Aistė Ambrazevičiūtė,
Imaginary Folklore - Recreating the Landscape, Fine Arts Academy Vienna, tutors: Kathrin Aste, Michael Hansmeyer, Wolfgang Tschapeller, 2016.
„The project’s design is based on the complex wood anatomy and material investigation, combining various scales and parts of wood, which enabled to discover new unseen forms out of wood. The aim of the project - to rediscover wooden architecture and its design parameters.“

I am interested in architectural research, creative experiments, pursuit for ideas and consistent project development. In the studies of architecture, as well as its practice, these are the fundamental parts at the core of any good project. Schools of architecture enjoy an exceptional opportunity to engage intellectual thinking, gather together experts in different fields and explore relevant problems, extensively and elaborately go deep into the essence of issues, offer innovative ways for their solution. Critical thinking and spatial analysis not only provide for a solid background for a good study project, but also encourage the community of architects and other professionals to focus on the existing and newly evolving problems, their causes and outcome, as well as potential ways of solution.

Why more research and explorations in architectural studies should be encouraged? First of all, I think, a research in architecture helps to tackle two fundamental questions: (i) scanning architectural space and identifying the emerging problems, still invisible in architectural practice (it contributes to figuring out the potential challenges and threats in the long-term perspective, forming sustainable and coherent principles for the planned modelling of architecture development) and (ii) search for new research methods by experimentation, new architectural principles, innovative technologies and finding ways of their application in architecture practice. 

I present this text as a dialogue with different experts in architecture – teachers, school leaders, who share their insights about research and pursuit for ideas in their architectural and educational practices. At the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation, the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow, and FUTURE+ Aformal Academy of Urbanism, Landscape and Public Art in Shenzhen, China, the interdisciplinary approach, innovations, research and experimentation are inseparable parts of education, in order to educate specialists capable of solving problems or exploring contexts of work and research fields, which today still do not exist, capable of looking for solutions for the most urgent challenges of the day. Therefore, in the text, the representatives of these three educational institutions share their opinions, insights and thoughts on research in educational process.

One of my interlocutors Jason Hilgefort (urbanist, head of the FUTURE+ Aformal Academy for Urbanism, Landscape and Public Art in Shenzhen) notices that correctly formulated question or emphasized key problem often may be even more important than methodical, consecutively performed project and are of more value not only to a student, but also the audience at large. The FUTURE+ Academy under his guidance does not follow the established canons, but rather attempts to foster future leaders by expanding the field of architectural thinking without restricting themselves by the existing specific design and research methodologies.

When asked about creativity in studies, Jason Hilgefort answers: “In many ways what we focus on is creating leaders. We do not believe ‘we know how to do it’ attitude. We encourage our students to try new ways, make mistakes and then we all discuss it together. And this is another key aspect, they are encouraged to debate with each other and the professionals. We think it is good to play and laugh, and experiment. School is a place to try new things, but not a place to be taught a particular methodology.

For us, the studies of spatial practice (architecture, urbanism, landscape, etc.) is not so much focused on only space designing or aesthetics. We try to encourage our students to be more aware of the forces that impact on how spaces are made – political, demographic, economical and other processes. We try to fight the cult of visual material (drawings) that, in our mind, has come to dominate too much and dictate to the spatial practices and sciences. With the use of sections, plans and renders only a very narrow point of view is set. But there are many more manners of expression to explore and create architecture, urbanism or landscaping.

To begin with, we do not teach our students ‘a way’. We certainly encourage them to engage in questioning in a number of ways depending on their skills (for example, with the use of films, interviews or statistical analysis). We also encourage them to test the ways, which they and often we are not used to. We strongly push them to both think analytically and abstractly creative at the same time. For the sake of something new, still undiscovered… We also encourage the sharing within a group. The process is not ‘yours’ and ‘mine’. We are exploring and collaborating to learn, but never competing for better grades. We see it facilitating them to find their own creative path, their own methods, rather than dictating a dogma.

For us, it is important to see all the systems and processes that often architects just take for granted. To understand the process first. Who is doing the commissioning? Where is the money for the project coming from? What is the goal of the developer with this project? How does energy get to the site? Where does the water come from and go? How will management of the site work after it is built? What other forces, influences can we use to impact, affect the project? What else could or should be there? If not now – even in a few years? The notion that we strive to have is putting a priority on, but not hierarchy. Thus, this way of learning goes in all directions.

Architecture, urbanism, landscaping, etc. – all these spatial practices cover many aspects. Some students want to detail windows, but many don’t. Some are interested in dealing with political motivations behind commissions in their future careers, some are less so. We attempt to keep the program broad, with “deep valleys”, so that each student could find his/ her own activity map, just in opposite to the broadly used standardized typologies of graduates.”

Whereas Kuba Snopek (urbanist and researcher, tutor at the Strelka Institute of Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow) emphasizes the importance of correctly formulated task for the study work aimed at the grounded result:

“I believe in the importance of two components that architecture students don’t give that much attention to: the brief and research. First of all, the brief must be formulated correctly, approved by and fully clear to all groups of the common process. Secondly, in the research, the essence often is to understand properly the function of the building, or how it should perform. I always try to get to the core of it – what is a theatre? What is a dwelling? What does it mean to read a book or to pray? For me, a research definitely does not start with the site, but with the core function the building is about to perform.

The process of research (that actually leads to establishing the core idea of the building) is always very similar by its structure, but differs in thousands of details in every given case. It consists of the following parts: (a) data collection and a quick research of all related fields; (b) recognition of patterns in the collected data; (c) naming the patterns; (d) “ideation” – application process of the recognised patterns in a specific case.

The essence is simple: answering one underlying question – ‘WHY?’ In every project done at Strelka and by myself, at every single stage of it, the development motives must be clearly set. To put it simple, every time you draw a line, you should understand WHY you are drawing it. Architecture always needs to have a strong rationale.”

Arne Cermak Nielsen (Danish architect, partner at BCVA and teacher at Copenhagen Royal Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture) adds that it is also important to find a potential of a place, its added value, which is sought after by himself in his practice and his students’ works. He says: 

“Study programmes, I believe, should always have some kind of social starting point, be socially responsible. Any current issue, crisis or urgent need can be addressed through the prism of architecture or urban planning. While designing in a specific territory, the livability of the environment could be increased, for example, by creating a public space or unique building offering something in return to the space it occupies. By identifying such livability aspects, projects of the students may gain greater value. Many global, national and local issues can be addressed fully or partly by the means of architecture and urban planning. I therefor recommend the students to follow the news, debate and statistics in order to locate the scope of their projects.

Often it is hard to persuade private clients to seek for social responsibility on broader scale, so it's essential to tell them what their benefits are. Some cities in Denmark, however, are able to formulate their consecutive urban architecture policies and action plans, which we can use as guidelines together with the clients. It certainly helps the dialogue with the authorities if the client and adviser understands these soft values as well - and not just the legal restrictions of density, program and building heights.

