PLOT 40
Teoría
Seventeen Harvard Design Magazine Optimistas, rebeldes, contradictorios, espontáneos, impulsivos, superficiales, colaborativos, desprejuiciados, libres, inseguros, creativos, inexpertos, innovadores y muchas veces incluso imposibles de categorizar. La adolescencia está caracterizada por la combinación aleatoria –con diferentes grados de intensidad– de estos adjetivos, un periodo de profundas transformaciones en nuestras vidas, y fundamentalmente de autoafirmación. Este es también el principio del nuevo milenio, adolescente. La revolución tecnológica a la par del desarrollo científico no solo modificó los modos de producción y la estructura del trabajo, imprimió cambios significativos en cada rincón de los espacios que habitamos, reconfigurando el modo en que nos relacionamos con el mundo, pero principalmente nuestra percepción respecto al paso del tiempo: hoy todo es (más) veloz, por lo menos esa es la percepción de la generación “pre-millenials” que tiene la experiencia del otro pasado. Seventeen, la edición número 44 de Harvard Design Magazine, explora y abre un campo para el diálogo, la especulación y la sorpresa en torno a este nuevo mundo rodeado de imprevistos, conflictos, resistencias y nuevas posibilidades para un futuro que se escribe incierto y se autoafirma a medida que avanza. Es una grata combinación que este número aniversario –y temático– de PLOT contenga dos de los textos de Seventeen traducidos por primera vez al español: “Derechos y ritos”, editorial de Jennifer Sigler y el ensayo “Smells Like Teen Spirit” de Ethel Baraona Pohl. No importa la edad, hoy somos todos adolescentes. Rodrigo Kommers Wender
Derechos y ritos(1) Autora Jennifer Sigler CV Ver página de colaboradores La juventud vencerá de manera irrevocable / ya que la verdad / se regenera siempre / en juventud. / El amor de la juventud / abraza / frustra con éxito / y mantiene unido, / a menudo sin proponérselo, / todo lo que el odio, el miedo y el egoísmo / intenta desintegrar.(2)
Buckminster Fuller.
Estamos en 2017. El milenio está en su adolescencia, y se nota. El mundo está actuando, tomando decisiones precipitadas e impulsivas cuyas repercusiones pueden llegar a ser irremediables. La estructura política es temperamental, volátil e intransigente. Nacimos con el año 2000 y los atentados del 11 de septiembre, nuestra juventud forma parte de una cadena de crisis y evoluciones rápidas. ¿El paisaje físico puede apuntalar nuestra confusión colectiva? La adolescencia puede
Tapa de Seventeen, Harvard Design Magazine. Número 44. Otoño/invierno 2017. www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/44.
(1) Derechos y ritos [Rights and Rites], de Jennifer Sigler, fue publicado originalmente en Seventeen, Harvard Design Magazine. Número 44. Otoño/ invierno 2017. (2) Cita original en inglés: Youth will win overwhelmingly / For truth / Is eternally regenerative / In youth. / Youth’s love / Embracingly integrates, / Successfully frustrates / And holds together, / Often unwittingly, / All that hate, fear, and selfishness / Attempt to disintegrate. Buckminster Fuller.
ser “una etapa”, pero la arquitectura, la infraestructura y la política son difíciles de deshacer. ¿Qué significa tener diecisiete en 2017? Este número de Harvard Design Magazine indaga a adolescentes de todo tipo –seres humanos, edificios, objetos, ideas– y su impacto sobre la imaginación espacial. Al igual que una novela de iniciación del entorno construido, “Seventeen” [“Diecisiete”] se sumerge en el limbo peligroso y excitante de los años adolescentes para entender el presente como un enlace entre el pasado y el futuro. ¿Podemos trazar nuestro camino a través de esta adolescencia global? Aunque se los cataloga como indignados o apáticos –en conflicto con sus anhelos y temores– los adolescentes también son optimistas, apasionados, creativos e ingeniosos. En términos legales, los diecisiete son el punto ideal, el acto final de la infancia en el cual la condición juvenil da paso a una serie de privilegios y restricciones de la adultez. Pero la adolescencia no es solo una transición física y emocional; también es una transición espacial. Los adolescentes siempre han desarrollado técnicas creativas y destructivas para crear espacios dentro de entornos que no pueden controlar. Al abandonar sus hogares de la infancia, los adolescentes anhelan eufemismos de una
autonomía que puede o no tener lugar en estos espacios marginales, de modo que vagan por las calles, huyen a mundos virtuales o se encierran en sus habitaciones; reclaman terrenos baldíos, parques y garajes como territorios propios; y allí trasnochan, se reúnen o simplesmente pasan el tiempo. Para una disciplina que define el espacio según un programa y un propósito, los confusos lugares de reunión de los adolescentes son fácilmente pasados por alto; pero el espacio, el no lugar y la falta de rumbo proporcionan un ámbito para la fantasía, el territorio compartido y la acción, sobre todo en tiempos de libertades cuestionadas. Los adolescentes no son “solo niños”, sus necesidades y deseos tienen un gran impacto sobre la economía y heredarán el entorno natural y construido que les legaremos. A medida que se extiende una profunda crisis política, todos cuestionamos y reavivamos nuestra tarea como ciudadanos y diseñadores. Los adolescentes, quizá más que nadie, saben cómo resistir y perseverar para crear nuevas reglas, para volver a inventarse a sí mismos, a sus comunidades y al mundo en el que quieren vivir. Como todos los adolescentes, nos preguntamos quiénes somos, adónde encajamos, y de qué manera podemos, también, dejar nuestra huella como diseñadores de alto impacto y miembros de una disciplina en evolución. En un 2017 dividido y temperamental, hay mucho que aprender del adolescente.—
187
Smells Like Teen Spirit
Ethel Baraona Pohl
156
Harvard Design Magazine
No. 44 / Seventeen
157
Smells Like Teen Spirit
Ethel Baraona Pohl
156
Harvard Design Magazine
No. 44 / Seventeen
157
Not so long ago, in 1991, Nirvana released the single “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” recalling the teenage years as an apathetic and depressed time of life. The song is widely interpreted as an anthem of teen revolution that speaks to themes of vulnerability and alienation.
