FAILURE
EDITED BY Robert Dutton Lauren Kehoe Louisa Preece
with lots of help from
Victoria Adegoke, Anthony Andrews, Jonathan Bown, Donata Bužinskaitė, Lewis Clarke, Ellie Collins, Adrian Constantin, Dafydd Davies, Sophia Edwards, Nadhira Halim, David Kay, Kristina Line, Iara Silva, Jennifer Steel, Nimrod Wong
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Matt Gaskin - Head of the School of Architecture Harriet Harriss - Principle Lecturer, School of Architecture Regner Ramos - Editor, LOBBY Hugh McEwan & Catrina Stewart - Unit F Tutors Jesen Tanadi & Athanasiou Geolas - Editors, The Draftery Patrick Myles - Art Director of RIBA Journal & Blueprint Liza Clothier - Development & Alumni Office Ronnie MacLellan - Senior Lecturer, School of Architecture
WITH MANY THANKS TO
Paul Inman - Dean of Faculty of Technology, Design & Environment Janet Beer - Vice Chancellor, Oxford Brookes University Beth & Deborah - Oxford Greenprint And the many others who have helped us make this magazine
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a r i e l f u
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Editorial: Preparing to Fail Errors and Corrections The Experimental Zone Uncivilisation What Lies Beneath Architecture 1999 Columbia: Participation & Conflict Imagining the Impossible Delirious New Park From Failure to Personal Commitment Where Did the People Go? Dealing with Failure Architectural Selfies We ARE going to Ibiza To be an Architect Not Failing is a Risky Business Architecture and Failure Call for Abstracts - OSA Issue Three
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Returning to OSA for our final year we were greeted by an unusual message from our tutors; aim to fail. The gist being that in order to excel, first you need to embrace failure, and the potential opportunities that can be gained through risk. It appears that we are a generation averse to risk taking, burdened with ever-higher levels of debt and greater uncertainty in our careers. We set out to use this issue to cherish and nurture a culture of experimentation in our school by celebrating the avenues of exploration that went unfulfilled, the experiments that didn’t work and the ‘dead ends’ discovered along the paths of our design projects. So, welcome to Issue two of OSA Magazine - Failure. Superficially the theme and title may not appear to make for the best PR for our school and no doubt we’ll be hearing from the marketing department (again). Beneath the surface it reflects a deeper ethos which values experimentation, exploring, critiquing, discussing, and future-thinking above simply succeeding by following the paths already mapped out by others. In terms of time and money we are lucky to have the resources to fail, especially as students, therefore we should acknowledge this privilege, cherish the opportunity and exploit it! We begin by looking at our own failures, reflecting on the feedback we received
are two sides of the same coin. In this vein the editors of magazineREM present OMA’s unsuccessful competition entry for Parc la Villette, which came second to Bernard Tschumi but nonetheless was crucial in the establishment of the discipline of landscape urbanism. Other contributors have taken the opportunity to comment on the different ways that others have failed. MArchD student Anthony Andrews makes the compelling argument that the scenarios we all like to devise to justify our design work are usually based on some pretty shaky assumptions, while UCL PhD candidate Fani Kostourou challenges us to rethink our professional preconceptions of failure with an analysis of the public space of favelas. The articles in this issue all stem from the idea of failure as an integral part of educational and professional life. This mindset allows projects, such as this magazine, to be realised. Everyone involved in supporting, submitting, editing and reading the magazine has taken a risk and as a thank you for preparing to fail, we enclose a Failure Checklist poster within the front cover, for classification of your future failures. The next issue of OSA will be our last as editors, and we’d like to conclude in the same audacious spirit that we began with. After months of soul (and dictionary)
on issue one in our own little ‘errors and corrections’ section. MArchD tutor Toby Shew follows with his manifesto for The Experimental Zone, which has ‘no guarantee of success, only failure’. Many of the articles in this issue, echo the central tenet of the argument that experimentation and failure
searching, we’ve settled on the theme for the final issue of Volume One - Fetish. See page 63 for the call for abstracts. Thanks for reading, and happy failing. The Editors Rob Dutton, Lauren Kehoe & Louisa Preece 7
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Errors and corrections In the spirit of celebrating failure, the OSA Editors wanted to find out how we failed with the first issue of OSA, Frontiers. We pinned up the spreads from the first issue and asked our fellow students to get to work with their red pens.
