Diy subjectivity savia palate

SUBJECTIVITY DIY By Savia Palate

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (History and Critical Thinking) in the Architectural Association School of London September 2015 Â Â

Abstract Forms of subjectivity cannot be DIY. The juxtaposition of terms derived from this thesis’ title intends to challenge a discourse structuring numerous recent spatial projects of contemporary society, which in their majority assume the empowerment of the self through the use of ubiquitous DIY manuals for the creation of participatory environments and collective spaces. In exploring this question, this thesis problematizes the commonly held assumption that selfempowerment and participation together mean collectivism, and it examines the role of architecture within this condition. In some cases, architecture unravels the structure of the self and its distortion. In other cases, architecture becomes a mechanism that contributes to this distortion.

The ‘entrepreneurial self,’ following Michel Foucault’s definition transforms the individual into ‘human capital’ through a neoliberal re-conceptualization of labor. This new subject, the entrepreneur, is tremendously hopeful, active, and reactionary to the existing status quo. However, the advent of the DIY / Maker culture, as promoted and encouraged by several small groups, official institutions, and non-profit organizations, problematizes whether these possibilities liberate the individual or, adversely, raise awareness about novel mechanisms of control that construct delusional subjects.

This thesis was conducted through the layering of three main scales: (1) the scale of the blueprint, which investigates the instructional behavior and ideology behind open source blueprints and the spatial implications of this ‘openness;’ (2) the building scale, which explores the way spatial environments are formed in order to encourage the possibility of a limitless self-potential; and (3) the scale of the city, where the self is encouraged to participate in designing and improving their city through platforms that simultaneously motivate the individual’s interiority to dominate. These three scales are examined either through recent spatial projects, such as the FabLabs, or online platforms that prompt spatial formation, including WikiHouse and Maker Cities. All of the examples emphasize on the inevitable collectivity, which is identified in the background of every individual action. The role, not only of the individual, but also of institutions is crucial to this exploration.` This thesis aspires to provide critical insight into how architecture is degraded to a mechanism of shaping subjects. A mechanism that is indirect, innocent, and illusive. However the same mechanism simultaneously holds the capacity of being direct, truthful, and liberating. This fragile duality, embodied in the way forms of subjectivity are constructed, calls architects to redefine architecture’s boundaries once more.

Table of Contents

Introduction……………………………………..…2 Chapter 1: The DIY Project…………………...10 Chapter 2: Architectural Cookbooks……….22 Chapter 3: Access to Tools…………………...32 Chapter 4: Did Someone Say Participate?....44 Conclusion…………………………………..……56 Bibliography………………………………………..i List of Figures……………………………………..vii

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1.1 Liberland

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Introduction “People always ask me where do you go to get the permission to setup your own nation or your own state? No, you don’t get permission. You just go ahead and do it.”1 On April 13, 2015, Vit Jedlicka, a Chezh politician and activist, announced the declaration of the Free Republic of Liberland, a self-proclaimed nation on a territory in-between Croatia and Serbia. The split of former Yugoslavia into ne countries failed to include this specific piece of land. Jedlicka, based on the Homestead Principle, claimed it to start the development of a new nation-state.

There were arguments against this nation that noted that Liberland is definitely not a country but just a website. However, the Croatian border patrol was mobilized in to prohibiting anyone from entering this website’s territory.

Nevertheless, this ambiguous website/nation attracted hundreds of thousands of people who preferred to neglect their own official national identity in order to become citizens of the new country.

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Indeed, there are several steps that someone needs to follow to found their own nation; however, getting permission is not one of them. The ubiquitous how-to manuals of the contemporary world provide all of the information needed for the general reader to do anything, including the creation of their nation. There is a list of conditions and requirements that, once checked, allow anyone to build and create their own nation.

Jedlicka claims that Liberland is a completely legitimated project and satisfies (almost) every requirement for nationhood. It has a physical territory, citizens, a flag, a coat of arms, an anthem, and a currency. Its established form of government is a ‘constitutional republic with elements of direct democracy,’ and its constitution and laws are written and uploaded on its official website. Liberland’s founders and citizens aspire to develop a network of connections with other nations so as to become officially recognized.

This community emerged as a reaction against the European Union and its accompanying austerity measures, supporting the idea that European nations can survive self-sufficiently.

The creation of a website for declaring Liberland as a new state and the announcement on Facebook were enough to form a community of supporters. The majority of Liberland’s followers believed in the formation of a nation that would be tax-free. Jedlicka aspires for Liberland to become a country similar to Monaco, Luxemburg, or Signapore. Liberland’s funding is entirely reliant upon the voluntary donations of its citizens or other organizations and crowd-funding campaigns. Within three months of its existence, Liberland had raised aound 100,000 Euros. The Liberland Settlement Corporation, the key funding contributor to Liberland, owns 80,000 square meters of Liberland’s territory.

The corporation is based in Switzerland and is comprised of a number of investors who expect that Liberland will ultimately become officially recognized and that its value will be very high. The aforementioned conditions imply the existence of two separate interest groups that aim to be part of the same community: the ones who aspire to liberate themselves from austerity measures and the ones who invest in the development of a new tax-haven. Simultaneously, the notion of community does not refer to a common interest, or a common goal. Moreover, these two conditions co-exist within one figure: Jedlicka’s interest as an activist and investor. On the one hand, Jedlicka reacts against the European Union austerity regulations, and on the other hand, he ‘invents’ a new country to gain profits.

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Utopia or not, Liberland is a real fact, and it is not the only one. The incident of Liberland opens up the discussion on how individuals today are empowered to be self-reliant and are convinced that they can become anything they desire. Society offers profound possibilities for the individual to ‘succeed’ by taking their faith into their own hands. This new subject, the entrepreneurial self, is tremendously hopeful, active, and reactionary to the existing status quo. The constitution of the self as a process of subjectivation, in relation to an investigation concerning space and architecture, is the focal point of this thesis. In the case of Liberland, Jedlicka seems to be the representative figure of this empowered individual. Liberland’s followers are like-minded individuals who believe that identifying other like-minded individuals can accomplish their own interests. However, there is doubt surrounding whether these possibilities liberate the individual or, adversely, raise awareness about novel mechanisms of control that construct delusional subjects.

The notion of doing something on your own is not limited only to crafts, home improvements, or skills such as cooking, building, gardening, and knitting, among others.

DIY, especially nowadays, applies to a broad range of activities, behaviors, and habits.

However, forms of subjectivity cannot be DIY. Even though empowering, DIY implies the guidance of a how-to manual, of an instruction guide, of an expert. The juxtaposition of terms derived from this thesis’ title intends to challenge a discourse structuring numerous recent spatial projects of contemporary society, which in their majority assume the empowerment of the self through the use of ubiquitous DIY manuals for the creation of participatory environments and collective spaces. In exploring this question, this thesis problematizes the commonly held assumption that self-empowerment and participation together mean collectivism, and it examines the role of architecture within this condition. In some cases, architecture unravels the structure of the self and its distortion. In other cases, architecture becomes a mechanism that contributes to this distortion.

The first chapter initiates and clarifies the theoretical framework of this study, providing definitions and explaining the historic, socio-economic and political background of the condition that prompted this thesis’ question. The main structure of this thesis unfolds in three main cases, which explore peripheral questions that lead to the investigation of the main research question. Each case concern itself with the ways in which the individual enters into the production of a collective coercion, in particular as the latter is established

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as a fundamental framework to the subsequent course of architectural and urban thinking.

Each chapter is introduced by a story of individuals, products, and spaces, as evidence of the examined condition, providing further insight on how this thesis emerged. All three cases surfaced as ideas critical of, and in fact opposed to, hierarchy, capitalism, power, and consumerism. Against this detachment of the individual to their own world and their ignorance of how their surroundings and daily life objects are produced, the empowered and active self declares to contribute to processes of commercialization, marketing, producing, and decision-making. However, it is crucial to examine these reactionary approaches as immersed and instrumentalized within the system. What does it mean to react? And what is the role of the contemporary institution in this reaction? These questions are interrogated in relation to the role of the architect as a figure and of architecture as both a spatial product and discipline.

(1) Architectural Cookbooks

By analyzing themes and practices that have prevailed with the appearance of the image of the whole Earth and the subsequent Whole Earth Catalog, this chapter discusses the importance of the ‘recipe,’ which in architecture is similar to the blueprint. Both the recipe and the blueprint have the capacity to infinitely reproduce a sample. Information of this kind was kept secret by the few, while today information has become open, free, and accessible to everyone. What are the spatial implications of this ‘openness’ and of the infinite reproduction of blueprints by everyone? And how liberating is the customization of the self and self-products when the instructions are already prescribed? This chapter examines the level of control and the ideology behind this ‘openness,’ where everyone can contribute, receive, and exchange information following how-to prescriptions.

(2) Access to Tools

This chapter focuses on the scale of the maker space as the molecular effect of a broader picture, which culminates in the scale of the city. The accumulation of

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information, tools, and machines in one space implies the promise of a limitless selfpotential. Maker spaces are contemporary workshops that operate as pedagogical projects, since they proclaim to be collaborative learning centers, where making converges with processes of education and forms of living. The autonomy of the self, and its emancipation is conditioned by mechanisms of control interwoven in social and physical structures. Maker spaces, in institutional spaces, emerge an alternative production and sharing of knowledge. This chapter questions the claimed potential of participation, whether the latter is a means to create a sphere of individual expression or not. On the one hand, maker spaces motivate the empowerment of the self. On the other hand, they are constructed in such a way that they demand participation and sharing. But these two conditions, selfempowerment and the possibility of participation, are part of the same project.

(3) Did Someone Say Participate?

This chapter focuses on the scale of the city as the explicit phenomenon of participation demanded by economic, political, and social forces. Maker cities expect their development through online participatory platforms where everyone can express ideas and suggest future plans. The city as an entity in flux reveals a collective space made up of subjects whose actions, needs, and proclivities constantly change. These participatory platforms for designing a city reveal a catalogue of urban types who stand in for the city in different ways: the people, the institutions, and the architect. How do you then design a city within a system that fosters the development of an individuality that is fundamental to a supposedly democratic model of citizenship? Even though participatory design enhances the ‘anonymity’ of the city, this specific anonymity comes as a product of motivating the individual’s interiority to dominate.

This thesis aspires to provide critical insight into how architecture is degraded to a mechanism of shaping subjects. The kind of mechanism is indirect, innocent, and illusive.

However, the same mechanism simultaneously holds the capacity of being direct, truthful,

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and liberating. It is precisely this fragile duality that we, and first and foremost architects, need to demarcate.

P.S. In case you are interested in founding your own nation-state, there are several howto manuals to help you ‘just go ahead and do it.’

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1.2 W ired M agazine C over Issue A pril 4, 2011.

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HOW TO START YOUR OWN COUNTRY *Excerpt from wikiHow to do anything: “How to Start Your Own Country.” wikiHow to do anything. n.d. Web. 9 Sept. 2015

Tired of crazy politics and government interference or social permissiveness? Has your tax burden become more than you can bear? If you’ve ever thought that if people just did it your way, things would be much better… we have good news: you can start your own micronation! It’s not easy, but it’s also not impossible, and we’ll show you how to do it.

We’ll also show you some successes, some failures, and the very real future of nation building.

