As an architecture, COP26 fell foul of all of the regulations. For two weeks, with a notable choreographed chaoticness, the ‘Blue Zone’ negotiating space was removed temporarily from Glasgow as the city was redrawn as a patchwork of private and public occupancy. At times, navigating the COP26 programme felt like a mapless orienteering exercise with few doors and even fewer windows.

The Blue Zone and its ‘phasedown’ outcome illustrated a noticeable lack of any alarm and a conscious attempt to construct a hospitable environment for the negotiators and not the negotiated. As part of the negotiating assemblage, 503 representatives from fossil fuel companies were present. If this lobby were a country it would have the most delegates present in Glasgow (followed by Brazil with 479 negotiators). Within this delegation are over 100 fossil fuel companies and 30 trade associations seemingly present for their own negotiations.

Conscious measures were taken by organisers of COP26 to ensure the protection of those tasked with protecting the planet and inscribed a new geography of spatial significance to the city. Miles of steel hoarding, concrete jersey walls, and an overwhelming presence of fluorescent yellow boundaries redefined the public’s potential for meaningful participation.

In a reactive resistance to this, the existing streets were reclaimed by activists and imbued with a new sense of civic visibility. Rallies, protests and performances redefined the streets of the city as stages for solidarity. Attending the Friday for Future Global Climate Strike was, by some measure, the most resonant experience of our attendance. There was a much-welcomed clarity in hearing the collective voice of the 25,000 strong young persons, parents, teachers, and activists as they marched, sang, and drummed their way from Kelvingrove Park to George Square. Culminating with a rally headlined by Vanessa Nakate and Greta Thunberg, the echoes of ‘blah, blah, blah’ would have been clearly heard by those who would prefer not to listen.

COP26 shone most brightly through the presence of young and future generations.. At 21, Bruno Rodríguez’ demands to protect the rights of nature to avoid “jeopardizing the future of younger generations” illuminated the Fifth International Rights of Nature Tribunal. RCA School of Architecture Dean Adrian Lahoud’s screening of Climate Crimes at the Glasgow Planetarium sparked the inquisitive curiosity and questions of audience members barely older than the 2015 Paris agreement. And Luisa Naubauer, who at 23 successfully filed a revolutionary complaint against her governing representatives in Germany over their insufficient action on reducing emissions, was loudly heard through the trees of Es Devlin’s scenography as an inspiring force in future climate leadership.

It was during Naubauer’s explanation of the ‘gaps’ within current climate law that the influence of staging, technology, and financial backing on the volume and legibility of climate messaging was at its most distinctive. The spatial inequalities were reflected through the production value of events. Some audiences were treated to a spectacle with elevated stages and sponsored sofas and pot plants, crystal clear zoom conferencing on 10-metre cinema-quality screens, and numerous camera operators and sound and lighting technicians. While others crowded small seminar rooms and struggled to operate microphones.

Throughout the week there was a taste of unsettling franchising of the conference which benefited those with the most substantive marketing budget, slickest video conferencing software, and just-for-profit innovation. COP branded whiskeys, formula E cars, PR for techno-solutionism were not to be found at the windowless, basement temporary headquarters of Global Justice Now, a tireless organiser of the COP26 Coalition who resisted the attempts of disenfranchisement and curated the most extraordinarily dense programme of alternative events in the name of climate solidarity.

In its opening and headline event, the People’s Tribunal, a number of judges, rapporteurs, and witnesses including: Lumumba Di-Aping, Vijay Prashad, Pablo Solon, Nnimmo Bassey, and Adrian Lahoud gathered to share evidence in view of simulating a charge against the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change over their inability or unwillingness to address the climate catastrophe. Delivering its verdict, the jury found the convention guilty of six serious charges calling for COP to “disband in its current form and be reconstituted from the ground up” as a means of redress.

Offering his dissent with usual vigour Di-Aping closed the tribunal:

The UNFCCC has allowed itself to be converted at best into a catering company for the G7, at worst into a carbon noose for the global south.

It is through words like Di-Aping’s in which COP’s are battled. As the conference drew to a close, the negotiations once again sucked the world into a whirlpool of jargon. In true British last-minute style, one of the most controversial moments of the 14 days occurred in overtime of the negotiations. “Phase-out unabated coal power” was changed to “phase-down” and this subtle difference set in motion generations of future planetary consequences.