Similar approach is also declared by Slavis Lew Poczebutas (partner of MEKADO architectural studio, Berlin, former project director at OMA, guest teacher at different universities), has been a guest professor at VGTU over the last years, working with local students in the format of short and intensive design and implementation workshops. When he started to teach at the architecture faculty, the format of workshops as means of experimenting intensively and freely on certain topics had not been established yet, but explored and tested successfully since. 

He is encouraging the faculty to continue to open up the dialogue and format of teaching to explore and debate on pressing challenges of our contemporary and increasingly complex life which evolves and changes around us. Architecture schools need new methods of architectural and urban thinking and organization to develop solutions for a progressive urban future. The architectural education has to encourage students to be curious, asking questions, be critical and to develop their own passion and creativity for topics on and beyond architecture that today have an increasing influence on the urban world and its inhabitants and users.

So, the experts from different places of the world I have talked to say different things about creativity, they apply different methods and develop different projects, but they have unanimously stated the importance of research and experiment in the process of finding any given project’s essence, nature and problems. In addition to this, all my interlocutors have emphasized the need for intensive work not only among students, but also teachers, which is actually happening in their alma maters – each lecture requires intensive preparation work, work during it and a lot of discussion and/or reflection after it. Teachers compete thus attempting to maintain high quality of studies in different groups or departments.

To solve the issues (or rather challenges) that recently appear in Lithuania requiring complex and uneasy solutions, just the good practice examples from abroad are no longer enough, they require innovative and unique ways of solution, as well as complex, strategic and creative exploration path. For meeting such challenges, cities also need entire teams of experts, including not only urban planners, architects, constructors, but also politicians, designers and even urban activists.

Today, an architect, urban planner or landscape designer has to be capable of not only solving the emerging urban problems on the professional level, but also finding, identifying them. Teaching how to find out, understand and evaluate complex problems and challenges, discuss and hear other opinions, find common vectors for activities has to be the prerogative of schools of architecture. The schools mentioned in the text still learn themselves how to discover, understand and perceive, and they help different organizations and institutions in doing this. By gathering experience through study researches, the STRELKA Institute works in collaboration with different institutions in organizing competitions and other urban processes important for the city of Moscow. Teachers and students of the FUTURE+ Academy give lectures and creative workshops to pre-schoolers, elderly people and local communities. The distinctive feature of work of Copenhagen Royal Academy is presentation of its students’ graduation works to experts of different areas, town residents and even tourists at large exposition spaces.

Without any doubt, the primary mission of any university is training a good professional in a certain area, but a university has also to be the place, where important issues can and, I believe, should be analysed, causes and ways of solution of different processes looked for, strategies developed for possible city scenarios, discussions among experts held and society at large enlightened. The schools of architecture discussed in this article are good examples of how architectural education trespasses the boundaries of just teaching technical subjects. All the interlocutors have emphasized the importance of fostering a self-confident personality able to think, gather and analyse critically the information, create innovations and trespass the boundaries of sticking to standardized and established methods in preparation of any project – of a house, city, street, park or even a computer software.

Ignas Uogintas is an architect and partner of DO ARCHITECTS office since 2015. With the DO ARCHITECTS team, he works on such projects as the territory development of Svencelė, Ogmios Miestas in Vilnius, Misionierių Namai, the apartment block quarter in Vilnius. Before joining the DO ARCHITECTS team, Ignas worked with different architecture offices in Lithuania, Spain, Poland, Netherlands and Denmark gaining different professional experience.

Ignas Uogintas graduated from Copenhagen Royal Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, studied at the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam and Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, the Faculty of Architecture. In his graduation work for the Master degree, Ignas analysed the history, problems and development possibilities of Pašilaičiai residential district in Vilnius, from small interventions to the entire regeneration of the district. Ignas Uogintas’ graduation paper for the Bachelor degree has won an award of the best study project in Lithuania.

The major part of his projects, researches and studies has been related to analysis of architectural and urban structures in cities and their development in problematic territories focusing on broader spatial, sociocultural, economic and other contexts. 

Today I am going to talk about education in architecture and, in particular, the Studio-X initiative at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP). Created by Dean Mark Wigley, this initiative serves as a model for both globalization in education as well as the relationship between architecture and research.

Wigley calls for educating “the expanded architect,” challenging students to think outside of the bounds of what conventionally is possible in architecture, to use the radical thinking developed in architectural education in other spheres, even those quite removed from the built domain. In the second half of this talk I will discuss an example of how the expanded architect might function in terms of my own practice, the Network Architecture Lab. The global context is key for Wigley, who argues that “if we do not think about the future in and with all the transformative regions of the world, then we are not thinking about the future.” For Wigley, the huge geopolitical changes going on worldwide—globalization, the rise of China, the end of the Soviet Union, the development of Brazil, India, and so on—are not just political and economic transformations but also produce changes in both thought and architecture. In American universities, there have been fundamental changes as well. In the 1960s, virtually all the faculty and students in Columbia’s architecture program were white American males. Now American students and faculty are much more diverse as students from across the world come to study here. Consequently, addressing global changes has become a matter of greater urgency and Wigley proposes that instead of serving as a colonial enterprise with satellite campuses worldwide, the university can expand beyond its local condition to become a platform for establishing systems of cooperation.

Studio-X

Wigley’s approach to this is the development of the Studio-X program (“X” standing for experimental). The Studio-X global network is composed of nodes located in megacities, with facilities in New York, Beijing, Tokyo, Amman, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, and Johannesburg. Each individual node is not a traditional classroom or studio venue, but may rather be ascribed to a global interface, a gallery, a library, a lecture space, a meeting room, an office, or a coffee bar. In various ways these elements combine to form each Studio-X node which in turn becomes a place for developing creative approaches to solve the most pressing problems of urban transformation. In theory, at least, each of the nodes becomes equally important and they all become centers of activity. Unlike say, New York University’s Global Programs, it is not meant to export leadership, education and research around the globe or to provide a place for study-abroad programs, but rather to understand that as much as Columbia has a great deal to offer, it also has a great deal to learn. The university advances as a learning institution as it expands into this network.

These images are of the global prototype Studio-X in the SoHo district of New York. It is located in 180 Varick Street, a building that is itself a kind of incubator for some of the most advanced architectural thought in the country—2 X 4 Design, Michael Sorkin, OMA, Toshiko Mori and other practices are located in the building. Studio-X is rather inconvenient to get to from the university’s campus, being located forty minutes away, and it is expressly not a place in which to teach or hold reviews. Rather, it is a place in which faculty work with students on research projects is conducted and, like every Studio-X node, has a busy schedule of events, lectures, and exhibitions. For Wigley, employing students to do research at Studio-X is a way of ensuring that they expand their knowledge, getting hands-on experience and learning about design outside of the school without being taken advantage of as unpaid interns in commercial offices. Where events, lectures, and exhibitions within the university typically appeal to students, those at Studio-X are for graduates who work in the many firms in SoHo, Chelsea, or otherwise nearby as well as a broader public audience. To accommodate these tasks, Studio-X is set up as an endlessly reconfigurable space with easily demountable desks.

