BOURDON TO BIENNALE

In conversation with Andy Summers

Andy Summers is an architect, educator, curator, and public programmer specialising in architecture and the built environment. He is currently the Co-Pilot for Stage 4 at the Mackintosh School of Architecture. He also teaches at the University of Edinburgh and is a co-founder and co-director of the Architecture Fringe.

He’s interested in developing and contributing to a pluralised, progressive culture of architecture which seeks to support a just common good, and his work questions and explores the conditions within which architectural cultures emerge, often challenging existing structures and cultural norms.

MACMAG (MM): Could you tell us a little bit about why and how you started the architecture fringe?

Andy Summers (AS): There was the Scottish Government’s Year of Innovation, Architecture and Design in 2016 led by the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland and part of the main flagship of that was there was a Festival of Architecture. Just previous to that, for context, was the Scottish independence referendum. There had been a great upswell in civic engagement and society talking about what you want to do together as a group of people that live on an island. We had done quite a lot of work in the referendum campaign on architecture and designing. So we were up and running with regards to public engagement and talking about architecture and the public sphere. When the festival of architecture was announced, which is great, it’s like 'that’s interesting' Us, as a few individuals could not understand how we were going to participate in that.

Being inspired by the Edinburgh Festival fringe model, we have decided to create a fringe to the festival of architecture. We did not ask to do that, we just did it. Myself, Akiko Kobayashi, Dr Stacey Hunter and Ross Aitchison were the original four and grew with the addition of Neil

McGuire. That was February 2015. The idea was to have a more Open Access pluralised way of exploring architectural culture in Scotland. Getting to the 2016 edition was an epic amount of work. I think I had about 40 different conversations with people with regards to, should we use an architecture fringe? Do you see any value in it? We did a lot of work to try and make sure it was going to work on the launch. In the first edition we had about 38 different projects and events on the platform. The success of that then snowballed. We began to get public funding and began to produce a core programme. We are just moving into our 6th edition this June, which is under the provocation of revolution

MM: The Architecture Fringe collaborates with artists, activists and, as you were saying, a plurality of people in the industry, how is it working with such a variety of different people? How has that affected your work or your outlook on architecture?

AS: Pretty critically and pretty fundamentally. You cannot necessarily make change on your own, and everyone has different perspectives, so working with other people is critical in terms of encapsulating and reflecting a cross range of experiences and allies. Part of the great joy of the Architecture Fringe really is that it is the best excuse to talk to anybody. We have got this platform of the festival and if you just approach people when you have something behind you, it is a great excuse to begin a dialogue.

Ever since the start, we have always tried to programme quite plurally and part of that is also being able to support people financially. A big part of our learning through the years, has been to apply for public funds and not rely on in-kind labour for the people we are commissioning. That does not reflect, sadly, in the team yet who are still mostly volunteers.

The core programme is a huge part of what we do. The kinship and allyship with the open programme is so critical because if they were not there, then we would just be talking to ourselves. What is so nice about the model is that if we take / other, for example, the people of colour collective who came out of the Glasgow School of Art, and the current team are

Mia Pinder-Hussein, Alyesha Choudhury and Carl Jonsson, they began to self-produce work and use the Architecture Fringe open platform to amplify their work and that is the whole point. We don’t gatekeep access to the platform. We don’t have a curatorial committee that sanctions if you can do that or not, as long as it’s safe and it’s going to happen, then it’s not actually our business about what your approach to that culture is.

In terms of working with other people, it is really amazing and what was nice about the 2021 edition was we were going through the pandemic, which was hard for everybody, but because we were mostly online, through necessity, our programme internationalised.

Unlearning was our provocation theme then. We were learning about biases and how different people’s lived experiences are affected by the systemic structures that are inherent within society. It was so great because we worked with people in Detroit, New York, Calcutta, people here in Glasgow as well. That was quite liberating.

MM: In October it was announced that the Architecture Fringe, along with -ism magazine and /other was to represent Scotland at the 2023 Venice Biennale. Your proposal is titled, 'A Fragile Correspondence'. Could you tell us a little bit about that, and what your involvement entails?