‘Phasing-down’ may well be an accurate echo of the official ‘Glasgow Climate Pact’, but Glasgow has shown that the legacy of the conference as a whole does not have to be exclusive to what goes on inside, but how it can inspire those outside. Observing coalitions between geographies, stakeholders, expertise, generations, words and action, spaces and people offers to us a warm respite for the justified malaise that we share. It was in this solidarity - outside - that we observed a vibrant, intelligent, and inspiring phasing-up of collective energy that continues to march on towards COP27.

—Nico Alexandroff, Benjamin Mehigan

[END]

MA City Design 2021/2022
Politics of the Underground
Archaeological Site as a Case of Urban Struggle

Archaeological sites in Palestine are never frozen in time, they are living and breathing urban spaces. As public space is impossible to carve within the West Bank given the zoning laws imposed by the Israeli occupation, archaeological sites provide rare pockets of breathing room for children to play football, for teenagers to walk through tree groves in privacy, and for families to open popup souvenir shops for tourists visiting the sites.

Unfortunately these sites have been settler-colonial battlegrounds for a century, weaponised to dominate land by controlling its historical narrative. Hundreds of archaeological sites within Palestine were excavated and looted repeatedly, where imperial and settler voices and biblical narratives were then superimposed onto the ground, simplifying complexities and flattening out subterranean entanglements. In so doing, the process of colonial excavation - which exploited Palestinian labour including women and children - rendered Palestinian presence obsolete. Today, the settler-colonial Israeli state continues to weaponise archaeology as a tool for nation-building and expansion by attaching each site to a Zionist and biblical narrative.

By highlighting those spaces as living and breathing landscapes today and questioning the value systems and assumed linear time embedded in the classics and archaeological discourse, the MA City Design studio embraces a delinear state to contest the prevalent instrumentalisation of archaeological sites and shed light on how they are weaponized to expand the Israeli occupation. The apartheid state legitimises the dispossession of Palestinians from their homes and businesses near and in the archaeological sites in Sebastia, Hebron, Silwan, Al Jib, and many others. Settlements are strategically built near and around biblically significant sites as a chess move towards further land grabs and control of the physical terrain. Settlers terrorise the ecological landscape by setting fire to Palestinian agricultural fields surrounding the monuments, cutting down trees, and leaking toxic waste in the valleys.

The studio begins with Sebastia, a village northwest of the city of Nablus in the West Bank. This is the first case study in what will be a series of focused enquiries that will aim to do two things: restitch the fragmented archives of each site by building a living archive where historical and contemporary data is consolidated into a single open source space that can be used by the public, and two, create interventions that aim to undo models of the apartheid state. Both outputs centre Palestinian voices.

The studio will follow challenging lines of flight that explore different scales and forms of urban struggle including the right to public and private space, ecological terrorism, religious tourism, oral history, excavation labour, militarised archaeology, cultural heritage, displacement, and restitution. Through each lens the students will work towards collective knowledge building and embrace a collective mode of operating while engaging with the Palestinian residents, activists, NGOs, archaeologists, sound artists, archivists, through physical and virtual platforms. In the final term, the students will embark on their Independent Research Project taking off from the same lines of flight but through their individual and independent methods and interests. Future editions of the studio will look at other archaeological sites in Palestine with the hope of growing the living archive and forms of intervention over the years with each case study.

—Dima Srouji

[END]

At 12:00 CET on 16 July 2021, from the Teatro Piccolo Arsenale in Venice, Filet Space in London, and the 21C Museum in Nashville, RELAY¹, a 24-hour global conversation hosted by the Biennale Architettura 2021, began. RELAY chased the hour between noon and 1pm around the planet in a global act of transfer— holding time and space for one another, passing ideas on, and on, and on— moving across time zones while continually staying in the present. RELAY was curated by Fiction Feeling Frame² (Adam Kaasa, Thandi Loewenson, and David Burns).

In response to Biennale Architettura 2021 curator Hashim Sarkis’ framing statement ‘How will we live together?’, RELAY gathered over 60 architects, artists, activists, curators, and designers in conversation around questions of building a collective voice: ‘How can we speak to one another? How can we speak together?’

