ATELIER MOB

The following article is part of the book New Commons for Europe, which is the transcript of conversations that occurred during the Bedford Tapes Symposium at the Architectural Association in London on 09.12.2016.

On 9 December 2016 the Architectural Association in London hosted The Bedford Tapes, an event that brought together architects and experts from all over Europe. New Commons for Europe captures the vitality and the doubts of a new generation of architects living at a key moment in the history of the European Union and questioning the role of the profession and the architect's ability to produce projects and spaces for the common good with an alternative set of resources and profit structure. After the conference a series of interviews were conducted with participants in London, Berlin, Brussels, Paris, Lisbon and Bucharest. The book chronicles both the event and the interviews, which have developed into an ongoing European conversation between architectural figures that takes a new reading of the boundaries of the discipline and its interactions with political, economic and social factors.

The following conversation is based on a presentation by Tiago Mota Saraiva about a Lisboa project called Terras da Costa and followed by a conversation including Pooja Agrawal, Jeremy Till, Kathryn Firth, Joachim Declerck, Jack Self, Mathieu Delorme, Anthony Engi Meacock, Holly Lewis, and Oliver Wainwright.

Tiago Mota Saraiva I’m going to focus on a project that we started in 2012. It is sited in the outskirts of Costa da Caparica in Portugal. Terras da Costa neighbourhood is a fifteen-minute drive from central Lisbon. The site is a shantytown and next to it are massive upper mid-class building blocks. The distinction produces a natural conflict between these urbanities.

When we first visited it, it was clear that we would be intervening in a situation that presented conditions that are not proper for anyone to live in. Houses with no ventilation, isolation or natural light; no tap water; no legal electricity; no paved streets. On the other hand, the plot had high urban restrictions. It is labelled as both an agricultural and ecological preservation field. We set our goal on fighting for building new decent houses, on an urban plot nearby, but not on restructuring the existing houses, which generated the first conflict with some organisations that were on the field claiming to keep the people there and merely fighting for a few building improvements, although keeping the brutal social gap.

After the first visits we declared: ‘We do not see the proper conditions for human beings to live here so, if you agree, we may help you start a common political fight to build a decent new neighbourhood for you’ – we have always been political in our actions, and our political drive was heightened in 2011 when Portugal suffered the troika’s interventions (a period of time when Portugal was under a severe austerity and privatisation programme imposed by the European Central Bank, IMF, a European Commission). There was an urgency to act for human rights.

But how did we get to this neighbourhood?

We started working in Terras da Costa through an Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa workshop called Noutra Costa dedicated to think the future of that territory. The decision of the group we were tutoring was to focus on what we could do with the people that live there in the present moment and near future.

We used the weeklong workshop as a starting point for immediate initiatives. We tried to organise a football match that might connect inhabitants with people that lived around the neighbourhood (none came!), design some benches and tables and ending up with a party. We tried to initiate a thing that did not exist – and exists with difficulty now – that is, to mix people from outside of the neighbourhood with inhabitants. Despite that, the football match coupled architects from the workshop and people from the neighbourhood and was actually the most successful initiative in this regard.

Afterward the locals came to us saying, ‘We want your help – the issue is the tap water’. In the beginning we were saying, ‘We can help you as citizen-activists but not really as an architectural office. Providing tap water is not a matter of architecture’. And in response they suggested the design of a community kitchen.

This part of the process was bottom up, because building a community kitchen was the dream of one of the first and oldest inhabitants, Dona Vitória. Furthermore, they already had the tradition of eating together.

The project started with a series of failures – submitting a lot of applications to support the kitchen project and construction, and being denied. For one and a half years all of them were refused. At a certain point we met with a group of people that was working ten kilometres from our site, the French/German collective Exyzt. They were building Casa do Vapor, a temporary structure in a fishing village.

At the end of their project, Alexander Römer, now from ConstructLab, called us saying they wanted to give us the wood so that we could start building the kitchen. We wanted to have Exyzt or ConstructLab in the project but they gave us the contact of a similar Portuguese collective that was starting. That’s how our partnership and co-authorship with Colectivo Warehouse started.

