since 2002, trapped in a legal void, neither inside nor outside Jerusalem borders. The inhabitants of Shu’fat are threatened to be deprived of their Jerusalem residency documents and therefore once again be forced to leave their homes.

Refugee camps are, by definition, meant to be temporary.

Yet in Palestine refugee camps have existed for well over half of a century, and architecture plays an exceptionally symbolic role. Every stone set is a representation of perma­ nence and undermines the refugee’s political existence as such. Within these constraints, DAAR members were asked to design a girl’s school in the Shu’fat refugee camp in East Jerusalem. The architectural result is a statement about life in exile and a vision beyond the tired dialectic of temporariness and permanence.

Is architectural intervention at all possible in such a distorted and unstable political environment? And how could intervention be possible without normalizing the exceptional and transitory condition of the camp? How could architecture exist in the here and now of the camp, yet remain in constant tension with a place of origin?

Architecture is too often seen in the Palestinian context as simply a technical and bureaucratic solution with no social and political value. Too often, architecture has been humiliated in vacuous formalism; to look green or sustainable or efficient, apolitical answers to political problems. Too often within the humanitarian industry, architecture has been reduced to answering to the so call ‘needs of the community.’ Rarely has architecture been used for its power to give form to social and political prob­ lems and to challenge dominant narrations and assumptions.

The Shu’fat School embodies an ‘architecture in displacement’: it is an attempt to inhabit and express the constant tension between the here and now and the possibility for a different future. The architecture of the school does not communicate temporariness through an impermanent material construction. These materials are too often instrumentalized for a ‘politically correct’ architecture that relegates refugees to living in shanty­ towns. Rather, through its spatial and programmatic con­ figuration this architecture in exile attempts to actively engage the new ‘urban environment’ created by almost seventy years of forced exile. Perhaps this is a fragment of a city yet to come.

The design of the Shu’fat School is inspired by the pedagogical approach cultivated by Sandi Hilal and myself in Campus in Camps, an experimental educational program based in Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem, Palestine.

Our approach is devoted to the formation of learning environments where knowledge and actions are the result of a critical dialogue amongst participants, and in direct connection with communities where the interventions are taking place. To describe this egalitarian and experi­ mental environment, we use the Arabic term Al jame3ah.

Translated to English as ‘the university’, the literal meaning of Al jame3ah is ‘a place for assembly’. As such, this educational approach is to create a gathering space and a pluralistic environment where participants can learn

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Alessandro Petti

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Credit: DAAR

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Shu’fat School with a typical UNRWA school in the background.

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Challenging the model of education through architectural form

freely, honestly and enthusiastically, and where partici­ pants are involved in an active formation of knowledge based on their daily lived-experience.

Al jame3ah is a space that aims to contribute to the way schools and universities understand themselves, and overcome conventional structures. In doing so, it seeks forms of critical intervention for the democratization of knowledge production.

DAAR, an architectural office in Beit Sahour, Palestine, for this project comprised of Petti, Hilal and Livia Minoja, in collaboration with the engineering depart­ ment of UNRWA and with the participation of students, teachers and organizations from refugee camps, imagined the ‘school in exile’ as an occasion to elaborate a frag­ ment of a different approach to education and society – a school to be experienced by the students not as a site of repression and discipline, but as a site of liberation and responsibility.

The generative form for the school is a circular space, space around which people can gather to tell or listen to a story. Architecturally, the hexagon constitutes the single classroom, a space in which each participant is equally invited to speak.

Recognizing that the camp is a spatial expression of a particular relation to another place – the place of origin – the project, instead of dismissing this relation, inhabits this tension and contradiction. We created a double for each classroom: an outside open space, a piece of land to cultivate material and the cultural dimensions of the place of origin.

For Louis Khan, schools began with a man under a tree who did not know he was a teacher, sharing his realizations with others who did not know they were students. In this pedagogical spirit, the spaces in the Shu’fat School offer the possibility for the constitution

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Geopolitical location of Shu’fat refugee camp

of ‘tree schools’, where people from the community could become teachers and activate community-based discussions around topics that the participants can choose according to their relative needs. The tree school is first and foremost a gathering of people around a tree, per­ ceived as a living being. The tree, with its characteristics and history, is the device that creates a physical and metaphorical common territory where ideas and actions can emerge through critical, free and independent discussion among participants.

The tree school is a space for communal learning and production of knowledge grounded in lived experi­ ence and connected to communities. It brings people together in a pluralistic environment where they can learn freely, honestly and enthusiastically. It reasserts what is urgent for participants, forming an active group that chooses words, constructs meanings, and creates useful knowledge through actions. The tree school is activated around the interaction and interests of the participants and its structure is consequently in constant transformation and open in order to accommodate changing urgencies. It can last days, months or years.