PHOTOGRAPHS This is one of the limitations of printing on a Risograph. Photographs simply do not reproduce as well as line drawings due to the way the printer calculates halftones - see the swatch for details. For this issue we’ve bumped up the contrast on photographs as much as possuble and included many more drawings as illustrations. So if you want to get published send us drawings!
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TYPOGRAPHY Ouch. Pretty much universally panned! You may have a point with the underlining but we love our typography - as did the art director of Blueprint when we showed him the draft of this issue! When designing the magazine we tested over twenty fonts which had to meet the criteria of being: a) legible at low point sizes on a risograph printer on uncoated paper b) aligned with the informal, accessible nature of a student zine c) designed within the last five years Apercu was the clear winner in our opinion. It’s a fun, contenporary typeface with excellent legibility at low point sizes and on a risograph. However you’ll be happy to hear though that the underlining is gone and we’ve reduced the variation in typographic devices as much as possible.
LEGIBILITY OF OVERLAID IMAGES AND TEXT Yeah, fair enough - we totally got carried away with this. One of the benefits of using a risograph (aside from how cheap it is) is that the inks are not opaque and it’s easy to overlay page elements. While it might look OK for some standout pages (such as the front cover and this issues poster) we appreciate it isn’t always appropriate so we’ve toned it down massively this issue.
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THE experimental zone Zone 5 tutor Toby Shew presents a manifesto for a new, experimental type of post-graduate design studio born from an ongoing dialogue with David Greene in which students are given no guarantee of success - only of failure.
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n 2013 David Greene and Samantha Hardingham set out an aspiration for a design studio at the Architectural Association. The studio was instantly repositioned as a Zone, tutors as caretakers, guests as consultants, students as pirates – this shift in language was axial to a shift
in thinking about teaching and learning in the studio environment. David Greene appropriated his own poem to explore the possibility of a new type of learning space and argue that design is a way of behaviour, not a body of knowledge:
zone noun [C] UK /zƏџn/ US /zoџn/ An area, especially one that is different from the areas around it because it has different characteristics or is used for different purposes What Skills Do We Search? Pirate, artist, investigator, co-pilot, head chef, technician = architect Pirate, artist, investigator, co-pilot, head chef, technician = architect Pirate, artist, investigator, co-pilot, head chef, technician = architect Pirate, artist, investigator, co-pilot, head chef, technician = architect...
WHAT DO WE SEARCH FOR? ........ NOT USUALLY VALUED KNOWLEDGE Re-reading the Familiar Generalism is just not fashionable Using the moving drawing. Vagueness can be a useful tool. The uses of uncertainty Generosity
After this insemination, the embryonic ideas started to develop—conducted as a series of reactions to emails sent amongst the group between Samantha, David, John Walters and myself. A strategy for disruption was formed and work commenced on a video 12
POEM // David Greene
to introduce the studio to the students at the Architectural Association. A collage of statements, work and ideas that was presented as a backdrop to a nine minute cacophony of poetry and anti-doctrine doctrine.
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UNCIVILIsATION OxArch president Stephanie Stephanie Spiteri Spiteri responds to a field trip to Athens with a painting inspired by The Dark Mountain Manifesto, UnCivilisation.
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he pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric….The crumbling empire is the unassailable global economy, and the
frantically to buddy up an economic machine which, for decades, they told us needed little restraint, for restraint would be its undoing….Draw back the curtain, follow the tireless motion of cogs and wheels
brave new world of consumer democracy being forced worldwide in its name. Upon the indestructibility of this edifice we have pinned the hopes of this latest phase of our civilisation. Now, its failure and fallibility exposed, the world’s elites are scrambling
back to its source, civilisation: The myth of Progress. Excerpt from ‘UnCivilisation’, The Dark Mountain Manifesto, reprinted with kind permission from The Dark Mountain team. http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/
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WHAT LIES BENEATH UCL Space Syntax PhD Candidate Fani Kostourou considers what we may learn from digging deeper into what architects could call failure, highlighting six qualities of informal paths which she argues are worth integrating in formal planning.
