As the collectives ELEMENTAL
and ASSEMBLE
take home prestigious awards,
and the next VENICE ARCHITECTURE
BIENNALE will be all
about SUSTAINABILITY, AFFORDABILITY
and new architectural modes,
we speak to the collectives driving this new
ARCHITECTURAL VISION.
Naturally, some people aren’t convinced by the efficacy of these ideas.
Writing in The Architect’s Newspaper after Assemble triumphed at the
Turner Prize last December, Fred Scharmen wrote, “Awarding an art prize
for nice adaptive reuse of half-demolished public housing is like giving an
award for the prettiest band-aid on a sucking chest wound.” This seems
disingenuous. Independent groups like Assemble can be held no more
responsible for the structural problems that have created this “sucking
chest wound” than the inhabitants of the buildings they refurbish. They
also arguably draw attention to the need for political solutions in the UK’s
housing crisis. And in doing so they raise a more profound question about
the nature of ownership and public space itself: Who should have the right
to shape the places we live in?
In the run-up to the 2016 Venice Architecture Bienniale curated by
ELEMENTAL, SLEEK speaks to the South American bureau’s director
Alejandro Aravena, as well as Assemble, Collective Disaster and Something
Fantastic about their practice, their politics and the demise of the
starchitect.
In a recent conversation with SLEEK’s art
editor, the artist Ahmet Ögüt remarked
that architects are becoming the new
activists. “They’re on the ground, arguing
with the government, changing spaces,”
he said. This view might seem surprising as
contemporary architecture has once again
become dominated by vulgar displays of
wealth such as London’s One Hyde Park,
where a five-bedroom apartment costs
a cool £75 million. Moreover, in terms of
building, the profession has become the
domain of ‘starchitects’ – a term coined
by the Wall Street Journal in 2014
refer-ring to big designers such as Zaha Hadid,
Rem Koolhas and Frank Gehry, whose
names are brands in themselves.
Under this economic and aesthetic regime,
style has commonly ta ken pre ce dence over
substance, and the needs of communities
have been frequently ignored. However, a
new breed of architects are shaking up the
relationship between money, people and
buildings.
From ELEMENTAL’s revolutionary housing
scheme for squatters in Chile to Turner
Prize-winning group ASSEMBLE’s regen -
era tion schemes in the UK’s towns and
cities, the profession is emerging as catalyst
for change.
a ne
w
urban BL
The idea behind ASSEMBLE’S Turner pri-ze winning project began as a callout for ideas from a community scheme revitalising Granby Four Streets, a residential area of semi-dilapidated social housing made up of turn-of-the-20th-century redbrick vernacu-lar dwellings in Toxteth, Liverpool. Follow-ing riots in 1981, the council acquired many of the houses in the area for redevelopment, causing hundreds of people to leave, and nu-merous properties to fall into disrepair. However, over the last ten years, local res-idents have fought demolition plans and formed a Community Land Trust (CLT) to fix their neighbourhood. Assemble joined forces with the CLT to refurbish ten homes and establish the Granby Workshop, a social enterprise selling domestic items made from bits of demolished buildings. Subsequently, the London-based design group won the Turner gong at the Tate in December last year – becoming the first ‘non-artists’ to do so – and this February Granby CLT was awarded arts council funding for a winter garden. According to group member Giles
Smith, part of the group’s success is due to their nonconformist identity. “Going into a situation calling yourself an architect puts up a barrier between you and the community you’re working with,” says Smith. “We try to get around this by saying we’re not architects, and by es-tablishing real relationships with people.”
It’s a novel approach, and one that seems to be working. Since they formed in 2010 they’ve worked on several socially-oriented programmes. These include East London horticultur-al scheme Limborough Gardens, a child-led research project into play in Bristol’s Leigh Woods, and a temporary School of Narrative Dance at the MAXXI gallery in Rome. Other high profile jobs include a £1.8 million commission to create a gallery for Goldsmiths uni-versity in an old Victorian South London bath house, and The Cineroleum, a petrol station on Clerkenwell Road that they converted into an open cinema.
Collective Disaster is a group of architects, artists, activists, philoso-phers, scientists and economists based in Brussels and Berlin, whose work lies at the interstices of aesthetics, politics, ethics and science.
This multidisciplinary approach means that their portfolio is broad,
encompassing “Usine du Trésor Noir” (“Black Treasure Factory”), a public toilet linked to a bio-waste convertor, “Miracle Mountain” a spring heated by energy generated by a composter, and “BXL swings in the cracks”, a guerrilla project placing benches, ladders and tables fash-ioned from appropriated domestic materials in and around Brussels. Underlying this outlook is their focus on people power and the envi-ronmental problems facing humanity. They spoke to Sleek via email.
How did Collective Disaster start?
Collective Disaster started as a network of friends from different academic, professional and technical backgrounds who wanted de-velop their ideas. Our aim is to affect public opinion through cre-ativity and design, and the dynamic of our team has changed as we’ve evolved. Calling it a team is misleading. We’re just a loosely affiliated group of people acting under shared title.
Are you engaged with architectural activism?
We try to follow Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire’s dictum that “dialogue cannot exist unless dialoguers engage in critical thinking.”
