It’s the end of the year so it’s (clearly I didn’t make it) list-making-time, and because it’s also the end of the first decade of the 21st century we have an interesting time-frame to look at, especially when dealing with architecture. It takes some time to build, to reflect, to see trends turn into fads and to digest what you actually appreciate in buildings. I take notice of most of architecture’s production through the media (like the most of us), which makes it hard to render a constructive criticism of building production in general. But what does communicate are the idea’s that have driven a buildings’ design. This list of ten buildings and their designers summarize what to me personally is inspirational. These buildings have an attitude I appreciate, they deal with reality in a pragmatic, poetic and smart way, and they address a context, its limitations and potential in a explicitly architectural way. The list is chronological, and it is first and foremost about ideas and not about the particular building per se.

2000: Lacaton & Vassal, House in Coutras

The French office Lacaton & Vassal works from a few simple but convincing ideas that carry through all their work but is perhaps most simply illustrated by the above house in Coutras and the one in Floirac.

Ready Mades 1

Architects are often not the ones driving innovation in the building industry, but on the other hand they are the first ones to jump on new design-tools and materials exploiting the potential. In a radical way not in terms of formal innovation but in using the potential of industrial mass-production this is what Lacaton & Vassal is doing by incorporating the greenhouse into their repertoire (Bucky would like it: cheap, mass-produced and light). It’s cheap in terms of material and labor, and thus enables lots of usable space for little money. Besides it being a pragmatic solution in terms of budget, the greenhouse is also a very pleasant space to be. Very light, open-able roof and sides, free view to the outside, and when adjacent to other spaces, these spaces can easily spill out into the greenhouse when more space is needed for a particular use. The greenhouse provides a habitable climate about 80% of the year, and it can be incorporated smartly in the climatic scheme of a project. The greenhouse space has a different quality in its finishing, temperature, etc. which makes it a space that allows different kinds of use, like; fixing your motorcycle, playing in a sandbox, party, gardening, i.e. messy stuff.

The Luxury of Space

“Luxury is not gilded materials – luxury is pleasure, happiness, comfort, and a good rapport with the outside world.” as Philippe Vassal tells us. The office’s mantra is that luxury is to have more space, to build more m² for less. This is not a good thing in itself, but in a world where the architect has to negotiate with project developers and housing corporations this is a strategy worth while, and one which the office is successful at. It is especially an approach that has been productive in the social housing projects they have done, where budgets are limited anyway and the trade off between a medium quality of materials and an industrial aesthetic that creates more space is easily made. For an example, take a look at their Social Housing project in Mulhouse. Here also the greenhouse is a perfect tool to realize this additional space, in Coutras as well as in Florias the greenhouse doubles the living space!

2002: Diller Scofidio, The Blur Building

The American office Diller Scofidio (now + Renfro) designed one of the most important buildings of the past decade: The Blur Building. A building made entirely of an artificial mist generated by an array of nozzles that vaporize the water from the Lake Neuchatel above which it hovers. It’s not there anymore because it was a temporary pavilion for the Swiss Expo 2002 in Yverdon-les-Bains.

The Stuff We Live In

This building puts forward a radically different definition of what space is, of what it means to define a space not by walls, openings or demarcations on the floor but by what the nature of space itself is. Space is not a void, not a vacuum, not just the leftover when you carve a hole out of solid matter. Space is oxygen, water, a gas infested with particles, the vacuum in between atoms. What we think of as space is extremely anthropocentric. It is where we as human beings can move through and/or see through. I’ve always been fascinated by underwater photography where the ceiling of the underwater scene is the light fracturing water surface. It is merely where one material stops and another begins, but we can move through both. “Our space” – the places where mankind can be- is as much a material as concrete is. Space is the stuff we live in! Much of my favorite artist; Olafur Eliasson‘s also works with these theme’s in very interesting and persuasive ways.

2004: Elemental, Quinta de Monroy Housing

In a collaborative and participatory process Elemental (an unusual partnership with COPEC (Chilean Oil Company) and the Pontifica Universidad Católica de Chile) produced a scheme, a system actually, for social housing (which is now being repeated across the country). The challenged was to re-house a community on the same location, maintaining the social fabric and their central location in the city. With the decision to stay on the location, which was three times more expensive than relocating to another plot, the project had to deal with extreme budgetary limits. But found the solution in building half of a good house, and leaving room and facilitating self-built expansion of the house by the inhabitants themselves. Here the architecture frames the infill.

