The Possible Progress issue continues, further speculating the paradoxical nature of progress as culturally and spatially significant. The fundamental prompts remain: exploring the shifting landscape of futurity in contemporary society, accumulating research regarding the very possibility of progress in these new conditions compared to that throughout history, all the while understanding architecture as a privileged barometer of the movement towards disparate notions of progress at different times. 

The Answers Series, as the title suggests, is dialogue-inherent, wherein both questions and answers are proposed, conversations are prompted and new ideas about progress are verbalized. Progress itself implies a vectorial movement between two points: one of departure and one of arrival. The departing point is where a situation is perceived as problematic and from which questions emerge. The arrival point proposes answers to the questions: it promotes a vision, a desire, but it does not necessarily speak of how to get there. 

A selected group of architects, photographers, social scientists and historians were invited by Cartha to engage with the notion of progress in the domain in which they specialize. A part of this group responded directly to the question: “is progress possible in architecture?” ; and the other, to provide two images that conveyed both a ‘problem’ and a ‘solution’. 

Posing the question “is progress possible in architecture?” prompted very direct responses, ones that tackle both pragmatic and experimental practices in architecture as well the social, political, and cultural repercussions of such processes. The exercise to recognize both a problem and solution through images invited storytelling, produced narratives of context and society not only in design but also in the ideas of image culture itself. With the invited contributor’s research, Cartha puts forward Answers to the Possible Progress: photographs, drawings, texts, screenshots, and design approaches that are both determinate and speculative, a curated culmination of thoughts from some of the most interesting practitioners worldwide.  

Aprdelesp (Mexico City) analyzes photographs of Balbuena metro station, taking note of the ways in which image-making tells a story in itself. Séverine Marguin and Henrike Rabe (Berlin) use office architecture as scientific case studies for an experiment on progress. OMMX (London) deals with material degradation of the Palace of Westminster through avenue of architectural drawing. Ciro Miguel (São Paulo) captures vectorial moments of symptomatic change, and Young & Ayata (New York) digs into the aesthetics of images, problematizing digital shadows with the Nolli plan. Tibor Joanelly (Zurich) speculates on the concepts of newness and innovation in practice. Bernard Khoury (Beirut) creates the story of Salah, a Syrian runner, freedom fighter, and prisoner of war. Marie Jose Van Hee with Sam De Vocht (Ghent) repositions the window at the core of space making. Phineaus Harper (London) questions if progress is even appropriate as an architectural aspiration. The Answers Series draws clear lines of progress in social, political, academic, urban, architectural, and ecological platforms, recognizing starting points and respective goals of openly defined players.

The whole cycle was aimed at dissecting a notion that seems to permeate current perspectives on almost everything. Political progress, socially progressive, natural progress, uses of progress — all too familiar and all too untouchable. The need to reflect on the mechanics of progress and, most importantly, on the hands that move the levers, took us on this one-year investigation. The texts, visual essays, drawings, installations and projects which emerged from it shed a light on the moving parts of progress by offering autonomous visions one can freely inspect. We thank our contributors for embracing our call and invitations in their wholehearted and sincere ways, allowing us to share with you an issue which, in its certain provisional state, brings progress to a level all can engage with in a constructive way. 

 

In 1969, the British illustrator Robin Bath took a photo of one of the entrances to the Balbuena station of the Metro Line 1 right after its inauguration, at the corner of Calzada Zaragoza and Calle 16 in eastern Mexico City. This photograph is from the archive of Lance Wyman who led the identity design for the Metro. The Metro system was supposed to open before the 1968 Olympic Games but it was not finished on time. In the foreground, the original sign post for the station stands with its pink flower pictogram. In the background, there are two buildings: one with fenced windows and a door shutter; and a second one with a plant, a birdcage, a water tank, washing lines and power cables on its rooftop. The buildings appear in bright, contrasting colors, and it would not be surprising if they were painted specifically for the photograph, Potemkin village-style, as it was done in other zones of the city during the Olympic games a year before. The only two people in the shot are two policemen who, from their extremely relaxed posture, one can assume were unaware the photo was being taken.

 

On a cloudy morning of november 2016, nine cameras on the roof of a Google Street View car took nine simultaneous photographs that were algorithmically stitched together to form a single 360º image of the same entrance of the Balbuena station, 47 years after its inauguration. This photograph, along with similar images from 2008, 2009, 2011, 2014, and 2015 are publically accessible through Google Maps. In the foreground, the entrance to the underground station is all boarded-up and was being renovated at the time, while the bare structure for the original sign post–now scrap metal–sits upside down on the corner. On top of the fence, there is a red sign indicating that the compulsory fee that the construction workers’ union collects has been paid, although not necessarily that the said union is protecting the workers’ rights in any way. In the background, both buildings remain: one is now a La Michoacana ice cream shop, painted pink and branded with paraphernalia, and the other has a green sign for a pharmacy, which matches the color of its facade. Of the three people in the photo, two of them clearly know they are being photographed by Google’s nine-eyed camera, but there is a third subject, probably peeking into the construction site, perhaps again unaware of the loss of his anonymity.

APRDELESP (Mexico City, 2012) is an architecture office: a practice-as-research on space and its appropriation processes.
Some of their best-known case studies are Material Art Fair (editions: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, and 2016), MACOLEN (2016), Parque Experimental El Eco (2016), and CAFÉ ZENA (2012).
They have participated in the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2017: Make New History (2017), the digital archive for the Mexican Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia – 15th International Architecture Exhibition (2016), the museography for the Archivo / Italia exhibition in Archivo Diseño y Arquitectura (2015), and the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture in Shenzhen (2013). They won the “Pabellón Eco” competition for Museo Experimental El Eco (2016) and were finalists for the 3rd Open Call for the Architectural Intervention for the Feria de las Culturas Amigas in Mexico City (2018).
They have published the books A Manifesto on the Appropriation of Space: a Methodology for Making Architecture (Gato Negro Ediciones, 2019) and Notes on Winnie-the-Pooh’s house-tree (Ediciones Hungría, 2019). They were selected as one of the Seven Innovative Design Studios to Watch by Metropolis Magazine (2016), and their work has been published in PLAT, Harvard Design Magazine, Log, TANK MAGAZINE, and Scapegoat Journal.

Daniel has also worked with Lee Mallet on urban studies for East London, and on residential and educational projects at Philip Meadowcroft Architects, both in London where he is based. Since 2016, Daniel works at Haworth Tompkins where he has been involved in a number of housing projects.

