RAUMLABOR

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 Markus Bader about a Montreal project called Fountain House and followed by a conversation including Pooja Agrawal, Jeremy Till, Joachim Declerck, Jack Self, Mathieu Delorme, Tiago Mota Saraiva, Anthony Engi Meacock, Holly Lewis, and Oliver Wainwright.

Markus Bader I would like to show a photo of some people in raumlabor, just to make clear that I’m not working alone, neither in the office nor on other projects. Somebody discovered we were fifteen years old and so they wrote an article on us and brought a photographer. There are just the people that were there on that particular day. Part of the practice is that we’re involved in various projects, very project-based in various cities, so we’re rarely ever together in one place.

The picture featured our ‘Bye-bye utopia’ slogan. It was set up for an exhibition that we did once in KUB Arena in Bregenz and then became our pitchline. It is addressing a sort of dilemma that we feel between the heritage of an architectural utopian project in the background of our architectural education and the actual difficulty in putting a utopian spirit/aspiration into a practice that is implemented in reality.

The project I am going to present reflects this paradox and the way we approach architecture. It is called the Fountain House, which took place in Montreal in 2014. For setting up the project, I spent a lot of time in Montreal, being there and trying to find a sense of this city. Four things struck me during my visit and exploration.

First, being in Montreal as a visitor I discovered a landscape full of these Le Corbusier-type buildings. I walked around and was looking for whatever raised my interest and I discovered Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67, built for the 1967 World’s Fair. That was a time when architecture was implemented to create a certain pride in the sense that, ‘What we create, projects a future through an object’.

Second example is Buckminster Fuller’s American pavilion for the 1967 exposition. Back then hoisting rockets, flags and everything from the moon age that was supposed to bring us into the future with this Cedric Price idea of technology having the answers, we just need to ask the right question. Now it’s a centre for environmental questions, the skin burnt some years ago and it’s a sort of remaining dream underpinning the utopian ideal that we can create the future through architecture.

Third, I started to be interested by a series of protests that happened in public spaces in 2012 called the Casseroles movement. The government decided to raise the student fees. In a strong French tradition a sort of revolutionary protest emerged and basically it is a technique of protesting not by carrying banners and making big pamphlets and claims, but by making as much noise as possible with casseroles ie, saucepans. This is also a possibility for everyone to express their solidarity over the common question of the governmental regime of exclusion. This is not accepted through wide areas of society and these protests are proof of such political belief. For me this was an extremely touching use of public space, as a political space primarily, but also as a space where encounter happens.

The map on the screen was handed in by the students to the authorities to represent the plan, the trajectory of their protest walk, happening in 2012.

The political struggle was concerned with the Government Issue: the law that tries to limit the right to assemble, to meet in the streets and even the lawyers, as you see in the picture, came out and said ‘We don’t want to implement that law through our profession’. It was extremely impressive for our practice because we define public space as something that we co-produce; it is not something that just has a status, that is just a given, but something that we create. And this dramatic political example is a dramatic illustration for that.

Fourth, the water – the Saint Lawrence River. It is an amazing force of nature, of resource, of material, of power. It’s super impressive; it just permanently runs through the city and I was drowned within its energy. Which led to the question: how does water reach us as a resource?

I thought of water as an invisible service. Looking into the question, I went to the water plant, which is one of three in the city. The plant has this ex-Futurist headquarters with a power room and a control room. I met the lady who is the head of it all. She happily showed me how to clean filters and so on. There are thirty-five people working there, in this amazing piece of architecture. This is highly invisible to a wider public. To a certain extent the architecture represents a pride in the sense of ‘we are achieving something for the future’ – so it still exists in this mode of 1970s projects.

The infrastructure of the Saint Lawrence can easily take a loss of more than 50 per cent in older pipe systems and they are still operating at only 50 per cent of their capacity. So there is a lot to be said about water management and specific industries in Montreal and the policies around that. There was a political decision in Montreal to provide free water to everyone in the city, directly into their houses, which is really remarkable from a German perspective. When there was a public discussion about taxing the water, the idea was rejected with the argument that the 1 per cent could still fill their pools, because they could easily afford to chip in a bit more money, while for the poorer part of society it would create much more pressure.

These four findings gave birth to the project and we were interested in an intervention re-addressing the idea of public service, and to find a special way to translate this into the urban sphere and the public space.

