Agency

Working With Uncertain Architectures

Florian Kossak, Doina Petrescu, Tatjana Schneider, Renata Tyszczuk, Stephen Walker, Florian Kossak, Doina Petrescu, Tatjana Schneider, Renata Tyszczuk, Stephen Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135281908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

While the potential of agency is most frequently taken to be the power and freedom to act for oneself, for the architectural community this also involves the power and responsibility to act as intermediaries on behalf of others.

Presenting current thinking from practitioners and scholars from around the world, this book asks for a more active relationship between the humanities, the architectural profession, and society. Considering issues of architectural research as an agency of transformation, this book explores how humanities research can better contribute towards understanding current architectural needs.

Agency
Working with uncertain architectures

Florian Kossak, Doina Petrescu, Tatjana Schneider,
Renata Tyszczuk and Stephen Walker

‘Our Climate. Our Land’: Greenpeace buys a plot of land in Sipson near Heathrow Airport, on the site of the planned third runway.

The picture shows a meadow where two people have scarcely finished carving out the words

OUR CLIMATE

OUR LAND

We can see an air traffic control tower in the distance and, even fainter, a plane just taking off.

At the beginning of 2009, this piece of land was purchased by a Green-peace coalition and it sits right in the middle of the terrain between the villages of Sipson and Harmondsworth that has been earmarked by the British Airport Authority (BAA) for the proposed third runway development for Heathrow airport.¹ Greenpeace bought it as an act of direct opposition to the extension plans of the airport authority, noting that ‘at full capacity, Heathrow would become the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in the whole country. We can’t let this happen if we are serious about tackling climate change’ (Airplot!). Should BAA want to purchase that land, Greenpeace have said they will challenge the proposals – not only legally but also through the physical obstruction and blockage of construction.

Although only four owners can be named on the deed for this plot of land, Greenpeace have invited the public to become beneficial owners. This offer has been taken up by over 45,000 people so far.

These tens of thousands of co-owners (even if only in spirit) turn Green-peace's local spatial move of acquiring a piece of contested land not only into something that is trans-local but also into something that acts on and refers to an international scale. People from all over the world can join a protest that in itself has both local and global implications.

‘Our climate, our land’ is the story of a growing network of activism that traverses geopolitical borders to highlight issues of universal concern. By filling in a simple form on Greenpeace's website someone becomes complicit that some small and seemingly immaterial decision might have a real and very material implication within a concrete context.

It is an awareness of this relationship between individual action and the bigger picture; the issue of scale; of knowingly exploiting and working with cause and effect; of a knowledge of the ‘system’ and how to intervene, transgress and exploit it to one's advantage; and of realising the power and transformative potential of connections, between subjects, disciplines and people, that is the key to this book and the understanding of the term ‘agency’.

‘Agency’ in Sheffield

The conference, AGENCY, started with a research group called ‘Agency’, initiated in 2007 in the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield. It arose through the alliance of staff and researchers working in and around the subject of architectural practice and education, taking a critical view of normative values and standard procedures in order to propose alternatives. The focus from the beginning was on how architectural practice and education might evolve in the context of radical transformation of society and the environment.

AGENCY conference desk.

‘Agency’ is potentially a provocative name for a research group. It was chosen to give an immediate sense of the research in the group being active, engaged and outward-looking. It implies change, with a hint of subversive irony. The strapline ‘Transformative Research into Architectural Practice and Education’ expands the idea, stressing the word ‘transformative’ to suggest a research activity that both creates and responds to shifting conditions. Instead of remaining passively (and safely) contained within our academic environments, we see ourselves as agents acting both within and between the fields of research, practice, education and civic life.

The potential of agency might first be understood as the power and freedom to act for oneself, but for the architectural and architectural research community it also involves the ability to act on behalf of others, bringing responsibility. Both the discipline and the profession have always tended to become embedded in dominant power structures: this is manifest at various scales, from the body to the building, then on to city, continent and globe. To remain in this position opens them to Gramsci's accusation that they support and maintain the prevalent ideologies of the status quo.² The role of architects and academics cannot be neutral: if played out uncritically it reverts to the interests of those in power.