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Mirante da Paz was inaugurated in 2010 and represents the entrance to the slum including elevators connecting the hilltop community to the subway station as well as a look out with a panoramic view of the downtown. The complex easily stands out as a pure landmark from the contrast it creates with its background, the favela.
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As Perec wrote in 1974: “The street: try to describe the street, what it’s made of, what it’s used for…Detect a rhythm… Decipher a bit of town…The people in the streets: where are they coming from? Where are they going to? Who are they?” While walking through Cantagalo favela along the hillside of Morro do Pavão in Rio de Janeiro, one sees that the main path may not look like formal streets or one of Jacobs’ great streets. However it serves the exact same purpose: traffic conduit, infrastructure line, common space for access to private property, place of social and commercial encounter and exchange, public showcase, and political space. Through a complete random aggregation of elements the path managed to embrace at the same time all the functions and speeds
taking place in the favela. Even more, we believe it disposes six specific spatial qualities that offer a direct interest for design: direction, conspicuousness, walking pattern, conviviality, scale and comfort. Similar to other informal paths, Cantagalo’s main street is a veritable stage of gathering where inhabitants feel comfortable spending most of their day. It encourages them to appropriate it making it a working counterexample for the planned streets of the Brazilian ‘condomínios fechados’ and MCMV settlements. The favela of Cantagalo is by no means perfect, nor is its main street; nonetheless it succeeds in retaining the guilefulness found in the everyday life of ‘favelados’; a guile that creates and transforms possibilities in space.
1. M. Santos, A natureza do espaço, técnica e tempo, razão e emoção. Hucitec, São Paulo, 1996. 2. In the architectural discourse, learning from informality is not a novelty but dates back from 1960’s John FC Turner’s writings and it has been constantly growing as a fashion since then. 3. M. Angélil, R. Hehl, Something Fantastic (eds) Building Brazil: The Proactive Urban Renewal of Informal Settlements, Ruby Press, Berlin, 2011. 4. In his March 2012 speech The 4 commandments of cities http://www.ted.com/talks/eduardo_paes_the_4_ commandments_of_cities?language=en 5. Favelas, Learning From, Lotus 143, 2010. 6. M. Bense, Brasilianische Intelligenz, Wiesbaden, Limes, 1965. 7. Ginga basically means absolute bliss or happiness. The Portuguese word conjures up an almost dance-like way of running. It’s swinging your body from one side to the other to deceive. It’s the happiness found in Brazilian football players and the Brazilians from the lower classes who are often more generous, happier and more willing to try new things. It is the rhythm of the place. 8.K. Lynch, The Image of the City, The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1960, pp.47-8. 9. G. Perec, Species of spaces and other species, Trans. J. Sturrock, Penguin, UK, 1997, p. 50-52. 10. A. B. Jacobs, Great Streets, MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1993. 11. Gated communities 12. In 2009, Brazil launched ‘Minha Casa, Minha Vida’ (“My House, My Life”) mass housing programme in order to face a 5.8million housing deficit. 13. M. Angélil, R. Hehl, Something Fantastic (eds) Minha Casa – Nossa Cidade! Innovating Mass Housing for Social Change in Brazil, Ruby Press, Berlin, 2014. 14. This is the De Certeau’s notion of guile. M. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. S. Rendall, U of California Press, Berkeley, 1988. 15. Favela inhabitants
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Aligned to the street, enclosed pockets of activities make it natural for the people to stop and get involved. Stores, windows with displays, pocket shops, street vending, signs to attract your attention, graffiti, doorways, people going in and out of them.or attraction for them.
Spatial Quality VII: Comfort People in the favela spend most part of their time outdoors. The weather conditions favor such a habit. The narrow dwellings urge it. The heterogeneity of activities amplifies it. Š MA Advanced Studies in Urban Design, ETH Zßrich 2012-13
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I don’t see a 3D printer doing that dodgy conversion and infill job in Cambridge town centre, or meeting the client to discuss their latest change of heart three months into the build. But it did start me thinking about a topic I often come back to – as architects, should we be attempting to predict the future? Is it even possible?