More information on this project; Small Scale, Big Change at MoMA (has great video’s) and over at ArchDaily (has plans and sections)

Framing The Infill

The role of the architect in this case is to develop the framework, to design the architecture of the system that can host change, welcomes uncertainty, instead of designing a fixed image. Besides the budget constraints another argument Elemental uses is that in contrast with ‘normal’ housing, social housing decreases in value over, it’s more like a car, than it is real estate. To provide the space in the plan, literally ‘room for improvement’ each house acquires identity, inhabitants acquire pride in the upgrading of their house, and the public space doesn’t have the dreary monotony associated with social housing. The “framing the infill” approach is one that is not only useful in a social housing, or developing world context. Kunststad at the NDSM wharf, Amsterdam is an example. But balcony infills and literally frame infills are a common DIY practice in the Soviet social housing projects (Plattenbau, Microrayons) across the former Soviet union and eastern Europe. Although the frame/infill is really about an open system it is also used as an aesthetic, for instance this frame/infill pastiche by MVRDV in their Sildodam project in Amsterdam. While a certain system, produces a certain aesthetic, this doesn’t mean that behind that aesthetic the associated system is actually at work.

2004: Recetas Urbanas, Strategies for Subversive Urban Occupation

Recetas Urbanas, translates as Urban Recipes and this is exactly what a series of ‘Strategies for Subversive Urban Occupation‘ are. These projects, like the Skip project above, are scripts, how-to’s that exploit the loop-holes of the system. Recetas Urbanas seeks out the fringes, the legal limits of what the possibilities to make vacant space useful for playgrounds and temporal habitation. Architects as modern activists who don’t work against the grain of the system, but with the system as accomplice.

Love the System

Fuck the System, was the slogan of the Punk’s , Love the System, could perhaps be the slogan describing the hacker’s attitude. The hacker needs to passionately seek out the potential of a system, to exploit the possibilities that the authors unintentionally wrote into the system. A system serves specific agenda’s, it is equipped to deal with specific events, but ‘the system’ always lags. It lags behind the creativity and ingenuity of the hacker, of the entities that are unexpected, and were not incorporated as a possible variables. The system is the arena of the 21st century, with on one side the ones who write it, on the other side the ones who play it, whether this is the legal, technological, commercial or political system. The system will be the battlefield and the common ground for collaboration (also see Framing The Infill), we better learn to love it, one way or another. Especially when more and more gets systematized with the digitization of more and more sphere’s of society

2007: Ontwerpgroep Trude Hooykaas, The Crane-track (Kraanspoor)

When biking around the Amsterdam harbor searching for new office space Trude Hooykaas spotted an abandoned crane track and imagined it as the majestic pedestal for a long glass office hovering above it. Ten years later it was there. A long process, working together city authorities, a project developer and her office doing the design. The initiative was hers, and in that sense this project can classified as unsolicited. The Crane-track is simply the most beautiful re-use project i’ve ever seen.

Re-Use

Nothing shocking about this notion in architecture, although in building practice it’s still far from commonplace, as the recent Dutch contribution, Vacant NL, at the Venice Bienale makes clear. I would almost want to argue to write law that buildings need to be put to a use, when there is a shortage of housing, or another function for that matter. To forbid demolition to a certain extend, it’s basically the destruction of capital and history. Not that everything should be preserved, but in principle demolition should be the less attractive second option, not the first one.

2007: FAR, The Wall House

Another project from Chile, this time by FAR. Not just Chile, but the entire Latin-American world is presenting the world with great work and bringing an activist and socially conscious edge to architecture. Other favorites of mine are Urban Think Tank (Venezuela) and Pasaj Emergentes (Columbia). What I think is smart about The Wall House project is the concept of decomposing the laminate of which a buildings wall’s and especially its facades are usually made up of. The result is a ‘baggy architecture’ (the term comes from Rory) that allows a generosity of space, which allows for various types of usage changing over the course of a day and with the seasons.