Participants included Onyeka Igwe (UTC+00), Himali Singh Soin (UTC-02), Zoé Samudzi (UTC-05), Raja Feather Kelly (UTC-05), DJ Lynnée Denise (UTC-07), Nicholas Galanin (UTC-09), Kapulei Flores (UTC-10), John Carty (UTC+12), Daniel Boyd (UTC+11), Abdul Abdullah (UTC+10), ruangrupa (Iswanto Hartono & farid rakun) (UTS+09), Ellen Pau (UTC+08), Sahej Rahal (UTC+08), Anna Engelhardt & Sasha Shestakova [Distributed Cognition Cooperative] (UTC+05), Stella Mutegi & Kabage Karanja [Cave Bureau] (UTC+04), Tabita Rezaire (UTC+03), and dozens more.

RELAY was broadcast in Accra at the Nubuke Foundation, at a special parallel satellite event hosted by Lesley Lokko of the African Futures Institute. A parallel RELAY accompanied the main broadcast, hosting intermittent performances and interventions by members of the Fiction Feeling Frame research collective, and the entire 24 hour event was live tweeted by current and former students of the School of Architecture on @fff_industries. Original artwork by Linn Phyllis Seeger was commissioned for the project and is archived on instagram at @fictionfeelingframe.

—

RELAY began and ended with the following performance:

ADAM: RELAY was a durational conversation, a ritual in circumferential publicness, a performance becoming telegraph, current, message.

THANDI: RELAY was resonance, synchronicity, amplification and interference. It was a live act of tuning and retuning, finding meaning as much in static, dead air and the space held between words, as in the weight, force and matter of speech.

DAVID: RELAY was the capacity to negotiate distance and time through a circuitry of interconnected broadcast, rather than the persuasion of instantaneity. It suggested the capacity of language, of energies, of influence to manifest through the technology of the discussion, of two bodies in relation, then two more and two more and bodies and bodies.

ADAM: RELAY was as if a global circuit of people were sitting in a circle and one by one we turned left and then turned right, an ongoing relayed conversation. Each brings into relief ideas, books, people, histories, disagreements, citations, places, fictions, alt-futures, so that a set of tender circles emanates and expands like a pebble in dark dark water.

THANDI: RELAY was the performance of the whisper, of gossip, of chatter. It practised the impossibility of being everywhere, hearing everything. It operated against human time, sleep time, productive time. It was about the impossibility of doing it all, at the same time, and the realisation that all depends on each in relay with the other.

DAVID: RELAY invited us to become submarine telegraph line, electromagnetic current, fibre optic cable, telephone pole, radio wave, sine, cosine, tan. We were not a message transmitted through a relay. Rather the relay became the message as infrastructure.

ADAM: RELAY broadcasted broadcasting, platformed platforming, and channelled channelling. It listened in on intimacies sited elsewhere and elsewhen. It collected a process of watching, observing, recording, transcribing. It was a sitting with, a being with, a radical togetherness that is fractured by time and geographical isolation. It invited a coming and goingness, a performance unique to everyplace and everyzone. It was a liveness experienced with multiple beginnings and multiple endings.

THANDI: RELAY performed itself as loss, leaks, disconnection, glitches, interruption. These were not gaps of meaning, but precisely the meaning of bandwidth.

DAVID: RELAY was a non-scripted scripting where sound became script became document became trace became live became comment. Each move was an integrated co-, a co-scripting, of co-sounds, co-documents, co-liveness, the you and me and us and there, and then, and was, and was, and might of co-traces.

ADAM: RELAY sat within larger histories of communication, transmission, cables and signs. Of the power of connection in histories of war, of colonisation, of empire, of pedagogy, performance and liberation. It was an experiment in relay as message as wave, wave as wake, wake as sound and space in time.

THANDI: RELAY relished the insurgency of what it was to feel for someone through the limitations and ruptures of the channels we have at hand.

DAVID: It happened now, now-now, now and again, through multiple forms of feeling through others and others feeling for you, refusing the limitation of the box, the screen, the container and the cell, and instead revelled in a line of sensing passed on, in the round.

…..