over common ideas about the past, present, and future of architecture. Maria Charneco, Alfredo Lérida, Guillermo López, and Anna Puigjaner enjoyed being together so much, as friends and as intellectual partners—sharing their passion for speculative projects, theoretical references, and different forms of representation—that they eventually started entering architectural competitions together. After participating in a few open calls, in 2011 they won a competition to build a project called Floating, a booth at Construmat, the Barcelona construction-industry trade fair. Soon, they won another competition, ultimately deciding to open an office, MAIO. It was nothing more than a simple gesture to give a name to something—a kind of “working friendship”—that had been growing organically for the past five years. There is a certain political impact behind this joyful attitude, mutual respect, and active participation in community making, and it can be recognized in the group’s refusal to feel undermined at a moment when the very structures of society in Spain were being eroded by a pervasive political discourse of fear and fragmentation following the financial and real-estate crisis of 2008. Their work somehow smells like teen spirit. There is an optimism inherent to their projects, which they use to go beyond orthodox approaches to architecture, every project enacting a deepened critical approach to their political, economic, and academic contexts. The diversity of formats and scales—from creating public spaces, housing, and performative installations, to running a gallery or editing a magazine— allows them to search for solutions for a complex discipline. All four members of MAIO also teach or write, laying the ground for highly developed conceptual approaches to their design work, which seeks to define new ways of producing architecture, avoiding the division between practice and theory. For example, the concept of one of their recent works, 110 Rooms (2016), a collective housing building in Barcelona, is based on their ongoing research on collective domesticities and systems: “the building has been designed as a system of 110 rooms which can be used as desired. Each apartment [can] be potentially expanded or reduced, adding or subtracting rooms, in order to answer to future needs of its inhabitants.”3 Formally, MAIO often use collage in their work, recalling the collages of Superstudio. And while their means of representation go far beyond conventional architectural drawings or contemporary renderings, they don’t simply nostalgically reproduce aesthetics and modes of working from the past. Using WhatsApp, Instagram, or Snapchat, the daily workflow at the studio is now underscored by communication technologies, resulting in the possibility of working with many people and belonging to many groups at the same time. They recently participated in the curatorial project “Interludios Remotos” (2017), a visual essay created across seven days and inspired by the popular format of the photo-novel. It connects Mexico City and Madrid through WhatsApp conversations between two architects, with Puigjaner and López (both traveling in the respective cities at the time) featured in MAIO’s iteration of the city exchange. For Jacques Derrida, “the friend is the near one and friendship grows with presence, with allocution in the same
Adolescence is characterized as an age of confusion, alienation, sexual awareness, independence, and resistance. But “teen spirit” also encompasses the full spectrum of alienation, as teenagers hormonally embrace friendship and togetherness, and seek a sense of belonging. In these years anything seems possible, and nothing is unthinkable. Today, we are living in an era of continuous political turmoil marked by armed conflicts, economic crises, and environmental disasters. Systemic impoverishment has become the new normal, and the logics of debt as a mechanism of exploitation and domination is a constant in our daily life. Political rhetoric increasingly promotes segregation through the building of walls, closing of borders, or spreading of messages that erode empathy within the social body. The main successes of capitalism are those of individualism and commodification, resulting in a financialization of (almost) everything—goods, services, and knowledge itself. This is the scenario we find in the second decade of the 21st century, a world always in flux, where daily life means navigating uncertainty and instability. But even in this climate of suffering, injustice, and anger, positive human relationships persist; people are keen to join forces in a quest to define new ways to activate the social body and recover the confidence in the “other” as one of “us.” A certain teen spirit has emerged and spread worldwide. Not Nirvana’s alienated teen spirit, but one based on friendship and optimism has overtaken the streets and, by extension, the urban field. The connections and tensions between oneself and the other recall the Aristotelian passage in Giorgio Agamben’s short essay “Friendship” in which he says that to have a clear perception of our own existence, we need friendship.1 By perceiving our friend, our friend also perceives us, creating a reciprocal dynamic of mutual self-understanding. And this can only happen through the performative acts of friendship, which for Aristotle, via Agamben, are the basis of “living together”—by conversing and sharing our thoughts (koinonia). These shared affective experiences are essential in the formation of community, which is the basis of friendship’s political potentiality. As political theorist Jon Nixon explains, “To address the needs of the other—on the other’s terms—is to open up the possibility for human growth and development, which in turn opens up the possibility of mutuality and reciprocity. That is the premise upon which genuine friendships and strong democracies are based.”2 Friendship is also the element that defines a group of recent architecture-school graduates in Barcelona who bonded
158
Harvard Design Magazine
MAIO, 110 Rooms, Barcelona, Spain, 2016.
