The Society of Interiors

The Society of Interiors Edited by

Rochus Hinkel

The Society of Interiors Rochus Hinkel (Ed.)

Contents p.5 Introduction

p.13 Inclusive City-Making PETRA PFERDMENGES

p.43 Superstudio: Continuous Domestic Landscapes PETER LANG

p.63 Land for sale. North West London. Approximately 87.7 sq m. Suitable for a Variety of Uses (subject to obtaining all relevant consents). Freehold Guide Price = £185,000. TATJANA SCHNEIDER

p.91 Forced Associations TOR LINDSTRAND

p.117 Urban Actions ROCHUS HINKEL

Introduction Rochus Hinkel

The Society of Interiors is a collection of essays that offer a theoretical, historical and practice-based analysis of the inexorable privatization of public life in the context of global urbanization. Experimental samples of alternative practices are explored that critically and creatively respond to the increasing commercialisation and privatisation of urban space. The essays investigate the role of the architect, artist, and designer in this era of financialisation and credit crisis, as futures are foreclosed by the infinite debt of repaying one’s loans. To counter the oppressions of the society of interiors, the design thinkers and practitioners here reflect upon and critique the contemporary condition, and propose alternative spatial, inter-relational, social and political adventures that potentialise ‘other’, alternative situations. Rather than being subsumed by our contemporary plight (which we sometimes mistake for comfort), and rather than giving way to a generalised melancholly, the practices discussed in this book aim to highlight how we can remain actively engaged in the production of a shared, common, and greater societal composition. 5

For more than a decade we have seen the emergence of alternative, often marginal, practices that operate at the periphery of what is commonly understood as an architect, artist or designer’s discipline and profession. The ability to work at the limits of one’s own professional capacities has seen the rise of ‘other’ hybrid and productively messy practices. While some practitioners operate primarily as individuals, others form temporary collectives and establish networks, building partnerships and relationships with local communities, establishing ‘new’ agencies in and for the production of public space. These practitioners are able to sustain their engagement in a complex environment defined by conflicting interests. However, their impact on the mechanisms of power at play are marginal compared to the vast majority of built production, the dominant spatial politics and the influence of financial players, including profit driven investment funds and the co-option of state responsibilities by private enterprise. While many alternative practices vociferously point toward pressing issues, and raise difficult questions, the ability and the power to create effective change would appear frustratingly minor and peripheral. Alternatives are only offered in homeopathic doses, while practices accept their marginal role and retreat into the murmuring complaints of discourse, often shared within small circles that are frequently lodged in the sheltered workshop of academia. 6

There is a growing sense of frustration and struggle, or else out and out exhaustion. At a symposium on ‘Interiors and Cities’ hosted at one such institutional setting, Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design the discussion was concerned with the question of how the critical and creative practitioner could resist the sell out of public spaces. Where Tatjana Schneider addressed the London context and addressed questions of private ownership, Tor Lindstrand reflected on the infinite and empty reflections produced in the recently opened Mall of Scandinavia, leaving the panel and audience near the brink of an abyss of resignation, with just a remainder of frustration to keep them motivated. Much as we bear witness to the fallout of climate change, images of disaster fed to us through our televisual media, we have also come to realise that the death knell of public space has already sounded, and that we are powerless as a profession, and certainly as individuals, to reverse the development. Must we surrender so easily? No, I don’t think so. Peter Lang reminds us of Superstudio’s radical architectures and utopian megastructures that overcome the dominant bourgeois model of ownership and society. Practices such as Petra Pferdmenges’ alive architecture have responded creatively to the challenges of the evacuation of public space by establishing a critical and inclusive design practice, engaging with local communities, 7

but at the same time making efforts to change the political framework at a larger scale. The complexity of the questions around the politics of urbanisation and the evacuation of public space requires a common effort in order to be able to achieve any change or improvement. The economic, social, and political situation of the world around us is a messy, entangled superimposition of a multitude of strata, composed of conflicting interests and contradictory meanings. While it might seem close to impossible to disentangle what is at stake, we need to be able to deploy designerly ways of mapping and knowing our urban environments if we hope to have a chance of addressing the issues we are confronting. The question remains as to whether a systemic change can be achieved and alternatives sketched out without being able to quite grasp what is confronting us. Who must we band together with? It seems obvious that small changes and experiments in and around public spaces that resist the plight of seemingly inexorable urbanisation can test and hopefully establish new strategies and tactics and offer inside knowledge that will enable us to respond to the imminent future in experimentally productive and life enhancing ways. They prepare the ground for a common effort that will enable us to achieve change or improvement, but we must also acknowledge that such work is necessarily undertaken collaboratively with a diversity of urban actors. 8

Land for sale. North West London. Approximately 87.7 sq m. Suitable for a Variety of Uses (subject to obtaining all relevant consents). Freehold Guide Price=ÂŁ185,000.