‘Agency’ offered to host the 5th AHRA international conference, giving it also the theme agency, hoping that the submissions would energise the relationships between the humanities, the architectural profession and society. We wanted to explore ways of understanding current architectural needs, possibilities and capacities for action. Humanities research has a tendency to be too inward looking: ‘Agency's’ ambition was to redirect such work towards greater engagement. We hoped to shift the focus away from the objects and processes of architectural production towards an investigation of their wider context and possibilities. We wanted to learn from the papers offered what is meant by ‘action’ in the different contexts of research and practice. We wanted to know what kinds of activities and conditions were relevant, what prevents the effective exercise of agency, and what the necessary tactics for action might be. We hoped also to address the big social and political questions of our age concerning human survival and the environment.

Florian Kossack et al.

‘Agency’ also considered the conference structure in itself as an exercise of agency; it was not only an academic conference but also a social (and spatial) event. Indeed, the social, spatial and cognitive production was continuous, overlapping, and considered without hierarchy. Spaces outside the School of Architecture were used and transformed in such a way that other users of the university could interact with and benefit from the event. At the same time, the conference was considered within the school's pedagogical framework, being integrated in the teaching curriculum of the M.Arch course, and students were also involved in the organisation.

AGENCY fringe events: Community Design Centre by An Architektur and Mathias Heyden.
Fringe events allowed engagement beyond the temporally limited and often passive reception of a paper presentation, making the topic of agency more visible. For example, the construction of the exhibition Community Design Centre by An Architektur and Mathias Heyden was undertaken with the help of Sheffield students. This turned the students into active agents and producers rather than mere recipients, demonstrating the kind of creative participation process discussed theoretically by Till, Petrescu and Blundell Jones (2005). The exhibition curators were present, and engaged in discussions both with the conference audience and with each other. While a conference paper can theorize a concept such as ‘agency’, presenting and discussing examples, an exhibition has added power to engage an audience. Its duration allows a longer and repeated engagement with the topic, and deeper, more multilayered reflection on the material presented.

AGENCY fringe events: Urban Act
A second exhibition, Urban Act by atelier d’architecture autogérée presented the result of a European research project on alternative urban activism, including a book launch. The book and exhibition presented the work of twenty-three groups (artist groups, media activists, cultural workers, software designers, architects, students, researchers, neighbourhood organisations, city dwellers including a number of participants at the Agency conference), whose activist work takes different forms: from radical opposition and criticism to a more constructive and propositional acting, embedded in everyday life. Both exhibition and book launch took place in one of the school's architectural studios, generating discourse about academic research, alternative practice and architectural education, which aimed to broaden the students’ understanding of architectural practice.

AGENCY fringe events
A third exhibition presented the Interdependence Day (ID) Project set up to test new ways of framing global environmental change and sustainability issues. Seeking to break away from the disempowering litany of impending disaster that ‘knowing about climate change’ tends to bring, it invited participants to explore the current state of global interdependence, encouraging experiment and creativity in a politics of change. The exhibition included stills from recent works by Renata Tyszczuk developed in the context of the ID Project. These works addressed the imprecise and provisional nature of public and expert responses to climate change, drawing attention to what Tyszczuk calls the ‘alternative axioms’ of uncertainty and scarcity: ‘we don’t know when its coming in’ (dv, 2006) and ‘we don’t have a survival kit’ (mappa mundi installation, 2007). Other exhibitions included How Yellow Is Manchester? by Dougall Sheridan, If I Could Redesign London I Would … by Sarah Wigglesworth Architects; Design with Research in Mind by the BDR–Bureau of Design Research.

The papers and events at the AGENCY conference offered new insights into the notion of agency and answered many of the initial questions by proposing original approaches. These could be taken to fall into three broad thematic activities: to intervene, to sustain and to mediate. These three themes also form the structure of this book, and will be introduced here in turn.

Intervene

To intervene necessitates action since intervening also always means interposing, intercepting and often interfering. In the context of agency, intervening takes on a political and ethical meaning. Here, it is about the influencing of processes through tactical manoeuvres, by stepping in and affecting their course. For agency to be exercised in its fullest sense though, this intervention always takes place through negotiation and deliberation and ultimately brings about the empowerment of those involved. This is something that all chapters in this section have in common: an urge, call it an itch, to bring things or people together and thereby to promote this intervener, this agent, to be not only an intermediary but also pro-active and practical when working with and within the production of space. All contributions in this section address the role that time plays within the process of intervening; several chapters investigate the means through which intervening becomes possible; some look at the relationship and power structures between all agents involved in any given process or project in education or practice; some discuss how models of human agency can be challenged to allow an ethical framework for a more sustainable society to develop.