The programme of Fountain House was very simple: it was a place around a permanently running water tap. I grew up with this paradigm that you have to save; you have to permanently save and you have to be very critical about the resources that you use. This idea of self-limitation is very strongly built into my set of values, which I was both given and have adopted. That value is very much part of our culture and it is connected to this idea of crisis. In reaction to crisis we pull out these protocols and say, ‘Okay, now it’s the crisis so we can do the same work with less people, or with less money, and we can impress everyone with the fact that it works even better’. We are coded like that. We need to look at that approach very critically, especially in a city where a resource like water is available in such abundance – which is not true in every space, but this particular city definitely has enough water. Why not just keep the water tap running?

I was looking for a place where the water tap could run permanently, where the water would be permanently available for everyone in the centre of the city. With this programmatic proposal I approached the Goethe Institute and they created links to other institutions in the city like La Biennale de Montreal and the Quartier des Spectacles, which is an interesting new construction, similar to a shopping mall. I chose an empty lot, which is just off Rue Sainte Catherine and on the boundary between Quartier des Spectacles, which is a district undergoing a lot of new development, and the older Montreal, which is known for strip clubs, sex shops and music venues.

In section you can see that there is a possibility to access the roof and enjoy the view. I wanted the outer skin to create something that’s changing, that doesn’t look like a fortress tower but one that is meant to transmit some kind of idea that this building is alive. This was done very literally by putting earth in between wood and some fabric and letting it grow.

There were a lot of negotiations around allowing it to be an open space, which were driven by a paradigm that we are all familiar with: the paradigm of distress and fear. Montreal has a very strong graffiti scene and people were sure that they would probably leave me two days with this beautiful inner panorama and then it would be covered with graffiti. There was an area nearby that was known as a place where crack users hung, as well as a place that was giving out food and subsidies to homeless people. Through the whole project there were a lot of people saying, ‘We need fences, we need to fortify’. These sentiments brought scepticism, they fed the fear of an intervention by these groups while the threat wasn’t even there. I hope that my power as an architect and designer of the space is the capacity to produce atmosphere. I try to load space with friendliness, with generosity, with something unexpected.

We designed it so that there was not only water falling down but it collected into this little basin and every now and then in random moments a cloud would appear and bring the building right onto your skin and you could feel it, it enwrapped you. A lot of people came in, just walking by, and used their mobile phones to take a picture – they realised that there was a special moment happening. That was a very exciting moment for me because I have all these ideas about how it could work and then it happens. Here you see various people doing various things, and the man on the left is somehow embracing the sun coming in. I am interested in whether it’s possible to place something that doesn’t have a perceivable programme. What happens when we don’t have a protocol of how to act – ‘this is a public toilet, this is a cinema, this is a car park’ or ‘this place is associated with specific programmes’?

We worked with a group of artists to engage in a dialogue. The artist Chris Salter engaged in a dialogue about ‘what it could be?’ or ‘how else you might relate to this question of water in the city?’ He took the space on as image, for him it was a clock tower, and he put the most powerful strobe and disco folk that he could find to turn it into a dramatic otherness every now and then. The artist Chantal Dumas interviewed people and recorded sounds around the topic of water in and around Montreal. There were various projections by Ælab (Gisèle Trudel) and other artists in Montreal that were working on water-related issues.

Also, the workshop is part of our on-going practice and we build things together, so we built furniture for the public space around. We also organise dinners and collective cooking because that is a powerful way to bring people together.

We try as much as possible to bring these kinds of conversational moments out into the public sphere so that people, while we’re discussing public place, can just walk by and listen in. If we want to talk about how to reach people, this is definitely not reaching an everybody audience, but at least it creates visibility for a group of people that are interested in this type of practice and people can slide in and out.

I would like to close with a question. For me this project was an attempt to investigate the question, can work on reversing the narrative of ‘we have to cut back, and cut back, and cut back’ and readdress or revalue the infrastructures that we have, to find new ways to express ourselves? While all this public money and private money is being spent, can we find moments, critical moments, where we feel that something has a fantastic power that we can also turn to a common or a public benefit?

Pooja Agrawal Who maintains it? Who manages it?

Markus Bader Like most of our projects, this is temporary, so now it’s gone. And while it was there, it didn’t have a lot of maintenance, just somebody checking in on it every now and then. But of course the management of this kind of project is an issue.

Oliver Wainwright Was there any legacy or afterlife for the project and for that space, for how people conceived that bit of the city?