More on The Wall House (images and plans) over at ArchDaily, and a profile on FAR over at designboom

Baggy Layering 1

A Building’s exterior wall is typically a package of construction, insulation and door or windows openings. This packages also serves a variety of functions security, privacy, comfortable indoor climate, visual control of the surroundings etc. With bundling all these functions in one laminated layer in a sense makes all inside spaces more or less interchangeable (when it comes to climate and comfort). When de-laminating the various materials which make up the typical exterior wall, it results in a series of ‘inbetweens’ with distinct atmospheric and functional qualities. What I often lack in buildings is a place that allows you to make a mess, or to be nonchalant about. The sterile modern dwelling limits usage, it doesn’t allow dirt, stains, damage. Typically this is the garage or the garden, but these are always so separated from the rest of the living experience of a house, like people, smells and sounds don’t spill over into other spaces. A baggy layering also allows for is a more gradual way of living in terms of time and space. Just like the winter-garden provides a space that provides you an option between summer and winter. It’s not, either weather to be outside, or weather to be inside, there is an intermediate option. Baggy layering allows for a spatial ebb and flow in a building and invites a broader pallet use. Baggy layering can also be seen in the work of Lacaton & Vassal and Architecten De Vylder Vinck Taillieu.

2007: Tezuka Architects, Fuji Kindergarten

In the category ‘buildings that make me smile’, this one is on the top of the list. Just he idea, but also the architecture, they’re so beautifully simple and executed gracefully. I remember first seeing it, I couldn’t stop smiling. The story behind the project has a similar feel good touch:

“The request from the kindergarten directors was extremely simple in content: “we want you to make a Roof House for five hundred kindergarten pupils.” We had been introduced by Kashiwa Sato, a creative director who loves the Roof House. The Roof House is a work we completed in 2001. Even now, the family eats together up on the roof. The Roof House has caused debate on its pros and cons. Has the roof been really used during hot summers and cold winters? The answer is YES. The husband and wife team that run the Fuji Kindergarten understood this roof without a single word of explanation. Nor was it necessary to explain the power of understanding of Kashiwa Sato, who had introduced us to the kindergarten directors. At the climax of the initial meeting, we conferred at the Roof House. Although it was originally just an inspection visit, having gone up onto the roof, somehow no one wanted to go home. Whether Mr. and Mrs. Takahashi (the owners of the Roof House) became involved, or whether the other couple involved them, unconsciously there was a deepening feeling of familial solidarity, however slight. We don’t think this is due to it being a gathering of people with similar hobbies and preferences. Discussion was unnecessary. The Roof House told us everything. “In summer the roof is hot, so we go out in the morning and evening. In winter the roof is cold, so the afternoon is good.” These comments from Mr. and Mrs. Takahashi, owners of the Roof House, penetrated to the essence of the architecture. This time, our team understood perfectly. The Roof House is the mother of the kindergarten.” – source: e-architect (for the entire story behind the realization and design of Fuji Kindergarten)

Here all the images and plans if the Fuji Kindergarten over at Architype Review

Rock the Roof

Probably one of the most under-utilized space of a building. No bigger story here other than a plea for that the roof should be used more, especially in urban settings.

2008: Architecten De Vylder Vinck Taillieu, Les Ballets C de la B en LOD

I think in recent years my appreciation for Belgian architecture is surpassing my appreciation of Dutch architecture. In the work of the Belgians there is an appreciation of the ordinary, an aesthetic not aimed at the spectacular, but at dealing with common materials but using them in an architecturally interesting ways. Unlike the Dutch or ‘Droog’ Design trick of old stuff, or the ordinary in a new wrapper, or with a ‘twist’, something Roemer van Toorn calls ‘Fresh Conservatism‘. The Belgians are virtuoso’s within the ordinary without trying to remix or refresh it. (All of this is a grand generalization, and weakly supported position. Not more than a hunch really)

Although an annoying website, one should take the effort to see more of De Vylder Vinck Taillieu’s work

Baggy Layering 2

In the facade above another example of baggy layering resulting in a very different kind of image as in FAR’s Wall House. Behind the vertical glass plane, a stone wall that locally retracts from the glass to make room for the stairs. In front of the glass are the sunscreens. Here the bagginess happens in a smaller range, every layer is visibly stacked on top of the other. Here the layering really results in a distinct aesthetic, this baggy aesthetic isn’t so much visible in the Wall House, where it the bagginess is experienced throughout in the entire plan.

Ready Mades 2

Not in this project, but in other projects of De Vylder Vinck Taillieu has used a remarkable ready made; the pre-fab strut, as a budget solution for keeping the floors up. Apparently cheaper than your basic concrete or steel column, although a pity you can’t profit from the column’s adjustable height after construction.