Tatjana Schneider 63

Parasites chomp away at the common-wealth the world over, eating away inside the social body, stripping people’s assets, foreclosing homes, dispossessing value rather than contributing anything towards its creation. In parasitic cities, social wealth is consumed through conspicuously wasteful enterprises, administered by parasitic elites, our very own aristocracy (the 1%) who squander generative capacity by thriving exclusively from unproductive activities: they roll dice on the stock market, profit from unequal exchanges, guzzle at the public trough; they filch rents and treat land as a pure financial and speculative asset, as a form of fictitious capital.1

M

uch has been written about the proclaimed right to the city which, broadly speaking, demands that what is commonly produced must also belong to all those who have had a part in producing it. Current practices of wealth extraction, it is argued by groups and practices that I will lump together here as “alternative architectures”, are inequitable; decision making and the development of space and buildings are not transparent; matters are settled by a small elite of politicians and wealthy individuals and executed in ways that manifest this class’s power through designs that are ignorant of the severity of socio-spatial inequalities at best and patronising at worst. In opposition or response to this, actions and movements that call into question neoliberalised ways of developing spaces and buildings – which Tor Lindstrand refers to as “hysterical 65

situations” but are now almost normalised – have at times gained critical momentum over the past decade.2 Increasingly, these critiques come packaged, conceptualised and theoretically articulated as distinct forms of urbanism (e.g. tactical, ecological, radical, inclusive, bottom-up, whatever) and design (e.g. social, activist, resilient, human-centred, strategic) that promise alternatives to speculative and singleinterest development. Prominent examples of this discourse range from the (not uncontested) largescale yet spatially acupunctural transformations of urban Medellín through citizen participation and transparency in resource allocation under Sergio Fajardo in the early 2000s to articulations such as the People’s Vision Document for Mumbai’s Development Plan – the latter formulated in 2013 by an alliance of 88 NGOs and other community-based organisations as a case for the democratic management of planning through the integration of marginalised and currently disregarded groups and individuals in planning processes.3 Most of these initiatives, whether small or large in ambition and scale, are generated from the “nonelites” or take them as a starting point. They might refer to projects as transformative or emancipatory, but the common denominator can be articulated as a more or less explicit anti-capitalist stance. Take, for example, the Initiative Esso Häuser in Hamburg that managed to fight off the erection of an exclusive 66

Rochus Hinkel Rochus Hinkel is Professor of Interior Architecture and Furniture Design at Konstfack – University College of Arts, Craft and Design in Stockholm, and Professor of Artistic Design at OTH Regensburg. He has taught at RMIT’s School of Architecture and Design, TU Berlin, the University Stuttgart and the State Academy of Fine Art in Stuttgart. His practice has been exhibited internationally, including Kortrijk, Belgium, and Basel, Switzerland. Reviews on his practice have been published in Bauwelt, Detail, form, Monument, Ottagono, Wallpaper, Deutsche Bauzeitung (db), Möbel Design (md), design report, Hochparterre, Melbourne Design Guide, Der Architekt, amongst others. Rochus has also served as curator at the Weißenhof Architecture Gallery where he inaugurated the Weißenhof-Architekturförderpreis. Besides he has established in 2011 a series of roundtable discussions in Berlin, Melbourne and Stockholm, where like-minded practitioners and academics from a diversity of fields meet. He was the editor of Urban Interior – Informal explorations, interventions and occupations (Spurbuchverlag, 2011), Notions of Space (Craft Victoria, 2008) and guest editor of Stadtbauwelt Melbourne (Stadtbauwelt, 2005). Rochus holds a PhD by thesis and creative works from the Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne.

Peter Lang Peter Lang is Professor in Architectural Theory and History at the Royal Institute of Art, in the Department of Architecture, Stockholm (KKH). He holds a Bachelor in Architecture from Syracuse University, earned a PhD in Italian history and urbanism at New York University and is a Fulbright recipient in Italian studies. Lang works on the history and theory of post-war Italian architecture and design, with a focus on Italian experimental design, media and environments during the 1960s. He has written and curated projects on the Italian Radical Design and Architecture movement; most recently the Mondial Festival in Mashup: the Birth of Modern Culture at Vancouver Art Gallery Museum (2016). He also co-curated, together with Luca Molinari and Mark Wasiuta, Environments and Counter Environment: Italy the New Domestic Landscape at the Graham Foundation Chicago (2013). Lang has been a member of the Rome based urban arts research group Stalker since 1997.

