Disegno #32

The Quarterly Journal of Design #32 Spring 2022

This issue includes: Hannah Beachler’s timetravelling, Afrofuturist period room, featuring Ini Archibong and Jomo Tariku; digital realities with David Chalmers and Space Popular; community outreach with the Onion Collective; a return to the decaying pods of Tokyo’s Nagakin Capsule Tower; the demolition of Mumbai’s chawls; déjà vu for feminist architecture collective Matrix; a stay at Emeco House with David Saik; and Stefan Diez’s electric textile ribbon.

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Introduction

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Designing the Batman Words Oli Stratford

Reader, I have been to see The Batman (2022) and I have thoughts upon it.

Like, who’s designing his kit? Because there’s lots of it.

There’s a rocket car, a cape for gliding, grappling hooks for whizzing along, and boots that are perfectly designed to let him easily switch between clomping about in the shadows and giving bad lads a shoeing. Presumably it’s not the Batman himself – he’s too busy glowering and throwing hands – and I don’t think it’s Alfred the butler either, because he’s got loads of silverware to polish and a wayward master to implore to take more regular showers. It’s a plot hole!

This intrigued me, so I set about finding out whether it had ever been explained in the comics instead. After extensive Googling, I am happy to reveal that Batman did indeed once have a designer on his staff: Harold Allnut. A fine designer’s name for a fine designer, I’m sure you’ll agree, but Harold’s job was a hard one.

Like many young creatives, Harold presumably dreamt of working within social design or crafting affordable products and housing solutions that could make an impact around the world. Yet good intentions quickly fade when faced by economic realities and the cruelty Introduction

of the job market. Harold presumably took the only design role available to him upon graduation: helping a billionaire kick people’s heads in. It’s a tale as old as time.

Harold’s role was clearly not a position that many designers would dream of, but it must have had its upsides. The R&D budgets were presumably tremendous and, while the constraint of having to make everything look like a bat may not have been in line with Harold’s personal aesthetic, it must have been nice to create a consistent body of work. Perhaps Harold was even able to convince himself that the trickle-down effect would kick in. His designs may initially have been bespoke commissions, but just imagine their potential when industrialised. Affordable Bat-tech could one day find itself in the hands of first responders and council workers, geared not towards violence, but rather swift, bat-like provision of healthcare or social programmes. Imagine a time when there is no longer a Batman, but rather a society of Batpeople. Design can make things better.

Alas, such things were not to be. We all know that design and technology often do as much ill as good – just watch the news. Harold is not atypical. His designs remain the playthings of the rich and batty; their creator largely unknown. He didn’t even make the film’s final cut – maybe his arc was simply too bleakly realistic for cinema.

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Contents 7

Introduction Designing the Batman

10

Contents

12

Contributors

14

Masthead The people behind Disegno

17

Timeline November 2021 to March 2022 in review

22

Photoessay Emeco Abides A Venice sewing factory reimagined

35

Roundtable The Whole Tapestry The making of the Met’s Afrofuturist period room

91

51

Project Onions Have Layers Social-enterprise-on-sea in post-industrial Watchet

104 Report The Making and Razing of Mumbai’s Chawls A portrait of Mumbai’s housing on the brink

63

Essay Obsolete Masculinity The rise and fall of Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower

77

Project The Electric Ribbon Trick A magician’s guide to lighting

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117

History Enter the Matrix Déjà vu for a 1970s feminist architecture collective

Interview Design for the Realv World Space Popular follows David Chalmers into the metaverse

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Contributors Philippe Calia is an artist, photographer and filmmaker based in Bangalore. p. 104

Aki Ishida is an architect and associate professor at Virginia Tech. p. 63

Sade Fasanya is a Nigerian-American digital and film photographer based in New York City. p. 35

Dean Kaufman is now a half step deeper into the metaverse. p. 117

Ramak Fazel is an American engineer, photographer and Brooklyn-based archivist. p. 22 Fabian Frinzel is a photographer and road cycling enthusiast. p. 77

Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg believe the metaverse is just a fancy word for the internet in 3D. p. 117 Noritaka Minami is a visual artist and associate professor of photography at Loyola University Chicago. p. 63

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Mitzi Okou is a co-founder of Where are the Black designers?, a volunteer-run, nonprofit advocacy organisation. p. 35 Rupal Rathore builds and writes in India. p. 104 Viviane Stappmanns is keen to talk about design as a collaborative, socially-oriented practice. p. 91 Jim Stephenson likes a bit of life and a bit of mess in his photographs of buildings. p. 51

The Quarterly Journal of Design #32 Editor-in-chief Oli Stratford oli@disegnojournal.com

Founder and director Johanna Agerman Ross

Publisher and commercial director Chris Jones chris@disegnojournal.com

Deputy editor India Block india@disegnojournal.com

Creative directors Florian Böhm Annahita Kamali akfb.com

Senior sales executive Umaima Walia umaima@disegnojournal.com

Creative producer Evi Hall evi@disegnojournal.com

Designer Jonas Hirschmann info@akfb.com

Advertising representative – Italy Carlo Fiorucci carlo@fiorucci-international.com

Fact checker Ann Morgan

Circulation and stockist enquiries Adam Long along@thelogicalchoicegroup.com

Sales consultant Farnaz Ari Distribution The Logical Choice thelogicalchoicegroup.com

Contributors The cover shows a photograph of Emeco House in Venice, Los Angeles, shot by Ramak Fazel.

Contributors Ini Archibong, Hannah Beachler, India Block, Jos Boys, Philippe Calia, Sade Fasanya, Ramak Fazel, Fabian Frinzel, Ann de Graft-Johnson, Evi Hall, Fredrik Hellberg, Mo Hildenbrand, Aki Ishida, Dean Kaufman, Sarah E. Lawrence, Lara Lesmes, Noritaka Minami, Mitzi Okou, Rupal Rathore, Viviane Stappmanns, Jim Stephenson, Oli Stratford, Jomo Tariku and Abraham Thomas.

Paper and print This issue of Disegno is printed by Park Communications on Edition Offset 120gsm by Antalis. The cover is printed on Arena Extra White Smooth 250gsm

by Fedrigoni.

Thanks Many thanks to Jon Astbury for all of his help getting the band back together; Alexandra Kozlakowski for her logistical wizardry; Sveva Bizzotto for making a rather complicated shoot seem simple; Midgard for all its support; Molteni&C and Carlotta Albezzano for a great launch; Het Nieuwe Instituut and Delany Boutkan for a fabulous partnership; and Farnaz Ari for not missing a step on her return to Disegno.

We are very grateful to all our contributors, and for the help of everybody who has supported us and made Disegno #32 possible – not least Sun-Blushed Basil Brush, who is always moisturised, in his lane, unbothered.

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Contents copyright The contents of this journal belong to Disegno Publications Limited and to the authors and artists featured.

If you are tempted to reproduce any of it, please ask first.

Disegno Works Disegno also runs the creative agency Disegno Works. disegnoworks.com The Crit You can keep up with Disegno and our work by listening to The Crit, a podcast focused on the design world and its impact on current affairs. disegnojournal.com/podcasts/the-crit Contact us 50 Wenham House Ascalon Street London SW8 4DZ disegnojournal.com

PLAY. AND PAUSE. AND PROVOCATION. Masthead

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER

of diversity frequently coming to

in practice as the Christian take on

no avail), any move to divest power

the concept has. Two thousand years

Virgil Abloh (1980 - 2021)

from the old guard and give other

and counting!

It’s an overused term, but Virgil

candidates a chance is a welcome one.

Abloh was a polymath. Not only the

At around the same time as Lokko’s

artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s

announcement, the United States’s

Richard Rogers (1933 - 2021)

menswear and the founder of Off-White,

prestigious RISD design school also

“I quickly came to realise,” the

Abloh was also a trained architect

announced its new president, Crystal

architect Richard Rogers once wrote,

who art-directed albums for Kanye

Williams – the first Black person

“that working in someone else’s

West, made clothes for Beyoncé,

to occupy the role in the school’s

architectural practice was not for

created sneakers for Nike, DJ’d

145-year history. “There is power

me.” And a good thing too, because

at Lollapalooza, and designed for

in multiplicity,” Williams said

Rogers’s self-belief resulted in two

Vitra and Ikea, all while blazing

upon her appointment. “Diversity of

of the 20th century’s most delicious

a trail for Black creatives across

experience and perspective catalyses

pieces of architecture: the Lloyd’s

the industry.“[My] real job,” he said

deeper, richer conversations and

building and the Centre Pompidou.

when appointed to Louis Vuitton, “is

therefore stronger, more creative and

Despite this, however, it’s not

to make sure that there’s six young

innovative decisions and outcomes.”

totally clear that even working

Black kids that take my job after me.”

It’s a lesson that leadership across

within his own practice was entirely

It would prove a fitting legacy for

the industry would do well to learn.

for Rogers. As a theorist and writer,

a remarkable talent.

Rogers vaunted public space and the creation of dense, dynamic cities (believing deeply in the political power and value of his discipline), yet the bulk of his clients were banks and property developers, with his practice responsible for its fair share of socially corrosive luxury apartment blocks and corporate behemoths. Rogers, like all architects who engage with the forces driving

Images courtesy of Myles Kalus Anak Jihem via Wikimedia Commons, Murdo MacLeod, and Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners.

urban development, leaves behind a

When three become one

complex legacy, but his best works

In Christian doctrine, the Father,

will endure: proudly urban, socially

Son and Holy Spirit are understood

generous, and profoundly pleasurable

to be three distinct persons who

in their architecture. The field has

somehow share one Godly essence (very

lost one of its most memorable and

mysterious!) and, well, if it’s good

brightest practitioners.

enough for the Christians, then it’s good enough for design too. December bought news that the advertising agency AKQA had decided to expand its

A change of leadership

design portfolio, taking a majority

“A new world order is emerging, with

stake in the design agency Made

new centres of knowledge production

Thought to add to its existing

and control,” said the architect

stable of architects Universal Design

and author Lesley Lokko (pictured)

Studio and industrial designers Map

after her announcement as the curator

Project Office. Together, the studios

for the 2023 Venice Architecture

are to operate as The New Standard,

Biennale. “New audiences are also

a design collective that will

emerging, hungry for different

allow the three practices to work

narratives, different tools and

independently, while still sharing

different languages of space, form,

expertise and collaborating across

and place.” Lokko talks a good game

projects when required. In principle,

(with a superb CV to match) and her

it’s a good move, allowing three

appointment feels significant: she is

heavyweight studios to broaden out

the first Black person to curate the

their offering to clients without

biennale and only the fourth woman.

damaging their work by diluting their

In a field that remains overwhelmingly

core expertise. Let’s just hope that

male, pale and stale (with any talk

it proves as successful and enduring

Timeline

Just do it. Meta.

it for him and his partner to play

Game Pass platform: a subscription

Nike continued to carve out a space

during lockdown, but the traffic

service that has aspirations to do

for itself within the metaverse

it began to generate proved all too

for gaming what Netflix did for

in December when it acquired RTFKT

tempting. The New York Times snapped

television. For Activision, however,

(pronounced “artefact”), a two-year-

up Wordle for a seven-figure sum

the deal offers the possibility of

old company that specialises in

in January. So far, the newspaper

a reset from its checkered recent

designing virtual streetwear for

has kept its promise to keep the

history. Since mid-2021, the company

gaming and digital spaces. The

game free and ad-free for everyone.

has faced numerous scandals and

acquisition of RTFKT and its virtual

Bets on how long that will last?

lawsuits, facing allegations of fostering a “frat-boy” company culture

drip adds an element of excitement

that senior management failed to

and pop culture prestige to a digital strategy that has been long in the

Thierry Mugler (1948 - 2022)

address. Microsoft may have spent the

works for Nike. Since 2018 the brand

“I don’t believe in natural fashion,”

best part of $70bn to buy Activision,

has made six company acquisitions,

the fashion designer Thierry Mugler

but can a big cash injection cure a

all of which fall under the remit

told The New York Times in 1994.

company riddled with scandal? Looking

of machine learning, predictive

“Let’s go for it! The corset. The

at the number of payouts Activision

analytics, and digital retail. With

push-up bra. Everything!” Mugler, who

has already made to settle lawsuits

those earlier acquisitions Nike did

died in January, dominated fashion in

against it, Microsoft may need

a lot of the legwork for setting

the 1980s and 90s with designs mixing

something more than cash up its sleeve.

itself up to deal with the changing

latex, leather, and S&M, conjuring

face of 21st-century retail; with the

up garments that were outré, defiant

acquisition of RTFKT, they’re getting

and utterly transporting. “If we do

Ricardo Bofill (1939 - 2022)

into bed with the digital cool kids

it, let’s do the whole number,” he

Ricado Bofill was the postmodernist

to help stock their shelves. Cosy.

explained. And what a number it was.

rebel of 1970s architecture, but his pink concrete behemoths returned to prominence in the 2010s when they emerged as Instagram darlings. The Catalan architect, who died aged 82, built citadels and housing projects in sweetshop hues, painted the pool of his holiday home blood-red, and inspired countless film directors.

Bofill may have considered himself an outsider architect, but he lived long

Wordle on the street Timeline can barely remember a time before our daily Wordle ritual (although our editorial team is a 50/50 split between midnight and morning players). The simple word guessing game has the habit-forming quality most brands and publishers

A mixed deal

could only dream of, with players

Twenty-one years after Bill Gates

flocking to share scores cryptically

unveiled the original Xbox, Microsoft

on social media using a pattern of

is the world’s third biggest gaming

black, yellow and green emoji squares.

company. In January, Microsoft’s

Yet Wordle is also an anomaly in

gaming division grew larger still when

the economy of tech design, where

it acquired Activision Blizzad Inc

gamification and flashing pixels are

a publisher best known for series such

meant to keep us focused and clicking,

as Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, World

–

exchanging microhits of dopamine for

of Warcraft and Candy Crush Saga –

attention that can be charged for.

for $68.7bn, the biggest merger in

In the world of Wordle, by contrast,

gaming history. For Microsoft, the

you can only play once a day and

deal hugely expands its catalogue of

WWF + NFT = WTF

there's no advertising. Josh Wardle,

games and lets the company potentially

The new year saw the design world go

the game’s developer, originally made

offer exclusive titles to its Xbox

cuckoo for crypto, with NFTs suddenly

18

FEBRUARY

Images courtesy of RTFKT, Indüstria / Brad Branson and Fritz Kok, Silvia T. Colmenero, and @tremaineemory.

enough to become cool twice over.

JANUARY

MARCH

smuggled into random projects with

one thing is making money,” he told

all the elan of an egg slipped into

Business of Fashion in 2020, “how

the nest of an unsuspecting warbler.

can I dance their bottom line with

The heart of a pig

Inflamed by NFTs’ money-making

my bottom line?” It ought to be a

“We hope this story can be the

potential, brands and studios began

dance worth watching.

beginning of hope and not the end,”

churning out digital assets like there

said David Bennett Jr., speaking after

was no tomorrow (although, to be fair,

the death of his father David Bennett

given the technology’s well documented

Sr. in early March. In January 2022,

effect on the environment, there may

Bennett Sr. broke medical ground when

well be no tomorrow), with perhaps the

he became the first man in history

most egregious example coming courtesy

to receive a heart transplant from

of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), an

a genetically modified pig – the donor

organisation you would have thought

animal having been genetically altered

might have a vested interest in not

to eliminate any genes that might

setting nature on fire. Alas, February

trigger an aggressive rejection

saw the charity’s UK brand launch

response, as well as bolstered

Tokens For Nature, NFTs of cute

with new genes to aid a successful

animals such as the Galápagos penguin

transfer. The surgery was performed

and the Amur leopard rendered as

by the University of Maryland Medical

rotating, digital cubes, all profits

Center and its initial success seemed

from the sale of which would be used

to offer a future in which chronic

to fund conservation work. Right.

organ shortages may be eradicated.

Suddenly, animal tissue was the

Twitter quickly stepped up to do what it does best (administer a thorough

Getting out of the cookie jar

subject of a daring new design field

bollocking) and, a short while later,

In February, Google announced the

in which biological matter could be

the WWF abandoned the scheme. Let this

next stage in its ongoing attempt to

minutely adapted to help save human

be a lesson to design at large: just

overhaul its treatment of third-party

lives. Xenotransplantation of this

because something can be an NFT,

cookies – the means by which companies

kind brings countless ethical issues

doesn’t mean it should.

track your movements between websites

(that poor pig for one thing), but

and tailor the adverts you see

it also represented hope to many.

accordingly. Under Google’s new plan

Bennett’s death is tragic, but

All hail the Supreme leader

for Chrome, these cookies will be

his treatment remains trailblazing.

VF Corp has had big plans for

replaced by “topics”, which take

For more than a month, a human lived

streetwear brand Supreme ever since

patterns from your browsing history

thanks to a pig’s heart. Bennett may

it acquired the cult label in November

and lump them into broader categories

have been the first, but he surely

2020. Supreme is undoubtedly cool

(transport and travel, sports, comics

won’t be the last.

and VF’s CEO Steve Rendle had assured

and animation etc.), of which three

investors in 2021 that it could use

will be provided to advertisers each

this cultural cachet to grow its

time you visit a site. For Google,

X marks the spot

current $600m annual revenue and

the move is intended to keep hold of

Do you get buyers FOMO? Are you

become a “billion-dollar brand in

users through provision of a “privacy

susceptible to scarcity marketing?

the coming years” – after all, what’s

friendly policy”, even if privacy

Well, hold onto your credit cards,

cooler than helping rich corporations

actively goes against the aims of

because Swedish design brand Hem is

get richer? Well, February brought

online advertising, which is how

launching Hem X, a niche outlet that

news of the person Rendle is backing

Google actually makes the bulk of

will sell limited edition, handmade

to help Supreme make that cool

its money. As such, it’s a balancing

designs from a rotating cast of

billion, announcing Tremaine Emory,

act, and any alternative Google offers

designers, artists and curators.

founder of fashion brand Denim Tears,

its advertising partners will clearly

The first Hem X collection has

as Supreme’s new creative director.

be less appealing than the hyper

been curated by the Swedish interior

Emory made his name through a series

individualised data they can harvest

decoration collective Arranging

of collaborations with international

at present. Those poor advertisers!

Things, and will include pieces by

brands such as Nike and Levi’s, into

Is nobody thinking of their needs?

up-and-coming makers Rasmus Nossbring,

which he managed to infuse political

But with Chrome said to account

Lisa Reiser, and Jonatan Nilsson.

messaging and commentary surrounding

for well over half of all global

The launch will contain fewer than

the experiences of Black Americans.

web traffic, advertisers are

100 pieces, so you’ll have to be fast

Emory seems an astute choice for

likely to have to accept that

– and prepared to spend a minimum

Supreme, particularly as he’s under

that's simply how the Google

of €599. The model of limited drops,

no illusions about what he’s being

cookie crumbles.

which originated in streetwear and

brought in to do. “[Brands’] number

sneakerhead spaces, is beginning

Timeline

to ripple outwards from fashion.

attacks that were to come. Ukraine

Perfume brand DS+Durga, for example,

has fought back, however, with its

has become infamous for its “studio

own volunteer IT Army targeting

juices” – extremely limited one-off

Russian transport and power networks.

runs of fragrances that sell out in

In one instance, Russian energy

a flash. But while impulse purchases

company Rosseti had to shut down

of beauty products or clothes are one

its electric vehicle charging points

thing, buying homeware tends to be

after they were hacked to display

a longer term commitment. Then again,

messages insulting Russian president

you’ll get ultimate bragging rights

Vladimir Putin. The Lithuanian-led

and you won’t see the same piece pop

EU rapid cyber response team has

up on everyone else’s Instagram grids.

also deployed for the first time to

Virtual elbows at the ready.

help defend Ukraine against Russia’s attacks, while Romanian cybersecurity agency Bitdefender has lent its resources to the cause.

An early Pritzker Three cheers for Diébédo Francis Kéré, winner of the 2022 Pritzker Architecture Prize! After 2021's edition of the "architecture Nobel" celebrated Anne Lacaton and JeanPhilippe Vassal for their work in renovating and reclaiming existing spaces, it is encouraging to see the award continue down the path of recognising socially conscious forms of practice. Kéré made his name designing a series of schools and medical facilities using materials local to their sites, developing participatory, climate-conscious architecture that could be built resources as possible. “He knows,

Ukraine’s cyber-security ministry

from within, that architecture

warned in March that the nation is

is not about the object but the

fighting the world’s first “hybrid war”,

objective; not the product, but the

with Russia simultaneously raining

process,” the Pritzker jury's citation

down missiles on its cities and

for Kéré read. A smart choice for

deploying digital weaponry against

the Pritzker, then, and one that

its internet. A report from UK and

caries an additional pleasure. In

US intelligence agencies found that

the past, the Pritzker has typically

Sandworm, a Russian state-backed

served as a lifetime achievement

hacker group believed to be behind

award, often given to practitioners

the 2017 NotPetya cyberattacks on

in the twilight of their careers.

Ukraine, had developed a new type

By contrast, Kéré's practice is

of malware called Cyclops Blink,

thriving, with a host of larger

which could prove devastating in

projects currently underway. Kéré

disrupting Ukrainian infrastructure:

has already enjoyed remarkable

days before the physical invasion

success, but the best may be yet

began, the nation suffered a

to come – perhaps they'll award him

distributed denial of service (DDoS)

some kind of super-Pritzker in 2042.

attack that targeted websites of Ukraine’s government and banks, with digital chaos prefacing the physical

20

Image courtesy of Martin Brusewitz.

by local communities using as few

Cyberwar in Ukraine

Timeline

Emeco Abides Words by Oli Stratford Photographs Ramak Fazel

“Look,” says the architect David Saik, grinning down the line from his studio in Berlin, “we all know there are fantastic old industrial buildings where you walk in, sweep the floor a bit, and it’s basically there.” He pauses a beat. “This was not one of them.”

What Saik was dealing with was, instead, something of a wreck: a small former sewing workshop in Venice, Los Angeles. Built in the 1940s, the space stood just a couple of blocks over from the crummy bungalow occupied by The Dude in the Coen Brothers’ 1998 comedy The Big Lebowski. “These small buildings like The Dude’s bungalow are quite typical of the area” Saik continues, “but they’re being knocked down for redevelopment.

There are actually very few left, so [the workshop] was a lucky find in that sense.

But the first big, grand act was to not just demolish it.”

Demolition would probably have been easier. “It hadn’t had any money put into it in forever,” notes Gregg Buchbinder, CEO of the US furniture brand Emeco and the current owner of the space. “It had become very architecturally dishevelled.”

The main building was dilapidated and sandwiched between two supplementary spaces – a small, pitched-roof structure at the front, with a box garage out back.

“But when you went in, you couldn’t tell that these structures were connected and you couldn’t see the pitch of the roof,” explains Saik. “There’s no shortage of light around here, but the space itself was actually very dark. It just didn’t have any qualities that would, you know, attract you.”

And yet. “It was everything I was looking for,” says Buchbinder. This was to be Emeco House.

The idea for Emeco House began in the late-2000s, when Buchbinder became interested in the idea of opening a new

kind of space for his business. The brand’s factory – where it produces its celebrated aluminium Navy Chair (1944), as well as contemporary designs from studios including Barber and Osgerby, Jasper Morrison and Industrial Facility – is based in Hanover, Pennsylvania, but Buchbinder had begun mulling over the possibility of a space elsewhere that might fulfil a different purpose. During a work trip to Tokyo, for instance, he had found himself in an area of the city that caught his eye. “It was full of creatives,” he explains. “Photographers, candle makers, leather makers: it attracted me a lot. And as I was walking through it, I came across a traditional, wooden Japanese home and just thought, ‘That could be a really cool place for me to have a little showroom.’ Whenever I came to Tokyo, rather than stay in a hotel, I could just stay in my favourite area instead.”

Similar experiences followed in Paris and London, but Buchbinder never advanced his idea for an Emeco outpost.

Although he lives in Long Beach, it wasn’t until Buchbinder made the short trip across Los Angeles to Venice to see his daughter Jaye, Emeco’s head of sustainability, that plans began to progress. “I realised that Venice, where Jaye lives, is full of creative, inspiring people and it’s so close to LAX that anybody could easily fly in,” Buchbinder explains. “Our factory is on the east coast, and can be hard to get to [in Pennsylvania], so I often connect with people in LA. I just thought, ‘Oh, you know, maybe Venice could work.’”