1. Learn about your country 2. M ake your plans 3. Know the rules 4. Find territory for your micronation 5. Build an island 6. Invite your friends 7. Establish a government and a constitution 8. Declare your independence 9. Establish an economy 10.

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Be recognized by the world Community 11.

M anage your branding

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G et out there and do it!

An entrepreneur Jane ni Dhulchaointigh was a student at the RCA in London. In 2003, while working on her MA, she decided, “I don’t want to buy new stuff all the time. I want to improve and re-imagine the stuff I already have so it works better for me.” This verdict became her final school project. She started playing with smelly silicone caulk and waste wood dust that had tried to ‘cracked’ in order to give to this material an infinite amount of uses. The smelly silicone led to a presentation of a series of comic images, where the material can stick any possible object together and be used in countless ways. The smelly silicon progressed into a patented silicone technology that can fix everything. Once stuck and shaped accordingly to a variety of materials, this unprecedented moldable glue becomes a durable and flexible silicone rubber that can permanently remain in place. It started by fixing and repairing broken pieces and objects, and then radically expanded through an online community of exchanging ideas.

Jane could not find a corporation to fund her business model so she decided to start ‘small.’ The material was immediately popularized between the DIY-ers at a global scale after Harry Wallop at the Daily Telegraph Technology rated the product with a 10/10 review.

The ‘Sugru community,’ and the ‘Sugru-ers’ helped Jane start up and promote her product.

‘The crowd has been integral to our success to date. Facebook and Twitter have helped us grow the brand without spending lots of money,’ Jane confessed in an interview with Telegraph.

‘All our growth comes from a community of people that take Sugru and share online what they’ve done. It’s not because of anything to do with Sugru, it’s because people are really awesome. People have an amazing feeling of pride and confidence when they see they can fix something – even when fixing a fridge, they think ‘I’ve beaten the system!’ continued in another interview with Wired magazine.

The smelly rubber was named by the TIME magazine as one of the 50 best inventions of 2010. The rubber placed at 22, while the iPad remained at place 34. Jane was named as the ‘Design Entrepreneur,’ the first time such an award was established during the London Design Festival in 2012, and the business expanded in retail stores in both the UK and the USA. However, in order to grow further, there was a need for funding. In July 2015, Sugru started an online crowd-funding campaign, alongside with another online campaign called ‘the rise of the domestic ninja,’ which hopes to raise the profile of the campaign. The domestic ninja is an invitation to Sugru-ers, to share their imaginative ways of using Sugru. The number of responses exceeded all expectations, and the crowd-funding campaign raised more than £1m in four days. The campaign broke two records: It was the first ever crowd-funding campaign that managed to gain £1m from one single investment, and when the campaign ended with an amount of £3,548,820, it became the widest reaching campaign with investors from 68 countries.

Jane admits to Telegraph that the invention of Sugru achieved such a popularized response due to timing: ‘Sugru has been successful because of timing. When I started the company in 2004, I would talk to people about fixing

things and they would look at me like I was mad. By 2009, they were saying, ‘Oh that’s cool.’

‘The recession made people think about whether they really needed that extra pair of trainers or if they could fix the ones they had. We also spend so much time in front of computers that we want something to show for our day. We bake cakes, make meals from scratch, garden, and fix things.’

Jane’s Sugru invites people to ‘hack’ their world and their products rather than buying new, share and exchange ideas about the product, and help the product to expand. Jane started as a student of product design struggling with smelly silicon to finish her final project. She is now an entrepreneur of an innovative material that raises millions. The story of Sugru is an explicit example of the contemporary world: the advent of the Maker movement, and Foucault’s ambiguous notion of the entrepreneurial self, and the growth of a community based on the amplification of individualism.

2.1 Versatile S ugru

2.2 TH X 1138

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The DIY Project ”Let us be thankful we have commerce. Buy more. Buy more now. Buy. And be happy.”

This quote is constantly repeated throughout George Lucas’ film THX 1138 which was written and produced in 1970. Even though the film tried to imagine a future dystopia, 2015 seems to be brighter than how it was once perceived. THX 1138 demonstrates a totalitarian and controlled world, where invisible forcers repress self-awareness, self-motivation, and the self entirely.

The film flaunts a homogeneous environment where people are white, dressed in white uniforms, bald, and instead of names they have a prefix and a number. On the other hand, today’s tendency is to promote the self to be active, motivated, and unique. Instead of homogenizing environments, we are embracing heterogeneity. However, there is doubt surrounding the reality of that heterogeneity and how truly active we are if everything we do is already prescribed? He common denominator of THX 1138 and today’s condition might be the fact that we never know who is actually in control.

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THE MAKER MOVEMENT MANIFESTO *Excerpt from the book: Hatch, Mark. The Maker Movement Manifesto: Rules for Innovation in the New World of Crafters, Hackers, and Tinkerers. McGraw-Hill Education. September 2013. Print.

MAKE Making is fundamental to what it means to be human. We must make, create, and express ourselves to feel whole. There is something unique about making physical things. These things are like little pieces of us and seem to embody portions of our souls.

SHARE Sharing what you have made and what you know about making with others is the method by which maker’s feeling of wholeness is achieved. You cannot make and not share.

GIVE There are few things more selfless and satisfying than giving away something you have made. The act of making puts a small piece of you in the object. The act of making puts a small piece of you in the object. Giving that to someone else is like giving someone a small piece of yourself. Such things are often the most cherished items we possess.

LEARN You must learn to make. You must always seek to learn more about your making.

You may become a journeyman or master craftsman, but you will still learn, want to learn, and push yourself to learn new techniques, materials, and processes.

Building a lifelong learning path ensures a rich and rewarding making life and, importantly, enables one to share.

TOOL UP You must have access to the right tools for the project at hand. Invest in and develop local access to the tools you need to do the making you want to do. The tools of making have never been cheaper, easier to use, or more powerful.

PLAY Be playful with what you are making, and you will be surprised, excited, and proud of what you discover.

PARTICIPATE Join the Maker Movement and reach out to those around you who are discovering the joy of making. Hold seminars, parties, events, maker days, fairs, expos, classes, and dinners with and for the other makers in your community.

SUPPORT This is a movement, and it requires emotional, intellectual, financial, political, and institutional support. The best hope for improving the world is us, and we are responsible for making a better future.

CHANGE Embrace the change that will naturally occur as you go through your maker journey. Since making is fundamental to what it means to be human, you will become more complete version of you as you make.

In the spirit of making, I strongly suggest that you take this manifesto, make changes to it, and make it your own. That is the point of making.

2.3 Invent.

The billboard is found in S ilic on Valley, C alifornia (U S A ).

It is evidenc e of the origins of the empowered ‘entrepreneur.’

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The Entrepreneurial Self as a Collective Subject

DIY was an ethic born in reaction against the dominant society that considers culture primarily in terms of a profit-generating, commercial enterprise… The key in all of this culture is participation. If you don’t participate, it doesn’t happen.

Following Shepard and Hayduk (2002:133-140), Do It Yourself emerged as a reactionary act to various marketplace motivations, including economic benefits, and frustration towards product availability. DIY’s meaning was ‘the building, modifying, or repairing of something without the need of experts.’ While this mostly referred to the act of self-organizing home needs and improvements, it was also associated with giving a respite to your passive life, such as getting off of the couch in front of a TV to take responsibility and control your life away existing ruling institutions. Consequently, the resulting activities range from the home scale to larger scale endeavors such as selfpublishing magazines, pirate radio stations, and small market companies. Nowadays, DIY is mainly related to online open source platforms and the advent of the so-called Maker Movement. It is more defined as ‘building, modifying, repairing something’ through the use of open-source platforms ‘altruistically’ provided by experts and professionals.

Contemporary Makers2 are ‘the new industrial revolution,’ as Chris Anderson (2012) explains in his book. Using mottos such as ‘hack the system,’ ‘learn, participate, share,’ and ‘how to make (almost) anything,’ among others, they invite every individual to exploit their own skills, gain new ones, and realize their ideas. The Maker Movement has developed events, tools, databases, and spaces, but more importantly an ‘idea’ subject: the entrepreneur.

The model of the entrepreneur, as defined by Michel Foucault, dates back to 1980s and 1990s. Foucault has been exploring the difference between liberal and neoliberal subjects and paradigms in his book The Birth of Biopolitics where neoliberalism shifts to “govern for the market, rather than because of the market” (2008:121). Governmentality, referring to power, to neoliberalism captures the market as ideal model for society, moving away from the liberal understanding of the market as a mere mechanism to

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govern society. In order for the market to become a model of society, there are several aspects, mechanisms, and propositions that need to be adjusted. The definition of the subject as entrepreneurial is this adjustment’s prime intention. Foucault suggests that forms of subjectivity are cultivated through a neoliberal re-conceptualization of ‘labor.’ This thesis explores how the DIY / Maker culture, alongside its distillation of spaces and subjects, is one aspect of this re-conceptualization that indeed transforms individuals and their forms of living into ‘human capital.’

The concept of ‘human capital’ converts the worker to an entrepreneur, a concept that lies at the core of neoliberal forms of subjectivity. The subject as an entrepreneur is no longer manipulated or exploited but has the capacity to ‘work on the self’ and to take care of himself. To be an entrepreneur means to embrace the risk of taking care of oneself and be willing to self-exploit. Every individual can optimize skills, knowledge, expertise, and talents regardless of their social class or status and equally attain power. However, this liberating deception of ‘regardless of their social class or status’ is eminently crucial in the case of DIY / Maker culture, since this condition can provide the individual with skills and knowledge apart from existing institutions, and in particular elite educational institutions, that hold the supremacy of reassuring the subject of a promising future career. Today, the subject has the capacity to train him/herself through a wide range of possible resources, a possibility augmented by contemporary technological means, open-source databases, and ‘free’ access to valuable information.

When the subject becomes an entrepreneur, the economization of every aspect of life is inevitable. Even though not directly controlled or exploited, the way the environment is orchestrated suggests to the subject the ‘right’ ways to work, train, operate, and participate in society. For Foucault, this is a form of ‘environmental control,’ where the subject is produced in such a way to be productive. The elusive freedom of the self, in several cases, finds its basis in habits, as these are cultivated through forms of living and learning. Even though the notion of the self profoundly refers to autonomy, the contemporary self cannot rely on their autonomy, since society requires them to act and behave accordingly. Foucault denotes how the science of behavioral economics was coincidentally born at the same time as the theorization of neoliberalism. Behavioral

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economics asserted economic qualification to behaviors, including family life and education, behaviors that before were not considered to be economic. Neoliberalism shapes a social reality that is beyond formal economic regulations and is immersed in cultural propositions.

The Fordist economy removed the craftsmanship knowledge from the engineers in order to develop more efficient systems and distribute those systems using workers in order to deploy an assembly line of production. Post-Fordism, as the neoliberal form of labor, came as a psychological response, almost a humanitarian act, to the inhuman assembly line of workers that did not allow the person’s intelligence, creativity, and sociability to expand. The conclusion was that the assembly line, as an organization of labor, was not only inhuman but also unproductive. Adverse to this notion, post-Fordism encouraged working conditions in small groups of people. Following a mode of collaborating in producing, post-Fordism, as an organization of labor, was proven to be much more productive than Fordism. The aspect of collaboration is immanent to contemporary labor today. Maurizzio Lazzarato (1997) explains:

In this phase, workers are expected to become ‘active subjects’ in the coordination of the various functions of production, instead of being subjected to it as simple command. We arrive at a point where a collective learning process becomes the heart of productivity, because it is no longer a matter of finding different ways of composing or organizing already existing job functions, but of looking for new ones.