No. 44 / Seventeen
159
Not so long ago, in 1991, Nirvana released the single “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” recalling the teenage years as an apathetic and depressed time of life. The song is widely interpreted as an anthem of teen revolution that speaks to themes of vulnerability and alienation.
over common ideas about the past, present, and future of architecture. Maria Charneco, Alfredo Lérida, Guillermo López, and Anna Puigjaner enjoyed being together so much, as friends and as intellectual partners—sharing their passion for speculative projects, theoretical references, and different forms of representation—that they eventually started entering architectural competitions together. After participating in a few open calls, in 2011 they won a competition to build a project called Floating, a booth at Construmat, the Barcelona construction-industry trade fair. Soon, they won another competition, ultimately deciding to open an office, MAIO. It was nothing more than a simple gesture to give a name to something—a kind of “working friendship”—that had been growing organically for the past five years. There is a certain political impact behind this joyful attitude, mutual respect, and active participation in community making, and it can be recognized in the group’s refusal to feel undermined at a moment when the very structures of society in Spain were being eroded by a pervasive political discourse of fear and fragmentation following the financial and real-estate crisis of 2008. Their work somehow smells like teen spirit. There is an optimism inherent to their projects, which they use to go beyond orthodox approaches to architecture, every project enacting a deepened critical approach to their political, economic, and academic contexts. The diversity of formats and scales—from creating public spaces, housing, and performative installations, to running a gallery or editing a magazine— allows them to search for solutions for a complex discipline. All four members of MAIO also teach or write, laying the ground for highly developed conceptual approaches to their design work, which seeks to define new ways of producing architecture, avoiding the division between practice and theory. For example, the concept of one of their recent works, 110 Rooms (2016), a collective housing building in Barcelona, is based on their ongoing research on collective domesticities and systems: “the building has been designed as a system of 110 rooms which can be used as desired. Each apartment [can] be potentially expanded or reduced, adding or subtracting rooms, in order to answer to future needs of its inhabitants.”3 Formally, MAIO often use collage in their work, recalling the collages of Superstudio. And while their means of representation go far beyond conventional architectural drawings or contemporary renderings, they don’t simply nostalgically reproduce aesthetics and modes of working from the past. Using WhatsApp, Instagram, or Snapchat, the daily workflow at the studio is now underscored by communication technologies, resulting in the possibility of working with many people and belonging to many groups at the same time. They recently participated in the curatorial project “Interludios Remotos” (2017), a visual essay created across seven days and inspired by the popular format of the photo-novel. It connects Mexico City and Madrid through WhatsApp conversations between two architects, with Puigjaner and López (both traveling in the respective cities at the time) featured in MAIO’s iteration of the city exchange. For Jacques Derrida, “the friend is the near one and friendship grows with presence, with allocution in the same
Adolescence is characterized as an age of confusion, alienation, sexual awareness, independence, and resistance. But “teen spirit” also encompasses the full spectrum of alienation, as teenagers hormonally embrace friendship and togetherness, and seek a sense of belonging. In these years anything seems possible, and nothing is unthinkable. Today, we are living in an era of continuous political turmoil marked by armed conflicts, economic crises, and environmental disasters. Systemic impoverishment has become the new normal, and the logics of debt as a mechanism of exploitation and domination is a constant in our daily life. Political rhetoric increasingly promotes segregation through the building of walls, closing of borders, or spreading of messages that erode empathy within the social body. The main successes of capitalism are those of individualism and commodification, resulting in a financialization of (almost) everything—goods, services, and knowledge itself. This is the scenario we find in the second decade of the 21st century, a world always in flux, where daily life means navigating uncertainty and instability. But even in this climate of suffering, injustice, and anger, positive human relationships persist; people are keen to join forces in a quest to define new ways to activate the social body and recover the confidence in the “other” as one of “us.” A certain teen spirit has emerged and spread worldwide. Not Nirvana’s alienated teen spirit, but one based on friendship and optimism has overtaken the streets and, by extension, the urban field. The connections and tensions between oneself and the other recall the Aristotelian passage in Giorgio Agamben’s short essay “Friendship” in which he says that to have a clear perception of our own existence, we need friendship.1 By perceiving our friend, our friend also perceives us, creating a reciprocal dynamic of mutual self-understanding. And this can only happen through the performative acts of friendship, which for Aristotle, via Agamben, are the basis of “living together”—by conversing and sharing our thoughts (koinonia). These shared affective experiences are essential in the formation of community, which is the basis of friendship’s political potentiality. As political theorist Jon Nixon explains, “To address the needs of the other—on the other’s terms—is to open up the possibility for human growth and development, which in turn opens up the possibility of mutuality and reciprocity. That is the premise upon which genuine friendships and strong democracies are based.”2 Friendship is also the element that defines a group of recent architecture-school graduates in Barcelona who bonded
158
Harvard Design Magazine
MAIO, 110 Rooms, Barcelona, Spain, 2016.