The idea behind the space was relatively simple, but procuring it more complex. Buchbinder wanted a flexible space in which people could be introduced to Emeco’s products and brand through informal conversations, presentations or exhibitions, but also

22

a place where the public could visit socially or guests of the brand could stay overnight. “But there’s only about 7 per cent of real estate that’s actually zoned for that in Venice,” he explains.

When the sewing workshop came on the market, its previous owner looking to flip it at a profit, Buchbinder leapt at the opportunity. “It seemed perfect,” he explains. “It had two levels, with apartments upstairs and a larger space downstairs, which was exactly what I needed.” Further motivation came when Jaye Buchbinder introduced him to Designing Your Life, a 2016 design philosophy book by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. “It said to stop dreaming about what you want to do, and prototype it,” says Buchbinder. “Well, I make furniture.

I know how to prototype – that’s all I do.

Suddenly, this idea felt more like product design than chasing a dream.”

One of the first steps in the project was to bring Saik onboard as Emeco House’s chief architect. Buchbinder and Saik had not known one another previously, but were introduced by a mutual friend who was aware that Buchbinder was working on a building project: the designer Jasper Morrison.

“It certainly helps to be introduced by Jasper,” Saik notes, “but equally that could have meant very little to Gregg.”

“Jasper doesn’t mince words, so for him to speak highly of someone meant a lot,” Buchbinder explains. “So I already knew that David’s quality of work was going to be good, but the overall decision wasn’t something that I can articulate clearly – it’s more that something either feels right or it doesn’t. And David was such an easy guy to talk to and be with.

It just felt a good fit.”

Core to this connection was an understanding of Buchbinder’s ambitions for Emeco House and his desire to steer away from a traditional branded space.

“Gregg wanted this very generous, open feeling, so that people could come in and get the sense that this was a real part of the neighbourhood,” Saik explains.

“It wouldn’t feel pretentious, it wouldn’t feel like a showroom, and it would have some accommodation upstairs so you could stay over or head up there for a drink. But we were a long way off that at the start. We really had to start taking everything out piece by piece, before looking at how we could bring it all back together.”

Guided by Saik, who worked in concert with the local architect Keith Fallen, the project began to radically restructure the space from the ground up. The downstairs was opened up, such that you can now look through the entire building from the front door through to the rear courtyard and out onto the alley beyond, which is separated off by an industrial rolling door. These changes to the internal structure were radical, but intended to appear discreet. “I really like that, now, you can’t really tell what is new or old,” Saik says. “Because we did a lot to get these spaces to connect.”

New apertures were created within the structure increasing light within the space, while a central light well was introduced across the two floors. Within this double-height space, Saik has planted a vast cactus that stretches upwards through the building, providing “a kind of iconic element that holds the core of the building together,”1 with the light well additionally driving airflow to ensure that the space can be naturally ventilated.

Upstairs, the building’s original wooden joists have been maintained, adding to the sense of a more domestic space.

“It’s a little bit like a beach shack up there,” Saik explains. “But a very nice beach shack.”

Throughout the development, the guiding notion of prototyping remained essential, particularly when the project was slowed by the onset of Covid-19.

In total, Emeco House took five years to create, with the team using this extended development period to allow for constant refinement. “It clearly took longer than it had to because of the circumstances,” 1

Fans of The Big Lebowski may enjoy the parallel between Saik’s unifying cactus, and the Dude’s beloved rug, which “really tied the room together.”

Saik concedes, “but there’s never anything wrong with a project being built slower, especially with an existing building. It gives you the advantage of being able to actually stand there and say, ‘Well, I’m standing next to this window: should we keep it or not? Should we extend it a little bit? Or how about some more light here?’ Jasper always says that the problem with architecture is that you can’t make a prototype, but if you’re building slower that’s essentially what you’re doing. You can’t get everything right from the start and you’re always going to change something if you’re standing there. That was the process that we tried to apply to every aspect of this building.”

The slowness of the development fed into Buchbinder and Saik’s desire to focus on the detailing and materiality that would be core to the space. A large front window went through multiple variations until everybody was satisfied with its proportions and placement, while door and window frames were specially executed in galvanised steel; “Which ties to the vintage of the house,” Buchbinder notes, “but David had to find a local guy to specifically make those, because nobody does it any more. That took about 10 times more effort, but it just looks right.” Elsewhere Saik designed bespoke doorhandles that are precisely calibrated to their positioning in the space, ensuring that they won’t be hit when the blinds are lowered, nor make contact with a wall when the door is opened. “It’s rare to find someone who wants to have a discussion about door handles for two weeks,” says Saik, “because a client typically just wants the door handles they saw in some chalet in Switzerland or something. But Gregg was always driven by questions over whether we could do things a little bit differently or a little bit better. He really kept the project moving forward over a very long period of time.”

To Buchbinder, this approach grew out of Emeco House’s positioning as a passion project, rather than a conventional branded space. “The biggest benefit to the process was that most of the time a client has a deadline and a budget – I didn’t have a deadline and I didn’t keep a budget,” he explains. “This was more of a debate about what made sense and would work.” Saik took Buchbinder to

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visit Peter Zumthor’s Kolumba Museum in Cologne, for instance, in order to see an example of the lime plaster finish he had in mind for the space. Buchbinder quickly became infatuated with the material. “It was about three times the cost of a more conventional material, but it seemed perfect for this project,” he explains.

In addition to its tactile and aesthetic qualities, this plaster brings environmental benefits – while lime releases carbon during its production, it also captures ambient CO2 during the carbonation process that sees it revert to limestone – feeding into the wider ecological conscientiousness of the building. All power is sourced form solar panels on the roof, with temperature managed by airflow through the building and its many apertures providing daylight for illumination. “It’s essentially off the grid,” Saik notes. “Although we haven’t designed it with materials specifically made for sustainable construction, it’s very practically sustainable.”

The space’s design is considered, but intended to be relaxed – what Jaye Buchbinder, who worked with her father to develop the house, describes as “a quiet comfort”. “Nothing is flashy,” she says, “but everything is thought through.”

To the Buchbinders, the space stands as a manifestation of Emeco’s wider design work, built around the same principles that the company designs its furniture in accordance with. “This was just like a chair project,” Buchbinder summarises.

“Make sure we talk about the materials we use and consider any connection, because that’s where things fail.”

Within Emeco House, the individual details are all designed to add up, but ensuring that they were executed properly was a hard-won battle and the work of half a decade. “Someone talked about it being minimal, which is a word that many people, myself included, don’t like,” Saik explains. “Because this building really isn’t minimal. It’s the product of everything we wanted to do; everything we wanted is there. So, really, you could say that it’s maximised. The design wasn’t a process of just reducing everything down to a clean, white form. While the final result may appear simple, it’s actually anything but.” He pauses for a moment, before laughing. “If you had to pay for it, you certainly wouldn’t say it’s minimal.”

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QUEST A new SEAQUAL fabric, made from recycled marine plastic. #seasickofplastic

The Whole Tapestry Words Mitzi Okou Photographs Sade Fasanya

In a time of awakening and reckoning, Before Yesterday We Could Fly is a rose from the concrete, emerging from a museological world that has long been rigid in accepting and allowing Black creativity into its realm.

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Curated by Hannah Beachler, the Oscar-winning production designe behind Black Panther, and the academic Michelle Commander in collaboration with New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met), Before Yesterday We Could Fly is labeled as a “period room”, although in truth it is everything but. The room is a replica domestic space, but one that proposes a new history of Seneca Village: a 19th-century community founded predominantly by free Black tenants and landowners that was razed in 1857 by the City of New York to create space for the construction of Central Park. Before Yesterday We Could Fly captures this community’s past and infuses it with a present and future: what if Seneca Village, and historical and contemporary communities like it, had the opportunity to grow and thrive?

This question has allowed the installation’s curators to bring together work from Black artists and designers from around the world to create a space that is monumental and iconic. Its pieces speak to moments, objects and people that have shaped universal Black experiences and similarities across different Black cultures, while also speaking to specific narratives that Black individuals can relate to. It is a moment that has been a long time coming, newly installed in the Met to offer a fresh perspective on the concept of the historical period room – a format that displays architectural components and decorative objects in an aesthetically pleasing way, but which typically tells only a partial truth or else leaves out the truths of the marginalised.

Rather than purport to represent a specific period, Before Yesterday We Could Fly is a space unconstrained by time, which collapses together the past, present and future. It is a reclamation and repurposing of history that allows Black people to think about possibilities that might push their minds and imaginations beyond the confines that the American system and its ilk have set for not only themselves, but for generations to come. Looking at the room, I imagine myself as a traveller through space and time, transporting myself to a future and a dimension where Black people are thriving and technological advancements are powered by stories, rituals, and movements.

The works within the room are driven by speculative thought and contribute to how the space changes based on how the viewer imagines or sees themselves within it. Pieces such as Morning Cloak

by Tourmaline, a photograph in which a pink-haired,

Black trans woman sits angelically surrounded by decaying vines, or Iya Ati Omo by Yinka Ilori, a beautiful chair with the seat upholstered in African wax print fabric, capture cultural nods towards icons, memories, and thoughts from across the spectrum of Black experience – these works, and others like them, allow the room to simultaneously exist as a place of memorial and a playground for the imagination. It is a beautiful encounter between the different skills, crafts, and disciplines that have been used to tell a variety of Black stories. Inspired by the history and remnants of Seneca Village, the room reimagines the concept of “it takes a village”, before visualising what that village might actually look like.

To learn more about the process behind the project, I moderated a discussion that brought together some of those who created the room: Beachler, the Met curators Sarah E. Lawrence and Abraham Thomas, and featured designers Jomo Tariku and Ini Archibong.

Across the course of the conversation, an edited version of which follows, we traversed the journey that led to Before Yesterday We Could Fly and its importance to including, preserving, and amplifying the Black diasporic experience.

Mitzi Okou When I first heard about Before Yesterday

I Could Fly I was so excited. Since George Floyd and 2020 there has been a lot of much needed disruption within the creative community. But one of the spaces and communities that has been very slow to react to that reckoning with racial injustice is the museological and exhibition world, which has always been inflexible in accepting Black creativity. When I learned about this space, I was over the moon because it’s a moment we’ve all been waiting for. It’s iconic.

Sarah E. Lawrence We’re thrilled to talk about it and, given how you’ve framed your interest, I think it’s important to emphasise that this project actually started in 2019.

I arrived at the museum in March 2019 as department head for European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, which has a long, complicated history with issues of colonialism and empire. The director of the museum, Max Hollein, was interested in having a new type of period room, which was something I’ve always been interested in because of what I like to call “the conundrum of the period room”. Every period room is an absolute fiction, but their effectiveness is predicated on the invisibility of the curators’ hands – they seem very real, even though they’re not. I was

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Fabiola Jean-Louis’s Justice of Ezili, next to Yinka Ilori’s Iya Ati Omo chair.

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Out / Side of Time by Jenn Nkiru.

A collection of ceramic pieces by Roberto Lugo.

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in conversation with my colleague Ian Alteveer about whether we could start this project with that fiction, rather than concealing it – would that allow us to tell stories in our period rooms that are otherwise omitted? We were very sensitive to the fact that our period rooms are predominantly white, Eurocentric, affluent domestic interiors. We wanted to rethink that.

Mitzi And that was what led you to Seneca Village?

Sarah Seneca Village was just 200 yards west of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I felt strongly that the museum had both an opportunity and an obligation to address that proximity. Our fiction was to imagine that the Seneca community had continued to thrive – not been destroyed in order to create Central Park. Could we imagine a woman who was a descendant of the original community, who continued to live in her family home and, over time and generations, had accrued some degree of material wealth and furnished her home in a way that speaks to her family history and sense of self?

That was our fiction, but it wasn’t our story to tell.

In thinking this through, the first thing that I thought of was the movie Black Panther – I had been deeply impressed and very excited by the interiors that Hannah had created for that, particularly the study/ library room. Here was this designer who had already done serious research in imagining a kind of PanAfrican, Afrofuturist domestic interior in a way I found profoundly compelling. So I thought, “Well, I should start speaking to her.”

Hannah Beachler It was kismet. When Sarah called me I was in Detroit, working on a film that dealt with Paradise Valley and Black Bottom – predominantly Black neighbourhoods in Detroit that were razed for urban renewal in the 50s. We were doing location scouting and I was seeing the few Black homes from this period still standing around the city. I started getting really involved in the idea of how there had been a whole life there, but no one knows the story of what happened to it. Well, wouldn’t it be great to purchase some of these homes and renovate them as living museums? At that point, I get a call from the Met, saying they want to talk about this project.

I mean, I was just like, “The Met!? Of course – I’m completely available.”

Sarah Hannah explained that she was already dealing with this pernicious history of the destruction of African American communities across the United

States through claims of eminent domain for urban development, which essentially precluded the continued existence of African Americans in these spaces and instead created leisure areas that were predominately for white populations. Hannah’s vision and engagement with this project was so exhilarating that we basically handed her the reins

“The beautiful thing was that the museum heard me, they listened, and it became this thing we were all inside of.” —Hannah Beachler and said, “Okay, you do this.” We also reached out to Michelle Commander, a historian at the Schomburg Center who has worked closely on this material. But Mitzi, you mentioned the summer of 2020 and I should say that the inflection, framing, and conceptualisation of this project has been deeply informed by what happened between 2019, when the project had one intention, and its subsequent clarification and crystallisation in response to where we are now.

That summer was a very powerful experience. I can speak for all of us at the museum when I say that it meant a great deal to have a project like this to get us through that experience in a way that felt like we were doing meaningful work.

Hannah Talking about that summer, I remember just breaking down. That was a pivotal moment in the direction of this. As a Black person, a Black woman, most of your life is about holding that space and not letting it out – letting it be within you, dealing with it without outwardly projecting. But at that point I was so tired. We were quarantining with Covid, no one knew what was happening, and I just broke down. The beautiful thing was that the team at the museum heard me, they listened, and all of a sudden it became this thing we were all inside of. How we were approaching it, how we were looking at it, and all of the individual details became so important in light of the conversation going on that summer around racial inequity; around the death of Black

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men and women in the streets with no justice and no peace; and how we are taught the struggle and the pain of Black lives before we’re taught their joy as part of our four weeks of Black history that we’re allotted each year. From there, we all understood where we wanted to take this. It fell into place and I haven’t enjoyed anything so much in my life. I have never felt so safe, which sounds weird, but you have no idea what it means to be in a space where you may have felt that you didn’t belong, but then you find that you actually feel safe.

Mitzi There are so many things that are specific to one person’s experience in the space, but which also speak to the universal experience that a lot of Black people have. Even though it’s a period room, I feel like that term “period” constrains it a little bit, because it’s collapsing time within itself. It’s speaking to the past, the present and the future, all at the same time. How did you balance all of that?

Hannah Good editing and a good team. For the kitchen space, for example, a lot of it is just my experience of my Nana’s house. There’s so much stuff in there, but somehow it all seems put together. In that one kitchen you get your hair done, you clean greens, you have conversations. It’s alchemy. The balance is the result of having a story, and each piece serves its purpose within that story. That’s something that I do in my world as a production designer – I weave things through a set so that your eye is drawn through it.

What beautiful furnishings can come in and speak to this space? We have our “village potter” Roberto Lugo, whose work has been set out as if somebody had just gotten up from the table, but you also see that those ceramic pieces feature Harriet Tubman, Stacey Abrams, Beyoncé and all these iconic Black women.

For me, that is part of the empowerment of our person who maybe lives in this place and is bringing items from the past and the future – time tumbling and toppling over itself. That was a lot about how we could keep this space feeling dense, full, and lived in. How can we tell our story through these beautiful artists and their work?

Abraham Thomas I love what you said about objects tumbling into each other, because that word “alchemy” is so central to the room. It also makes me think of experimentation and layering, and the idea of this room as a call to action or confrontational gesture within the Met and its history of period rooms. It is such an interesting curatorial and artistic statement,

because we have these very rich, complicated, messy layers within the room. As you mentioned, Mitzi, even the term “period room” is difficult because it has a bounding nature to it – the idea that these are distinctive historic chapters we’re laying out, but that’s not the reality of any lived experience of an interior space. What is so powerful about the Afrofuturist period room is that it embraces and acknowledges the idea that there’s always artifice within conventional period rooms.

Hannah The Met has faced its history and present with its eyes wide open. They stepped away from the podium so these other voices could sing. Think about what that means to not just the artists, not just to me, but to everyone who walks through that space. So it is iconic, it really is iconic. This is where we need to begin with institutions taking a long, hard look at their history. How can the future be different in an equitable, inclusive way? Because diversity isn’t just a conversation, it’s action. That’s what happened here: action was taken and that’s what makes change. We stepped forward to show the pride and the joy of the Black diaspora. That’s what you feel first with the

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room, even if all of these other discussions about the pain and struggle are there too. You have Fabiola Jean-Louis’s dress [Justice of Ezili, a garment made from paper, gold, Swarovski crystals, lapis lazuli, labradorite, brass, ink, and resin, ed.], for instance, which initially just seems like a beautiful dress, but when you start to look for longer you see it includes chainmail and you see that it’s a body at rest, which you don’t often see in the case of Black women.

Mitzi Jomo and Ini, how do you see your work within what we’re talking about?

Jomo Tariku Why don’t I start by indulging you with how I got into this, because if an Academy Awardwinning production designer as accomplished as Hannah could feel whiplash from the Met calling, you can imagine how I felt receiving that first email – it was the first time I’d been contacted by a museum, let alone a museum of that caliber. It has been an emotional journey to get to this point where I have my Mido Chair [a technically complex walnut veneer chair that resembles an afro comb, ed.] in the Met’s collection. I grew up in Ethiopia, where I had uncles with huge afros because they were into the Shaft movies or Jim Kelly, who was in Enter the Dragon with Bruce Lee. People like that were heroes, because you rarely saw Black people presented positively in movies. My uncles were imitating these African American actors with huge bell-bottom pants and elevator shoes, and as a kid I was fascinated by all these things. So I sent in the idea for Mido to the Met and they ended up commissioning it. I’d hoped that it might go along with Hannah’s vision, but it was only later that I discovered that the archaeological dig at Seneca Village had actually turned up a comb.

It felt like the universe was lining up.

Ini Archibong The biggest thing for me was how Hannah tapped into the element of Afrofuturism in my work.

So in this collapsing of time that you described, the thing I was hoping to bring was the extreme future, the science fiction, the comic book – that side of things. The pieces that I included were pretty sci fi, but Hannah somehow treated them in a way where it didn’t feel like a juxtaposition with everything else in there. She made choices like the TV set, which was simultaneously futuristic and retro [a multi-sided set designed by Beachler, programmed with a video by the artist Jenn Nkiru, ed], being placed next to my Orion table and underneath my [Vernus 3] chandelier, which really helped to make it feel like everything

made sense. The Vernus in the room is actually different to the original, which had a springtime, floral colour, whereas this is a bit more sour and radioactive in its colourway, and we went with steel metalwork as opposed to brass. The concept of that initial piece was the hope that is represented by the first bloom

“In this collapsing of time, the thing I was hoping to bring was the extreme future, the science fiction, the comic book.” —Ini Archibong of spring – a reminder that no matter how long the winters last, spring will bloom – but with this new colourway it becomes almost cautionary. What if you woke up when the snow has melted and all the flowers have bloomed differently as a consequence of the unnatural things put in the soil before winter?

That can be taken however it wants to be taken. But all of my work has that cautionary element to it. So with my Atlas chair, if you look at its detail, you’ll see a metal stone positioned between the seat and the leg – a little stone holding everything else up, like the story of Atlas holding the world on his back. As creatives of the diaspora, I think most of us can relate to that feeling of the weight of the world being on our shoulders to some degree. So all of the pieces fit within that context of having an Afrofuturist perspective and aesthetic, which is pervasive throughout my work.

Mitzi What was your first moment of going into the space when everything was on display like?

Hannah It was really heavy. I actually had to walk away and take a moment, because I couldn’t put it into words at all. Part of why I love to design sets is that you have that moment when you walk in, but this had that extra personal moment of taking me back through all of our meetings, everything that had happened that summer, and everything that we all went through. Everything culminated with walking in, touching it and moving around it, seeing all of the thoughtfulness – I can’t articulate how that feels. I cried, I screamed, I slapped people’s arms – I just didn’t know where to put all my excitement. I remember coming to the Met when

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I was 13 with my friends and we felt so grown up.

I was coming from rural farmland and had never seen a building like that. I had never walked through halls like that. I had never seen artwork like that.

To actually get that phone call and be a part of this exhibit – I cannot express how incredible and lifealtering that is.

Abraham Quite soon after I had joined the Met, Sarah very generously reached out and shared the project with me. Like Sarah, I’m a nerd about museum period rooms, so I loved that this was a piece of agitation around that form. For me, what was really important was the fact that there was going to be a long-term legacy. On a practical level, Sarah had said from the beginning that this project would involve making acquisitions for the permanent collection. My role is primarily as a curator of architecture, design and decorative arts, and a big part of that is adding things to the collection. That is such an important part of what we do as curators, so for me it’s notable that we have acquired roughly 20 design objects ranging across furniture, ceramics, glass and lighting design, all by Black designers, of the African diaspora. This will be a multi-year project, but I love that even in 10 years time there’ll be scope for these objects to be on display in our galleries and integrated with other curatorial collections to really elevate these stories and these makers in contexts that were previously unimaginable. When I saw that room open for the first time, it really got me thinking about what this will do for the Met’s collection and displays, long after I’ve left the museum.

Ini When I first went in I saw my pieces next to Roberto Lugo’s work – who I’m a huge fan of – and among all this other amazing stuff by people like Zizipho Poswa.

I went to that room every day for about a week and I still don’t know if I’ve seen everything – every time I go in, I focus on a different thing. I live on a lake in a small town in Switzerland, I don’t live in New York, so seeing a huge, grandiose thing like the Met’s period rooms is not part of my everyday. Seeing my pieces in that context was overwhelming.

Sarah I was deeply, deeply affected by this project.

The sense of camaraderie and community was really meaningful, because this was not a project that was immediately accepted by the Met community: it took a lot of careful work to explain not just the project, but the process, because we really wanted community buy-in. To say that this was a rocky road is kind of an

understatement. But we have gotten to a point where it is not only gorgeous – and every single piece in that room is just beyond – but it is also a new model of curatorial practice for the Met, which is a very hierarchic institution. We headed into this as a deeply non-hierarchic collaborative undertaking, in which curators and scholars and designers and artists were all working on the same plane to make this happen.

My intention was to model new modes of curatorial practice that might make the Met a better place to work, for all of us. And when I say all of us, I mean our diverse audiences and collaborators too. We were exploring new modes of engagement with the world for the institution. We’ve been incredibly fortunate with its critical reception so far, but more meaningful is seeing people who come in unexpectedly and suddenly see themselves, their history, and their families in these rooms.

Hannah The response has been lovely. There were a couple of critics, which there are always going to be because you can’t please all the people all the time, but here’s what I say about critics: you’re talking about it. End of story. You can hate it all day long, but you wrote about it, and you talked about it, and you published it. So you care about it. This means something to you, one way or the other. I would rather that than complete indifference, because this exists, it’s in the world, and that has been so important.

When you walk in, it’s everything that we talked about. Njideka Crosby’s wallpaper for the space is stunning and, when you look at it up close, you will see the collage, you will see the portraitures in her work – that’s what I want everyone to walk into.

I don’t care what you look like, who you are, where you come from, your station in life – this exhibit will meet you where you’re at, and you will find something in there to relate to.

Mitzi This space is reclaiming and repurposing Black history so that it’s sustainable for future generations.

The key word is “sustainability”, which is something we do not practice on. Sustainability has to do with profit, but not capitalistic profit: profit in a way that the people who benefit from that sustainability profit off of it, and therefore give back and it lives on. So how do we build more sustainable initiatives that reclaim and repurpose Black history so that people can continue to profit from generation to generation?

Sarah One of the challenges we had is that this project seemed like an outlier: it seemed out of keeping with

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Magodi - Noxolo by Zizipho Poswa.

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A jar by Thomas W. Commeraw.

Prestige Stool: Leopard by Bamileke or Bamun master beaders.

Thriving and Potential, Displaced (Again and Again and...) by Njideka Akunyili Crosby.