Here are more pictures and plans of the project: ovo-1(4)

2009: Gon Zifroni, Void House

Former Metahaven partner Gon Zifroni designed this house in Brussels. Minimalist woodwork, without interior walls and what I like most, no ground floor! Such a simple, but radical architectural move especially in a street with row housing where such a move makes an impact. I haven’t invented a name for why this appeals to me so much, but it has something to do with a fundamentally architectural move. To make an opening, to close of or to frame a view. To make one straightforward un-nuanced purely architectural gesture that radically determines the experience and use of space. Kersten Geers and David van Severen often use these brutally simple but radical architectural choices as well, like ‘walling a space‘ is a strategy that often occurs.

2010: John Körmeling, Happy Street

Definitely in the category ‘buildings that make me smile’; John Körmeling’s Happy Street, Holland’s contribution for the 2010 Expo in Shanghai. What I love about the work of Kormeling is it’s humor, it just tells us “Why so serious?”, and especially “Why so serious about design?”, which is I think important to ask more often than we as designers do. Design won’t save the world, but a happy street will lift your spirits, and perhaps this is what Körmeling thought, as he explains in the video. When addressing the Expo’s theme ‘Better City, Better Life” he replies with, “a good city starts with a good street”, who wouldn’t agree.

One of the things that intrigues me is that the architecture on Happy Street quotes the past, icon’s from the Dutch modernist canon (at one third of the original size, work of Duiker, Dudok, Rietveld and others). It’s retro, it’s pomo in a sense and it doesn’t annoy me at all (it usually does). For instance in all of Körmeling’s buildings he uses the same detailing, like simply re-using the classic modernist window detail (glass fitted in steel T- and L-profiles sealed with putty), and why not?. These details are simple and beautiful, and this probably means that deep inside, when it comes to aesthetics, i’m a modernist (which I don’t see as an insult). But it also brings back a the discussion of the recent Volume (#26) launch, on the ethics of aesthetics (a piece by Rory Hyde in the issue), with as one example the social housing project in Islington by FAT which makes me cringe honestly, but then again I think the Inntel Hotel in Zaandam by WAM Architecten is funny, I can actually appreciate it. Clearly humor is serious business!

The next day after I did my lecture on expanding architectural practice, new business models and unsolicited architecture there was a panel discussion with various practitioners, which in various ways fit into the ‘expanded’ or ‘unsolicited’ models of architectural practice promoted in this lecture. In this discussion some interesting guide lines or lessons were shared on their practice ‘models’. The practices around the table were: Agency, Coloco, Arquitecturas Colectivas and DJ arquitectura.

All of them practicing closely together with local authorities, directly with users and addressing urgent socio-economic conditions on the ground. Curious for what the kind of business models were behind these practices, I asked them ‘how do you pay the rent?’ and ‘how are projects initiated?’. Some of the answers/lessons:

Paying the Rent:

- Accept that you won’t earn a lot of money, and that you won’t get rich! You will be ‘poor’.
- Live and work cheaply.
- We are enabled to do our work with a grant/subsidy
- Take a part-time other job.

Taking Initiative:

- Yes, you start some projects without getting payed anything. But you need a realized project as a ‘proof of concept’. When a project actually does what it claims to do, people will ask you to it again in other places, repeated it and up-scale it.
- You have to realize that politicians have bags and dossiers packed with empty words, they need concrete projects, proposals to give those words real meaning. This is the potential, the opportunity. And this is also where eventually money will come from to realize projects, politicians are searching for opportunities to execute policy, you can provide that opportunity.
- Politician, are important as well as the media. They can speed up processes, you need journalist and politicians as collaborators to expose and broadcast ideas, in order to get the public on your side.

What I realized after these answers is that, the traditional role of the architect was very intimately connected to the client. The architect represented the client. Up to the crisis building project, real estate development etc. got bigger and bigger. Architect to an ever greater degree were working for investors, speculators. Organizations who rent out office space, who trade real estate and to whom return on investment is the most important criterion. Now their projects are On Hold. Recently the city of Amsterdam in their plans for 2011 declared that the current models of real estate development have failed. And that the city sees a great potential in citizens, collectives and small developers. The architect has to re-find the client, the client that actually lives and works in the house that he or she build for/with him. In other words the users, individuals, groups, collectives the various localities and those who inhabit them. The architect/client collaboration became something unholy, something that had little to do with users, citizens, the public, but all the more with the built environment as a commodity.

