REAL

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 Jack Self about its magazine called REAL REVIEW and followed by a conversation including Pooja Agrawal, Kathryn Firth, Jeremy Till, Peter Swinnen and Oliver Wainwright.

Jack Self We have been talking about a methodology of designing with time and through time as an intrinsic role of the architect. And in that sense it would have been appropriate for me to present Home Economics, which is the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year, which I curated, and which was designed through time and really tries to look at this.

But I decided not to do that! I decided to present a magazine, because for me there is a crucial importance to spread messages conveyed by our generation to a broader audience. There is a lot of value in saying, ‘We believe in democracy, in inclusivity, in equity; these are the values that we stand for and we’ll try to pursue them through the material evidences of our work’. It is capital to do so if we want to resist the crisis of the left, this crisis of lack of belief, this kind of agony of power that Jean Baudrillard would call anxiety about privilege. The right don’t suffer from that – they’re conducting revolutions, they’re taking Britain out of Europe, they’re building walls, they are locking Europe. In that sense it’s equally important to design a door handle and to design a spreadsheet or masterplan.

The REAL Review comes from the REAL Foundation. I don’t trust myself and I don’t trust other people; I start from the basis of an alter-neoliberal doctrine which is that no one gets out of bed in the morning to do things unless they have an incentive. Let’s assume that that’s the case. It’s rather reductivist but as you get older, as you get fatter, you get comfortable, you get tempted to follow the money, you make a series of decisions and quickly you find yourself sliding in a direction that your young idealistic self would reject but you say, ‘Well, it’s not so simple actually, I was really naïve back then’.

How can you take these alter-neoliberal values into the structure of an architectural firm? The way that we did this was by creating the Real Estate Architectural Laboratory, or the REAL Foundation. It’s structured using the same model as the Architectural Foundation in the United Kingdom – it’s a limited company. It has articles of association which are published on our website and make available the types of projects we can do. We have a group of advisers who in some cases might reject a project because it doesn’t fit those criteria. I’m the director; in the future I could stand down and someone else could replace me and the essence of the company would remain the same.

We do many things and these articles of associations dictate a certain way of working and therefore we don’t draw any distinction between publications, exhibitions, building projects, etc, – they all are scales of the same ideas.

In Venice this year Patrick Schumacher said to me, ‘Architecture is like a Ferrari. It’s so expensive that most people, if they ever buy one, they only buy one in a lifetime, and it would be the single most expensive thing they do’. And I said, ‘Well, you know, Ferrari also makes hats and t-shirts and key chains’, and he replied, ‘Yes, that’s why we make tables’. But Zaha Hadid tables are still like 2,000 to 20,000 euros each. So my question to him was, ‘How do you create an ideological keychain? How do you represent the essence of Ferrari as an ideology at the scale of a small industrial object? How do you create architectural ideology which can work at the scale of a global vision for the future of the world and something extremely modest, a sheet of paper? How do you work across those?’

Our flagship magazine, REAL Review, was funded by a Kickstarter campaign – almost a thousand people collectively pooled 23,000 pounds – which is why on a first cover we featured an image representing our interpretation of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan with a dozen people exiting from his mouth: a symbolic drawing expressing the power of bringing people together. It was started with a colleague of mine, Shumi Bose, who left REAL before the first edition was published, but she was very instrumental in setting up the structure of the magazine. The REAL Review came out of the fact that I was reviews editor at the Architectural Review and then they stopped publishing reviews. Day one, the concept for the magazine was, ‘We will just review books; it will be like the London Review of Books for architecture’; day two produced the slogan, ‘What it means to live today’ – it’s a review of the contemporary. It is a review of everything but through the lens of architecture, through the particular way in which architects think.

It presents a series of reviews. The concept of the review is very important because the review looks back in order to look forward. It’s grounded in the tangible, in the material, or in things that already exist. Today, we tend to think of the review as being a literary review, but the review spans from the Amazon system through to the academic review. The review asks, can we examine things which exist in the world and find a potential in order to create a positive proposition? I think this is an intrinsically architectural way of thinking because we always have to come up with a proposal.

The magazine presents long-form articles and it’s aimed at a general readership. It’s extremely important for me to win over the general public. I always think of my mum. She’s a really intelligent women; she is not disinterested in architecture – she knows who Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe are. She quite likes Charlotte Perriand but that’s pretty much it. But subjects like Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the production of space or Karl Marx’s class struggle as it existed in Red Vienna are impossible to get across to a general audience. Although there are so many interesting things in architectural culture today, they remain contained within a very introspective discipline. So the idea of mass communication is very important. The point of the review is to then interject and say, what is the space for changes within this?