The tree school reclaims a diversity in ways of learning.

For many, knowledge is based on information and skills; the tree school places strong emphasis on the process of learning that cuts across conventional disciplines of knowledge, moving according to a different vision, one which integrates aspects of life and is in dialogue with the larger community. It welcomes forms of knowl­ edge that remain under the radar of traditional academic knowledge. A tree school is where new forms of knowl­ edge production are made possible, when teachers and students forget that they are either teachers or students.

The first tree school was established in Bahia, southern Brazil, together with the Brazilian art collective contrafile’ on the occasion of the São Paulo Biennale in 2014. It joined together activists, artists, quilombola intellectuals, landless movements and Palestinian refugees in discussions about forms of life beyond the idea of the nation state and the meaning of knowledge production within marginalized sectors of society.

The tree school also took the form of a public installation on the ground floor of the biennale exhibition space, hosting thousands of students from São Paulo schools. At the end of the exhibition, the tree was planted in Tainã Culture House, a central node of the quilombola network. Quilombos were communities founded by enslaved Africans and Afro-descendants who fled their oppressors and established what later came to be known as the first democratic republic in the Americas. After the Bahia experience, we activated other tree schools in the Shu’fat refugee camp in Jerusalem, in Cuernavaca, Mexico and in Curitiba, Brazil. Over the coming years, the tree school will be activated in other contexts and with other groups who have already expressed interest: among these, a network of teachers and students from Beirut and Turkey; a group of architects in Bogotà, Manama and Medellin, who have already proposed similar learning environments in slums; and in Bangalore, India, where we want to develop a non-Western based curriculum.

With the tree school, by activating critical and egalitarian learning environments, we want to mobilize marginalized knowledge that stays under the radar of traditional academic learning. These experiments want to be in dialogue with formal educational institution in order to create new spaces for learning.

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Credit: DAAR

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One classroom

Four clusters and one court

One classroom and one garden

Three courts

One cluster

One school

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Reinier de Graaf

I will learn you architecture!

I remember my first job: Harbour Exchange, buildings 4, 5, 7 & 8, London Docklands, 1988. A building frenzy had engulfed London during the last years of Thatcher’s reign, allowing many recently graduated archi­ tects like myself a first taste of practice. The quality of the buildings we worked on, only ever referred to by their number, was bland – not quite the post-modern pastiche of Canary Wharf, but rather a dumbed down form of modernism: straightforward money making machines.

They were commissioned under so-called ‘Design and Build’ contracts, which meant we essentially worked for the contractor, for whom we produced on-demand drawings with no further say in how our work would be executed. My first task had been to amend the ceiling plans of the lower and upper ground floors of office buildings, which were still under construction. Suspended ceilings had to be redesigned to contain star-like lighting patterns and fixed points from which to hang the occa­ sional chandelier. The investor had calculated that with retail uses on the ground floors (instead of offices), the buildings would generate substantially larger financial returns, and so a partial conversion was launched even before the buildings were finished. Among the staff of junior architects, there was a perverse delight in the thought that if we drew fast enough, the conversion of the building’s interior might work its way up and even­ tually overtake the ongoing construction of the upper floors.

I had graduated only six months earlier and in many ways my first job came as a complete shock. It was not so much the quality of the buildings I worked on that shocked me, or the gratuitous nature of decisions such as the above, but rather the fact that practicing as an architect appeared to have nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing to do with studying architecture. The first emo­ tional state I recall as a practicing architect is that feeling of utter uselessness. My technical knowledge fell way short of what it needed to be, making me largely inadequate, and nobody was interested in the elevated philosophical considerations I had developed during my studies. For this job I was at the same time over- and under-qualified.

It was an experience that I shared with other recent grad­ uates. We kept our spirits up and tried to feel good about ourselves. Admittedly, we worked on garbage, but this was straightforward garbage. (At least we were not involved in the Cesar Pelli building being built next door.)

Pay was good and working days were neatly confined 9 to 5’s. Still, in the face of a never-ending stream of seem­ ingly pointless tasks, every day seemed to last a lifetime.

I was confident things would change with time.

As soon as I would no longer have to execute the ques­ tion­able design decisions made by others – in architec­ ture they are that by definition – things would get better.

Ultimately there would be room to put into practice some of the idealism I had developed in school. However, once I began working for myself, everything that had bothered

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Back closer to the turn of the decade, OMA/AMO was invited to help found Strelka, a new pedagogical initiative in Moscow that sought to erase the distinction between academic and practical knowledge. The glove seemed to fit the hand perfectly, seeing as how AMO has expanded the limits of architectural practice and application of research into ever-new territories ever since it began.

Now that it’s been taken off, we invited Reinier de Graaf to reflect about what it was like to actually put the glove on. What we got back was instead a highly personal meditation on gloveness and the motives behind putting them on.