If the New York Studio-X has been a successful prototype, expanding beyond that location was Wigley’s next step. Let’s look at some of these nodes, starting with Studio-X-Beijing. Columbia has many reasons to be in Beijing, with China growing exponentially and a number of faculty members already working there. For example, in 2009 Steven Holl completed his “Linked Hybrid”, a Beijing complex that addresses the massive growth, rapid change, and the opening up of the country. Given the crowding in Beijing, it’s appropriate that Studio-X-Beijing is small and seemingly hidden away, located in a factory building in a new art zone near the historical center of the city. Although I mentioned that Studio-X facilities do not host study-abroad programs where students spend a semester or a year in a foreign country, Columbia does send visiting studios to the Studio-Xs for a week at a time, as part of a scholarship program in which every student who attends GSAPP is reimbursed for travel abroad with one studio during their final year of education. Thus, a number of studios have already visited Studio-X Beijing, even as it has held competitions, symposia, exhibits, events, all attracting hundreds of local people.

Studio-X-Rio is in an historic townhouse in the city center. It offers another set of conversations and events that revolve around Latin America and an expertise in emerging creativity from around the globe. Studio-X-Rio also allows us to glimpse at how these centers might work financially, by approaching business leaders interested in bringing creative approaches to Rio from the perspective of digital and network technology. Although digital and network technology is explicitly the focus of the Studio-X program as a whole, the key location for it is Rio, since that is what the local condition calls for and produces funding for.

The Amman, Jordan facility is not a Studio-X but rather a “lab,” considered part of the network, but smaller than a typical facility, a mini Studio-X, if you will. The Amman lab is the only one that functions within another larger Columbia University center, being opened within the Columbia University Middle East Research Center in March 2009. In contrast to Rio, the focus of the Amman lab is historic preservation. So for example, the staff might undertake the exploration of some ruins and how one might preserve them in tandem with the historic preservation faculty. Beyond the focus on historic preservation, there have also been architecture design studios visiting the downtown, urban planning studios in poor neighborhoods and other activities held there.

These three examples of Studio-X nodes give a general overview of how the global network functions, but essential to understanding it are the labs that the school has built. Again, these operate outside of the traditional curriculum to conduct research that pushes the bounds of what architecture is. One of the oldest and most well-known labs is the “Spatial Information Design Lab” (SIDL) run by Laura Kurgan and Sarah Williams. This lab specializes in applying the architect’s spatial expertise towards geographic and cartographic issues, tackling complex problems through visualization. The most well-known of their projects is “Million Dollar Blocks,” done in collaboration with the Justice Mapping Center. In this project the SIDL argues that reducing crime by focusing on the areas with the highest crime statistics can be a misguided approach. Instead, they conclude that it is important to focus on the neighborhoods that prisoners come from, as that is where crime begins. So they look at the addresses that felons come from and identify city blocks in which the government spends more than a million dollars per year to house residents. The resulting amp allows the government and private institutions to rethink where prevention efforts should be targeted.

Living Architecture Lab, run by David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang specializes in responsive architecture. The lab’s premise is to develop architecture that senses and responds to the world. For example, in South Korea they created Living Light, a pavilion with skin that glows and blinks in response to the local air quality. Together with the SIDL, they used air pollution sensors to track what the impact was on air quality in the city before and after restrictions were put in to limit pollution for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Although the Living Architecture Lab takes on big issues, they also understand the virtues of small scale and published a set of books on flash projects to explore particular projects in architecture done for under a thousand dollars, which in the US is not a lot of money. 

The Network Architecture Lab

For the last section of the lecture, I wanted to focus on my lab, the Network Architecture Lab, founded in 2006. The lab’s premise is that the impact of digital, networking technology needs to be investigated carefully, even skeptically. Our sense of space has transformed completely and virtually every facet of our lives, from politics to friendship to how we watch movies to how we think of sex has been subject to transformation. I’m agnostic, if you will, in regard to technology and, indeed skeptical of the impact all of this is having on our lives.

The Network Architecture Lab’s focus is largely on invisible architecture, on the transformation that has left no visible traces on the city around us. The transformation involves what media theorist Paul Dourish calls “Hertzian Space,” the spatial dimension of the electromagnetic spectrum produced by our devices, e.g. the space of radio waves, the space of wireless technology, and even the maps traced by hidden network cables.

Let’s take a look at a series of projects that we have done. First, take the Infrastructural City, a book that I edited and that the lab designed and produced maps for in 2008. This book is the culmination of years of research into Los Angeles, the city that epitomized the big infrastructure of the modern era, existing only because of aqueducts that bring the water from hundreds of kilometers away as well as the over eight hundred kilometers of freeways within it. The city exists because of electric lines that bring it power all the way from both Nevada and Washington State. This is a city that does not naturally exist, it is a city that is on a massive life support mechanism. And yet, in a way, every city is like that. Vilnius, after all, faces similar challenges, such as having to rely on gas from overseas. In the book, I hypothesize that you cannot build that kind of infrastructure anymore in a developed country. There is a mass of political impasse that prevents it. Rich or poor, people don’t want big infrastructure projects in their yards. Any time a big project is proposed, incredible road blocks are set up against it . Politically speaking, this is a major problem for us as a country. But what’s interesting is that some planners understand this condition and incorporate it into their work. In Los Angeles, planners realized that if they add another lane to an existing freeway that will cost a billion dollars a mile. In seven years, however, the freeway will clog as badly as it had clogged before the lane was added. So instead, they incorporate the traffic jam into their strategy, understanding that people generally will not live more than 45 minutes away from where they work. If the jam means it’s harder to go the extra distance, then people move or get new jobs. So there is a kind of feedback effect where the jam itself is no longer seen as a problem to solve but rather as a condition that can be incorporated in the planning process. As we look at the city we see more of these kind of feedback effects in the development of smart infrastructures, that is traditional infrastructure augmented with sensors and computers.

Another project we did was a book called “Networked Publics,” initially begun at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California (University of Southern California) and finished at Columbia. I was hired at the Center for a year, right before I came to Columbia, to run a research group looking at sociological and cultural aspects of what today’s technology was bringing us. Moreover, as we developed the book, we augmented it with a series of panels on the book’s topics at Studio-X, working with Domus magazine to create a hybrid lecture with audience interacting with us using live streams. People in places like Helsinki, Chicago, Washington D.C., Columbia, and Australia watched it and responded using Twitter. In turn, the response was fed back into the event in the form of questions that the panelists responded to. After the panels, we asked people throughout the world to respond with unsolicited pieces which we then gathered together, reviewed and worked with Domus magazine, which published them on their website. So this became a kind of feedback effect in which we tried to incorporate as many ideas as we could.