In 2019, Daniel designed and released, in partnership with Ediciones Hungría, “Construcciones Modernas S.A.”, the first of a series of architectural illustrations as homage to Mexico City.

 

CARTHA published “The Possible Progress: Answers Series” a week before the global lockdown. In the answers submitted, some addressed the notion of progress in retrospective terms and some futurist, some took a particular view on the capacity of technology in society and the environment, but all critically questioned “growth” as the defining principle of “progress”. 

Growth, as we may now understand it, is a difficult concept to piggyback, riding blindly into Utopia: not only was viral growth the reason for the lockdown, but the forced halt for community engagement everywhere was frustrating, something to endure, and often with anxiety – of infection, but also of disturbing the productive routine we are so accustomed to performing, often making way for internalized disappointment and fear of the unknown. Productivity and progress are closely linked; both are conventionally viewed as good but are theatrical in their executions. 

Taking a step back to reflect on the current state of things, Ainsley Johnston and Rubén Valdez from CARTHA caught up with the authors of “Wayfinding”, collaborators Rodrigo Escandón Cesarman from APRDELESP and Daniel Díaz Monterrubio. This conversation scrutinized the complexities inherent to image-making and critiqued the spectacle of progress in Mexican architecture.

 

RV
Could you briefly describe your collaboration?

DDM
I think we have known each other for around six years but I don’t remember exactly. 

REC
I actually think we met through your Tumblr initially and then started following each other on Twitter, if I remember   correctly. I met you in person for the first time at Cafe Zena. 

DDM
Yes then we started chatting with Willi [of APRDELESP] more frequently. My Tumblr was sort of an archive of Mexican architecture and design-related stuff, and I have met a lot of people who share similar interests to mine over the past ten years through the platform. 

 

REC
So when CARTHA invited APRDELESP to contribute to the issue on Possible Progress, Willi and I instantly thought of our conversations with Daniel about Mexican modernist architecture.

DDM
Rodrigo and Willi wanted something which spoke to a historical context, probably not an image or a project but something through which we could talk about the idea of progress in this context.

We wanted to approach it as research; we initially looked for an image already infused with ideas that we could respond to. We didn’t want to respond directly, but to leave gaps for more general interpretations of “progress”. Our submission specifically refers back to the layered historical context of Mexico and tries to translate that into something more contemporary. That was important because I think a lot of historic academic research reads in a very closed, unavailable manner.

REC
Yeah, in our practice we see these invitations for publications and competitions as opportunities for collaboration. The brief was to create two images with accompanying texts which brought to mind the spot-the-differences newspaper cartoon format, or more generally the structure of a “before and after”. The idea of progress can be complicated by the two images we chose. The images point to each other but there is no clarity as to what the realized and potential progress embedded in the scene is. 

DDM
We wanted to make it a quick response, one that is both in the present and the past, whilst at the same time considering the process of image creation. We were lucky to pinpoint what we wanted to express with this historical image and then add many layers to it with the subsequent image from Google. But I think the images as a pair also say a lot even if they don’t have any text. And you know you can even go on Google Street View now and actually see that there’s a new image, and you can try to compare to the “original” or every other iteration. 

RV
I would be interested to visit the corner and see it for myself now… 

DDM
It’s quite an interesting corner actually. The original image was related to the strategy the organisers used to depict Mexico City for the Olympics. That’s why I thought it was a good starting point because for the Olympics they were cleaning and painting over everything so it would look more Mexican, bright and vibrant and colorful, to show a different image than what had always been there. The government and the International Olympic Committee gave residents paint to use in their houses in order to produce an image of Mexico as both modern and at the same time colourful and vernacular. It was often a slightly clumsily executed, yet definitely a well-thought through attempt to create a sleek tropical atmosphere. The image also shows a subway station, but the thing is that the subway didn’t arrive in time for the Olympics in 1968 – it came about a year after the games were finished. For us this image was a great starting point. 

AJ
I think the translation that you’re talking about is really powerful between the two images. The first one being something, as you explained, as quite staged, and then the second one more passive in its construction. They’re complete opposites in a way, of intentionality and passivity, but they’re both, as images, accepted as fact. 

REC
I don’t know if we had thought about it exactly that way but I really like that way of thinking about it. The fact that the first one was probably staged not only in the framing of the photograph but also in the actual painting of the facades. Then the Google Street image, how it exists in this matrix – not only every point in space is photographed but also it has this additional dimension of the same space being photographed over time. 

DDM
I think there’s also this point of resolution: in the original image you can zoom in as best you can but there won’t be much detail – after all it comes it’s analogue. In the Google image there is a lot of detail, you start seeing all this stuff when you zoom in, for instance on the rooftop, like clothes lines and cables, but there’s also digital information.

There is also a bit that we didn’t expand on further, which is the sign for the construction workers’ union. 

REC
That’s an interesting detail that appears in the second image of our submission, the Google Street View image from 2016. You can start thinking again about progress, and how in the first image you see this massive government project… and you know this is near the decades when there was a kind of Mexican version of a welfare state, and this project was an effort to portray Mexico City internationally for the Olympics in a very clean, top-down organization of design and labor for the “newly-built” subway station. 

In the present-day image you see that little red sign [which the construction workers’ union gives the construction site manager to hang on the site after the union fees have been paid], one that is very symbolic of worker’s rights, but in reality the construction worker’s unions aren’t appropriately compensated. The symbol redistributes power through corruption. From the neatly-dressed policemen guarding the station, to the chaotic construction site with a little union plaque on your way to the ATM, there is an interesting labor story going on as well.

RV
Yeah I find it interesting that we come again to what Daniel was mentioning about the layers of content in these two images. I see this very little detail of the workers’ union sign as a witness to the friction between what progress was supposed to bring, in terms of the rights of the workers, and the reality that actually didn’t work out in that way at all.

REC
We were trying to throw a more complex response and didn’t want to rely on a 1960s’ idea of progress. Sadly these beautiful subway stations have been either torn down or modified, but the point wasn’t to be nostalgic about this.

RV
In your own practice you often work with series and repetition using an attitude of the same-but-different. For example your projects for the Material Art Fair for which you have used a similar concept over the past four years, whilst deploying subtle changes each time… A kind of evolution through repetition. This also resonates with the idea of progress, but a smaller scale version, achieved not through spectacular innovation but rather through careful improvements. 

