Democracy, Deliberation, and Hybridity in Three Contemporary Architectural Practices: Interboro, Apolonija Šušteršič, and Stealth

Reviews \| Buildings + Projects

Apolonija Sustersic, Bonnie Dundee, interior view, Dundee, Scotland, 2005. (Courtesy of Apolonija Sustersic.)

Journal of Architectural Education, Democracy, Deliberation, and Hybridity in Three Contemporary pp. 116—122 ª 2009 ACSA Architectural Practices: Interboro, Apolonija Sustersic, and Stealth

NOAH CHASIN Bard College

Democracy, Deliberation, and Hybridity in Three Contemporary Architectural Practices: Interboro, Apolonija ˇ Susˇtersicˇ, and Stealth

Writing in 1962, the Dutch architect and Team 10 Secretary Jaap Bakema claimed if architecture and planning could shake hands again, streets and buildings will define each other \[sic\] in return. Two disciplines playing nicely together seemed, at the time, like a long shot. Today, a growing number of architects have grown suspicious and even weary of the professions long-standing sovereignty, choosing to challenge conventionally hierarchical arrangements, to expose sites to the mysteries of the atelier (allowing the site to serve as the space of work, rather than designing, a priori, every detail), and to undo the tyranny of heteronomy. These adherents to the cult of hybridity are as

These adherents to the cult of hybridity are as nomadic as their projects are restless. Refusal to reside in a single city is a function of the works existence amid liminal spaces beyond geographic urban confines, and yet always within them as well. Their projects are motivated by a shared perception that master narrativesof epistemology; of the intersections of art, urban conditions, and politics; and of geopolitical and biopolitical truthsmust be subjected to a radical reframing such that the vicissitudes of contemporary life not only avoid neglect but, in fact, comprise the substance of a new mode of existence. Their work is more often than not staged through the rules and regulations of an intervention, rather than through the canonical practice of monumentality. The question as to whether theirs is a cultural activity, a social commentary, an aesthetic act, or something that stands outside of previously established categories,

is a question that I hope to answer (or at least to problematize) here. Biopolitics, as derived from Michel Foucaults

problematize) here. Biopolitics, as derived from Michel Foucaults writings, has been used and abused recently in varying ways. Here, without launching into a philosophical inquiry into the terms utility, Id like to use it in an admittedly narrow manner. We have known for some time the way in which architectural and urban practice has been utilized to entrench hegemonies and reinforce traditions both old and new. What one can now observe is an acknowledgment of the power of motivated intellectual and cultural practices to give voice to disenfranchised communities, those that are culturally, sociologically, economically, geopolitically marginalized. The conventional boundaries of marginality most definitely have shifted, and architecture and planning must move with these shifts to take proper stock of the way that the politics of center and periphery have heretofore been played out, and of how they must change in order to accommodate new positions. Many hybrid architectural practices address

All of the practitioners discussed were trained as architects, save one member of Interboro, trained as an urban planner. That they have chosen to work outside of the relative conformity and comfort of conventional architectural practice is not entirely a financially motivated decision. Instead, the interstitial qualities of these practices derive organically from a response to the unstable conditions of political and cultural realities that characterize contemporary urban conditions. Interboro, comprised of Georgeen Theodore, the late 1990s. At that point, the politics and ingenuity of self-organization came into play: a flea market arose in the vacant lot; it became a popular place for drivers license practice and testing; and informal gatherings of both political and illicit natures occurred. The point of the exercise was not to repurpose the site as a first step at rehabilitation, but to see how disregarded urban spaces organi- cally prosper in unanticipated ways. Interboros metaphor for the assessmenta sort of etiological appraisalimagined the site as a body depleted by disease in which healthy biological constituents, aided by medical interventions, could still be identified from the faint pulses of activity detected

1. Interboro, Site Plan, In the Meantime, Life with Landbanking,winning entry for Dead Malls Competition, 2002. (Courtesy of Interboro Partners.) within the decaying corpus. Interboro principal including the residents of this socio-culturally one that had been landbanked by the malls Daniel DOca calls this incremental approach the diverse neighborhood at the nexus of Downtown developer (Figure 1). The developers refusal to cumulative effect of little moves.1The intention, Brooklyn, Fort Greene, and Park Slope. transform the mall into something that could ultimately, is to extrapolate events, uses, amenities, The best example of the firms interdisciplinary immediately benefit the community was based on and the internally organic, inchoate nature of the approach might be found in their winning project financial concerns; yet what Interboro observed to site in order to envision its multivalent potential for the LA Forums Dead Malls competition (2002). have happened while the site sat dormant was quite uses as a cohesive unit, rather than as an inert series Their choice of the Dutchess County Mall in Fishkill, compelling. Once a thriving commercial destina-of disintegrated, discrete spaces. NY was motivated by a careful perusal of the site, tion, the mall had reached a state of desuetude by One of Interboros current projects seeks to ratify similar attempts at community advocacy