No. 44 / Seventeen
159
MAIO, Floating, 2011.
MAIO, Floating, Barcelona, Spain, 2011.
Ana Dana Beroš, Intermundia project, 2014.
place.”4 This dynamic has an increased potentiality thanks to our ceaseless use of social media. The “near one” can be miles away, but the “presence” is real by means of communication, interaction, and even working together in real time; consequently, the notion of friendship has broader limits than ever before. This ecosystem is fertile ground for exploitation of our time and capabilities, even if there’s no intention of doing so, because social media runs on enthusiasm, a sense of collaboration, and immediate responses. Therefore, this always-available attitude can also represent the normalization of certain anxieties, paired with the commodification of our social relationships within an economic system specializing in the normalization of exploitation. Like the rest of their generation, many young architects feel they need to respond, to react, to be problem-solvers as soon as a new push notification appears on their screens. Derrida states, “There is no friendship without confidence . . . and no confidence which does not measure up to some chronology, to the trial of a sensible duration of time.”5 How does this affect our personal and professional relations in a moment of accelerated time? If, according to Derrida, friendship is based on stability, constancy, and permanence, it’s time to rethink how to sustain a practice based on the values associated with friendship in times of great speed, mobility, change, and uncertainty. Like MAIO, Croatian architect, curator, editor, educator, and exhibition designer Ana Dana Beroš has a practice fueled by friendship. But rather than having a studio with friends, she works freely with different groups of friends and collabo-
rators, depending on the project, the context, and the shared concerns, which are always shaped by a desire to change the established status quo. Here, Beroš’s desire to question the world, indeed an adolescent impulse, embodies the notion of teen spirit—that associated with openness and the energetic rejection of repressive environments. Her work often prioritizes creating environments that catalyze social change. Beroš’s educational work focuses on the impact of architecture in society, culture, and politics—such as “Out of Focus: Architecture of Giving” (2007–2008), a relevant and visionary para-educational program of lectures held at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Zagreb, run by then student group ARCHIsquad, of which she was a core member. It was focused on the work of architectural practitioners from around the world who work with marginal communities in non-Western contexts. Prescient in its pre-recession moment, when the building and construction industries were peaking, it intended to give visibility to other ways of practicing architecture beyond from the walls of the studio. In a similar vein, Beroš’s recent program *urgentArchitecture (2011– 2016) is a nomadic architectural advisory center for citizens, an open school for inhabitants to learn how to ameliorate their immediate living surroundings. Opposed to expensive investments, it sought to determine emotional and collective investments—from the bedroom to collective spaces—and it was held in peripheral neighborhoods of Zagreb, but also throughout Croatia, from touristy Istria to postindustrial Rijeka and Sisak.