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the Met’s normal curatorial programming. But now that it’s open, there are a series of exhibitions and acquisitions that will follow. We have another exhibition that will open in March 2022 [Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast, ed.] dealing with the depiction of the Black body and abolitionist sculpture, for example. This will become part of a broader institutional commitment on the part of the museum. It’s very important for the Met to hurry up and get to a place where this is what we do and that it doesn’t attract attention because it’s an anomaly, but because these are extraordinary, thoughtful, provocative exhibitions, displayed right alongside others that may be considered more in keeping with the Met’s history. In the next year and a half or two years, we are going to be there in terms of our programming, but we we are still not going to be at that kind of sustainability that you’re talking about until our curatorial staff represents the diversity to which we aspire. I’m a big advocate of collaborating with colleagues outside of the Met. Hannah and Michelle [Commander] are amazing examples of that. Fictions of Emancipation is a collaboration with Wendy S. Walters, who is a poet essayist at Columbia University and a woman of colour. When I think of diversity in our curatorial practice, it’s not simply a question of race, but also new methodologies and professional modalities. I love working with people who aren’t art historians. My hope is that we can get to a point where we’ll have that diversity internally, but also through sustained collaboration with new types of colleagues from outside of the museum.

That will become a kind of default setting so that we will have rich curatorial voices in our exhibitions.

When we get to that point, we will have reached that notion of kind of sustainability.

Jomo Since my introduction to the Met, I have had four more acquisitions of my work by other museums.

Out of the four, I think three are by curators who were previously at the Met. Work still needs to be done behind the scenes. In my former life, I was a data scientist, so I’m always looking for patterns.

There needs to be a conversation going on about making a more robust effort on how to do a better job curating and acquiring Black art. The Met is the leader, so we are going to expect more from what it can do, other than just more installations.

Ini There needs to be more, and it needs to not be derived from a fetishistic lens – a lens that came

from the establishment of what it meant to be wealthy when travel was limited and people started to get access to “exotic lands”. Now that we’re in a global society, it’s time to shed that exoticism and fetishisation. Something like this shouldn’t be a novelty – it’s just what we do. It’s who we are.

Abraham In terms of broader sustainability and future projects at the Met, I’m actually currently working on this year’s Roof Garden commission, and we’ve invited the Los Angeles-based artist Lauren Halsey to produce it. Lauren is creating an extraordinary, large-scale architectural installation that will draw upon many themes related to Afrofuturism and the power of speculative imagination, so I’m excited to see the dialogue that will emerge between Lauren’s work and that of the artists and designers in the period room project, and to build off that existing momentum. Jomo makes an important point about the Met being a leader in the field, and the responsibility to model this sort of curatorial methodology that we’ve been talking about. As Sarah said, the change has to come from within, and the diversity of backgrounds we need is not just based on race or socio-economic background, but also in the range of approaches that we bring to this work.

We can’t afford for a project like this to be a flash-inthe-pan outlier. When I think about this period room’s location, it’s great how it is physically sited in the museum. It’s wedged between an 18th-century Italian bedroom and the British Galleries, and right outside is a key collection of medieval art. There’s this idea of asserting presence and saying, “No, we are here.”

This room literally asserts its presence in the heart of the museum, and I hope that can be a metaphor for how we think about projects like this. They shouldn’t be shy and skirt around the edges, they belong right in the centre of these varied collection displays.

Hannah It’s also a big responsibility for Black creatives in positions like my own. When we think about maintaining sustainability, we also need to think about the fact that when you’re the voice in the room, you need to say exactly what’s on your mind. I’ll give you an example of what I’m talking about. Not long ago, Prada had that issue with the little figure they had in their window [in 2018, Prada provoked outrage when it displayed products utilising Sambo imagery as part of its Pradamalia line in its New York boutique, ed.]. Everybody was like, “Well, if there was a Black

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person in the room, that would have never happened.”

Well, actually, it would have in some cases, because in some cases you just want the job. In some cases, you just want to be there and you’re just happy to be there.

So you stay quiet. That is not sustainability: that is not thinking about future sustainability and profit in the Black diaspora. Whatever institution, whatever industry you’re in, you have to be strong enough to speak up, even if that thing may be uncomfortable.

I’ve been in positions where I’ve felt like I should say something, but just stayed quiet. And then that little figure gets in the window.

Jomo I’ve done data research on Black designers in furniture design; I did my own survey of 173 companies, which found that 0.3 per cent of their designers are Black. When I told a couple of friends about this project, they pretty much said, “Look, you release this thing and you’re on a blacklist. You won’t get licensed.” But I needed to put this data out there.

Did I get calls from furniture companies? Absolutely not. But you know what, museums did call. A MoMA curator was the first person to reach out to say that they’d always known this was an issue, but they’d never seen it in numbers. What I like to tell young Black designers who reach out to me is that they should be doing more than just design. It should be about learning your history, and putting your version of the story out there. It has to be more than just, “Oh, I want a career,” because we need to win this battle. When we reach an equilibrium, maybe we can rest assured that things are going okay and we can lay off the pressure, but at this moment in our history change needs to be made. I think that’s part of the sustainability question you have. Advocating for others should be part of our work – it shouldn’t be a case of making it and then forgetting the rest.

It took somebody’s death to accelerate the debate to this level, which is deeply saddening, but it has had an effect of change on museums. Nevertheless, I recently saw that of the top 18 US museums – and that includes the Met – just 1 per cent of the art they collect is from Black artists. More work needs to be done. I watched the virtual opening of Before Yesterday We Could Fly again yesterday, and it really got me emotional, Hannah, when you talked about a Black girl walking in there and the effect seeing this would have on her. I consider this more than just a period room – it is about changing the tone of an industry within the creative world.

Mitzi That’s something that is not taught in design

practices or creative practices: how to create something that can be sustained for longer than you’re alive, but also sustain others as well.

Ini But if documentation, recording and inclusion hold any importance to anybody, it’s not to us as

“I consider this more than just a period room – it is about changing the tone of an industry within the creative world.” —Jomo Tariku Black people. Putting our work in a museum doesn’t help us to remain relevant or in the zeitgeist of our people – it allows me to be included in the narrative of Western society. If there is a benefit to that, it’s a benefit to the world at large, but not necessarily a specific benefit to people of African descent.

I don’t say that to be controversial, I’m just trying to be objective. If I wasn’t being put in a museum, and I was still doing my work amongst my people, such that they were the ones learning from it and absorbing it, it would continue to affect the way they did things going forward. It would build upon itself generation by generation. If we weren’t forced to fit into this paradigm, we wouldn’t need to be included in order for there to be a preservation of what we’ve contributed.

Mitzi I’m glad you said that, because it’s a perspective we need in this.

Ini I’m not a separatist or anything like that – I just like to be honest about what it is that’s happening.

From my perspective, one of the important things about this kind of outward display of validation is connected to my belief that there is a universal unification of all things. As long as anything is not being recognised for the value that it adds to the universal whole, then that whole is suffering.

Although I said it’s not necessarily important to us to be included, it is important for everyone else to have access to the creativity that we have to offer.

Mitzi But what are your hopes for the future of Before Yesterday, We Could Fly? And those can be completely

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wild because the room itself is actually based off of speculative thought.

Ini I hope they make it bigger and that it’s the beginning of more rooms like this – the beginning of the rest of the world being able to tap into what we have to offer as a people from our myriad different perspectives. The Afrofuturist angle is a great place to start, but there’s a whole gamut out there that can be explored.

Hannah Imagine an Afrofuturism period room that is all music and instruments from throughout the history of the Black diaspora. How would that story feel when time is collapsing over itself and you have past, present and future instruments? Bring in Questlove or Kendrick Lamar – that would be fabulous, because there are so many ways the story could be told. Other people can take this on and push it, so we can watch it transform a further time. I think that the Met is avant garde, because they’re the first to do something like this and really fight for it and bring it to into existence. As they say in the film world, it’s canon. They’re the first and everyone else didn’t get in the car quick enough.

Because this is history and this will go down in

history. You can say words all day long, but it’s action that makes change and they took action. For me to have been a part of the seed being planted and to watch it grow – I couldn’t ask for more.

Abraham Something that resonates with me is this idea of working with people who aren’t art historians.

I’m a big fan of cinema, so the idea of working with a production designer of Hannah’s pedigree was amazing. I love the idea of doing more projects like this, so we’re not just working with curators, historians, connoisseurs and experts in the traditional sense. We could work with production designers, musicians, playwrights, librettists. I like the idea of this room expanding the idea of how we tell stories.

A big part of being a museum professional is telling stories and engaging audiences. I would like to see how we can build on what this room has achieved and think about how we can learn from other experts outside the museum to tell stories in different ways and explore this rich, multi-layered narrative. This room has shifted us into an arena where we can be a bit more vulnerable about how we present the established last word on something. We’re open to numerous interpretations and there’s that sense of ambiguity about the stories we’re telling. There’s not one single narrative or way in which we present these histories; we can bring in other voices, and I hope that that can be something that permeates the way we and other museums do things. It’s not just an ivory tower, didactic way of crafting a story or presenting history.

There is an element of rupture within this project, which can be very healthy going forward.

Mitzi What did you or what do you still want to personally say to Black creatives?

Hannah That you are a part of this, you’re a part of this world, and you belong here. The thing that sat with me was that almost every time we spoke to artists, they would say, “The Met? I would never see my work there.” What I would say to Black creatives is: don’t ever think that. Always know that you can get there.

There will be someone, whether it’s a Sarah or an Abraham or an Ian, who is there and who wants to make a change. They want to push the envelope and bring something new, and that could be you. It’s a shift in our mindsets to know that there are people fighting for this. The same thing happened with Black Panther. Victoria Alonso [Black Panther’s executive producer and Marvel’s president of physical, post production, VFX and animation, ed.] fought for that

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Mido chair by Jomo Tariku, next to Ini Archibong’s Orion table.

Vernus 3 chandelier by Ini Archibong.

Ceramics by Roberto Lugo atop the Imbizo table by Chuma Maweni.

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film to come to fruition for 15 years before I showed up. She fought the good fight. So don’t ever think that you do not belong, or that it is out of your reach. You just have to believe and, when it’s the right time, it will happen. You won’t see the entire tapestry, you will only see the strings that are in your life, until one day you’ll step back and see it all. But know that there is purpose and reason for your work, for your story and for your voice, and follow those strings because you will eventually see the tapestry.

Jomo It’s hard to follow that, but I would say that Black creatives who have struggled have a different view of what perseverance means. I started this whole idea of creating an African furniture line back in 1992 as part of my thesis work in industrial design, and I never let it go. I’ve had friends saying that if I dropped it I would be more hireable by others, but I wouldn’t let go because I knew it had a place in an industry that was ignoring it. Hannah, you mentioned the canon – the canon needs to include our conversation and our perspective. We are the advocates on the frontside, but on the backside we need people like Abraham and Sarah to do the work for us, because I have no clue whether museums get together and discuss this issue or not. All I can do is fight for this idea and, if a road is open for me, I should be able to bring other Black creatives along with me. We need advocates who say “Come on in.”

Sarah I would certainly echo Hannah in urging for perseverance. What’s also incredibly exciting and important is the ability of designers to be able to communicate the content of their work, and in that way educate the broadest audience, whether that’s a museum curator or the person on the street. I came to the Met from Parsons School of Design, where I was dean. We worked really closely with helping to educate our aspiring young designers to learn how to talk about their work and see how important that is. It’s difficult, because you react to furniture and decorative art objects and any work of art through a non-language based response. To learn how to put that into language, to help your audience feel that your work is approachable, meaningful and resonates for them, is a challenge. My message to other designers is to take that responsibility seriously. It is so important in supporting your creative act that you can explain it, because these are often very complicated designs that draw on a range of traditions, social practices and new technologies. The richness of that creative work

is not immediately accessible to everyone. To do that additional work to help articulate your practice is a very important part of this. And I would say this is not specific to Black designers, but it is a moment where the voice of Black designers has a particular resonance. This is a time where these explanatory, elaborating voices have an enormous impact on the future of a diverse creative practice for design.

Abraham It’s really about the invitation. I hope this can be a statement about generosity and an invitation to engage in dialogue. An important legacy of this is that the work of Black designers has a place on our part of the map and the real power here is to integrate this work amongst the encyclopaedic range of our collections. Jomo talked about the archaeological object, the comb, that we have in the room and how that connected with him, but you’re also thinking about the way in which Ini’s work relates to his collaboration with Murano master glassmakers or Southern California modernism and the work of someone like Fred Eversley [an American sculptor known for his work with cast resin, ed.]. There are so many interesting connections with these works that they deserve more than just being sequestered away in a narrative around diasporic design. I think that’s what we can offer them.

Ini A lot of the time we’ve seen examples of Black creatives being forced into a framework that may not necessarily be natural to us. My biggest message is to do things unique to the experience we have, because we’re now getting to a point where we actually have that opportunity to do so. I’m an industrial designer who was educated at top design schools, mostly by white people. That experience has been important to me, and I wouldn’t have been able to make my work if I didn’t have those tools, but I use them in service to an expression that comes naturally from me. I now have the opportunity to express myself without being confined by the canons of appropriate expression that we learned in school. Finding the way to balance the inescapable system that we’re born into while not losing ourselves is the key to our ultimate success. E N D

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Associative Design (AD) is a project by the Portuguese Association of Wood and Furniture Industries (AIMMP) that aims to develop and promote the production of products from the home sector as well as launch challenges that will contribute to innovation in the use of both technology and design.

AD will support and push companies that share this vision and take their products further into exciting new markets.

associativedesign.com associativedesign@aimmp.pt @associativedesign

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Onions Have Layers Words India Block Photographs Jim Stephenson

Most architecture journalists visit a new opening once. The PRs hustle you round on the press tour, you harangue a captive architect with questions, some shiny press images land in your inbox, and the job’s a good’un. But I’ve kept coming back to East Quay in Watchet, south west England. A communityfocused chimera, East Quay is a multi-level complex that encompasses a restaurant, art galleries, artists’ studios, an education space, shop and holiday rentals.

It’s also the culmination of eight years of effort on the part of the Onion Collective, a female-led group of locals who banded together to try and address the chronic shortage of jobs, cultural venues and programming, community facilities and opportunities facing this sorely deprived part of the country.

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I’ve returned to the space not because the media didn’t get it right the first time – The Guardian hailed it as an “enchanting place” and it made a lot of end-ofyear best-of lists in the UK architecture press – but because it just works. East Quay is an art gallery with a dog-friendly restaurant that’s a 45-minute drive from my house – practically nothing in Somerset terms.

I’ve taken my mum there. I’ve taken my next door neighbour there. You can enjoy some culture in the form of an exhibition; sit in the sun with a glass of wine and a bowl of pasta, listening to the wind whistle through the nearby boat riggings; then buy a vegan candle, a book to make you think, and a fancy bar of chocolate in the shop. If you want to stay the whole weekend, you’ll soon be able to rent one of five holiday pods.

This, of course, is the point of a social enterprise.

You come along, engage with a place and spend your money there, which should then all get ploughed back into the town. The first time I saw East Quay, I got the grand tour from Georgie Grant, one of the Onion Collective’s five directors, and Piers Taylor, whose architecture practice Invisible Studios, along with Ellis Williams Architects, took on the job of designing the £7.3m government-and-grant-funded project. “Unquestionably, in 25 years of practice, it’s the most ambitious project I’ve ever been involved with,” says Taylor. Grant is more sanguine: “Life is complex, and buildings should talk about how life really is.”

jobs,” says Grant. “It was a sense of identity. It’s like when someone dies, that death reverberates out.” That same year, a report conducted by the Office of National Statistics found that four in every ten workers in West Somerset earn less than a living wage – the worst statistic in all of England. Watchet’s ward also ranks in the top tenth percentile for mental health issues across the country and, while the whole of England is facing a housing crisis, Somerset is at the eye of the storm; a 2021 survey from Halifax named Taunton – just 30 minutes’ drive from Watchet – as the town with fastest rising house prices in the country.

Four in every ten workers in West Somerset earn less than a living wage – the worst statistic in all of England.

It wasn’t always like this. In the 19th century, Watchet was a port town with a mill fuelled by some of the very coal it was importing and exporting. The West Somerset Mineral Railway was built to bring iron ore down from the hills to the harbour, where it was shipped across the Bristol Channel to Wales until the mines closed in 1883. The town’s busy harbour was the inspiration for one of the era’s most famous epic poems: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Samuel Taylor Coleridge made a home in nearby Nether Stowey and wrote his best work here amongst the hills and sea views, before succumbing to an opium addiction.

Today, there’s a 7ft-high statue of the Ancient Mariner and his infamous dead seabird on the esplanade.

The harbour isn’t open to commercial craft any more – it was shut in 2000 under a controversial Harbour Revision Order. Alongside sobering statistics about people’s lives, there are still architectural tells around the town that speak to Watchet’s more industrious past. From the window of one of East Quay’s holiday pods, which are having the finishing touches put to them at the time of writing, a workman points out the old trackway where cargo of local quicklime

East Quay is a beacon of hope in post-industrial Watchet, a town whose fortunes have taken a significant dive in the past century. Once a thriving harbour and mill town, and the terminus of the West Somerset Mineral Railway, Watchet is today the sixth most deprived ward in Somerset; West Somerset, in which Watchet sits, is the 45th most deprived of England’s 326 local authorities. In 2007 there were around 500 employment opportunities recorded in the town, for a population just shy of 4,000 people. In 2010, a report conducted by Somerset County Council and NHS Somerset sounded the alarm on the area’s high number of hospital admissions for alcohol misuse, which it linked to a poisonous combination of low employment and high house prices.

In 2015, the situation worsened. Watchet’s 265-year-old paper mill shut down and 176 jobs vanished almost overnight. “It wasn’t just the lost 52

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could be loaded directly onto boats from the West Pier before the lime kilns were abandoned in the early 20th century. All that remains, the workman tells me, are three tumbledown stacks in various stages of decay. “There’s a lot of those remnants kicking around,” he says.

and the education space, a cosy wood-lined room furnished with floor cushions made from rag-stuffed recycled bouncy castles and bouncy stools that look like the buoys that bob in the sea below. Scattered across the first and second level are the rental pods, one perched on stilts like the well-kitted-out crows nest of a ship. Each features a unique interior designed

by Pearce+ Fægen. The designers, who relocated to Watchet for the duration of the project, have managed to translate some of East Quay’s madcap DIY spirit into their interiors. One pod features a netting floor and a code painted onto the walls in maritime signal flags.

Another features a cheeky illusion in the form of a bathtub sawn in half and turned into a sofa. Leave the curtains open and anyone looking up from the seaside would think someone sat in it had been caught taking a semi-public soak.

On the exterior, the pink concrete continues up from the ground floor in some places, augmented by corrugated metal cladding with rust-red stripes and sharp angles of grey metal that stick out against the sky. For the traditional British seaside, it is decidedly postmodern. “It’s two lightweight sheds on a plinth,” summarises Taylor, “All of us loved the ad hoc, antiarchitecture-type buildings around town,” he continues, enamoured by Watchet’s boat sheds and lean-tos.

“They really influenced us.”

Local reception to its design was initially mixed.

“It’s a shockingly contemporary building in an ancient harbour town in West Somerset,” says Grant, who estimates that there was a 50/50 split of fans and detractors on the Onion Collective’s Facebook page right up until the building opened in November 2021.

They found that if they posted interior shots then the reaction would be positive, but renders of the exterior or construction photos would soon attract a 200-postlong argument over modern architecture. The mudslinging got so heated that a local paper, the West Somerset Free Press, started printing some of the choicest insults against the design, accusing it of resembling “Legoland” or looking like a “four-yearold drew [it]”. But once the huffy denizens of social media were able to experience East Quay in real life, the grumbles about modern design have, it appears, melted away. “When they experience it, they get what the architecture is trying to achieve,” says Grant. “You see people’s surprise and joy. It’s so unexpected; it allows architecture to express something more.”

The architecture of East Quay is a contradiction that coalesces into something more than the sum of its parts. It is a new thing on salty earth in an ancient place. It represents jobs in a post-industrial town, and a community centre in a country whittled down to the bone by decades of austerity. Up close, you can’t miss East Quay. On top of the centre’s sturdy concrete base is a strange collection of angular structures clad in corrugated metal, which bring to mind jetsam blown in from the sea, or farm buildings tumbled down the hill behind. But walk out along the sea wall and you can see it start to blend with the red-tiled rooflines of Watchet. Once you’re up on the hills looking down, it almost vanishes – Invisible Studio living up to its name.

At its base, East Quay is built like a fortress. Its high, flat-faced walls of pinkish concrete buffed smooth are unscalable, a bulwark against the wind that whips in from the sea. Although the space appears impregnable, there are multiple routes in and around East Quay via stone steps, cut-throughs and alleys that connect to the quayside, and a coastal path that runs behind the site, parallel to the town’s railway. The centre’s plan is L-shaped, with a sheltered outdoor space at its centre. “We wanted to make a courtyard that was protected from extreme weather where people could gather,” explains Taylor. The courtyard is also host to Contains Art, three shipping containers that have been converted into miniature art galleries, and outdoor seating for the restaurant. Wide glass doors open onto the restaurant on one side and the art gallery on another. The rosy-hued concrete has been left raw, giving the halls a bunker-like feel apart from in Gallery One, where a cathedral-like cylindrical column has been been buffed as smooth and shiny as rose quartz. Taylor insists I reach out to give it a pat.

Atop this monolithic base is a pleasingly ramshacklelooking second level where the architects have installed the artists’ studios, full of inimitable seaside light for painters and photographers, and equipped with shopfronts to attract passing customers (the tenancies help fund East Quay). Across the way is Gallery Two 54

Making sure Watchet’s residents know they have a place in East Quay is important to the Onions.

The press attention has brought interest from further afield: the pods are booking up far in advance. Once they’re finished and ready to be rented out, the group plan to hold a grand opening for this final stage of East Quay, along with a screening of a film about the project made by Taylor and Owen Pearce of Pearce+ Fægen.

But before that, the Onions want to have an open day to allow Watchet’s residents to come and snoop around the holiday lets, giving them a sense of ownership over what will be the only non-public parts of the whole complex. Nosiness is a vital part of community engagement.

“It’s two lightweight sheds on a plinth. We loved the ad hoc, anti-architecture-type buildings around town.”

—Piers Taylor

The East Quay Kitchen – a way to create jobs and turn a profit, with the enterprise part of social enterprise being crucial to East Quay’s long-term prospects – already has its regulars who come for breakfast. “It’s becoming a meeting place,” says Grant. The Onions have also found it has become an unexpected but welcome staging post for those visitors who may not feel comfortable walking straight into an art gallery. Invisible Studio’s architecture is beautiful, but those big, ruddy concrete walls and the white art-filled rooms within are a little intimidating.

From the cafe windows or, on dry days, the trestle tables outside, those who may be less confident about entering an art space can “test the air”, says Grant.

They’re considering putting a sign for the gallery in the courtyard to create an enticing breadcrumb trail right up to its door.

One group the space is already popular with are the local teenagers. The first time I visited in October, Grant was quick to tell me with a certain amount of pride that when school finishes they flock there

to order a portion of chips washed down with a Coke.

“It’s funny,” she says, “when we gave a talk to the police commissioner he asked us, ‘So tell me, how are you going to stop the youths from congregating?’” They tried to explain that young people congregating in East Quay would be a feature, not a bug. When I returned in February, it transpired that they’ve grown even bolder in congregating over the winter. “The teens are lovely and troublesome,” adds Grant. “They love the reception area because it has a free sofa and, when they get rowdy, we push them upstairs to Gallery Two. They’ll be on their phones, but maybe they’ll take the art in, unconsciously.”

Formal youth engagement programmes can often be cringeworthy, but at East Quay the connection has been allowed to happen organically. In a first-floor workshop, for instance, local carpenter Hannah Griffith Prendergrast has been squirrelling away and working with the odds and ends of wood left over from the space’s construction and fit-out. “It would have been skipped otherwise,” shrugs Griffith Prendergrast.

“It would have cost the builders more to get rid of it.” With supply chain issues pushing up the price of timber, it’s a thrifty solution and one that produces beautiful results – everything from old scaffold boards that Griffith Prendergrast has turned into tables and benches for the café, to clever little shelves for sandpaper (ordered by grade) made from leftover plywood. Young people, Grant and Griffith Prendergrast tell me, love to drop in here and try their hand at making things. While I’m there, they earmark a place to store a vast Minecraft-inspired figurative sculpture one of the teenagers is planning. Meanwhile, up at the topmost pod, graffiti is drying on the walls. The teens were involved, but it’s not the casual vandalism the police commissioner was afraid of; a graffiti artist was invited to decorate the space as part of a residency, so showed them how to master the art of spray paint.