We tried to implement a participatory design process but the locals were always asking, ‘When does the tap water arrive?’ This is very relevant because you have to set basic conditions to start a participatory project. We had two questions about the kitchen that we needed the community to decide on. Is it going to have a closed, lockable area? They decided yes, it should. And where are we going to build the kitchen? They proposed a place that was one of the most tense areas, and they wanted to build there in order to occupy it and create a common space there. At a certain point of the discussion, everyone wanted everything to be contained in this kitchen – even a morgue.

But this community was indeed always under threat – the drug dealing networks, the police, etc. The police interventions were aggressive. It is no longer happening because now the community has relevant access to the media, which they can use to advocate for themselves. It’s a matter of visibility.

Back to the economy of the project. We started with the support of Casa do Vapor, but then a person from a jury that was reviewing one of our applications contacted us. She was from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. She wanted to understand the neighbourhood and our work and advised us to apply directly to them for funding. Our application was accepted and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation supported a significant amount of our work and project.

Our relationship with the municipality was tense at the beginning – they knew more or less the type of technical support we usually give to other neighbourhoods, related to legalisations and paper work. They started saying: ‘Don’t think that this neighbourhood will ever be legal’ and we answered, ‘No, we also think that this plot is not right to build on’. This question of legalisation is also linked to another important fact. It’s an agricultural plot; it’s really fertile.

We claim for the right to the place but that does not mean to build exactly where it exists. The right to the place, as we see it, is the right of the people to stay nearby, in order to keep their networks, kids to stay in the same school, workers to use the same public transport, etc. We claim for decent houses.

Since we got the funding we began building the kitchen. In fact the space does not function entirely as a kitchen, it’s mostly used as a common space. For example, six months after the kitchen opening, the electricity was cut. Everyone was very stressed and organised a general meeting. The pamphlets had the hour and the day, but they forgot to say the location. It was pretty clear to everyone that it was going to take place at the kitchen. It retains its identity. Recently someone started to cook there in order to sell meals for two euros on Saturdays.

We held a lot of meetings with the municipality, and we always tried to help the neighbourhood association. We didn’t organise the elections but we participated on the day of the first election in 2014 by participating at the polling stations and counting votes.

This photograph shows the first time the counsellor and the vice-mayor went to the kitchen. It was a very important day. They went there and announced that they would bring tap water there, build a sewage system, and not charge the community for the installation of the water infrastructure or consumption. Almada’s municipality has decided that people that prove economic shortcomings will be supplied with five cubic metres of water per month.

Generically speaking we are very focused on designing one process and defining politically the road we want to travel – in distinction to starting from a concept, as we were taught in the university. In this case the political crux was the idea of water. The urgency of water. At the first meeting with the municipality we said that we were not fighting for these people’s houses to become legalised because we didn’t think the houses were worth being legalised. We are fighting first for the water, which is a human right, and they accepted that as a common ground – that’s why it worked.

The municipality, in this case, was not following what the national politicians usually do. For example, public assistance is not allowed in this neighbourhood because most people have no papers, so everything is considered illegal. But the municipality took risks here in regards to the national policies.

The Community Kitchen is illegal, because we don’t have a law that can answer to these emergency issues. However we don’t want it to become legal, because this will open the door for the neighbourhood to remain in its current precarious conditions.

We received an award for the building, which was really important – not only for us, but also for the people who live there. It has attracted a lot of media

attention. Before starting to talk to the media, we decided on a strategy for the next step. We repeated to everyone that the best prize that the Community Kitchen of Terras da Costa could get was its dismantling, because it would mean that it would not be needed and the neighbourhood would be relocated. This statement was very powerful to deviate the focus from the Kitchen and Prize, to the social conditions people were living in. The prize gave us a way to step forward to do the thing we wanted to do afterwards.

In the meantime, we had no further funding to continue our work there. The visibility given by the prize allowed us to receive a second grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. It allowed us to continue the work that we think is relevant, specifically to map and to register the housing, to understand how the houses/people were organised, how inhabitants organised the houses, and so on, in order to design houses according to their needs in the future.

We did a survey of all the houses and started to understand people’s seasonal movements, to have updated lists of people that live there, which is very fluid and changes all the time. This second round of financial support gave us the opportunity to stay in the neighbourhood and to construct a manual of information on the neighbourhood, to get some clues for the new housing process.