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Volume 45 The Death of Socrates, Jacques-Louis David (1787).

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Volume 45 Installation view of Šelltexts by Eyal and Ines Weizman.

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Courtesy: Eyal and Ines Weizman

Jack Self

While studying to become an architect, I worked for several years on the side as a web developer. My job was to design websites and then code and implement them. Mostly I was paid a flat rate, allowing me to easily recycle work from job to job and shortcut my way to lump sums (which promptly went on tuition). However, in one particular job I was asked if I would complete timesheets – hourly forms that documented to my employer specific tasks and activities I had achieved throughout the day.

I objected to the timesheets on three grounds.

Firstly, the sheer volume of tasks I worked on, nearly simultaneously, would make completing the forms as time consuming as the work itself. So it was impractical.

Sec­ondly, I considered it a gross invasion of privacy: as a satellite worker stationed at home, and often working at odd hours of the night while my girlfriend slept, it would reveal a pattern of life that I didn’t think was the concern of my employers. What difference did it make to them when and how I worked, as long as I got stuff done?

The metrics of their own corporate success models could hardly seem applicable to my own unique patterns of work.

Finally, and most importantly, I was not sure how to list the time spent researching how to do the things I was actually being paid for. As anyone working across multiple creative software platforms knows, it is not pos­ sible to learn any program comprehensively. Even advanced users rely on online tutorials and forums to see alter­native methods of working, tricks and tips to automate or accel­ erate processes. While this learning was vital to my employ­ ment (even though it sometimes inter­rupted tasks for several hours) I couldn’t decide if it constituted work, or some kind of perverted vocational leisure (that is, personal time used for commercial purposes). Worst of all, this kind of learning was never-ending.

With the rising cost of education it’s not uncommon for students to take up a side job to help pay the bills. While these tend to require a completely different set of skills than the one being studied, they also help to distinguish the student as a prospective employee. Competition in the labor market has come to depend on these vocational experiences and extracurricular fields of knowledge to determine the most suitable candidate for what are ulti­ mately generic positions. When learning becomes the requirement for working, learning becomes work. Jack Self reflects on what more there is to learn.

As the number of programs and types of tasks I performed expanded, it became increasingly hard to recall all the tools and commands I had taught myself, especially if I used them rarely. I found I no longer remem­bered exactly how to do something, only whether it was conceivably possible, and where the best place to remind myself was located. In other words, this form of learning was not principally about knowledge accumu­ lation or memory retention. Rather, it concerned the speed at which I could acquire new skills, and my mental proc­ essing power to creatively combine apparently unrelated program possibilities to produce highly specific outcomes.

The imperative of this form of constant superficial learning (and we are endlessly told we must now be ‘stu­ dents for life’) has become a key constituent of contem­ porary labor forms. If we are always in direct competition with even our most immediate colleagues, then speed of adaptation is the most important way to gain competi­tive market advantage. This kind of social Darwinism – the belief that we must innovate or die – is a deeply held neoliberal value. But while Darwinism begins as a purely scientific description of survival and fitness, its incorpo­ ration with a social and moral dimension results in some abhorrent assertions – namely that it is not only a fact of life that the powerful succeed over the weak, but that it is right for them to do so and we must not block the flow of natural forces that guarantee this situation. This is the basis for the neoliberal desire to dissolve the wel­ fare state and abolish market regulation. It also permits greater extremes of wealth inequality, because it psychoti­ cally considers them aligned with the natural state of being.

Although I resisted the timesheets fiercely, even­ tually I had to submit. The bureaucracy of surveillance and the ethics of competition were greater than me.

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Time confetti

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And, after much deliberation, I decided not to invoice for my ‘learning’ time.

Nonetheless, the difficulty I had deciding whether vocationally oriented learning was indeed a form of labor, or just joyless leisure, exposes a more profound collapse in the previously polarized relationship between work and non-work. Rather than selling our labor as a mono­ lithic period, we are increasingly asked to splinter our day into recombinable units. The result – brief scraps of leisure time scattered throughout this atomized work schedule – is sometimes called ‘time confetti’. As we tear up and throw about our labor, all that remains in the (shortening) gaps is leisure time so fragmented that we can only focus on passive activities (the American TV show The Bachelorette is one of my own shameful weaknesses).

Circumstantial evidence suggests that long-form journalism is making a comeback. Particularly, youth reader­ship of essay-based publications like the London Review of Books is rising steadily. However, the expan­ sion of this marketplace is not driven by fresh demand.

It is instead a product of the decline in even longer-form reading: books. With such a fragmented work life, and even more piecemeal leisure, we cannot focus. Even as publishing and sales volumes are rising, we are reading less and less. Consequently, that stack of books on our nightstands is growing, and we are helpless to tackle it.