DDM
There is part of the submission that speaks about constant progress. You try to innovate every time you do a project but you also want to build your own language for a studio. One thing I like about your work (at APRDELESP) is that you share information in this way that’s really open. I like that on your website there is a list of subcontractors or contractors with even an evaluation sheet. It’s not that you repeat yourself but it’s just very efficient, it’s an honest evaluation. Oftentimes as a starting studio you need to produce more, make the process streamlined in the economical system we live in. But I really like what you’re doing, you know, we’ve been working with these people that are good and you open this to others. I think it also speaks to what your idea of progress should be. 

REC
To quickly add to that, at APRDELESP we publish every photograph that we take of the space and I think there’s something very interesting in seeing hundreds or thousands of photographs of the same space. This type of documentation through repetitive layering complicates these notions of progress.

DDM
We were discussing this when making the submission too; how it’s funny that many well-known projects always end with that one big amazing picture.

RV
I think that’s a good point because one of the aspects we were quite interested about with this submission was the role of the image. Now that we spend most of our time in front of screens, the role of the image is fundamental –  especially for social direction. Now we’re dealing with the photogenic idea of progress.

DDM
I think the Metro image speaks a lot about this idea. I was reading about design and the city for the Olympics, and many texts were talking about just that: to craft that idea of “Mexican” identity they were digging into the pre-Hispanic past to show the “true” aspect of Mexican culture. In a lot of the stations you see a pyramid or an old glyph or just the name of an area  which is not Spanish, and the colour of the lines were also meant to be vibrant for that purpose. Condensing all of that into a series of images paints such a fixed picture of what Mexico should be, which when you visit, or see the comparison between the two images, you realise what the reality of a multi-layered and complex city really is.

AJ
And how do you think your idea has changed in the past two months? Maybe we can speculate on the proliferations of inherently political imagery or the social implications of Zoom calls as a result of the lockdown.

DDM
For the first two weeks for me were hard, to cope with the idea of your family and friends being somewhere else. And then you’re absorbing everything, walking into the unknown, I became more excited about digging into resources online that I wouldn’t normally use. I found it strange how quick we all were to adapt. 

REC
Speculating on it now, I’m thinking out loud, but I guess this is where we always were… at the time I was in Mexico City, Daniel you were in London, then I left for Boston, and I’ve been here since. We were already collaborating remotely. I guess this whole lockdown feels a little bit like a triumph of the screen, finally, but I wonder if that had actually already happened. Instead of going out to photograph this corner directly, it always made more sense to show the virtual and disembodied Street View Image. This urban space that is virtual was a transformation already in place before the lockdown.

RV
We have all worked remotely in some way or other over the last five to ten years, but the idea of communities communicating across borders and time zones through shared documents, messages and video calls, has changed quite dramatically over the past few months. The extreme necessities brought about through lockdown has changed our perception of community and this has also changed our perceptions of progress.

REC
Yeah, our practice is structured around seeking these physical spaces of friction, encounter and uncertainty. As you know, we have run a cafe, a furniture shop, a bar, a gallery and print shop, all open to the public. 

We think about the practice as a matrix of private and public infrastructure, and also the physical and digital infrastructure for the office, and these two categories intersect. We have the private physical, our office; the private digital, which is our digital tools for collaborating; the physical public, which is the cafe, bar and so on; and then the digital public, our website where we publish all our information and remain quite transparent. So the physical part is sort of disabled now, and we have to figure out what that will become.

RV
These reflections talk not only about your contribution and the notion of progress in the late 60s juxtaposed with present day Mexico, but also a more comprehensive, multilayered way of understanding progress through the role of the image. 

AJ
In a way you were, at the time, already commenting on today’s condition that deeply depends on the capacities of image technology. 

RV
I really hope we will see each other again in person.

Sometime. Eventually.

 

 

 

 

 

The Palace of Westminster, home to the UK Parliament and designed by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin, has often been referred to as a classical building in disguise. Cloaked in the prevailing contemporary ornament of Gothic Revival, the building is seemingly able to contain multiple identities. But there are problems. The original choice of poor quality Anston limestone, simple enough to carve elaborately into, has condemned the structure and it’s cladding to a lifetime of perpetual renewal. London’s polluting tendencies has seen the relatively thin overcoat of the building patched, removed and replaced since its construction. At a time of acute crisis in the individual and collective representation by our institutions of state, perhaps there is a different course of action for the building’s inevitable maintenance, one in which the expensive need to maintain its appearance in its totality can be questioned. 

Dressing Down Parliament is a drawing of the building, stripped of its ornamental veneer to reveal the structural brickwork behind. It proposes an alternative future for an edifice that is admired and castigated in equal measure for its position as a symbol of centralised power. The drawing suggests a more open-ended resolution, one where the spaces and surfaces of the building are deliberately dismantled to make way for more diverse forms of representation.

OMMX build, draw and write about architecture. They believe that architecture gives form to our collective desire to understand and express who we all are. It can construct intimate portraits of different communities, from individuals and families, to companies, landscapes, cities and nations. OMMX is committed to this biographical process, to creating spaces that we can relate to and that help us relate to one another. 

They have served a broad mix of private, social and public sector institutions, working on housing, private residences, galleries, offices, public spaces, festivals, exhibitions and shops. Selected clients include the V&A, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Design Museum, English Heritage, the Wellcome Collection, the British Library, Clerkenwell Design Week, Naked House and Marian Goodman Gallery. 

They have been nominated for the EU Prize for Contemporary Architecture, Lisbon Triennale Début Award and have also had recent successes in competitions organised by the American Institute of Architects, the Royal Institute of British Architects, the National Infrastructure Commission and the British Council. The office were shortlisted to represent the UK at the Venice Biennale in two of the last three national competitions.

 

 How is new architecture created? And how is newness measured? We would like to explore this question from the perspective of spatial research. Every new design idea is related to an existing culture, to past designs, buildings, techniques, theories and stories, referring explicitly or implicitly to them. However, we do not understand the relationship between past and future designs as progressive-linear, following an evolutionary path towards a better architecture. In this sense, we are rather critical of the possibility of progress in architecture: Progress for whom? By whom? For what purpose? In what form? 