At times we do actually produce more familiar designs on an urban scale. In 2010, we competed in a worldwide competition to redesign Long Island, New York. Our proposal was that if you want to redesign Long Island, you need to think about it in terms of infrastructure, ecology and networks, and to undo some very commonly held ideas about what you must do with urban planning. First of all, we noticed that Long Island still gets its water from an aquifer underneath it. We decided that since the aquifer was currently being polluted out of existence and that getting water from elsewhere was prohibitively expensive, we’d have to decide which part of the aquifer to keep and figure out a way to rapidly depopulate the land above it. We also found out that some areas of Long Island are thriving and others not. Many of the areas that are not doing well are above the aquifer. So we proposed that rather than trying to revive these communities, we should abandon them through tax incentives and regional planning in favor of densifying some of the older suburbs close to the city that are now increasingly being populated by recent immigrants. These suburbs are already places to which Indian, Portuguese, and Spanish immigrants move. We decided on a few key overall moves. First, we suggested that within these suburbs, we could also mimic that strategy of selective depopulation that we introduced on the island-wide scale. We’d turn the depopulated parts into parks while densifying the centers. We also proposed that the ethnic identity of the suburbs be celebrated so that the centers would become filled with radical typologies from immigrant culture, such as, for example a mini driving golf courses on top of a parking garages. This seems odd to us, but if you are in a Korean neighborhood in Korea or in the United States, it is absolutely normal. In other words, we set out to promote ethnic diversity across the territory, not across an individual community, thus encouraging these neighborhoods to be greater communities while also serving as destinations for dining, shopping, and entertainment.

Finally, I’ll briefly mention a project we took on at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. We were invited to participate in “The Last Newspaper” exhibit, a show in which artists looked at the fate of the newspaper. My collaborator Joseph Grima and I decided to focus on how newspapers’ readership is changing. We are increasingly reading newspapers on devices—iPads, smart phones, and so on—and we’re getting very targeted ideas of the news, algorithms ensure that we see only things we want to read. Moreover, news is becoming something very private. In the past, people would read newspapers in public, thus performatively announcing the importance of being an informed citizen. So we sought to find ways to revive the newspaper. Joseph had noticed how in China people read newspapers posted on walls outside. I also remembered from my childhood in Chicago. We found that newspapers were often hung in public on walls outside newspaper offices, so that people could read them. In the 19th century, with the spread of mass literacy and cheap paper, cities like New York and Paris were filled with literature, filled with words. So we imagined a newspaper that could be hung in public and established a newspaper office in the gallery, bringing staff, an office, even a typewriter on which the visitors to the show were asked to write letters to the editor. I decided that we really needed to think not of a new newspaper each week, but a new section each week, edited by a different group to reflect on the role of the newspaper in shaping architecture and urbanism. Taking some examples, Netlab produced the “City” section to look at the way the New York Times operated in New York City during the blackout in 1977, how they interacted with the public and continued to be published and what its effects were. The concept was to work with the graphic designer Neil Donnelly to imagine that this paper wouldn’t just be read, but would also be hung in public. Each one of these is an individual issue, with a different graphic layout and is designed to be read on the wall. We imagined we’d post this all over New York City, although it turned out that didn’t happen. We found out, after starting the project, that it was actually illegal to do that, except on temporary walls surrounding construction sites. The problem there is that the posters hung on those walls are done with the permission of the building contractor, which often were mafia-controlled. So, the options seemed to be that we could have our knee caps broken by the mafia or fined 35,000 dollars per incident. We applied to the Metropolitan Transit Authority to have it hung on various job sites they had and eventually we made it through the paperwork, but by then it was November and it was too cold. We also underestimated how long it would take to hang these things, because it’s actually quite hard to hang them. In the end we reflected on how the difficulty of posting such things changes the relationship of public documents and the city.

The point of the New City Reader was that we wanted to investigate the interaction of media, the city, and architecture. After all, the buildings by Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry and so forth are being built partly to appear in the news, and partly to get the builder’s name in the news. So newspapers and architecture are very tied together. Newspapers are players within the city. They play a key role in the urban realm. And, of course, with newspapers being greatly impacted by new media, we were interested in how these things would work together.

This talk has been a brief overview of the Studio-X and labs initiatives at Columbia. Together I hope that this provides an understanding of how the education of the expanded architect might progress and how GSAPP is experimenting with new models of education and research.

I was asked to talk about education and as Linas says in [his] introduction , I am active in different places: besides being an associate partner at Henning Larsen and having worked for Foster and Partners, I have been teaching since I finished my studies. I taught at three institutions for 8 years–The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, The Bartlett School of Architecture and Lund School of Architecture. I also realized that my practice has become a kind of teaching institution on its own. From such a perspective MAP (Manual of Architectural Possibilities) is also some type of a school. Therefore I wanted to look at myself as an educator, asking–how do I teach, what do I teach and why do I teach?

I tried to organize my teaching activities, in which I use different definitions for how and why I do it. For example, for the last five years I do workshops instead of running a studio in the Royal Danish Academy. Those workshops are seven days of very intense work with a very specific scenario and agenda. At Lund School of Architecture I am heading a design studio for Extreme Environments and Future Landscapes masters course. Our studio specializes in this field and the course spans throughout the full semester. I teach undergraduate students in Unit 3 of a bachelors course at the Bartlett School of Architecture, where there are always two semesters. The span is thus very long , which also means that the mode of teaching  is subject to  changes over time. MAP on its own lasts six months, from day zero to the date it is sent to the printers. The studio of the Extreme Environments and the Institute of Architecture are sort of parts of each other. The projects that we do there often get a lot of students and interns engaged. They have become a very interesting dimension of the education, actually not only for them, but also for me.

