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Implementing Advanced Knowledge

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2.2.3

Interview John Palmesino

Interview - John Palmesino

(The text that here follows is an extract from an IAAC published interview by Willy Müller and Areti Markopoulou with John Palmesino and Ann-Sof Rönnskog in occasion of their lecture at IAAC.)

WM: We would first like to welcome you at IAAC and thank you for being here with us sharing your work and vision. We consider that your work and research is very much relevant to the work we are developing here and the philosophy of this Institute.

JP: Thank you for the invitation. We are glad to be here with you. Actually we have been following your development of the discussion on territories and especially the work on “Hyper Catalunya”.

WM: So what’s particular about our current agenda is that two of IAAC’s founders, Vicente Guallart and I myself (along with Manuel Gausa back then) are currently holding positions in the political team in Barcelona’s City Hall.

Vicente Guallart as the City’s Chief Architect; and I as CEO of Barcelona Regional, a major strategic infrastructural developer in the city of Barcelona.

So, this has a relative importance because part of the agenda behind IAAC’s philosophy is now forming part of the policy making agenda of the city and its surroundings.

The moment we are experiencing is very bad, particularly for Spain but also in general, because we are in the middle of a huge crisis in Europe.

Perhaps you’re going through that in the U.K. as well. But on the other hand it is a very good moment as an opportunity to really think things over. It is the moment to set the foundations and reflect on the agendas or the basis that are behind all the activities. So it’s a time to discuss, to share, to extend ideas that could set out the basis for the next twenty years. It is important to put them on the table and discuss them seriously. That is why you are in Barcelona today.

It is a pleasure to have you here. It is a nice surprise, because we know a lot about your work through the web, publications, but part of the knowledge is also to meet, exchange, talk and reflect about different issues directly about territorial, urban and social contemporary problems.

AM: Within IAAC’s research agenda there are few topics that we consider very much related to your work; therefore your feedback will be of great value. Some of those topics are: Territory and zero emissions, territory and self-sufficiency as well as intelligent cities, urbiotics and city management through empowerment of the citizens.

Cover - Full Capacity Masterplan, John Hudspith 2

I would like to start with something that a former mayor of Denver once said: “The 19th century has been the century of the empires, the 20th century has been the century of nation states, and the 21st century will be and is the century of cities”. For many years we found ourselves too busy building, extending our cities, creating growth phenomena, increasing CO2 emissions, and consuming environmental resources. Nowadays debates about urbanizing a new city raised the question of what is the model of the efficient city. Which one do you think is the model of an efficient city today?

JP: From Empires, to States, to Cities. It looks the other way around to us: From Cities, to States, to empires, to corporations. Probably we are at close to a major shift from organizing cities for cohabitation. What you might see as a connection between certain territories and authorities organizing into a completely new system where that particular mixture is governed by corporations. Then the question is how we put in place cities that deal with that shift and their conditions.

Living in cities goes by hand with rapid growth of the population. I think in our generation the population of the world has doubled. And that is the major issue. But it also means that not only cities are at the side of innovation. The other part being invested by corporations is also shaping the cities. So part of our research is trying to understand these deep processes. We are looking at conditions like migration, energy consumption and circulation of goods and taxes in a deep space.

I think that the major difficulty at the moment is to rethink that deep space. How do you connect the Sub-Saharan land into conditions of housing in Copenhagen? How do you connect the generation and the production of capital values to the urban crisis in Spain? I think that we are in a very strange moment. And I think most of our time is split in half, where we try to understand that, on one side we have to be exclusive, be able to come up with a new model, new solutions and a direct intervention. And on the other side, we have to respond in an inclusive way to the different conditions. So I think that this is a type of schizophrenia that could be interesting to be taken as a model of action.

A friend of ours listened and said: “50% is for the past, 50% is for the future”. But of course, it’s always about now. So that particular condition is programmatic for us, it becomes a way of operating, it becomes a way of mixing the analytical side with the possibility of intervention and we see that there’s a huge potential there. So how do we share knowledge? How do we generate knowledge about the environment? How do we allow different populations, different groups of people, different stakeholders, (And most of them keep also shifting, during the day, from being stakeholder to users) into that formation of things?

You mentioned zero emissions, urbiotics, efficiency and city management.

This is a different vocabulary for a shared agenda and I think for us it is very interesting to see how can we combine them, how we make management part of architecture, how we shape the material space so that different agents can become part of a negotiation, how we allow cycles of energy and materials and different flows to what we might call an ecological approach into the construction of the city, without making it only a political agenda.