Redefining architectural practice is as much about redefining the architect as it is about redefining the client.

Although delivered simply as an amusing anecdote, when taken out of context, this crude piece of wisdom from the elder statesman Peter Corrigan seemed to capture the essence of ‘extra/ordinary’. This was a conference about engaged practitioners; engaged in the ‘ordinary’ messy reality while still managing to scratch out something ‘extra’. Architects presented innovative (and often idealistic) approaches to complex problems, while not afraid to go beyond the discipline to engage with the pragmatics of financing, policy or public engagement in order to see them executed.

Creative director Mel Dodd’s vision for the conference included the words ‘contingency’, ‘compromise’, ‘complexity’, ‘concession’, ‘collaboration’ and ‘constraint’ – a clear endorsement for tentative conclusions and grappling with the real as opposed to the confident presentations of crisp and complete buildings by architectural stars as we have seen at past conferences. This is at once a reflection of our ‘no frills’ economic times – an end to the age of excess – but also a statement of urgency for the profession. If we continue to hitch our future on offering rarefied aesthetics instead of participation in the complex mechanisms of the city, our days are surely numbered.

However, these words of vision came back to haunt the organisers, who were forced to make compromises, contingencies and concessions as Iceland’s volcano left five of the eight international speakers grounded in European airspace. This served to highlight Australia’s location on the other side of the world, far away from the global centers of discourse. Although most were able to present via satellite with few technical hiccups, as is the cliché of conferences generally – it’s not what is presented that matters, but what is said in the bar afterward – a layer that was unfortunately missed.

One of those who did make it was Alejandro Aravena of the Chilean practice Elemental, who presented a number of community housing projects which challenge established methods of financing and delivery to produce a more equitable and quality end product. For the Quinta Monroy housing in Iquique, Elemental worked within the government subsidy for housing provision of around $10,000 per house, which is only enough to build a tiny 40m2 house. Instead of accepting this limitation and perpetuating sub-standard outcomes, they instead reframed the problem, to build as Aravena describes, ‘half of a good house’. This is done in a way that encourages infill and extension in the future when the family can afford the materials themselves. A genuinely innovative and demonstrably beneficial built project.

Elemental’s Quinta Monroy housing in Iquique, Chile.

This ethically-motivated project contrasted sharply with the other projects Aravena presented which were planned for Switzerland, Germany and the United States. Despite claiming that the practice tries ‘to approach design problems in the same way in developing countries as in the developed world … to achieve the same limit of irreducibility’, with a seat on the Pritzker jury, and a building in construction on the Vitra campus adjacent to the fire station by Zaha Hadid, Aravena makes no secret of his ambition to join the A-list.

This seeming contradiction is highlighted further by the fact that Elemental is supported by the Chilean oil company Copec, who donate to the practice as part of their philanthropic investments. Although many assume this relationship to be sinister, could this instead signal an innovative practice model for the support of research into social projects? Just as Aravena upended the subsidy system in order to provide a full house with only half the budget, so his practice is also supported through an unlikely partnership. Both require vision beyond the ordinary.

Also flying the flag for the socially-engaged, research-driven approach was architect Teddy Cruz, who gave an express version of his excellent ‘Radicalizing the Local’ lecture via satellite. From a shocking analysis of the extreme disparities in wealth and opportunity that span the US–Mexico border, Cruz projected an architecture that could begin to address these social, economic and policy-related issues through built form.

Despite the obvious similarities in terms of territories and concerns, Aravena didn’t take kindly to my comparison of his work with that of Cruz, simply stating ‘I wouldn’t like to compare myself with him, because I haven’t seen any built work.’ I also have to admit, that while being incredibly impressed when I first came across the work of Cruz, by the third viewing I left feeling disappointed that his exceptional analysis and proposals have yet to be tested in reality. Of course, this need not be the responsibility of the urban researcher, but perhaps there are other architects who could adopt this thinking and deploy it as a case study? Without it, this incredible research is unlikely to make a difference where it is needed most.

Teddy Cruz, presenting via satellite.