The richness and impact of both projects lie in their pedagogical approach, which focused on architecture as a tool to empower the local communities through engaged collaboration. They also recall the concept of the “common good,” so diminished by neoliberal processes but now the raison d’être of many of the alliances between architects—and friends— that are looking to redefine the notion of agency and that question the political impact of working between the self and the other. To invoke Derrida again, “There is no democracy without respect for irreducible singularity or alterity, but there is no democracy without the ‘community of friends’ (koína ta philon), without the calculation of majorities, without identifiable, stabilizable, representable subjects, all equal.”6 But friendship has its own limits, and we must not allow the institutional apparatus to take advantage of it, as we have already started to see with the commodification of the so-called sharing economy in which some are making a big business of our impulse to embrace openness, confidence, and sharing.7 This way of working is good as long as it does not transform into a situation where underpaid and overburdened practitioners find themselves in a constant battle to survive economically within the dichotomy pitting monetary value against the activist agenda of their work. This is indeed a counterpoint to the kinds of scenarios in which practices like MAIO and Beroš move. Often the work by practitioners who exhibit this kind of “teenage attitude” takes to its limits the idealization of concepts such as collaboration, the learning experience, and creativity, generating a growing propensity for one to be always
160
Harvard Design Magazine
No. 44 / Seventeen
available, to be connected 24/7. “Surely you work gratis for social media, for purposes of friendship and work-related networks, and in no small part for professional self-promotion,” artist and theorist Martha Rosler reasons.8 “Learning by doing” is often the strategy for these practitioners; the impulse to collaborate or work with friends with a political or social agenda has driven them to become immersed in time-consuming and underpaid projects, with neither real nor structural impact on society, despite their intentions. Regardless, in moments of change and transition, the only way to fully understand a new working context is from the inside, by accepting failure as part of the learning process. Where have we seen collaborative practices like MAIO’s and Beroš’s before? Or, is there something that we can learn from the past to avoid the systematic financialization of this teenage attitude? If we travel back in time to London in 1961, we’ll encounter a moment when a magazine, at first little more than a staple-bound compilation of student projects, started being distributed by a group of recent architecture graduates. The magazine’s title, Archigram, became the group’s name after the third issue was delivered and its audience started growing. This is how Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, and Michael Webb founded one of the most influential avant-garde architecture practices of the 1960s and early 1970s. Working together using Letraset, typewriters, and staplers, they first and foremost sought to share fresh ideas, discuss topics that interested them, and have
161
MAIO, Floating, 2011.
MAIO, Floating, Barcelona, Spain, 2011.
Ana Dana Beroš, Intermundia project, 2014.
place.”4 This dynamic has an increased potentiality thanks to our ceaseless use of social media. The “near one” can be miles away, but the “presence” is real by means of communication, interaction, and even working together in real time; consequently, the notion of friendship has broader limits than ever before. This ecosystem is fertile ground for exploitation of our time and capabilities, even if there’s no intention of doing so, because social media runs on enthusiasm, a sense of collaboration, and immediate responses. Therefore, this always-available attitude can also represent the normalization of certain anxieties, paired with the commodification of our social relationships within an economic system specializing in the normalization of exploitation. Like the rest of their generation, many young architects feel they need to respond, to react, to be problem-solvers as soon as a new push notification appears on their screens. Derrida states, “There is no friendship without confidence . . . and no confidence which does not measure up to some chronology, to the trial of a sensible duration of time.”5 How does this affect our personal and professional relations in a moment of accelerated time? If, according to Derrida, friendship is based on stability, constancy, and permanence, it’s time to rethink how to sustain a practice based on the values associated with friendship in times of great speed, mobility, change, and uncertainty. Like MAIO, Croatian architect, curator, editor, educator, and exhibition designer Ana Dana Beroš has a practice fueled by friendship. But rather than having a studio with friends, she works freely with different groups of friends and collabo-
rators, depending on the project, the context, and the shared concerns, which are always shaped by a desire to change the established status quo. Here, Beroš’s desire to question the world, indeed an adolescent impulse, embodies the notion of teen spirit—that associated with openness and the energetic rejection of repressive environments. Her work often prioritizes creating environments that catalyze social change. Beroš’s educational work focuses on the impact of architecture in society, culture, and politics—such as “Out of Focus: Architecture of Giving” (2007–2008), a relevant and visionary para-educational program of lectures held at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Zagreb, run by then student group ARCHIsquad, of which she was a core member. It was focused on the work of architectural practitioners from around the world who work with marginal communities in non-Western contexts. Prescient in its pre-recession moment, when the building and construction industries were peaking, it intended to give visibility to other ways of practicing architecture beyond from the walls of the studio. In a similar vein, Beroš’s recent program *urgentArchitecture (2011– 2016) is a nomadic architectural advisory center for citizens, an open school for inhabitants to learn how to ameliorate their immediate living surroundings. Opposed to expensive investments, it sought to determine emotional and collective investments—from the bedroom to collective spaces—and it was held in peripheral neighborhoods of Zagreb, but also throughout Croatia, from touristy Istria to postindustrial Rijeka and Sisak.
