studioBASAR
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 Alex Axinte and Cristi Borcan about a Bucharest project called Scoala de Oras (City School) and followed by a conversation including Melanie Dodd, Pooja Agrawal, Jeremy Till, Joachim Declerck, Jack Self, Mathieu Delorme, Tiago Mota Saraiva, Peter Swinnen, Anthony Engi Meacock, Holly Lewis, Markus Bader, Harriet Harris.
Cristi Borcan We first would like to introduce the context of Bucharest. It’s completely different from the rest of Europe, especially London or a Western European metropolis.
We are an architectural studio and a public space practice. This mix is also because without our architectural practice we could not sustain projects dealing with the public space. I want to make this clear from the beginning: opposite from what was said earlier, in Romania there are few public funds for the kind of projects we do. We have one national cultural fund. Only one. And this influences fundamentally the way we practise, as you can easily imagine.
We develop a lot of actions in public space – they range from temporary to permanent. We use applied research, community activation, participatory programming, urban design, and live education programmes. We are trained as classical architects but none of the tools we are using in our projects were taught or learned in school.
We grew up during communism. But it was a completely different communism than our parents’ communism. And that is because we were in our childhood and for us everything was like a playground, with a lot of freedom. There was a very good time for us, although public space was very controlled, and the state was very powerful, controlling every aspect of life. What happened during the 1989 revolution completely changed the paradigm of public space: people took action against the state – a phenomenon that didn’t happen until then in Romania.
People took action on every part of public space and it was a strong moment of emancipation and freedom, especially for people who had spent their life in a socialist neighbourhood – which is basically everyone. These socialist neighbourhoods were built to fit the new socialist woman and man according to socialist ideology; they were not built only for social reasons. So, in Eastern countries, there is a difference between socialist housing and social housing. In socialism housing was for everyone. And they are still like that nowadays: the population is very mixed in these neighbourhoods.
After the revolution the massive protest against the state opened the way for a massive privatisation. The structure of the society and the morphology of the public space changed: most of the public facilities disappeared or were privatised – being turned into shopping malls for example; industrial areas were opened to speculation; housing blocks, parks, and leisure spaces became giant car parks. Our lives were directly influenced by the introduction of the capitalist Western mode of consumption, and it has influenced our work a lot.
After decades of socialism and forced collectivism there has been a rise of extreme individualism and privatisation at every level of society and the city. These phenomena are visible all around the public space: parking places on sidewalks; fences around playgrounds and green spaces; individually thermo- isolated apartments; personal heating systems – because a lot of people want to be disconnected from public resources. Extreme individualism has led
to general mistrust. This leads naturally to the loss of a public sensibility and public spaces.
Of course, there are also reactions to these changes and ways of living. Like in every extreme situation people find ways of surviving by collaborating: building small-scale furniture – benches, playgrounds or even water wells in front of their apartments; gardening in communal green spaces next to their blocks; or by acting: extending their apartments; transforming ground-floor apartments into small shops. This was important to explain because this context totally rooted our action and the project Alex is going to present.
Alex Axinte The project Scoala de Oras (City School) is composed of different projects. It’s a project created by Porsche Romania and developed together with Bucharest Community Foundation. It is a corporate social responsibility (CSR) project that was selected by an independent jury and awarded one of the grants in 2015. The project is still running.
Continuing into 2016–2017, the City School’s subject is public libraries, aiming to activate public and community space through a live educational project. The Bucharest Metropolitan Library consists of a network of 30 branches that still exist as one of the last surviving networks that is producing and distributing culture and education. For example, in the socialist collective housing neighbourhoods it remains one of the last starting points of both spatial and functional potential to activate and coagulate the community. Basically, all the other public facilities are gone.
Working with the network of public libraries we discovered the peculiarities and interesting sides of this network. One thing is that they are site specific, almost to a chameleonic kind of specificity: different context – different library – different behaviour. This results also from the fact that only two libraries among the whole network of 30 branches were built as libraries, while the others were just located in leftover ground-floor spaces owned by the municipality. Even though there is a law that regulates the minimum number of square metres dedicated to a certain number of inhabitants, a study made by a Romanian architectural group called Collective East revealed that only 20 per cent of the necessary area is met.