The murals are meant to evoke local symbols, but there’s clearly been a bit of creative licence – radlooking motorbikes and dinosaurs feature heavily in the design. “I didn’t know Godzilla visited Watchet,” quips Grant.

Teenagers are, in fact, the origin story of the Onion Collective; without them, there wouldn’t be an East Quay. The seeds were planted by two local sisters, Naomi Griffith and Jessica Prendergrast, who set up a youth centre called Minehead Eye. The centre was supported with £3.2m in funding obtained through

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Myplace, a government scheme that ran from 2008 to 2013, and which gave a total of 63 grants towards the development of youth centres. Myplace was the last bit of money the UK government put towards

Frustrated, they took matters into their own hands. The Onion Collective incorporated in 2013 as a community interest company – a type of social enterprise that operates for the community rather than private shareholders. Through arts programmes and local collaborations they built inroads and networks, with East Quay as the latest step in their plans. With its pods for weekenders, shops selling paintings, and a restaurant offering roasted romanesco and tahini, East Quay isn’t necessarily a teens-first kind of building. But in a county where more than 62 per cent of the population will be over the age of 50 by 2029, the Onion Collective is keeping one eye on the youth of Watchet. “If you’re a kid growing up from a deprived background here,” says Grant, “you’ve got the least chance of anywhere in the country.”

“If you’re a kid growing up from a deprived background here, you’ve got the least chance of anywhere in the country”

It’s hard to talk about East Quay without overusing the C-word: community. “When you talk about community it’s sort of a misnomer, because there’s no such thing as one community,” says Grant. “It’s a whole load of different groups coming together.” There’s not a single Watchet community, but rather scores of overlapping economic and social layers, sometimes interlocking – and sometimes at loggerheads. “When we talk about community, what we really mean is conversation,” says Grant. “You build community by having as many organised conversations as possible. Even though they have differences of opinion, you ask people to imagine what that perfect future might look like, if everything went well.” Keeping everyone’s eyes on the communal prize is more than half the battle, it seems. “Any community organising is three quarters managing relationships,” says Grant.

To help capitalise on these relationships, the Onions have decided to map them. Free Ice Cream is a studio that uses video game design technology to create digital products for arts projects and public sector entities. Working with the Onion Collective, Free Ice Cream’s founders Simon Johnson and Sam Howey Nunn built an interactive digital map of Watchet’s residents and their connections to each other. The methodology was low-tech: the Onions got 50 townspeople in a room together and asked them to write down answers to questions designed to help plot the people and organisations that make Watchet tick. The result of this is Understory, which may sound steampunk but in actuality looks like a blossoming network of spiderwebs or a map

—Georgie Grant

youth services; analysis from the YMCA estimates that funding for youth centres was cut by 70 per cent between 2010 and 2020. Over that decade, 750 youth centres closed down. At the same time, anti-teenager sentiment in the UK reached an all-time high from which it hasn’t significantly decreased since. Moral panics over antisocial behaviour have seen shopping centres and train stations install devices that emit high-pitched sounds that assault the more sensitive hearing of those under the age of 20. Businesses and councils install pink lighting in an attempt to ward off young people by highlighting acne. In a country full of architecture openly hostile to teenagers, a gallery space that welcomes teens to drop by to eat chips and hang out is radical.

Minehead Eye managed to adapt and survive when many youth centres went under. They added a skate park and a climbing centre, and became so successful that when the local council was forced to jettison its youth services team a few years ago, Minehead Eye was able to step in and take them on. Griffith and Prendergrast saw more untapped potential in their local area, particularly as to how combining social justice with judicious enterprise could do good where local councils struggled with meagre funds. “We used to meet all the time In the pub, drink cider and have endless conversations about what should happen in Watchet and why it never does,” says Grant, “[We kept wondering], why isn’t anyone doing anything?”

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More Together Than Alone, an exhibition by artist Neville Gabie that was the first to be shown at East Quay.

The Two River Paper paper mill.

The courtyard space at East Quay.

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of the stars. Each node represents an organisation or person, and you can filter them by shared goals such as mental health, housing or economic growth.

Understory charts the bonds and links made by social capital, with a slider that can be moved to adjust the degrees of separation between each node. Want to find out who else is committed to improving people’s physical health? Tinker with a few settings and you’ll

“It was a big risk for the council to take. Not every councillor is even going to understand what a social enterprise is.”

—Georgie Grant

learn that you can hit up the town band for help.

A wide cross-section of Watchet society is already on Understory: the mayor; the school’s head teacher; the local disability volunteer; the youth worker. “In times of trouble these people are tasked with disseminating information,” says Grant.

Of course, there have been troubled times recently.

When the pandemic began, the Onions spearheaded the response with the Watchet Coastal Communities Team to form a coronavirus support group for the town.

They coordinated with a local Co-op supermarket to bootstrap a system where people isolating could call a helpline with their shopping order, which would then be passed on to volunteers to bag, before being picked up to deliver to people’s doorways. An old-fashioned community effort with a contemporary twist, the scheme featured doorstep payments enabled by a card reader from SumUp, a mobile payment startup, so that the Co-op could be paid back at the end of the day. But as the pandemic drags on, even community organisers are feeling the drag. “Lockdown was exciting, there was that adrenaline,” says Grant. “Now so many people are so sad. We need gathering again, [we miss] the importance of physically being together.”

My last visit to Watchet came just after Storm Eunice had blasted up the Bristol Channel, putting our part

of West Somerset on a red weather warning. Luckily, East Quay had been left unscathed by the high winds.

Over a coffee in the café, Grant told me it had reminded her of one of the darker days of the project, when Storm Ciara – “a particularly horrible storm” – battered Watchet in December 2019, just as they were due to start construction. A cavernous hole opened up in the Victorian-era harbour wall and there were fears that the site would be found to be structurally unsound.

“We thought it was game over,” says Grant. “I remember sitting in the office in tears.”

Although engineers ultimately deemed the area to be safe, the site had already been burned by one doomed project. In 2008, developer Urban Splash, which specialises in building homes in decaying industrial spaces, obtained planning permission to build 75 homes designed by London-based studio Mikhail Riches. It was the year of the financial crash, however, and the plans never got off the ground, with the developers unable to agree with stakeholders on the details of the development. “Watchet is unique,” says Grant, “and they didn’t get it.” Reading over the notes from a council meeting in November 2013, you can see the unease with the Urban Splash scheme bubbling to the surface. “It was felt that the community aspect in the project was not catered for,” reads one bullet point. “Lack of affordable housing element,” reads another. The Onions had to work hard to nurture advocates who could lobby for East Quay from within the corridors of council power. Bridgwater and West Somerset is a Conservative safe seat, meaning its elected officials tend towards the traditional. A rabblerousing group of women looking to set up a social enterprise was an outlier. “It was a big risk for the council to take,” acknowledges Grant. “Not every councillor is even going to understand what a social enterprise is.”

Even today, with East Quay resplendent by the sea, it’s not all plain sailing. With the project almost complete, there has been a sting in the tail as the space’s contractor Midas Construction went into administration in February 2022. East Quay is safe enough, with just a bit of snagging and some janky plumbing and lifts to sort out. But if it goes under, the loss of Midas Construction will hit the region hard – it employs almost 500 people with the same number again relying on it holding its place in the supply chain.

The Midas touch was a gift that became a curse, but Watchet, along with a swath of the Quantock Hills,

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is under the protection of a scourge that became a blessing. Somerset folklore has it that, long ago, the area was terrorised by the Gurt Worm, a dragon who fulfilled its fire-breathing, sheep-pilfering instincts until an axeman split it in half. The halved dragon formed a distinctive, humping topography, while its blood soaked into the earth and blessed the place.

Driving the winding roads to Watchet today, the only hulking beasts you pass are tractors from local farms and the haulage lorries trundling down to Hinkley Point C nuclear power station. It’s here where you can see Big Carl – the world’s largest crane – outlined like a yellow skeleton against the sky. Livestock remain unmolested and cows even have their own traffic light systems to cross the road at milking time. But on a wet day, the soil weeps a sanguineous copper red that could well be dragon blood. Indeed, the Gurt Worm is a part of East Quay – Pearce+ Fægen carved his fearsome likeness into the wooden frieze that lines one of the pods, while the local blood-red sandstone was ground up as the aggregate that stained its walls a sunset-pink.

With this fairy story in the walls, I was primed to believe in magic when my first tour of East Quay concluded with a flourish. In the concrete guts of the ground floor is a form of resurrection – a new paper mill. Two Rivers Paper makes rag paper by hand, wringing a soft and textured surface from the pulped up fibres of cotton clothing that can’t be worn any more. It’s a neat symmetry; Watchet’s original paper mill made its products from recycled materials, and here’s a recycling paper mill that makes art paper installed by a collective that uses art as a tool of revitalisation. It was a journalist’s gift: a perfect metaphor, the neat closing of a circle of life, a bow on a story about rebirth and rejuvenation.

The conclusion would practically write itself.

Except, it became apparent that the Onion Collective has far grander necromantic plans than a single artisanal paper mill to help symbolically replace the town’s lost industry. East Quay currently employs just shy of 30 people, making it Watchet’s biggest employer. But the Onions don’t want to stop until they’ve replaced all the jobs lost in the closure of the mill. I’ve been sworn to secrecy about the specifics of their experiments, but things are happening with fungi in the bowels of the abandoned paper factory. The design industry is increasingly turning to mycelium as a sustainable alternative to materials such as plastic. It grows fast,

feeding on dead things in dark places, and can be grown into all kinds of shapes. Once it has served its purpose, it rots back into the soil. The Onion Collective are at the prototyping stages of designing a series of mycelium-based products, the manufacture and sales of which they hope could one day employ scores of local people.

On a wet day, the soil weeps a sanguineous copper red that could well be dragon blood. Indeed, the Gurt Worm is a part of East Quay.

It’s a wonkier kind of metaphor, but there’s a link between mycelium and this unusual social enterprise.

They both are organisms held together by myriad inconspicuous threads that communicate in mysterious ways. Life that doesn’t just survive, but thrives in a place where there was once decay, recycling nutrients that were already there, but hard to see to the untrained eye. E N D

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Obsolescent Masculinity Words Aki Ishida Photographs Noritaka Minami

Like a time-capsule, the photographs of the interiors of the Nakagin Capsule Tower units – shot by Noritaka Minami over the course of many years – transport me back in time to the Tokyo of the 1970s, where I spent my childhood. More immediately, they take me slightly less further back, to a time eight years ago when I rented a unit in Tower B.

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Noritaka Minami, Facade, 2021. From the series 1972.

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Noritaka Minami, A905 I, 2018. From the series 1972.

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On a suffocatingly humid day in July 2014, I rented capsule B907 on Airbnb from someone who said they had been active in the preservation movement for the Tower. I had been following the controversy over the Tower’s fate – which was, at the time, still up for debate – and found the arguments for its demolition as compelling as those for its preservation as a cultural monument. These duelling arguments are writ large in Minami’s photogaphs, which were taken from the early 2010s onwards and show the Tower’s capsules in an array of conditions. Some show units left to decay from water damage and neglect, while others capture those that had been diligently repaired and maintained by their owners. Back in 2014, I was struck by this disparity between the building’s futuristic aspirations and aesthetics, and the nostalgia that surrounded the preservation movement. With either preservation or demolition imminent, I was keen to witness the Tower firsthand before it reached the next phase of life.

painted white, and the original Sanyo mini refrigerator and fold-out desk were still intact. The host had written on the whiteboard that the bathroom had no hot water, and the shower and tub could not be used. The toilet flushed feebly. The rented unit exuded impressions of a bachelor pad – it may or may not have been wiped clean after the previous guest, with the towels perhaps freshly washed, but certainly not crisp.

The Nagakin Capsule Tower opened in 1972 as one of a few built works by the Metabolists, a group of avantgarde Japanese architects who sought to develop a mode of non-Western modern architecture, basing their visions on the Japanese ideals of constant renewal and eternal adaptation. In the Metabolist spirit of continual growth, the architect Kisho Kurokawa designed the Nakagin Capsule Tower with a plan for its individual living units to be replaced every 25 to 35 years, while its concrete cores were estimated to last for more than 60 years. Now, 50 years since the Tower’s completion in 1972, none of the capsules have ever been replaced, and the building suffers from significant structural and cosmetic deterioration.

Kurokawa designed these capsules for a “homomoven”, an elite businessman who would occupy the unit as a temporary residence and office in central Tokyo, allowing him to eliminate as much as 90 minutes of daily commuting time from his main home in Tokyo’s outskirts. The capsule was designed to be basic; the man’s other needs, including socialising and meals, could be fulfilled by the city. Like a well-appointed business hotel that could be purchased by individuals, or by companies for use by their employees, the building offered amenities including secretarial and housekeeping services. In the Tower’s deluxe units, built-in Sony colour televisions and stereos offered the latest in entertainment technology. The Tower has never provided cooking facilities. Instead, it has always housed food services on the ground floor.

A café initially occupied this space, and later it was replaced by a convenience store that served bento boxes. Abundant eateries and pubs pack the streets and narrow allies surrounding Shimbashi Station a few blocks away.

There was a remarkable absence of women in the building during my stay. When I asked Minami if he had also noticed this during his visits there to photograph the building, he explained to me that even though women constituted around a fifth of the occupants,

I was struck by the disparity between the building’s futuristic aspirations and aesthetics, and the nostalgia surrounding the preservation movement.

Following the unit owner’s instructions on Airbnb, I walked past the security guard at the front desk to retrieve the room key from a stainless-steel mailbox in the lobby. Riding the elevator with its bare lightbulbs, which emitted a blue glow on the stained grey carpet, the neglected state of the Tower became palpable.

From the elevator landing, I spiralled up a few short flights of stairs, passing by doors covered with peeling paint, and makeshift plastic sheets and tubes that the residents had installed as drainage to divert the leaking water that plagued the two interconnected towers.

I turned the key to unit B907. In contrast to the dim stairways, reminiscent of neglected public housing towers built in post-war Tokyo, the unit’s interior struck me for its brightness. The cabinets had been recently 66

Noritaka Minami, A905 II, 2018. From the series 1972.

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Noritaka Minami, A806, 2021. From the series 1972.

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they were more reluctant than men to have a stranger enter and photograph their capsule. Even today, despite the deteriorating physical environment and the changed roles of women in Japanese society, the Tower remains largely a world of men, isolated in their capsules.

The masculine ideals of the 1970s have reached obsolescene alongside the building.

The Japanese masculinity of the 1970s emanates from the Tower’s original sales brochure published by its developer, Nakagin, and the promotional video produced by Taisei Construction Company. The video shows the architects – wearing pressed business suits and with cigarettes in their hands – presenting their visionary ideas of capsule living and novel construction methods: precast concrete panels and metal capsules, the latter fabricated by makers of the same shipping containers that travel the world for global commerce.

These images remind me of my childhood on the west side of Tokyo, with a father who commuted in a dark suit, carrying a matching leather briefcase. Fathers of our generation came home after dinners and drinks with colleagues. I only knew of these salarymen’s working lives from photographs of their company gatherings and retreats, which consisted almost entirely of men – with the exception of a few female administrative assistants.

It was around the time of the Nakagin Capsule Tower’s completion that my father traveled to the US for the first time, to visit the headquarters of the 3M Company. He came back inspired to move his family there and, a decade later, he did. These were the decades of unbridled ambition and exponential economic growth in Japan; the world of men who rebuilt the country following the devastations of World War II. Metabolist architecture, which grew out of accommodating an unexpected surge in population across cities and the countryside, mirrors the wider population and economic boom in Japan.

The Nakagin Capsule Tower is an embodiment of the far-reaching aspirations and utopian visions

of Japanese men of this era, which have yet to return since the economic bubble began to burst in the late 1980s. Along with the fading ambitions and confidence of the men who built it and were its target market, the Tower has heavily deteriorated both physically and symbolically. Perhaps more significantly, the masculine ideals of the 1970s have reached obsolescence alongside the building. Compared to their fathers, the newer generation of Japanese men are generally thought to be less ambitious. There is a term for these men, “herbivore men” or “grass-eater men”, coined by the writer Maki Fukasawa. In both professional and romantic relations, these man are seen to lack the assertion and proactivity associated with traditional Japanese masculinity – a description sometimes applied pejoratively, but with which many self-identify.

If they do choose to marry, more Japanese men now expect a home life in which they will share domestic chores as well as earning power with women – although surveys suggest they still lag behind men of other countries in time spent performing housework.

As with most works of modern architecture, the Nakagin Capsule Tower has been iconised through the highly stylised photographs that were taken at the time of its completion. For nearly its first four decades, the Tower was publicised globally through these images from the 1970s, when it stood as the tallest building in a neighbourhood still populated with pre-war wooden low-rise buildings. Kurokawa, the youngest founding member of the Metabolists, was an outspoken public intellectual and a dapper cultural ambassador. He commanded the attention of the mainstream media and frequently appeared in weekly journals and women’s lifestyle magazines. On television, he addressed the public with his images and stories of Metabolist architecture and modern ways to live, work, and play.

It was only decades later, around 2010 (the year that Minami first photographed the Tower), that images of deteriorating, water-damaged capsules began to alarm the architecture community worldwide.

Suddenly, the Tower’s fate seemed precarious.

While architects, students, and Airbnb travellers started to broadcast the deteriorating condition of the Tower on blogs and websites, Minami’s photographs seized upon the quotidian details of the everyday work and diversions of its residents, who appear ambivalent or nonchalant about the preservation controversy.

Minami stayed in the Tower 10 times between 2012

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Noritaka Minami, A503 I, 2021. From the series 1972.

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Noritaka Minami, A503 II, 2021. From the series 1972.

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Noritaka Minami, A503 II, 2017. From the series 1972.

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and 2021, sometimes for as long as six weeks in one go, building up relationships over the course of the decade – after all, he depended on the generosity and trust of the preservation activists and their network of residents to enter the intimate interiors of their capsules. Minami’s work unearthed the everyday lives within an iconic building; realities that stand in stark contrast to the architecture of spectacle and myths portrayed in the media and architecture publications.

The capsules were stylised by design, always appearing as if a stage set for photography. Every capsule is 10sqm and has the same circular window, which serves as a datum and a constant backdrop for every interior photograph. Kurokawa drew an analogy to a camera whenever he described this glass oculus, which originally included a circular, folded-paper shade that opened and closed radially.

In the 1993 documentary Kisho Kurokawa: From Metabolism to Symbiosis, the architect says that the oculus was “designed to have a mechanism resembling the shutter of a camera.” The window is visible from every point in the unit – except when one is in the bathroom. In the capsule I rented, with the paper shades long gone, I could not escape the eyes of neighbours who could see in through the oculus – a lack of privacy that I found intrusive and unsettling.

Besides resembling a pinhole camera, the capsule’s interior finishes amplify the short-lived, set-like quality that underscores the building’s overall impermanence.

The capsules were manufactured by metal fabricators at Daimaru who typically built shipping containers – an apt symbol for a live-work capsule that Kurokawa envisioned as a mobile living unit which, in a near future, could also transport the human. In fact, in his ‘Capsule Declaration’ of 1969, he calls a variety of vehicles, ranging across the traditional Japanese palanquin to train cars and aircraft carriers, “capsules”. While the futuristic appearance of the capsules’ built-in cabinets with their modern electronics suggests a materiality of plastic or metal, the interior cladding and cabinets were, in fact, built by carpenters in plywood – a practical, affordable material with a relatively short lifespan that suited the planned obsolescence of the replaceable capsules. Indeed, the general impression that the units were massproduced like cars is inaccurate. Minami’s images reveal handcrafted details, such as the radius of rounded corners, that vary from one unit to another according to each carpenter. The photographs also

show that the wood interior made the capsules prone to mould and deterioration from Tokyo’s humidity, exacerbated by poor plumbing design which ran pipes horizontally underneath each capsule.

Minami’s photographs chart not only the building’s state of neglect and deterioration, but also the different ways in which each capsule and the artefacts inside reflect the idiosyncrasies and characters of each occupant. Before preservation activists amplified their efforts around 2013, the Tower’s occupants could be categorised into three groups: those who were there for practical purposes, including its convenient location; those who had no other choice but to rent a unit in a dilapidated tower; and those who took an interest in its historical significance.

The most intriguing unit interiors are not those that attempt to restore the original conditions, or the ones furnished with minimalist décor, but those of the first two types of occupants.

The impression that the units were mass-produced like cars is inaccurate.

Minami’s images reveal handcrafted details.

One of the units Minami photographed belonged to a fish broker. Unlike the owners of units who chose to furnish their spaces with Rem Koolhaas books, iMacs, or mid-century modern furniture, the fish broker does not appear to have been concerned with his capsule’s aesthetics. He has replaced the built-in cabinets with a large utilitarian desk and metal wire shelving from which headphones and work-related papers hang.

Behind the desk are folded blankets and activewear atop a bed covered in a fabric featuring teddy bear and apple patterns, over which hang a few more casual garments, a helmet, and belts. A poster of saltwater fish and a map of Tokyo Metro crowd the wall. I wondered if the trader chose the Tower for its proximity to the Tsukiji fish market, but Minami said it was picked for its access to public transportation and Ginza’s nightlife. In a 2017 photograph of unit

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Noritaka Minami, A503 I, 2017. From the series 1972.

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Noritaka Minami, Bridge, 2021. From the series 1972.

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B506, which appears abandoned, a cut-out map of Japan covers the unit door. On the dust-covered cabinet is a white construction worker helmet. Was this a temporary home for a construction worker

treated the maintenance of buildings with indifference, and that contemporary culture privileges architecture in its original form over the lived experience of it. In the case of the Nakagin Capsule Tower, for a variety of reasons (including a lack of funds and difficulties in accessing the capsules with a crane to replace them), the developers neglected to maintain and replace the units. Without systematic maintenance, including unit replacements, the capsules could not evolve to match changing work cultures, gender roles, and domestic lives. At a moment when the building’s demolition is now inevitable, Minami’s photographs capture the lived experience of a tower that has reached obsolescence both physically and as a symbol of masculine dreams.

The night of my stay in unit B907, I could not bear the heat, humidity and lack of privacy; the glaring fluorescent light from the adjacent elevated expressway; and the deprivation of basic human comforts we have come to expect – hot water, a functioning shower, and a sense of safety for a woman traveling alone. At 2am, I searched online for a room at a Marriott a few blocks east and escaped down a stairway that appeared abandoned and unsafe, and out past the front desk, now unmanned after-hours. The next day, at 6am, I returned to the Tower to photograph it in daylight and return the key. E N D

I could not bear the heat, humidity and lack of privacy; the fluorescent light from the adjacent expressway; and the deprivation of basic human comforts. who migrated across the Japanese archipelago? Like a detective’s crime-scene photographs, Minami’s shots leave only fragmentary clues about the lives lived by the recent homo-movens; artefacts left in the nearlyabandoned Tower seem to belie the business-suit masculinity the architect and his client projected at the building’s completion.

Just prior to the pandemic, a foreign investor expressed interest in buying the Tower to preserve it, but these plans ultimately fell through. Now, in 2022, the capsules will be disassembled over the coming months and distributed to museums around the world or turned into rental units, and the owner will demolish the concrete cores and erect a new building on the plot.

That the capsules will travel the world as Kurokawa imagined, but through having reached obsolescence, is an irony. I wonder about the capsules shipped across the world: will they be cleaned and restored to their original state? When Rachel Whiteread cast the interior of an East London row house as an act of protest at their demolition, the ashes left in the cast chimney of House (1993) marked the lives once lived within its wall. Similarly, the capsules as they stand – with their leaking ceilings, dusty umbrellas, and exposed asbestos – convey more of the realities and subjectivities experienced by the Tower and its occupants than a restored capsule ever could.

In her book Maintenance Architecture, the architect Hilary Sample writes that architects have 76

The Electric Ribbon Trick Words Oli Stratford Photographs Fabian Frinzel

In 2018, Pere Llonch sent an email to the industrial designer Stefan Diez. Llonch, CEO of the Catalan lighting company Vibia, already knew Diez. Only a year previously, the pair had launched Guise, a lighting collection designed to make borosilicate glass tubes emit an ambient glow without any visible light source. So this wasn’t an email out of the blue. But even by the standards of two people who knew one another, Llonch’s email was kind of weird.