The richness and impact of both projects lie in their pedagogical approach, which focused on architecture as a tool to empower the local communities through engaged collaboration. They also recall the concept of the “common good,” so diminished by neoliberal processes but now the raison d’être of many of the alliances between architects—and friends— that are looking to redefine the notion of agency and that question the political impact of working between the self and the other. To invoke Derrida again, “There is no democracy without respect for irreducible singularity or alterity, but there is no democracy without the ‘community of friends’ (koína ta philon), without the calculation of majorities, without identifiable, stabilizable, representable subjects, all equal.”6 But friendship has its own limits, and we must not allow the institutional apparatus to take advantage of it, as we have already started to see with the commodification of the so-called sharing economy in which some are making a big business of our impulse to embrace openness, confidence, and sharing.7 This way of working is good as long as it does not transform into a situation where underpaid and overburdened practitioners find themselves in a constant battle to survive economically within the dichotomy pitting monetary value against the activist agenda of their work. This is indeed a counterpoint to the kinds of scenarios in which practices like MAIO and Beroš move. Often the work by practitioners who exhibit this kind of “teenage attitude” takes to its limits the idealization of concepts such as collaboration, the learning experience, and creativity, generating a growing propensity for one to be always
160
Harvard Design Magazine
No. 44 / Seventeen
available, to be connected 24/7. “Surely you work gratis for social media, for purposes of friendship and work-related networks, and in no small part for professional self-promotion,” artist and theorist Martha Rosler reasons.8 “Learning by doing” is often the strategy for these practitioners; the impulse to collaborate or work with friends with a political or social agenda has driven them to become immersed in time-consuming and underpaid projects, with neither real nor structural impact on society, despite their intentions. Regardless, in moments of change and transition, the only way to fully understand a new working context is from the inside, by accepting failure as part of the learning process. Where have we seen collaborative practices like MAIO’s and Beroš’s before? Or, is there something that we can learn from the past to avoid the systematic financialization of this teenage attitude? If we travel back in time to London in 1961, we’ll encounter a moment when a magazine, at first little more than a staple-bound compilation of student projects, started being distributed by a group of recent architecture graduates. The magazine’s title, Archigram, became the group’s name after the third issue was delivered and its audience started growing. This is how Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, and Michael Webb founded one of the most influential avant-garde architecture practices of the 1960s and early 1970s. Working together using Letraset, typewriters, and staplers, they first and foremost sought to share fresh ideas, discuss topics that interested them, and have
161
the Space Race were enough to fuel the imagination of young architecture students, who discovered an unprecedented sense of freedom in the way they articulated architectural thinking. Haus-Rucker-Co and Coop Himmelb(l)au in Austria; Superstudio, Gruppo 9999, and Archizoom in Italy; and Ant Farm in the United States were among the groups that developed avant la lettre what contemporary architectartist Céline Condorelli calls “support structures”—“the choices and alliances that we make all the time (like which books to read and refer to, or whom to work and think with) are instrumental in the formation of culture.”10 By working together in such a diversity of formats, these groups were speculating boldly on the logics of architecture as a radical form of social practice, questioning what architecture was or should be in a postindustrial society. A few years earlier, several visionary architectural projects were developed, such as Buckminster Fuller’s dome over Manhattan (1950), Kiyonori Kikutake’s floating city (1959), and Paolo Soleri’s Arcology (1959). Unlike these projects, those that followed were born of a sense of collectivity and a joy in working together—fertile ground for the emergence of an increasing number of studios in the 1960s advancing theoretical work and praxis that prioritized collaboration, social interactions, vitalism, sensuality, openness, and experimentation, coupled with respect and friendship. At this point, individuality was left aside, and something started smelling like teen spirit. These young groups didn’t prioritize traditional building; for them, architecture was everything and everything was architecture. This was a culturally transformative period, and in the architecture community the effects were further shaped by environmental concerns, science-fiction films, and the expanded understanding of visual culture. A sense of resistance and the idealization of the absurdum were common responses to the indeterminacy of this era of social change. This sensibility was a generational search for an alternative form of practice that derided the clichés and failures of modernist architecture. The emergence of practices based on the experience of having common concerns—even if different points of view are maintained—with respect to social, political, economic, and ethical issues, has resulted in a similar way of working. Here, both the projects and the thinking itself are intertwined, connected, and in constant conflict at the moment of trying to define the limits, sources, and contexts from which they emerge, and foreseeing how they will evolve. As Gruppo 9999 stated, “the only project was the project of our lives and our relationships with others.”11 The present and historical moments share many common questions. Technological developments, political and social transformations, and changes in labor conditions resulted, and continue to result, in an aloofness to the traditional way of practicing architecture. However, there are differences in the political and economic contexts of the 1960s and the 2010s. Practices of the 1960s and 1970s were built around the feeling of a revolutionary potential, with the confidence that it was possible to secure a better future together; today, even when the future is the topic of discussion, practices are oriented toward a better present, trying to catalyze some change
Cover of Archigram 1, 1961.