Let’s zoom in on a particular case in the neighbourhood of Militari. It is where we decided to focus our intention and we made a pilot project. Militari is an area of almost 300,000 people. It’s a very densely populated neighbourhood.
It could be ranked as one of the largest cities in Romania but it’s only a borough of Bucharest. The library is located on a ground floor of a housing block, behind a very crowded commercial market that faces the boulevard. The library was almost invisible due to the fact that the windows are painted. The space was planned in the ‘60s as a communal living room because the block was made of one-bedroom apartments and tenants were in need of a room to meet with their families. The communal living room has been transformed over time for various uses and ended up being a library that had been closed for several years when we started the project. There is one more library nearby, so potentially they can function together.
We didn’t invent a problem, but reacted to a very dramatic situation, related to the disappearance of the social space’s most basic infrastructure. When we started to ask people during the research phase about where they usually meet with their acquaintances, one of the answers was in the supermarket. We thought that these existing public libraries in the area could play a social role.
Our main ambition was to transform the closed library into social infrastructure. That is also why we decided to focus our interest on the public spaces between the libraries.
We wanted to involve students in the process in order to pursue our ambition of starting a live educational project. It is a way to introduce students to skills and knowledge they would never learn in the Romanian school system. We wanted to offer a real experience with the idea that education could be done through situations instead of being artificially created in a laboratory format. We pushed for having tutors and students from diverse backgrounds – from architecture, sociology, landscape design. We built partnerships and alliances with universities so that students receive credits for the work they do with us during these workshops. Students participated at every stage: from research to interviews to workshop organisation and of course to design and building projects. It was a fantastic experience for them and it was compelling to be part of such an experimental hands-on project, and to use a hammer. You never touch a hammer during your architecture studies in Romania.
The most important work is impossible to show through nice pictures because it is a history of building relationships. We also did physical interventions: we removed the paint from the windows; we built bookshelves; we developed a mobile pavilion and different sorts of urban furniture to create a more welcoming environment for the public realm around the libraries.
It is really important for us to upscale the lessons learned to the network of libraries. That is why we developed a guide that will help librarians to start a similar process in their branches.
The attitude of the project was to open up to the neighbourhood. We started by making questionnaires, interviewing the inhabitants, the neighbours, the former users of the library, the users of other libraries. The research and activation process was a sort of pioneer project for everyone involved – for us, for the students, for inhabitants, for Bucharest Metropolitan Library – they had never done this before. Even the financing partner was pioneering its relationship with the Bucharest Community Foundation. It was a first time for everyone.
We also organised a workshop for ideas with the librarians. We gathered to discuss their problems. One of the main issues was related to visibility. It sounds like a very short-term need: to become more visible in the midst of retail advertising that is savagely overtaking streetscapes. Scratching off existing layers of paint on windows was one of our tactics as well as using bright colours for the added public furniture to attract attention to the library. With these kinds of diffuse interventions, attentive to the need of librarians and locals, we created a neighbourhood living room. We organised in the library an exhibition about the neighbourhood’s history. Some of these tools are used as mirrors, to show the face of the neighbourhood to people. Organising an historical exhibition about a socialist neighbourhood was something that people wouldn’t think could exist, because they assume that the neighbourhood has no memory and that history only existed for the city centre.
We were also very open to suggestions. For instance, we interviewed people who had always lived there. They started to propose ideas about possible alternative uses of the library. We organised all kinds of meetings, DIY workshops, inhabiting the living room, organising screenings, hosting Christmas chorales and collective readings.
The goal of the project wasn’t the reopening of the library. We wanted to locate a live project into a real space and Bucharest Metropolitan Library granted us the access. And then, asking people, opening doors, organising events, raising the question about how this library should be transformed, we created the expectancy. The management of the library realised that and made a huge institutional effort and reopened the library, equipped with a librarian, a daily schedule and some books. So by engaging and studying the subject we started to provoke and move the subject.
We also took the library out on the street through a mobile pavilion that we called Trailer for Research and Activation. We used it to announce the re- opening of the library and we also lent it to other institutions and groups that we thought could be interested in activating public space. The Metropolitan Library used it as a mobile branch for the three following months. Cultural associations that don’t have these kinds of tools to go into public space have used it. Civic groups have used it for organising pop-up events. It was used twenty times by different users over six months.