Stefan Diez, photographed in his Munich studio.

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“Dear Stefan,” it began, “As you know I’m very interested to find a concept based in connecting positive and negative… How do you feel about it?

Do you have something in mind…?” And that was more or less it. An abstract question, paired with an open invitation to design something – anything – in response. Llonch’s only requirement, it would seem, was that this thing should somehow connect positive and negative. Whatever that might mean.

Initially, the email appears to have been met with a degree of confusion at Diez’s studio in Munich; in fact, an earlier discussion between the two that had circled around a similar topic had failed to lead to any concrete ideas. “I thought it was a really strange briefing,” Diez acknowledges. “I remember that Pere was calling this thing Plusminus and talking about connectivity, and I was hearing him, understanding what he was saying, but it didn’t really ring a bell immediately. I wasn’t electrified.”

“The way I see my job is close to being a magician.

I always want that magic dimension wihin my work.”

—Stefan Diez

Nevertheless, Llonch must have been onto something, because after Diez had parsed the unorthodoxy of the briefing, the invitation began to get under his skin. “Something about the way Pere formulated his question in that email made it click,” he says. “I started to assume that this was not really a question about positive and negative, but rather a question about taking a radical look into the world of lighting and being a designer – thinking about things that people just don’t question any more.”

This is the kind of thing that lighting designers often say, particularly with the rise of microLEDs and OLEDs – technologies that allow for lighting to exist as flat or flexible panels in contrast to the forms proscribed by traditional filament bulbs and conventional LED lamps. “It’s a total paradigm shift,” summarised Carlotta de Bevilacqua, CEO of the Italian lighting brand Artemide, when asked

about the impact of OLEDs back in 2013.1 “But I’ve always been a critic of technologies such as OLED,” says Diez, “because although I understand that they make a surface into a light, what quality do we get from that? It clearly has some good applications, such as in work environments, but it’s really only bringing efficiency, whereas I’m more interested in effectiveness.”

In response to Llonch’s email, Diez wanted to explore something different to the technological breakthroughs that typically inflame lighting designers. “Like, how you actually get electricity to a light,” he explains. The challenge, as Diez saw it, was to understand how you could power a lamp if you stripped away conventional cabling. What other ways are there of getting current to flow between positive and negative?

“The way I see my job is close to being a magician,” explains Diez, grinning from beneath a black baseball cap. “I always want that magic dimension within my work.” This is a comparison that Diez is fond of, having regularly used it as a metaphor for his working process since founding his studio, Diez Office, in 2002. “You’ve probably heard me say this a few times,” he admits.

Previous projects from Diez’s studio have been called things such as the Houdini chair, Rope Trick lamp, and This That Other seating series (named for a card trick that you have almost certainly seen, even if you don’t recognise the name) – magicky things all round, in other words, because Diez understands the process by which a magician works as offering a good model for design. The final outcome should always look effortless and delightful, even when a considerable amount of engineering and thought has gone on behind the scenes to make the trick come together.

“It’s about creating a fascination by making things disappear, for instance,” Diez notes, “or making the impossible easy, or creating a simple solution for something that appears complicated. I don’t like it when things look like too much effort.”

In that respect, the aforementioned Guise is a classic Diez trick. You hide a strip of LEDs within a thin aluminium element. That aluminium is designed to be unobtrusive and discreet – it might as well be up your sleeve – meaning that it can be surreptitiously attached to a tube of borosilicate glass that features 1

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See ‘The Vanishing Point’ in Disegno #5.

led a tour of the brand’s factory in Gavà, outside of Barcelona, where production has been completely overhauled to accommodate the manufacture of Plusminus, Diez’s new lighting product. “To be honest, and I think this will be very evident,” Llonch muses, “I had no idea about the consequences of that email.”

some simple geometric scoring across its surface.

So far, nothing magical. But when you run power through the lamp, those score marks suddenly start to glow, and the cut edges of the glass begin shimmering, as if the light is leaking out from where the tube has been slit open. There’s still no real clue as to where that light is coming from, though. The LEDs aren’t visibly shining through the tube, so it’s kind of a mystery.

The truth, as with all good illusions, is simple.

“I like a cheap trick,” Diez explains. “I don’t enjoy it when things become too complicated. Give me a hat trick instead.” Guise, for instance, relies upon the principle of total internal reflection – a basic physical phenomenon that you learn about in school. If light strikes the barrier of a material at a sufficiently wide angle, it doesn’t refract outwards, but rather bounces back inside. In Diez’s lamp, the angle of the LEDs ensures that the light they emit is kept inside the glass, bouncing invisibly around its internal structure.

It can only escape the material when it comes to a cut edge, or else to those patterns scored into the surface of the borosilicate. Abracadabra, Refracto Begone!

And there you have it: light without a light source.

Or so things appear, anyway.

Given this interest in magic, you can imagine why Diez’s curiosity was piqued by the openness of Llonch’s email. “The condition for such a crazy briefing is trust,” he explains. “Usually companies want control over the process, but Pere didn’t because he trusted me. And that trust needs to come from both sides, because a weird briefing is a big risk for a designer. You need to be sure the idea isn’t completely stupid if you’re going to invest time and money into it.” So Diez started experimenting. Working with his colleague Arthur Desmet, he began messing around in the studio’s converted joinery space on Munich’s Geyerstraße, exploring the potential of different materials in the hope that they would have something to show Llonch when he next visited. “Let me know about your thoughts,” Llonch had written to conclude his initial email, “just in order to know if we need to allocate time and resources for some new concept for next Milan fair…” – a fair due to take place in April 2019. “So we’re talking about less than half a year for a totally new concept,” explains Diez.

“Which is a lot of pressure.”

Today, nearly four years on from that initial email, Llonch is in a reflective mood. His colleagues have just

The essential structure of any magic trick, assuming that you trust the authority of Christopher Nolan’s 2006 stage-magician thriller The Prestige, comes in three parts. The first of these is the Pledge. “The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man,” narrates Cutter, an ingénieur played by Michael Caine. “He shows you this object.

Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn’t.” Well duh.

After Llonch’s email, Diez and Desmet began exploring what new approaches towards powering lighting they could devise. Fairly early on, they settled on a basic methodology. “We tried to electrify things that are not usually electrified,” Diez summarises.

Photographs from this development phase show wires hooked to wooden clothes pegs, which are in turn pinched onto scrunched plasticky forms; or complex branching mobiles made from tangles of quasi-coat hangars; or elaborate constellations of a metallic sheet material, folded into three-dimensional patterns that glow electric and beautiful, like shards of a mirror caught in the sun. “Which were all somehow fascinating,” Diez notes, “but so complicated – they weren’t fitting our major goal as designers, which is to simplify things.”

“We were having fun, but it was also tough because the research was going in every direction,” adds Desmet. “It was almost a non-brief, so the results were very complicated.” If things are too complex, you don’t have much of a Pledge.

Faced with material research that was going nowhere fast, Diez and Desmet hit upon a new idea.

The pair fished a red ribbon from a drawer in the studio and suspended it in their space. This ribbon was their new Pledge. The next part of the trick, the Turn (in which “the magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary”) seemed obvious. “It was literally the day before the presentation to Pere,” recalls Diez, “when we both suddenly thought, ‘Why not electrify a ribbon?’

We take for granted that electricity is conducted

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through wires, but what if there was something else that could do the same?” When Llonch arrived in the studio, the pitch delivered to him was nearly as abstract as his initial email. “We thought we’d just show him what we’d tried and see if he was interested,” says Desmet. “We put a piece of foil or something on the ribbon,” adds Diez, “and said, ‘This is a lamp.’”

“The condition for such a crazy briefing is trust.

Usually companies want control over the process, but Pere didn’t because he trusted me.”—Stefan Diez The system proposed to Llonch broke with many of the cardinal principles of lighting design.

In place of the usual assortment of conductive wires concealed within walls, Diez and Desmet wanted to create lighting that carried the flow of electricity through the room itself, conducting it along textile ribbons pulled taut into strict geometric arrangements, or else dropped into swirling loops whose arcs would be prescribed by basic physics. “I like using gravity as a force, with material as a counter-force,” Diez explains. “The dialogue between the two usually gives you nice shapes and I believe there’s a link between that logic and beauty: you don’t have to force something. You can just let it go.” With these ribbons drawing a current through the space, and the specific form of the installation determined by gravity, the studio reasoned that lamps could simply be clipped onto the textile wherever light might be needed. “I saw that it was about getting the freedom to conduct light in a space,” Llonch recalls, “which is really powerful.”

One implication of Diez’s proposal was to erode the distinction between architectural and decorative lighting: the difference between functional lighting fully integrated into a space and light sources selected for their physical aesthetic. “Architectural lighting serves a purpose, but not any decoration or mood,”

says Diez. “It’s very often anti-poetic. I think we can blur these boundaries to open up a new potential.

I have never understood why spaces like offices have to be so strictly utilitarian in their design.” In place of more static lighting arrangements, whose form is partially determined by the architecture of a space and access to its wiring, the studio reasoned that Plusminus could be a means of making lighting malleable and tactile, safe to hold in your hands, and capable of being rearranged to suit changing needs. “It was about the emancipation of light from architecture,” Diez says, “because until now we’ve been using electrical interfaces that reach back to the pre-war era.” By contrast, once a ribbon had been connected to the grid at one end, or plugged into a wall socket, it could trace its way around a room in as direct or as meandering a route as you pleased. “I think we’ve reached a point where the traditional grid system doesn’t really make sense anymore and we should be able to control a bigger part of lighting,” Diez notes. “This idea that you have to think about the architectural components of lighting is over.”

The difficulty, of course, was the third part of the trick. “[Making] something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back,” explains Cutter. “That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call the Prestige.” Electrifying a ribbon, Diez reasoned, wasn’t difficult – a simple matter of stitching in conductive threads – but electrifying it in the right way seemed impossible.

“We could have just used a sewing machine,” Diez explained, “but then you have these parallel bumps where the wires are concealed. And if it ever became knotted or twisted, you’d get a short circuit at the connection point.” If Plusminus were to work effectively, it had to meet certain functional requirements. The ribbon had to betray no sign that it was anything other than a conventional textile; users needed to be able to clip or unclip as many lights to it as they wanted, at any point upon its length; and, when the trick was finished, the ribbon should revert to normal, with no sign as to its hidden conductivity and no marks left behind to reveal where electrical contact had been made. There had to be a Prestige.

“We couldn’t have anything that would indicate this was a trick, and not just a standard ribbon,” says Diez. “But I was worried whether that was actually possible, because it was the part that I had least

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“I like a cheap trick. I don’t enjoy it when things become too complicated. Give me a hat trick instead.” —Stefan Diez

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Plusminus installed in the Saxony-Anhalt Art Foundation for an exhibition about the designer Erich Dieckmann, for which Diez has created the installation architecture.

control over. I had no idea how I was going to get electricity inside that ribbon.”

Fortunately, somebody else did.

At Vibia’s base in Gavà, textile designer Karina Wirth points to a terracotta ribbon, draped from the ceiling and swung into low, lazy loops. Clipped to each coil is a glass sphere, fat and plump like grapes on the vine. Each sphere glows soft and honey sweet, while the end of the ribbon spools loosely across the floor.

Nearby, a blue ribbon, lightly textured with two shades of thread, cuts sharp across the room, pendants clipped to its taut surface. There are undulating sage and grey ribbons too, variously bearing cone lamps and spotlights, before stretching out into geometric forms with strip lighting. Each ribbon is about as thick as a waist belt and they’re entirely safe to touch: you can gather the loose curves into your arms, or twang the ribbon where it has been drawn tight, the lamps shivering with the movement, but otherwise unperturbed. For their installation, the textiles have been clipped onto the walls and ceilings with small anchoring loops, or else dangled from invisible wires, or allowed to wind themselves languorously around metal rods like boas. “I got super emotional seeing it for the first time,” Wirth says. “It’s a beautiful thing.”

Wirth is usually based at the Textile Prototyping Lab (TPL) in Berlin, a research body founded by five partner institutions working across Germany’s textile and electronics industry. “We’re there to make a bridge between research, design and industry,” she says, with the group receiving funding from Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research to connect different skillsets from across these fields. The TPL has a central prototyping facility on Berlin’s Bühringstraße for interdisciplinary research and development, with specific expertise drawn from its various partner institutions. The Saxon Textile Research Institute and Textile Research Institute Thuringia-Vogtland contribute knowledge around textile production and construction, while the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration provides support around integrating electronics within textile structures. “We have different expertises,” Wirth explains. “So we can start with prototypes in our central lab and then translate those quite quickly to other institutes to implement their knowledge on weaving on industrial machines.”

Aware of the TPL and its work, Diez had travelled to Berlin in summer 2018 to seek its help in developing the Plusminus concept. “We explained the problem to Karina – that we needed to get electricity inside the ribbon and that you should be able to touch it without getting a shock – and we started working together,” he explains. “But as a textile designer, Karina wanted to achieve more. She immediately saw the potential in terms of aesthetics: pattern and glossiness.”

To push these elements of the project, Wirth began her investigations using hand weaving, exploring different conductive yarns and construction methods.

“We needed to understand how we could combine the yarns and get the electricity inside,” she says.

“But I also showed them the potential of the textiles and how we could get a nice construction: something that was a bit more ‘design’, because the idea needed it to have that haptic [quality] and feel like just another textile in the room. The initial prototypes Stefan had brought to us were more like something you would get in the construction industry – very technical.”

“We needed to understand how we could combine the yarns and get the electricity inside. It needed to feel like just another textile.” —Karina Wirth Working with a copper yarn to provide connectivity (“It behaves more or less like a normal yarn, but not as soft”), Wirth built up different weaving patterns, layering yarns such that the conductive threads would be undetectable within the final textile. “We realised it would be nicest if you could get a very even surface,” notes Wirth, “so we went deep into the construction to see how you could balance it out to make sure you wouldn’t notice it from the outside.” When the finished textile is cut open, two channels of copper are visible in its centre like veins, entirely surrounded by woven polyester threads that disguise and safely insulate the conductive core – a sleight of hand undetectable to those not in on the trick. “It’s so great when you have an expert,” Diez grins. “Karina paved the way for this.

From the beginning she was clear that we could do it.”

Project

But while Diez was working with Wirth on the development of the textile, he was also designing other elements of the system. His studio created a series of lamps to accompany the ribbon – which by now was being described as a belt – all of which were grounded in simple geometric forms: a range of variations upon spheres, cones and strip lighting.

“In the beginning we had a lot of different ideas, but we ultimately felt it was wrong to overdo it, “ says Diez. “A glowing ball is nothing new – we’ve seen it a thousand times – but I still thought it was the right decision to work with primary shapes. When one does something fundamentally new, it’s such a luxury that you can work with very simple details.” This process, Desmet explains, proved equally rewarding for those working with Diez in the studio. “It’s much more fun to design a system than a single object,” he explains.

“Of course you treat each element as a single object, but you’re also after a simple, common line in between everything.”

Yet even if the lamps’ forms were simple, they still posed a number of technical challenges, not

At the root of the connection Diez and Huertas Ferran developed to meet these requirements is a set of pins. Each lamp is fitted with a buckle, which the belt slides into before two plastic elements slip over the top and sides to hold it in place. Once the belt is anchored, a clip fitted to one of those two elements flicks down, firmly securing the lamp in place while simultaneously pushing hidden metal pins up into the centre of the textile. “Everything is based on those pins,” summarises Huertas Ferran – when they sink into the belt, they make contact with the concealed copper thread, drawing power down into the lamp.

“A little bite like a vampire,” quips Diez, “and you have electricity.” Yet the art of Diez’s system is in disguising its operation. A precedent for Plusminus, Diez explains, was a style of festoon lighting typically employed within Bavaria’s beer gardens, in which lights can be similarly pressed into a PVC cable to draw power. “It leaves two small marks, which you can hardly see when you take them out,” notes Diez.

“But of course you cannot endlessly do that with the cable, because it’s a 7mm piece of plastic.” By contrast, Plusminus’s fangs sink through the textile unnoticed and leave no mark or damage upon their exit, while the construction of the belt means that it can flow more readily and flexibly than PVC, as well as pulling taut to carry more weight without tearing. “With the belt we’ve made, you could easily hang a thousand kilos,” says Diez.

To complete the system, a series of different electrical connections and components were designed, along with specific anchor and termination points for the belt. “But the important thing is that you don’t have to [specifically] choose any of these,” explains Huertas Ferran. To accompany Plusminus, Vibia has developed an online platform that allows different installations of the system to be built from scratch, or else adapted from pre-existing templates.

According to the physical requirements of a design developed on this platform, the system determines the accompanying elements needed to install it.

In this respect, there is no off-the-shelf version of Plusminus. Instead, each configuration of the design is generated and manufactured for a particular situation, with the results subsequently shipped in custom packaging with personalised installation instructions. “We did a calculation around all the possibilities that you have with the different luminaires and found that for every element there

“This is really like McDonald’s. Think of a Happy Meal. We need to make sure that every component is in the box.”

—Sergi Requena

least understanding how the connection to the belt could be made. Each belt can run for 30m on a single electricity source, “so you needed to have the opportunity to fix the components in any position [along that length],” explains Miquel Huertas Ferran, Vibia’s technical director.

If Plusminus were to deliver the flexibility it promised, and not require each luminaire to be painstakingly threaded on from one end, the team needed to devise a click-and-connect mechanism that could clip onto any point on the belt, any number of times. “The solution had to be open,” Huertas Ferran concludes.

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was something like 798,000 combinations,” explains Judith Patiño Olivares, Vibia’s head of marketing.

“It’s exponential.”

In support of her point, Patiño Olivares gestures towards the different manifestations of Plusminus that are available within the same platform: from simple arrangements positioned above desks, through to baroque chandeliers formed from nested loops of the same belt – each lamp individually controllable thanks to chips installed inside them. “Just imagine what that could mean for old buildings, such as libraries, where they may not want or be able to do any installation [within the architecture],” she says.

“Here, it’s very easy. With one system you can create whatever you need. Really, this should be seen as a digital product because the website is directly connected to the factory, so everything is automatic.”

Yet for a digital product, Plusminus’s appeal is grounded in its material qualities. In Gavà, Wirth turns one of the conductive textile spools over in her hands. “You can do a great job with one part, but then it’s just a piece,” she explains, before gesturing to the finished installations scattered across the building.

“But when everybody does a nice piece, all of those come together to build something.”

Plusminus’s implications for Vibia are considerable, not least in terms of how the company will construct the design. In the factory in Gavà, for instance, a robot called BellaBot is shuttling around the space, letting out bleeps and bloops as it passes between the work benches and stacks of electrical parts. The BellaBot’s body is a trolley ridged with shelves, topped by a digital screen displaying a cheerful cat’s face: a set of delighted anime eyes, replete with digi-whiskers and a tiny nose. A set of plastic ears completes the look. The BellaBot is manufactured by the Chinese brand Pudu Robotics, whose devices are typically used to deliver food to customers in restaurants and cafeterias, yet the Vibia BellaBot’s shelves are laden with electrical components, which it delivers around the factory.

“This is really like McDonald’s,” smiles Sergi Requena, Vibia’s operations director as the BellaBot purrs past him on its way to make a delivery. “Think of a Happy Meal,” he says. “We need to make sure that every component – the hamburger, the toy, the fries – is in the box.”

The hardworking BellaBot is used throughout Vibia’s factory, but feels representative of the

automation and changes to production methodology required by Diez’s new design. “Plusminus is special because the concept is so different,” explains Requena.

“We’re talking about so many different combinations that it’s impossible to have all of the different versions of the product available in the final warehouse.”

Maintaining sufficient stock of finished Plusminuses to meet orders would be an impossible task, but the company is still conscious of the need to manufacture and deliver its lights quickly. “You have to appreciate the differences between industries,” summarises Patiño Olivares. “If someone orders a new car, you can tell them it will be three months and that’s fine because they understand that you’re specifically building the car they’re ordering – the market is prepared to wait. But if I tell an interior designer their lighting will take three months to arrive, they’ll just go for something else instead.”

To make Plusminus’s production possible, the factory maintains a rolling stock of the system’s different components, which are automatically allocated to specific orders received through the online platform. Each order’s elements are packaged as a kit of parts, while stock is digitally monitored such that elements are replaced the moment they’re exhausted. “I compare it to a coffee shop,” says Requena. “When you go to a café, you’re maybe two minutes away from your drink because they’ve already got everything. But if the coffee shop needed to buy the sugar, the plate, and the spoon in that same two minutes, it wouldn’t be possible.” Every iteration of Plusminus, Requena explains, can be produced in two weeks. “And that’s two weeks maximum,” he says.

“We’re working day by day, directly from the website.”

The belt itself, he says, is manufactured off-site, before being delivered to Vibia in huge spools, where it is fitted onto a machine that can test the electrical connection throughout the textile, before cutting it to length for each installation. “The belt is like the box of the Happy Meal,” Requena jokes. “It’s the one element you always have.”

These changes to Vibia’s production have come at a considerable financial cost, with the company having significantly adapted its production to align itself with Diez’s vision. “They’ve had to invest in 150 different tools,” explains Diez, sat on the factory’s balcony having just toured the production facility as it gears up for the launch of his design. “That’s quite a pressure when you see that effect of a whole company

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joining forces for one idea. You have to hope that the product is strong enough to carry that.” The challenge, he notes, has not solely been to engineer the trick that lies behind Plusminus, but also to communicate the idea behind his system. “What makes a closed product easier to explain is that you say, ‘This is the problem and this is the solution,’” he says. “It fits like a key to a keyhole. But with Plusminus you don’t have one problem – you just have a feeling of where it can be applied – and it’s not one particular solution either.

It’s a toolkit you can use to solve many different problems, so there’s not an immediate promise of success. You have to prove it.”

well as workspace management solutions. “New Order [provides] a shelving system that is so flexible in its structure and composition that you can modify it, expand it and customise it in endless variations,” wrote Hay’s co-founders Rolf and Mette Hay in a company publication devoted to the design. “At first glance, the system architecture is ultra-simple, but on closer acquaintance it proves quite complex in its multi-purpose versatility.” Today, the product is one of the cornerstones of the brand’s range.

With Plusminus, Diez hopes to transfer some of the principles of New Order into the context of lighting. “I see a lot of parallels between the two,” he explains. “New Order was basically a shelf and a table, but Hay had to understand that retailing it would be very different [to other products] because it’s actually a system. That’s a difficult process, but thank God that they believed in the concept and put the time in, because today, after some 10 years, they’re really there. I now see New Order everywhere, which I had always thought could happen, but I’m still quite shocked by its success.” Both Diez and Vibia are hopeful that a similar trajectory can be followed by Plusminus. “We must have had the right prototype and the right vision back in Munich, because if Pere had known from the beginning what this process would mean, he might never have started it,” explains Diez. “You have to grow alongside it and that’s a painful process. To be honest, if Pere had seen from that first presentation that Plusminus would involve investing in 150 tools, he would have probably said he’d rather do something else instead.”

But this, of course, is how magic works – you never know what you’re in for ahead of the illusion’s completion. “And maybe that’s the reason why projects like this can stay alive,” concedes Diez.

“You don’t know everything in advance, but at a certain stage you reach a point of no return – so much has been invested already that you just have to finish it.”

This, Llonch concedes, is true. “It has been,” he says, “the most expensive email I’ve ever sent.” E N D

“We must have had the right prototype and vision, because if Pere had known what this process would mean, he might never have started it. ”—Stefan Diez This, however, is a trick that Diez has pulled off before. In 2012, he created New Order for the Danish design brand Hay. In its simplest terms, New Order is a set of aluminium shelving, but Diez’s design is focused around extracting as much variation as possible from within its basic framework. How many handkerchiefs can be pulled from a single sleeve?

The resultant New Order system is modular and open-ended, with its aluminium elements snapping together with an Allen key, meaning that the same elements can create basic shelving units, but also clip together in different formations to form sidetables, cabinets, desks, or else elements of interior architecture. “We wanted New Order to be built like a stage,” Diez explains in a 2018 video for Hay, with the system geared up towards being endlessly recalibrated from within its basic toolkit to create any element that users may require. “New Order can be a framework for that or a backbone,” concludes Diez. In the same year as that video was published, Hay launched a second version of the system that further extended its capabilities with panels, drawers and doors, as

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Enter the Matrix Introduction Viviane Stappmanns (with thanks to Jon Astbury)

History

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A photo from a consultation for the Jagonari Asian Women’s Centre (1985).