Haus-Rucker, Environment Transformers, left to right, Flyhead, Viewatomizer, and Drizzler, 1968.
fun. It was not a business but a personal project founded on friendship, enthusiasm, trust, and confidence. Crompton explains that Archigram “had a mailing list, but it was on an honesty basis. We had, I don’t know, three or four hundred people who were on the mailing list and the deal was: we sent them a copy of the magazine and they sent us the money back.”9 The group went on to produce a series of speculative designs, paper architecture, independent publications, happenings, and exhibitions. The spirit that emerged in London in the early 1960s was also surfacing in other cities. Technological developments like
162
Harvard Design Magazine
Archizoom Associati, Supernova sofa, 1967.
here and now. In the past, the question of the individual was accompanied by the struggles for freedom (of speech, of thought, of information, and so on), hence plurality was undermined almost by necessity; nowadays, individualization is the maximum expression of neoliberalism, and this prompts the need to recover the sense of collectivity. The practitioners highlighted is this text have their conflicts, doubts, and anxieties, but it’s significant to underline the need for their teen spirit, and to recognize that now is the time to embrace collectivity and friendship. In the words of architecture editor and writer Rebekka Kiesewetter, we need to acknowledge “the importance of acting and thinking in a collective paradigm, made of constellations that exist and evolve without having to manifest their existence through forming a party, a group or a movement . . . most of these constellations exist without the individuals even knowing that they are a part of a collective body.”12 Because being part of the social body is not an end anymore but a means to build a better society, to engage the social dimension of the architectural practice. Smells like teen spirit, yes. But anew.
No. 44 / Seventeen
Ethel Baraona Pohl is a critic, writer, and curator. She is cofounder of the independent research studio and publishing house dpr-barcelona, which operates in the fields of architecture, political theory, and the social. Her writing has been published in Volume, MAS Context, New City Reader, and Uncube, among other publications. She is director of Foros 2017, the architecture lecture series of the UIC Barcelona School of Architecture. Opening spread: MAIO, 110 Rooms, 2016. See Giorgio Agamben, “Friendship,” Contretemps 5 (December 2004), http://sydney.edu.au/ contretemps/contretemps5.html. 2 Jon Nixon, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 128. 3 MAIO, “Rooms: Collective Housing at Provença Street,” e-flux architecture, July 6, 2017, http:// www.e-flux.com/announcements/144780/110-rooms-collective-housing-at-provena-street/. 4 Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 2005), 240. 5 Ibid., 14. 6 Ibid., 22. 7 See Dean Baker, “Don’t Buy the ‘Sharing Economy’ Hype: Airbnb and Uber Are Facilitating RipOffs,” Guardian, May 27, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/27/airbnbuber-taxes-regulation. 8 Martha Rosler, “Why Are People Being So Nice?” e-flux journal 77 (November 2016), http://www.eflux.com/journal/77/76185/why-are-people-being-so-nice/. 9 Kester Rattenbury, “Interview with Dennis Crompton,” Archigram no. 3 (1963), Archigram Archival Project, http://archigram.westminster.ac.uk/magazine.php?id=98&src=mg. 10 Céline Condorelli, The Company She Keeps (London: Book Works, 2014), 222. 11 Gruppo 9999 quoted in Marco Ornella, 9999: An Alternative to One-Way Architecture (Genoa: plug_in, 2015), 5. 12 Rebekka Kiesewetter, “Under Trees: The ‘Third School’: Changing Our Perception around Education,” Aformal Academy, February 17, 2016, http://www.aformalacademy.org/ wp/2016/02/17/017-rebekka-kiesewetter-under-trees/. 1
163
the Space Race were enough to fuel the imagination of young architecture students, who discovered an unprecedented sense of freedom in the way they articulated architectural thinking. Haus-Rucker-Co and Coop Himmelb(l)au in Austria; Superstudio, Gruppo 9999, and Archizoom in Italy; and Ant Farm in the United States were among the groups that developed avant la lettre what contemporary architectartist Céline Condorelli calls “support structures”—“the choices and alliances that we make all the time (like which books to read and refer to, or whom to work and think with) are instrumental in the formation of culture.”10 By working together in such a diversity of formats, these groups were speculating boldly on the logics of architecture as a radical form of social practice, questioning what architecture was or should be in a postindustrial society. A few years earlier, several visionary architectural projects were developed, such as Buckminster Fuller’s dome over Manhattan (1950), Kiyonori Kikutake’s floating city (1959), and Paolo Soleri’s Arcology (1959). Unlike these projects, those that followed were born of a sense of collectivity and a joy in working together—fertile ground for the emergence of an increasing number of studios in the 1960s advancing theoretical work and praxis that prioritized collaboration, social interactions, vitalism, sensuality, openness, and experimentation, coupled with respect and friendship. At this point, individuality was left aside, and something started smelling like teen spirit. These young groups didn’t prioritize traditional building; for them, architecture was everything and everything was architecture. This was a culturally transformative period, and in the architecture community the effects were further shaped by environmental concerns, science-fiction films, and the expanded understanding of visual culture. A sense of resistance and the idealization of the absurdum were common responses to the indeterminacy of this era of social change. This sensibility was a generational search for an alternative form of practice that derided the clichés and failures of modernist architecture. The emergence of practices based on the experience of having common concerns—even if different points of view are maintained—with respect to social, political, economic, and ethical issues, has resulted in a similar way of working. Here, both the projects and the thinking itself are intertwined, connected, and in constant conflict at the moment of trying to define the limits, sources, and contexts from which they emerge, and foreseeing how they will evolve. As Gruppo 9999 stated, “the only project was the project of our lives and our relationships with others.”11 The present and historical moments share many common questions. Technological developments, political and social transformations, and changes in labor conditions resulted, and continue to result, in an aloofness to the traditional way of practicing architecture. However, there are differences in the political and economic contexts of the 1960s and the 2010s. Practices of the 1960s and 1970s were built around the feeling of a revolutionary potential, with the confidence that it was possible to secure a better future together; today, even when the future is the topic of discussion, practices are oriented toward a better present, trying to catalyze some change
Cover of Archigram 1, 1961.
