AWP towards a climate
Roger Connah lives in the Hotel Architecture, Ruthin, North Wales. He has travelled and taught globally for over 4 decades. Winner (with John Maruszczak): Revenge of the Lawn, White House Redux, Storefront, New York 2008; Associate Professor and currently Associate Director of Graduate Studies, Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. His last work is the 10 volume Deschooling Architecture - The Anti-Library (FadDesign House, Montreal 2014) including: 1 Architecture Degree Zero (2008) 2 Pulp Architecture (2009) 3 A House for de Kooning’s Friend (2009) 4 AaltoEgo (2011) 5 The Irresponsible Self (2011) 6 The Brautigan (2012) 7 Life After Architecture (2012) 8 Deschooling Architecture (2013) 9 Headless (2013)10 iDeath (2013). Other publications include: We Let the Goldfish Go (2014); Being:An Architect (with Ian Ritchie, RA 2013); The Rest is Silence (2011),The Piglet Years (2007); I am Architecture (ed. 2006); Finland (2005); 40 Young Architects from Finland (ed. 2002); Aaltomania (2000); How Architecture Got its Hump (2001); Grace and Architecture (1998); Welcome to the Hotel Architecture (1998); The End of Finnish Architecture (1994) Writing Architecture (1989).
Nuance Galore: And Not Only At Night! by Roger Connah
part 1 Familiarisation “Tell the story all the same,” said Adamsberg, looking affectionately at his deputy, and sensing fear in his reluctance. In Danglard’s mind, for all he was an authentic atheist, not inclined to mysticism, superstition could still find a clear way in, by taking the broad pathways of his perpetiual anxiety. Fred Vargas The Ghost Riders of Ordebec (2013)
This refusal to compete with slogans goes on. If I had to hazard a guess for an innovative and challenging architectural practice in the 21st century it might well take the shape and dynamics of the Parisian practice AWP (Agence de Reconfiguration Territoriale). Even the datached language is precise but hardly pretentious, refusing to compete with the slogans a professional architecture would ordinarily imply. Instead: this refusal implies re-framing. It recalls the wish for clear intrigue in a discipline like architecture that, perhaps, the original Modernism let slip. Where and when did we lose the somewhat delicate and desired world of dreaming, that clarity of the blurred condition? Reconfiguration implies new identities and atmospheres of space and place, an attempt - as noted - to maintain after realisation the dynamism with a potential to evolve thorugh time and change of use. Ecologies may be fragile and more so because of global and political misdemeanour but they can be strengthened and architecture has its role; infrastructure is hard, it is the glue, memory and sensations are soft but by no means secondary to the architectural intelligence which softens the voyage out. Let us be clear: this is a new narrative, but how?
For some years now I have been following the work of Fred Vargas, the French historian and archeologist who writes captivating novels about a cloudshovelling French Commissaire of Police called Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg and his somewhat brilliant, all-knowing but rigid Commandant Danglard. It was inevitable that this reading would collide with my understanding and appreciation of this innovative and challengingly precise Parisian practice. Just as Vargas’s novels are about naunced detection and very carefully dreamed solutions, the Office for Territorial Reconfiguration is about architecture of course, but holds much more than that. Direct experience not only seeks the phenomenological situation for each project but dislodges the process with sequences of perpetual stumulation. In all sense cinema, at all scales architecture, where architecture can intervene kaleidoscopically and atmospherically. Until, in city and chapel, community or garden, like a detective with a strong, often unstable hunch, this is the imaginary geography that articulates our approach and invites us in. And if we think Vargas might offer us the eccentric edge of this century, it should come as no surprise to think the novelist Virgina Woolf would take us back to the pivotal years of the 20th Century. It is impossible not to bring them together. Let us not lose sight of the last century and the alchemy that many professionals and critics wished to make of it as we re-think an engaged and committed practice for this century. It may appear odd, even untimely, to introduce such a practice by referring to Vargas at the same time as mentioning Virginia Woolf.