The post-Fordist model of production has been replaced by cooperative forms of labor that expect the entrepreneurial self to act as a collaborative subject. On the one hand, society convinces the subject to be active for self-organization and self-reliability through the acquisition of skills and expectations. On the other hand, human capital today is based on what neoliberal economy demands: the more you share and the more you expose yourself, the more reputation capital you earn. As a result, the entrepreneurial self is constantly negotiating between two equally stretching selves: the one who strives for autonomy and the other in need of collective interaction. To draw the line between these

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two is profoundly imperative, however, formidable. This conflict brings the question of subjectivity to the fore and the way current processes of making in the city manage to establish relationships between the individual and the collective, which further redefine the notion of community.

The Rhetoric of Creativity

In A Grammar of the Multitude, Paolo Virno (2003) suggests that the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism was prompted by the advent of cultural industries, where intellectual reflection becomes immersed in spheres of labor. The cultural industries of the early 1960s have been transformed in today’s creative industries, where the entrepreneurial self becomes a dominant figure. Gerald Rauning (2007:101) calls the creative industries ‘pseudo-institutions.’ As Rauning claims, cultural industries such as newspaper publishing, radio, and television still very much conformed to the structure of Fordist factories. In contrast, creative industries have the structure of micro-enterprises:

Whereas the model institutions of culture industry were huge, long-term corporations, the pseudo-institutions of creative industries prove to be temporary, ephemeral, project based. The time of the modulating project institution is perfectly smoothed, but by no means eternal. At the same time it is striated, modularized, and multiply hierarchized in a new way.

This new structure plays a prevailing role in the inflation of freelance entrepreneurs, where creativity, alongside keywords such as innovation and originality, become job skills required to the subject that amplify ‘human capital.’ It is important to mention that Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception (1944) grieved the loss of entrepreneurial freedom given the homogenized cultural environments produced by media corporations, while today we experience the proliferation of entrepreneurial freedom and ‘creatives.’ Claire Bishop in her book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and Politics Spectatorship (2012) depicts how society encourages this condition and the way creative industries, art, and knowledge economy are merged with the politics of the modernized New Labor. Amongst various examples,

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the Dutch initiative, as described by Bishop, explicitly reflects this merge after an official declaration by the Dutch government towards an instrumental cultural policy. In 2001, the government announced their mission using the words: ‘Everyone is creative!’ and ‘Free the creative potential of individual.’

The contemporary DIY / Maker culture similarly exhilarates this proliferation, since it provides the information, tools, and spaced needed for everyone to become a freelance creative, a self-employed entrepreneur, and an innovative laborer. A series of organizations have emerged in the last decade to propagate creativity: TED Talks, where specialists present their ‘ideas worth spreading;’ the Creative Commons, a license that every creative can use to allow the free sharing of their work but also secure their copyright; and the Institute of the Future, that owns multiple online platforms (including the Maker Cities that will be analyzed in another chapter) for sharing ideas in almost every aspect of life. With mottos such as ‘hack the system,’ the Maker movement can be seen as another ‘pseudo-institution,’ since the privilege of self-entrepreneurship can only exist as a myth. The endorsement of hacking the system receives multiple definitions, but none of these definitions can be alleged as a withdrawal of the individual from the current system as formed by the existing institutions. The entrepreneur can only survive and succeed if she or he remains devotedly connected to the existing system, where various forms of dependency in self-entrepreneurship exist, from funding to marketing, legal regulations, and policies.

Pedagogies of Space

The DIY / Maker culture constructs collaborative environments where creativity is supposedly embraced, encouraged, and developed. In his article, Foucault’s ‘environmental’ power: Architecture and Neoliberal Subjectivation (2015:181-196), Manuel Shvartzberg explains that Foucault’s notion of the ‘environment’ is not delimited to a metaphorical approach conceived by ideological and economic prescriptions.

‘Environmental power’ for Foucault literally includes the orchestration of spaces, architecture, and infrastructure by neoliberals to correspond to their market-based ideal model of society. Architecture then becomes a mechanism that contributes to the shaping of the neoliberal subject, and as this thesis investigates, to the shaping of the

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entrepreneurial self as both a collective and creative subject. These spaces weave, within a single space, modes of living and working, endorsing specific behaviors for the subject.

Historically, this condition, where architectural spaces become behavioral mechanisms, can be elaborated through the Soviet’s social condenser, where space regulations attempted to introduce the self into the production of a collective enforcement. Social condensers were intentionally designed to embrace a form of collective living in order to improve worker performance. The project meant to reconfigure established and preconceived notions of social hierarchies through spatial design. This fact exemplifies a kind of pedagogy of space, where the architectural object constructs or is constructed to serve a social norm. The private family unit was reformed into a social unit to endorse daily social interaction between the workers as part of communal living and as a reflection of Karl Marx’s concept ‘just as society itself produces man as man, so is society produced by him.’ Individual working and collective living followed specific spatial configuration for the subject to adapt habits that subsequently create an alternative rhythm of life. The importance of this societal transformation upon the subject through space rests on the fact that it was a voluntary simulation rather than an enforced transition.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the post-Fordist era endorsed the formation of spaces that operate differently than factories. These spaces seemed to be more informal, open to flexible programmatic specification, and more communicative in terms of the way workers interact and participate within the space but also in a broader network of connections.

Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Centre), established in 1970 in Palo Alto California, is an exemplary of this spatial reconfiguration. Xerox represented probably the most inventive computer company of its time, where innovations such as the personal computer, laser printing, and Ethernet networking were developed. Its peculiarity in contrast to formally organized informal meeting spaces inspired the spatial arrangement of major computer companies and research laboratories today. Instead of having conversations and meetings within conventional meeting rooms, the researchers at Xerox had open spaces with beanbag chairs and chalkboards to relax and brainstorm.

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Alan Kay, one of the directors at Xerox, admits that ‘one of the reasons why we used them we discovered it was impossible to leap to your feet to denounce somebody after you sat in the beanbag chairs because you tended to sink into it further and further. So it had a way of relaxing people and it was very good for design.’ The notion of defying intense controversies finds its response to open source spaces with beanbag chairs, and beyond that it is equated with an increase in creativity and productivity. Xerox combined the spatial configuration with quality management, designating to accumulate the world’s greatest scientists and programmers at a weak economic period for the USA after the Vietnam War. The employees were allowed to freely work and experiment without deadlines and instructions, characteristics that lead to efficiency and inventiveness.

Today, spaces like Xerox PARC are considered to be campuses or workspaces that still exist in Silicon Valley, such as the Google, Apple, or Facebook Campus, which effectively combine creativity and environmental power. These campuses are on a greater scale, and besides their inventiveness within their spaces, they are criticized for being disconnected from the rest of the word. DIY / Maker spaces and platforms, which will be further explored in the following chapters, are the more inclusive version of these campuses.

Technology, engineering, and fabrication are still emphasized, but, unlike the big campuses, they aim for a locality, community, and experimentation. They both have the same Silicon Valley-roots, since maker spaces in their majority are established and funded by these institutions and corporations; however, maker spaces provide openness and access to every subject. The question here is the possibility of self-organization, which is stimulated by the DIY / Maker culture and at the same time enacts capitalist exploitation.

DIY is promoted by these institutions and subsequently does not have the reactionary agenda it used to have. Instead, it is immersed within the system. This thesis, does not attempt to diminish the advantages offered by this condition. However, it aspires to open up a critical discourse by doubting the preconceptions and illusions around terms such as ‘openness,’ ‘participation,’ and the ‘self.’ These terms, which were once distinct, juxtaposed, and contradictory, are now blurred and embedded into one of another. This blurring is precisely the fine line examined by this thesis. Looking at DIY as a project means to address a potential situation. The DIY Project is an ongoing process that is about

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to come into existence but still undefined. It is a vision of another reality, an alternative world that identifies mechanisms of control immersed in forms of living as orchestrated by the DIY / Maker culture. It does not consider the individual; instead, it is the result of shared collective knowledge.

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A cookbook Purpose: We are as Gods and might as well get good at it. So far remotely done power and glory –as via government, big business, formal education, church – has succeeded to point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing – power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process as sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.

Once you open the Whole Earth Catalog journal, the first page clarifies its purpose. These words, written by Steward Brand, the founder of the Catalog, provoke and aim to awake the reader to take their own fate into their own hands.

The figure of Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog utterly coincide with the notion of the entrepreneurial self. The Catalog became one of the most popular periodicals of its time mostly because it attempted to give power to the less powerful, to share information that until then was sacred, and to educate and cultivate habits in people for a new way of living, a one that liberates the mind, the heart, and the soul. The Catalog aimed to shape its readers as ‘hackers’ of the existing system by building alternative worlds directly through Drop City and other communes, and indirectly by molding the individual into an entrepreneur.

Function: The Whole Earth Catalog functions as an evaluation and access device. With it, the user should know better what is worth getting and where and how to do the getting.

An item is listed in the catalog if it is deemed: 1) Useful as a tool, 2) Relevant to independent education, 3) High quality or low cost, 4) Easily available by mail.

Catalog listings are continually revised according to the experience and suggestions of Catalog users and staff.

The Catalog started as a mobile structure called the Whole Earth Truck Store as an ‘information service.’ However, the aim was clear and consistent from the beginning: to spread knowledge to people by providing them with valuable information. Brand drove the Whole Earth Truck Store moving from place to place and selling goods or transforming it into a portable library. Even though it mostly toured in several American communes the Whole Earth Truck Store gained increased popularity around the globe. Subsequently, Brand, understanding the potentiality of a lighter and easier to carry product transformed the truck into a periodical. It is important to indicate the fact that the Catalog, even though seemingly suggesting a primitive, back-to-nature approach, also warmly embraced the latest technology of its time to convey their ideology to the world. It was the first time that people had to interact with consumer technological products such as the automobile, radio, and the television, among others. The Catalog was similar to today’s makers’ goal of bringing back hands-on work, crafting, and other technical skills by using the latest technology of their time.

The Catalog was divided into seven sections: Understanding Whole Systems, Land Use, Shelter, Industry, Craft, Community, and Communications. Each section touched upon a specific aspect of life, since it included in its reading lists suggestions for construction manuals, ways to mediate, cooking recipes, fishing and hunting tools, travel guides, and government documents. The trans-categorical theme of the Catalog transformed the catalog from a manual for making to a manual for living. The Catalog’s readers were not only getting information about technical knowledge or basic facts. Instead, they were also prescribing to alternative ways of living following the Catalog’s ideology: reactionary figures of the 1960s counterculture, eludsions to psychedelic experimentation, and imagining a future cybernetic society.

The image of the Blue Planet became the symbol of the Catalog’s vision of utopia, a community where borders do not exist and the whole earth becomes united. Therefore, the Catalog supported the vision by becoming a collaborative product, where users and editors are equal in exchanging, commenting, suggesting, and sharing knowledge and ideas. The democratized and egalitarian community of the Catalog gradually became a network and a system profoundly reminiscent the way contemporary ‘communities’ are built through social media and web platforms. The last pages of the last issue of the Catalog were dedicated on ‘How to do a Whole Earth Catalog,’ aiming to continue its legacy, to sustain its community, and simultaneously to provide its recipe for success.