The CSR also launched an evaluation of our project. It was a very interesting moment when the Bucharest Community Foundation (FCB) and the CSR programme looked at the social return on investment (SROI). We were not familiar with such a method. Nobody was. Even for the CSR and FCB it was the first time they used this evaluation tool. It was a very interesting process because it consisted of interviews and discussions with the stakeholders of the project, which were the students, the librarians, and the team. So we had a lot of feedback on our project through the SROI and it was extremely interesting to collect all the points of view on such an action.
The evaluation process stressed also some of the associated risks represented by the super-monetisation of life, which is a scary phenomenon for us. But the process is still experimental and we try to understand the indicators and also try to learn a new language through the process. The collaboration with the CSR was also a rich learning process and we became familiar with the notion of the social value of the project. It helped us to see success and failure within the methodology of our project. According to the evaluator, it appears that the main beneficiaries were the users of the Trailer for Research and Activation, then the students, then the library management. The project team got a minus on the report so we apparently get no social value out of the project. It is a very interesting measurement tool in conjunction with the monetary tool, which together gives us an idea of how much an amount of euros invested is able to gain in terms of social value. These are policy indicators that refer to a professional policy language. It allows us to understand languages different from the one we are used to speaking. It opens new semantic fields for qualifying our process and projects, far from fancy professional magazines or internet popularity measured through the tyranny of likes on Facebook.
Melanie Dodd It’s really nice to see live projects from a fresh point of view, I mean, from a context different from Western Europe. It makes you reassess what project-based learning is; you begin to understand the full network of implications. Some things work across a bigger bandwidth of knowledge – from using a hammer to understanding systems of governance. This is something that’s embedded in parts of architectural education but is not fulfilling its potential and it is an answer to why architecture education needs to expand as a discipline. Architecture education is focused on subjects, which is always going to be necessarily small, whereas if it starts to cut horizontally across societal ways of working, then it suddenly opens up. I’m just reiterating this idea that you situate.
Another important thing that comes out of your talk is the idea that the university is a key partner. In these precarious times in which there is a blurring of what’s public or private, how things are funded and how they work both in terms of governance and society, this idea that the universities are key partners to mobilise projects is really important.
Harriet Harriss What’s compelling about this project is how effective deinstitutionalising architectural education can be. Thirty years ago, 80 per cent of university budgets would have been spent on academic staff, and 20 per cent on administration and management. In the thirty years since, we’ve managed to invert that sum. A university chancellor now demands a CEO’s salary. In the UK, educators are no longer public-sector workers, we are instead working for the private sector. Within your model there is a latent ambition to disrupt this notion of keeping education as something that needs to happen within the cloister of a design studio or an academic institution. We might need to move towards these models due to economic circumstances and questions of affordability in architectural education, so do we need to modularise education around this kind of project in order to make it accessible? During this project, how engaged was the community in the building process – not just the architecture students learning how to use a hammer, but the actual community participants themselves in gaining architecture skills?
Alex Axinte Because the library had been closed, whatever coagulated around the library also disappeared. It’s very interesting to be in a community when something disappears – all it takes is a few years for it to be like it was never there. It was very hard in just a few months – this was a six-month project – to get some of this awareness back. The students engaged the inhabitants in a consultation phase. If the project had spanned a longer period or if we had worked with existing civic groups we could have started from a different level of engagement. One of the most difficult parts of these projects is to crystallise a group around a topic. Doing this with students, we discovered things that are very peripheral and it’s not a pedagogical objective. But for example, encounters between generations does not happen very often, but in these kinds of projects, because we are doing interviews and questionnaires, it happens more frequently. It doesn’t fit within the objectives of opening a library, but to put retired people and young people in a conversation is important – there is no place in society for this to happen anymore. Working with students was the main goal, and then also working with some of the neighbours who were in a spatial crisis. This neighbourhood is very disconnected from the centre so residents can’t go to the centre to use public facilities; they are kind of imprisoned in the neighbourhood.