Architecture only assumes coherence in resonance with the people who use it. And in turn, the latter is a product of the former. Progress can therefore only make sense within this dialectic. The normative dimension of progress points to a possible universal good that is central and relevant e.g. in the debates on urban sustainability– but only as long as the architectural strategies are context-sensitive and context-responsive. There isn’t such a thing as the one perfect transferable solution for all contexts and epochs. 

In order to gain a deeper knowledge of the context or the specificity of the respective situations for which buildings are to be constructed, empirical studies are absolutely indispensable. We therefore propose an experimental knowledge production for the architectural practice. By ‘experimental’, we mean on the one hand empirically-based, in the sense that the knowledge production is grounded in scientific empirical studies; and on the other hand design-based, in the sense that it involves an iterative design process, within which different possible scenarios are being designed, built in scale 1:1 and tested with regards to its use. In this sense, we advocate a definition of experimentation¹ that consciously takes up the ambivalence of the term and transcends the usual dichotomy between scientific and artistic experiments. While scientific experiments are usually presented as hypothesis-driven, repeatable and measurable, and artistic experiments are considered explorative, strange and singular, we regard the dichotomy between the two as both ideal-typical and obsolete. In all constellations, the difference, the chance, creativity, blurred contours and singularity play an important role. In the spirit of the historian of science Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, we plead for a “differential reproduction” ² in which reproduction–in the sense of maintaining the material conditions of an experimental process–produces difference in the sense of divergence³ . It is in this divergence that the actual new can occur. The result can be progressive or regressive, completely unknown or take up the known in new ways–the point is that the experiment creates a deviating focus. In this sense we do not believe in a linear process of knowledge production but rather advocate a fractal or cyclical evolution of knowledge⁴. 

We gave this approach a try in the field of spatial research. In our research project ArchitecturesExperiments at the Cluster of Excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung of the Humboldt-Universität Berlin we have investigated the spaces of knowledge production. Our question was: How can space actively promote knowledge processes? 

In the history of office architecture, a long tradition of experimentally and creatively exploring the connection between space and knowledge exists, including e.g. the development of the “office landscape” by the Quickborn team in the late 1950s⁵ or the typification of work spaces by Francis Duffy since the 1960s⁶. By contrast, the design of scientific architecture, i.e. the spaces in which scientific research and teaching take place, is not yet being questioned and experimented with to the same extent, although the university is the place of knowledge generation and innovation par excellence. In particular, the question arises what kind of spaces are conducive to an increasingly interdisciplinary and collaborative research. 

Bild Wissen Gestaltung, to which our research project was affiliated, represented a large and unusually interdisciplinary research project and therefore offered the opportunity to examine such a research project from within: What influence does space have on knowledge production? Which spaces and spatial qualities are required to develop new knowledge at the interface between the disciplines? We placed particular emphasis on the question of collaboration: What effect does space have on collaboration within and between existing teams as well as on the emergence of new constellations? A specific challenge was to find spatial conditions that promote collaboration but also offer opportunities for individual retreat. In order to investigate these questions empirically, we developed a novel experimental and interdisciplinary method for the investigation and design of space, so-called ‘experimental design-based field research’. For this purpose, a research area of 350 m², the Experimental Zone⁷, was created for forty scientists, which was redesigned and rebuilt approximately every two months over a period of three years. A total of eighteen experimental settings was carried out and observed both quantitatively and qualitatively. In line with a practice theoretical approach, the materialized knowledge practices and routines, i.e. bodies and objects, were afforded special scrutiny. 

We developed the notion of the collaborative habitat to describe a synecological system for interdisciplinary knowledge production, which encourages interdisciplinary collaborations and synergies between individualized researchers, both in the context of existing teams as well as regarding the creation of new projects. The collaborative habitat is fundamentally based on the cultivation of a collective identity manifested in a sense of belonging and mutual trust among the researchers. This is an expected result. What our study has revealed, however, are the spatial implications and consequences associated with this. We have developed five statements that include recommendations for the design of interdisciplinary research spaces: 

1. Physical co-presence is the prerequisite for existing and new collaborations: On the one hand, the study suggests that a gradual rapprochement with others and their unfamiliar practices facilitates acculturation processes as well as the emergence of new collaborations. On the other hand, our study concurs with the literature in confirming the fundamental role of interactions in physical co-presence. In particular, a combination of a low connectivity and a low visibility severely inhibits informal exchange. As a design consequence, the study suggests that open and transparent typologies such as open-plan offices are especially suitable in order to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations. 

2. The heterogeneous practices of a multidisciplinary group of researchers are in part incompatible when performed side by side. In response–and in contrast to trends such as activity-based working⁸–, the majority of the scientists investigated created individual and group territories that offer protection in the open space. As a design consequence, an architecture characterized by a high diversity of areas with different characteristics promotes the emergence of heterogeneous research spaces. 

3. A research environment with a high visibility of work-in-progress content can stimulate the rapprochement between the disciplines and the emergence of new collaborations. We therefore advocate an architecture that encourages the display of research progress outside the computer, e.g. by integrating highly visible analog and digital media such as pinboards or collective displays in central and highly visible locations. 

4. The analysis revealed that the fundamental prerequisites for the emergence of collaborative spaces are the seamless transition between individual and collaborative practices, as well as the possibility to look at media together. Spatial constellations that enable both help co-presence to evolve into collaboration. 

5. A participative design approach contributes both to the collective identity and spatial reflexivity of the researchers and thus to the appropriation and formation of a collaborative habitat. 

These statements could perhaps be misunderstood in the sense of a belief in a progress in architecture. By them we in some way plead for an improvement of the spaces of science: The empirical investigation has shown that traditional typologies with individual offices and corridors have become obsolete. However, it must be kept in mind here–without relativism–that we have studied a specific target group in a specific context and that the results cannot easily be transferred to any other context. We therefore argue that the deviations of different contexts should be studied carefully. In fact, our investigation suggests that it is precisely from such deviations that new directions can emerge. 