We read fewer books, we learn less, and we abandon hobbies. We cannot invest in ourselves, or our intellects, beyond the acquisition of vocational skills. ‘Down time’ is spent unraveling the mysteries of CAD, Photoshop, animation, audio production, coding or video editing.

The mastery of these informatic platforms is the source of our competitive advantage: what becomes valuable in the ‘workplace’ (which is decreasingly an actual place) is no longer specific knowledge at all, but the capacity to learn quickly. This understanding of learning is funda­ mentally different from traditional conceptions, because it is rooted in communication and exchange, not educa­ tion or pedagogy. It is the individual’s ability to command signs and their significance in order to accelerate the exchange of products that is the basis for contemporary forms of learning. Underpinning this notion is of course the recognition that immaterial labor of the kind described necessarily produces immaterial products: websites, business services, consultancy strategies and digital art­ work of various kinds.

Learning is no longer a question of memory or skills, but speed of adaptability and change, compelled upon us by a hegemonic world order administered by signs, semiotics and images. The first and most important philosopher of these concepts is of course Jean Baudrillard, although it is Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi who has coined the most precise term for this synaptic Empire – semiocapitalism.

We can hardly resist our incorporation into this machinism of signs. To do so would be career suicide.

So what, if anything, can be done to reclaim the domain of leisure and the intellectual autonomy of learning ‘for its own sake’? To begin, we must understand what learning – as its own end – and leisure have in common: namely, that they are both types of activity lacking an obvious purpose or pragmatic application. They are not endured, in the hope of achieving some direct result, but are enjoyed, simply as complete experiences in themselves.

Despite this fact, leisure and learning-for-itself are two sides of the same philosophical coin, embedded

within the brutal history of liberal humanism. The subject of this paradigm is enclosed within democratic institu­tions that produce ‘informed’ citizens. To achieve this, the subject is compelled to express their will by transferring their political power to a chosen representative. For this act to be perceived as autonomous, anonymous, and with­out undue interference, depends heavily on the belief that independent opinions are emergent by nature – thoughts produced by non-linear patterns that surface from a synthesized wisdom of the Western philosophical and scientific canon. The majority of this canon is never directly related to any particular civic question at hand (its value as knowledge is thus not as precedent). The existence of the canon is rather intended to create a gen­ eral legibility and comprehension of logic itself, and thus the popular ability to apprehend the soundness and consistency of public rhetoric. Accordingly, it is no coinci­ dence that a decline in this type of learning corresponds to the collapse of the public will into the chaos of the Hobbesian multitude, or crowd.

Leisure and non-work, as the other side of the coin, are related to the production of democratic subjectivity by providing the time for contemplation and reflection necessary to synthesize structures, patterns, arguments and facts and assess the relative weight of opinions, etc.

Pointless leisure is not as purposeless as it might seem: it is a specific type of time intended for the formation of one’s own opinions. Leisure and learning for their own sake are intimately interrelated by the common project of manufacturing the civic soul.

You might have noticed I have not deviated from the language of what might be called computational sociology: the reconfiguration of the individual into a com­ ponent of a vast social machine, a subjectivity itself prone to all the same logic of obsolescence, fatigue and replacement of the cog or part. Therefore, my first proposition is couched in similarly familiar terms: noncommercial learning (outside the semiocapital frame) is in fact a form of exercise.

Over the last several years, body image and fitness have become normalized in a strange and aggressive way. Amongst women, the yoga pant, neon Nikes and ski-jacket / pearl earrings combo has assumed the status almost of a uniform, and its acceptability in a variety of public places is quite astonishing. It is an ideological sign of being in shape, ready, tense. Physically taut, tort, taught…

Amongst men, upper body strength, fuelled by protein shakes and supplements make visible a kind of capitalist violence, manifest in the steroidal superfluity of muscles that will never be used for anything but their own per­ petu­ation. It might be that this fitness obsession is another example of avant-garde gay culture permeating the mainstream, or it might be that the gym (along with the shower) are today the only places where not responding to emails and phone calls is still socially acceptable.

Physical fitness may have become a pastime purely because it is the last activity we can do in peace.

In any case, investment in body image is a fine simile for the type of learning I have in mind. To resist our psy­chological exploitation by the proliferation of time confetti we must invest in lengthening our attention span and strengthening our memory retention. This should be approached exactly like a training session: at the very moment you become bored when reading – at the very second you feel that inescapable compulsion to pick up a screen, to interact, to exchange – push on. Read to the end of the page; read to the end of the chapter. Set yourself

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The vision of a body struggling against decline (for how else can exercise be understood) and pitted against the city distracts us from the truth of our condition: our muscles are being trained for feats they will never perform, while our mind is exhausted of all its potential. Â

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