Harriet Harriss If you look at the etymology of the word ‘participation’, it means ‘to share’ but it also means ‘to take’. And obviously what has been taken in this project from the student’s perspective are vital architectural skills relating to community engagement. But it would be quite useful to also up-skill the community participants as part of this installation. Architecture skills will always be relevant to these kinds of spaces in order to maintain them and to allow people to shape them in the future. But if students’ involvement is tied to an academic timetable and they engage in communities in a short-term way, it becomes a legacy challenge. In some ways it can disrupt relationships and stop the project from developing. Equitable skill-sharing – for example, making sure the community get as much from it as the students do – is a particular challenge that I’ve faced in some of my projects and seems extremely present in this one as well. Without the students driving the project, will it still thrive?
Alex Axinte Yes. We face that issue. We realised that we relied on students a lot – we’ve asked for too much time, too much engagement – for a project that is not included in their university credits system. That is why we went to the university to create a strategic partnership that would allow students to receive credits. It was an interesting discussion about how our live project could be seen as a pedagogical exercise.
Peter Swinnen You mentioned Porsche Bucharest.
Alex Axinte It’s a car dealer.
Peter Swinnen I presumed so, yes. (Laughs.) Porsche is a big player, right? I have a lot of respect for how you try to manage the project and hold on to it, and push it as far as possible. But I would expect that there is a discrepancy between this big player and you guys – scratching the floor and the windows. Did you manage to convince them to enhance their financial contribution for the coming years and involve them much more in the project process? CSR can’t be an excuse for big companies to do something small and ethically good. Did you manage to make a difference on that level?
Alex Axinte This CSR is managed by the Bucharest Community Foundation which is one of the most innovative NGOs in Bucharest. By attracting private money and channelling them towards funding NGOs or groups of citizens on different topics, they created this project. It was an ideas competition with an independent jury of professionals who were not only from Porsche or the Bucharest Community Foundation. It was a big event in our very small scene. As we said, we have only one cultural fund that holds one or two competitions a year.
Peter Swinnen My question is: do you have tangible evidence that this project actually succeeded in convincing them to enhance the CSR impulse?
Joachim Declerck I have the same question. We have been involved in similar kinds of projects where there are great moments when things start to work and then there is also the moment after work when you ask yourselves: how did this incredible energy you spent and invested change the logic of things? Did it lead to a multiplication? Did it change the way the library system functions and is operated? Did it change how Porsche operates? The way the Rockefeller Foundation has changed from sending out money to engaging around topics? Did you have the feeling that you were changing certain logics?
Alex Axinte For the first time in this project, the Metropolitan Library invested public money in the refurbishment of the space. They replaced the windows and they made a bathroom; until then it was only the CSR funding. To make a social return of investment evaluation was something that had never been done before in a CSR in Romania. The Bucharest Community Foundation convinced Porsche to participate for a second edition. It is not like the Rockefeller Foundation that gives grants for many generations. We participated in the first edition. Bucharest Community Foundation convinced them to contribute again because of the results of the five CSR projects that were supported. They then contributed to a second edition with increased budgets. Our project was invited to continue for the second edition without participating in the competition. We realised from the analysis of the SROI that you can’t just do a six-month project and quit. You have to follow-up with a second edition to guarantee the quality and sustainability of the projects over time. From that point of view, our small project managed to change how the CSR worked.
Flavien Menu Our student from last year, Arya, spent a year studying CSR in Belgium.
Arya Arabsh The CSR is a really fascinating regulatory resource. It has a lot of potential but it comes with a price: usually the investor wants its own image to be promoted. I’m really surprised that you managed to invest a lot in the local social fabric. Usually the CSR tries to target a larger audience afterwards or at least promote it. Usually investors want to have their branding on it. I was wondering if you can explain how you managed to work over this conflicted situation and if there was any promotion afterwards?
Alex Axinte No, there wasn’t.
Arya Arabsh What was Porsche expecting?
Alex Axinte There is a website. Again, the biggest player was the Bucharest Community Foundation who was filtering the process. You have to place the CSR in the context of Bucharest. For example, this project had a budget of 10,000 euros and for the second phase of around 8,000 euros. I don’t know if this sum is small ... but for Bucharest it’s very big. You have to imagine that there are few municipal or government funds.
Peter Swinnen Did you invest money in this project?