Flavien Menu I would add something to this question of legacy, you’ve been practising through these types of interventions for a long time now – 15 years. Perhaps you can give us some insight into your experiences and the legacies of all these temporary pavilions and temporary interventions that you did over that time.

Markus Bader I acknowledge the critic who says that by staying temporary, there might be a certain weakness involved. That all the efforts mentioned before are done, all these people are activated, all these fantasies are being raised and then, the actual material outcome disappears. But the temporary also has a lot of freedom and a lot of opportunity. You can see that as prototyping or creating a sort of imaginary, that you can walk in and even before we all agree that ‘all cities need to invest in Fountain Houses’ – it’s probably good to check if it works.

Flavien Menu Temporary projects often mean low budgets and it underpinsthe question of long-term sustainability of such practices. Temporary projects are great opportunities for young practices to build their first intervention. However, over time there is a need to become more stable and sustainable by building things that are more tangible. All the works we saw today are still really fragile and low-budget, but how to keep that attitude while dealing with larger projects?

Holly Lewis I have to disagree actually. I understand that we’re working in different contexts where there are differences in funding structures, but I run a business that employs seventeen people. It pays seventeen rents and seventeen mortgages and that’s a proper sized business in the architectural world. And we are doing proper sized projects, they are important, they are not little flimsy things and we cannot characterise that as fragile. This is exactly what I was talking about: we say, ‘It’s marginal, it’s small, and it’s temporary’ and we minimise significance and what we’re actually doing is dealing with the urban context and making proposals that are appropriate to that context and the outcome. And the fact that it is temporary or small might be right for that time and then I can look at different contexts and use the same tools and analysis and synthesis and propose something that is equally appropriate to a huge scale of redevelopment. So I’m not going to say that we are small or marginal, sorry no.

Anthony Engi Meacock I think there’s a real danger in assuming that big businesses are somehow stable and sustainable – look at the billions corporate companies have lost this year alone.

I think it is strange to say that architects and designers are charitable. It’s not embarrassing to make money. We should be proud of being able to make money and also to be able to do what you believe in in that process. Big businesses aren’t necessarily more stable or more successful.

This state of mind was challenged a lot in the last financial crash when many major corporate firms went bankrupt. Big firms aren’t necessarily stable because they often have corporate structures; we need to get over the feeling that big is stable and sustainable. There are other ways of being financially sustainable and economically viable.

Alex Axinte I have one thought from the margins of Europe. We are close to the Balkans, in the south of Romania. When we go to bed every night we wonder if something has changed. Change is not sudden. Recalling how we began, we were called artists or agitators or all the bad words in the cultural context of Bucharest. But after a while we also started to engage another growth model. It’s not that our organisation should grow. We are trained as architects that growing is the goal – you demolish something to replace it with something bigger. We have this DNA of growth. This is true in terms of office organisation as well as an outlook towards society.

One of the most interesting parts of education was unlearning school. It was fun and very creative – it was an opportunity given to us because school was so boring that we had to have this unlearning process. In Bucharest’s context, we are working in increasing the alliances, not really the organisation. We are growing our skills. For us, temporary interventions were a way to learn new skills, to test new processes and to bring our knowledge and vision into the public space. We shouldn’t make benches out of stone to get successful public spaces. We made a temporary installation seven years ago that is still illegal, but that is producing public space around it. Is it temporary? We are all temporary. How much should we talk about temporariness? I think we should go beyond that. It is more about what uses these temporary installations are constructing, and what spaces are being constructed.

Recently we began to work with civic groups. We have to frame the context: ten years ago in Bucharest there were no civic groups, the notion did not exist, and now there are more than twenty groups. We are collaborating with one of those groups and we are building a community centre together with them, which just opened one month ago. So we are moving forward, not at a large scale but we are increasing skills within the processes that we are developing. And now we are finally called architects – the scene is calling us architects because there’s this recognition of the transformation that these projects are making. I think the potential epidemic of these practices is the most important thing. So, these kind of table discussions, even if they are tiring and in the loop – I’ve been to this lecture before – I think that they are very good propaganda, if we still want to learn new languages, we have to preach this kind of approach to architectural education. So we have to keep repeating the same lectures.

Jeremy Till One of my favourite quotes is from Brian Eno, who said, ‘There are many futures and only one status quo. This is why conservatives mostly agree and radicals always argue.’ In a room like this, there is a temptation to never agree. I am worried that there’s a group of people that have moved around conferences in the last ten years, and reconvened, and looked at each other, and went away in rooms and have been critical of one another. And I wonder whether we can continue to do that.