AS: The Venice Biennale is the world’s largest art and architectural exhibition, a fully internationalised exhibition based in Venice, I think since 2000 Scotland has had an independent representation there. The Biennale flips between art and architecture. There was an open call this year and we have already worked very closely with /other and -ism magazine before through the Architecture Fringe, so we were already up and running with regards to exploring ideas in response to Lesley Lokko’ s overall provocation which is The Laboratory of the Future.

A kinship between all our work with three curatorial teams is really about language a lot of the time, and we’ve been really interested in the land in terms of the land reform movement in Scotland which is critically important. About 456 people own over half of Scotland. It is quite an institutionalised and internationalised financial tool. What we are doing with our fragile correspondence is looking at how language overlays upon the land and the many different nuances from different languages that are placed as a lens upon that topography. If we take the Gaelic language, for example, a lot of the time the Gaelic language will directly describe characteristics of the landscape. But in English it is just a phonetic translation and all the connections lost. There are three locations we are exploring:

Loch Ness through the Gaelic lens. In essence how land is heavily internationalised with the financial model on the South bank but in the North bank there’s community buyout land, such as the Breaking Forest Trust. So different models and different ways of engaging with trees and forests and the culture associated with that.

Then Orkney, and we are exploring the Norn language which was in Orkney for about 800 years but is now defunct. Interestingly, the kind of contemporary culture in Orkney is one of a Norse lineage. They are living through a language culture that they don’t speak or use anymore.

Lastly, in Ravenscraig, near Motherwell, which used to be Europe’s largest steelworks, we are exploring Scots and English and how we can try and recognise the contemporary landscape as a place of authenticity.

It is really interesting exploring the three different locations together because, for example, Ravenscraig is just a blip in time, it was only open for 30 years, a human endeavour, an investment to create Europe’ s largest steelworks and then there is nothing. In comparison to the community in Orkney, which has a lineage of 10,000 years because most of the previous structure of built stone is still physically there. There is a real different time aspect to how the communities have used the land that we are exploring. In summary, all that work is reoriented to how we can better engage and work harder towards the climate emergency. That is the ultimate aim of the work.

MM: You mentioned -ism and /other. How did these groups come about and what roles do each of them play?

AS: /other emerged from the Glasgow School of Art People of Colour Collective. They began to self-propel and selfproduce cultural responses to architecture. We have worked very closely with /other for quite a while. Mia is in Stage 5, Carl just finished his Masters at MSA, and Alyesha has just graduated from the Mack. Similarly at the University of Strathclyde in terms of selfpropelled work four students: Aoife Nolan. Kristina Enberg, Amy McEwan and Alissar Riachi came together to form -ism magazine. We had a really nice, tested relationship with regards to how we have worked together before, and we decided to then, through the Architecture Fringe invitation, work together for the response to the Venice Biennale open call.

MM: What is the process of creating a proposal for the Venice Biennale?

AS: This is where all one’ s learning comes into play. Because there’s nine of us, there are three different curatorial teams. We all have different perspectives and different realms of work, even though we come into some kinship with regards to the language. How we work is quite democratic for nine people. It has been a really interesting mix where we are all different. We are all looking after different parts. For example, the main curatorial push: The Architecture Fringe is leading on Ravenscraig, /other is leading on Loch Ness and -ism magazine is leading for Orkney. We are working with local collaborators and visiting collaborators there. Then we will have our own curatorial response to each of those locations, which will be in the exhibition, but importantly, where we also come together within the creative production. We have lexicon for the project, which kind of redefines existing terms and proposes new terms for how we look at language and the land. It is a big learning process for us all and we are really enjoying it so far.

MM: The Mack is unique to a lot of other architecture schools as it sits within an art school. How do you think this then impacts the teaching and learning experience?