Alex Axinte As a team of coordinators, yes. The CSR limits the amount you can allocate for administrative costs – 20 per cent of the total – and of course we needed more than 20 per cent. But just a few years ago we worked for free in this kind of project, so for us it’s a step forward. It’s also a step forward for our students. It’s also a step forward for the libraries. It’s a big step forward for the CSR and for the Bucharest Community Foundation. We were aware of the risks as we saw extreme monetisation of the social return on investment. But, how much does a smile cost? The ones who are doing the evaluation process are very aware of this metric.
Pooja Agrawal Public funding often works by saying, ‘I’m going to invest 200,000 pounds and from that we want 20 jobs, 2,000 square metres of public space, and so forth’. This is seen as a valid output or outcome. However it is increasingly important to have a conversation about social value. What is that? How do we define that? And I’d like to understand a bit more about how you define it in your project. Did you define it before you started? Is it something you understood along the way? And how did you measure it?
Alex Axinte First we had objectives to target because it was a competition. During the project we learned that we were going to be evaluated on those objectives. One of the objectives was to expose students to participatory projects, also to produce the trailer and make sure that it is used by different organisations, and to deliver a process to the Metropolitan Library that they can spread through their network. These objectives were successfully achieved and the evaluation was quite positive.
In the second phase we also had objectives, and some of them were remains from the previous phase. Now that we are more aware of the importance of evaluation we are thinking about how to evaluate our projects. It could sound like an excuse, but we are acting in a very small scene and whatever you do is considered great, everybody taps you on the back if you do whatever, because you are not quitting this kind of practice. In this context, it is hard to stay objective about the quality of our projects. The evaluation protocol was the first time that somebody asked us questions about what we got out of the project. It was also the first time that someone came with a methodology for evaluating us, by interviewing the students separately from us to understand the positive and negative aspects of the work.
Peter Swinnen I question the idea of the CSR because I think the CSR model could be something to activate education and not just a method for big companies to sleep at night.
Tiago Mota Saraiva The project showed the power that research can have in revealing what everyone has in common with other people. In this kind of project, people meet and talk and get in conflict. We shouldn’t avoid conflict in our experiences of participation. We step forward when getting into conflicts. People start to get to know each other. The enemy starts to change its face – it is no longer about neighbours or strangers but it can be much more constructive.
I don’t think the money Porsche or Bucharest Community Foundation invest will change the way institutions are working. They clearly know from the start that the small amount they invest won’t change their image. But this is not important. What is important is the way you build alternative projects and the way you use it. From volunteering to grants, you have to be increasingly transparent about your fees, about how much it costs to make social actions and movement. That’s the key issue. That’s something that we have to dispute, make them understand that we are working mostly for the common good.
Jack Self I wanted to pick up on the point about how you measure value. I’m very sceptical of attempts to commoditise or to value things that previously had no value. Of course traditional capitalism needs to calculate profit. And in order to have profit you have to have a measurement. So metrics are integral to this but often incomplete as soon as you start to say ‘how much a smile costs’ or ‘we want to promote the value of inclusivity’. What I like about this project is that all of the value that is non-monetary is indirect or in fact shielded or concealed from the corporations and the CSR project through either material or indirect processes. You have the Bucharest Community Foundation which becomes the face of the project. Then you have all the projects underneath which are then shielded from that. So the CSR looks just at the foundation and you can create a website, you can do publicity, but all the projects underneath become invisible.
Flavien Menu What strikes me is the budget given by an actor like Porsche. For such a company, 10,000 euros is almost nothing while for you it represents a lot. So yes, it is a win-win situation but in the meantime it is a lot of reward for Porsche in terms of image and reputation – and probably in terms of tax exemptions. It reveals a glass ceiling, where this kind of budget is relatively important for designers but for bigger players it is pocket money. It is essential to learn and reach a certain level of economic and political knowledge. It allows us to break glass ceilings and be able to influence change at broader scales. Otherwise it makes us seem weak and viewed as little players.
Markus Bader I would like to add to that. Most of our projects are publicly funded, and mostly with cultural funds. There is an interesting gap when we sometimes have to disguise our work as art or theatre or through some other discipline. However, there is also an interesting gap that I call ‘urban practice’ which probably encompasses the funds that you were accessing and using for the project with this 20 per cent limit for administrational work. The framework completely lacks the idea that there is a professional doing the work. We are working somehow in this gap to create imaginaries or to translate a need or a potential into an activity or into a next step. In Berlin I started arguing for ‘urban practice’ to be included in the discussion whenever cultural funds segment disciplines.