Often it appears our language and our common reference worlds have become disguised in the stable spectacle of contemporary architecture. Opting for a realm of possibility and performance, the artist or cineaste framing action, we are challenged today to travel but not arrive. We are invited to leave issues and construction unresolved but in no negligent manner. Instead any adopted materiality must dare to be something else; this is a drama – the word is precise - that respects impermanence, not in terms of whether architecture itself can still emerge triumphant but in terms of knowing just what can remain unrevealed and what vocabulary is in need of rescue. Consider temporality, performance, perspectives, illusions, curiosity, ambience, flux, redistribution and promenade and we are already invited into the cine-narrative of this inventive practice. But put these alongside the cloud shovelling words that we are often advised as critics and commentators to stay away from; hospitality, sensuality, sensoriality, generosity, and openness. There is little doubt that – over the last two or three decades - the tectonic games of digital imaging practices have offered architecture of the contemporary spectacle a wayward set of signs; the iconic has been dislocated. Space, the unfurling of the in-between, the crossover from territory to landscaspe, when put through the exercises and experiments AWP carry out turns this back on itself. Replace iconic with dramatic; let’s not pull back from taking our own critical risks. Architecture: the voyage out, night or day, a room of one’s own. In a recent song from The National (2013) called
Graceless, there is an irresistable line that pulls us up short: “there’s a science to walking through windows.” The sweep and curve of much contemporary architecture takes no real eimence when it comes to the iconic. Dialogue goes further, the tectonic drama is not our only refuge. There is indeed a science to walking through windows and we need to find it. Our critical challenge is clear: we are invited to reconsider the ‘remarkable’. When we hear the words ephemeral, unfinished, partial, or even zero energy, we are actually being invited to learn how to live, or live again, in both the hard and the soft, in infrastructure and script. Space itself can be iconic; weightless and dramatic, kaleidoscopic, atmospheric! We are offered this; then it is up to us. Traces are accessible and interactive; new interpretations, with phenomenological cunning, invite new sitings. Stylistic elegance is not forbidden but it is interrogated too, nowhere better than in Norwegian Wood, the urban lantern in Stavanger. Lennon and Murakami; you have to smile if not laugh outright. The atmosphere is infectious, on the ground or in the air. It is too easy to describe the approach as a diagram for diversity. Interdisciplinary is itself a hospitable process; it can caress symbol into new use, and confrontation into creative encounters between sign and narrative. We once had a dream or shoud we say, it once had us. Critical atmospheres might be a useful invention. Reflection not reflex, this is a particular relation between thought and action. It works so well in architecture at all scale because it, rightly, seduces
us to think we can go beyond residual activity, but at the same time it knows architecture needs all the residual and the unstable it can accept to remain open, evolving and remarkable. This is what is implied when we see the reworkings become form; when romance is re-activated. As Cianchetta writes, “we are constantly moving from natural scale ‘teasers’ to long term larger scale projects, matching experimental tools with anlayticals ones of architecture and master planning, aiming to reveal new possible territories and to re-activate the idea of ‘desire in them, bringing a state of enchantment back to the cities.” Adaptive re-use: let’s not remain so quotidian. From deep teasers to long-term larger scale projects, this bird has flown! What are we doing here? We are putting thought in relation to its own inevitability. The 20th century may not be far behind us, but the re-composition strategies are ours, with a responsibility that belongs to such practices. If AWP move from exercising precise territorial games in a water plant, an urban park or a hight street, or then suggesting new cartographies of the night, it is not so much the projects, themes, scales and experiments are energetically innovative, they are of course. It is the process they measure to remain open and the communication they take on. Language again is our key; this is deeply trollish in its adventure and crossed with the research that each member of the practice brings, the results are always unusually workable. We are not speaking only of transformation here, which pits the predictable codes of an expected architecture against unfamiliarity. Here AWP play deeper game
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with symbol and space, icon and drama, research and redux, a deeper seriousness with openness and atmosphere. Frame and re-framing, it is cinema itself that AWP use to their advantage. Devices cunningly and critically layered one across the other are mapped and then insinuated into architecture producing an atmosphere we have lost, even in recent cinema. Cinema, when re-framed, when accepting the accidental narrative, is precise enough to hold the hospitality and generosity this practice seeks in all its legibility and flexibility. And cinema when atmospherically unfastened, as in Antonioni, is fleeting enough to hold all the architecture and concepts attempted - the legibility of the host, and the liberation of the hosted. Always a potential alternative in any scenario that can dare to remain in flow, but not unhinged. Where are our new critical adventures to validate the water plant as script and scenario, not of urban crime but intrigue? This is not the gossip of being, it is careful re-framing, where thinking and action belong as much to the planner as they do the cineaste. Brittle as Antonioni, these are atmospheres that leave us breathing more easily without letting go of the anxiety necessary to remain alert. It is less known that we breathe differently in different spaces, yet we are re-informed through desire. This function is high on AWP’s index of interfering with the familiar. Dwelling and architecture are here being only gently tamed (but not too much!) into a serious of under-written works. This is an architecture life shared, as much as it is the undoing of labels, exposing the familiar and falsity involved in easy definitions and solutions.
AWP is a practice that collaborates, that consults, that colludes. It is a contemporary 21st century practice whether working with the usual suspects: Arup, Foster, Rogers, Perrault, Zagari or HHF. This is, in official terms ‘a landscape and public space consultancy’ – in unofficial terms, these atmospheres created are essentially critical fictions that we need to bring back into architecture. If I had to echo a community amongst which I see these partners operating, it would suggest a gentle leap back to the work of Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle/Workshop for Potential Literature): the supple and juxtaposed inventive scripts and atmospheres of Calvino, Matthews, Queneau and Perec. AWP in a short period of 10 years have set up a compelling Workshop for Potential Architecture. And for that greater community, a critical indulgence that we should embrace I would include the following for starters: Antonioni, Godard, Allen and Almodovar, Cortazar and Gombrowicz, Ashbery and Adonis, Viola, Baldessari and Elliason; Vargas and Woolf (of course!). Stable and unstable elements, the rhythm of the hard and the soft and experiences and feelings all have a habit of returning to architecture and space. In a way they return to where they originally belong. If this is a critical fiction, then let’s have more of them. If architects and the loose phrases we use for this still confused discipline and profession are to be listened to, to be commissioned for issues we think unresolvable and difficult, it will be because of the work of a practice like AWP. This is cutting agency; it resonates with Virginia Woolf in such that it allows the unresolved and the unclear to remain precisely unresolved,
an unmeant world, unrevealed even at times, but nevertheless experienced. Nuance galore: and not only at night!