2. Interboro, Parameter, Varick and Canal Streets, New York City. (Courtesy of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.) through a project for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. A 37,000 square foot site at the nexus of Canal and Varick Streets and Sixth Avenue lies empty, awaiting development by Trinity Real Estate. Interboro is in the process of designing a sculpture park that will function with a rotating series of site- specific installations, the entire project lasting for 3 to 5 years. The requirement of a perimeter fence, due to the lot being technically a construction site, necessitates that the firm integrate some sort of boundary into the plans conceptual framework (Figure 2). The design calls for a module that can function simultaneously as a fence unit and a bench segment, each module moveable to accommodate whatever sculptural intervention might be proposed and accepted into the space. In this way, the fence becomes the projects most public and usable part. Likewise, a series of trees will be planted to correspond to the sites proposed street grid, Democracy, Deliberation, and Hybridity in Three Contemporary Architectural Practices: Interboro, Apolonija Sustersic, and Stealth

1. Apolonija Sustersic, Community Research Office, interior view, iBiD Gallery, London, 2002. (Courtesy of Apolonija Sustersic.)

1. Apolonija Sustersic, Bonnie Dundee,aerial view, Dundee, Scotland 2005. (Courtesy of Apolonija Sustersic.)

incubating the future open-source network of the site, according to principal Georgeen Theodore. The democratic ideals espoused by open

site, according to principal Georgeen Theodore. The democratic ideals espoused by open source advocates of all disciplines (be they software, housing, or literature based) are precisely the antidotes to heteronomy that many alternative practices find most compelling. A U.S. president speaks of the need for a deliberative democracy, while simultaneously assembling a cabinet whose clashing viewpoints virtually guarantee that policy meetings will be structured like graduate philosophy seminars. This will come as welcome relief from the obedient, team-building exercises that were likely the norm in the outgoing administration, and in Obamas agenda one can discern hints of a notso-subtle shift in the way that more of us are beginning to gauge the importance of understanding the workings of free space (that is, space as in communal, not Cartesian). Deliberation connotes discourse, and dis-

as in communal, not Cartesian). Deliberation connotes discourse, and discourse, as many have come to accept it, begets indeterminacy. The peripatetic Apolonija Sustersic, a Slovenian-born architect practicing in Amsterdam and teaching in Stockholm, works often in concert with other artists, architects, theorists, and curators to create a hybrid practice the parameters of which are deliberately hard to grasp. For 2 ½ months in early 2002, Sustersic took over the iBiD Gallery in East London and transformed it into the Community Research Office, a space for the discussion and dissemination of ideas about gentrificationspecifically focusing on the neighborhood where the gallery is located, but also understood as a larger urban issue (Figure 3). A kind of mobilized version of David Adjayes two Idea Stores (also in London), Sustersics intention was to begin with an empty space and gradually fill the gallery with material accumulated from a series of invited guests, speakers, and community members. The exercise mirrored the way in which gentrified neighborhoods gradually (and somewhat artificially) transform from empty, disused space to ones comprised of material displays of increased affluence and use. It character drivenan interactive, interdisciplinary, temporal series of actions that can only be understood as a convergence of constituent actions and actors, both intentional and incidental. In collaboration with architect Meike Schalk, Sustersic created another participatory intervention at the Contemporary Arts Center in Dundee, Scotland for a 2005 exhibition called Our Surroundings. Bonnie Dundee, as the installation was titled, was modeled after famed Scottish bot-

5. TU-Delft Faculty of Architecture After Fire, May 2008. (Photo by Sjors van Berkel courtesy of TU Delft.) anist and urban reformer Patrick Geddes, whose also deliberately opened up the often internal and the traditional primacy of artistic intention and model of the garden landscape and the Valley mysterious processes of artistic invention and relocates agency to the dynamic interactions that Section were early-twentieth-century attempts to research into public view, inviting scrutiny, criticism, take place on and within the site, rather than within foreground the importance of community and social praise, encouragement, skepticismessentially the a set of a priori decisions imported to the site as interaction in the formation of urban contexts. In gamut of potential responses. a kind of temporary artifice. Part charrette, part Dundee, a greenhouse, suggesting perhaps both Sustersic called the Community Research studio exercise, part curatorial enterprise, Joseph Paxtons Crystal Palace (1851) and the Office a study situation. 2 This taxonomy refuses Sustersics intervention is performative rather than transparency of the International Style, took center stage on a small tract of sod-covered land in an