‘The only thing stopping you is you, trying insane to remain the same. This pretty much is the motivation.’ This is a nice piece by Reiner de Graaf from OMA. I’ll end on this piece. Reiner de Graaf explores an intricate history of concrete panel housing and concludes with the fact that he grew up in a mass- housing complex near the port of Rotterdam. Family members would come to visit and they would say, ‘It’s fairly inhuman, fairly annihilating here, I don’t understand how you could all live in this’. Whereas for him and the people that lived there, there was a lot of comfort in the material equality and the fact that all the houses looked the same; they didn’t see that as an aggregate of individual houses but a single block that represented the entire groups of people that they knew lived inside. This shows a very strong and intricate relationship between the material reality of how we live and the immaterial and theoretical ideas that we have about how the structure of society should be. Thank you.

Flavien Menu I want to discuss your use of media. You have a real control of media, of your own image – you mentioned earlier in the day that you have a public face and a private face – and it’s quite interesting that you speak about mass communication. It’s also a way to promote your own image. People take leadership roles by shaping their image through media. Here it has allowed you to successfully crowdfund thanks to subscribers and followers. You revealed an invisible mass of actual people. Millennials promote their work and image through media but it is also used by people around this table here to influence political and economic decisions. How could mass communication become a weapon?

Jack Self For us, it is not about personal image; it is not at all about personal brand. And, in fact, the insistence on the consistency and uniformity of what is produced is really an attempt to resist anything which suggests that it’s about one individual. It is also important for REAL to develop a specific aesthetic which is replicable in an attempt to be in a way ultimately generic and also recognisable so that you can associate particular ideas and ideology with that visual media.

Oliver Wainwright I have a question about audience and your idea of mass communication. Your audience by definition is going to be self-selected because it’s a crowdfunded magazine. How do you get around that, how do you reach an audience outside the kind of people in this room?

Jack Self When we completed the crowdfunding we had 860 subscribers and since then its growth has been quite surprising. We have enough money for six or seven issues because of the independency and stability of the subscriptions- based financial model.

In terms of the audience, I try to promote it in the most diverse circles as possible. For the first issue we printed 4,000 copies and they almost all sold; we now have 2,000 subscribers and it’s growing. For the third issue we will have a distribution deal that will take our print run up to 7,500, which will make it the largest architecture magazine in the UK by circulation. Now if you look at the people who subscribe, a third of them are from the world of fashion, about a quarter are from the world of design, and the remainders are a combination of the general public like my mum’s friends – who backed us on Kickstarter – and obviously a high number of students in architecture and architects. My ideal subscribers are Daily Mail readers.

Oliver Wainwright How do you engage with them? What is your tactic to reach the Daily Mail reader?

Jack Self Well, I haven’t got to that one yet. (Laughter.)

Pooja Agrawal Do you tailor your content to target that audience? Because a 10,000-word article by Reiner de Graaf about concrete housing doesn’t sound like something for a Daily Mail reader. How much do you compromise the things that you might be interested in, to target that audience?

Jack Self Well, you have to have a mix of different content; this is an editorial question. There are two aspects: one is, what type of question do we want to produce, and then, what are the core ideas that we’re trying to promote and what is the best way to promote them. How do we take these ideas and make them engaging and entertaining? It always starts with an ideological position. But it’s also a question of the writing. There are not bad subjects for writing, there are only bad writers. And a lot of my work involves defining a very basic editorial structure: there are no sentences more than 25 words long and we use a fairly reduced vocabulary to avoid any type of jargon at all.

Jeremy Till Can I ask a question about representation and identity? This table of critics is different from the audience in terms of its composition – in terms of gender, ethnicity and class. Jack rightly got a lot flack for the issue of REAL in terms of its...

Jack Self ...overwhelming white, male representation.

Jeremy Till Full disclosure, here I am: probably the best paid person in the room, went to Eton and Cambridge, am white and male, so probably not quite the right person to ask this question. But how can we have political agency when we are so unrepresentative of the audience, of the constituencies that we should be working with?

Jack Self The first issue was actually an accident. I commissioned 50 per cent men and 50 per cent women and through a series of extremely unfortunate and totally unrelated events, nearly 60 per cent of the women who were commissioned didn’t file or were unable to file. And then we had an agonising decision about whether we should delay or what we should do about that and in the end we published anyway and decided that we would face the flack.