Alex Axinte In the second part of the project, the administrative funds increased to 40 per cent. It is the direct result of the efficiency of our actions. This is something that we have done for many years: convincing through action. We cannot do this in a two-hour meeting. We convinced them by the first stage of the project that human resources are equally important compared with the physical output.
We know how to wear different hats. We spread our influence through architectural pedagogy, through art galleries, or into urban administration. It is not very straightforward and I don’t know if we are a movement – I never thought about it – but we are in movement all the time, acting and then thinking.
Bucharest encourages this because you have to do things – saying something is not enough because there is no one listening. We have to educate all these partners: the civic partners, the institutional partners, the financial partners, and the professionals that have never done this kind of project before. So how should we do it? We have to act.
Melanie Dodd If we think in a very forward way, it is important to consider that there is a social, large profitable top layer which is a redistribution of that down to people. It’s interesting to think about that rather than to monetise every single thing you do. There is a blur between what you pay for and what you do as part of what might be a future non-work economy. It’s worth thinking about, especially in light of where these funds come from and the objectives that they carry with them. Because if it’s scalable to a slightly more radical level then maybe these are the ways in which things get done. We can rather think about how individual practices make economic models work; it’s a completely different paradigm shift in how we operate.
Jack Self The next stage I can imagine for a project like this is to say: how can this not be a question of charity? How does this turn into the generation of local revenue? In the West we have hundreds of years of economic development that occurred in Romania in only twenty years. It therefore becomes much more extreme. But in fact, in nineteenth-century Britain there was no welfare situation whatsoever and there were a number of private associations, institutes and foundations that were set up and they were then nationalised and the process of nationalisation allowed them to then be privatised and sold off and destroyed. What does socialism look like after the welfare state? Part of that is of course creating a system that is robust enough to resist exploitation by larger forces. At a very small and simple level it can be switching between always being a consumer to generating value by yourself.
Mathieu Delorme When you were talking about value and measuring social value, it made me think that we have to think about currency. We value this with the euro. We have to think that our currency is a social construction, an economic social construction, and we have to maybe create a local currency.
In Nantes for example, we had a discussion about the involvement of the local people, asking how we could pay them for their work. There is a local and complementary currency in Nantes called the Sceau-Nantes. Maybe we can try to build a micro-economy based on this currency; we can explore and be inventive and make our own economic system for territorial and urban projects.
Jack Self We have to be very careful about those types of systems. In London you have initiatives like the Brixton pound. It is effectively a kind of microscopic economic protectionism. Of course the initiative is very clear in a moral and ethical sense: you have money which is not staying in the local economy and there is no incentive for it to remain in the local economy. So you create a system which artificially creates an incentive to prevent the money from leaving the local economy. In the long run, the ideological consequence is that you say there is no necessity for the universal and there is therefore no responsibility of either the state or larger-scale entities in order to effectively manage how economic resources occur. In that sense we have to be very careful where we locate the responsibility for these things because it should not be the responsibility of a local city to have a parallel currency to the euro. In that sense it is the responsibility of the entities responsible for the euro itself to ensure that the distribution of currency within society is more equal.
Holly Lewis I want to go back a little bit to something that Flavien said earlier. You said that we are small players, and I reject it.
Flavien Menu It was provocation, and I was surprised that no one reacted to it!
Holly Lewis If we accept that, then we are shooting ourselves in the foot and taking the money out of our pocket and it’s nonsense! We have to not be small players. The city isn’t a small player and construction is an enormous part of the economy! There is so much money being made and put in different pockets and sent in different directions and architects don’t engage with that level and it’s stupid. We have really great intelligence about cities and how cities come together and how people come together. We need to engage with those conversations. We need to try and direct them. We need to put ourselves in those rooms. We need to not be small players because the subject matter that we are dealing with is not small.
There are loads of examples of people who don’t let certain perceived limits just be there. Richard Rogers, for example, said ‘I’m going to be at that table, I am going to influence policy and government’, and it is possible to do that. I don’t believe that there is a glass ceiling. I think we need to get in the rooms and it is possible to do that, we just don’t talk about it enough.