In contrast to the earnestness of Cruz and Aravena, the inclusion of Sam Jacob (replacing his partner Sean Griffiths) from the UK firm FAT seemed a curious choice for a conference decidedly focused on the ‘ordinary’. But of course, this is precisely the territory FAT revel in, mining the language and peculiarities of ‘common’ taste – a kind of urban vernacular that dispenses with sober sincerity in lieu of humour and irony. We were treated to the chequered brick patterns of the Islington Square social housing development – supposedly derived from a dandy’s socks – and the digital mash up of a Gothic source book for the Sint Lucas school in Boxtel, Netherlands.

FAT’s Sint Lucas School, Boxtel, 2006

Not everyone supported this approach – again, Aravena showed his teeth (when I provoked him), claiming that ‘I don’t buy from that presentation that that is the taste of the people, it was extremely exaggerated, a bit ironic, and I don’t think you can play with these kinds of issues, [social housing] is a serious thing.’ This comment – and other backchat from delegates to the same effect – seemed to capture a major rift in the reception of the ideas presented; namely that social ambitions ought to be expressed with a corresponding language of earnestness. Has our Modernist training led us architects to measure authenticity and honesty by image not impact?

The doubters must have missed Jacob’s excellent potted history of half-timbering, where he traced the source of this so-called ‘authentic’ British style – revered by architectural conservatives such as Prince Charles – as one imported from Saxony, and originally built in England to remind these German invaders of home. Far from being vernacular, half-timbering in England is therefore nostalgic and referential at its very core. FAT pursue this superficial heritage to its extreme conclusion by creating a half-timbered font – pure communication – and use it to write nothing less than ‘Kill the Modernist Within’.

Indeed, hidden behind FAT’s fancy façades are buildings that are making a real difference in improving communities, a point reinforced in the presentation by Tom Bloxham of Urban Splash, the developer of the Islington Square project. FAT’s work brought much needed humour (and critical rigour) to a conference line-up bordering on high-horsery, and a reminder not to confuse the image of ethics or honesty with the actual social impact on the ground.

These speakers – and the many others I’ve overlooked here – represent a renewal of architecture’s instrumentality in dealing with social concerns. Our heritage and training in a spatial and aesthetic discipline is being augmented by a need to engage simultaneously on social, environmental and political levels. Our marriage to the market of past decades is being tempered by a broader responsibility for the city, and an ambition to take into account those needs beyond the commissioning client’s. It’s time we all learned how to fly.

Extra/ordinary conference site
Interviews with Sam Jacob and Alejandro Aravena for The Architects

Albena Yaneva (knowingly or not) took up Reyner Banham’s challenge as formulated 20 years ago in his Black Box essay; to venture into what architects actually ‘do’ and to do this through psychological and anthropological research into the messy reality of the office and observing the banal and mundane processes of design. This is what Albena Yaneva did and 010 publishers recently published her ethnographic research (which she did from 2002 till 2004) on the office life and design practice of OMA: Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design [buy]. Unlike the more traditional sociological research in architectural practice such as Dana Cuff’s Architecture: The Story of a Practice [buy], Yaneva has based her understanding of the social on Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT).

“ANT maps relations that are simultaneously material (between things) and “semiotic” (between concepts). It assumes that many relations are both material and “semiotic”. For example, the interactions in a bank involve both people, their ideas, and technologies.

Together these form a single network.
Actor-network theory tries to explain how material–semiotic networks come together to act as a whole (for example, a bank is both a network and an actor that hangs together, and for certain purposes acts as a single entity). As a part of this it may look at explicit strategies for relating different elements together into a network so that they form an apparently coherent whole.
According to actor-network theory, such actor-networks are potentially transient, existing in a constant making and re-making [1]. This means that relations need to be repeatedly “performed” or the network will dissolve. (The bank clerks need to come to work each day, and the computers need to keep on running.) They also assume that networks of relations are not intrinsically coherent, and may indeed contain conflicts (there may be poor labor relations, or computer software may be incompatible).” – Wikipdia (28-3-2010)

