Life Unincorporated
with Andrea Zanderigo
Royal College of Art ADS 1 (2021-22)
with Andrea Zanderigo
Royal College of Art ADS 1 (2021-22)
My idea of Utopia is not that it’s an elsewhere, a non-situated elsewhere to strive
towards, nor that it’s contained only within an imaginative projection. Utopia could be
instead considered almost in phenomenological terms as a sensed present.
I have the feeling that political transformation has to be situated in what we are
already in the midst of experiencing. The repudiation of the present, of sensing and
of relationship, which is the present, is uninteresting and flattened out. There’s a
plenitude of unrepresented agency already existent. The present is materially infinite
- Lisa Robertson, in “Evening Will Come” (2013)
Reflecting on the crises which define contemporary life – social and racial inequity,
environmental collapse – we can’t help but feel we’ve been here before. In particular,
it is in the cultural movements of the 1980’s that we discover an uncanny mirage of
our present moment.
Indeed, we feel it’s about time to look back at the eighties, as a decade in which
several processes harking back to the sixties peaked, and new social and economic
tendencies began to surface. Post-war corporate culture was still booming,
producing a humongous quantity of spaces for white collar labour. Neoliberal
policies, the real estate craze and the financialization of the economy at large were
binding the middle and upper classes of the western world into an endless cycle of
work and consumption, enacted in the discontinuous space of downtown office
towers and department stores, as well as suburban malls, corporate headquarters
and single family houses.
While we might consider any number of typologies inherited from this enormous
mass of built matter, we are drawn to two in particular: the office tower and the mall.
Both are temples of collective production and consumption. They also share a
genericness and disposability: they are each a product of and accessory to capitalist
exploitation.
Although these structures emerged from the darkness of late capitalism, they present themselves now on more utopian terms. They are pragmatic accumulations of slabs and pillars whose functioning is enabled by appropriate cores and extensive sets of installations, with their hollow interiors now offering a plenitude of unrealised agency The very same features that made them the perfect tools for perpetuating the economic cycles of the capital, offer now an untapped abundance of available space, where our increasingly boundaryless lives could potentially flourish.
The scale and nature of this challenge is unprecedented. Transforming and re-appropriating these volumes requires an entirely new architectural and programmatic toolbox. What will be kept and preserved? What will be dismantled or recycled? What will be added? How to deal with these inefficient skins and toxic layers? How to turn unapologetically energy-devouring beasts into acceptable if not virtuous edifices? How to reassess their often obtuse relation with street life? How to gracefully combine the desires and needs of the individual with the level of collectivism which is necessary in order to inhabit them?
These questions make clear that we will be facing a still relatively untapped field of research, which we will support with investigations the studio has made in previous years into two tectonic archetypes – the cave and tent. This dichotomy could be understood as an essential critical tool in order to decipher the architecture of the past and tackle the environmental crisis. The question of whether we design for a lifespan of a year, a decade, or centuries will remain fundamental in order to focus our intentions and to calibrate the ecological footprint of the material resources we use. This time though, instead of starting from scratch, we apply this knowledge to what is already there.
Amazon killed the mall, Google killed the office, Covid-19 buried them. And yet their shells remain as our newest ruins. Too cumbersome to be efficiently wiped out, to expensive to be retrofitted in ortodox ways, these accumulations of built matter are here to stay. As such, we must find alternative strategies to deal with them and to give them back to the city they belong to. How will we furnish them? How indeed will we occupy them? What life awaits for us behind their thin curtain walls? We strongly believe that architecture is a project of investigating and intervening in the construction of lived experience. Making models, drawings and collages is for us as important as investigating reality and reporting narratives. This year, we will focus more specifically on the fertile shared territory between architecture and photography, with contributions from Stefano Graziani and Bas Princen. 51N4E will join us in the live project, sharing the knowledge they accumulated while dealing with the difficult transformation of the WTC in Brussels.