DAVID: Good morning, my name is David Burns. The time in Nashville now is 5:00am. TURN OFF CAM

THANDI: Good morning, my name is Thandi Loewenson. The time in London now is 11:00 am. TURN OFF CAM

ADAM: Good afternoon, my name is Adam Kaasa. The time in Venice now is 12:00 midday. TURN OFF CAM

—Adam Kaasa, Thandi Loewenson, and David Burns

[END]

The following is the first in a series of articles written by students from the School of Architecture documenting their studies in their own words. An English translation of the article is available here.

En discusiones dentro del programa de doctorado de la escuela de arquitectura en el Royal College of Art decidimos formar un Grupo de Lectura donde leer y discutir sobre pensar en otro idioma y sus implicaciones. Funcionó como un experimento para compartir la experiencia de lectura colectiva entre aquellos que compartimos un mismo lenguaje desde nacimiento, así como aquellos que habían conocido este idioma a partir de sus investigaciones y viajes. El Grupo de Lectura buscaba ofrecer un espacio para compartir en tiempos de distancia social, pero también nos permite abordar lecturas nacidas en español y cuyo pensamiento sobre estudios decoloniales, teoría crítica, y política de género no se traducen tan fácilmente.

Como primer ejercicio colectivo trabajamos en este texto a partir de la primera lectura que compartimos del sociólogo peruano Anibal Quijano (1930-2018), “Colonialidad y Modernidad-Racionalidad”.

Cadáver Exquisito a partir de Aníbal Qujiano:

Quijano es principalmente conocido por su concepto de la ‘colonialidad del poder’. La discusión, en el contexto de una institución académica anglosajona y de tradición imperialista, tiene como objetivo reflexionar en español, sobre nociones de raza y cultura y el rol del lenguaje como dispositivo de poder que “genera el sistema-mundo moderno/colonial”. Este grupo de lectura busca explorar los sistemas de “producir conocimiento, de producir perspectivas, imágenes y sistemas de imágenes, símbolos, modos de significación; sobre los recursos, patrones e instrumentos de expresión formalizada y objetivada, intelectual o visual” de nuestra disciplina, la arquitectura y el urbanismo. Sobre cómo nuestras escuelas reproducen “patrones de expresión de los dominantes, así como de sus creencias e imágenes.”

Si la colonialidad según Quijano, impone un orden racial y/o etnico del mundo bajo el capitalismo, ¿qué rol puede jugar el lenguaje en el proceso emancipatorio de dichas estructuras de control? El pensar juntos en nuestros distintos entendimientos del idioma y sus traducciones castellanas, mexicanas, andinas, o incluso híbridas con el inglés, nos ayuda a esclarecer las identidades heterogéneas en aquello que pareciera unirnos; en ese lenguaje que compartimos, aún anclado de distintas formas, en los patrones de poder tan variados que rigen nuestras propias subjetividades. Este texto, a manera de cadáver exquisito, busca reflejar esas relaciones intersubjetivas como sede de la producción de conocimiento. Este ejercicio cuestiona el carácter “individual e individualista del sujeto”, evade la claridad autoral, y la post-producción. Es más bien huella de una conversación a siete manos sobre lo que significa pensar en español acerca de la modernidad-racionalidad que materializa nuestra disciplina.

El nacimiento de la arquitectura como profesión y del arquitecto como sujeto en nuestro contexto Iberoamericano emerge paradigmáticamente en la ebullición de los procesos colonizadores de las Américas, donde a finales del siglo XVII la creación de la academia de las matemáticas con estudios especiales en arquitectura al reinado de España, comienza estudios que pronto derivaron hacia la arquitectura militar y la fortificación gracias a documentos como el Tratado de Architectura, del matemático jesuita Jean Charles de la Faille. Una disciplina que para mediados del siglo XIX se sedimentó como autonoma de gremios ligados a las artes y las ciencias en medio de procesos revolucionarios y separatistas; en donde escuelas tan antiguas como la Academia Nacional de San Carlos que nace en el colapso del reinado español, establece la carrera tanto de Arquitecto como de Ingeniero Civil en 1858 y cuyos egresados construyen las infraestructuras de unificación de un territorio hasta entonces unido por la gran estructura colonizadora pero fragmentada en su gobernabilidad. Para la mitad del siglo XX este proyecto arquitectónico e infraestructural sería necesario en los procesos de modernización de los distintos países, donde castizos estudiados en instituciones europeas extienden sus preceptos de progreso y vanguardia en los contextos latinoamericanos.