She has chosen to report on her research object, the office life and design practice at OMA , in the format of short stories composed of anecdotes, interviews and office stories. So, no academic language and heavy referencing, but staying close to the language, operations and materials on the office floor. Yaneva makes this deliberate choice based on a distinction she makes between meta- and infra-reflexive discourse, a distinction developed by Latour. “Meta-reflexivity is based on the idea that the most deleterious effect of a text is to be naively believed by the reader as in some way relating to a referent out there. Reflexivity is supposed to counteract this effect by rendering the text unfit for normal consumption  (which often means unreadable). This accepts as given that the readers are naïve believers, that there is such a thing as a normal consumption, that people easily believe what they read, and finally that believing is always to relate an account to some referent ‘out there.’ This is a very naïve set of beliefs in the naïve beliefs of readers.”( Bruno Latour in The Politics of Explanation: an Alternative [pdf]) “I prefer to follow an infra-reflexive approach that goes against this common belief by asking no privilege for the account at hand. This exercise in infra-reflexive writing can be seen as a test of the short story genre in design studies. In the accounts presented here, architects and their models are free and active anthropological projects, full of life, and ready to take part in an intriguing story; design process appears as a reflexive and responsive event.” – Yaneva Albena

What follows are accessible stories about office life, the trajectory of design objects through the office space, with simple illustrative examples, experiences of individual designers. The drawback of Yaneva’s approach is that the there is a lot of repetition in the text, the importance of the foam-model environment is stressed over and over again. Nonetheless, the book contains many revealing anecdotes and insightful interviews, also the restraint from academic referencing is a nice experience and makes it a quick and accessible read.

For me personally Yaneva’s work is special, because she really did the research I at one point in my graduation project at TU Delft had in mind. That is, to do a more or less ethnographic research in an architecture office based on a grounded theory method (which has some affinity with ANT). I eventually did a comparative literature research and wrote a theory [pdf]. One of my main inspirations was Donald Schön, as was Yaneva’s, since Schön was most interested in the perspective and experience of the designer him/herself, and thus also in working on a theory which would fit that experience. A theory that would be recognizable to architects, and not exclusively for one specific type of practice, or from only one point of view. So I’m very happy with Yaneva’s work! She writes:

“The common feature of all stories is that they all account for the nature of design invention; the latter is not reduced here to an abstract concept of creation or construction. Instead, I tackle it as something that revolves into concrete actions and practices: in collective rituals, techniques, habits and skills ingrained by training and daily repetition, in reuse of materials and recycling of historical knowledge and foam chunks. It is also a very fragile process – when a building is in the making and as long as it exists as a scale model, its existence is very tentative, very frail. At any moment in design process it can live or it can die, it can merge into something else, it can be reused, recollected. That is, a view of design as constituted from the inside; it stems from the experience of making.” – Yaneva Albena

What I found in Yaneva’s stories are illustrations and elaborations on many of my own theoretical ideas. In a series of posts that will follow I will elaborate on this. To be expected are posts on C.S.Peirce‘s Diagrammatic Reasoning, illustrated by some of Yaneva’s anecdotes and observations, as well as an elaboration on the rhetoric behind the Seattle Central Library into which Yaneva provides some different angles on how this supposedly ‘super-logical’ building came to be.

Banham would be pleased to read Yaneva’s ethnographic account of the ‘tribe’ of architects housed in their ‘tribal longhouse’ on the Heer Bokkelweg, especially when he would read about Olga’s dance.

“Watch Olga as she is seized by something unexpected: she starts straying in the office with the new NATO model in her hands. Is there a design idea that precedes the shape we see as we follow Olga in her excited dance through the office, showing the model that holds the idea to tell the architects from other project bubbles? No, no one can claim there is an abstract idea that first appears in the creator’s mind, and is later embedded, incorporated, materialized in a shape. The idea emerges as inseparable from sensible matter; it has an objective locus.” – Yaneva Albena

Something of the likes of a ritual almost happens in the office, Olga is exited by a ‘discovery’ and wants to share her excitement. Also it happens to her, it’s not a preconceived concept in the mind that just needs to be drawn or made. If there is anything of a mystical nature happening in architectural design it happens to the designer, and is not done by the designer. The locus of ideas is to a large extent outside the architects brain, and heavily influenced by the possibilities and limits of the tools and materials architects use in their studio. Models are never thrown away, architectural inventions (remember the patents in Content?) are cherished and constitute the laboratory architects works in. All these ideas, patterns, devices, parti or concepts materialized either as models, drawings or pixels, in other words this is the external hard-drive of the architectural brain, this is the stuff architect think with.

A review of Yaneva’s book at Archined (March 15 2010) : Blue Foam

Albena Yaneva, Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design, o10 publishers 2009, p. 128, € 19,50, ISBN 987 90 6450 714 4