We also mapped possible places for residents to be moved, and organised a discussion on where we could build the new neighbourhood with the people. We identified four plots (less then one kilometre away) and we explained our research process to the residents. The idea was not to force them to choose one. We rather wanted to produce material to inform decisions about where and when to build the next neighbourhood. Ultimately, the participatory process results, concerning the plot choice, led to the one we thought was the best. And luckily it was also the one that the municipality was willing to choose.

Flavien Menu Thank you for this presentation. I would like to go back a bit to your trajectory as a firm. You started your office before the crisis, winning competitions and the like, but then you decided to change your attitude and you also decided to stay in Lisbon while your colleagues were leaving for Northern Europe. You have said that you wanted to stay because there was a lot to do but not enough money to do it.

Tiago Mota Saraiva I remember a lecture we gave in Porto in 2007, where we were presented as the most political office of the new Portuguese architects’ generation. At least at that time, that wasn’t viewed as a positive thing.

When the crisis started, Portuguese Pritzker Prize winners Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura, gave dozens of interviews declaring the failure of architecture in Portugal, encouraging younger generations to leave the country, saying there was no work to be done over the next few years. Just run for your lives. We answered back by saying: ‘No, we look around and there is a lot to be done everywhere. The only thing not working, is that money and energy are not being invested in architecture’. And that’s when we started a programme to work with people that need architecture services but have no money to pay for them. We called it: Working with the 99%.

Former energies that we used on architecture competitions, we started to use on designing applications for funding interventions on these neighbourhoods or on designing and building common facilities. If the first experiences were leveraged by us, from one day to another, people started to knock at our door and ask for help. We can build a design programme but also help create informal groups, associations and cooperatives. And, of course, we have now more skills in the team, mostly from social sciences. We changed our way of getting work from one that was focused on winning competitions to one that focuses on fundraising.

During 2016, to best manage this type of project, we decided to also found a co-op: Trabalhar com os 99% [Working with the 99%]. The co-op opens new doors to the practice, establishing it also as an institution to be listened to on new laws and legislations, and that may integrate other NGOs, unions, and neighbourhood associations as members. This urges them to participate on co-op decisions but also provides VAT benefits when using the co-op services.

Joachim Declerck These shantytowns are something that we have seen over the past twenty years as something that is an interesting field for architecture but also for human rights, and the aestheticisation of those rights is clearly taking over. You go beyond the level of saying that there is a temporary installation that is necessary: you define a question, you help draw the first space that enables a community to organise itself, but you also use your expertise to say that it’s not permanent. You’re quite tough on the same community that you’re trying to help. Drawing this process line further than the first installation is something that is exemplary.

We often make a temporary intervention, we often celebrate how fantastic the party is, we often take the photograph, as you did, in the temporary intervention that distinguishes itself from the shantytown and then we stop the arrow of attention: the attention span of the architect is over. I’m interested in the way you work with communities in terms of organising themselves and the way you work with space to help organise this community: it is in these interactions between how cooperatives organise themselves, communities organise themselves, and how space can help facilitate this. There is a lot to be won in the area between the organising of communities and the organising of space – there’s a lot of work where you can actually reinvent a lot of the conditions of how things could work.

Jeremy Till I have a question that has to do with everyone at the table. Everyone here has been through an architectural education. And architecture education is pretty rubbish generally, it goes down an incredibly conventional set of trajectories, values, aspirations. It might look different but actually it’s pretty much the same around the world. Most of you have come out of that and entered into a slightly parallel universe, in which you’ve taken your skills and your aspirations and have shifted them into a different realm. I’m really interested in what you think is transferable from the conventional norms of architecture values to these other set of rules. And what skills did you bring from the conventional architecture education arena: what do you bring to the table that is different from someone coming from a planning degree or an economics degree? What’s your special characteristics?

Tiago Mota Saraiva In Portugal we still have this myth of the architect as a builder, so we were considered false architects – ‘architects pretending to be sociologists’ as defined by Francisco Aires Mateus after our work being published in Domus. But what I really do think is that we are in the process of extending the boundaries of architecture – which is not a new thing. It is not something that is going to destroy other ways of doing it, but it’s something that, with the skills of our discipline, we may also do. We have the skills and tools: design abilities, technical know-how, communication skills, paperwork management...