AS: I studied at Edinburgh College of Art for my Part 1. Within the art college it was very celebrated and acknowledged that we were in a wider environment of creative production, you were integrated with furniture makers, jewellery makers, landscape architects. Academically, one of the most interesting things we did at the Art College was when we had an afternoon of multidisciplinary reviews. All you did was present what you were working on at that time. There were no staff, it was student led. It was like a review, a friendly one to talk about people’s work and what was really wonderful was that the painters, who were not necessarily used to quite acute criticism were with the architects who were just giving it out. What was great was to recognise that other people were invited to talk about architecture, and they had really wonderful thoughts on it because the creative process for constructing a piece of furniture, for example, is about materialities, about connection, space. There is lots of kinships with architecture, even for jewellery. Looking at how materials go together and design. These are different disciplines, though they share such a wonderful departure point about how you create and form materials in a particular. manner.

I had a real kinship for art skills going into teaching. Being in the Glasgow School of Art, I do some days kind of pinch myself in a way that I actually teach here because I did not ever come here as a student. The culture at GSA was such a special place in terms of even the way the campus is set up, it has very close together buildings. Before the Mackintosh building burnt down it had internationally known spaces for art. Being in an Art School, you have to take advantage of the different departments because that’s the most wonderful thing about it.

MM: How does your work, particularly in terms of The Architecture Fringe, feed back into how you teach or approach teaching?

AS: I got into teaching a little bit randomly. I did know some people, so I approached them and said, ‘are you looking for any staff? I have moved back up from London, here is my CV’. I got an interview, and I got a job teaching Art Design on a Monday and Architecture studio on the Friday. Ten years later I’m still ESALA, which I absolutely adore. I had never really thought about teaching, in the first year it was a real bonfire of experience, because you don’t get any training. It was really interesting to selflearn, so I committed to trying to explore my own approach to pedagogy because it is vital.

In tandem with the work of the Architecture Fringe being a plurality and widening culture of architecture, empathetically realising that obviously people do not experience life in the city the same way as myself.

It is really invested in trying to work out how we teach. We used the Architecture Fringe 2021, for example, the (Un) Learning provocation. We had a whole education strand where we tried to reimagine first year architecture, we worked very closely with Kathy Li and some of the third years who are now Stage 4. We had an international symposium online, we had a full publication, 'Education in Architecture'. Part of my work here in terms of equity, engagement and supporting more people to come in and talk about architecture, is trying to get our guests and reviewers paid. Currently the school doesn’t pay for guest reviewers

MM: We spoke about architecture and that collaboration with other creative fields, how does that present itself in architectural practice in your experience?

AS: That is a hard one because that depends on each office. Architecture itself is quite a wide discipline in terms of response and each are authentic. If you are only interested in aesthetics, that is fine but other people need to be interested in other things and so practice also reflects that - different practices have different areas of focus. I think what the best thing to do in practice is if you are very upfront about your ethics and your values and what you are interested in then every client who comes towards you does not have an excuse to say I did not know you are into that. Architecture is a great excuse to collaborate with other people. The end result is trying to also enjoy the process of working with people because it doesn’t always manifest into something physical.

MM: In terms of both teaching and work in practice, do you see an increase in, to quote our title ‘Creative Allies’ being formed in the future? Do you think architecture is becoming more interdisciplinary?

AS: I think it is. definitely becoming more recognisable with regards to acknowledging other people exist. The issue that I have is that even with the new proposals from the ARB, for example, about how we might reimagine our education, is that everything works back from getting your part three and being registered as an architect in the UK.

A lot of people will never get to Part three because they do not want to or something else might come up, so that then can have the effect that says then your educational learning is not valid if you are not going to hit this endpoint. What I think we have to do is acknowledge that this is a space of authentic learning. Our training has to see beyond Part three registration, because we have such wonderful variety of skills and what we do here together can be taken into local government, into community groups, into many different areas of civic and public life that don’t rely on someone doing a Part three exam. Some people do not want to do Part three and it is making sure that their contribution and education can go somewhere authentically without feeling that they have not achieved something just because they did not get the same qualification.