 

 

 

 1 Here we refer to the anthology Experimentieren, in which we carried out a praxeology of the concept of experimentation in 25 disciplines (both natural, social and cultural sciences and design): Marguin, Séverine, Henrike Rabe, Wolfgang Schäffner, and Friedrich Schmidgall, eds. 2019. Experimentieren. Vergleich experimenteller Kulturen in Wissenschaft und Gestaltung. Bielefeld: transcript.
 2 Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 2001. Experimentalsysteme und epistemische Dinge. Eine Geschichte der Proteinsynthese im Reagenzglas. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
 3 Marguin et al. (op. cit), p.15.
4 See the works of Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: North Carolina; and of Abbott, Andrew. 2001. Chaos of disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
5 Kockelkorn, Anne. 2008. “Bürolandschaft – Eine vergessene Reformstrategie der deutschen Nachkriegsmoderne.” ARCH+, no. 186/187: pp. 6–7.
6 Duffy, Francis. 1997. The New Office. London: Conran Octopus; Duffy, Francis, Colin Cave, and John Worthington, eds. 1976. Planning Office Space. Architectural Press; Duffy, Francis, Andrew Laing, and Vic Crisp. 1992. “The Responsible Workplace.” Facilities 10 (11): pp. 9–15; Duffy, Francis, and Alfons Wankum. 1966. Office Landscaping: A New Approach to Office Planning. London: Anbar Publications.
7 Marguin, Séverine, Henrike Rabe, and Friedrich Schmidgall, 2020. Experimental Zone. An Interdisciplinary Investigation on the Spaces and Practices of Collaborative Research. Zurich: Park Books.
8 Veldhoen, Erik, and Bart Piepers. 1995. The Demise of the Office: The Digital Workplace in a Thriving Organisation. Rotterdam: William Stout Architectural Books.

 

Henrike Rabe is an architect and doctoral researcher at the Laboratory for Integrative Architecture at Technical University Berlin. She studied architecture in Berlin and Toulouse, and worked with Kazuhiro Kojima+Kazuko Akamatsu/CAt (Tokyo) and Brisac Gonzalez (London). She conducted empirical and historical research on the spaces and practices of knowledge within the project ArchitecturesExperiments at the Cluster of Excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung of the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. She is co-founder of ARCHIEXP, a studio for interdisciplinary spatial research and design. 

Séverine Marguin is a sociologist heading the methods lab in the Collaborative Research Center 1265, Re-Figuration of Spaces, at the Technical University Berlin. After completing her doctorate on artist collectives in Paris and Berlin, she worked as a researcher on the project ArchitecturesExperiments at the Cluster of Excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung of the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. Her research focuses on science studies, collectivity, interdisciplinarity, visual research methods and experimentalization. She is co-founder of ARCHIEXP, a studio for interdisciplinary spatial research and design. 

In this collection of images, the impact of mankind in the world environment is shown as a patchwork of infrastructure networks, constructed topographies, artificial landscapes, urbanized patches, industrial zones, and toxic rivers. The constructed narrative is fragmentary and disjunctional, bringing together ambiguous elements, different scales, and time frames. 

According to Luigi Ghirri “Photography is in any case always surreal in its changes of scale and its constant juxtapositions, and in comprising both the conscious and unconscious images of reality no longer present. Reality is being transformed into a colossal photograph, and the photomontage already exists: it’s called the real world.” 

In these over-designed and saturated landscapes, the ordinary can turn into extraordinary, the small into big, the megalomaniac into the everyday and vice-versa. The assemble of images becomes a project, its reality, small fragments of architecture.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ciro Miguel is an architect, visual artist, and photographer. He holds a professional diploma in architecture and urbanism from the University of São Paulo and a master’s research degree in advanced architectural design from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. He worked as an assistant professor in architectural design at ETH Zurich from 2013 to 2019, collaborating with the departmental chair of Marc Angélil. He was a partner at Angelo Bucci/ SPBR arquitetos in 2003–07 and 2010–13, and an architect at Bernard Tschumi Architects in New York from 2008 to 2010. As an architect and artist, he participated in various exhibitions in both Brazil and Europe, including the two last editions of the Venice International Architecture Biennale and the recent “Access for All” at Architecture Museum of the TU Munich. In 2019, Ciro Miguel co-curated the 12th International Architecture Biennale of São Paulo “Todo dia/Everyday”.

 

Amy Perkins from CARTHA caught up with the author of “Super-designed World” Ciro Miguel to reflect on his submission for “The Possible Progress: Answers Series” that was published a week before the global lockdown. This conversation navigated the notion of progress as inherently paradoxical, questioning these nuanced differences through the medium of landscape photography.

AP

You are an architect, teacher, photographer and visual artist currently studying for a doctorate at the ETH. Your work as a visual artist is often about bringing objects as well as ideas into a close and sometimes uncomfortable proximity. We invited you to submit to the magazine in 2019 on the topic of progress to which you submitted an epic photographic essay describing our super designed world. The series of photos you assembled was published just before the whole planet went into a global lockdown, which is part of the reason for us revisiting it through the lens of hindsight today.

Maybe you would like to begin with a brief description of what you were trying to say when you put the original submission together.

CM

The idea of this photo essay was to discuss the domestication of the planet through fragments of man-made environments. Generally, the images show juxtapositions of different temporalities, programs and scales. In a sequence, it is a critical narrative about the meaning of progress in different parts of the world through disordered samples of urban patchworks that happen anywhere.

AP

Maybe we can talk a bit about how you work: I imagine that you have an incredible archive. When you receive a task such as this one is it about sifting through your images and putting together a story, or do you go out fresh with your camera to try and capture the idea?

CM

My approach to photography is pretty much that of an architect who takes pictures as a way to investigate and formulate ideas about cities, architecture and people. Therefore I keep a big and chaotic archive, almost like a diary of images taken anywhere, anytime, with different cameras and film. By looking at this very broad collection, one starts to realize patterns and recurrences that can be organized in particular ways in order to tell specific stories. In addition, I also keep an archive of old photographs, maps, postcards, drawings and projects that I constantly use as reference. 

AP

They are all photographs from your own personal archive, photographs you took yourself – how did you go about making this particular selection for the publication?

CM

They were imagined as images of the Anthropocene, images that contain traces of human activity, for better or worse. The selection itself started with a Luigi Ghirri text in which he writes that “Reality is being transformed into a colossal photograph, and the photomontage already exists: it’s called the real world.” The photographs have clear oppositional qualities or spatial discontinuities, like in a photomontage: an artificial forest next to skyscrapers, tennis courts next to a container port, a monumenta reservoir in the mountains, an ordinary swimming pool on a hill, etc.

AP

So we are looking at extremities of human action in and upon environments?

CM

Definitely. I was always fascinated by the idea of domesticating a wild river or constructing on top of a mountain. However, these extremities are not exceptional experiences, they are part of our everyday life.