Pooja Agrawal That’s one of the reasons why I joined the public sector. I wanted to be able, as an architect, to influence how money is being spent, where it is being spent, how much is being spent, who it is being spent on. As a student I was never exposed to the idea, that as an architect I could work in the public sector. And yes, funding for the public sector has been diminishing but we can still influence by being at that table and I think we should be more creative about what we can do as architects. This is why I am co-founding a new social enterprise called Public Practice that will place the most talented architects and planners in local authorities to work for the public good.
Joachim Declerck I think it’s important to say that it’s not the only option. We can read the world as ‘there is big money being spent and we need to follow where the big money is; there is a lot of power that is still public, we need to go to the public’. The example of Bucharest is an example where a lot of the power is also in setting up initiatives – making a setting where things can come together and build their own logic. There is another capacity of design that can be used to design the logic to not scale up. A public framework might allow for many local initiatives, but that is a side of the design work that I think is crucial if we want to produce intrinsic meaning and capacity. That’s where we have to really sit and discuss. That requires money. That requires a space that is hard to construct. However, that space allows us to design not the exceptional fantastic demonstrations and not the visualisation of the existing power structures but the new middle that can connect those two logics, the urban programmes, which is very hard but crucial to our ambition. If there is a movement, it is the movement to design logics out of the things we learn from these exemplary projects.
Flavien Menu We are living in the myth of public power and the phantasm of what public power is able to do. It’s part of the public sector to work with the private sector. In France, for example, all the policy makers work with these consultancy offices – Deloitte is everywhere, it’s at the Elysée, at the ministries, it’s at the mayor’s office and lots of other institutions. The private sector influences the public sector a lot. The limits of public and private, and good and bad, are blurred; there is a grey zone where we can intervene.
Jack Self I want to just say something very quickly to the students and the audience about Instagram because we live in an area in which there is personal brand, which is a completely different type of personhood in the world from natural human personhood. It doesn’t really have anything to do with who you are. It has to do with the way in which you present yourself. Presenting ourselves as big players has to do with public perception.
For example, I will not tell you how many people work for REAL, although it’s more than you might imagine. I won’t tell you what our turnover is, although it’s more than you might imagine. I do, however, feel totally comfortable going into meetings with Pricewaterhouse Coopers or with the Greater London Authority. One of the things that I resisted during my own education was when people would say, ‘Well, this is an interesting architectural project for a student’. I think that when you start studying architecture you become an architect effectively almost immediately. If we look at how famous architects’ projects are often looked at, people still talk about Rem’s student work or Zaha’s student work as being architectural projects. They are not student projects they are architecture. In that sense, as soon as we are taken seriously and begin to project an image of being capable of engaging with any level of society and any scale of project in any way, we also take the skills that we have as a discipline more seriously and thus we maximise our agency in the world.
Arya Arabsh Jack talked about monetising the smile, about what the next step would be after the charity level, and we also talked about how we can be bigger players. Something that is crucial here, as your office is doing, is to engage with this language. How can we learn the language of measurement? How can we build the language of measurement? There is an urgency to explore other ways of practising. For instance, the infrastructure sector is evolving a lot through the help of CSR and we should be able to infiltrate that market to take action. There has been a huge increase of attention in that sector in the past three or four years. By better engaging we can become larger players.
Joachim Declerck I agree, but we should not underestimate the fact that we can also set the language. I want to give one example with the term ‘productive landscape’. It’s an old term that hadn’t been used for a while and at a certain moment the idea of the productive landscape as a policy programme came about. And now it’s something that starts to rule by itself. It produces new commissions and the commissions are no longer ‘can you redesign the landscape for agriculture?’ or ‘can you solve the problem of biodiversity next to the agriculture?’ – no! – it is now, ‘can you redesign the productive landscape?’. To set the tone to build a narrative of what we are talking about is a crucial step in making things spin by themselves. I’m always worried when we try to speak the language of others. It’s much more intriguing to find a language that conceptually triggers many parties. Both physically and linguistically.
Holly Lewis It’s also extremely gratifying to hear politicians use a term that you invented!
Peter Swinnen The re-emergence of the term ‘productive landscape’, at least in Belgium, was unsolicited. It’s nothing new but it brings together a lot of energies that already existed and all of a sudden it was formulated in such a way that in five minutes the minister could understand the potential impact. He could understand the huge potential for future policy. Again, in five minutes time they are willing to put a lot of money on the table that you can use to set up pilot projects.
