Aug 19
2012
Introducing the theme of the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale, “Common Ground,” Biennale director David Chipperfield stated, “The role of the architect is at best one of critical compliance. Architects can only operate through the mechanisms that commission them and which regulate their efforts. Our ideas are dependent on and validated by the reaction of society.” The U.S. entry for the Biennale, “Spontaneous Interventions” challenges this notion, presenting projects and strategies that are “provisional, improvisational, guerrilla, unsolicited, tactical, temporary, informal, DIY, unplanned, participatory, open-source.”
In your experience, what strategy is most valuable: spontaneous intervention or critical compliance? Why?
Spontaneous Intervention 13 Replies
Critical Compliance 3 Replies
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Contributing Editor, The Architect's Newspaper |
Mitch, your “Unplanned” exhibit is a great example of charting a long-term critical course. Granted, spontaneous intervention and critical compliance do not sit in opposition, but the terms suggest different ways of approaching a problem, and, as you point out, different timelines and issue of scale. Rather than setting up a “this versus that” question, it would be interesting to hear more on interpretations of terminology and examples of approach—from both designers and users.
Monday, August 20 at 3:21pm
I think there’s also room to consider not just the way in which a project comes about (by commission or self-initiated), but also the types of behaviors that it promotes. It may take a great deal of planning to create an open framework that promotes spontaneity. The public realm is the site of overlapping codes, both regulatory and behavioral: what is allowed, what is appropriate and inappropriate. Creating platforms for spontaneous behavior is an essential part of the design of the public realm. And because the public realm is shared, designers have to work within those codes to find opportunities for intervention. My hunch is that projects within the American Pavilion are exploiting these types of opportunities that encourage behaviors that are non-compliant, highly spontaneous, but realized through a great deal of careful planning.
Monday, August 20 at 10:34pm
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Architecture Writer and Curator |
While perhaps the title “Spontaneous Intervention” is misleading, since lots of planning and thought does in fact go into how we conceive and perceive works, these types of projects – those that rethink or reevaluate the standardizations in the field and the institutionalization of practice, are oftentimes the most relevant and are embedded with greater potential to enact change in the built environment. It is through constant negotiation between the two realms – spontaneous intervention and critical compliance, respectively, that we can promote new ways of thinking, making and doing that will eventually lead to new standards of design and consequently new modes of critical compliance.
Tuesday, August 21 at 7:05pm
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executive editor, The Architect's Newspaper |
Though so-called Spontaneous Interventions are happening around the world, I think the curators of US Pavilion are picking up on something that is particularly relevant to American cities today. These projects are a response to the failures of American urbanism of the past, and reflect an optimistic engagement with cities today. Further, with so few clients and so little public support, architects, designers, and landscape architects are taking matters into their own hands and taking an activist/entrepreneurial approach. This is particularly valuable for young designers to gain experience, build relationships with community groups (potential future clients), all of which will inform their work as they gain commissions and begin to work at larger scales and build with more permanence.
Wednesday, August 22 at 10:45am
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Contributing Editor, The Architect's Newspaper |
A thread that seems to be emerging under the spontaneous intervention banner: proactive design as a catalyst for public conversations about the built environment. As architecture and design practices mature and as their projects grow in scale, these conversations tend to become more formalized (community board meetings) and mediated (through clients, institutions, the press). So another question to consider: When the dominant approach shifts from one of spontaneous intervention to one of critical compliance, does the quality of architects’ conversation with the public also change?
Saturday, August 25 at 5:46pm
What’s important to remember is the current shifting and shrinking nature of public space, information access, and communication. What I mean is that the value of crowd sourcing now means that the audience replaces the client; and funding is raised via venues such as Kickstarter and communicated through Facebook and Twitter. As architects, we are no longer solely responsible for a single client but instead have the venue and opportunity to reach an audience.
What this means for architectural production and methods is yet to be seen. The client is dead. Long live the crowd.