How do we make it? How do we proceed? So this is the kind of work that we are trying to do. And we’re trying to do this by combining (in a very strange way, again schizophrenic), contemporary architecture, urbanism with activism, and what we might call policy making. And really keep it always as one thing, always integrated, always the same.

ASR: I think what we are realizing architecture has to do with this idea of “one green building isn’t enough to solve the situation”. So what we are trying to do is look at that force which go much deeper in order to come up with combinations or integrated plans; that’s what we’re trying to do.

The project we chose at the AA with the students is about studying the coast of Europe, the whole coast, from the White Sea from Russia, at the north, all around the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, to understand better what the deeper spaces in Europe really are. It is not only the coast. But it will help us understand what processes are going on right now in Europe; try to see which ones we could integrate in these places.

Cover - Willy Müller at Clour9 installation Figure 1 - Willy Müller at Clour9 installation 4

AM: So, as you say, one of the goals of the Territorial Agency is to investigate our urbanized world that is undergoing profound transformations in the organization of our politics and their spaces of operation. So, what used to be the relationship between politics and space? And which are the fundamental changes for a better functioning of our current and future cities?

JP: Part of the work we do is trying to understand the distinction between citizens and stones in our cities. That is the problem we face in democracy. It is the problem Greeks had, the polis and the politeia. How do we bring them together? It is interesting that through the Roman translation of politeia we end up in the public thing, the republic. And we understand the intervention of things and the organization of things as being major aspect of governing and managing the city. So we see the direct relation with architecture.

Today the real difficulty is to know what a government is. We are in a very strange moment when the debate about management of cities and cohabitation is adopting architectural terms, like “urbanization”. But architecture is not seen as a profession so we are somehow taken away from our own object of work and study, and that is the big problem.

So our attempt is to say: “Architecture is not the building”. It is also the building, but that is only the tool for achieving a reconnection between politics, and that means how we live together, how we cohabit, how we organize our institutions (which are major part of our research). How do we institutionalize that system? Rivers, forest and all the mineral stratas.

I think that is what we are dealing with today in architecture. It is a very strange phenomenon that implies an expansion of scale, an expansion beyond the limits of what is within our reach. That includes the atmosphere, water, plants. It is a very strange moment of radical transition.

When we think that architecture is the relation between these spaces, it means that we have to revise all the technologies governing that relation.

It is no longer governing property structures and height in buildings, but it implies the entire procedures of management of territories and cities, beyond the 19th and 20th century, which brings some problems. The first one is a problem of what people might call “bio politics”; we are entering the anticipation of dealing directly with life. And the second problem is how to sustain certain transformations in a direct way.

In the first problem, “bio politics”, we are part of a system of governments imposed by us on us. And the second part is to find out how we sustain the change. So how do we maintain the focus?

Maybe we are naïve, but I think it is still a direct understanding for people, to see in front of them what they are doing, what everybody is doing. How do we reconnect a number of institutions and individuals into a common goal? And that is the strength of architecture: It makes things visible. Everybody understands what a village, a city, a house, a metropolis is. It is very straight forward.

MB: I have a question about politics. Many contemporary philosophers have been working on the topic of distribution of power: Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault wrote about bio politics. So the notion about how you exercise that power seems to be the underlying agenda of all these systems. In the light of the latest developments (such as the Arab Spring and other similar events that happened in the last century), are we facing a new type of citizens?

How are those processes evolving? What do you see in the potential of this transformation? It is a very big transformation in society.

JP: There is a moment when citizenship is reducing its rights and powers and it is becoming closer and closer to the figure of the migrant. So there is something very interesting going on, especially in Europe. Deep transformations in Europe are at the level of what it is to be a citizen. What does it mean to have a passport in the pocket? And I think that is very difficult to grasp. For instance… having lived for quite some time now in London I really understand how the notion of sovereignty is still entangled somehow in the 19th century, with the state and the empire. But contemporary practices in Europe are very ancient because it is a governmental organization without sovereignty. The European Union is not sovereign in Spain. Spain is sovereign.

Figure 1 - Interview at IaaC 6

In the UK it is the queen who is sovereign, not Europe. And at the same time we have to follow sovereign regulations. So I think we still don’t manage completely to perceive what the consequences are on the way to operate in this big peninsula of the Eurasian continent. What is it to be a citizen? What is it to be in charge of our space? How do you shape the space? It is really a difficult moment.