Previous page: a photo of the central courtyard of the Jagonari Asian Women’s Centre.

All images courtesy of Matrix and Verso.

The contribution of women to design practice and history has largely been ignored. Full stop. This has been an accepted truth for decades, but only recently has it materialised in concrete efforts to rectify this erasure. Yet while we are finally coming to appreciate the full scale of the contribution of practitioners such as weaver Gunta Stölzl or architect Lina Bo Bardi, more questions have emerged. Are our historiographic tools out of date?

Is the lens through which we view the history of design too myopic? If we dump existing definitions and cast a broader net, could we start to find role models who may guide us toward a more socially and ecologically sustainable design practice? We have become accustomed to attributing the authorship of works to individual designers, as well as recognising their innovation through the material or formal aspects of their work.

But the large-scale teamwork necessary to bring a project to fruition, or the participatory processes that can make, for example, a community hall more innovative than a developer-funded commercial office building are hard to show in portraits and pictures. They have, therefore, slipped under the radar of recognition.

In this vein, many narratives of design and architectural history have overlooked – or at the very least under-recognised – the work of the Matrix Feminist Design Co-Operative, a London-based architectural collective that was founded out of a left-wing feminist design movement active in the late 1970s. Despite this lack of recognition, however, it is impossible to underestimate Matrix’s potential for providing a model of future practice in multiple ways.

The first point to note is that Matrix ran their practice as a collective, not as a hierarchical structure with a domineering “genius” as its face.

As companies and design studios alike grapple with finding ways to work more collaboratively, they need look no further than Matrix to show them how. Secondly, Matrix intuitively developed an understanding of intersectionality decades before a more mainstream recognition that marginalisation and discrimination usually happen on more levels than just one. Matrix was particularly attuned to working with communities that were marginalised in multiple ways, such as single mothers from migrant backgrounds. Thirdly, at a time when both design education and practice were still dominated by the one-size-fits-all doctrines of standards and universal solutions of post-war modernism, Matrix recognised that the act of designing is neither passive nor neutral.

As the architecture writer Jon Astbury identified in his opening text to How We Live Now, a 2021 exhibition on Matrix that was staged at the Barbican, Matrix were aware that “consciously or otherwise, designers work in accordance with a set of ideas about how society operates, and who or what is valued.”

Matrix explicitly addressed the relationship between gender and the built environment. Combining both a practice of research and a practice of building, they formed a group to investigate and reveal the deficits of cities produced by male-dominated urban planning. Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment, their collaboratively written treatise, was published in 1984 (today, a much sought-after original copy would likely set you back hundreds of pounds). Meanwhile, at

the practical level, Matrix designed social housing and women’s shelters, and launched a number of initiatives aimed at making the architectural profession more accessible to women.

Although Matrix dissolved in the 1990s – around the same time that the ecosystem of housing and property in which they operated was fundamentally changed by the UK’s Conservative government – interest in the collectives’ groundbreaking work has been rekindled in recent years. Making Space was republished by Verso Books in March 2022, accompanied by a new foreword from researchers and architecture historians Katie Lloyd Thomas and Karen Burns. Elsewhere, some of Matrix’s original members have been working to create an archive to document and preserve the collective’s work: How We Live Now, for example, was co-curated by Jos Boys, co-author of Making Space. All of this illustrates that the questions Matrix were grappling with in their work have lost none of their relevance for today’s architectural practice.

Who are our buildings and shared spaces designed for? Who is excluded from this designed environment and what effect does that have on the communities who live there? In the roundtable that follows I spoke with Boys, Ann de Graft-Johnson and Mo Hildenbrand, all of whom were original members of Matrix. Together, we aimed to make a contribution towards keeping the legacy of the collective alive.

Matrix was active from 1981 to 1994, and you were an all-female workers cooperative with a non-hierarchical structure.

You worked on state-funded social building projects, including women’s centres and refuges, facilities for women and children, construction training workshops, and lesbian and gay housing projects. There is so much in that description. I would like to deconstruct that a little bit and go back right to the beginning and ask you: how did Matrix actually start?

Jos Boys It grew out of something called the New Architecture Movement, which was unionising architects nationally towards the end of the 1970s, as well as Community Technical Aid Centres – shopfronts providing direct architectural services to community groups. London was very derelict at that time, and community groups were resisting office developments being thrown up. Out of that, the New Architecture Movement developed a feminist wing. It was still a time when those left-wing movements were very male dominated and women were expected to just make the tea.

I met the women who actually set up the practice in the early days, such as Anne Thorne, Sue Francis, Barbara McFarlane, at that time.

I was working as a freelance journalist and squatting in Covent Garden.

I had an office at Five Dryden Street, partly because I was squatting around the corner and we didn’t have any washing facilities, and partly because I was a freelance journalist and I could rent a shared desk.

It was one of the first WeWork-type offices, but with a much more community-based understanding. I had access to all this kit like Xerox machines and receptionists. It was quite anarchistic and the basement became a place where we had our meetings, which I remember as being really full: like, 60 women turning up. Out Viviane Stappmanns

History

of that discussion group there was a relatively amicable split between women who were more interested in how women could be much more equal within the architecture profession, and women who thought that architecture as it was taught and done and practised needed to change completely. In that first camp there was a group called Mitra, which did organise as an architectural practice for a bit, but Matrix really grew out of the feeling that the way to move forward was to have a design practice.

We did a couple of schemes, not under that name, which didn’t come to anything, but they did began to clarify this idea that that you could have a feminist design practice.

Ann de Graft-Johnson Part of the discussion was questioning the nature of architectural education and the culture of the profession. Quite a few of the women involved in the early days were resisting becoming architects, because they didn’t feel that the culture accommodated the practice and ethos that they went on to adopt. Most of the women studied architecture, but there were also journalists and writers. It was broader than just people who had architectural training. There were people who wanted to become architectural practitioners but didn’t want to qualify, although most members of Matrix did end up qualifying as architects at a much later date. When I joined the practice in 1985, I was one of the few people who was actually a qualified architect.

Jos There were also all those other connections from people involved in community action and squatting. Women like Julia Dwyer, who came into it through her experience setting up lesbian households in derelict houses; being interested in training in architecture and then becoming disillusioned by the way architecture was taught. Mo, your experience was similar?

Mo Hildenbrand I trained as a social worker but got frustrated. Working with community groups and in a women’s refuge was important for me. When I came to England, I lived in London Fields in a mainly lesbian housing co-operative that got funding to buy houses and refurbish them. I was interested in studying architecture from having been a part of that building process.

Jos We should mention Sue Francis, too, and Fran Bradshaw and Mary-Lou Arscott – all people who were very much involved in building as much as architecture, having studied architecture.

Ann Fran became a bricklayer, but she was in the same year as me at Newcastle University. I’m a university dropout and then went to the AA to complete my Part One and Part Two, whereas Fran did Part One and Part Two architectural studies and then decided to go into manual trades, before joining architectural practice in later years.

Viviane How did this actually work in terms of daily practice? How did people become a member of Matrix?

Mo When I applied it was a very detailed application. I got the job after an interview, but there was a probation period of half a year and an interim assessment. You took part in all the meetings all the time, and also worked on budgets. For me, it was actually quite difficult, because I had just finished my Part One, so I did not have any experience whatsoever. I was thrown in at the deep end. But after half a year, I became a full member of the cooperative and had full responsibilities for the practice and projects.

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A wheelchair accessible shower in the Essex Women’s Refuge (1992).

“Urban Obstacle Courses”, a photo of Ann Thorne and her children.

Feminist analysis of building design guides and marketing material.

History

We were very clear about the job description, but we also had a person specification. It was a tight system. We anonymised recruitment, so details about identity were separated out from the actual application. Today, I work in a university where we still don’t have anonymous recruitment.

One of the critical issues was that we were trying to make sure we were diverse. Making difficult decisions about whether or not somebody met the equalities criteria was quite often a problem. There were times when, although we’d shortlisted people, there was nobody who we felt met the standard. That was very difficult. We had racist micro aggressions – somebody coming for an interview and just barging past us when Gozi [Wamuo] and I went to answer the door. We were actually running the interview, so you can imagine that that didn’t go down well. That person lost the job before they even crossed the threshold, frankly. We were working with diverse groups, so it was important to build engagement and not make stereotypical assumptions.

Mo Most of us worked very, very long hours, including Saturdays and Sundays, just to keep it going. Everything was discussed. The finances, which everybody was responsible for, as well as policy issues. We discussed each project in full.

Viviane Was there a particular atmosphere in London at that time that made it a fertile ground for these discussions? When you talk about the squatting and cooperatives, it seems like there was an atmosphere for experimentation and discussion; that everyone was campaigning for better conditions.

Ann At the time, the Greater London Council (GLC) – before Margaret Thatcher managed to abolish it – was very supportive of different groups.

A lot of funding went to lesbian groups, gay groups, women’s groups and Black Asian and minoritised groups. Matrix was one of the practices which offered technical aid and fell within that bracket. The Jagonari Asian Women’s Centre [an educational centre for Asian women designed

by Matrix in Whitechapel, London, ed.] was one of the last – if not the last – projects to get funding through the GLC. Matrix was working for community-based organisations through that funding, with groups like the Claudia Jones Organisation [a London non-profit providing services to women and their families of African Caribbean Heritage, ed.], which was looking at Saturday schools because of what was happening to Black pupils who were not getting equity in education. There was dialogue between different, diverse communities, and ongoing discussion within Matrix about what is feminist practice. What is feminism? How do we approach working with people in a collaborative and participatory way? The office protocols and structures were very well thought-through when I joined.

It was a completely different way of working.

Viviane What were the ideas that resonated with you?

Ann The commitment to the rigour of how you practise architecture, which included accommodating people’s lifestyles. The fact that women who had children were accommodated with core working hours; having a minimum of two people on every project so there was continuity; a non-hierarchical basis and everybody having equal wages; an assumption that everybody can take responsibility for decision making. Some of it didn’t work, but quite a lot of it did.

Ann

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Mockup of the front cover for Making

Space: Women and the Man Made Environment, Pluto Press, 1984.

How did it turn from a place where you regularly met and discussed into an actual practice with projects?

Jos Those things happened in parallel and were to do with different groups of women who came together because they were more interested in particular aspects. Via Sue Francis, we got asked by Stockwell Health Centre to help them out with a redesign. They were quite radical, but they’d had a conventional architect and disliked what they had done.

I got involved in that, but it still wasn’t under the name Matrix. That happened when we moved on from squatting in Covent Garden and into what was called short-life housing. The front room of those houses was the seedbed of what became Matrix. As for the book, the group of women [working on that] overlapped in some ways with the practice, but not in others. There were women who just worked on the book group, but weren’t involved in the practice. In the early days, anyway, there was also a support group of women who were already in practice and were experienced. The early workers were straight out of architecture school, so there was a network of [more experienced] women who did that role in an unpaid capacity.

Ann There was a lot of discussion about protocols. Through developing the publications and the talks, we were able to describe what kind of processes we adopted. For example, recognising that quite a lot of our client and user groups would be laypeople who may not necessarily be able to read architectural drawings. So processes might include offering training in reading drawings and adopting techniques for getting across spatial understanding. That might be producing rough working models that didn’t feel intimidating. Sometimes, if they were in existing premises and we were either designing a new build or adapting those premises, we’d mark the layout of the existing floor with the proposals for the model, so that they could have an idea of scale. Sometimes it would be about going on visits to different projects so that they could see pros and cons and talk to people staffing the place. It was thinking about different ways of looking at the process, not just, “We’re experts, this is the design you’re going to get.” Obviously, the argument against that is how time-consuming it made the consultation process. But we were able to gain a much better understanding of the user’s needs, and some of the actual buildings worked better as a result. I don’t know whether Mo would agree, but quite often the aesthetic wasn’t as important as the process. Aesthetics were important, but they needed to reflect the culture of the organisation. Most of us had gone through a modernist education, but it wasn’t really our remit to impose that model on our client groups.

Mo The most important thing was to incorporate the end-users’ views into the design and into the final building. With the women’s refuge in Essex, for example, the external design was not imposed on the end users, even if the ideas came from us.

Jos If we’re talking about the cost of consultation, the thing that I didn’t know about until we were developing the Matrix online archive was how much funding there once was for feasibility studies.

Ann That was what enabled Matrix to offer the kind of service it did. When that funding went, it seriously impacted on the groups we could work for.

Viviane

History

“It was thinking about different ways of looking at the process, not just, ‘We’re experts, this is the design.’”

—Ann de Graft-Johnson

It removed a community layer and it left us working on housing association projects where there wasn’t the scope for participatory approaches. I would basically be finding a site, working out density requirements, and producing proposals. We weren’t necessarily involved with the user group and it very much depended on the nature of the housing association representative.

With the Essex Women’s Refuge, that was a project which straddled the government rates cap, and a housing association rather than the local council took over as the client. This impacted on the inclusivity of the design. We’d originally designed the lift to go up to the top floor where women could bring their possessions, and donations of clothes and toys could be stored there. It was supposed to be wheelchair accessible.

When it was taken over by the housing association, they refused to endorse having a lift up to that level. We did manage to win the battle of not having the wheelchair accessible bedroom being on the ground floor, but that housing association went against the ethos of what we were trying to do.

Mo Having an accessible bedroom on the first floor was for the safety and security of the women. A lift to the first floor was absolutely necessary.

Viviane Why was the budget for feasibility studies cut?

Ann Because Margaret Thatcher didn’t like the fact that the Labour-led GLC was bang across the river from Westminster. She managed to dissolve the GLC and the London Boroughs Grant Scheme came in instead. We did get funding from the London Boroughs Grant Scheme – for a couple of years. Then, although the grant schemes officer had said they were going to support the renewal of our funding, when that meeting actually came, it was a case of “Off with their heads” and they discontinued it. It was really problematic because the groups that lost their funding were mainly Black and Asian-led projects. The Boy Scouts, which had at least £3m in the bank, got their funding. It was a rout.

Jos What was brilliant about the funding for the feasibility studies was that it enabled not just Matrix, but lots of architectural practices interested in participation. It meant that you could work with users to think about what was needed, be supported in writing a brief, and in doing costing. A very good example is Jagonari, where the client group assumed that all they would be able to afford would be a few porta-cabins. Working with Matrix, they could discover what they actually wanted. It gave time to talk things through and think about the design implications and the cost, the budgeting implications, and to be supported in making an application. They could meet their ambitions. Relatively speaking, it was a big and generous scheme for a community-based project, and that feasibility study enabled that building to happen in an equitable way. That feasibility funding was also good, solid, daily income.

Ann We had an annual income, obviously, and we had to do reports on how the money was spent. But it did allow lots of groups that wouldn’t otherwise have been able to resource it to get to a point where they could put in for funding to actually realise a project. With Jagonari, it enabled extensive cultural conversations. Meetings carried on during construction, discussing aspects such as having a mixture of Indian continent toilets and Western toilets. There was a detailed discussion about being really mindful about security, because there had been a lot of racist attacks 98

Meeting notes from the

Making Space book group.

A poster for Women’s Realm: A Weekend

Event on Women, Building and the Environment held at the Polytechnic of North London (1987).

at the time, but trying to treat the building elevation in a way that was positive in terms of sending a cultural message, rather than a building that looked like a castle.

Viviane That example illustrates how all these processes are driven by the structures and policies around it. You did these participatory processes which, until I discovered Matrix, I thought were only a recent discourse in architecture education.

Jos When I studied architecture in the 70s at The Bartlett, UCL, it had a radical moment. A lot of the people studying there were also working in community action. Participation was very current. Nick Wates [a writer and project consultant specialising in community involvement in planning and design, ed.] in the year above me wrote a book called Community Architecture and we were reading books like After the Planners [a 1971 text by Robert Goodman, ed]. There was a lot of stuff going on in the States about grassroots community action around architecture and cities. The way that Matrix did it was very current in recognising that the language of architecture and its tools, such as plans and sections and elevations and models, are often alienating. In terms of a general ethos, we needed participation in this process.

Ann It’s very much dependent on what architecture school you went to, because Newcastle wasn’t like that. I went to the AA because Paul Oliver [an architecture historian and expert on vernacular architecture, ed.] was teaching, but the year I joined I think he’d fallen out with Alvin Boyarsky [the chairman of the AA from 1971 to 1990, ed.] and left, and Brian Anson [an architect and planner who lost his job at the GLC when he joined local residents in protest against the demolition of buildings in Covent Garden to make way for car parks, ed.] had also left. By the time I got there, that kind of ethos had disappeared.

Mo When I was at architecture school in the 80s it wasn’t really discussed.

But what was interesting when I studied at the Polytechnic of North London was the woman’s access course [the Women into Architecture and Building (WIAB) was founded by Yvonne Dean with Matrix members including Susan Francis to teach courses helping women enter the built environment sector, ed.], so women who didn’t have the A levels to enter architecture school could go through that way.

Viviane London at that time sounds like a kind of paradise compared to now, although I have to be conscious of not romanticising it. Was it a conscious decision from Matrix to only work on public schemes?

Ann We didn’t turn down private schemes. In fact, we did go for a number of private schemes, but there was quite a lot of sexism going on. We were put forward to go and look at some premises in terms of designing offices for a bank. I think we made the mistake of saying, “Why do you want to be on the top floor?” So we failed the interview. In terms of Jagonari, there was a lot of support from the then GLC from one particular person and they went on to London Docklands. They tried to recommend us there, but people were very suspicious of an all-women practice that called themselves feminists so we didn’t succeed, even though people were trying to put us forward for private projects. We had discussions with banks who were looking at having crèches and nurseries associated History

The Cover of Making Space: Women and

the Man Made Environment, Verso, 2022.

with them, trying to increase staff gender diversity. But I don’t recall any of those actually coming to anything. We wouldn’t necessarily turn down a private project, unless it was iniquitous, but we did have a way of working that didn’t always fit what they were expecting.

Viviane In her foreword to the reprint of the book, Katie Lloyd Thomas said there wasn’t much interest from the architectural profession at the time.

What’s your recollection of the climate back then?

Jos It was very much a time when it was generally assumed that the built environment was neutral and wasn’t affected by gender or race or sexuality.

It was a gentleman’s club – this idea that professional knowledge and balance and compromise would give you the best solution. There was no idea about bias. Even the word sexism was still relatively new, so there literally wasn’t the language to talk about it. Putting the book together was about trying to find that language. When I gave talks to the architecture profession, I found responses generally tokenistic. They couldn’t grasp the idea that it should change anything about how they worked. I was told that it’s good to have some women in architecture because they could— Ann —design kitchens!

Jos Exactly. Design interiors. Then you’d go off and have kids and that would be the end of it. A “waste of money”. That was the 70s and 80s.

Ann When we were doing our paper ‘Why Do Women Leave Architecture?’ [a University of the West of England report for the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) diversity panel Architects for Change (AFC) written by Ann, Sandra Manley and Clara Greed, ed.], which was published in 2003, one of the interviewees said that women were doing interiors, and men the exterior design. There was still that pattern of behaviour going on in terms of gendered allocation in work.

Viviane It’s still going on. You look at any architecture school, the interior design course will be packed with women and the architecture students doing parametric modelling are the technical guys. Even when I was studying, I wasn’t aware of things like gendered space. I’m interested to hear what it feels like for you now, because suddenly there’s traction.

The language exists to name all these issues so perhaps we can get closer to them. But does it feel, for you, a little bit like “I told you so”?

Ann Well, yes. What’s that film called – Groundhog Day? Sometimes it was difficult that there were things that just didn’t get a platform for discussion, but a lot of the discussion around process was productive and constructive.

There was a certain amount of autonomy in the practice, rather than working for a conventional architectural practice with a very strict hierarchy. The last practice I worked in I was very definitely de-skilled.

There wasn’t any autonomy, my opinions weren’t respected, so I ended up needing to leave. Whereas in Matrix, we did work very hard, but the people who worked and stayed were very, very committed to the core ideals.

Mo What I find nowadays in the workplace is that young women don’t know anything about Matrix. When you talk to them about it, they may be interested, but they’ve got no clue.

Ann Matrix was unique, perhaps, in bringing together lots of ideas, but the ideas weren’t new. It was a combination of being born out of different movements, but also bringing in people like me – I wasn’t involved in any 100

A hand-drawn promotional poster for Matrix (1979).

Part of a leaflet for Women’s Education in Building, advertising courses in trades jobs run by and for women.

of the movements before I joined Matrix. It wasn’t a homogenous group of women all coming from the same background and the same starting point.

Jos These things hit a moment, they trend, they fade, and then they come back again. I’m getting a flurry of requests at the moment to talk about how to make cities safer for women. Right. Fuck that for a laugh! There was plenty of work done in the 1970s and 80s, and huge numbers of publications done by the GLC and the Women’s Design Service. The problem is men still asking women how women can make themselves safe, and how the design of the built environment can make things safe. I get asked to explain, yet again, to white guys, what the problem is. What’s great from Black Lives Matter and #MeToo is it puts the burden onto the dominant groups. Whether that’s being white or middle class, or being male, or just being an old fart.

Putting the burden back onto those people to think about this, and actually investigate this themselves, rather than endlessly leaving it up to the minority groups to do all the work and do all the continual persuasion. It does go round in circles, which has to do with power and how dominant groups reclaim their territory. It’s interesting why Matrix is suddenly back in and gender and architecture is back on trend and in the discourse. The stuff I do around disability is on trend now, too. It’s really weird. It’s not like disabled people haven’t been campaigning for access since the 1960s.

Ann We have what I call a very contradictory situation, certainly in the UK, where on one level, we’ve got culture wars and dog whistles, and at the same time we’ve got much more grassroots activism and Black Lives Matter. And they’re on a collision course in terms of who’s going to win that dialogue.

I think it’s quite a precarious time, frankly.

Jos The thing that was really important about Matrix was it focused on more than the user. It was empowering not just by recognising that people didn’t understand what the tools of architecture were, but by acknowledging that users are not a homogeneous group.

Ann Even at that time there were other practices working on a so-called participatory process basis, but it was quite often incredibly tokenistic or excluded certain groups. There was a power structure that meant only certain voices got heard or, in some instances, no voices got heard. There’s a scheme in Peckham, for example, where the architects were proud of having kept a very narrow width with the layout, but it has a kitchen and a dining room on the ground floor as separate rooms. This was, and is, an area where there are lots of quite large families, five or more people, quite often with small children – it’s difficult to supervise small children in the way that these house plans were divvied up. It became obvious that the plans were ones that suited the architect in the practice. Similarly, there were conversion projects where, because that particular architect didn’t like sinks under the window, it meant a family-sized fridge couldn’t fit anywhere or else you took out the dining space. People weren’t considering the family structure or the culture. You get this white layer, this middleclass layer, from an architect about how they perceive a living space being imposed onto the people who are going to be in it.

Jos Matrix refused to just have this notion of “the user”. The thing was really unpicking that, listening to those diverse experiences, and trying to engage with them and understand how space is gendered.

History

A promotional postcard for Matrix.

Adding to that, the Jagonari Asian Women’s Centre entrance and the treatment for the ground floor were very different to how some of the white-majority women’s centres were. Quite often those had a shop window frontage that was more transparent. Whereas with Jagonari, because of racist attacks, it had to have a defensive entrance that opened out as you went into it. Matrix acknowledged that women aren’t all the same.

That there are different issues that people face. That included things like, with Jagonari, not meeting after dark, because safety was more of an issue in relation to those women, whereas we were meeting after dark with white women quite a lot, even though it was the era of Reclaim the Night.

Viviane How did the archive come together? When you look at the archives of many architectural practices, they have models and plans of buildings that were built, but Matrix was about so much more than that.

Jos The [Matrix Open feminist architecture] archive was almost accidental.

It came out of some of us meeting every now and then over about two or three years to talk about getting the book re-published, because it was unavailable. We all kept getting emails saying, where can we find the book? I don’t know how much you paid for it but it was going for £350 online.

Viviane I found someone in Sussex who had no idea and auctioned it on eBay for £9, so I pounced. I had an alert set up, because the museum would have been prepared to pay £400.