Phoebe Crisman (‘Environmental and Social Action in the Studio: Three Live Projects along the Elizabeth River’) is interested in the potential that architecture school in general, and the design studio in particular, bring to the exploration of agency in situations where students engage directly with communities through dialogue and building. By discussing a series of design studios she has been engaged with, Crisman reflects on the inherent political nature of her teaching approach. At the same time her experience latently draws attention to the fragility of this type of agency, due to its dependence on the strong intellectual set-up of the parameters within which all agents involved in the project operate. Agency, here, is first and foremost about Crisman's understanding of the group as morally responsible actors in respect of a process. The design studio is guided by inclusive principles and gives the architect's role a different meaning, in which ‘risk’ (in the sense of not-knowing-what-the-outcome-might-be or I-might-not-get-my-scheme-through) is seen not as a threat but as an opportunity. This way of thinking fundamentally challenges traditional architectural education and preconceptions about the questions of ‘what an architect is supposed to do’.

It is the history of the Yale Building Project between 1966 and 1969 that is captured and contextualised by Richard W. Hayes (‘Activism in Appalachia: Yale Architecture Students in Kentucky, 1966–9’) and which he identifies as an ‘unprecedented experiment in learning-by-doing and community service’. Hayes gives an historical perspective to Crisman's more recent activities in architecture school, positioning his account against the background of major institutional changes that occurred in the 1960s and Charles Moore's change of emphasis in the architectural curriculum from the point when he took over as Chairman of the Department of Architecture at Yale in 1965. Building upon a student initiative of designing and building houses for private clients, the intention behind Moore's Building Project was for first-year students to get direct experience steered towards social responsiveness. Whilst initiated from above, the Building Project was essentially student-led. Moore and his team established a set of rules of engagement and while the finished products/buildings as such found resonance in the architectural press, Moore continued to stress the importance of the process over the product, of student experience over skilful design. This critical approach to pedagogy, the shifting of power structures as well as the empowerment of students that enabled and still enables the Building Project interventions, illustrates the potential to instil agency: through leaving the ivory tower behind but also through direct action which calls attention to the transformative potential of architecture.

Dana Vais (‘Secondary Agency. Learning from Boris Groys’) explores the potential transfer of Boris Groys’ writings on art onto the subject of agency and architecture. She particularly focuses on the concept of the ‘secondary’: a position that is not the most powerful – neither, however, is it marginal. The secondary, she asserts, acts through the indirect, circumstantial, delayed and incomplete, and is always dependent on others. Mapping this notion of the secondary, Vais tests these observations against the concept of action as developed by Groys in reference to three multidisciplinary practices: Duo, 3RS and TUB. She looks at the role of the agent, arguing for assemblages over individual authorship; the space in which actions take place, noting the importance of situatedness and location; the avoidance of the production of mere objects and a focus instead on the project; the fabrication of difference or otherness as an induced strategy; ready-mades and the strategy of over-identification with a political system or spatial arrangement. Vais sees the agency of these practices as defined through their indirect nature; something that isn’t immediately in the foreground but comes to the fore through sheer perseverance.

The final chapter in this section is both historical and contemporary and is in one way also a direct expression of a form of agency. In an interview with Roberta Feldman and Henry Sanoff, An Architektur and Matthias Heyden (‘On Consensus, Equality, Experts and Good Design – An Interview with Roberta Feldman and Henry Sanoff’) explore the changing conditions and changing power structures within which Community Design has been operating in the US since 1963. It is here that the term agency is stressed to its fullest extent: Feldman on the one hand is an activist, believing and practising intervention in such a way that design becomes a tool for ‘social and political mobilization, as a possibility to act against spatial injustices’. Sanoff, on the other hand, has been interested in pedagogy in the widest sense: as an advisor to communities and in the development and application of new methodologies for participatory approaches in planning processes. What this interview brings to the fore are the motivations, the reasons behind choosing a certain path. In both Feldman's and Sanoff's cases it was direct experience with a system (education/academia/practice) that they found unacceptable, and which motivated them to intervene, to challenge pre-set conceptions about professions as such, about the role of the architect in planning processes, about fundin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustration credits
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Agency Working with uncertain architectures
• Intervene
• Activism in Appalachia*
• Environmental and social action in the studio
• Secondary agency
• On consensus, equality, experts and good design
• Sustain
• Acting up
• Ethics and aesthetics
• The radical potential of architecture
• Agency, assemblages and ecologies of the contemporary city
• Mediate
• Against determination, beyond mediation
• Agency and automatism
• Interior exile and paper architecture
• ‘Air rights’