6. Stealth, Archiphoenix: Faculties for Architecture, Venice 2008. (Courtesy of Stealth.)empty lot near the citys waterfront (Figure 4). Again, the site and structure served as a meeting place for public discussions on the positive and negative connotations of urban activism. As Schalk and Sustersic write, the structure demonstrated how a city planning office could be thought of less as an exclusive institution, and more as a public meeting place. 3 The publicness of architectural and urban design practice are benchmarks of the works by Dutch architect Marc Neelen and Belgrade-trained architect Ana Dzokic, who together comprise Stealth Architects (their name is sometimes ren- dered as stealth.ultd). Their description of a hybrid practice is of working on a horizontal, interdisciplinary level . . . treating space as an agency. The concern is more about what an architect can lead you to understand about space and structures than how the practitioner can determine how \[space and structures\] function as objects. Along with Ole Bouman, architectural theorist and director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, Stealth co- curated the Dutch pavilion at the 2008 Venice Democracy, Deliberation, and Hybridity in Three Contemporary Architectural Practices: Interboro, Apolonija Sustersic, and Stealth

1. Stealth, Transformation of the City through the Processes of Wild Building and Street Trade,from Wild City, 1999—2001. (Courtesy of Stealth.) Architecture Bienniale, the theme of which was Neelen and Bouman included), and saw this con-decided to design a pavilion holding 1,500 trans- architecture beyond building. Stealth and Bou-flagration as a symbol of the need to rethink lucent crates that could be fashioned into myriad man had just witnessed the accidental burning of architectural practice from the ground up, as it were spatial organizations (Figure 6). Here, they staged the Faculty of Architecture building at the Univer-(Figure 5). Rather than showing significant build-a series of debates with invited speakers revolving sity of Delft (a school with many illustrious alumni, ings of the past two years, the curatorial team around themes relevant to the state of the CHASIN

1. Stealth, Densification: New Belgrade,from Wild City, 1999—2001. (Courtesy of Stealth.)

architectural profession, a series entitled Archiphoenix: Faculties for Architecture. The obvious invocation of the creature rising from the ashes, along with the double entendre of the word faculties, makes clear what was at stake in the project. The self-referential nature of the project is evident, too, which is to say that it was a pavilion at an architectural biennial circumscribing a space in which architectural collectivity was discussed collectively, and this discussion of how such spaces in such pavilions might function occurred at the moment that the efficiency of one iteration of such a space was in the process of being tested. Already in 1999—2001, Stealth had begun to

native having completed graduate studies at the Berlage Institute (then located in Amsterdam), noticed a schizophrenia in the conditions separating the two cities most familiar to her, and used an architecture studio in Belgrade to compile a database of the genetics of uncontrolled urban processes as manifested in the depravity of Belgrades built fabric (Figure 8). Much like Interboros Dead Malls project, Wild City sought to use Belgrade as a laboratory, identifying rules within the chaos, and asking the central question, If you can only block or erase \[an\ 5\ underutilized space\], can you still interact with it? In order to understand the clandestine contours of this disenfranchised public sphere, Stealth collaborated with experts in such fields as artificial intelligence and astrophysics in order to examine the whole theoretical spectrum of chaos from the discrete to the expansive.

Notes

1. Conversation between author and Daniel DOca, Georgeen Theodore, and Tobias Armborst, Brooklyn, NY, 11 November 2008. 2. Apolonija Sustersic and Liutauras Psibilskis, Apolonija Sˇusˇtersicˇ: Community Research Office (Frankfurt am Main: Revolver/Archiv fu‹r aktuelle Kunst and London: iBiD Projects, 2004), p. 19. 3. Meike Schalk and Apolonija Sustersic, Project Bonnie Dundee, in Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Nolwenn Marchand et al., Urban Act: Practices, Groups, Networks, Workspaces, Organisations, Tools, Methods, Projects, Data, & Texts (Montrouge, France: Moutot Imprimateurs, 2007). Significantly (for the argument at hand) the copyright of the book is actually held jointly by all the contributors and the publication is organized through a network of distributors, all of whom have agreed to give away one copy of the book for each one that is sold. The book is also available as a free PDF download at www.peprav.net or www. urbantactics.org. 4. Interview between author and Marc Neelen and Ana Dzokic, November 19, 2008, New York City. 5. Ibid.

There is not room here to adequately explore the concept of the public sphere, either in its historical or its contemporary manifestation (or, for that matter, to debate the concept of its existence entirely). For the sake of discussion, we may assume that there exists a concrete or conceptual space in which the dialectics of contemporary discourse are played out. The contours of this space are contested and increasingly dematerialized, corresponding to the incursion of technologys role into information management and into the mechanisms of social networking. Each of these three practices plays amid the interstices of this as-yet identifiable public sphere, challenging its boundaries from the most material to the most ontologically abstract. One can see how, in the projects discussed above, the intertwined roles of discussion and deliberation come to the fore, returning the most democratic principles of inclusion and community building back to the constituents of those democracies and communities, and establishing the ground rules for their emergence where they do not yet exist. This is the most imperative role that architectural practice can play within our eras rapidly unraveling web.