It is crucial to admit the Catalog’s success, since it managed to inspire major entrepreneurial figures of the contemporary world. Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, commercialized Xerox’s inventions, such as the personal laptop, that until then were used only for military purposes. Jobs provided this limited access technology to the public. Larry Page and Sergey Brin invented the digital form of the Catalog by establishing Google, one of the most popular search engine platforms on the web.

Shel Kaphal, the first employer of Amazon was a former employee at the Whole Earth Truck Store, where he was packing orders of democratic alternative world withdrawn from the seemingly unwanted system simultaneously applies as the overture of contemporary forms of economy and power. These entrepreneurs did not capture the Catalog as a mere manual for making. Instead, they saw the potential of the Catalog’s content, function, and purpose and managed to develop new forms of living that now dominate today’s society.

3.1 W hole Earth C atalog

3.2 Blueprints The building is subtrac ted in its basic elements.

The image illustrates A utoC A D drawings, found in the W ikiH ouse W ebsite with the basic elements of a house ready to be c ut on a C N C mac hine or a laser c utter.

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Architectural Cookbooks ‘Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?’

This quote prompted the beginning of an evolution that today seems to be at its climax. In 1996, Steward Brand at Berkeley’s Sather Gate initiated a campaign based on his belief that NASA possessed satellite images of the Earth. The aim of this campaign was to force NASA to publicly release these images so that they would not remain available only to deities. In 1968, the image of the blue planet was featured on the first cover of Whole Earth Catalog, a journal published by Steward Brand. The delimiting circle of the Earth permanently replaced the distant horizon and created a system where everything exists as part of a whole. The self equates the world. The appearance of this powerful icon reveals two radical effects: the effect of openness and the effect of an interconnected system which there is no escape.

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3.3 Rec ipes for H ousing The D ome C ookbook is an instruc tion book, published by the Llama Foundation and S teve Baer. It was largely promoted and distributed by the W hole Earth C atalog sinc e it was providing instruc tions to people of how to build their own dome. The D ome C ookbook was used as a primary sourc e for building domes in c ommunes during the 1960s.

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Recipes for Housing

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it is so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other3.

These words said by Steward Brand to Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, at the first Hackers Conference in 1984. Brand remained dedicated to his first campaign in 1966 and his iconic phrase ‘information wants to be free’ is still used by every activist who supports the development of an accessible public domain over exclusive governmental control.

Brand was inspired by one of the main projects of the Enlightenment that occurred from 1751 to 1772, the Encyclopèdie, a 35-volume principally edited by Denis Diderot. The Encyclopèdie attempted to collect the knowledge of that time and make it available to the general reader. Until then, knowledge had been controlled and owned by the monarchy and the church; circumstances that made Diderot’s goal seem perilous. Diderot aspired to transmit useful information to the public in order to lessen their dependency to the pope or the king and give them power in knowledge in order to cultivate their own skills. Diderot strived to elevate the ordinary worker, and those deemed socially inferior, and provide them access to empower themselves. The book’s reactionary attitude inspired Brand to edit the Whole Earth Catalog. The Encyclopèdie’s contents and the way it accumulated information is also similar to the 1960s periodical.

The figure of Diderot seems to represent the entrepreneur of the Enlightenment, since his core motivation for publishing the Encyclopèdie was his own way of living rather than his aspiration to help the common good. Diderot’s father was a prosperous cutler who disowned Diderot when he decided to abandon his law studies and become a writer.

Diderot then lived b spending other people’s money, making a lot of friends, and constantly paying debts. The idea for the Encyclopèdie arrived as a project to repay his

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debts. At the beginning, the Encyclopèdie was intended to be a translation of the Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1728), a compilation of pieces written by an amateur interested in arts and sciences, from French to English. The Encyclopèdie was dedicated to describing the practical way of doing and improving things, similar to the ‘hacking your everyday stuff’ motto of the Maker movement. Richard Sennett (2008) speaks about the Encyclopèdie as the ‘bible of craftmanship’ and how the figure of the craftsman became the emblem of the Enlightenment. Diderot, Brand, and the contemporary Makers saw the craftsman as a figure that equally combined manual and hands-on work with mental labor.

To collect knowledge, Diderot said, ‘We addressed ourselves to the most skilled workers in Paris and the kingdom at large. We took the trouble to visit their workshops, to interrogate them, to write under direction from them, to follow out their ideas, to define, to identify the terms peculiar to their profession’ (qtd. in Sennett 2008:98) This process is similar to the Whole Earth Catalog. Brand and his fellow editors were either maker themselves, were involves in communes, or were publishing letters from other makers as a call for sharing. The main difference with the Encyclopèdie is that even though there were many contributors, they were all philosophers, writers, and recognized intellectuals during the time, including Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu. This constituted a difficulty to the process of accumulating information from craftsmen given the fact that the craftsmen had the knowledge of making but were incapable of describing it in words. Both project’s outcomes were the result of various contributors, of sharing information, of transmitting knowledge from the experts to the general reader, and an endeavor that today is probably at its pinnacle.

Information, how-to prescriptions, and manuals are reflected through the notion of the recipe, which increasingly becomes a powerful tool in contemporary society. Maynard Keyner, one of the most important economists of the 20th century, indicates how easy it is to ship recipes rather than cakes. The recipe becomes the secret of an infinite reproduction of anything and for this reason seems to be much more valuable than the product itself. In an era where every discipline strives for open information, Keyner’s observation inspired Alastair Parvin to develop the WikiHouse4. In 2011, the WikiHouse was first presented at

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the Gwangju Biennale as a platform where everyone can customize and download their house. In 2013, when Parvin gave a talk5 on this project at a TED conference, public’s reception was enormous.

Blueprints in architecture are what recipes are for cooking. The WikiHouse allows the user to choose and download plans, sections, and every construction detail necessary for building a house. The platform provides the possibility for customizing the given prototypes using SketchUp, an easy to use 3D software frely available through Google.

The blueprints are then available as cutting patterns for a CNC router. The patterns are cut in plywood, a relatively chap and easy to find material. The whole idea is based on bottom-up, copied, and affordable typologies produced without the need of an expert.

According to Parvin, WikiHouse is based on the belief that self-built environments through the use of open source software can be the starting point to evolve architecture’s social economy.

Architecture has always been an affordable possession for the five percepnt of the world’s population. This five percent, either through the philanthropy of the 19th century, or communism of the 20th century, the state or real estate developers, was building and providing architecture to the rest. Parvin’s WikiHouse comes as a reaction to this stipulation by constructing a digital library on how to make your own house. The critique of WikiHouse was heavily focused on the incapability of the general public to have access to machines and tools such as CNC routers. The response to that critique came with the wide spread use of FabLabs (Fabrication Laboratories) and other maker spaces around the globe, a case that will be discussed in the next chapter.

Challenging alternatives to mass-produced housing units, WikiHouse shifts the focus of architecture from the spatial product to the elements that comprise it. Similarly, Keller (2012, 2014) advocates for the importance of knowing how rather than knowing what, indicating the importance of the event and the action on shaping spatial forms in order to understand architecture as a medium of other hidden processes rather than a final product. Easterling (2012:23-24) brings the example of developers, explaining that they do not build mass-produced suburban houses. Instead, they produce slabs, frames, and

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every other distinct element needed to assemble the house. The possibility of repeating an act for the reproduction of a product degrades the individuality of the house in front of its massive result. Blueprints provided by WikiHouse raise similar issues of what the effects of this reproduction might be. In an era where self-made cities are more than architect-made buildings, WikiHouse seems to create a high-tech shanty town, making a promise that everyone can produce their own house. However, the specific numbers of available prototypes, and the fact that customization, the use of CNC routers, and 3D software might not be time effective for everyone, do not envision a plurality of products.

The recipe is not a prescription

In his book The Craftsman (2008:182-190), Richard Sennett presents four different ways of writing the recipe of poulet á la d’ Alfubera, a 19th century recipe that Napoleon with chef Careme invented after a victory over the English at the Lake of Albufera in Valencia.

Poulet á la d’ Alfubera is a recipe for a boned chicken stuffed with rice, truffles, foie gras, and a sweet pepper sauce. Sennett presents the way three people give the instructions for this recipe to others. The first, a Provencal-American cook named Richard Onley, gives a precise and detailed explanation of how to do it. Onley uses only words but no visuals.

This method seems to be difficult to understand when you are a beginner or unfamiliar with cooking. Julia Child is the second cook who shows more than tells. Child combines visuals, either in television or with drawing in her books that make process of cooking conceivable even for a beginner. Besides the addition of visuals, Child identifies herself with the beginner cook and expresses an empathetic attitude:

‘Always angle the cutting edge of knife against bone and not against flesh.’

Child counsels the cook who picks up a knife, where Onley commands:

‘Force the flesh loose from the breastbone, working along the crest.’

The third cook, Elizabeth David, who never became famous according to Sennett, has a recipe for poulet á la d’ Alfubera limited to finding the right chicken from the barnyard.

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David provides the scene of the barnyard more than the process of preparation among several anecdotes and facts, which proved useless both to the beginner and the expert. In contrast to these three cooks, Sennett introduces Madame Benshaw, an Iranian refugee who does not really know English. When writing the recipe, Madame Benshaw ends up with this:

Your dead child. Prepare him for new life. Fill him with the earth. Be careful! He should not overeat. Put on his golden coat. You bathe him.

Warm him but be careful! A child dies from too much sun. Put on his jewels.

This is my recipe.

Sennett explains that Madame Benshaw manages to provide efficient metaphors for tacit knowledge, including the processes of stuffing, browing, or setting the oven. It is not a list of instructions in the flattest of language like Onley’s recipe, nor a narrative of preparation such as Child’s. Madame Benshaw’s recipe skillfully demonstrates the objectives of the cook that allows the imagination to rise.

The example of Madame Benshaw reveals a main restraint: depending on the user, every valuable document such as a recipe can be proven worthless. Even if you know each step on how to do something, there are ingredients that cannot be prescribed. Imagination and creativity are two of them, and these, according to Sennett, make the real craftsman. The same stands for the entrepreneur, where ideas and intelligence have the same importance as technical knowledge; however, both are required. WikiHouse might provide the information and the blueprints for individuals to learn how to make their own house, but does not guarantee that the individual is available, capable, and willing to customize the prototype or expand the idea further to adjust it according to their needs. The ones who are in economic need of these kinds of prototypes do not have the basic knowledge for using either the Internet nor the machines and the software. On the other hand, for the ones who have access to the Internet and knowledge to understand and build the prototypes, it is a question if they are willing to sacrifice their time.

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‘W e might as well be as G ods’

A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.

Karl Marx (1967, qtd in Deamer, 2015: 178)

When Diderot decided to write the Encyclopèdie, he was convinced that the only people who could afford to be stupid are the rich and prosperous ones. The others, in order to survive, need to be active, vital, and vigorous. They need to identify their talent in a sequence of trials and errors, dare to fail and learn by doing. On the other hand, the question of human limits was shattered by Brand, the Whole Earth Catalog, and the condition that perilously increasing nowadays with the Maker Movement. How-to manuals, recipes, and blueprints do not infinitely reproduce mere products, but more importantly they reproduce identical subjects. The contemporary subject is prescribed to behave as ‘God,’ to be active, and ready to ‘hack’ the system. It is precisely this openness, an openness of knowledge, an openness of possibilities, and an openness of everything, which offers a vantage point for a critical position. Sennett’s example of the three recipes underlines some of the limitations these how-to manuals and blueprints provide. In the case of WikiHouse, the question is not anymore about the author, the expert, and the general reader, the master and the amateur. Customizing a house, a building, or anything cannot be approached as a mere technical problem-solving solution.