Workshops

If I had to give a tagline for these workshops, it would be “Education as a Positive Disruption“. Why do I say that? The workshops that I teach at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts normally take place at a time when students are starting to form an idea of the building that they would like to design. Usually they have been to the site and tried to define the program. But they have not yet gotten very far with their drawing.  The agreement is that they come in and create a bit of chaos during the workshop period. What type of chaos? It goes in different directions. Usually one works more or less on one’s own during the semester project–that is the tendency in the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. You have time to negotiate and discuss your ideas, you think a lot, you draw. But sometimes it gets difficult to get those ideas onto paper. My attitude is to do the exact opposite–in order to provide the students with a broad pallet of different tools, with which they can  react to a project scenario or a methodology. So we concentrate on one aspect of every project, we put everybody together in one room, we work 17 hours a day for seven days, although it is less in reality–there is introduction on the first day, the last day is for the critique–so actually they have five days to do this. We work backwards, almost like reverse engineering–what is it that you would like to focus on, what is it that you would like to do, and then just do it. I would not want to talk about it, if it is not built in front of me. I do not want to hear about it, if it does not have any shape or form. The idea is to use your hands as direct tools to establish a dialogue within your methodology. We believe that tasks can also teach very directly. If you are thinking, “I want this façade to move and react to sunlight”–fine, but next time we see each other, I want to see something that does that, and if you have a problem, then we will try to figure it out. Very often I do not even know how it is going to be done, but we together find out technologies or solutions that would make it possible to do that. For four or five days it is a room that is very difficult to be in for everybody. But I also noticed that when people are working very close to each other, they inform each other. They see what each one does, share decisions or they help each other, one has tools that the others did not use, solutions that some discard, others picks up. Proximity and density are often amazing tools to stimulate a design process. In a way, you almost have to suspend disbelief and ask everybody to go into this unwritten contract that we are going to try and go by these rules for these seven days. It does not matter if you hate it at the very beginning or if you are fascinated by it, the idea is to embrace another way of doing architecture or generating methodology, which you may or may not use afterwards. At least you have another pallet in your toolbox, another way of doing things.

Why is this interesting? I think it is empowering for the student to believe that whatever he or she imagines might be possible. At the very beginning, they all think “I cannot build that” and after only five days reality is there. For example, one of the students was working at a site close to a lake. She was fascinated by how the structures and the walls were seeking and taking in humidity, creating crystalline structures. She wanted to see what happens if those structures of crystals were very big and started to take over the space. I showed her how different crystalline solutions could grow in front of you. Then she started to play with different sizes, how those spaces could be inhabited. She made films about how these crystals are growing and the different spatial qualities that can be appropriated. It suddenly reminded me of actual crystal caves underneath Mexico. Suddenly we realized that what she thought was a way to test possibilities, nature has done in thousands or millions of years. I think that the architectural language, established by the growth of something that is not necessarily in the same tradition of how we design spaces, can be very original.
I have to say that, throughout the years at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, I have created some kind of a tradition where people understand what they are getting into when they are going into this workshop, they understand that they are not going to sleep for a while. Although it was difficult in the very beginning: students could get very upset and be very irritated and would try to report me to the dean. It happens sometimes. I think that it must be due to another type of context, a tradition that has embedded their understanding of what education or work is. But most of the time it is fantastic and we learn together. Many of the times I do not even know how to find a solution for their idea or their vision. We have to go on this journey together. I have to start calling all the scientists or mechanics I know and say:  “Hi, I have this student who wants to do this crazy stuff! How do we do this?”, and sometimes we just cannot come to a conclusion and that is fine, it is not a problem. I am not so interested in if it works in the end or not, but the fact that you are engaged fully in the desire to achieve that idea is very important. Other times there are things that seem impossible to me and students surprise me and realise them.

Extreme Environments and Future Landscapes

Extreme environments is a theme that is of great importance to me. I have to say that extreme environments have nothing to do with disaster scenarios. I am teaching a master course at the  Lund University for fourth and fifth year students on extreme environments. I call it “learning by research and speculation”.

First I would like to explain why extreme environments are interesting. Unless you are willing to live in a space suit, you are going to have to engage with the difficulties of our environment. Some of them are very extreme. It does not have to be about weather. We know what happens during an earthquake in, for example, Haiti. Our surroundings are more and more often characterized by scenarios where people suddenly have to live in an unbuilt space and recreate their environment. 

We have scenarios which are constantly repeating. People keep living in Louisiana despite knowing that they are going to be hit by a hurricane at least two or three times during the season. Resilience is incredible and I do not understand why  architecture maintains  the same gestures, we keep building the same way. We do not change infrastructure to prepare for flooding. There are amazing new realities that we are confronting, not necessarily only because the climate is changing. There are simply so many of us, we are hitting our own footprints and tripping on them. A volcano in Iceland explodes and traffic is completely paralyzed, because it just takes the heavyset communication road. Then everybody realizes how much we are dependent on something as fragile as an airplane. There are collapse scenarios because sometimes we build too fast or on foundations which are unstable.  I was in Tokyo during an earthquake in an old home from the 1950’s, all in wood. I could see the whole building just moving back and forth, the whole wooden structure was flexible. If some element cracked, the Japanese joinery system made it possible to remove it, get a new one, slide it in and lock it in. But when you step outside, you see a cracked modern building façades of concrete and glass which have to be torn down. You start thinking: “what happened there? Did we lose something in the process? Are we forgetting that there are systems that are more resilient to a certain type of extreme scenarios?”

There are thousands of square kilometres covered in plastic for growing tomatoes in Malaga, south of Spain, or some places in Italy. How absurd is that? Why? Can this be something else? If it has to be covered with plastic to grow tomatoes, can we cover it with something that acts differently? That is an extreme scenario, in my opinion, an artificial extreme environment, where I would like to envision alternatives on how to grow vegetables. We also extract so many resources. We need energy and then we do not know what to do with its waste. We have Onkalo in Finland, a plan for a huge depository of nuclear waste. What are those spaces? What are those extreme scenarios? Is there something more to it than just a garbage dump? We have oil and we pump it as much as we like–the process looks like a floating city sucking the Earth. We also know what happens when something goes wrong there. This is what really interests me, because it is “my backyard”, it is my reality. In Lund everybody is doing projects in their backyards–on nice farmland, in a beautiful Swedish landscape. I cannot imagine being a student in this world and not be a part of the rest of the world and invest as much care for it as your own backyard. That is the intention of this master course.

I will give you some examples of student projects in this course. One is working with Chernobyl and radiation. The other one with Lake Neva, where there is extensive  pollution and hypoxia. Another one is working on dunes and landscapes that are in constant movement, researching how to build with sand. Another one is working on a high student transient population. 40 % of residents in Lund are students, so half of the population disappears every year and something new comes. That is an extreme scenario, when your social context is replenished and changed.