For example, when we started working on the kitchen project, we told the community that we were going to meet with the municipality in order to move forward. For them, the municipality was not different from the police. The police were seen as the aggressors, who were violently trying to displace them and to destroy their livelihoods. But it was important for us to understand that we were going to go through the project procedures as we do with all other projects. So the first thing we did was to go to the municipality and ask about their plans for the territory and the possibility of designing a community kitchen for the neighbourhood.

That’s where we assume our architect’s profile, or at least, what the society sees and expects of an architect. By the way, usually when I show this project to a conventional audience of architects in Portugal, I always dress myself as a standard architect (mostly in black). It’s a matter of representation. Not a representation of the office, but the representation of the excluded neighbourhood. On the other hand, in the neighbourhoods, it’s important to take off this social and dressing barrier, so that people may feel comfortable to complain and criticise. Which they do, a lot. Our experiences are not the experiences of consensus in these participatory processes or in these events; it’s an experience of conflict and democracy methods implementation. This has a lot to do with designing the process.

Joachim Declerck There is a world famous sociologist in Brussels who was very critical of architects and their hubris of trying to be involved with everything. He has been critical nearly his entire career, until about two years ago. He recently told me that he shifted his opinion, that he discovered that the incredible force of architect-designers is the project-based mentality of working – that processes always lead to material reality. Architects analyse what the question is, dismantle it, visualise it, check it with others, draw conclusions, maybe draw options so as to help others to decide. The process in government terms – not in all governments – can be endless, that’s the typical thing with governmental decision-making processes. He noted that the most design-driven processes always have an ambition to end, preferably not in ten years but in a visible time. In that sense, the magazine is a project for me, an exhibition is a project, and this project mentality is unique to architects and the tools that it gives to others is the unique asset.

Jack Self I was going to say the same thing in a slightly different way: a lot of people are now working on project bases; basically architecture is a mentality, it’s a design methodology, and it’s a framework or lens for viewing the material world and for tracing the relationship between immaterial processes and material artefact. Increasingly people do not work for a company for their entire lives, they don’t work for fifty years in one factory and then get a gold watch. They now work many careers but they work on projects for defined periods of time with fixed outcomes.

And a lot of young people are really struggling because they do not understand the methodology of how projects operate, but they are being forced to work on a project-by-project basis. I think what architects understand, and of course Mies said it very well, is that you don’t invent a new architecture every Monday morning. How do you continue your ideas and beliefs if you have a different client, a different site, a different activity, and a different programme for every project? How can you create continuity when every single project demands that you start from scratch? There is both the project in terms of the individual project but also the project of the career, of the life of the architect or of the company.

Jeremy Till It’s more than just a project, it’s a spatial project in a broader sense of the term – one that goes beyond the formal and engages with the social. That comes from the sensibility and ability to make spatial judgements; it’s something we really bring to the table but clearly not in the formal sense.

Joachim Declerk I don’t completely agree. You can’t consider designing policies as a project. And that’s exactly what we need.

Kathryn Firth I wanted to raise something which I didn’t learn in school but I feel is a skill that one needs, which is that the architect has to be a mediator – something, as you said, that isn’t easy. What are the mechanisms for working when there are voices that are louder than other voices? Is there a kind of holding back that you feel the responsible architect has to do, because you of course have an opinion and you are here as an expert but you don’t want to dominate? What are your experiences in that and how do you deal with those situations?

Tiago Mota Saraiva When we presented the four potential plots for the new neighbourhood we were quite clear that we didn’t have a previous opinion. We didn’t choose what in our technical opinion was the best site. We told the residents that they were going to make a collective decision, and we would also have a technical opinion, afterwards. We were trying to inform the municipality’s decision, which had to ultimately purchase the new site’s land.

During the presentation of the four potential sites, the president of the neighbourhood association was the only one who was against the idea of relocation. Even his wife and kids were in favour! Of course this produced conflict at a certain point. There is always information that we could not get or understand because we don’t live there. You also have to consider that there is a high tax of functional illiteracy and 45 per cent of the people are under eighteen years old. So there are always misunderstandings and irrational moments.

We were not interested in choosing a site for them, but instead we sought to offer choices. We are building spaces of emancipation and if there is too much reluctance we are not going to force anyone. We want the people to be part of the energy we are trying to create. We have no hidden agenda or financial speculative desires.