There are two avenues in which we often explore the future of architecture: 1. An unfolding of events, situations, disasters, or changes in culture, society. 2. Assumed development of new technologies or building materials, sometimes creating or fitting new typologies, and the sort of functions users will be requiring, expecting and desiring. These can be taken on a scale ranging from the near future/almost certain (a
us. How do we decide between the serious and the ridiculous – what is a legitimate provocation, and what is a waste of time and energy? Traditionally, people have never been very good at predicting the rise of technology. There are simply too many variables and unknowns – for a relatively recent example think of the rapid rise and fall of the minidisk, embarrassingly cut down by the mp3 player and iPod in its infancy. This inability to map future trends afflicts tech giants and futurologists alike, a now familiar failure that we have come to accept, and a risk of looking into the crystal ball. Yet sometimes there is success too. Practices such as Archigram and OMA/AMO have drawn from possible futures in very different ways, using two key skills from the architectural repertoire – creativity and strategy respectively. Think walking cities (fanciful fun) versus European renewable energy networks (perhaps to be taken seriously). They can encourage people to think about different possible futures, and make us question where we would like to be in 10,
worsening housing crisis, global warming) to the possible (3D printed housing on Mars) and eventually the unlikely (a floating cloud city for members of an alien race who are allergic to bees and ambient jazz). But where do we draw the line? Clearly as young architects, we must react to the changing circumstances of the world around
20 or 50 years time. Clearly somebody has to explore new avenues of thinking, and this investigative probing of the future is good for creativity. The danger is believing too much in our creations – as we immerse ourselves in a world where our own predictions rule, we may forget to cater for the realities of
“NUCLEAR-POWERED VACUUM CLEANERS WILL PROBABLY BE A REALITY WITHIN TEN YEARS.” ALEX LEWYT (PRESIDENT OF LEWYT VACUUMS) 1955
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Oil Silo Home by PinkCloud.dk An entry to a competition for the design on a zombie safe house shows a playful response to a future event, reappropriating disused oil silos. Sparking a conversation about possibilities to adapt disused infrastructure & equipment as it becomes obsolete?
our own current very real problems. Our effective ability to create useful tangible solutions becomes lost. We must continue to push boundaries
beware ever taking our own (sometimes pretentious?) whims too seriously. Every future will be tampered with by a thousand other changes which we will never be able
and explore, and to enjoy doing so. But
to foresee, and create a reality that may
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Colombia: participation & conflict CENDEP graduate Martin Dolan reports on the failures of participatory engagements on public projects in the city of Medellin, Columbia.
O
“
ne did not want to be in the
Cielo is a worker in the Centro de
street playing when a shootout began, in the middle of the bullets flying over-head, with people falling at your feet as happened to me several times. I remember seeing them wounded and in agony.�
Desarrollo Cultural (Cultural Development Centre) in Moravia, Medellin where the government attempted to intervene and end the violence and poverty, that the neighbourhood faced since its construction on top of a rubbish dump in the 1970s.
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Failure
In this drawing, failure is about imagining the impossible situation best fitted to
compilation of robotic technology helping one another adapt to the inevitability of a
inspire the design concept. It is considered a failure as it is very likely that the end design product will not even relate to the drawing. The idea is that instead of utilising individual images or collages to best visualise an initial concept, the drawing absorbs all different and possible elements into a logical space, which, to relate here, is the
submerged Miami. Kineticity provides the design concept with a futuristic, vague, differentiated, and an unrelated inspiration towards the solution to flooding issues in Miami. The drawing serves as a ‘failed inspiration’ to the design process, just as the end product would be a ‘failed reality’ to the drawing. 33
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delirious new park MagazineREM Editors Marco Belloni & MinKyung Han present OMA’s competition entry for the redevelopment of Parc la Villette. Although unsuccessful, the entry was specially commended by the jury and it’s influence was critical in the development of the field of landscape urbanism.