The question is about certain qualities, such as creativity and intellectual work, dominant characteristics of the architectural profession, that become suppressed by trends, spectacles, or even capitalist exploitation when they become part of the entrepreneurial project.

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An entrepreneurial space Hans Hollein sits in his Mobile Office bubble. The telephone rings: ‘Hello, this is Hollein speaking. Yes, I just arrived at Flugfeld Aspern. Yes I just finished the drawing of the house. It will be delivered to you immediately. You can look at it in a second.’

Mobile Office was a live performance broadcasted on television, so instantly the camera captured Hollein’s drawing; a small villa with a pitched roof, a chimney with smoke and a garden. Hollein continues: ‘Yes, a very modern design. Yes, exactly as you ordered it… Goodbye.’

In his essay “The Architect as an Entrepreneurial Self: Hans Hollein’s TV performance ‘Mobile Office’” (2015), Andreas Rumpfhuber claims that through this performance Hollein presented himself as a hybrid working subject who knew exactly how to sell himself: ‘He is the cosmopolitan entrepreneur and he is an outstanding creative worker. Yet he is goal-oriented and lives a stable life. He works on a multitude of projects on different scales around the world. Still, he also works in teams. He collaborates, for example, with his wife, who is an haute-couture designer, and designed the costumes and suits for the Austrian Pavilion at the Milan Triennale exhibition in 1968.

Hollein is not only an architect. He is also a designer of objects, an art-director, and an artist. But he is also an entrepreneur: he is active and self-employed, he is innovative.’ It is not a coincidence that the work of the architect explicitly provides information on what an entrepreneur requires as skills. An architect’s knowledge requires them to combine intellectual thinking, technical skills, crafting, creativity, and managerial skills, given the financial and marketing requirements in building relationships with clients.

The case of Mobile Office also reflects another crucial prerequisite for entrepreneurs: the need of a workplace exposed to the public.

This is perceived in four elements of Hollein’s workpace: Hollein performs his workplace as a spectacle on television. Even though geographically specific, he manages to build international connections with clients and orders. The nomadic character of the bubble suggests that Hollein can work anywhere at any time converging forms of living within his working place. And finally, the bubble as a space is not functionally determined and is a ‘free space,’ as Cedric Price would characterize it. The undetermined attributes of the bubble constitute it as a flexible and adjustable structure that can be anything, anywhere, anytime, similar to

the qualities of the entrepreneurial self. Maker spaces are the workplace for an entrepreneur, and not surprisingly they share the same characteristics with the Mobile Office. They are ‘free spaces’ and without the machines and the tools they could accommodate any other function. Makerspaces can be either movable or stable structures, and in both cases Makerspaces and the Mobile Office are robustly connected to global networks while simultaneously educating, and teaching the future entrepreneur.

4.1 A n ‘entrepreneurial’ spac e The image was taken during H ans H ollein’s performanc e. H ollein sits in his M obile O ffic e drawing a house.

Wh a t d o e sa r c h i t e c t u r e wa n t t ob e ?

Access to Tools Who are the makers in your history?

Who are the makers in your city?

Are you a maker?

The way we make things is always changing. The steam engine sparked in the industrial revolution, moving the world from handcrafting to mass production. The assembly line in interchangeable parts transformed the way we live and work. And global shipping reduced the costs of transporting goods, creating a worldwide connected economy. Today making is changing again. Such as the printing press gave a way to laptop, the tools for making everything are becoming increasingly available to everyone.

From maker spaces garages to repurposed libraries, makers are building and hacking, customizing and tweaking in schools and start-ups around the world are soldering and coding, documenting and sharing.6

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‘Makerspaces’ are currently spreading around the globe. They can be found under different names such as Hackerspaces, Hacklabs, or Techshops. However, they all share the same objective: a community-based workspace where fabrication machines, technology, and tools are accessible to people with allied interests, the majority being entrepreneurs. These spaces are focused on peer learning and sharing knowledge, where the entrepreneurs cultivate skills and use the tools and the machines provided within a makerspace by collaboratively working in small groups. The concept of makerspaces and the entrepreneurial self coincide with an amplified growth in ‘knowledge economy,’ where creative industries and industries alternative to traditional manufacturing become the focal point. Institutions have radically adjusted themselves to include makerspaces in their facilities and expand their interconnectedness into the world.

‘Forget about DIY. FabLabs are about Do-It-Together.’

Neil Gershenfield7, another Steward Brand, aspired to expand the idea of ‘access to tools’ by creating environments where people can access not only how-to information but also skills, advanced technologies, and materials to actually utilize the information. The idea of the FabLab (Fabrication Laboratory), one of the most popular types of makerspaces, emerged in a basement at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA), and a course of Gershenfield’s called ‘How to make (almost) anything.’ The basement was in operation at all hours but with limited access, serving as a well-kept secret between fabrication-minded researchers at MIT. Its purpose was to launch of ideas within a physical space equipped with laser cutters, vacuum formers, 3D printers, hypersonic waterjet cutters, and a broad range of tools. Gershenfield was convinced that this basement could be a powerful learning model and subsequently should be open to everyone. Within months, the FabLab was converted from an MIT gated community to a worldwide phenomenon. Today, FabLabs are heaven-on-Earth for every DIY-er and Maker, who in return has helped contemporary maker culture to grow even more.

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4.3 A c c ess to Tools The image is a projec t by A ristides A ntonas named ‘The Responsible H ouse. A Plan for a c ommon spac e’. The projec t aims to provoke the way housing today is largely affec ted by smart devic es, tec hnology, and soc ial media.

The image c ould be the plan for any FabLab or any makerspac e where spac e is defined by mac hines, tools, and its interc onnec tedness to the world.

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The idea of learning by making finds its response somewhere in between digital and physical spaces, a condition that rooted a traditional academic setting, in this case the MIT campus. FabLab conformed to a promise: that people who had never considered themselves designers or, entrepreneurs, could now afford and access educational material. FabLabs are spaces that refine a new form of empowerment, opening an infinite sample of possibilities to the individual. The promise of ‘hacking’ your own world caused an active reaction to the existing system and an opposition towards the passive reception of ubiquitous information and consumer products. Now that you don’t have to buy something, you can simply learn to make it yourself, or improve and customize it to your own needs and preferences.

FabLabs are small workshops that function in a post-Fordist configuration, where people in small groups collaborate on the same project, aiming to achieve creativity and productivity. The emphasis on the communal and collaborative nature of contemporary labor follows a Marxist ideology that started as an opposition to the alienated conditions of working and living after the industrial revolution. The notion of the workshop historically is not restricted to purely the knowledge of making but it is highly associated with forms of living. Karl Marx, Charles Fourier, and Claude Saint-Simon perceived the workshop as a space where labor and life where diffused, and this form of living was predominantly collective. The diffusion of working with living, along with the encouragement for collective activities impelled as a noble cause over the estrangement of the industrial revolution.

However, the question of whether collectivity is liberating or enforced has always been crucial. In most cases, space becomes a battlefield between exploitation and solidarity.

William Morris, an English craftsman and follower of Marx’s ideology, when writing his seminal work News from Nowhere (1980), described an ideal vision of working communities where people would ‘hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner’ (qtd in Beshty, 2005), since leisure and working cannot be separated.

The phalanstery, one of the most notable utopian societies inspired by Fourier, was primarily organized as a reaction against the alienating working environment that occurred after the industrial revolution. Even though Fourier’s ideas were based on the

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diversity of human personalities, they were criticized by Roland Barthes, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin as illusive. The persistence of a collective way of living was proven to be obstacle for finding the balance between collectivity and the autonomy of the self.

Robert Owen, a Welsh social reformer, established New Harmony, a massive communitybased structure built in 1825. The objective was to implement a self-sustained community where 3,000 people could work and live together. Similar to phalanstery’s fate, the project failed because people felt their individuality was subdued for the sake of the common interest.

Adversely to these spaces of social reform, both workshops and makerspaces share a similar spatial configuration with the factory. Makerspaces aim to produce knowledge, share information, and cultivate skills for people, deduce the production of knowledge more important than the production of commodities. It is precisely this condition that underlies similar obscurities related to forms of subjectivity between industrial estrangement and contemporary freedom in labor. According to Pier Vittorio Aureli, the factory ‘reduce(s) architecture to its barest form possible’ (2015:110). The example of Albert Kahn’s design for the Ford Motor Company Plant in Highland Park, which became the first to host the assembly line, was a structure of reinforced concrete of columns and slabs forming a massive open space. The goal was precisely to create unobstructed spaces to accommodate the most optimized method of production. The same abstractive architecture applies in smaller workshops and makerspaces where similar guidelines apply: machines, tools, and people are the primary elements for architecture and, according to the way these three are combined, produce qualitative work, but first and foremost they product human subjects. Either a Fordist assembly line or a post-Fordist small group exchange of knowledge space remains the same. The question here becomes the role, or even more the incapability, of architecture in hosting dissimilar modes of production, both alienating and humane within the same spatial structure.

Aureli links abstraction in architecture with capitalism, and the way makerspaces operate justify this condition. Peter Drucker, in his book Post-Capitalist Society (1993), illustrates the work in late capitalism, explaining that the worker’s knowledge will no longer be applied to tools or productivity, as it was until early 20th century. Drucker presents the

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figure of the ‘knowledge worker,’ where the means of production becomes knowledge itself. The entrepreneur is the exemplary of the ‘knowledge worker,’ where technical skills are combined with creativity, fabrication, marketing, financing, and managerial skills.

Today, universities advertise the development of transferral skills, prerequisite skills for the future worker, since the individual is encouraged to enter society early in life. FabLabs are considered to be indispensable facilities in every elitist educational institution today, in particular in architectural schools such as the GSD (Graduate Design School) at Harvard University and Penn Design at the University of Pennsylvania, among others. However, FabLabs can be found in their more inclusive form, in specific locations within cities or as a transportable structure that travels around a country. In these types of FabLabs, people of any age and from any economic status can engage themselves without being registered at a school or any other institution. In general, though, FabLabs and every other makerspace are funded and encouraged by official institutions, redeemed in ideas and creativity.

Constructing the Creative Entrepreneur

Future generations will not be of labor workers but creative entrepreneurs. Cedric Prices’ definition of ‘free space’ configures an architecture that enables human creativity in spaces that are programmatic adaptable, and have no spatial boundaries. Price anticipated the deficiency of spaces to emulate the economy, and in 1066 he published the Potteries Thinkbelt proposal, an alternative plan to resolve the demise of manufacturing in post-industrial Britain. The title is derived from the site of the intervention, a misused industrialized site in North Staffordshire, which until early 20th century accommodated a local pottery and ceramics industry along with a rail network. After the economic crisis during the 1950s-60s in Britain’s manufacturing sector, the site remained abandoned, highly polluted, and underused.

Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt came as a response not only to the reclamation of the devastated area but also as a broader technique critique to how economic processes affect space. The plan conveyed the idea of an educational network for 22,000 students to emphasize education and knowledge as a form of production and as an alternative to industrial production. During the 1960s, there was also a reaction against educational institutions’ superior and elitist operation. Price’s idea was to encourage a

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democratization of learning, where the students would act as wage earners in the educational system. The emergence of knowledge education, information technologies, and the post-Fordist transition constituted Potteries Thinkbelt as a trend in urban development during the 1980s.

Potteries Thinkbelt proposes transfer and faculty areas, along with several housing typologies, such as capsules, crates or battery. These parts of the network are for the most part movable and ephemeral in position and function. Price believed that architecture moves much more slowly than society, and as a result it cannot resolve any immediate issues or problems. The permanency of architecture, its construction as a fixed product, and its over-determinacy in terms of function limit the possibilities that architecture could have. For this reason, Potteries Thinkbelt included moving parts that would have the possibility to easily adapt to real-time feedback according to economic data market demands, and population movement. This idea mirrors the operation of today’s ‘smart cities,’ even though the way Price envisioned architecture still remains a utopia.

However, the significance of Potteries Thinkbelt largely resides in the unrecognizable edges between education and society, forms of production and forms of living. Potteries Thinkbelt represents a factory of knowledge, moving from material production to immaterial knowledge where intellectuality, creativity, and skills are more important than objects. The project intended to be a social utopia for alternative educational institutions.

However, if examined today, given existing neoliberal and capitalist values and ideologies, it can be characterized a precursor of makerspaces and, subsequently, another spatial configuration that shapes subjectivity.

Makerversity, a space that currently occupies the basement of the Somerset House in London, mirrors in several ways the proposal of the Potteries Thinkbelt and exemplifies the current organizations of labor. Somerset House’s lower for, a 3,000 square meter space, was left derelict for a long time. Tom Tobia, the founder of Makerversity, managed to regenerate about 1,500 square meters of space, facilitated with tools and machines similar to FabLabs, and became dedicated to promoting collective learning and shared knowledge for people who want to start their own business. Makerversity’s name blends

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4.4 M akerversity – a makerspac e in the basement of S omerset H ouse, London (U K)

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‘university’ and ‘maker’ to parallel its objective: ‘A shared making and learning space in the heart of London, providing an affordable and accessible space for learning, experimentation, production, and enterprise.’8 The project was initially self-funded but is now sponsored by major educational institutions and technology companies such as the British Council, Pearson, Plan B’s ‘Each One Teach One,’ and Cabinet Office, among others. The Maker Library Network, a recent British Council project aimed at bringing makers and creatives together, is currently connecting Makerversity of the UK with ThinkKing, the South African ‘Makerversity.’

The architecture of Makerversity is again another ‘free space,’ where functions, people, and machines facilitate an enormous open space. It is separated into three main workshops that serve as miniatures of the whole flexible and abstract space: (1) the Manual workshop, which is the main space with machines, tools, and workspaces ‘where our members make a well, get their hands dirty and bring their ideas to life;’ (2) the Digital workshop, which accommodates digital and fabrication means of production; (3) the Assembly space, which is used for the final stages of production, constructing, finishing, and storage. In these spaces, people who become members of Makerversity can learn, experiment, and materialize their ideas by helping each other. Part of the project is a curriculum of courses, where members become the educators and faculty teach likeminded individuals. To become a member, the individual is required to have an idea of a project in mind that will eventually turn into a business. In addition, Makerversity facilitates two studios, a photo studio, and a sound studio, that are run and managed by experts who provide their knowledge to the members. Similar to the FabLabs, the skills provided combine technical and hands-on work while expanding the notion of the entrepreneur since the members can only be ambitious creative-entrepreneurs.

The person is the tool

In 1900, Frances Johnston’s photographs of the Hampton Institute, displayed in the American room at the Musèe Social in Pars, show ex-slaves and expelled Indians working together. Making was used as a means to resolve ethic differences, since they were part of a common project. For this reason, the workers in Johnston’s photographs depict each

40

individual as the tool they use, all part of an assembly line dedicated to a specific task that will complete the common project. The assembly line of the factory expected the subject to master one specific skill as part of a broader project. Today’s assembly line is the subject itself. Similar to the attributes of a ‘free space,’ the ‘free subject,’ who in this case is the entrepreneur, is characterized by abstraction, flexibility, and adjustability. The subject becomes a versatile tool, since the entrepreneur is required to obtain a trans-categorical range of skills. Makerspaces are part of this project, expressing a pedagogy of subjectivation in their operative space. Makerspaces are shaped in a way to succeed where previous community-based workshops failed, which is to find the balance between educating the self to become autonomous, self-sustained, and self-organized while simultaneously functioning as a strictly collective space. ‘Dream it. Make it. Share it,’ where ‘sharing’ becomes a keyword for expecting, or even demanding the subject to be cooperative, participatory, and collective.

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4.5 / 4.6 Franc es Johnston’s photographs.

The person is depic ted as an extension of the tool, and the tool as an extension of man.

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A collaborative product ‘I am doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386 (486) AT clones.’ (qtd in Ratti, 2015:63) While still a student, Linus Torvalds started developing a code for his own personal use. When he encountered some difficulties, he asked for help through an online platform. It was then that this code, which ended up being one of the most popular computer operating systems for banks and developers and the basis for further programming developments, became a collaborative project, composed by many users who started helping Torvalds and exchanged knowledge and thoughts with each other. To consider the immense response to Torvalds’ call, it is necessary to say that only 2% of the source code was estimated to be from Torvalds’ involvement, a percentage that still constitutes him as the main contributor of the source code.

It would be arbitrary not to acknowledge the importance of Linux as a successful product assembled by various actors who did not share anything in common beyond their interest in developing software.

Linux’s contributors were eager to altruistically share their knowledge with strangers to make this code work. In the book Open Source Architecture (2015), Carlo Ratti brings to the forefront the example of Linux to support his argument towards a participatory design using technology, an anonymous architecture where the architect acts like Torvalds. The ‘choral architect,’ as Ratti suggests is the new role of the architect, who needs to be an orchestrator more than the person who provides design solutions or building documents. However, there is a need to distinguish why participatory design radically differs from writing a programming code.

Linux was created among users who did not necessarily have to physically meet. It was enough to be at home behind a computer screen, a common habit of the contemporary individual and an advantage given by the way technology and online platforms as meeting points operate. Even though writing a code is not a straightforward linear procedure, rather it is a constant trial and error effort, in comparison with design it has one main stage that requires particular technical knowledge in order for people to participate. Design, as a more abstract and vague field, gives the illusion that everyone can participate, an open and inclusive field of action. This can be relatively real to the extent that people can propose ideas, suggest solutions, or frame problems and needs. To proceed to the implementation of a design, not only does the process become exclusive, but it also becomes complex.

5.1 C asa Telematic a, U go La Pietra “The D omic ile C ell: A M ic rostruc ture: within Information and Telec ommunic ations S ystems, 1971.

The projec t was presented in the M oM A exhibition “Italy: The new domestic landsc ape,” 1972.

For La Pietra the house bec omes a meeting point and a plac e for exc hanging information, something similar to today’s soc ial networks.

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Did Someone Say Participate? 9 Architects like Ugo La Pietra and Hans Hollein designed ‘capsules of communication,’ where the minimal building could only be a phone booth, since once you own a telephone you are utterly connected to the world, which is basically all you need. Today’s minimal building could be probably be the same one square meter space where the telephone is replaced with a laptop or any smart device. The entrepreneur as a collaborative subject is encouraged to participate in a variety of activities involving their work, their community, or their own living. Easy access to online meeting points enhances the empowerment of the public to become part of decision-making processes, and participatory design cannot be exluded from those processes. Each of the users, without the need to actually meet one another, feels powerful and capable of participating in decision-making for their own city. But what about actually making the city?

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5.2 M aker C ities Platform

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Architecture without Architects [The High-tech Version] In 1965, the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York presented an exhibition and release of a book called Architecture without Architects. It was Bernard Rudofksy’s seminal work on what he called ‘non-pedigreed architecture,’ an investigation of the significance of vernacular architecture. The book was characterized as polemical, since it challenged the authorship of the architect in a period where Modernism was at its climax.

Rudofksy interrogates and documents examples of authorless architecture by examining the way traditional builders were collectively working to form their houses and their communities. The builder was the user itself and, subsequently, the spatial product was a specific response to local challenges and needs. Architecture without Architects incited new ways of thinking about architecture, such as communal or participatory approaches.

Many voices joined Rudofksy’s call, each one experimenting new roles for the architect, either as an organizer, a facilitator, or even eliminating architects’ responsibility entirely.

The Maker movement is one of these voices encouraging participatory design methods.

The main difference between the Makers’ call and Rudofksy’s is that the spatial product is not a result of an informal cooperation. Rather, the vernacular becomes institutional, and traditional ways of building become high-tech. The collective building among workers becomes a ‘co-operation online phenomenon,’ as Richard Sennett (2012:24) would call it.

Sennett presents this phenomenon as an effect that holds the potential to stimulate people to act simultaneously online and offline. He presents examples of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings of 2011, but he mainly focuses on GoogleWave, a software primarily designed to enhance the phenomenon of cooperation online. Similar to Renaissance experimental workshop, people could suggest or even alter the development of a project, such as the formation of policies on migration in London, through the GoogleWave platform.

However, even though GoogleWave was a positive idea, Sennett, while using it, soon realized its shortcomings. The platform’s design had a very definite definition of what cooperation is and how it materializes. Online platforms for participation are oversimplified, developed on a dialectical and linear model of conversation, ant they repudiate what might be fruitful for progressive in discussion. The popularity of

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GoogleWave soon declined, since the company revoked its operation in 2010, one year after its inauguration. Similar to GoogleWave, there is a proliferation of these platforms that aspire to succeed. The meaning of participation, in particular in design, through online platforms is still incomplete, doubtful, and vague. The seemingly open environment encourages the users to participate, suggest, share and endorse design proposals. Still, the spatial products, as the outcome of these platforms, are for the most part unrealized.

Maker Cities10 is an online platform developed in 2014 by the Institute of the Future, a non-profit organization located in Palo Alto, California. It has the form of a game, and everyone is invited to sign in and respond to one main question: ‘How will your city be a maker city in 2025?’ The platform shows a world map with all of the places where people have already recommended a project. The user’s, or the player’s, role is either to support an already catalogued future proposed by another user, or to share their own future. All of the ideas are required to be related to the maker movement but are open to several aspects of society, including food production, forms of living, learning processes, and governmental issues. During the game, questions keep appearing on the screen, such as ‘What forces keep this future from coming true?’ so other people can refine your idea.

Their call is that ‘maker across the country are coming together with tools, skills, and time to collaborate toward building a better city of the future – a maker city!’ As seen in previous chapters, these people already have in their hands instructions and blueprints, and they are also (supposedly) trained and skilled enough to expand their territory of influence form the scale of the self to the scale of the city.