Students research only at the very beginning of the course. This approach is inspired by MAP. It is very interesting when you get students to research first instead of going to design right away. New questions arise during research processes and their design decisions are informed by our research discoveries. They are informed by some type of fact. They are taking informed decisions. For example, a student researching Chernobyl started with the location of Chernobyl, charting different villages around, distances between them and their radiation percentage. He found out that there are people who are returning. The facilities are still open and there are about 3000 researchers working every day in Chernobyl. This is the  first radioactive catastrophe which allows us to see the effects of such an accident. He looked at the global  conditions  regarding nuclear stations–the quantity  and distribution in the world; nuclear process of fission, the dangers and assets of that, how much uranium there is. He started to look into effects of radiation on your body. The air in Chernobyl is not that bad, but the ground is irradiated. You can breathe the air fine, but caesium stays in the ground and that is a problem. But people are coming back to Chernobyl and that is the reason his project started to become a reality. They were planting potatoes in the land which is irradiated, just because people wanted to go back to their hometown. Also tourism is increasing in Chernobyl. There you have an architectural question: there are no facilities for the locals to grow potatoes in safe ground, there are no facilities for visitors or tourists to stay that is not irradiated by caesium. The researchers have to go 500 kilometres away from time to time when radiation levels are too high, because there are no housing  facilities that are properly  protected. That student chose to work on a  project that consists of a series of elevated landscapes–new earth elevated on top of the old, with some research units underneath and space where people can grow their potatoes. That started to define his project and this is perhaps the most important point. Research poses a series of questions, it is the methodology we use in MAP. We choose some of those questions and start to define the answers: “Would it be interesting to do that?”, or “Can architecture propose a solution?” as an alternative and critical approach to the problem.

The Bartlett School of Architecture, Unit 3

The Bartlett School of Architecture is an amazing institution with a long tradition.  It is in a way characterized by learning without  limits and there are so many different studios. Some of them are extremely pragmatic and aim to take very specific decisions and solutions. Others do only virtual production and films. Others are engaged with momentary effects. There you have a huge spectrum of different possibilities of reacting to your reality that surrounds you without putting any limits on yourself and asking - is this what you want to do? Prove it, try it and take it to its limits. At the Bartlett bachelor unit there is a lot of on-site work, which is a tradition of the school. For instance, we went to Venice to explore floods. Venice used to be flooded two or three times a year, but now it is every single day in November and December. Usually the flood reaches the level called acqua alta - when the sea rises almost two metres. We wanted to understand what that is like. Not only through pictures, but by  going there and finding out what happens when your street disappears and you do not know the difference between the street and the ocean. We were engaged with a series of studies and experts to understand the topography and topology of the streets in Venice, and how some streets are protected and others could easily flood.

It is fascinating particularly from an architectural point of view, because of the realities people in Venice deal with. There are realities that you can design. There are realities that make us understand our world differently. The projects that come out of research are much more radical. The students tried to inhabit abandoned oil rigs as stations for housing; recycle contaminated water; create waterfalls that would be part of the landscape. What was important was the method – how to engage experience with space.

Studio

Another place, where we do a lot of learning and some teaching as well, is our studio. I call it “learning by building or experimenting”. It is often a shared experience–there are interns, other architects in the same boat. We go together and we see where it will take us.
I will tell you about one such idea: the Weaving Project. It is one of those “what if?” stories. Many of the individual projects conducted  research that did not lead anywhere–we crashed into a wall, but we learned something. Others had a better ending. But this project started when I was fascinated by the  very old tradition of weaving and the structural rigidity and strength of woven baskets. Usually they are manufactured for very specific and functional aims–to carry fruits or stones, to catch fish. What fascinated me was this rigidity that originated from the geometry and the material. There was no glue, no screws, it all works by friction. One day I came across the work of some Japanese weavers who were breaking away from the functional tradition of the basket.  The question arose very quickly - what if this would be a new way of making structures? What if we could weave a structure? What if we could use this as a way of inhabiting a structure, would that be possible?

There are hundreds of different weaving patterns and we started to focus on the patterns that could manipulate and create architectural spaces. We asked: what would happen if it would have a foundation? What would happen if it would have to go underground? We were thinking of an architectural proposal and we found out that the more you curve the weave, the stronger it becomes. The more corners it had–the more rigid it would become. We started trying out different materials, such as laminated wood or plastic. We started to look at potential tests and it was a total fiasco, because the materials in question have properties that are very difficult to manipulate. That did not work at all even after we spent six months doing a virtual model and trying to make it work. But we got something out of it: an understanding of how the weave worked. We found out a way of achieving structure densities, because we could control the thickness and the widths of the materials that we were planning to weave with. It was used as a guide to go towards other types of modelling. We compiled an architectural proposal as a small pavilion and it was presupposed that we could do it.

Organizers of the exhibition “Notch”–Nordic and Chinese Cultural Exchange exhibition–looked at the woven structure that we had published on internet and they said, “Hey, David, can you do this for us? Next month?” I said, “Sure! Great, now I create a scenario, like I do for my students”. I am going to have to live by my own rules and we have to solve this problem.

I sent interns to do this and I think they did an amazing job. Bamboo became a very obvious choice in Beijing because of the amount of the material available  there, its cheapness, accessibility and the qualities it has. It was a learning experience, because we had to test everything and build it. In the end, we managed to do it. I still cannot believe it, but it was finally  standing in front of Kengo Kuma’s building for the festival. I think this is a good story not so much because it was built, but because we found ourselves in a situation where we had to do something, because we said “yes”. If I would have been less naïve, I would have said, “forget it, we have never tested this”.

Manual of Architectural Possibilities

MAP–Manual of Architectural Possibilities–initiated a lot of methodology that I have talked about today, which is based on research. I did MAP because I wanted to get all these crazy things we did in the studio out into the world. I did not want to do a webpage, it would just get lost–I wanted something that would be limiting for us, putting some constraints. The idea of MAP was to provoke discussion through the world of ideas, “what if’s” and the possibilities we were playing with. It was not about creating answers, solutions or any new movement but just to encourage a discourse and dialogue. I had a very specific idea of MAP–research before starting to design, collaboration with scientists and experts before starting to invent any type of space. We have very strict rules for doing MAP. There are three months of research, where nobody is allowed to draw. When questions come up, we get together and discuss what the relevant points are. We take those that are interesting to resolve, tackle and question through the language of architecture. We pick these questions out and start to develop projects. Some are ironic, some are critical, some are pragmatic. But the idea is to try to react to questions that arise from research. MAP is an A1 paper folded into a map. On one side it presents research and on the second side there are projects. I teach together with Peter Cook and I am very lucky that he writes the introduction for each issue.

In MAP 001 “Antarctica” we showed the geography, the topography, the bedrock and sections of Antarctica. We learned about how icebergs break off, vocabulary for icebergs, different types of snowflakes and how they are formed. Climate conditions that surround the continent. The flora and the fauna, cycles all the way to extremophiles, living beings that should not be alive, because they subside in  extremely low temperatures. The first construction and last constructions on  this continent. We also went into the political situation of Antarctica, which is very special. Everybody claims it, but nobody owns it. And what about building? How do you build there? Can you build with snow? What has been used? We charted every single base station that exists. Then we did a series of projects which react to these realities and questions that we encountered. MAP 002 was named “Quarantine”. Some might think–what does quarantine have to do with architecture? When we started to research, we found out that it was incredibly linked to architecture. There are always spaces of containment. It is about containing and controlling the movement of viruses, of individuals or animals with viruses. So it has everything to do with spatial constraints. We had a series of projects that engage with that topic in a critical manner.