ASR: That might be why we have a project at the Territorial Agency where we pursue the investigation of the North. And we have started that because we find potential in studying an area not yet inhabited. If you compare it to the Mediterranean, it is already a situation where we are in the legal operation of right or wrong about everything, and it is very coordinated and monitored.

There is a completely new situation emerging, with new resources, with new technology too, to get these natural resources out: The iron ores in Norway, all the deep drillings in Russia, the new Northern route in China... And at the same time there is this drive for smaller nations to become independent, with the new resources. And they are not necessarily looking for the nation. So, that is why we find it very interesting to compare those two situations.

JP: But it gets always into the definition of architecture. Maybe it is our particular mind-set that cannot stand up so much. In the end, the particular way one structures those things ends up influencing how they perform, how they allow certain lives, how they allow certain potential developments in younger generations. How older generations can teach a new path. It is very strange to take. How can we be decent? Everyone, at the same time, knows very well that architecture is very close to practices we don’t like. They are always carried out with the help of architects. So that’s a very strange situation: Architecture cannot exist without a client, without a commission.

So when we discuss, say, the level of the agency, it is about how we bring architecture all the way up the ladder and discuss with the clients what can be done. And that has to do with having a very straightforward notion of shared images, of shared goals. It is very difficult for architecture to operate, because we can point at lots of bad examples and very few good ones.

So, again, should architecture get involved in the development of the world? Didn’t that already happen in the 13th century? Look at all the disasters!

It’s very interesting to see how Barcelona somehow manages a very deep faith in architecture, especially Modern Architecture. On the island we live on, modern architecture is immediately dismissed and seen as a particular practice that created those disasters. We are on a losing ground in terms of culture. And there are very few places in the world, like Barcelona, that can keep up with that, that can carry on. I think it is really interesting.

WM: There are two interesting issues here. The first one is the loss of client relationship, the triangular relationship between society, architects and political entities. This was a stable relationship when it was clear who was who. But now this model is in a crisis. I would like to reflect on who is working for whom in that kind of trilogy. And how society is dealing directly with the architect, how this is a primitive model, because that is not a mature or a very developed model of intervention.

The second issue has to do with scalarity. The architect and society have different notions of what scale or urban is. When we speak about territory none of them agrees on the term very well. The users have a very stable, defined conception of what urban scale is. The architect observes between large and small scale. But today we are facing a different question on what the territory is. We talk about the environment, air quality, taxes, criminality, information, networks. But which are the layers, the elements that define territory? What kind of elements would define that notion of territory?

JP: For the first point, the triangle, I think we can give extremely good answers. I have the impression that we have two options here. Either we wait until that relation is set out, we enter in a new relationship and then we act.

Or we take the risk and design it. We redesign those relationships. We have to take risks. Everything is not set up but we have to try it. The question is, whist trying, how do we allow that question to be the driving force? We don’t know the right way to organize that relation. So, maybe there shouldn’t be only one way, maybe we should have many decision-making processes interacting one with the other, so that intelligence appears. This is something we will also discuss during the lecture. How do we allow a variety of decision-making processes be incorporated in the project? Because what appeared to us in the last 20-30 years is that the technical side has become technocratic in relation to the politicians.

ASR: I think it is the communication between the three that is becoming explicit through the European Union. Technocratic is the only language that these three can speak.

JP: And technicians (and we the architects are also becoming technicians) never talk to the other technicians. And every problem is seen by a particular sector in a completely different way. So the way that risks are defined is becoming more technical rather than based on culture and society. Which risks are we ready to take as a society? We never discuss those issues as a society. Because there might be no society at large, but multiplication and fragmentation.

Figure 2 - Territorial Agency 8

The second issue: The scale. Maybe one big thing we learn as architects is that there is no such thing as the large and the small scale, but there is navigation of scales. It is all about the way we enter and navigate those. Maybe the solution is to have many scales operating at the same time and have them communicate with each other. Institutions, how they communicate with one another so they can learn. And on the other side of the scale, how we organize so they can also learn. That is a really big issue. How do we make someone who operates in a large corporation, even in a decision making position, to collaborate or exchange information with another person, maybe making smaller decisions?