Even though the project is still in its primitive stages, there have been some early attempts at approaching the city scale through making. The city of San Francisco, and not surprisingly since Palo Alto and Silicon Valley are the generators and major supporters of the Maker movement since the Whole Earth Catalog era, demonstrates itself to be an exemplary of Maker city. The Maker Street Prototyping Festival11 was an initiative held by the Planning Department of San Francisco, the Yerba Buena Centre of the Arts, and the James L. Knight Foundation as part of this making experience within the city. It was promoted as an ‘open call for creative ways to improve Maker street’ and citizens’ responses were tremendously positive. Hundreds of submissions offered ideas for the city through the creation of models and prototypes suggesting small-scale interventions that

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could eventually spread around the city. The prototypes varied from pop-up libraries to vegetated areas, benches, and phone-charging stations. The diversity of interventions addressed in its entirety the augmentation of public engagement, smallness, and temporality. However, smallness and temporality can be characterized as a fleeting advantage by the state to the citizens, a small dose of power that is taken the same time it is given.

The example of the Maker Cities as a platform is not the first one that has empowered the individual to make their own city. Diycity.org, a website launched by John Geraci in October 2008, was the first attempt at this endeavor. Geraci’s platform was based on the belief that cities need to coincide in technological advances and that, similar to the Internet, a city needs to be open. There is a tendency nowadays to associate ‘open’ and the ‘internet’ with participation. However, there is a fine line between active and inactive participation when it comes to online source platforms. Geraci was inspired by the Apps for Democracy, a project made by the city of Washington, DC, the first city to invite their citizens to provide real-time data in crime feeds, poverty indicators, governmental issues, or any other data related to the city’s operation. Diycity.org invited citizens to form their own interest groups and discuss online how to set up bottom-up initiatives for their neighborhood, city, and region. After two years, the website closed largely for two reasons. The first was that excessive participation renounces the process as highly openended and deficient of a final decision. A lack of hierarchy interferes with progress and materialization. Who will make the decision if everyone can express their own ideas?

Who will decide what is the best solution to implement if everyone can be constantly opinionated? The second reason is that the operator-entrepreneur of such a website is in need of a business plan. The popularity of these applications, which is truly tremendous, does not guarantee their financial success. This is when such initiatives are required to collaborate with existing institutions to sustain themselves economically.

Today’s participatory design platforms such as the Maker Cities seem to have a more promising future since they act in collaboration with institutions and the state. This institutional bottom-up approach is a tendency of the state to gain back its credibility. A lot of bottom-up interventions receive funding, and subsequently they are required to present final products. Cedric Price, Reyner Banham, and Paul Barker in their essay ‘Non Plan’

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present the construction of the city from its users as ‘an experiment of freedom.’ The essay, written in 1967 and published in the journal New Society, counterpoints outdated planning regulations, particularly in Britain, and suggests that citizens better know what they need and should be handed over control in designing their own city. However, the level of emancipation within such processes in contemporary society raises doubts. There is a main argument that participatory design challenges the configuration of power relationships. Maker Cities and almost every participatory plan operate under existing planning policies and design protocols. In the end, the individual as a participatory subject loses their autonomy, since their ideas and suggestions are censored and edited by the existing hierarchy and top-down actors and regulations. This is another reason that these projects are mainly small and temporal. While citizens introduce their ideas and freely express their needs and urgencies, the final decision is made by the city. Even though it is not a point to critically condemn, since Diycity.org unfolded the significance of an hierarchy in these processes the question here is whether participatory design can give power to the people only if it has the capacity to alter existing planning policies and regulations more than proposing ideas and schemes.

The Architect as a Collaborative Subject Maker Cities do not require the ideas of an architect, nor their specialization. They follow citizens’ ideas and provide skills and the tools to people in order to repair or construct parts of their city. In one of his lectures, Michel Feher12 claims how the notion of ‘sharing’ today has substituted corporations’ costs with free labor. Feher explains that even though post-Forism is comprised of a humanitarian form of labor and the division between producers and consumers is no longer secluded, marketing techniques such as ‘tell us your opinion’ campaigns or ‘share your thoughts’ questionnaires exploit the general intellect and degrade the significance of experts. The corporation, through a seemingly spontaneous collaboration between people and producers, does not then require a specialist to come up with an idea, since it employs hundreds of ideas for free. Similar to this strategy, the state can have ideas for improving the city for free through participatory design online platforms, such as the Maker Cities, and the architect as a specialist is no longer needed for advising the state.

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The design of the city as a collaborative plan is not unprecedented and does not come only as a client’s or user’s request but, in several cases, such as the ‘Non-Plan’ essay, is the vision of the architect. Patrick Geddes, distinguished for his innovative thinking in the field of urban planning, stimulated the vision of the ‘civics,’ where the architect collaborates with the people to build their city together. Hannes Meyer, not long after he was dismissed from Bauhaus, wrote: ‘I never design alone. All my designs have arisen from the very start out of collaboration with others13’ (1933). Giancarlo de Carlo, founder of Team X, encouraged the public to be part of the formation of the city. Carlo’s seminal essay on participation (1980), where he explicitly states, ‘in reality, architecture has become too important to be left to architects’ became the dictum for every supporter of participatory design. Carlo claimed that architects should attain the role of supporting the public to shape their own ‘self-realizing plans.’ These cases, among others, are essential reflections of the contemporary tendency of empowering the self and simultaneously transforming the architect into a collaborative subject. All of these architects supported participatory design methods in terms of its social aspect, unlike the current institutional involvement in the example of the Maker Cities. However, there are current examples where participation is an attempt to remain faithful to social issues: ‘We believe that where resources and expertise are scarce, innovative, sustainable, and collaborative, design can make a difference.14’ Cameron Sinclair, co-founder of Architecture for Humanity, gave a TED talk in 2005, explaining the fundamental principles behind the Architecture for Humanity’s entrepreneurship and his wish for an Open Source Architecture. The project started in 1999 with 700 dollars and a website. These few resources were enough to build an organization from scratch, capable of raising over 5 million dollars in funding every year, of coordinating thousands of designers around the globe, and collecting more than 3,000 design projects with more than 300 implemented. Their slogan ‘Design like you give a damn’ invited people to propose ideas for areas in crisis, such as refugee shelters, natural disaster emergency reliefs, or community centers in developing countries.

Architecture for Humanity’s first project was a design competition for shelters to accommodate the Kosovans after the war in 1998-1999. The response was immense. It

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was then that Sinclair realized that a grassroots movement comprised by socially responsible architects and designers, among other non-specialists, was already in existence. The only thing missing was a platform that would eventually become the meeting point for these architects. In 2004, Katrina Hurricane killed tens of thousands of people in more than 11 countries, and Sinclair received more responses that he could even imagine. The idea was to start using an existing online application called MeetUp, in order to bring people together to help in specific areas. The task was to accomplish global collaboration for a realized physical action at a local level. Along with the holding design competitions, Architecture for Humanity created student workshops, lectures, and public forums to physically engage with others, motivate them to participate, and teach them how to build, participate, and design.

Architecture for Humanity inspired Open Source Architecture, a platform that has not yet been implemented but it is very close to a current reality. Open Source Architecture suggests that the construction of a community where people will design for humanitarian objectives. Everyone will have the opportunity to upload their ideas and design plans aiming to resolve problems around the globe. This project proposes the creation of at least one FabLab in every country as a physical space with the capacity, machines, and tools to realize their plains. However, there is a plethora of controversies considering the architect as this particular kind of collaborative subject. The most dominant one is the notion of ‘authorship,’ that the architect, even though involved in a participatory method, either as a facilitator, as a participant, or an organizer, needs to sacrifice his/her specialization and becomes anonymous. Sinclair acknowledges the substance of copyright in design work as the main obstacle for Open Source Architecture. The solution to that comes by the Creative Commons license, another non-profit organization that supports open source access to everything, which is dedicated to securing intellectual property.

Every architect can secure copyrights for their designs, and therefore the design can be shared and infinitely reproduced in countries with similar issues. For example, when a design proposal suggested by Architecture for Humanity is once built, then anyone can take the construction documents and the blueprints and reproduce them at no cost.

Sinclair’s TED talk concludes with a quote by Buckminster Fuller:

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It is highly feasible to take care of all humanity at a higher standard for living than anyone has ever experienced or dreamt of. To do so without having anybody profit at the expense of another, so that everybody can enjoy the whole earth. It all can be done by 1985.

Free culture, free information, and free change, ideas that have been both utopian and realistic since the 1960s, today with the internet and open-source platforms, look more promising than ever. However, it seems that there is great misinterpretation around the ‘free’ word. In January 2015, Architecture for Humanity announced its closing, since it was unable to receive sufficient funding to continue its humanitarian cause. When Parvin was creating WikiHouse, his goal was to provide housing for the 95% of the population who were dependent on philanthropists or the state. Architecture for Humanity is an explicit example of architecture from people that is still in need for this prosperous and rich 5% of the population. Grassroots movements, especially the ones involved in architecture, construction, and building, are largely affected by economic demands to bring change. Participatory design always sounds as a powerful idea. Nevertheless, it lacks reality. The assymetrical relationship between the architect-expert and the public, and the architect and the state or the institution as the client or the funding resource entails multiple layers of complexity given each actor’s interest.

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5.3 Liking isn’t partic ipating, or maybe not?

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Customizing a Self-City?

The aforementioned examples unravel participation as another form of soft power, deceiving the subject with power, which is temporal, short-lived, and dependent. On the other hand, this control might be necessary in the design of the city. We can customize our private ownerships and by doing this, among other activities within the city, the city is already a collaborative project. Even though the idea of forcing the customization of the city based on our preferences sounds appealing, the reality is much more complex. At some point there are decisions that need to be made, common infrastructures that need to get built, and spaces outside the self-sphere that need to be developed. If decision-making is for everyone, responsibility cannot be authorized to everyone, particularly in the way responsibility is perceived through the ubiquitous online platforms for the empowerment of the self, where not everyone seems to be willing to take any responsibility beyond their self. The entrepreneurial subject is confronted to resolve a conflict between individual autonomy and collective responsibility. The notion of the author and the specialist should not be perceived strictly in terms of technique or expertise. It includes social, economic, and political consequences and civic duties that oblige the expert to take personal burden for flaws, criticisms, and accusations, not only in technical design terms but also in terms of ethical approval. These are attributes, similar to creativity that the contemporary entrepreneur needs to obtain in order to transgress the adjustable vagueness of their trans-categorical knowledge to separate themselves from the mass.

Â

54 Â

HOW TO BUILD A CITY FROM SCRATCH: The Handy Step-by-Step DIY Guide *Excerpt from Guardian: Jeffries, Stuart. “How to Build A City From Scratch: The Handy Step-by-Step DIY Guide.”

The Guardian, June 30. 2015. Web. 09 Sept 2015.

Building

a

real

city

from

scratch

isn’t

like

playing Minecraft, Civilization or SimCity. Well, it is a little.

But problems arise in reality that don’t come up in cyberspace,

including

vainglorious

dictators,

pompous

architects, bureaucratic impedimenta and the fact that much of the best land is already inhabited by those intractable objects: pesky humans.

Nevertheless, after studying several urban planning projects around the world, we’ve mastered the step-by-step process of how to build your very own real city.

1. Choose a location 2. Ensure a reliable water supply 3. Ensure a reliable money supply 4. Think about jobs 5. Do not alienate locals 6. Devise a masterplan 7. Integrate transport 8. Consider banning cars 9. M ake rubbish clever 10. M aximize connectivity 11. Aspire to carbon neutrality 12.Start again, clown, you’ve forgotten parks 13. … and culture 14. Please, not another funny -shaped island 15. M ake a Statement 16. Treat workers with respect 17. Build fast. N o, faster …

18. Re-educate your new urbanites 19. If you build it, they will come 20. O h, yes – give it a name

6.1 D ream it. M ake it. S hare it.

O ne of the many empowering slogans of the M aker movement.