Cabe detenerse pues en la connotación de “castizo” y “estudiados” anteriormente mencionada, subrayando el carácter masculino, étnico y cultural que denota y el trasfondo socioeconómico del sujeto al que interpela. Como nos enseñó el pedagogo y filósofo brasileno Paolo Freire (1921-1997), debemos preguntarnos cuáles son las relaciones sociales y de poder que se transmiten, cuestionan o perpetúan a través de determinadas pedagogías, ya sean académicas o implementadas a través de protocolos, institucionales o no, de interacción social. Como muestra, la aparente contradicción de hablar del “español” como idioma vehicular de este texto - al que se le dedicó la primera discusión oral de este grupo sin conseguir llegar a un consenso de cómo se debería llamar de forma inclusiva la lengua común; ¿Cuántos idiomas contiene en realidad “el español”? ¿Cuántas subjetividades complementarias? ¿Cuántas formas de pensamiento autónomo? Las omisiones resuenan en el silencio. Si la arquitectura es un lenguaje común y universal - algo dudoso en el fondo, pero a menudo reconocido - es pertinente recalcar las tan distintas subjetividades que la hacen posible, la articulan, la habitan y la discuten en los distintos idiomas que viven en cada uno de ellos.

Desde una posición en este territorio professional, cimentada como es en las divisiones disciplinarias y categorización implícita en el paradigma sujeto-objeto, quizás es posible considerar lenguaje como un primer paso en lo que de Sousa Santos llama el proyecto de “justicia cognitiva” que es presentado como prerrequisito para la descolonización del conocimiento y la emancipación de las epistemologías del Sur. ¿Cómo consideramos también las múltiples formas de expresión dentro de un idioma colonial, que contienen huellas de historias que han sido negadas en el canon euro-colonial? Es importante considerar la posición de la academia como un espacio tanto de extracción como de reproducción de conocimiento. Es un lugar de intercambio en el que el lenguaje, en sus múltiples expresiones formalizadas, hace una contribución prominente y constante a la producción conceptual de valor. Si vamos a cuestionar lo que Quijano describe como la concepción europea de una totalidad social, entonces tiene sentido considerar esto en términos de la relación entre modos de producción lingüísticos y el valor. En estos términos, podríamos contemplar qué métodos podemos incorporar para confrontar más profundamente los conceptos de propiedad y custodia en relación con el conocimiento y la subjetividad. Tales conceptos no necesitan ser limitados a la simple selección o negación de diferentes expresiones de significado, sino pueden ser aplicados a una trayectoria más larga de producción, en la que estas múltiples afirmaciones sobre la realidad se reinterpretan y reproducen en relación con otros discursos, significados y verdades.

Invitamos a todos aquellos miembros de esta institución que quieran pensar juntos en español a unirse a este grupo de lectura, proponer autores, líneas de cuestionamiento, o simplemente leer en voz alta.

—RCA School of Architecture PhD Spanish Reading Group

[END]

In 2021/22, ADS5 will concentrate on building elements, their origins, carbon sequestering materials, and how they can be joined, bound, and brought to completion. We intend to provoke the construction industry and apply ethical purpose to our architectural skill sets. Through investigation and experimentation, we will learn where stone, timber, and other sequestrating materials can replace standard building elements. As architects, we will empower ourselves to regain the role of ‘Design Team Leader,’ a role currently in the hands of Quantity Surveyors and Project Managers, figures who are understood to have the ‘behind the curtain’ knowledge of costs critical to determining the forward momentum of a project. Simply substituting one material for another based on cost alone does not anticipate - or acknowledge - the knock-on consequences to embodied carbon, social interaction, or the textural and poetic outcomes to the design. Furthermore, these substitutions potentially increase the price tag through more complex interfaces of building products and systems. We believe that only the architect is trained and suitably skilled to predict and control these variables. Assisted by structural and sustainability engineers, cost consultants, and specialist stonemasons and builders, ADS5 intends to equip our students with fundamental knowledge of material, structural, and sustainability costs. This will allow them to enter practice using their knowledge and consultant relationships to inform any project their practice is working on. We will demonstrate that this way can be cheaper, quicker, and greener to build. In short, our students will be the vanguard sent to change the industry from a net contributor of atmospheric carbon to a carbon capture industry.