I think that there has been a generosity today, which I think should be continued, and I think that there’s a need for more collaboration. Because there is a danger that the radicals will continue to disagree. And at this political moment, the radicals need to get together, to fill some gaps.

I have been in a room like this for the last ten years; from Sheffield to Berlin, from Paris to London. And I did something that made people in those rooms very uncomfortable, when I said, ‘Actually all we are doing is designing lots of red sheds’, because a lot of the architecture coming out of these conventions was basically a kind of garden shed, many painted red. I’m interested in how we move beyond just talking to each other and red sheds, and how we collect another set of people around the table, to have a conversation that is not just an echo chamber or a space of congeniality, but actually engaging productively with people in power as well.

Holly Lewis I think the last thing that we need is more architects staying around and talking to architects. Actually we’re already doing these kinds of projects. For the Greater London Authority [GLA], for example, we are engaging with policy-level decision making and research and projects and we should be confident in our work and not say that they’re red sheds. We should be ambitious about what we are doing and say, ‘I can be at that table because what I have is just as valid as somebody who did some years of law school’. There’s a little bit of apologetic behaviour because the architect has this image of being an old man with a stick up his ass and we are not that anymore and we need to show that we’re not that anymore and I think we need to be more vocal about that.

I don’t think we need to all hold hands together and say ‘We are a collective, we are a movement’, but I think we can have confidence in our projects and say ‘The fact that I did that small thing means that I can do a bigger more important thing. And I’ll do it well because I do a good job’. I think there’s a bit of reticence to stick our heads above the parapet.

Georges are working with the housing ministry in France, shaping policy at the national level – that’s incredible! They are a young practice, and they’re doing it; historically that wouldn’t have been such a problem, just think of all of the incredibly ambitious social housing projects built in Camden. We are not ambitious enough as architects. We resist saying, ‘I’m an architect and I can do that’. We should!

Jack Self There is a value to sitting at the table with people that agree with you and doing it consistently for ten years, which sounds funny. To me the value is – and it’s the same reason that I write – everyone thinks they know what they believe, and everyone thinks they know what they think. But the act of saying something out loud is powerful. This is the first time I presented REAL Review, and I’m not going to present it that way again – because only when I said things out loud, did I realise that a lot of stuff didn’t make a lot of sense. The opportunity to do it again in the future will change my ideas as well, so I think there is real value in being able to discuss and debate with other people, clarifying our own positions and our own opinions, and being forced to present them to other people as well.

Tiago Mota Saraiva We have to be aware that organising collective discussion could have a powerful effect. For example, in Spain, dozens and dozens of architectural collectives have emerged in the last decade and a lot were engaged in the campaigns for electing Manuela Carmena (Madrid) or Ada Colau (Barcelona).

They brought together their knowledge and forces to produce content and solutions for the cities. For instance, they organised discussions with citizens in fragile areas to understand their needs. During the campaign they helped with methodologies that emerged from their daily work as collectives – tools sometimes, used for temporary interventions. They were brought to another level when used for political strength.

We use the same strategy in our work. Being close to people’s aims, gives us the knowledge. We constantly need to speak to others for building up our political influence. At the moment we are often called for solving problems that are not only architectural, at first glance. We have housing projects for the Romany community, for example. Our projects do not start with a sketch but through talking to people, stakeholders and other architects to understand problems, needs and alternatives. Our daily life is filled with trying to tackle prejudice and racism for instance, and you have to collectively discuss to open people’s eyes and minds.

It is a matter of battles that you decide to dispute and I am really convinced that speaking to each other, criticising and debating is the way to strengthen the power of our processes. Our Terras da Costa project would never have been like that without the help of Exyzt/Constructlab, for example, who provided the wood for the Community Kitchen construction.

Right now I feel that we are in a symbiotic spirit between practices for building up common good, rather than the classic competitive practice of fighting between each other for commissions and individual reputation.

Flavien Menu The idea of creating common good often underpinned public sector management. This idea – or maybe this lure – has been evocated a lot today while we often opposed public sector as good and private sector as evil, but it could also sound like a rhetorical tool for right-thinking indignation.

Oliver Wainwright There is the answer that the public sector pays a lot better than the private sector at the moment. If you are a practice looking to grow in the United Kingdom, you know that with developers the architect’s fee gets relentlessly squeezed down more so than in the public sector, which has, over the past five years, spent a lot on regeneration and housing. It’s counterintuitive to what is generally agreed upon, but it’s the way to make a profitable start-up today.