Haus-Rucker, Environment Transformers, left to right, Flyhead, Viewatomizer, and Drizzler, 1968.
fun. It was not a business but a personal project founded on friendship, enthusiasm, trust, and confidence. Crompton explains that Archigram “had a mailing list, but it was on an honesty basis. We had, I don’t know, three or four hundred people who were on the mailing list and the deal was: we sent them a copy of the magazine and they sent us the money back.”9 The group went on to produce a series of speculative designs, paper architecture, independent publications, happenings, and exhibitions. The spirit that emerged in London in the early 1960s was also surfacing in other cities. Technological developments like
162
Harvard Design Magazine
Archizoom Associati, Supernova sofa, 1967.
here and now. In the past, the question of the individual was accompanied by the struggles for freedom (of speech, of thought, of information, and so on), hence plurality was undermined almost by necessity; nowadays, individualization is the maximum expression of neoliberalism, and this prompts the need to recover the sense of collectivity. The practitioners highlighted is this text have their conflicts, doubts, and anxieties, but it’s significant to underline the need for their teen spirit, and to recognize that now is the time to embrace collectivity and friendship. In the words of architecture editor and writer Rebekka Kiesewetter, we need to acknowledge “the importance of acting and thinking in a collective paradigm, made of constellations that exist and evolve without having to manifest their existence through forming a party, a group or a movement . . . most of these constellations exist without the individuals even knowing that they are a part of a collective body.”12 Because being part of the social body is not an end anymore but a means to build a better society, to engage the social dimension of the architectural practice. Smells like teen spirit, yes. But anew.
No. 44 / Seventeen
Ethel Baraona Pohl is a critic, writer, and curator. She is cofounder of the independent research studio and publishing house dpr-barcelona, which operates in the fields of architecture, political theory, and the social. Her writing has been published in Volume, MAS Context, New City Reader, and Uncube, among other publications. She is director of Foros 2017, the architecture lecture series of the UIC Barcelona School of Architecture. Opening spread: MAIO, 110 Rooms, 2016. See Giorgio Agamben, “Friendship,” Contretemps 5 (December 2004), http://sydney.edu.au/ contretemps/contretemps5.html. 2 Jon Nixon, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 128. 3 MAIO, “Rooms: Collective Housing at Provença Street,” e-flux architecture, July 6, 2017, http:// www.e-flux.com/announcements/144780/110-rooms-collective-housing-at-provena-street/. 4 Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 2005), 240. 5 Ibid., 14. 6 Ibid., 22. 7 See Dean Baker, “Don’t Buy the ‘Sharing Economy’ Hype: Airbnb and Uber Are Facilitating RipOffs,” Guardian, May 27, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/27/airbnbuber-taxes-regulation. 8 Martha Rosler, “Why Are People Being So Nice?” e-flux journal 77 (November 2016), http://www.eflux.com/journal/77/76185/why-are-people-being-so-nice/. 9 Kester Rattenbury, “Interview with Dennis Crompton,” Archigram no. 3 (1963), Archigram Archival Project, http://archigram.westminster.ac.uk/magazine.php?id=98&src=mg. 10 Céline Condorelli, The Company She Keeps (London: Book Works, 2014), 222. 11 Gruppo 9999 quoted in Marco Ornella, 9999: An Alternative to One-Way Architecture (Genoa: plug_in, 2015), 5. 12 Rebekka Kiesewetter, “Under Trees: The ‘Third School’: Changing Our Perception around Education,” Aformal Academy, February 17, 2016, http://www.aformalacademy.org/ wp/2016/02/17/017-rebekka-kiesewetter-under-trees/. 1
163