The flipside was that almost all those pieces by the women we commissioned came in like three weeks too late, which would have made the second issue 80 per cent female. But we decided to turn it back to make the balance 50–50. But those kinds of number games are not important for me. For example, there is a piece by a male author which is extremely pro-feminist. When we were talking about what it means to be European, it’s also extremely important in REAL Review to reach beyond the Anglo-Saxon world and to reach beyond the traditional subjectivities that we listen to in our English-speaking environment. There is an attempt to straddle the line between what you might expect and what you don’t expect. And to present things that people are really eager and find easy to read with things that they might find more challenging but which might also change their opinion.

Pooja Agrawal I think the issue about how you reach a diverse audience is by making sure that people around the table are diverse in terms of gender and ethnicity. The idea that this magazine would reach someone who reads the Daily Mail or my auntie who lives in Dagenham – there’s no way she should ever want to read that magazine. Recognising that fact is bolder than saying that it’s actually for everyone. Saying that it is for people who study architecture, who are generally middle class, that’s fine. Recognising that we live in an echo chamber, that’s more powerful than actually saying that you think it’s for everyone across class, gender and race.

Jack Self I think the aspiration is important, because if you abandon the aspiration to be inclusive, then you really are in an echo chamber. I make this magazine not just to try to present ideas to people who already agree with my positions or have a framework to understand them, but also in order to create new audiences and to expose ideas to other people. My aspiration is to make something that is as accessible as possible.

Kathryn Firth You said your mission is to create a magazine that reviews things through an architecture lens. There are many different kinds of architects – are you representing all of their lenses, corporate included?

Jack Self What I can say is this: there is a small group of readers in Sydney that I studied with at architectural school, who do not come from wealthy means, who are doing a lot in their local condition to try to change the way that architecture operates. It’s an audience that I would not normally be able to communicate with, and I feel that it’s very important to have such a geographically diverse audience. On the other hand, one of the vice presidents of Condé Nast subscribed, so the scope is wide but it’s also not up to me who chooses to subscribe. All I can do is try to promote the values that I have – which have to do with inclusivity, equality and democracy – through editorial and the design of the magazine. I can only do the best that I can.

Peter Swinnen We are talking about a new generation putting out a magazine, which is obviously putting you in a lot of financial stress. Maybe there are other means – quicker, less expensive means to put out this content to a much broader audience. To be honest I don’t know what I should take home with me, from what I’ve heard from you. I heard a very good promo-talk, fantastic; it is your project so you’re going for it, fantastic ... et alors? I think you need to give us a bit more of this extra value that you try to put out there.

Jack Self Two things. First about why it’s a magazine. It creates huge authority and validation from the authors who are published and printed. It still has that value as opposed to a non-print publication, and that’s very important for me. In the previous incarnation of this magazine, which was a student magazine at the AA called Fulcrum, there was a single line on the middle of a single sheet, with two articles by two very different authors on the same subject. There was always a plurality of voices, but also you would have someone who is very famous often published next to a student or next to someone who had never been published before. And that creates democracy. In REAL Review you also have very well-known people next to someone who has never been published before, side by side, and that authority is very important for me. That’s what editing means. There is a cost per square metre in a magazine in the same way there is in buildings; you prioritise by what you include or what you exclude, which means there is a finitude to the magazine as a proposition.

But in terms of my takeaway, it’s extremely simple, and I will give it through the following metaphor: my parents were ill suited to each other as a couple and divorced when I was ten. One of the things that triggered that divorce was the fact that we had a circular dining room table. My father comes from a very traditional middle-class British, white background, my mum comes from an Australian background in which she was working class and a very vocal and strong feminist. And I think my father struggled to find his place in the family when he was not at the head of the table but in fact on an equal footing with his wife – not his wife, she refused to marry him – his partner and children. Now, what that tells you is that the head of the table is both a literal and metaphorical concept – it is literally just the head of the table but it has a metaphorical value as well, showing power relations, showing economic and cultural power relations that manifest, that are enforced and reinforced, through the material environment.

That’s why we are called REAL. Because it’s really an insistence on the fact that you can alter ... there was a fantastic experiment in the 1980s by a group of suffragette architects – not even architects – designers in America who changed the path between the head of the table and the armchair next to the fireplace in houses that they were designing, so that line passed through the kitchen and the laundry, thereby revealing and making visible the otherwise previously disguised labour of wives. It sounds really minor, and maybe even twee, but it is actually very powerful that such minor conditions of space, minor alterations of space, have huge impacts on social power relationships.

That’s the content of the magazine, which we didn’t discuss that much. These stories are about looking at the things which are everyday, banal, and which we take for granted, and seek to understand how they enforce and reinforce social power relationships. Are these relationships that you believe in and support, can they be challenged? What is the proposition for that? How do we move forward on that point? That’s the essence of the magazine; to take that idea to as broad a section of global society as possible is the ambition. That’s it.

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