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The proposal OMA submitted for Parc de La Villette was studied starting from the theories of Rem Koolhaas, in particular from the concepts explored in Delirious New York. In this book, Koolhaas is fascinated by the idea of congestion. His idea of a skyscraper encompasses the culture of congestion. He argues that the American skyscraper works as a social condenser, a machine to generate desirable forms of human relationships. This idea is reflected in the Parc de La Villette,. Koolhaas here aims to create a social condenser organizing the layout of the
floors, so we could create congestion and density typical of skyscrapers."2 Congestion is important because Koolhaas describes the metropolitan lifestyle contemporary urban activities unstable, uncertain that overlaps and changes. To provide the space a potential changing of the strategy of Koolhaas, will be the success of his future is "to bring the architectural specificity with programmatic indeterminacy", combining and overlapping layers of different composition, almost completely eliminating the three-dimensional
park as a section of a skyscraper. The park becomes "a Captivate of 40 or 50 different activities, arranged like the
look in favour of a program free and pure. A project as a strategy rather than design. All images courtesy of OMA.
1. Le Gouvernement a décidé de mettre un terme à l’ensemble des activités de La Villette à compter du 15 mars 1974. Ainsi pourra être engagée, dès 1974, sur les terrains devenus disponibles, une opération d’urbanisme de grande envergure. 2. Rem Koolhaas, Conversation with Students, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996
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Alternative strategies: OMA’s five layers (above, image courtesy OMA) versus Bernard Tschumi Architects winning three-layered proposal (below & opposite, images courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects)
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from failure to personal commitment MArchD student Nadhira Halim gives an account of her experience a design and build project in the heart of Borneo’s Rainforest.
M
y year out experience after undergraduate was an exciting one – I was working and living in a forest of Borneo, overseeing a design and build project of a Bio-Cultural Heritage Centre for a village called Buayan. Although
in Sabah, Borneo. I was in Buayan to work on the construction of the project, along with a colleague, Tom. Buayan’s Bio-Cultural Heritage Centre was commissioned as a centre for the villagers to continue their research on their
only 24km from the nearest city, Kota Kinabalu, the journey in or out of Buayan on a Jeep would take at least four hours on the mud tracks. Once, I even had to ride out on a bulldozer! I was working with Arkitrek, an architecture design company
culture, traditions, and the biodiversity of the forest they live in. Architecture students from the University of Edinburgh, who were led by Tom, initially designed the project, together with Arkitrek. Along the way, we had students participate in
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Where did the people go? MArchD student Adrian Alexandrescu on what remains unseen in architectural photography
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s students we are more often than not influenced by the past, in order to be able to improve on old techniques, we are required to understand what went before. However, what happens when you don’t see the obvious mistakes? What if the problems are right there, but at the same time are missing? Architecture photography has been under a lot of scrutiny over the years. Long gone are the days when Shulman was portraying the American dream through architecture and, how I like to put it, selling architecture through Coca-Cola
are packed with life and meaning, telling the story of the building. However, when the camera comes in front of our final built edifice we, as people, change. Is it something that we are afraid of? Are we bothered by people? As Jean-Paul Sartre famously said: “Hell is other people”, but is that actually true? We design for people but then exclude them from the final view of our product. I would like to see my friends in those photos during the grand opening. I would like to take the photo myself at the after-party when everyone is a bit tipsy. I want to see the tiered, first year student sitting in the main lecture hall, trying to pay
style photos. Even though the 50s and 60s have past, they are still impacting the way we ‘snap’ architecture. As students or even professionals, we produce renders which
attention to the last lecturer that speaks to him during week one. I want him there because he is part of the same world that my design, now a building, just entered in.
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dealing with failure Recent MArchD graduate Devon Telberg shares her reflections on how externally perceived failures may actually be a result of internal convictions. How does failure appear from the outside? From the outside, failure looks like nothing is happening. It looks like someone is just doing the same thing over and over again, everyday hoping for a different result. You
just want to tell them how they could try things a little differently because you think they don’t know that another way could help them progress.
What does it feel like on the inside? Failure feels very differently from the inside. It feels like a constant state of frustration because you’re comparing your situation to the image of what you want it to be. It feels like intimacy, as if that image could be quite close if only one thing could
life happy. Deeper than all those feelings, failure feels like conviction and conviction feels like a deep resolve that resides in a quiet place in the corner of your heart. Listening to it means facing the struggle of duality between that and every flake
fall in place. It feels like acceptance when nothing happens because you’ve become used to it for too long. It feels like doubt when some progress actually happens because that is not how you imagined it happening. It feels like emptiness from lack of that one thing you think would make your
of moments that shed away in the face of your convictions. Following your life with conviction can guide you towards a life where everything around you is valued deeper and deeper as you walk along your path. Flakes of things that do not matter drop away with every step you take.