Holly Lewis Whenever we’ve been approached by private developers, we don’t share a motivation for why we’re delivering the project. Our motivation is that we do the best possible project and their motivation is financial. And I don’t want to tar all developers with the same brush and I’m sure that there are some that don’t feel like that, but we have never been approached by one who shares our full vision. And we’re busy enough with the public sector, so I don’t feel that we need to have this massive expansion plan into the private sector. But I don’t deny that there’s private money in what we’re delivering – Section 106 is funded by the state’s income from delivering private development and we are shaping private development, so by doing some kind of planning documents or masterplan we are shaping private development.

So we are not disengaged from the private sector. But if they have given their money to a local authority I prefer to work with the local authority, just in terms of motivation for how to deliver the project. But absolutely, our practice is run because the private sector is spending its money. In all of our projects we are never spending central government money, we are spending developers’ money but we do it through different channels that we find to be more ethically comfortable.

Flavien Menu Oliver, you said that using public money is the best way to start your practice, but then when you want to grow, what do you do? You have to deal with the private money, right?

Oliver Wainwright Section 106 is a planning gain; every time there is a private development of a certain type of proportion, the local council can go in and cream off the top of that. It’s a mitigating impact of private development that has to be spent on improving public roads, parks, plantings, primary schools ... I think there is an entire branch of practice that only works with Section 106 budgets. The percentage funding for art programmes is similar to Section 106 and that could be cleverly diverted toward things, which aren’t conventional public art, there’s an avenue for smaller practices to exploit.

Jack Self We try to bite off more than we can chew. This is not my point actually, it’s Mark Cousins’: architecture is an intrinsically failed profession in terms of our inability to monopolise the field that we set out to colonise. Before the middle of the nineteenth century there was no professionalisation of doctors or lawyers, anyone could practice, and then there was this thing about quack doctors and suddenly only a doctor with certain qualifications can be a doctor; this was also true with lawyers. And doctors have a monopoly on the treatment of the body, lawyers have a monopoly over the law – architects don’t have a monopoly over everything that’s built, they can’t, so it was a failure in that sense.

Joachim Declerck Come to Belgium! It’s the most disorganised part of urbanised Europe, but everything you build has to be drawn by an architect. But it’s not a guarantee for more or better pay, or for better urban development.

There are many different discussions going on: one, this practice should not be marginalised and especially not by the practice itself; two, there is the question of pay; three, I think the reason we are also sitting together is because if you listen to some of our stories, many focus on certain challenges we face. The gap between what we are able to do now as fantastic experiments and the things we should be able to do is big. Part of the challenge we have is to find ways to close that gap and multiply our strategies for doing so. In that sense, when we say, ‘We have a lot to do, and we are marginal’, it’s not that the practice is marginal as a practice, it’s that what we are able to achieve is marginal compared to what we need to achieve.

Anthony Engi Meacock The idea that architects traditionally have been very bad at justifying their value is interesting. The image of the artist-architect- genius who draws a sketch on a napkin is actually very damaging. What is also interesting about lots of people around the table is this engagement with the language of business – engaging with that rhetoric even if you disagree with it. Engaging the private sector doesn’t mean actually working for the private sector; you can also change it. If we don’t understand, then we can’t change and we can’t survive.

Mathieu Delorme I would like to add something about language and the private sector: how can we as architects know or learn the language of economics? Because the failure of architects is that they don’t know where the money comes from. We need to make a shortcut in order to involve the money that is surrounding us rather than making a financially-motivated trip – going to New York or Shanghai. The language of architects is now increasingly about economy. We all have to go to business school or do a PhD in economics to create our own tools, we need money for architecture and we have to create that.

Jack Self And the point is really to make sure that you understand those financial tools as part of a financial design process, which is also part of architecture. For example, in Britain it’s extremely rare to get a mortgage on a property that’s more than five storeys above the ground, because it’s considered too risky, which means that high-rise typologies are either for extremely wealthy people who can buy it outright or for people who live in 1970s social housing. So an entire typology of the built environment becomes impossible because of the terms and conditions of a mortgage. I’m sure you’ve met people who work in financial institutions, many of them are very brilliant, many developers are also very brilliant. But the ability to resolve whether or not you can get water to run from a toilet back to a core is way more complicated than designing a mortgage. If architects can absorb financial thinking into our way of working it would give us a new type of agency and power.

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