Part 2 De-familiarisation A very thin line of shadow tapered on the horizon, scarcely thick enough to stand the burden of Paris, which nevertheless rested upon it. They were free of roads, free of mankind, and the same exhalation at their freedom ran through them all. Virginia Woolf The Voyage Out 1915
Whatever city I visit, whatever capacity we take on in a life of architecture, the solitude in contemporary architecture can so easily turn into a new loneliness. In conversation, in discourses that come and go, all is concealed. The camera crew enter and set up jib and dolly, take haunting images sequences; the buildings materialize in the relentless sun and then de-materialize in the night when nuances take a walk on the wild side and details change place with structure. We used to know ourselves, and what sort of architects, or professors or critics we were. Was it the one who still visits cities like Murcia in Southern Spain, tracing the Moorish influence, and writes papers about lost narratives? Or then the one attending the obligatory but stunning museum (The Salzillo Museum) and stopping for a cañas and tapas at the height of the sun. The architect is interviewed, in the kitchen, in the hammock, in the pool. The lights come on. New lives are illuminated, dreamed up; we don’t so much start again as space is reconfigured, territory sensualised, and the terraces merge with the city’s slopes,
and the trees hold new constructions from where we take new vantage points. And the recipes for olives continue to develop. The other professor, the one who returns to nothingness, reads Virginia Woolf’s first novel The Voyage Out. Intense, relentless self-analysis spreads out before us a new compendium for this century; where the people we meet, the conversations we have, the places we visit, the familiarities we relied on, are re-written, de-familiarised. In the voids, in the constructed dreams we inhabit it is impossible not to be dismembered yet re-configured. In the haunting analysis of the unresolved, we - and this includes architects - disappear into early Camus and Sartre. It is not so much James Joyce we return to any longer but the narrative that can no longer offer narratives for the future. This is not apocalyptic; walls are stripped back in the Arab district of this imagination; buildings treated with henna celebrating the impermanence of new histories appearing before us. Rivers not so much dried out as controlled at source, never to reach the sea. How can this be the professor invited to prepare a small document about a practice he considers offers a new intelligence for architecture? What codes must he use to convince anyone of this and what currency to dream and perform differently can be allowed into the constructed world? By all means put infinity on trail, invent environmental and metaphorical filters, but with what success? To judge by the complimentary alchemy of the three members of this practice, Matthias and Marc Amengaud and Alessandra Cianchetta, we
are being tempted into a way of writing about architecture and architects that has no model, has not so far been followed or established. We are invited into the contract that they themselves take. Are we to punish the pretence of scholars for extending their imaginations to others who cannot quite achieve it in the same way? What then does this practice mean to me? In a bar called Gran Rhin on Piazza San Pedro in Murcia I pause after the Salzillo Museum for a beer. Two small but no less weighty pieces of octopus are served as tapas, cut from the dish lying under the counter where the octopus is soaking in beer. These two pieces are served with a lemon drizzle. Of course we must remind ourselves. We have tasted so much of our lives before yet we must still allow ourselves repetitions which can and must extend the nuance of nothingness that we fight. This can hardly be the text required and yet, it is significant. The materiality of the octopus, soaked first in beer, cooked slowly then slightly roasted in the oven has the spendour of impermanence. Someone, somewhere, knows, where the resolved becomes the unresolved to be desired. I imagine the work of this practice not so much explained by this as resembling this intelligence they bring to architecture. The special alchemy can be read from page to project, from ‘patronym’ to ‘paysage’. Different skills must question the intelligence of what we still address as the architectural program. Cross-platforming is embraced. Philosophy tests the mapped world, as the mapped world questions the potential of the constructed world. It proceeds like this text.
I begin with no intention of calling in a bar in central Murcia and conclude with observations about an architectural intelligence. Without knowing it we have gone through Vargas, Woolf, Joyce, T S Eliot, Camus and Sartre. We may even now have met the cloud shovellers from Vargas’ idiosyncratic commissaire, JeanBaptiste Adamsbert. I end with a plea not just for this trio, for the materiality and dramas of the impermanence they offer, even their own impermanence, but a suggestion how it is they bring this currency, what we can call a constructed ambience or any other phrases we invent to remember them by. The obvious: it is not the language which will offer the merit, or the significance, but the intelligence that this practice so consistently cross-platform in ways the 21st century now begins to understand as its own difference from the 20th century. “Silence fell upon one,” Woolf writes in The Voyage Out, “and then another, until they were all silent, their minds spilling out into the deep blue air. The way seemed shorter in the dark than in the day; and soon the lights of the town were seen on the flat far beneath them.” Night and Day: which way is shorter for architecture? Neither. Inseparable! Roger Connah Murcia, Spain/ Ruthin, UK. July 2013.