Sunday, August 26 at 12:11pm
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Architecture Writer and Curator |
This notion of audience is something that is not new to the profession (think archetypal architect-client relationships) however, in our changing global society it has become increasingly larger and architects must address this in their projects and proposals. Expanding networks, social media and web-platforms have made architectural projects and urban design interventions more accessible to a general public beyond the scope of the insular architectural community, increasing the possibility of realization (if so desired). This relationship between the two – architect/designer and the public – must be constantly renegotiated. Mediated by critics, journalists, institutions, and the press to establish a critical commentary on the practice will ultimately help expand the understanding, agency, and value of architecture in contemporary society and lead to more socially-responsive design.
Sunday, August 26 at 11:02pm
Nice comments here and nice thread as well.
I completely agree with Jonathan Louie. First the fact that twitter, facebook, and the other social networks are becoming more and more relevant in the architect’s communication — at least they may help — is becoming a fact commonly accepted by architects, critics, etc. But I remember to have read on twitter, and it seems that Jonathan Louie said it clearly: the most important now is how these tools will be productive for architects — and allow me for adding critics, curators, editors…
Another aspect that Jonathan Louie and many others have pointed out is the increasingly important role of the “crowd”, of communities. I completely agree with that. A question however that must be posed: how can we define “community”? It is clear that our collective drive is much more toward sameness — to paraphrase Kazys Varnelis. Even though a large number of projects highlight a growing interest for spontaneous, DIY, acts, projects that involve community with limited budget. This is why, — as we are now in a network/post-fordist age —, I think (and I agree that this is the task of the critic, the theoretician much more than that of the architect to do it) it is very important to redefining “community”.
Finally, ‘spontaneous interventions’, as main theme of the U.S. Pavilion, that I find (I am neither American nor British, but French) particularly critical in the positive way. I may be naïve but I hope ‘spontaneous interventions’ will generate new thoughts, new approach to building, new methods, new ‘collective’ production, to linking cities with the ‘crowd’…
Wednesday, August 29 at 12:45pm
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Contributing Editor, The Architect's Newspaper |
Thanks Jonathan, Danielle, and Annick, for the latest thoughtful comments. So if we’re talking about a post-client era where the architect can be in direct touch with “the community” through a variety of means…what’s the architect saying and how are they saying it? Do you think a new generation of architects is changing the way they speak or present to be more accessible to the ultimate consumer of architecture?
Related note: Today at AN we just posted an an editorial somewhat relevant to this conversation: “That’s Not Architecture” by our West Coast editor Sam Lubell the issue of architecture (installations) in galleries v. architecture in the world: http://archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=6236
Have a read and post your comments here!
Thursday, August 30 at 6:04pm
This new generation of architects does change the way architects — all generations included — work, present, and, more interestingly, collaborate with community. Let’s take an example: the recent 3/11 event in Japan appears to have changed Japanese architects’ approach to building. Community is playing a crucial role that leads to interesting interventions at a small scale. Toyo Ito’s project “Home for all” is an example among others. Of course it is not necessary to go so far to find similar practices: Interboro Partners, MOS, to quote only these two agencies…
Workshop for instance is a great tool to connect community with architecture, and more broadly with cities.
Friday, August 31 at 8:40am
Especially when reaching out to a large audience, I think there’s something to be said about the spectacle as the ultimate communicative device. With the over-saturated world we live in, the client less architect by nature of their need to reach an audience, has to find ways to channel their inner Pop attitude to design communicative devices that glorify the conditions of the real world.
One of the more intriguing examples of this is the +Pool, which although may not be a duck it certainly captures the imagination and is an iconic form. And, despite the amount of attention it’s gotten, it’s a project that lives primarily through Kickstarter and vivid representations via the Web (video, website, and illustrations).
Monday, September 3 at 5:41am
> Jonathan Louie
Very interesting comment.
So, this poses the question that is becoming crucial to architects: how to fund projects. This is completely true that young architects will be facing with another issue that didn’t exist before the financial crisis (or, at least, is now becoming visible): funding sources. I find these projects such as Kickstarter as very interesting topic that highlights funding sources as becoming more difficult. Lack of funds puts inevitably limits on the realization of projects at small as well as large scales (except in regions that can still afford such huge interventions, let’s say Middle East, to limit to this example). Kickstarter requires the participation of anyone who wants to contribute to a project that s/he finds very important at a local context (but this may work at global context, too).