In our view, the task of the designer is to intervene in patterns of contemporary communication patterns and facilitate a constructive dialogue. However, every time we’ve tried something we’ve come up against resistance, so we’ve had to become activists, yes. The critic Justin McGuirk once said that architects hoping to change the world are going to require political will-power, and we agree with that assertion as. Unless we question dominant forms of culture, things will stay the same.
You’ve written elsewhere that guerrilla strategies are an effective way for people to express themselves.
We start from the premise that what is ‘common’ is first of all yours. You can use it and improve it, and you have a responsibility for it, too. So the city is ours, and if you can you should use it, just as much as you’d use your living room.
What determines your approach for each project?
Circumstances. That might sound weak, but the human capacity to adapt to our environment is crucial for survival. Other than that we don’t have any rules or regulations. We enjoy putting questions on the table and making people think about how their values haven’t al-ways been accepted as universal truths, and that change is possible.
Upending traditional architectural hierar-chies and putting people at centre of design are the cornerstones of Chilean agency ELEMENTAL’s vision. “We’re a ‘do tank’, not a think tank,” says director Alejandro Aravena, who received a Pritzker prize for architecture in January’s annual awards.
“And we use the city as a platform for cre-ating equality by identifying problems in transportation, housing and elsewhere where we think we can improve people’s lives.”
Founded in 2000 with the objective of improv-ing social housimprov-ing in Chile, ELEMENTAL consists of Aravena, Gonzalo Arteaga, Juan Cerda, Victor Oddó and Diego Torres. For one of their initial projects, they construct-ed social housing for squatter families in the town of Iquique. Realising that after purchasing the land, they only had enough cash to fit the dwelling with the bare essen-tials, they enlisted the DIY know-how of the building’s residents to finish the rest. They have since replicated this approach, allowing
for customisable, flexible units that can be adapted to each family’s budget and needs. ELEMENTAL’s work is characterised by a participatory design process, whereby initial plans are discussed with the local community, and modified according to their input. This method was used to great effect in Constitución, a city devastated by an earthquake in 2010, where the bureau publically displayed their plans to find out what the locals thought. “We tackle the issues that are relevant to our proposals, and we believe that identifying the questions, and thus the problems, is more important than going straight to the answers,” says Aravena.
“And by engaging with the different demands of our stakeholders, who include politicians, locals, environmental advisors and others, we maintain our connection with society.”
Doing this, the Santiago-based architects are also working against their industry’s perceived wisdom, which very rarely values public consultations, and where sustainability is hardly ever considered a top priority. “One of the biggest mistakes architecture makes is that we’re expecting society to be interested in the specific problems of architecture,” says Aravena. “Instead, architects need to adjust to what society is discussing. We should just provide the forms that can translate social problems into solutions.”
Later this year, Aravena will curate the Venice Architecture Bienniale, where ELEMENTAL’s ideas about modern living will doubtlessly influence the event’s direction. But with such a thoroughly radical approach to his profession, how does he view his own role as an architect?
“Cities consist of frictions and barriers,” continues Aravena, “but they also harbour the solutions to those obstacles, too, and that’s where architects have a very important job, because they have the potential to turn those conflicting forces into material forms, and solve some of the complex problems that different societies face. All it takes is the creativity to translate strategic opportu-nities into proposals.”
Ocho Quebradas House, 2013 – ongoing. Los Vilos, Chile Rendering: ELEMENTAL
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Changing the world might not be a top priority for most gradu-ates, but that’s exactly what motivated Berlin-based architect trio Something Fantastic. Having graduated from at the Berlin Univer-sity of the Arts in 2009, Elena Schuetz, Leonard Streich and Julian Schubert were eager to put their knowledge into practice. Their first pro ject was a 220-page illustrated manifesto based on their MA the-ses that set out their pragmatic yet ambitious principles. “It was a good chance to think about what we wanted,” says Schuetz. “It just felt like the right thing to do, rather than planning things as we went along, which is the common route.”
Something Fantastic’s philosophy is straightforward: keep it simple. In their view, one of the major failings of 20th century avant-garde design is the fact it was shrouded in such complicated terms that people without an arts degree couldn’t understand. “These designers, they saw the buildings as triumphs even though they were intangi-ble for most people,” says Streich. Conversely, Something Fantastic value functionality, smartness and eco-friendliness, a good example of which is their “Dumpling Express”, a streamlined, solar-powered mobile cooker designed for street vendors.
Moreover, their practice isn’t just focussed on design and publishing, but encompasses academia, too. After they released their manifesto, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich invited them to work on a postgraduate programme in urban design in Brazil. Their
work there included researching informally overgrown social hous-ing, such as Cidade de Deus, and exhibiting their pro jects at the São Paulo Biennial. They also encouraged government planners to con-sider favelas and their previously stigmatised communal qualities in their development ideas. “Favelas are built house by house, which is the complete opposite of the standard way buildings are constructed, and that’s super interesting,” says Schubert.
Indeed, some of their other projects are similarly unorthodox. Specu-lative design “The White City” implements Steven Chu’s hypothesis that painting all roofs white will reflect radiation back into space, and the “Nighttrain Station” aims to extend’s Berlin night train ser-vices in order to completely supplant short-haul flights. However, Something Fantastic don’t see themselves as activists, because they’re wary that such practices diminish government responsibility and in-vestment. “It just doesn’t work for us,” says Schubert. “We admire groups that take that stance be we think it’s unfair that they have to do so without much funding and with so much personal effort. But we’re sure that things will change. We always try to stay positive.”