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I propose that instead we perform the act of the architectural selfie. We should take a stand and not be a selfieographer. We should use the back facing camera, focusing on the buildings, spaces and world around us. Or better still why not dust off that DSLR, switch to manual mode and play with the exposure and shutter speed. Learn something new about photography,
your setting, composition or even just about exposure. Framings of architectures, details, reflections or context help to highlight the built environment around us. We should take notice of what’s around us, and not if we look good or which is our good side. Let’s show the world our creative sides and take more architectural selfies.
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we are going to ibiza Organising in the face of opposition: Zone 5 present the quest to make it to Ibiza and the benefits of having a student led trip.
D
S5 is a unit focused around selforganisation, self-direction, and personal responsibility. When the idea of a trip to Ibiza was first suggested, questions were raised about the likelihood of
Having made it to the island, stayed in a surprisingly characterful, beautiful, and also somewhat extravagant personal villa complex, and seen a fraction of the islands genuinely inspiring landscapes and
failure. Trying to organise the trip through official channels was met by resistance; media colouration of the island made the idea an eyebrow raising topic for many conversations with friends, lovers and parents. Opposition was found on all fronts.
vernacular architecture; as a unit we seem to have overcome the odds. By hiring cars in groups we were able to devise custom itineraries so the island was explored uniquely by everyone. The compiled images show Ibiza in
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a more forgiving, off-season light, avoiding the biased media representation of the island as a tourist, glitz infested ‘kitsch’ nightmare town. From biking across the island, to salt-flat sightseeing, driving in white-car-convoys, hiking to see a sunset, making our own cocktail bar, photographing every other minute, eating omelette each night at 3am, playing pingpong, videoing constantly, having impromptu tutorials [with or without
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tutors], sitting next to an open fire discussing architectural education, dancing, being asked to be a movie star [yes, Adam!], and dealing with the almost constant rain... It was not really about ‘going to Ibiza’, but about visiting a place to establish a studio and explore the current globalised, Gen Y culture, in an unbiased way. And yes, dont judge us again, the title is referring to that song by Vengaboys
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m
ore than academics and students in the process of establishing a meaningful definition of a civic pedagogy. Taking a playfully engaging, humaninhabited, neon-painted Civic Pedagogy TV
(CPTV) camera onto the streets adjacent to University campuses in New York, London and Oxford, we filmed members of the public responding to questions about how Universities – and specifically their programs – might make a difference to the communities in which they’re located. Opportunities for community situated learning2 already exist across various University programs such as architecture3 and nursing4. So the question isn’t whether Universities should offer more of these opportunities, since this is already happening. Instead, we asked the public to consider in what way these programs could benefit the community too.
revealed the limitations and even failures in our original question framing. For example, many respondents felt that the question was less about how students might learn in community placements, but instead how the community might access the University. In general, respondents perceived the Universities as holding great resources that are otherwise inaccessible to the non-academic community. In their view, making Universities accessible was the more pressing concern. What this highlighted is how Universities need to offer strategies that traffic opportunities for learning in both directions – students into the community but also the community into the campus. What respondents also revealed to us was a vital failure in our assumption that any ‘community’ automatically defines itself as homogeneous group, when it is instead comprised of a diverse range of individuals with specific needs. Indeed, all of us exist as members of multiple, dispersed and simultaneously overlapping communities at any one point in time. To meet the need of a ‘community’ therefore requires a civic
Yet what this article reveals is how some of the data volunteered by the respondents
pedagogy strategy that impacts on the lives of individuals and not just groups loosely
A VITAL FAILURE IN OUR ASSUMPTION WAS THAT ANY ‘COMMUNITY’ AUTOMATICALLY DEFINES ITSELF AS A HOMOGENEOUS GROUP
1. Kahn, L., (1961). Quoted in Wilder Green, Louis I. Kahn, Architect: Alfred Newton Richards 2. Holland, B. A., & Gelmon, S. B. (1998). The State of the” Engaged Campus”: What have we learned about building and sustaining university-community partnerships?. AAHE bulletin, 51, 3-6. 3. Harriss, H., Widder, L., (2014) Architecture Live Projects: Pedagogy into Practice 4. Elisabeth, C., Christine, W. H., & Ewa, P. (2009). Teaching during clinical practice: strategies and techniques used by preceptors in nursing education. Nurse Education Today, 29(5), 522-526.
