Outside Development: Elisa Iturbe

What does it mean to practice architecture?

Elisa Iturbe: Practicing architecture has meant different things across time and is coming to mean something different as we develop a stronger understanding of our own complicity in the climate crisis. Architecture is waking up to an ugly picture of the past few centuries and to what building has been doing to our ecosystems, and there are practices that are waking up to those kinds of issues and are starting to encompass many things beyond building. Of course, architecture has always had the capacity to address things beyond building. Architecture is a mode of knowledge—it’s a way of seeing the world. It has a cultural and a symbolic power. There are modes of architectural production that are fully embedded in a capitalist system where practice means serving that system and creating value for it, but there are also modes of practice that engage with the broader history of the discipline of architecture. I am resistant to the idea that practice is necessarily divorced from theory and I am reluctant to say that practice is just about the profession and not the discipline. The multiplicity of possibilities of what practice means is something that all practitioners have to navigate today.

How did Outside Development come into being, and how does it operate differently than what we might understand to be a more conventional architectural practice?

Outside Development started with me and my partner, Stanley, having a beer at a bar in New Haven. We had just graduated from Yale, and we were lamenting the nature of practice today. We asked ourselves, “What if you and I work together to initiate projects that embody our ideas?” The first few projects we did together were simply drawings we made in response to what we were seeing around us, and the riots in Ferguson were happening at that time. We started to think about the spatial nature of protest. We asked, “How can our spatial thinking contribute something in this moment?”

We knew that segregation is spatial, and that architects have a hand in the spatial distribution of people. We began with the basic premise that Outside Development would be a practice where we would use architecture as a mode of knowledge to see the world and take responsibility for what architecture is capable of, which can be both positive and negative. It was important that Outside Development would not become a conventional practice. In a situation where most acts of construction are so embedded in the things that we see as problematic, we had to find new modes of production. Our project Casa Familiar is a perfect example of how we want to work with, rather than for, clients—carefully, and by asking questions rather than only giving answers.

A term you use often, “carbon form,” puts form at the forefront. Why do you feel this is important, and why do you think so many architects who work with ideas of social and environmental sustainability shy away from form—or even think of it as an unethical focus?