On top of it, there were still people, in the field, working on a charity basis and giving strength to the idea that they should resist on the plot. This added another layer of complexity. The neoliberal idea that, with some improvements, people ‘like them’ would live well there. At one point I remember saying in one meeting: ‘Our fight is to build new houses with proper conditions. If you agree, that’s fine, we can continue to fight on your side. If you disagree, that is also fine, but we will step back’.

Flavien Menu Who has the right or power to commission a project? That is, who, how and when can we invent our own brief instead of answering a programme, because even if you try to disrupt it, it will still be commissioned by someone else?

Tiago Mota Saraiva We never asked the municipality if we could work for them. In the beginning we fundraised for the project because we understood that we should keep our independence. But, of course, if we want to build public housing with the municipality and the community, then that would have to be a totally different way of working and funding.

Jack Self OMA-AMO was one of the only models of previous generations that I could see when I was starting REAL. They created the possibility of self- initiating projects from within the studio in what appeared initially to be a quite interesting and independent way. The more I studied that model the more I realised that AMO is just a brand tool. It’s not a separate entity. Rem Koolhaas and his team have been setting the direction for their projects for the last thirty years. They say, ‘The next thing is the countryside’ and they only do projects in the countryside. ‘The next thing is China’ – and the first building they design in China is CCTV. It’s a very successful tool for pursuing what they want to do. They had previously done ten years of research at Harvard in which they used the academy as a lever in order to make lots of connections, so then their first project could be CCTV. REAL, on the other hand, is structured in such a way that in principle goes against the AMO branding relationship to OMA; rather we exist as a cultural foundation which is in fact an architectural firm and therefore we don’t have clients in the same way. We can always initiate projects.

Flavien Menu What is important to understand is the lever mechanism for self-initiating projects: what kinds of powers can we trigger? There is also a question of scale here. We are mainly speaking about small-scale projects, but what if we try to self-initiate a large-scale proposal?

Oliver Wainwright I want to bring in a totally different scale of self-initiated projects, which is probably Europe’s most expensive, most delayed building: the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. Initially it was funded in part by the money of Jacques Herzog’s former classmate, who was a very small time developer in Hamburg. They came up with this incredible vision, self-generated low publicity with this one rendering, and before they knew it the whole state was behind them. So it began as a very small-scale, kind of lucky commercial developer project and his architect mate, and suddenly became Germany’s biggest, most expensive, most delayed, arguably most amazing building. Projects can be scalable.

Pooja Agrawal Your mate has to be a commercial developer (Laughs).

Oliver Wainwright But he didn’t end up developing it. He didn’t have the means to develop it. They just made a very convincing image and then the state and the people got behind it and it became a public project because there was such momentum. This is a lesson in the power of publicity, of image making, of taking up a budget without the financial means to build it.

Jack Self We can use our forces as architects for good or evil. What you described is basically the role of image seduction that was prevalent before 2008, in which you didn’t have to build the building on the site, you just had to create a seductive image and that was enough to initiate the project.

Kathryn Firth Wouldn’t it be better if we could just educate the people that we call clients? The idea that we can do everything on every scale and we don’t need anyone and we just say we’re collaborative just smacks of the old powerful guard of architects. I much prefer a model where we actually educate people, learn from people who are in the public sector, who are interested in how development happens, and that we actually collaborate with them. I know we’re far from that perfect world right now but I think it might be a more sustainable model.

Jack Self I think we already have that situation. You must collaborate with everyone, and to make architecture with the 99 per cent you must also engage productively with the 1 per cent. How do you want to create systemic change if you decide that you are not going to talk to some people? You need to find a way to positively engage with forces that seem opposed or hostile.

Peter Swinnen To wrap up Jeremy’s question, I think it’s actually quite simple. The task of an architect is to detect clients who don’t know yet that they are clients. This could be at a very small scale, as most of the projects we have seen so far. But it can also happen on a big scale. Detecting clients who don’t know yet that they are clients is actually how I’ve experienced my education, how I experienced my first working experience, and that’s how I continue to work: in private practice and equally when I was a state architect. Especially in the public sector, to detect clients, political clients is a fantastic thing.

New Commons for Europe is sold-out on Spector Books website but last copies are available online