Just as Karl Friedrich Schinkel questioned the relevance of classical language to a rapidly industrializing world, we may now ask what relevance do tectonics, style and expression have in the era of the Anthropocene? Can we build better and cheaper? What will our new patterns and processes look like? Can our influence on the planet and society be positive, as well as spatially enriching? What responses will it take, and where does it lead? What are the parameters guiding the ethics of our works, and how are these ethics reflected in a building’s freedom of expression?

During the Live Project, we will work with structural and sustainability engineers, along with quantity surveyors, to examine a selection of buildings, both newly completed and those about to break ground. This examination will result in a report on our greener, faster, and cheaper doppelgängers of these projects. The studio will then have a menu of different building elements, which can then be deployed on their design projects throughout the year. Our selection of projects will include, but are not limited to, the following typologies:

1. Office/Residential/Hotel/Mixed-Use Tower
2. Mid-rise urban blocks
3. Houses – terraced, semi-detached, or detached
4. Public Institutions
5. Bridges

We will then evolve our research and address our findings within a variety of parameters. We will test our findings in urban settings, as well as rural locations, and explore how these materials might be systematised and applied to a wide range of scenarios. Graphic representation will play a key role. Both in terms of visually depicting the building elements from our research, and how we draw and represent the joining, binding and completion of our design projects and underlying ideas.

—Amin Taha, Jason Coe & Peter Rae

[END]

Un Mundo Donde Quepan Muchos Mundos (For a world in which many worlds fit)¹

RCA International Lecture Series 21-22, co-curated by Charlotte Grace & Dubravka Sekulić

The following is the text-format of an interactive working document that developed the arc of the series, co-mapped by Charlotte and Dubravka, and available to look at here. In the interests of redistributing authorship and amplifying a range of voices from a position of relative visibility (in the architecture world at least), we have committed to excessive footnotes.

Carrying the common wind^{2 3} of last year’s Co-liberation lecture series⁴, this year we look to inhabit and expand the idea of “Re-possession.”

We see possession⁵ as relating to oneself and one's place. It is both material and ethereal. It can be reclaimed and reoriented. In the spirit of social movements that seek to both take back and push forward,⁶ we refer to repossession⁷ as the struggle for an emancipated ownership: an object, state or practice of (re)produced belonging, felt as equally outward and inward, reciprocally individual and collective.

Repossession is a challenge to property: it is permeable and responsive, contingent on belonging and unbelonging.

Over the course of the series we will reach into and out from the earth and the body; searching for ways to repossess and reimagine them.

We will begin by excavating the relationships between geological, decolonial, and architectural practices, before exploring corporeal acts and atmospheres, somatic limitations and horizons, and the embodiment and enactment of emancipated selves and spaces, where a form of repossession is paramount.

We will trace the lines⁸ that are drawn to oppress, extract, and eliminate, but we will also outline the alliances⁹ that can unsettle colonial logic.¹⁰

With these discussions we seek a practice that can harness the moments and movements that both shape space and strengthen struggle in the search for repossession.

The series works to collect together an intentional community,¹¹ situated in the affordances of now but oriented towards an other future. By mapping the emancipatory routes between ground and horizon, we want to get to the heart of the matter: to stretch out and open up where it meets, holds, and forms us; to foreground the ideas and artefacts that build memory, militancy, solidarity, imagination, and action otherwise.¹²

Confirmed Speakers include :

CAVE Bureau
Anupama Kundoo & Dima Srouji
Charles Heller (Forensic Oceanography // Border Forensics) & Nandita Sharma
Fred Moten, Stefano Harney & Charmaine Chua
Dread Scott & Imani Jacqueline Brown
Anne Holtrop
Marco Armiero
Amin Taha
Jinwar Women’s Village & the University of Rojava
Jonas Staal
Susana Caló & Godofredo Pereira

— Charlotte Grace & Dubravka Sekulić

[END]