Another interesting aspect to this shift, should I say, is the possibility to follow the evolution of the project from its sketch to its funding to its construction to its completed phase. For non-practitioners this appears to be a chance to have a link with architecture, and more broadly with city-making, in a way. This may be odd, worse: naïve but allow me for saying that architecture is entering in a phase of producing a new form of collectiveness based on co-exchange with community…
Monday, September 3 at 1:01pm
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Masters of Architecture Candidate, Princeton University |
I agree with Mitch’s statement that this is a false dialectic, but I will articulate a different aspect. The compulsion of the US pavilion that requires every exhibited project to be “realized” (even though not all of the projects included were) automatically excludes some of the most interesting and polemical projects. There seems to be a willful amnesia within architectural debates, that just four years ago at the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennial curated by Aaron Betsky, for which the theme was “Architecture Beyond Building.” Any practitioner, writer, editor or curator should know that architecture does not equal building, and vice versa. Architecture can take the form of many media other than the building, and indeed architecture has always been non-medium-specific. Drawings, models, writings, films, and everything else that contributes to what we consider “the architectural discipline” are also “architecture.” Think of Mies’ Friedrichstrasse skysraper, or the films of the Eames, or Corbusier’s Domino diagram. All of these pieces of architecture are not buildings, but, via various media and technologies, continue to shape our idea of what architecture is to this very day. To frame the debate as “spontaneous interventions vs. critical compliance” is just as valid as juxtaposing “critical interventions vs. spontaneous compliance.” What we really need are conversations about how new media are shifting architecture’s engagement with new constituencies, as some of the prior conversations have hinted at. For example, what kind of projects will be realized via kickstarter that couldn’t be realized by older models? (hint: one must make a film for a kickstarter project…) How will this change architecture so that it might become critically-spontaneous compliant-interventions?
Thursday, September 6 at 11:59am
Allow me for going back on the urgent task of implementing new tools and methods in the framework of this discussion. As I said, spontaneous interventions need new tools and methods for a better understanding of this shift as many of us have mentioned.
In terms of tools and methods, I, in fact, rethought this week end of a series of “workshops” led by Paris-based AAA [Atelier d'Architecture Auto-gérée], also known as Urban Tactics, (not sure if this word ‘workshop’ is appropriate to the specific tool elaborated by AAA). AAA is a collective platform that elaborates urban tactics to encourage participation of non-practitioners (mainly inhabitants). AAA is located in the 20th arrondissement, a multi-ethnic neighborhood in the Northern Paris. These workshops were programmed on Saturday (not regularly) and were considered as a “rendez-vous” for locals as well as for Parisians and people who live in the suburbs (banlieusards in French). I usually attended these workshops before moving between Paris and Tokyo.
AAA’s tools can be summarized as follows: workshop, spontaneous lectures (inviting young practitioners to discuss with the public about their work, recent projects…), nomad and reversible projects and other DIY intervention at a local scale. With the participation of non-practitioners as central in their practice.
Some of you may have seen AAA’s proposition for the Venice Architecture Biennale. The collective platform presents R-URBAN at the Biennale. R-URBAN is a typical example of this DIY-type of interventions that attempts to connect inhabitants with the city they live in. As I said, bringing the end-user on board, AAA is an example of these ‘new’ practices that place the architect as connector between inhabitants and the city.
In conclusion, it’s very important to map these tools and methods for a better understanding of the ‘emergence’ of this new practice.
Monday, September 10 at 9:28am
Mitch McEwen
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This is a false dichotomy. The US Pavillion has done a great job of aggregating a very useful set of alternatives to commission-based practice. But the title ‘Spontaneous Intervention’ is unfortunate. The most enduring change happens far from spontaneously. 2 and a half years ago I curated an exhibit in LA called “Unplannned: Research + Experiments at the Urban Scale.” My curatorial essay for that exhibits emphasizes the dual meaning of un- as prefix. There is un- as in not, as in ‘uncircumcised’, and un- as in actively reversed, ie ‘undo’ or ‘untie’. When we take on unplanning the city, if we seriously care about undoing the damage of racial segregation, single-use zoning, car-based planning – to name just a few major issues left over from the 20th century – we must paradoxically develop long-term critical positions to undo planning, undo architecture. This involves a critical compliance with our methods.
Monday, August 20 at 10:15am