Alex Axinte We do not think of our project as simply making a nicer library with new furniture, but it is rather a prototype for a new type of institution. Even at its small scale, it’s a prototype of an institution. It could scale up. It could go into a network and can be replicated, it can be copied. And then it’s a big project. Small players make big projects, if they work together.
Flavien Menu Pooja and Holly hold key adversarial positions within public and private institutions and organisations. The role held here is different from the one in an architectural project, but it helps to sharpen one’s capacity to speak with decision makers.
Anthony Engi Meacock Returning to the question of education: there is a lot being said about the essential understanding of your agency and your position in the world. What wasn’t discussed is the idea of opening your mind through live projects. You start to understand your role in educational models by doing things and you start to understand the power of your agency. That is never discussed in architectural education. By doing something you have a drop of power but you also develop your own sensibility. To talk about these things is to take responsibility for putting your ideas into the world.
Joachim Declerck The question of education always leads to the question: do we have a new model of what the architect should be able to practise? The question of movement is the same question for me. I liked what you said very much: we are moving. I don’t think we should fall into the trap of trying to define what the architect should be able to do. I don’t think we have a movement.
What is happening is that many offices are doing very different things, but they start to function together.
You can emerge from an architectural education and choose very different types of practices according to your own capacities and interests. But we should try to define the new architect not as a kind of total figure, but rather find ways to connect forms of architectural practices.
I was educated in the Netherlands and in Belgium. Belgium has no overarching vision in terms of architecture education. The Netherlands only has overarching vision. Which one is wrong? You need both! The Netherlands is trying to find a way to come to concrete projects that are qualitative, that make sense within a larger vision. Belgium is trying to make a larger vision out of a lot of projects. They both need the same capacity. They need the way to link those two and I think that’s something that we really need to think about. How you curate? Connect these different forms of practice – the temporary, the more persistent, the more infrastructural, the intervention, and so on – in a movement. Because then we have a movement.
Alex Axinte Do you think that schools can be big players?
Joachim Declerck Yes. I think in the Belgian and Dutch context the schools are bigger players than the cultural institutions. An enlightened minister founded the Dutch Architecture Institute, the Berlage Institute, and secured the funds to stimulate architecture and the Rotterdam Biennale. These three institutions have defined the context of Dutch architectural production for the last twenty years. They made platforms for cultural production and the budgets to test things. And are they doing the same now as twenty years ago? Not at all. The current cultural practice is that of trying to pool and curate connections. It’s an infrastructure, you could say, for the grey space.
Peter Swinnen I do believe educational institutions are not taking the question of what they could do seriously enough. There is still this kind of lingering undertone of what an ideal practice might be, of what a canon might be. The educational institute has a huge responsibility in raising awareness for future practitioners, which it is not taking up at the moment.
There is an interesting gap for architectural education to actually jump into a grey zone – to make sure that practice and education become much more of an intimate couple. There is not one way of practising.
Tiago Mota Saraiva I think we should avoid the idea of new architecture. We are talking about extending boundaries. I don’t like to see it as a movement but more as a collaborative moment that is changing the way of conceiving our discipline. I was taught that you start a company after working for a famous architect for ten years. For me this is a totally obsolete model. Today we are proving that obsolescence by sharing our thoughts, our experiences. We stopped competing and started to understand that our practices can be symbiotic. I can take something that Anthony told us today and try to apply it to an experience we’re having. In the end we should be more cooperative than competitive. Once we were all running for the same competitions, we were all running for more or less the same work. Right now we are creating our own work but also trying to understand from each other how to improve it and how to open new doors for our practices.
For example, Alex and Cristi open doors by engaging this process of the CSR. It might also open new doors for other people in Bucharest or Lisbon. It is not a canonic movement but a symbiotic accelerator based on sharing, debating and discussing arguments that can add value to our practices.
Melanie Dodd I think you can be disruptive on many levels. Students need to learn that small-scale disruption is valuable – even if larger scale disruptions may have more agency in the long-run. The field of action is something that you step into the minute you start an education and maybe the time has come to deregulate the architect and the methodology of sticking with one route, which may in fact ultimately be counterproductive.
New Commons for Europe is sold-out on Spector Books website but last copies are available online