Tor Lindstrand Tor Lindstrand (Stockholm) is an Associate Professor at the KTH School of Architecture and a co-owner of the office of Larsson Lindstrand Palme Arkitektkontor AB. His practice oscillate between architecture, art and performance in numerous cultural contexts with projects presented in institutions like,TATE Liverpool, Venice Architecture Biennale 2008, 2010 and 2014, Steirischer Herbst, Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale, Van Abbe Museum, Royal Dramatic Theatre Copenhagen, NAI Rotterdam, Stockholm Architecture Museum, Tensta Art centre, Botkyrka Art centre and Storefront for Art and Architecture. Together with choreographer Marten Spangberg he initiated International Festival, a practice working on context specific projects spanning from buildings, publications, films installations and public interventions. In 2010 he founded Economy together with art director Jessica Watson-Galbraith, a practice working in architecture, art, education and performance. Tor Lindstrand is an architecture critic for FORM magazine. He is on the board of Eva Bonniers donationsnämnd, the advisory board of Interior Architecture & Furniture Design at the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design and on the jury for Ung Svensk Form. He is currently involved in a long term project with Warlayirti Artists Aboriginal Corporation as part of Spaced 3 : North by Southeast, Western Australia.

Petra Pfermendeges Dr. Petra Pferdmenges is the founder of the social agency Alive Architecture based in Brussels and a practice-based researcher at the KU Leuven. Through projects, design research, participation in conferences, publications and teaching she explores the role of the architect in the production of lived space in the public realm. The projects she develops are based on active citizen engagement to empower the local to welcome their guests in the gentrification process of urban development. The most recent publications are the editing of the Parckdesign 2014: Parckfarm booklet as well as the writing on the Parckfarm project in the booklet ’Public Space Prize Vlaanderen’. www.alivearchitecture.eu

Tatjana Schneider Tatjana Schneider is a researcher, writer and educator based at the School of Architecture in Sheffield, UK. Her current work focuses on the changing role of architects and architecture, pedagogy and spatial agency. She has a particular interest in theoretical, methodological and practical approaches that expand the scope of contemporary architectural debates and discourses by integrating political and economic frameworks that question normative ways of thinking, producing and consuming space. She is a co-author of Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture (2011), Flexible Housing (2007), and A Right to Build: The Next Mass-Housebuilding Industry (2011), and (co)editor of Agency: Working with Uncertain Architectures (2009) and glaspaper (2001–2007).

THE PRACTICE OF THEORY AND THE THEORY OF PRACTICE The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic information is available on the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de The Society of Interiors Rochus Hinkel (Editor) © Copyright 2016 by Editor, Authors and Spurbuchverlag ISBN: 977-3-88778-490-4 Publication © by Spurbuchverlag 1. print run 2016 Am Eichenhügel 4, 96148 Baunach, Germany All rights reserved. No part of the work must in any mode (print, photocopy, microfilm, CD or any other process) be reproduced nor – by application of electronic systems – processed, manifolded nor broadcast without approval of the copyright holder.

AADR – Art Architecture Design Research publishes research with an emphasis on the relationship between critical theory and creative practice. AADR Curatorial Editor: Dr Rochus Urban Hinkel, Stockholm Production: pth-mediaberatung GmbH, Würzburg Graphic Design: Moa Sundkvist, Stockholm

The Society of Interiors discusses a variety of spatial practices which critique, reveal, and resist the economical logic of a neo-liberal market. A market that caters for exclusiveness and individualities, where public space becomes an interior, that is highly controlled and privatised. The different essays unpack, develop and expand a diversity of interior and spatial practices in urban contexts that allow for a diverse public, express differences, and create other experiences and situations. Authors include the architect and researcher Tatjana Schneider, editor of Spatial Agency (Routledge 2011); the activist architect Petra Pferdmenges from alive architecture in Brussels; the architectural theorist Peter Lang and the architect and artist Tor Lindstrand, both from Stockholm. Rochus Hinkel is an architect, interior designer, curator, and editor of Urban Interior: Informal Explorations, Interventions, and Occupations (Spurbuchverlag 2011).

www.aadr.info www.spurbuch.de