Jos Of the group of us who met over the book, two of the women sadly died in relatively quick succession [Sue Francis and Julia Dwyer, ed.]. So that focused our minds on both the book and [the archive]. For practices like Matrix, community-based practices operating in that pre-internet period, stuff is just under people’s beds and in cupboards in Ikea and Tesco bags.

There was no sense of a collection in the way that a lot of traditional architectural practices have some sense of their legacy. I managed to get a little bit of money from my employers to help in this process. It’s been completely precarious, because it has depended on the goodwill of a very large number of women, including Mo and Ann and Gozi. Some women have vanished into the ether. People assume that the Matrix archive is what they can see from the website, that it’s a kind of collection or it’s in an institution. We’re increasingly being asked for permission to use stuff from it. I’ve no idea how that works. And I’ve no idea how long I’m going to be responsible for making that happen. It’s a rather random process, but for me it was a way of honouring Julia and Sue, and feeling that if we didn’t do it now, it would all get lost. A lot of it has been lost already.

Viviane What were some of the surprising things that came to the fore that people had under their beds? So much of your work was based on the process of the discussion, the research that was going on, that the final projects are only part of your legacy.

Jos How do you make an archive? You make an archive out of what people have and are willing to share. And a lot of that is handwritten and hand drawn, even if Matrix was quite early in using computers. I can see from the paperwork, the handwritten minutes from all those meetings, how exhausting they were. There’s resignation letters and some of the paperwork that Ann mentioned, the forms for recruitment. The complete specification Ann

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Educational material from Women Into Architecture and Building.

of Jagonari – someone sat there and typed all of that. That’s what makes a building a feminist building – a huge amount of work. We’ve all been really interested in not just sticking to the building plans. The models don’t exist anymore and we either can’t find the drawings or they’re in the RIBA Drawings Collection, which won’t let us access them unless we pay. It really needs somebody, or a group of people, to commit their lives to it.

Ann I don’t know whether it comes across in the archive. But the process largely contributed to the current users’ feeling of ownership. There is a drawing in the archive of the proposal for the Brixton Black Women’s Centre, which never went ahead, but got taken over by the council where it became about saying “You will have this,” whereas we were trying to work with a participatory process. At certain points you could see the guy from the council we were supposed to be dealing with crawling past the door to avoid coming into a meeting. Even though it was a female architect who took it over from us, she didn’t recognise the fact that you have to co-create. We didn’t have the terms “deficit model” and “social model” back then, but there was a continuum of deficit model, and we still have that in terms of social housing. It’s very difficult to get away from that and it goes into cycles. The next generation has to relearn it and then describe it as being innovative when it’s actually decades and decades old. E N D Making Space: Women and the Man Made Environment by Matrix is published by Verso, price £14.99.

Women measuring a floor plate on a building site.

History

The Making and Razing of Mumbai’s Chawls Words Rupal Rathore Photographs Philippe Calia

Mumbai is home to some of the tallest buildings and poorest neighbourhoods in India, with prosperity and poverty side by side throughout its urban fabric.

It is a city of marked contrasts: hawkers moving in and out of the Victorian arcades of South Mumbai; a river separating Dharavi’s household enterprises from the business district of Bandra Kurla Complex; beaches dotted with joggers and vendors; the international airport surrounded by Lego-like houses made of brick and tarpaulin, each with its own dish antenna anchored on the roof. Along its picturesque coastal setting by the Arabian Sea, heaps of garbage are deposited from the ocean every monsoon and strewn along the length of Marine Drive, a seaside promenade that forms part of the popular imagery of the city.

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As Mumbai grapples with the challenges of climate crisis and the limited availability of constructible land, its citizens are also faced with an acute shortage of affordable housing. Mumbai has one of the most unequal distributions of land in the world, with about 60 per cent of the city’s population living in temporary structures built on about 8 per cent of the total urban area. Today, more than 20 million people live in Mumbai, with this figure forecast to grow by around 5 per cent every year. There is an urgent need to address the city’s pressing issue of density, which currently stands at approximately 83,660 people per square mile.

In response to this, the government of Maharashtra state, of which Mumbai is the capital, has now turned towards redevelopment as part of a plan that has been in the pipeline since 2016. Maharashtra has announced a scheme to demolish the historic chawl tenement blocks located in the heart of Mumbai, which are to be replaced with multi-storey towers over the course of the coming eight years. This will be accompanied by the construction of an additional 17 towers for market sale, which will make available more than two million square feet of commercial space. What will be lost in this redevelopment is significant. The chawls are a distinctive element of Mumbai’s past, initially developed in the late 19th century to provide housing for mill workers during the city’s existence under British colonial rule. A housing typology that provides affordable single-room accommodation to tenants, chawls feature commonly shared access, toilet blocks and a communal courtyard. Today, they are home to families who pay a token monthly rent of Rs. 70 (roughly £0.70) to the Public Works Department (PWD) of Maharashtra. Although the chawls have been heavily neglected by the government – which owns the buildings – and they undoubtedly stand in urgent need of attention, the region’s plan is drastic.

The Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MAHADA) has already begun to raze the first of 195 BDD chawls (those created by the Bombay Development Department, founded in 1920) that have been earmarked for demolition in South Mumbai. It is one of the biggest redevelopment projects in Asia, estimated to be worth more than Rs. 17,000 crore (roughly £16.65bn), and the government has promised that residents of the demolished chawls will be rehoused in the same area during construction. Authorities claim to have identified buildings built on former textile mill

land to make residential arrangements for those affected by the project and, in case of scarcity of accommodation, the government has promised to provide a monthly rental sum of Rs. 22,000 (around £215) to families so that they can look for suitable options themselves. Eventually, each “eligible” family – those who have lived in the chawls and can produce registration papers from before 1 January 2021 – will be assigned a 500sqft apartment in one of the new tower blocks. “These chawls gave shelter to nearly four generations of migrant labour coming to Mumbai in search for a better life,” Jitendra Awhad, the housing minister of Maharashtra who spent his childhood in a chawl, told The Hindu in September 2021. “All of them may not have succeeded to fulfil their dreams, but these chawls offered them safety. We have planned the redevelopment to ensure that these families get their rightful homes[…] they will not have to go anywhere.”

“These chawls gave shelter to nearly four generations of migrant labour coming to Mumbai in search of a better life. They offered them safety.”

—Jitendra Awhad

The proposed razing of the chawls is designed to free up real estate in South Mumbai for the city to grow. The chawls are low-rise buildings in a prime area, and the government wants to replace them with buildings that will use the maximum allowable floor space index (FSI), with developers applying pressure to make these areas of the city available to investors.

But the plan is likely to do little in addressing the city’s rising density and the need to provide accommodation for all its citizens. Equally, while the scheme has pledged to rehouse chawl residents from a total of 15,593 rooms within the same area, there are reasons to doubt that this will prove to be a long-term arrangement. Due to the high maintenance costs of the new self-owned apartments, this redevelopment will simply push the city’s service-class population out from central and 106

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southern parts of Mumbai, and create opportunities for wealthy investors instead.

The city of Mumbai grew up across seven islands, which served as a centre for trading operations carried out under Portuguese and, later, British colonial rule.

By 1845, these islands had merged via piecemeal land reclamation into a single landmass that now constitutes the southern part of the city. In the 19th century, South Mumbai was an exclusive enclave for Western settlercolonialists who established a number of textile mills beyond its boundaries, attracting indigenous migrants from rural areas seeking employment in the new factories. While Victorian Gothic and Art Deco buildings created a strong architectural character in South Bombay, a parallel construction effort emerged amongst the workers drawn to Mumbai, who erected thatch-roofed huts on stretches of land reclaimed from the sea, which gradually developed to form a distinct typology of community housing, acquiring the name chawl (derived from “chaal” or “walk”).

In the wake of these structures, some of the earliest formally constructed chawls were commissioned by mill owners and designed to accommodate male workers in single tenements within the spacious compounds of the mills. Over time, however, as male workers began migrating with their families, these chawls became busy nodes in the city, weaving a network of roads, railway stations, hospitals and playgrounds around them. Initially segregated on grounds of class, caste and religion, each chawl represented a unique cultural identity. The trading community from Rajasthan and Gujarat amalgamated their tradition of crafts and visual art with the spaces they inhabited through wall murals and hangings, while migrants from the Konkan coast of Maharashtra brought with them expressive forms of folk and performing arts – theatre, dance and music. Gradually, the chawls evolved to become places of interaction and exchange where people collected for political movements and social causes, such as the Independence struggle; the demand for Bombay’s home region of Maharashtra to exist as a separate linguistic state; and the Dalit Panther movement against caste discrimination.

A key moment in the chawl typology’s development came when Bombay was hit by an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1896, which is estimated to have killed 29,000 people. In the aftermath of this epidemic, the British government introduced the City of Bombay Improvement

Act, establishing the Bombay City Improvement Trust (BIT) to address the fact that an estimated 30 to 40 per cent of the city’s population was concentrated in a meagre 3 to 4 per cent of its land. Constituted in 1898, the BIT aimed to widen roads, restructure old buildings and create more open spaces in the city.

Nevertheless, the housing crisis persisted, compelling the British government to establish the Bombay Development Department (BDD) in 1920, which undertook the building of publicly funded chawls.

A development loan described as “By Bombay, For Bombay” was raised and a town duty of one rupee levied on each bale of cotton entering the city for the same purpose. This institutionalising of the chawl typology standardised its architecture, plugging it into the city’s larger system of services (water supply, drainage, sewerage and electricity).

At present, there are a total of 207 BDD chawl complexes in South Mumbai. Under the MAHADA plan, nearly all will be lost.

The sociologist Patrick Geddes, who worked as a freelance town planner and taught sociology at the University of Bombay, remarked in the 1930s that Mumbai’s chawls were not meant for housing, but rather “warehousing” people, referring to these buildings as “Bolshevik barracks”. While Geddes’s comments may have captured an element of truth at the time – a 10x12ft room in a chawl could be occupied by more than 20 workers engaged in shift work – they are not an accurate representation of the realities today.

The chawls were typically constructed across four storeys, with each level containing 10 or 12 rooms, positioned evenly along the length of a 4ft-wide corridor.

Today, each single room, or kholi, accommodates a family of four to five, with tenants customising their kholis by adding open kitchenettes, loft spaces for extra storage, or bunks. Main doors often double up as cabinet shutters, while beds and chairs are folded away to make space for the day’s activities. Corridors offer natural spill-out spaces and it is not unusual to find furniture and benches placed along them.

Meanwhile, the large open spaces created between neighbouring chawls serve as courtyards, or wadis, where gatherings are held, festivals celebrated and tournaments organised. Children spend most of their time outdoors, huddled in groups for collective study or playing games.

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The larger neighbourhoods of which the chawls are a part have distinct qualities of their own. Since the closure of the textile mills in the 1980s, many residents have established commercial ventures and set up temporary shops along the street-facing front of their buildings. Some choose to sell vegetables and fish, which are frequently bought by occupants of the various chawls, while others deal in homemade pickles and sweets. One particular street in Girgaon, South Mumbai, is lined with a series of shops that are dedicated to the wedding card trade, tying into a network of jobs distributed in and around the same area, including handmade paper-making, dyeing and printing. Thus emerges a hierarchy of spaces catering to the economic sustenance of the chawls’ residents. The wadi is used for performing shared tasks; the narrow lanes between chawls are packed with secondary enterprises; the nukkad, or junction of lanes, serves as a meeting place for residents; while the chowk, or square, that merges with the main vehicular street is the hub of activity. Meanwhile, interstitial spaces such as those found under the metal or timber staircases that provide access to the higher levels of the chawls, are often appropriated as booths for local tailors or hairdressers.

While the chawls historically provided partial answers to some of the practical and social issues facing Mumbai, their dilapidation has forced many families to leave their tenements. After the passage of the Bombay Rents, Hotel and Lodging House Rates Control Act in 1947, which froze rent irrespective of

to view the area where Mumbai’s textile mills and chawls stood as prime real estate for the construction of offices and malls, luring their occupants northward with the offer of self-contained units in cooperatives.

“We never closed our doors,” says Rohit Shringare, a freelance photographer whose family left a chawl in South Mumbai in the 1980s for a cooperative society located far north of the city. “We could just smell what was cooking in each other’s homes and we bonded well with our neighbours who were like our extended family[…] In the cooperative, the only advantage is that we have more space, but everyone likes to keep their distance. The trust factor is missing.” In parallel to the development of the cooperatives, MAHADA undertook the building of affordable, low-rise apartment blocks in the city’s suburbs as part of a scheme to free up land for commercial undertakings.

Within a decade, development in Mumbai was booming, a phenomenon which saw many of the cooperatives slip from the hands of the collective and into those of private builders, whose primary agenda was to exploit the permitted FSI and sell every square foot possible. Byelaws for the building of new low-cost housing complexes reduced the minimum area requirements for kitchens and toilets, as well as allowing balcony or corridor space – which had operated as community spaces in the chawls – to be enclosed and subsequently included in the private rentable space.

Today, people’s feelings about the chawls are mixed. “I live here with my two brothers; two families, ten people,” says Jayant, a chawl resident who spoke to Maura Finkelstein for her essay in the book The Chawls of Mumbai: Galleries of Life. “We are not happy with the unit area. It is congested. But we don’t want to shift because we have spent our whole childhood here. This building is protected by the government, owned by the government. We love the area; the local people, shops and markets. Everything is close by; schools, hospitals, Western and Central railway stations[…] We are living in the centre of Mumbai and this is to our satisfaction.” On the other hand, Finkelstein reports that Sushila, who relocated to an independent flat in Vikhroli in the 1970s, does not regret her decision to leave the chawls. But when asked what she missed most, Sushila replies with a sparkle in her eye. “Ganpati,” she says, referencing the Hindu deity Ganesha. “I miss the large statues of Ganpati each chawl brought to their pandals in

“We are not happy with the unit area. It is congested.

But we have spent our whole childhood here.”

—Jayant, a chawl resident

inflation and the rise in property values, investment in the chawls was drastically reduced, thereby preventing their upkeep. In response, some chawl residents opted to move into more spacious “cooperative societies” instead. Alongside this decline in the condition of the chawls, from the 1960s onwards developers began 112

the wadi. We would celebrate together for 10 days and go in large processions to immerse the idol in the sea.” Affordability is one of the factors of the chawl typology that the proposed redevelopment pays little attention to. The locality of Worli, for example, currently has the largest spread of BDD chawls in the city. Under the redevelopment plan, these will be replaced by 33 40-storey towers, each of which has six floors of parking. An additional set of 10 towers, 66-storey each, will be made available for market sale, in addition to the 1.3m sqft of highly valuable commercial space that will be created by the scheme. Chawl residents will receive 500sqft 2BHK (bedroom, hall and kitchen) apartments.

The commercial flats, meanwhile, are 807 and 1,076sqft spaces.

There are numerous short-term problems with this rehousing scheme, not least the fact that disputes among family members have arisen with respect to the ownership of the new apartments (“In case of failure in resolving [these] disputes, the new flat will be registered in the name of the Director of BDD,” Vaishali Gadpale, chief public relations officer at MAHADA, told the press). Furthermore, the apartment units, though more spacious and self-owned, are designed for isolated living; a concept unfamiliar and unwelcome to most, many of whom would not have willingly given up their previous lifestyle.

The new scheme will include buildings with private entrances and paid access to facilities such as gyms, crèches and clinics. But even overlooking these issues, the current proposal is not expected to allow residents to remain in the same area in the long run. There are high maintenance costs associated with self-owned units that few of the chawl residents will be able to bear, even if the government has pledged to provide financial assistance for the first 10 years. And while people will be registered as owners of their respective apartments, they will not have collective ownership of the land or the building. “The government isn’t doing anybody a favour by giving us free flats,” Anand Bhandare, a fourth-generation resident at a BDD chawl in Worli, told The Hindu. “Nobody demanded 40-storey towers for rehabilitation. Has anyone given a thought to how poor families will pay for maintenance?

Why should we be dependent upon a corpus fund?”

Resisting changes to, or advocating for the fossilisation of, chawls is neither practical, nor viable. But dismissing the typology’s spatial merits,

and replacing them with tower blocks is to effectively denounce a population upon whom the smooth functioning of the city depends for the supply of essential services and labour. “It is important

“We need to ask, how can we learn from the chawls and transform them into something bigger, taller, denser?”

—Melissa Smith

to preserve something of the chawls; they are a critical part of history and also a very efficient type of habitable residential space in a city that needs density,” says Melissa Smith, an architect and urban planner based out of Ahmedabad. “At the same time, they can’t support the kind of density that Mumbai has without becoming more expensive, which would therefore require that they transform, and serve other sections of the population. What the chawls did well was minimise private space for affordability and provide shared access and other social spaces.

We need to ask, how can we learn from this and transform the typology into something bigger, taller, denser? This involves questioning how much space people need, how alterable it can be, what can be shared, what infrastructure in the building needs to be maintained.”

The chawl was one answer to the mass housing crisis that Bombay faced when it was beginning to urbanise, and the typology went on to adapt to the needs of the community it served. More than 100 years later, the city faces a similar challenge, to which drastic redevelopment has been put forward as the solution. Yet little information has been provided as to how this is to work in any detail. While the MAHADA website lists all the contractors and design consultants assigned for each of the selected localities, it does not reveal any clear planning scheme or projected maintenance costs. This lack of transparency in the process removes the redevelopment from public scrutiny and deprives the future occupants of these buildings of the opportunity to voice their opinions.

Moreover, the limited involvement of architects and

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the criteria for their selection (the tendering process took into account annual turnovers, as opposed to design sensibility and approach, stating that “[the] Applicant Firm/Consortium shall have to provide audited annual financial statements for the last three financial years to demonstrate an average annual turnover from Advisory Services of not less than Rs. 2 Crores” [around £195,855]) does not seem to have succeeded in bridging the gap between the government, builders and end-users. Many residents are only vaguely aware of the proposals already approved by the authorities and they fear that vital public spaces will be lost in the endeavour to make maximum profit from the available FSI. “Space does not create culture; it only promotes it,” Pankaj Joshi, principal director of Urban Centre Mumbai, told Alok Deshpande of The Hindu. “Ultimately, it is the people who create culture[…] so the focus should be on how

area of 85 hectares. Applying a bottom-up approach, residents were given access to serviced land and a framework for the accommodation unit, instead of a finished house.

Over the years that followed the construction of the project’s 80 sample homes (the remainder were never completed), the housing’s built fabric was able to grow comparatively organically, shaped by needs, aspirations and affordability. Guided by the hierarchy of spaces specified in Doshi’s masterplan, and a kit of designed elements (outdoor staircases, balconies, railings and verandas), Aranya’s social environment extended beyond the confines of a basic four walls and a roof. Inhabitants added steps, ledges, common landings and courtyards to allow them to engage in shared activities and introduce transitional spaces that also provide opportunities to pause and interact.

“Housing is not inert,” Doshi notes. “It is a living entity.”

Though very few units from the original scheme remain – most of them demolished as the city of Indore sprawled with privately constructed buildings – the scope for customisation that the project aimed to provide, and the choices it offered, assigned a sense of dignity and belongingness to its residents.

It is these same traits that the chawl residents in Mumbai must also be given, in order to make the redevelopment more informed and participatory.

Equally, Aranya stands as a warning to Mumbai.

Doshi’s scheme was, in large part, prevented from achieving its full potential as a result of declining governmental investment in housing and a growing reliance on private developers. Although the scheme received an Aga Khan award during its 1993-1995 cycle, for instance, the judges noted that it already represented “the remnants of an idea that has been eroded in the last five years”.

A more recently implemented project is Loving Community housing in Vastral, a low-lying, floodprone area in Ahmedabad. Designed by Sealab in 2018, the scheme identified 55 dilapidated homes in a pre-existing community settlement that had originally been developed to house those suffering from leprosy. Constrained by a tight budget and narrow plot sizes, each house was redesigned to maximise natural light and ventilation, but also to consider the different aspirations and needs of residents, which were gleaned through interactive sessions hosted with the community. The homes were erected on raised plinths that were conceived

“Ultimately it is the people who create culture, so the focus should be on how they can remain here.”

—Pankaj Joshi

they can remain here. We cannot say if the previous culture was better or the present[…] Only coexistence of different cultures and communities can make a city richer, not exclusion.”

There are precedents to which Mumbai might look, however, with India having already witnessed a number of experiments in low-cost, community housing projects with varying degrees of success.

While they may not directly apply to Mumbai’s hyper dense situation, their approach towards social housing is worth noting and learning from. The Aranya LowCost Housing in Indore, for instance, was commissioned by the Indore Development Authority and co-funded by the World Bank and India’s Housing and Urban Development Corporation in 1983. Located 6km from the city centre, the scheme was developed by architect B.V. Doshi to house 60,000 people from the “economically weaker section” of the society within 6,500 dwellings over a net planning 114

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as open spaces that could support work, gatherings and rest, and were built from the debris of demolished structures before being finished with smooth, red IPS. Restored and redeveloped incrementally, this project largely avoided the need for residents to find temporary accommodation in a different locality, and has effectively reused elements such as doors, windows and stone shelves from the previous homes.

“Our profession is serving a small part of the population in the country,” the scheme’s principal architect Anand Sonecha has previously noted. “We should critically look at architectural education to assure that schools are preparing students to also serve other segments of people in[...] society.”

Without an active debate amongst designers around the chawl redevelopment in Mumbai, fresh and practical ideas cannot be formulated to best suit the context of the city. Legally, everything has already been passed regarding the demolition of the chawls, but with enough pressure from Mumbai’s design community, positive changes could perhaps still be made during the eight-year implementation timeframe.

While redevelopment can be used as an opportunity to address the plural identities housed within the city and its socio-economic complexities, it also runs the risk of erasing Mumbai’s unique built environments – spaces that require investment and architectural attention, but which have nevertheless proven themselves a resilient typology over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. “It isn’t an all or nothing question as to whether the BDD chawls should be saved,” says Smith, who cites the need for design and architecture to explore and visualise alternatives to the current proposal. “Architects need to be seen as mediators, and work together with other groups to build consensus”. E N D

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Design for the Realv World Interview Space Popular (Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg) Photographs Dean Kaufman

“In effect, philosophy is an incubator for other disciplines,” writes David Chalmers, professor of philosophy at New York University, as well as co-director of the institution’s Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness.

“When philosophers figure out a method for rigorously addressing a philosophical question, we spin that method off and call it a new field.”

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In his latest book, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, Chalmers sets to work mapping out the beginnings of one such field: the emergence of virtual and augmented realities. “Today’s VR and AR systems are primitive,” Chalmers writes. “The headsets and glasses are bulky. The visual resolution for virtual objects is grainy. Virtual environments offer immersive vision and sound, but you can’t touch a virtual surface, smell a virtual flower, or taste a virtual glass of wine when you drink it.” Yet technological progress is rapid and “these temporary limitations will pass.” Even while our virtual worlds remain crude, there is no reason to assume, Chalmers argues, that they do not represent genuine realities. “Each virtual world is a new reality.”

Over the course of his book, Chalmers explores how we can conceive of Reality+: the universe formed by various virtual and non-virtual worlds. Through methodical argumentation, fables, relatable scenarios and illustrations by Tim Peacock, Chalmers opens a portal into the reality that is soon to emerge from behind the screen. It is a field with clear implications for design, not least in terms of how we should go about designing virtual worlds and objects.

In this space, few design practices have been as progressive or rigorous as Space Popular, a studio founded in 2013 by Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg.

Space Popular has designed physical buildings and installations, but this work is allied to a series of designs and projects focused on virtual architecture and the sociopolitical implications of digital spatial experience. “As digital media gains a third dimension through immersive technology, our cultural, political and experiential understanding of how we access and navigate spaces is challenged,” the pair wrote in their 2021 manifesto ‘8 Propositions for a Civic Portal Infrastructure for the Virtual Environment’. “The coming 15 years will see the weaving of physical and virtual environments become denser as our scrolls turn into strolls, and our cursor grows into our fullbody avatar.”

To explore these issues further, Disegno invited Lesmes and Hellberg to meet with Chalmers over Zoom and reflect on the theoretical and practical implications of the metaverse and digital realities.

An edited version of their conversation follows over the coming pages.

Fredrik Hellberg The core premise of the book, as we

understand it, is the idea of virtual realism. Could you elaborate on what means?