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Architecture and failure Assistant Editor of Bartlett LOBBY Daniel Stilwell proposes a framework for classifying failure.
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or me Failure comes in many guises and although in a majority of cases the connotations are strictly negative, there are still some that are exception to the rule. Inspired by and dedicated to the rhetoric of the late Lebbeus Woods entitled ARCHITECTURE AND RESISTANCE; I will explore ARCHITECTURE AND FAILURE in a similar fashion. Equally as equivocal as Woods made his, the idea that Failure is something of a double-edged sword is ultimately at the crux of this idea. Alongside the notion that Failure is inherently defined by the context it is used within. So I propose a basis for which Failure can be classified against in certain situations. Not only the bitter disappointment but also the sweet smells of success that blossom from Failure. Omissions and disorder to
Failure. We must accept it as a part of life and a way of life. A natural compass if you will, to buffer against. Failure disseminates the road, not to ruin but to fruition and feasibility. To keep a trajectory, a direction or some navigation will inhibit the good seen in Failure. Forks will appear and gut feelings will sway and meander you through. Lastly, a rolling stone gathers no moss, interpreted in such a way where moss in this context stands for stagnation and in some-way has a dual affinity with Failure. With an affluent field of semantics of which to draw from, it leaves us thinking about Failure as a complex oxymoron. I say oxymoron with a pinch of salt because when visualising Failure or attempting to make it tangible, you see it congeal like an amorphous blob, fusing with a host environment, situation, space or place
fortune and fate, tell of the circumstances Failure relates to Architecture. Most of all, Failure makes us more insightful for an unforeseeable future. Trial and Error & Progression and Regression are all attributes coinciding with
and manipulating like a parasite. A controller, a puppeteer or a grand master it forces you, quite delicately to forgo change and adaptation. So quite possibly in reality it is not parasitic but nurturing and maternal and natural.
See the poster for the full list of Dan’s classifications of Failure 62
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR ISSUE THREE:
FETISH In the third issue of OSA, we look to trace the elusive nature of fetish as it appears in different phenomena, in architecture and related fields. In all of its manifestations, the fetish appears to be a persistent and enduring component of creation, action and thought. There are three primary models of fetishism -- anthropological, Marxian and Freudian. All three define fetish as an object endowed with a special force or independent life. Marx called this transference, Freud called it overvaluation. In this sense the fetish is not a representation. It does not refer to something outside itself. It is internalised. Fetishism was coined in the 15th century by the Portuguese in relation to witchcraft and the cult objects of West Africans. “As an irrational relation to objects, fetishism was not just an abomination in the eyes of the Lord; it was also a damned nuisance to market activity” Vitruvius reminds us that architects are remembered for what they write and not
what they build, yet our own design projects are born from a fetish like obsession, where fetish is a necessity. Indeed, that which has propelled our interest and continues to evade us. Nevertheless, the fetish prevails, simultaneously prolific and devastating; it is a substitute for ideology.
We are seeking:
Articles, opinions, interviews, essays, critiques, manifestos, how-to’s, drawings, models, diaries, poems, fiction, projects, buildings, reviews, photo essays, travel diaries, details, contracts, infographics, collages, videos, reflections and anything else that you can think of
How to submit:
Please send a short 100-300 word abstract or thumbnail images describing what you would like to submit in response to the theme to submissions@osa.ink by the 31st March.
DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: 31ST MARCH
Architecture 1999 Architecture and Failure Architectural Selfies Columbia: Participation & Conflict Dealing with Failure Delirious New Park Errors and Corrections The Experimental Zone From Failure to Personal Commitment Imagining the Impossible Not Failing is a Risky Business Uncivilisation To be an Architect We ARE going to Ibiza What Lies Beneath Where Did the People Go?