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55 Â

Conclusion There are various ways individuals and groups constitute themselves as subjects through processes of subjectivatio: what counts in such processes is the extend to which, as they take shape, they elude both established forms of knowledge and the dominant forms of power. This is of value even if they in turn engender new forms of power or become assimilated into new forms of knowledge. For a while, they had a real rebellious spontaneity. (qtd in Till, 2005)

Â

56 Â

Deleuze and Guattari (1997) speak about the processes of subjectivation as unpredictable events, where the subject understands and knows oneself within their living environment. Adversely, the dominant proposition in which forms of subjectivity imply a level of control in the process of forming a subject can also be constructive by excluding imposed knowledge and power. Today, we are experiencing a new paradigm of power shaped by new forms of sovereignty. Sovereignty cannot be defined by fixed physical boundaries, nor are these boundaries centralized or specific. The mechanisms of this power are immanent within the social field, which produces life and shapes subjects. As a result, these mechanisms cannot be considered as imposed knowledge. This obscurity in the way it is reflected within architectural frameworks is one of the main interrogations of this thesis. This blurred condition provides the subject with the advantage to actually become entrepreneurial.

The entrepreneurial self is formed by the way organizations of labor and knowledge are construed within society. Michel Foucault (1967) described the way discipline was explicitly exercised over individuals in physical spaces such as asylums and prisons.

Today, the expansion of the entrepreneur urges us to experience an alternative type of control and discipline, one that permits seemingly autonomous forms of subjectivity.

However, to what extent can forms of subjectivity be autonomous is the main question of the contradictory project of ‘DIY subjectivity’. The DIY culture becomes another kind of soft power. In many of the aforementioned cases, DIY is presented as franchised, instructing the subject how to be productive, how to be active, how to participate, how to be progressive, and how to be entrepreneurial. However, the subject does not perform as an autonomous entity in the terms autonomy is usually defined. Contemporary subjects are constructed through communicative forms of living, collaborative modes of interaction, and inclusive methods of citizenship. These alternative social relations become the basis for organizing systems of labor and knowledge. As a result, the subject feels free and liberated in shaping oneself.

To shape oneself, processes of participation become significant in several aspects of living.

He normalization of social media, technological advances, fabrication machines, and ubiquitous information networks have provided individuals with easy participation which allows those individuals to become members of a community. In the case of the DIY /

57

Maker culture, the role of online platforms has been largely exaggerated, since the contemporary collective and the empowered self are primarily formed by other means.

Certainly the constant reference to informational databases is unavoidable, since they contribute as primarily triggering meeting points. However, the interest of this thesis is rather different. Participation becomes a form of living, because it is a prerequisite in workplaces and spaces of knowledge. The subject is encouraged, trained, or even forced to participate and collaborate with others for the development of the self. The empowerment of the self and the communal become parts of the same project, where the one contours the other. As a result, the entrepreneurial self is a collective subject, a condition that provides an alternative definition to the notion of collective and how communities are formed.

Architecture becomes an essential mechanism for constructing physical environments that produce the entrepreneurial self as both a participatory and collective subject. The limitless self is created within an abstract physical form, an interior where architectural elements are reduced and replaced by tools, machines, and modes of production. Since the entrepreneurial self is convinced to have a limitless set of skills, architecture becomes flexible, adjustable, and open. However, at the same time architecture creates multiprogrammed spaces that potentially can accommodate almost anything, architecture becomes vague. Similarly, even though the entrepreneur obtains a trans-categorical range of skills, simultaneously that figure loses heterogeneous characteristics that distinguish their individuality.

The cases presented in this thesis manifest the physical environment as an embodiment of cultural paradigms extrapolating ideas that negotiate schemas of capitalist production, notions of bio-power, and collaborative and communicative forms of living, labor, and knowledge. These three forms as presented by the DIY / Maker culture are interrelated and interconnected. The juxtaposed aim of the cases introduced is what raises the interest for this thesis. The fact that these projects start as reactionary and self-focused, aspiring to a declination from the status quo, and eventually become improvements for existing representative institutions is both beneficial and evasive. The majority of these projects do not diminish existing representative institutions, but their existence demands more inclusive forms of representation. The cases of the Maker Cities, Open Source Architecture,

Â

58 Â

Makerversity, and FabLabs reveal the constraints and challenges these projects have to face in order to survive within the current system. No matter the deliberate intentions, the underlying principles are revealed in the final creation. Even though the constraints are predominantly economic, the implementation of these projects is determined by existing political and social regulations and norms. Subsequently, these projects can only be fruitful when dealing with policies and rules, preconditions that require existing institutions, the state, or ever corporations to collaborate, agree, and decide.

While the collaboration between movements and institutions is what Chantal Mouffe (2013) explains as an ‘agonistic’ approach, transforming institutions that have lost their credibility to democracy into accountable entities to the citizenry, this collaboration can also be misleading. Mouffe (2013:115-116) advocates that ‘in order to challenge neoliberalism, it is necessary to engage with key institutions. It is not enough to organize new forms of existence of the common, outside the dominant capitalist structures as if the latter would progressively ebb away without any confrontation.’ The examples of this thesis reveal precisely this condition as more promising for enduring projects that aim to demolish the existing capitalist system. It is much easier to start something from scratch disconnected from current realities instead of repairing a highly corrupted world.

However, the independency of the project is relative to the current condition and in order to change something you need to deal with it rather than avoiding it.

The architectural project in this case needs to identify a space in between individual autonomy and collective responsibility, to demarcate the edges between flexibility and abstraction, and to ascertain a balance between agonistic approaches and manipulative acts. Since architecture becomes a mechanism embodied in building forms of subjectivity, it is necessary to redefine its discipline’s boundaries once more. As Deleuze and Guattari put it in the beginning, ‘this is of value even if they in turn engender new forms of power or become assimilated into new forms of knowledge. For a while, they had a real rebellious spontaneity

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Notes

1

Watch the video, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-21/inside-liberland-the-place-of-no-taxeswhere-crowdfunding-rules Kiernan, Ed. “Inside ‘Liberland,’ the Place of No Taxes Where Crowdfunding Rules.”

BloombergBusiness. Bloomberg. n.d. Web. 09 Sept. 2015.

2 See

more, Maker: A Documentary on the Maker Movement. Design Trust for Public Art Space. n.d. Web. 9 Sept 2015.

3

Quote found, Bacon, Terry R. The Elements of Power: Lessons on Leadership and Influence. New York: AMACOM American Management Association. 2011:153.

4 See, WikiHouse.WikiHouse Foundation, 2014. Web. 09 Sept. 2015.

5 See Parvin’s talk here, Parvin, Alastair. “Architecture for the people by the people.” TED Ideas worth spreading. TED Conferences, LCC, Feb 2013. Web. 9 Sept. 2015.

6

Watch intro (video) on Maker Cities website, http://www.makercities.net/#intro 7

See Gershenfield’s talk here, Gershenfield, Neil. “Neil Gershenfeld: Unleash your creativity in a Fab Lab.” TED Ideas worth spreading. TED Conferences, LCC, n.d. Web. 09 Sept. 2015.

8

See, Maakerversity website: http://makerversity.org/

9

The title of this chapter is borrowed from the title of the book: Shumon Basar, and Markus Miessen. Did Someone Say Participate?: An Atlas of Spatial Practice.

Revolver. 2006.

The book is a compilation of essays, projects, and authors invited to transgress the boundaries of their discipline, specifically the boundaries of architecture, and collaborate with other practitioners coming from other fields and disciplines for the development of an idea or a project.

10

See, Maker Cities website, http://www.makercities.net

11

See, The Maker Street Prototyping Festival website: http://marketstreetprototyping.org/

12

Michel Feher lecture series at the Goldsmiths University, London: Feher, Michel. Operative Thought: An annual lecture series on the Political Practices of Ideas / The Age of Appreciation: Lectures on the Neoliberal Condition, Goldsmiths University, 28 January 2015.

14

See Cameron’s talk here:

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Sinclair, Cameron. “My wish: A call for open-source architecture.” TED Ideas worth spreading. TED Conferences, LCC, n.d. Web. 09 Sept. 2015.

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Bibliography: Anderson, Chris. Makers: The New Industrial Revolution. New York: Crown Business.

2012. Print.

Aureli, Pier Vittorio. “Labor and Architecture: Revisiting Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt,” Log 23, December 2011. Print Aureli Pier Vittorio. Less is Enough. Strelka Press, 2013. Print.

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Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and Politics Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012. Print.

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List of Figures: Introduction 1.1 Liberland (edited)…………………………………………………………………………………….1 Original Image available from: Nolan, Daniel. “Liberland: Hundreds of thousands apply to live in world’s newest ‘country’.” The Guardian. 24 Apr. 2015. Web. 9 Sept. 2015.

1.2 Wired Magazine Cover Issue April 4, 2011……………………………………………………8

Chapter 1 2.1 Versatile Sugru (edited) Original images available from: Sugru. Sugru. n.d. Web. 9 Sept 2015.

2. 2 THX 1138……………………………………………………………………………………………...9 Image source: THX 1138 Movie

2.3 Invent. (edited)………………………………………………………………………………………11 Original image available from: “Silicon Valley Billboard”. Maker Culture. Wikipedia. Web. 9 Sept. 2015.

Chapter 2 3.1 Whole Earth Catalog (collage made by the author) 3. 2 Blueprints…………………………………………………………………………………………….21 Image source: WikiHouse.WikiHouse Foundation, 2014. Web. 9 Sept. 2015.

3. 3 Recipes for Housing / Dome Cookbook………………………………………………………23 Image source: “Dome Cookbook, Algumas Imagens.” Arquitetura E Discurso. Web. 9 Sept. 2015.

Chapter 3 4.1 An entrepreneurial space (edited) Original image available from: Hollein, Hans. “Mobiles Buro – Mobile Office,” 1969. Hans Hollein. Web. 9 Sept 2015.

4.2 What architecture wants to be (collage made by the author)…………………………..…31 4.3 Access to Tools……………………………………………………………………………………....34 Image source: Antonas, Aristides. “Responsible House. Plan for Common Space,” 2011. A House for Doing Nothing.

Dpr-Barcelona. Web. 9 Sept. 2015.

4.4 Makerversity………………………………………………………………………………………….39 Image source: Makerversity. Makerversity Ltd. n.d. Web. 9 Sept, 2015.

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4.5 / 4.6 The Person is the Tool………………………………………………………………………42 Image source: Johnston, Frances Benjamin. “Students at Hampton Institute Hampton Virginia,” 1900. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Wikimedia. Web. 9 Sept. 2015.

Chapter 4 5.1 Casa Telematica Ugo La Pietra…………………………………………………………………..43 Image source: Ugo La Pietra, “Casa Telematica”. 1972. Socks studio mag.,Web

5.2 Maker Cities Platform (edited)………………………………………………………..………….45 Image source: Maker Cities. Institute for the Future. n.d. Web. 9 Sept, 2015.

5.3 Liking isn’t participating(?) (collage made by the author)………………………………….53

Conclusion 6.1 Dream it. Make it. Share it………………………………………………………………………..55 Image source: “Dream it. Make it. Share it.” Stephan Engl. Web. 9 Sept 2015.

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