To conclude, the experience of learning or teaching is something that permeates everything that we do, or especially what I do. I think that when I am in the studio or when I teach, it is not only about me teaching, but also about being taught. The more questions you ask about your environment, the more you doubt everything around you, the more courageous and interesting dialogue you are going to have with your reality around you. Because there is nothing sadder than just accepting things as they are and not questioning them. Thank you very much.

I will talk about my research on controversies studies, as a research method and as an education of philosophy. I will also mention what kind of a new epistemology is opened for architecture by mapping of controversies.

Architectural theory has been puzzled for a long time by the big divide between architecture on one hand and the society on the other. Dissatisfied with the one-sided interpretations of buildings as static or technical objects only, architectural theory shifted its interests towards society. We are constantly reminded that built form relates to society and culture. To understand buildings and environments we must understand the society and culture in which they were produced. Here we are in the critical regime—in the regime of critical theory of architecture. Critical means to be attentive to the socio-technical contacts and the cultural/economic conditions of the projection of architectural knowledge. What is problematic with this framework? As a sociologist working on architecture and in the field of architectural study, I see a big problem in this divide—having architecture on one hand and society on the other. 

The problem is that as soon as we talk about this dichotomy, the modernist divide between context and content, between architecture as technology and architecture as symbolic social form, is maintained. My question is how can we circumvent the boundaries between context and content, between the abstraction called nature and the abstraction called culture? Between architecture’s technology and architecture’s symbolic form? How can we avoid the common simplifications of architectural theory, always tending to replace the specific—architectural practices, moves, processes, objects—with general categories—social factors, class, gender, matters of race, politics?

I want to suggest here, that there is another way of doing architectural research inspired by social sciences, one that relies on a radically different understanding of the social. The alternative to the critical reductivist approach is a pragmatist realist irreductivist approach. The pragmatist approach relies on the assumption that architecture cannot be reduced to anything. It is real on its own, it has its body, machines, technologies and groupings - no building can be defined outside of the process of its making, outside of the controversies it triggers. Design emerges in the same instance as its participants and its objects, it defines itself. Therefore we should follow the processes of making, using, contesting buildings. All the actors that take part in these processes, their statements, how they form alliances and create enemies, how they shape new associations. This will mean to follow them and visit all the places they had been to, all the difficulties they have had and all their concerns. If we follow the processes we rather gain access to the social and the architectural in their fluid states, we get a picture, in which we’ll be able to witness what architecture and society are made of, not take them for granted.

A pragmatist approach will require to account and understand, not replace design objects. It will mean to study the particular ways and actions, individual moves and collective groupings, through which architects shape buildings, gain design knowledge and produce new realities. To understand architecture we need to cross the sacred boundaries that separate architecture on the one hand and society on the other. And we need to cross them many times as we follow a contested architectural project or the design process. Only by engaging in ethnography of architecture would we be able to gain access to that particular moment when the divide between content and context, between technology and symbols and between society and architecture is  not yet made. A unique moment when both the architectural and the social are fluid. A unique moment in which all redistributions are possible.

I got interested in controversies in 2001, when I started working at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam as an anthropologist-sociologist of architecture. I spent two years living in the office and watching architects at work, following the processes of making architecture. In order to grasp the general rules of design or the genuine OMA habits, I just wanted to be able to see the details of the day-to-day activities.

A pragmatist way to look at the architecture of Rem Koolhaas would aim to understand the practices rather than the theories and the ideologies, the actions rather than the discourses, architecture in the making rather than architecture made. That is the reason I engage in ethnography of design and follow designers at work. Just as how  the sociologist of science Bruno Latour followed the scientists at work in the 1970s to understand the production of scientific facts.

To understand the meaning of OMA buildings and Koolhaas's architecture, I needed to forget or at least to put on hold all the official interpretations of his work and to look instead at the ordinary conditions of experience, to follow the way architects make sense of their world-building activities, to look at the routines, the mistakes, the workday choices - all these minor transactions of the daily life of a designer that critical theorists consider as indecent to tackle. I also accounted for the cooperative activity of both, architect and the support personnel, humans and models, paints and pixels, material samples and plans, that all constitute the design world. I assume that design was accountable, it means, pragmatically knowable, not symbolic.

Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan

The first case study I worked on was the Whitney museum in Manhattan on Madison Avenue, between the 75th and the 74th streets. It was designed in 1966 by Marcel Breuer together with Hamilton Smith. The building had quite an unusual shape for New York. 20 years later, in 1982, another U.S. architect, Michael Graves, was commissioned to design an extension to  the Whitney museum. The extension was very controversial, he had to go back to the drawing board and design it again. The second project failed, then he went back to the drawing board again. There were three projects designed and they all failed. 20 years later, the same project enters the office of Rem Koolhaas, in 2001.

From an architectural point of view, extending this building is almost an impossible mission, because the building is surrounded by the brownstones from the beginning of the 20th century, which are protected buildings and you cannot demolish them. Basically the site is very small and there are a lot of restrictions. The solution of Koolhaas was to have a complex of three buildings (a brownstone building, the Breuer building and a new building) working together and connected by the old elevator in the Breuer building, which was meant to be the core, the machine connecting the three buildings. This project was stirred up much controversy  between 2001 and 2004, and failed. Koolhaas had to go back to the drawing board and design this second scheme, which again was very controversial and failed. Two years later another architect was commissioned to design the Whitney extension - Renzo Piano. He spent a year and a half on the project, the project again was very controversial and failed.

The questions I had, when I started looking at this project, was - what was so wrong with  the Whitney, that it provoked so many reactions at the time of its construction in the 1960s and then later on at the time of its extensions? What kind of actors responded to the museum actions and claimed to talk on its behalf?

Of course one way to answer those questions is to look at the context of the 1960s and then the context of the 1980s and the context of Koolhaas and Piano and to try and extract the Whitney meaning from the mythologies of these three social contexts. To explain the Whitney in terms of  of mainstream social sciences would mean to produce a social explanation of its architecture by simply referring to all those factors outside its architecture: social, cultural, political factors, the zeitgeist. While architecture projects develop according to their own competitive logics, they are often explained and associated to particular forces behind architecture.

Entering the office of Koolhaas to learn about the ongoing process of design, I was gradually led, together with the architects from OMA, to open the black box of design of Graves and go back to the 1980s, then open the black box of design of Breuer and go back to the 1960s, always coming back to the office of Koolhaas with some little knowledge in hand which was important for the design moves of Koolhaas. OMA architects found out by going back to history that the Whitney had this amazing trajectory, rich of controversies. To gain access to the repertoire of factions of the Breuer building and the Graves’ building, they studied the history to find out what the building did - how the building acted in the 1960s, in the 1980s and how many different actors reacted to the building’s moves and to the attempts to extend it, how various actors talked on behalf of the Whitney.