AP

Part of the reason we are doing this interview is because the world has changed beyond what anyone could have imagined, due to something tiny and invisible to the naked human eye. We are revisiting these works to see whether your reflections on them have changed. Do you feel differently now about the result?

CM

My take on the subject was generally optimistic, with a certain thrill for these moments of humankind as a geological power, transforming nature into an inhabitable environment. But after the latest events this initial optimism has turned into melancholia. 

In the current context, it seems necessary to question this idea of dominance of nature or landscape, and embrace some sort of coexistence, in which we are not in the centre of everything and nature is not only the backdrop to our own actions.

For instance I was reading recently how in Ecuador a law was passed in 2008 to give its mountains, rivers, forests, and air constitutional rights. In other words, it completely changes the current notion that a mountain is only a resource to be exploited or a location to build hotels.

AP

What was your take on the notion of progress when compiling the essay?

CM

My critical look at the notion of progress is that it intrinsically has side effects. When a river is rectified and controlled in a concrete channel, it is a severe intervention, with many ecosystems altered forever. The pictures hint at this ambiguity: in this “super designed world” there is also death, ruin and decadence.

AP

What’s quite special about this photo essay is that it allows so many different readings. When I first saw it there was this kind shock at the scale and the types of human activity in the most extreme places. Then also a strange feeling of joy about the juxtaposition, the fact that, yes we are everywhere but we’re also intertwined with everything else. When you are in a good mood you can see the beauty in these situations, but when you are feeling disheartened about the state of the planet they can also feel totally overwhelming.

CM

As architects I think we all feel these contradictory emotions towards these images. Building in such harsh environments feels like the pinnacle of the technique, of civilization, to be able to transform an environment and make life possible. The Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha likes to say: “the question of architecture is to build the habitability of nature”. However, it also makes you question whether this is really the best that we can do. Is it possible to reinvent new ways to live?

AP

Your work is so bound with the idea of going somewhere to be able to make these compositions, these real life montages, and yet during the past few months global travel has been greatly reduced. Do you think that the way you work will have to change?

CM

Not being able to travel brought me back to collecting images and to travelling through books, and to taking pictures of pictures.

As a matter of fact, the photographer that I mentioned before, Luigi Ghirri, did not travel much in his life and most of his pictures were very close to his home. And therefore one can look actively and critically at many everyday situations that normally go unnoticed. During the isolation in São Paulo, for instance, I started to be much more attentive to my surroundings because I was basically confined to a block in the city and I made some interesting discoveries.

AP

I was going to ask if you would have done it differently, were you to have been given the task today, but it seems like you almost have. To try to find these juxtapositions from the essay within the confines of a city block is a great exercise.

CM

Yes! I was almost angry at myself for never having paid enough attention to these things before, the beauty of construction sites, sidewalks, corners and gardens, that have always been there, just a few steps away from my house.

I also developed a connection with the neighbours, following their routines everyday, even though the closest building was 100 metres away. Differently from European cities, where buildings are mostly close to each other, in some areas in São Paulo neighbors cannot easily communicate across verandas or common courtyards. For this reason, I took pictures of them with the camera adapted to a pair of binocular, a home-made invention.

AP

Coming back to the Ghirri quote and the idea of seeing the world as a montage, in some of your other work, you cut out images, placing them next to one another to create something new. There is an element of design in all your images, whether that is from montage or simply the composition of the photograph itself. What I worry about is when we rely solely on found images you remove yourself from that creative act.

CM

The photographer Bas Princen always says that a “good image” is in the lineage of other images, a good image is always connected to previous ones you have seen or will see. Sometimes a montage can be very contrasting, and sometimes very subtle, just enhancing a situation which is already present. All of the images we produce are manipulated and constructed, so I think that the method is the same.

But the so-called real world is way more dramatic and epic than anything you could actually imagine. For example in the last image, the one of the hotel on the mountain summit, many people believe that it is not real, and it really does look like a montage.

AP

What or who do you refer to? What would you say is your lineage?

CM

I have a real fascination for postcards, anonymous photographs and maps. Postcards are anonymous ordinary artifacts that portray subjects ranging from the extraordinary to the extremely banal, from the architecture icons to the everyday, from pyramids to roadside motels’ swimming pools. In the case of anonymous photography, the scenes are often composed in a way which allows them to tell very different stories of these emblematic architecture, buildings, and cities.

AP

So is that a big part of your work of, collecting and visiting archives to make yourself kind of a backdrop?

CM

Yes, I spend a lot of time casually image-hunting in online archives, libraries and old magazines. 

AP 

In your text you talk about the conversion of the megalomaniac and the everyday. Your work on the São Paolo Biennale focussed on the everyday, yet your photo essay is anything but the everyday, it talks more about megalomania. Is this oscillation between the two always on your mind?

CM

There is an interesting interrelationship between the megalomania and the everyday. For instance, in the São Paulo Biennale one of the works at Sesc 24 de Maio was about the consumption of water. This intervention, designed by EMI, was located in Sesc’s bathroom and it questioned how daily routines of body maintenance, like washing hands, can have a deep impact on the planet. Another work, by Andrés Jaque, connected architecture’s obsession with transparency with dystopian landscapes of extraction of ultra-clear glass materials. So in a way, the small scale of the everyday and the big scale of infrastructure are deeply connected.

Currently I am investigating pictures of colossal infrastructure projects through the presence of ordinary people in the images. Besides their compositional role as ‘human scale’ to reinforce the bigness of the architecture, my interest is to discuss who were in fact these invisible individuals and how their everyday tales can challenge narratives of architectural history.

AP

Do you think the visual essay as a social or anthropological research method is an underused tool by architects?

CM

Perhaps. This is actually the topic of my phd at ETH, to look for alternative stories of mainstream modernism, to expose what the monumentality of modern architecture imagery tends to conceal: the marginal characters, the maintenance routines, the collectiveness of construction, ordinary events, the juxtaposition of the archaic and the modern. These images, taken by photojournalists or anonymous photographers were not under the scrutiny of architects, so by looking at them, one begins to find stories in opposition to the literature you would read about this particular building or period.

Another visual essay I’m working on is about the images of the land clearings at the initial phase of Brasilia’s construction, the early displacement of earth for creating the city.  In all these scenes there was no sign of the architecture as we know it today, just tractors, trucks and the vast territory that the architects insisted on calling a “desert”. However, by looking at the photographs, one can see the physical reality of that amazing landscape with a rich fauna and flora. The images are very ambiguous as to whether it is construction or destruction.