David Chalmers The central thesis of the book is that virtual reality is genuine reality. There is a long tradition of people treating virtual reality and virtual worlds as some kind of second-class reality, as fictional or as an illusion or hallucination. I want to argue that virtual reality is very much continuous with physical reality. Virtual reality may be distinct from physical reality, but it’s ontologically on a par. This breaks down into a few different theses. Firstly, that virtual entities really exist and virtual events really happen – they’re not just illusions or hallucinations. Secondly, experiences in a virtual world can be as meaningful as experiences in the physical world. That’s not to say they’re necessarily going to be wonderful, because they could be everything from wonderful to awful: the whole range of human experience applies. The third and most speculative thesis is that it’s not out of the question that our own physical reality is already a virtual reality. This is the idea of the universe as a simulation, which is another way of thinking about continuity between physical reality and virtual reality.

Lara Lesmes What do you think enables these types of ideas? Personally, we feel like we can trace our curiosity about the notion of simulation to the use of VR technology. Do you think devices have played a role in enabling these ideas?

David The current VR devices have made a lot of this come alive and turned some of the philosophical problems into practical ones. For me, however, I don’t know whether it was the devices that got me into it.

In the book I talk about discovering an adventure game called Colossal Cave Adventure on the computers at my father’s workplace when I was 10-years-old. That was quite influential for me in thinking about digital worlds and I’ve played a fair number of video games, which surely played a role in shaping my interest too.

But I also read and watched a lot of science fiction, and science fiction was just as influential for me as any actual technology. Likewise, a lot of this plays into so many ideas in the philosophical tradition.

As a philosopher, you can’t help but think about Descartes. What can we know about the external world? Could all this be an illusion? It becomes natural to phrase these questions in terms of technology. Could all this be a simulation? Could I be in virtual reality? Maybe it’s a convergence

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of all of these avenues – philosophy, science fiction and technology – meeting in the middle.

Fredrik You’ve mentioned in interviews that you socialise and play in VR. How big a role does that play in your life?

David I’m not a huge user of VR, but when its resurgence started around 10 years ago and I heard about the Oculus Rift, I immediately ordered a developer kit.

At that time it was fairly primitive, but you could still get that full-blown VR experience. It has only been since the pandemic started that I’ve been using VR more regularly. In March or April 2020, when everything was locked down, a couple of philosophers who were interested in VR agreed that we should meet up in VR, explore some platforms, and spend some time with each other. A few other people heard about it and this eventually grew to a group of seven or eight of us who have continued to meet as the pandemic has stretched out. That’s been very good, firstly as a means of socialisation and keeping up human contact during the pandemic. Secondly, we’ve found that being in a group means that you can explore these platforms in a much more natural way. It seems that a lot of VR is very much made to be social. It made me think about the potential that virtual worlds have and how so much of it is going to involve communities.

Lara A big part of what we have been working on, especially since 2020, is developing architecture for social VR spaces. When we attempted to describe what the virtual is in the past, we used to say that something virtual is that which is something in essence, but not in its entirety. So it was a relief to see a proper definition in your book, where you define a virtual X as being something that has the strength or powers of X and, most importantly, the effects of X. But does that mean that whenever we talk about something virtual, we imply that there is an original that precedes it?

David I don’t think it has to. It’s true that there’s this very common use of the word that presents a virtual X as an “as if X”: it has the powers of an X and the effects of an X, without really being an X. But I think over time, the word has evolved in such a way that a virtual X can now be better understood as a computer generated X, which might or might not be a real X. So we can have a virtual book and there is no implication that that is not a real book. An e-book is a genuine book. I think we’ve lost those implications that a virtual X is not a real X. It’s true that in the case

of books there may be a non-virtual original.

On the other hand, we also have virtual computer programmes, virtual languages, and virtual data structures, which don’t imply that there is some non-digital original. As architects, you could design an amazing new virtual building that has no original.

What’s amazing about VR is that you can construct wholly new forms that don’t correspond to any original.

“An e-book is a genuine book. I think we’ve lost those implications that a virtual X is not a real X.” —David Chalmers Lara That steps into a challenge we often face. As designers, we have this issue of whether it’s possible to design anything completely new. We’ve seen architectural styles such as postmodernism that have championed historical allusions, but the 20th century was largely determined by the modernist idea that you’re always innovating or creating something new – that you’re detached from anything that came before. In the digital, because there are no constraints, it may seem as if we could do something completely new. But is that even possible?

David At some level, all creativity involves recombining existing elements. I mean, the most original novel in the world may still come down to letters in a sequence.

Are the letters new? Well, they don’t need to be because the book can still be new because of the way of putting them together. That may suggest there’s a continuum of creativity, depending on how big those chunks you recombine are. When you massively recombine small chunks, maybe that’s more creative than just taking two big existing chunks and recombining them.

Even an AI that generates new spaces and virtual entities in ways unlike what any human would design is, ultimately, still recombining certain things – although it may recombine them in a new way.

My advisor Doug Hofstadter used to talk about how variations on a theme are the crux of creativity.

Fredrik I also wanted to go back to your definition of virtual and ask how it has changed throughout

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your career. Within architecture in the 80s and 90s there was a lot of discussion about the virtual in architecture. But people didn’t mean computational simulations at all – they spoke about it purely as a thought experiment. That really defined a lot of the profession, but almost overnight it was replaced by this idea of a computational virtual.

“When we create a virtual public square, is that a metaphor of a public square? It is an analogy?

Or is it a simile?” —Lara Lesmes David When many people hear “virtual reality”, they

think of something that has the effects of something real, without itself being real, whereas when I first heard of virtual reality I thought about it by analogy with artificial intelligence. A virtual reality is an artificial computer-based reality. I come from a background with computers, so it’s second nature to me to think that way. Artificial intelligence is an intelligence that you construct, typically on a computer, so for me it has never had that implication that it’s not real. The same goes for being virtual.

Was the use in architecture tied to Deleuze’s sense of virtual as potential [Deleuze argued that the virtual are those things which are real, but not actualised, ed.]?

Fredrik Absolutely. That French philosophical tradition was very influential and defined a whole generation of architects.

Lara When we were students, we had no VR headsets and any understanding of the virtual in the field was very much used in the Deleuzian sense. But as we started practising, the first headsets came out and the virtual became a very immediate problem. It was a space in which you could actually design and implement design methods.

David As an analytic philosopher [working in a different tradition], I managed to almost miss the Deleuzian notion entirely. I rediscovered it after the fact and I’m now interested as to whether there is a connection between his notion and all of these other discussions of virtual reality. But even Charles Sanders Peirce

[an influential 19th-century US philosopher who contributed numerous entries to The Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, ed.], writing in a dictionary entry about the virtual back in 1902, pointed out that there are two different uses of the word “virtual”. He didn’t have the use of the word in terms of computers, but he did note that “virtual” means something like having the effects of a thing without being the real thing, as well as this other meaning that a virtual X is a potential X. He said that these are two different notions, because the potential X doesn’t yet have the effects of X, even if it may eventually. Deleuze traces his notion of potential from Henri-Louis Bergson, so maybe there’s one strand of the virtual that goes through Bergson and Deleuze, and then this other strand that starts with the medievals and eventually intersects with computer technology. The first people who used virtual in a computer context probably had that “as if” sense in mind, rather than the Deleuzian sense. But the term has rapidly became so closely tied to computers that there are now at least three notions out there: computer-based, potential and as if. The terminology has become very complicated.

Lara This is a vocabulary question, but when we create a virtual public square, is that a metaphor of a public square? Is it an analogy? Or is it a simile; something that just looks like a public square? Or is it something like an allegory? Or is it something that brings the narrative of that space into our heads, and we then start filling in all the implications that this thing looking like a public square brings forward? Or maybe it’s all of these things at the same time for different people?

David I’m tempted to say that a virtual public square really is a public square – there can be genuine public squares in virtual worlds. It’s particularly easy, I think, for social concepts to be realised in virtual worlds, because social concepts basically come down to the interaction of people and their understandings, and it’s very easy to have those things in a virtual world.

But there are also cases where we don’t want to say that a virtual X is an X. In the book I talk about the case of a virtual kitten. It may be a very sophisticated virtual kitten, but nobody right now would say that it’s a real kitten. Maybe it’s an analogue of a kitten – that is, a digital kitten with many of the properties of a kitten – but ultimately it’s not a real kitten. But biological cases are very complicated, so how about

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a virtual football instead? When you’re playing a game of football in VR, we’re initially going to say it’s not really a football, even if – at least in principle – it’s playing all of the roles of a football. So we might say that it’s an analogue of football, it’s an “as if” football.

But language can change and, over time, maybe half the football in the world will start to be played virtually. Then we’ll likely just call a VR football a football. It’ll no longer be an analogy – it’ll be an instance of the real thing.

Lara Or we’ll come up with another word to define the virtual football. It almost feels that there may be a problem of language in that we’re using the same word for two things that have a slight difference.

David Maybe we’ll develop a natural prefix, which is going to be useful to show what you’re talking about.

At the moment, people use “real” and “virtual”, which I don’t like, but we could use “physical” and “virtual”, or “physical” and “digital”. Or maybe, if this becomes very common, we’ll just have a simple way to indicate the difference, like subscript P or subscript V. It’s important to recognise the differences between the physical and the virtual, but I’d like to think we can recognise that in a way that acknowledges that they are, nonetheless, very closely related forms of reality.

Fredrik Is this idea of coming up with a grammar or new linguistic system something you’re interested in actually proposing in your work?

David If I had the right ideas I would , but I don’t know that I’ve yet come up with the perfect language for virtual worlds. But to some extent this has been happening for years already in cultures around video games. With the oncoming ubiquity of VR, it’s probably going to develop in all kinds of unpredictable directions. I can make some proposals, but whether they would catch on is a different matter. Maybe we need a linguistic summit to get people to sit around and try and come up with the right languages for usefully describing virtual worlds in a way that does them justice – that would be a cool enterprise.

Lara During the pandemic, we became concerned that once it was over and you could have physical events again, we’d return to the problem where you can’t attend if you’re not in the place they’re happening.

So we kept on borrowing a term from Rick and Morty, which is “holophobia” – discrimination against holograms. It sounds funny, but if you don’t make your event available through the internet, that might be quite holophobic. If you don’t create a gateway,

or a way of attending as a hologram, you’re actually being holophobic.

David There’s also “simphobia” for fear of simulations or non-player characters. Right now that is perhaps justified, because NPCs [non-playable characters in video games, ed.] are probably not conscious individuals, but as they develop that may become more of a problem: discrimination in favour of biological intelligences and against simulated intelligences. Do you find virtualphobia with respect to virtual architecture?

“It’s important to recognise the differences between the physical and virutal, but also acknowledge that they’re closely related forms of reality.”

—David Chalmers Fredrik Yes, indeed, and I think this connects to a question we have about how the notion of the virtual is posing a threat to the discipline of architecture, because architects have been trained largely to create physical buildings.

Lara When we mentioned the virtual public square, you said that it seems to be a public square, but it feels like that also comes with a lot of nuance. You’re implying that it’s a civic space and that comes with a lot of politics attached to it – issues of ownership, for instance. Who does it belong to? It’s actually a very difficult thing to say that anything can be civic on the internet if, by definition, all of those spaces are owned by someone. Even if I create a virtual world on my own, and try and make it really open-source and super inclusive, I’m still hosting that space. So we often face the question of whether we can talk about civic virtual space. Is that even possible?

David Ah, I see now. You mean “public” or “civic” in the sense of it being owned by nobody. In the physical world, civic spaces are still controlled by, say, a state or something, but that feels consistent with being

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civic. But if you’re controlled by a corporation, you’re not civic. I don’t know what kind of virtual spaces there are out there that are controlled by states, and that’s very interesting to think about. States could set up their own virtual spaces and call them civic, but you’re right that if a corporation sets up a space and says, “We have no control over this,” that’s an issue, because ultimately they do. That’s a dilemma. There’s a sense in which it can’t be genuinely public.

“Physical architecture exists in the context of a city that is controlled by certain laws. In virtual environments, the whole thing is turned on its head.”

—Fredrik Hellberg Fredrik This connects to a lot of the fears that many

architects have around this. Often when physical architecture is created, it exists in the context of a city that is controlled by certain laws. You can create a discrete object like a building, but it still connects to public utilities and many other things. In virtual environments, the whole thing is turned on its head, and the logic of how the thing you create connects to everything around it is completely different.

Lara Another aspect we have been thinking about is the speed at which architecture can be created in virtual worlds from the point of view of construction. We are used to architecture being this very stable thing. It lasts for a long time because it takes so long to make.

But, suddenly, we are creating environments in places where the timeframe is a lot shorter. We could imagine that it could soon be almost immediate: I might say a few words or put together a few images and a world is created. This brought us to this idea of whether we will have something like architecture at the speed of the spoken word, or architect at the speed of thought.

David Just this morning Mark Zuckerberg gave a presentation about AI in the metaverse. One of his examples was to say, “I want to be at the beach, I want

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to have some palm trees, I want to have an island, I want to have a table,” and as soon as he had said it the AI, which was called Builder Bot, went to work constructing a palm tree and a table in a way that fits the constraints. Presumably, there’s going to be a version of this where you say, “I want a building with roughly this shape and these floors that will do this,” and the AI will take your words and thoughts and produce something that meets its constraints.

And there you have it – instant architecture.

Lara Architecture has been one of the pioneers for this use of technology, but what always strikes me about these ideas of the future is that constantly coming up with places you want to be would be exhausting.

It’s already hard enough to choose what you want to watch on TV, so imagine having to come up with all the environments you want to be in all the time.

I wonder if there would still be a role for someone dedicated to orchestrating your sequence of spaces.

David That is one reading of the term “Reality+” or “Reality Plus”. When I was thinking about calling the book that, someone said, “That sounds like a streaming service: Disney+, Paramount+.” That wasn’t the original meaning I had in mind, but if you want to hear it as a streaming service, that’s not the worst thing in the world. In the future, just as we have Netflix, we will also have a streaming service for virtual worlds; you’ll be able to choose which reality you want to hang out in. Maybe AI will play a role in that. People are going to want to inhabit common realities a lot, so in order for people to have common realities, presumably we’re not going to create new realities every single time. Perhaps in certain moods you may want a new reality and then you work with a designer or an AI system to create it, but I think the forces of community are going to mean that much of the time we’ll hang out in common realities. A lot of virtual worlds right now seem to give creation a very central role. Even Roblox, which is so popular among kids, is a platform where a huge part of the experience is designing games yourself. Likewise, Meta has made designing worlds very central in its Horizon Worlds system. It’s an interesting question whether that will continue to remain the case, or whether that’s more of an early adopter thing. In the long term, perhaps there will be the special class of designers and a much larger class of users.

Fredrik We wanted to touch upon something in relation to language, which we’re trying to find ways to work

with within our practice. This is the idea of linguistic relativity or the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which says that the structure of language affects the speaker’s worldview or cognition. In our work, we extend this hypothesis to visual language and the semiotics of virtual environments. Do you think it’s a useful way to think about virtual environments, where everything may have been placed intentionally, to consider them as a form of language?

David I don’t find myself inclined to say it’s language.

I mean, in some very broad sense of language, is a chair language? Somebody had intentions when they created that chair and maybe it’s a symbol of various things, but I’m not especially inclined to say that that’s language. If a physical chair isn’t language, I’m not inclined to think a virtual chair is language, either. It’s a geometric object in space, which we can interact with in all kinds of spatial ways, whereas I think of language as being a bit more constrained – more deeply symbolic. It’s true that there are complex intermediate cases, such as gesture, which is perhaps a form of language, but it’s still very deeply motoric. What I’d want to say is that there’s the narrow class of language and there’s also the broad class of representations. Maybe everything in the world can be treated as a representation because we’re very representational creatures, but I’d hesitate to call that language.

Lara We’ve seen that the rise of new software, as well as platforms such as Pinterest, have enabled people to say things that they don’t have words for. As an architect, when you’re designing a space for somebody you often run out of words, because there is no word for a particular style that they may want. So, if you have a series of visuals you can put together, then we may get a sense of, “Aha! OK, that’s what we want.”

We can understand what that may be together, even if we don’t have a name for it. This starts to enable language to go beyond words.

David It seems like an amazing form of communication and other forms of communication certainly go beyond language. What is it that people say: a picture’s worth a thousand words? But that’s not to say the picture is itself a word, although it is sometimes a better way of communicating. I think that what is coming out here is that for many purposes, the construction of objects and virtual worlds can be used for very powerful new forms of communication and representation, whether or not we call them linguistic.

Lara I guess the issue for us is what we should call this

communication. I love that you brought up the chair, because the chair as an object is something we obsess over. We’re seeing so many virtual worlds with loads of chairs, but no one has the haptics to actually be able to sit on them. The chair is removed from its purpose, so why are so many people still putting chairs in digital spaces? We started to observe that making your avatar sit in a particular place, or perhaps just the act of sitting, is being used as a form of communication.

If I go to your virtual lecture, and I really want to support you, then I’m going sit on the front row in the virtual space.

David We have so many meanings and, in this case, we’ve got meanings inherited from the physical world.

Chairs were originally for some functional role, but they’ve been invested with so much social meaning in so many different contexts that it turns out you can transfer all of that into a virtual world, even if they don’t have the original functional meaning in the same way. The social meaning carries across, because much of what we have in the physical world is just that.

Lara That brings up two concepts that are quite commonly used in design. One is the notion of an affordance, which is used a lot within game design – something that carries a symbolic meaning which enables us, without being guided, to make certain decisions. The other is the notion of the skeuomorph.

A lot of the things that we have been talking about are skeuomorphs of some kind.

David I’ve got zero expertise on matters of design, but affordances are things we also know about in philosophy and cognitive science. We naturally perceive and interact with objects as if they afford certain actions. I see this glass of water, for example, as something to be grasped and drunk. The virtual world is a weird combination of importing some of the affordances from the the physical world – like a door is still something you can walk through – and creating wholly new affordances. So you can teleport in virtual worlds, for example, and there are signals for places where you can teleport. In mixed realities too, virtual objects and physical objects can afford very different actions, so it’s important to us as agents that we be able to perceive those differences and grasp the real affordances of the objects around us, otherwise things will go wrong. That’s one reason why it’s important that virtual objects be marked for us in some way to make their affordances clear.

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Fredrik Do you think it’s important those markers are

consistent? We recently wrote a manifesto of virtual environments, specifically around teleportation and moving around virtual environments, and one of the points within that is about being constant.

David I think people like having expectations that are fulfilled. We like surprises too, but only within limits.

So perhaps you could have occasional surprising affordances, but too much of that and it’s going to be chaos. Maybe that’s going to be one element of the language of virtual worlds. There are already ways of doing this in video games. Objects are marked as something you can pick up versus something you can’t, and that seems important. When there are new kinds of actions you can take in VR, we’ll need new ways of marking those affordances. But a lot of this depends on background knowledge. One of my themes is that once you’re a sophisticated user of VR – and you’re familiar with how things work in a virtual world, standard configurations and standard affordances – you perceive that world differently. You have what I call a cognitive orientation towards seeing things as virtual, and you realise that the standards by which you evaluate virtual objects may often be different from the standards by which you evaluate physical objects.

Fredrik Do you think it would be important for an architect or designer creating virtual environments to consider this as a function within the design to help people reach a point where they can have that cognitive reorientation?

David Certainly when it comes to the affordances.

You may even have cognitive orientation that is specific to different platforms. You’ll know that when you’re going into Meta’s virtual world you should expect one thing, and when you go into Apple’s you should expect another. The more complex stuff like the social meaning is going to be important too. There’s the direct social meaning of who you can interact with, but the more subtle social meaning that connotes class or culture or gender or nationality. Just as we have certain systems for doing that in the physical world – clothing communicates all those things, as does hair or housing or whatever – we’ll have to find new ways of communicating these things in virtual worlds via avatars, buildings, and more.

Lara One topic that we were curious about is the idea of games and roleplay versus reality – or how games

could broadly be understood as simulations. We often talk about simulation as something all-encompassing, in which we could be fully immersed and perhaps unaware of its nature. But we’re running simulations every day to test out scenarios in everyday life. When we’re kids, we’re playing games to try things out all the time and, more generally, we’ve seen processes in which games and game worlds have eventually become realities. Think about the way in which social media started as this funny thing to play around with, and then eventually people came to really care about it. What do you think causes this shift of a simulation becoming a reality? Is it when we start making money from it? Or when it feels like it is connected to our identity and therefore things are at stake?

“Once you’re a sophisticated user of VR – you’re familiar with how things work in a virtual world – you perceive that world differently.”

—David Chalmers David There are so many different kinds of games,

but normally we think that they somehow have a point that is distinct from most of our ordinary purposes in reality – that’s what makes them merely games. But actions within a game can be continuous to actions in the physical world. There are all these video game worlds that are half game worlds and half social worlds, for instance. Something like Minecraft is a little like this, or World of Warcraft.

People have all these quests which seem to be part of the game world, but they’re also used as a way of developing community, making friends and having relationships. This is also true for games in the physical world.

Lara It seems there’s two routes: either you start making money in it or else you start developing relationships that you really care for. And therefore there’s this fluidity as to whether it’s really a game.

David Once it’s fully social, those social elements are real. Once there are financial implications, those are

Interview

real. The social in virtual worlds and physical worlds is basically continuous, and finance within virtual worlds has implications for finance in the physical world. It’s funny because people sometimes say, “That shows that this actually has some reality!

You can cash out the money for real money in the physical world!” But even if you couldn’t, it would still be real. If you have someone conservative who thinks that only the the physical world is fully real, then the fact that these virtual worlds have effects in the physical world is a way for them to have at least derivative reality. But if you adopt the more enlightened view that virtual worlds and entities are real in their own right, what happens in virtual worlds matters in its own right, then you don’t have to be able to affect the physical world to be real. But maybe the conservative view can be a stepping stone towards the more enlightened view.

Fredrik How has the core argument of the book and these issues of virtual realism generally been received?

Because your audience for this book is very broad: the world of philosophy, but also people like us from across many other fields.

David So far I’ve found massive variation, which may be a little bit generational. People my age and older often tend to be more conservative about this and less willing to acknowledge that virtual realities are genuine realities, whereas for kids who grew up in digital environments it’s obvious. It’s like, “Why did you even need to tell us this?” I’m hoping that over time it will become more and more obvious to more people, because there are many people out there who find it counterintuitive and maybe even repulsive.

There are some very emotional reactions to the digital world: that it’s just not real and if you even mention the digital, it makes you a pawn of the tech companies who are trying to send us away from physical reality.

But I do find, at least philosophically, a lot more openness towards this idea – far more than there was 20 years ago, when it was pretty counterintuitive.

The analogue here is the idea of the extended mind, in which objects in your world can become part of your mind – the classic example of which is the smartphone. When Andy Clark [a professor of cognitive philosophy at the University of Sussex, ed.] and I put this idea forward in the mid 90s, it was generally regarded as rather extreme and implausible, but I think by now most people find it to be kind of obviously true.

Fredrik Apart from getting this book out into the

world, what is your next area of exploration?

David In Reality+ I was exploring the ideal theory of virtual worlds – what they could be, in principle.

Now, I’m trying to think a bit more about the nonideal theory about how things may actually be in practice. I’m starting to think about some of the shorter term issues that may arise: the way it’s going to be in the next 10 or 20 years, where it may be largely controlled by tech companies and imperfect in various respects. Philosophical issues arise here too, such as free will. If your world is constantly under the control of a tech company, and you’re the subject of manipulation, do you really have free will and autonomy in a virtual world? Or identity – the way people are using virtual worlds right now to express personal identity, gender identity and cultural identity in all kinds of ways, sometimes adopting identities in virtual worlds distinct from those they have in the physical world. This goes to the heart of many important philosophical issues about identity.

The non-ideal theory of virtual worlds is as rich and interesting as the ideal one. E N D Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy by David Chalmers is published

by Allen Lane, price £25.

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Dom Plate

by Michele de Lucchi

Designed by Michelle De Lucchi, Dom plate is a meticulously crafted sculpture resembling a star map guiding us home. The profound appeal of Dom plates is to be found in brilliantly designed geometry, meticulously executed details–which bear witness to enduring value of fine craftsmanship, and the warmth and tactility of solid wood.

For dealer information, please visit our website: www.zanat.org

Plastic: Remaking Our World 26.03.2022 – 04.09.2022

#VDMPlastic #vitradesignmuseum www.design-museum.de

»Plastic: Remaking Our World« is an exhibition by the Vitra Design Museum, V&A Dundee and maat, Lisbon

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