It is about influencing equally in terms of environment, criminality and so on. How do those things overlap? I think there is so much work to do. We have recently discussed some of these issues…

It is very interesting that young generations of students say: “It is a mess, so there is so much work to be done”, “we really have a lot to work on here we really have to invest”. So, how do we organize knowledge?

Let’s forget about divinities, let’s forget about superstars. And that’s also a big issue. The image of the architect is still seen as the big inventor, the big ego who comes with a gesture and solves anything at once. So, the hard labour behind it is forgotten. How do we organize a society where architects are seen as part of the government, as part of a civic institution? I think that this is the big work to be done at the moment. We have indulged too much in the notion of the individual genius. It is very difficult to move away from that.

ASR: Something that we are trying to do in our research is to look for the right tools to approach these things. So whatever is the given situation we try to see the transformation processes that could be of potential value for certain situations, bigger territories or small islands. In those places we try to reconfigure who the stakeholders would be, so that people who govern have a stake in it. That would mean inviting corporations, politicians, society, architects, and technicians, to a discussion to look for a possibility of negotiation. That’s one trial and error test that we’re trying to do, forming new assemblies to make territorial projects.

Referring to the Norwegian situation, things become very clear because they happen on islands, with small populations, so it is kind of one way to think of that.

JP: We tend to think that the Mediterranean is a large space. You mentioned the uprisings. We tend to think that the Mediterranean is a big melting pot. Suddenly you start also seeing how these conditions are rising. Suddenly every trajectory in the Mediterranean becomes clear.

Everything just passes by the other and almost never touches. And when they touch there’s a crash. So, suddenly there’s no longer a fluid space in the 10

Mediterranean with common food, with common languages. So when you travel from Catalonia to the south of Italy it is the same. That’s gone. Even the Mediterranean is undergoing a huge transformation in its formation of space.

When you enter the Mediterranean, your identity is petrified. You become a tourist, a migrant, a technician. When you are in the metropolitan area, you are an engineer and a tourist and this, and that. The moment you enter the space of the Mediterranean, you become one.

So how do we deal with that? I call that space “The solid sea”. It is becoming really a solidified space, where everything is predetermined. Say, if you are an engineer born in Sri Lanka and you are trying to do a Master in Barcelona, on your way here you will become a migrant, an illegal or a clandestine. That is the condition of sovereignty and citizenship that we live in that is exactly the moment of formation of the space.

We tend to think, even at the Mediterranean scale, that this is the kind of space we live in. So we have basically imposed this image in the Mediterranean: That we are messy, involved with one another and I think that is a highly dangerous image. If you look at the map of the Mediterranean of the last ten years, it is where all the wars have been… all the wars and revolutions! And at the same time, if you look at the north, the other side of the peninsula…The European peninsula is organized by two bodies of water, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and on the North Sea, the Baltic, and the White Sea. On the northern side, you have all these other experiments equally entangled with colonialism. With revolutionary new institutions coming up in Iceland, the new parliaments, transnational parliaments in Northern Scandinavia, the new corporations coming in and buying everything. So, equally, you can start seeing that Europe is becoming in itself a big buffer zone between these two sea spaces. And it is interesting to see how it is on the coast, where you are having innovation, in places like Barcelona, Athens, Cairo, Copenhagen, and Reykjavik. It is at the margin, at the border, where you start seeing changes. It is never really in the centre, if that exists.

This might be because architecture is shaping a new image, a new shared way of work space. So in this way we can start being incisive. In Italy we call it incisive, effective. You mentioned efficiency. We can change that to effectiveness.

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IAAC BIT FIELDS: 1. Theory for Advanced Knowledge 2. Advanced Cities and Territories 3. Advanced Architecture 4. Digital Design and Fabrication 5. Interactive Societies and Technologies 6. Self-Sufficient Lands

Nader Tehrani, Architect, Director MIT School Architecture, Boston Juan Herreros, Architect, Professor ETSAM, Madrid Neil Gershenfeld, Physic, Director CBA MIT, Boston Hanif Kara, Engineer, Director AKT, London Vicente Guallart, Architect, Chief City Arquitect of Barcelona Willy Muller, Director of Barcelona Regional Aaron Betsky, Architect & Art Critic, Director Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati Hugh Whitehead, Engineer, Director Foster+ Partners technology, London Nikos A. Salingaros, Professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio Salvador Rueda, Ecologist, Director Agencia Ecologia Urbana, Barcelona Artur Serra, Anthropologist, Director I2CAT, Barcelona

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