Thus instead of tracing a linear account of the Whitney's architecture from Bauhaus to Koolhaas, based on a comprehensive historical analysis of its past and engaging in a process of interpretation of Whitney, we were rather interested in its performance, in its career, in its particular building trajectory and the agency of the building. In order to understand the Whitney museum as an architectural object, we had to unravel this history of controversies.

As the controversies developed, I looked at the press clippings from the 1960s and also all archives of the museum of the 1980s and, of course, all the documents related to the project of Koolhaas. In the 1960s the Whitney is never on its own. As soon as the project started and the building was already under construction, different actors gathered around the building. Artists, the Whitney family, Breuer & Smith architects, the board of trustees, architecture critics, New Yorkers, gravitation laws and neighbors. In the 1980s, because there were three different projects, this controversy was defined as the biggest controversy in the galaxy of U.S. architecture, because it lasted nearly a decade. We can see that, as the controversy developed, a bigger number of actors and resources were mobilized and the new associations, new connections among those actors were traced. The more people spoke against and in support of the building, the bigger the crowds of visitors got, the more the resources and lies locally available increased, the more social the design became.

Following these controversies and the many detours the architects’ intentions took to extend the building, we do not see any longer just one static modernist object—a construction. We see an object, its anticipated extensions presented as design plans, a variety of actors gathering around the building, debating, criticizing it or expressing disagreement or agreement with the particular plans. That is how the Whitney becomes a multiple object, an assembly of contested issues: the brownstone's destructibility, the zoning filling, the neighbors’ vulnerability, the narrowness of the site. The Whitney that looked like a simple technical or aesthetic object, in the controversy became socio-technical, sociopolitical. Built once in the 1960s and completely forgotten, it became extendable. From taken for granted it became contested, from static—a bird in a flight. Not an autonomous emancipated coherent modernist object standing out there on Madison Avenue, but a complex ecology. Precisely because design and architecture are accountable, report-able, we cannot continue to argue any longer that buildings and architecture institutions are created  to combat the diffracted presence of society. There are no social dimensions or factors of any sort explaining the success and failure of architecture objects. Buildings are not projections of the social, but they could become social, because they possess an immense capacity of connecting heterogeneous actors. This particular capacity of a building to associate both human and non-human actors and in different periods of time, makes it an important social actor. Here is the social, in the process of mobilization and enrollment of different actors, explaining architecture, reflecting architecture rather than being outside of architecture.

We can argue that a building cannot be defined by what it is and what it means, but only by what it does, what kind of disputes it provokes and how it resists to intensify transformation in different periods of time. Such an understanding of buildings, I believe, can bring more awareness to  the ways architecture is made and how it takes part in the making of the social.

London Olympics stadium

My second example is regarding the controversies surrounding the London Olympics stadium design. Controversy for me is a synonym of architecture in the making. In 2012, London was the center of world attention as it was to hold the 30th summer Olympic games. More attention was drawn to the athletics stadium. How can we expect the design of such an important building to be met without resistance? A building, that once built on site would trigger the entire transformation of east London, would modify the mayoral politics, would raise the greenhouse gas emissions, and would impact the residents’ lives and health. It becomes crucial to find out new ways to navigate through the controversial sets of opinions and map this controversy.

The existing representational tools, however, are not powerful enough to represent what was going on in London. The interpretations revolved around either the social issues and redevelopment plans for the Lea Valley in East London, other interpretations are made about the urban regeneration and rebranding strategies of the Olympics. The role of the Olympics for urban governance was discussed, different attempts to measure the tangible and intangible impacts from hosting the Olympics in London were evaluated. To understand the entire magnitude of the design related transformations at stake, these interpretations are not sufficient. We need instead to map the entire complexity of the debate, we need to follow the controversy. By following the controversy, we base our knowledge about the controversy upon its manifestation in the media, in publicly available documents on the websites of official organizations.

First we follow and enlist the whole range of actors concerned by the controversial design, whether they be architects, communities, costs, stadium design precedents or existing buildings, area regeneration prospects or legacy scenarios. With the generic term actor we designate all beings enrolled in the controversy. Then we map the actors’ main statements and trace the thick mesh of relations among the statements circulating in a dispute. Finally, we visualize the networks of the actors, where they always appear as interfaces of connections. Such mapping covers the research that enables us to describe the successive stages in the production of architectural knowledge. By mapping controversies, we also refer to a variety of new representational techniques and tools that permit us to describe the successive stages of controversies. For instance, mapping the Olympic stadium controversy allows us to gain access to not yet stabilized states of the urban and the social. When I say mapping, I mean mapping not as a mimetic tool, but as a navigational tool. To map a social phenomenon is not only to represent it, but also to make sense of it.

First we started a collaboration with experts in parametrics and then with computational designers. The main question we had in mind was how we could visualize these networks more efficiently to avoid the traditional separations between actors and networks, between individual and society. How can we overcome this kind of static dimension of the network visualizations?

Drawing on the expertise of a parametric designer, we produced visualization of the London Olympics stadium design controversy which is an animation, a dynamic visualization. We wanted to have something different, something that will account for this unpredictable aspect of the networks. We collaborated with the R&D department of London-based company AEDAS, led by Christian Derix. The visualization of the controversy allows us to follow assembly of heterogeneous actors, their different groupings and re-groupings; we can also explore the relative importance and weight of the different actors and how they position themselves according to different concerns. The main concerns in the story are: legacy, cost and sustainability. This simulation allows us to have a dynamic, concern oriented controversy mapping and it also shows for the first time a visualization in which the actors are not drawn as colored dots or squares. It means the actors do not have an identity before they enter the controversy, but they gain their identity in the controversy as they connect. To the extent that even Boris Johnson is not the mayor of London when he enters this controversy, he becomes an actor because he connects to more and more actors and because he connects he is an actor in this controversy. It became a database as well: you can go back to the particular initial sources of the debate and read particular articles, if you want to follow more closely the trajectory of a particular actor in this debate.

Conclusion

The dynamic network mapping captures occurrences, events and situations that make the social traceable, graspable. Taking further inspiration from architectural computing, learning from its specific epistemology will allow us to develop a new take on social phenomena. It is impossible to grasp a building at once. It has temporal qualities, analyzing it as an immutable entity, would provide a perfect reductio ad absurdum of the separation of time and space in architecture.

Following the making of, following the processes around buildings, this approach allows documentation of the continuous flow that a building always is. To grasp it as a movement, as a flight, as a series of transformations. Instead of seeing how a building occupies a particular niche inside a society or corresponds to certain economic or cultural needs, the mapping controversies method allows grasping the capacity of buildings and design projects to elaborate around themselves, their times and their spaces and even societies of interested parties. Following how a controversy unfolds in time and space would permit us to do with buildings and design projects something akin to what Henri Bergson has done in the philosophy of process. Thank you for your attention.