AP

And my guess is that it is both. It is the destruction of a habitat.

CM

Exactly. It was seen at the time as an image of progress and development. The word ‘progress’ is constantly repeated during Brasilia’s construction, reinforcing the idea that a modern city could bring ‘civilization’ to the country’s hinterland. However, looking at the pictures today, progress seems much more like a story of destruction and violence.

AP

This idea of finding archive images where the focus is not necessarily the architecture or humans, but is activity, especially when you are an architect, you start to see yourself and your work as parts in much greater scenes, you start to read the architecture as part of the background to these scenes. It gives you this feeling of being just one of the players in a rich habitat.

CM

Definitely, this is very interesting. By pushing the architecture to the background, buildings allow these stories to unfold, supporting the unpredictability of life.

AP

But there’s also a problem in the language architects use as well. Describing some things as “deserts” for example, the words conjure ideas of emptiness, of a lack, which leads to the opinion that these places are somehow less worthy.

CM

And it’s actually a myth. Rainer Banham’ text Scenes in America Deserta describes the desert as full of life, as a very rich environment. Architects tend to use these words “desert” and “tabula rasa” to justify their projects, but there is no neutral landscape. This exploitative, destructive thinking is so embedded in our western culture, and architecture is not immune.

By looking at the photo essay after all the changes in the world which followed, it seems we have only one story being told, that of progress, of advancement. However there are other ones, from those who have always been marginal to these processes and have different perceptions. Perhaps the answer to the planetary crisis will come from them.

 

 

 The Nuova Pianta di Roma by Giovanni Battista Nolli, engraved in 1748, known as the Nolli Map abstracts the city into figure and ground; the spaces of roads, squares, and the quasi-public of civic-religious interiors are left blank, while the mass of the built is hatched black. The Nolli Map renders the city as an intelligible public ground against the solid fill of the inaccessible private interior of architecture. The engraving visualizes the city through the graphic hatch of poché. In this drawing, the abstraction of a planar cut floating above the ground coupled with the aesthetics of rendering material as graphically solid, produced the visible presence of space as formed in relation to mass. Through this, individual buildings disappear into the mass of the urban context. This imaging technique became fundamental for urban analysis, explicating the formal order of a city as access, circulation, systems of service distribution, and the public realm. Or, put another way, even though it is architecture that provides the visible experience of the city, the Nolli Map makes sensible the background politics that allow the city to perform, it presents the city as a network of access that feeds pockets that withdraw. 

The surfaces of our environments are scanned, stored, monitored, cross-referenced and monetized. This is done by governments, militaries, corporations and you. It is done by satellite imaging, LiDAR scans, Google Street View, Bluetooth beacons and what was formerly known as photography. With all shifts in technologies of mediation, a residue is spit out. In the case of our scanned environments, this excess is the very real space lost between and behind the discrete instances of scanned points. This loss manifests itself, as shadows, as gaps where scans skip and stutter in attempts at achieving fidelity. There is an architectural concept that relates to these hidden zones, which emerged initially as a graphic abstraction in architectural representation. The shadows that hide behind and between the scanned imaging of the surface can be understood as a transformation of the concept known as poché. How architecture can engage these gaps to open alternative possibilities for inhabitation is a deeply political question as reality is increasingly represented through the aesthetics of the digital image. 

 

Michael Young is an architect and educator practicing in New York City where he is a founding partner of the architectural design studio Young & Ayata. Young & Ayata have received a Progressive Architecture award, the Design Vanguard Award, and the Young Architects Prize. In 2015 they received a first-place prize for their design for the new Bauhaus Museum in Dessau, Germany. Michael is an Assistant Professor at the Cooper Union. Previously, he taught studios and seminars at Princeton, Yale, SCI-Arc, and Columbia. He is currently the 2019-20 Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

 The word ‘window’, etymologically rooted in the Old Norse vindauga, was for early Germanic peoples just an unglazed hole in the wall or roof that permitted wind to pass through. Most Germanic languages later adopted a version of the Latin fenestra, to describe a glazed version of the ‘wind eye’. 

European law imposes more severe building regulations with regard to the insulation and accompanying ventilation of buildings, eventually resulting in so-called ‘Passive Buildings’; a machine connected to ventilation ducts filters and refreshes the indoor air without too much energy loss, using little electrical energy. While inhabiting the building, one is thus less connected with the natural elements. We think the more radical vindauga situation is not problematic, but rather functions as an inspiration to design intelligent fenestrae – machines without electricity – that assure a healthy, tempered indoor climate resulting in engaged ‘Active Buildings’.

 

 

Marie-José Van Hee and her team of architects renew the tradition of building timeless architecture. Throughout her career, she has devoted particular attention to space, natural materials and light, and has made use of classical elements such as the window, door, fireplace and staircase to anchor the house, the public building, or even the city. She has long been connected with the Sint-Lucas School of architecture and taught at the ETH Zürich in 2016. 

Sam De Vocht has been a close collaborator of the studio since 2005 and is a guest teacher at the TU Delft since 2016.

 The Question: 

Salah’s heroic quest for speed and freedom. 

Salah was born somewhere in eastern Syria, about 280 kilometers northeast of Damascus. 

At a fairly early age, Salah wanted to be an athlete. He became the speediest runner of his native village of Deir El Zor. 

Before the age of maturity, he was allowed to drive the family truck through the hills of eastern Syria and beyond. His fasciation and love for the machine shaped many of his impossible dreams, which included wanting to become the first Syrian professional formula 1 pilot. 

Just a few years later, Salah was given his first mobile phone and was finally connected to the national Syrian cellular network and beyond. 

In his constant quest for speed; from animal speed to mechanical speed and finally electronic speed, Salah was convinced he could break the confined spatial boundaries of his geographical territory and roam through the unconfined spaces of a great and promising free world. 

Is this why Salah thought he could be a free man? 

In 2011, Salah took the very sober decision to join the freedom fighters of Deir El Zor not only to defend his village from the oppressors, but more importantly to secure his rights and his access to this promised free world. 

A few months into the battle, Salah was captured by the oppressors. After a few weeks in captivity, he was finally released in unprecedented prisoner exchange operation orchestrated by the elite National Guard brigadier general Issam Zahreddine. 

The Answer: 

The POW 08 is a self-propelled apparatus for the use of returning Prisoners of War to enemy lines. The binary nature of the device allows POW 08 to act simultaneously as an AGI [Auxiliary Gatherer of Information] over hostile territory. Sensitive INTEL [Intelligence] is gathered through Infrared live video footage which is collected on its route.

 

 

“There are no limits to growth and human progress when men and women are free to follow their dreams,” lied Ronald Reagan in his re-election inaugural address in 1985. Only a decade earlier, the Club of Rome had prophetically warned that, if the physical limits to growth are ignored, society will ‘overshoot those limits, and collapse.’ But the promise of perpetual progress – life without limits – was a powerful propaganda message for Reagan’s doctrine of deregulation.

Today, endless progress by overcoming limits is still celebrated through cringeworthy clichés: ‘Know no limits;’ ‘you are your only limit’ or ‘don’t tell me the sky is the limit when there are footprints on the moon.’ Even as unprecedented fires, floods and biodiversity loss reveal the extent to which the cause of progress has pushed the planet to breaking point, our relationship with limits remains antagonistic. It is no coincidence that within Labour, Europe’s largest political party, the faction least prepared to use parliamentary power to take bold action on confronting climate change is named ‘Progress’. Is it time to turn away from the mantra of progress? 

In the opening of his seminal manifesto, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth the American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller argued that, shipwrecked in a storm, you might avoid a watery grave if by chance the top of a mahogany grand piano came floating past. Clambering aboard this improvised raft, you could cheat death, but your miraculous escape would not mean that the best design for a life jacket is a piano top, nor that ships should ensure the safety of their passengers by stocking an abundance of Steinbergs. 

Bucky’s point was that just because something gets you through in a moment when your options are limited, that does automatically not make it the best designed tool for the job in the long term. Yet as a culture we are clinging to all manner of piano tops – systems, practices and materials that allow society to stumble along despite being evidently unfit for purpose and increasingly unable to weather the turbulent waters ahead. 

“If we invented concrete today, nobody would think it was a good idea,” argued Michael Ramage, head of the Centre For Natural Material Innovation at the Architecture of Emergency summit in London.¹ “It’s liquid, needs special trucks, takes two weeks to get hard and doesn’t even work if you don’t put steel in it. Who would do that? — Nobody!” We have built up such a vast infrastructure around manufacturing concrete that despite its deep flaws, it seems impossible to shake its ubiquity in construction. The predominance of concrete is just one of the many ways in which the piano tops of yesterday shape the possibilities of tomorrow.

Like concrete, I believe the love of progress is a piano top – an addiction we uncritically cling to knowing the harm it can cause for fear of finding an alternative. Progress, like growth, is so intertwined with our conception of prosperity that it is hard to even find the vocabulary with which to describe a good life without them. What would architecture be like without this socialised obsession? What kind of buildings would a culture at ease with its own limits commission? What materials would we specify if architecture was no longer made in the service of endless progress, but of maintaining equilibrium? 

Many architects have a pathological fear of maintenance. When work is done on buildings that does not result in bigger better features it is generally considered a failure of the designers to not use more resilient materials. Specifications are regularly made with the sole intention of reducing maintenance needs – green spaces are paved, vinyl is laid over timber floors, tarmac is poured on cobbles, etc. To actively embrace maintenance, rather than avoid it, would mean a sea change in the material culture of construction, and a revaluation of janitorial labour. Thatching, for example, was once a widespread roofing technique with good thermal performance, hyper-low environmental impact and seductive sculptural qualities. Yet today, thatch is not just rarely specified, but actively replaced as its need for occasional repair makes it unattractive in the eyes of our durability-obsessed culture. What would it mean to rethink this stance, to embrace thatch, and other plant-based and natural materials with vigour, not despite their need for maintenance, but because of it? 

The architecture of the Musgum people in Cameroon features tall domed mud huts, their facades covered in geometric arrays like the texture of a Peter Randall- Page sculpture. However this pine cone-like pattern is not simply a decoration, the deep relief of nooks provides the hand and foot holds for labourers to clamber over the facade, repairing the mud render throughout the year. For the Musgum, facade repair is like window cleaning – something that should be regularly repeated and which good architecture facilitates. What would it mean to apply such a philosophy to contemporary western cities so that acts of repair are valued and expressed formally?

 

There is, perhaps, a lesson to draw from high-tech. The glass facades specified in gleaming towers across the world by the likes of Norman Foster and Richard Rogers don’t need repairing often but they do require regular cleaning. In the hands of the best high-tech architects, window cleaning infrastructure became exuberant architectural features such as the deep blue cranes perched on the Lloyds Building by Richard Rogers². If high-tech can articulate cleaning as architecture, what new forms and architectural devices could embody an architecture of maintenance?

The urge to always progress – for growth even beyond the natural limits of our planet and climate – is driving architecture and society to make wildly unsustainable choices. The lure of progress has accomplished some great things, but it is increasingly clear that we must establish a more critical relationship with the purpose and pitfalls of progress. Westen architects must unlearn their colonial mindset of constant expansionism and learn instead from indigeinous communities whose architecture facilitates ongoing care, rather than ongoing growth. The architect of tomorrow will no longer be a servant of progress but an agent of equilibrium – reconfiguring of form and matter in a constant process of adjustment and replenishment promoting balance. Architecture as an endless process seeking the end of endless progress.

Cover: Ronald Regan’s presidential oath, Photographer Unknown, Ronald Regan Library
¹ h t t p s : / / w w w . d e z e e n . com/2019/09/20/concrete-climate-change-architecture-emergency/
²h t t p s : / / w w w . d e z e e n . com/2013/08/04/movie-richard-rogers-lloyds-building-high-tech-architecture/

Phineas Harper is director of Open City. He is a critic and curator exploring the intersection of architecture and politics. He has contributed to a number of books as an author and editor including A People’s History of Woodcraft Folk and a new book of architectural science fiction, Gross Ideas: Tales of Tomorow’s Architecture. Phineas writes regularly for a wide number of publications. He is a regular columnist at Dezeen and has written for the Spectator, the Independent, Harvard Design Magazine, RIBAJ, DOMUS, Real Review, Uncube and The Architectural Review among others. In 2019 Phineas curated the Oslo Architecture Triennale in collaboration with Interrobang and geographer Cecilie Sachs Olsen. Combining theatre, fiction and exhibitions the festival examined the architecture of degrowth bringing together economists, performers, architects and activists from around the world.