LIVING ARCHIVES

Neeraj Bhatia

‘There is no political power without control of the archive.’1

In the Information Age, the archive performs a unique role in society as a building constructed to house information through the ages. In contemporary culture, it is largely understood as a neutral repository, but notions of power and control are in fact fundamental to its formation. It is simultaneously a place – oikos – and a form of order and law – nomos. If information is understood as power, the archive is, and has always been, a critical technology of rule.

Every archive engages in acts of exclusion, classification, and preservation. Through the selection of information, only particular histories are deemed to be valuable and thereby only certain vantage points are represented. The documents contained within an archive reflect negotiations and contestations of power, yet are disguised as a unified whole that conceals instability and fixes particular narratives. Ways of understanding and structuring the world are formed and propagated through the systems of ordering and classification that all archives employ. Systems of classification attempt to bridge the representational gap between human interpretation and nature itself – a form of ‘information mastery’ that is the goal of every archive. How societies assemble and classify vast amounts of information not only structures how they perceive the world, but also determines how they act within it.2 While selection becomes an act of forgetting, through preservation, a collective memory is formed that spans generations. By making the fleeting permanent, society is reminded of what they have inherited—expanding the collective realm through time.

The relationship that archives have with power often makes them complicit in affirming the interests of those that are most dominant in society. Because of this, archives (and archivists) have a tendency to perpetuate both the political and economic status quo, as well as existing social orders, by legitimizing their priorities. If the archive is used to naturalize and disguise power protocols, then its architecture is often complicit in projecting a false image of stability in order to overcome the inherent instability of its collection.

Since the end of the Cold War, state archives and their record-keeping practices have been scrutinized under pressure from open, democratic societies. If secrecy, access, and the destruction of documents are mechanisms by which to harness power, then the opposite is also true. Archives are both revolutionary and traditional. They make the law or make people respect the law, and are constructed forms of legitimacy that safeguard individual assets. There is no state without them, and yet they constitute a continual threat to the state’s power. The archival turn in the past thirty years has examined both the reliability of preserved documents and the underlying socio-political conditions that produced them. It understands the archive as an epistemological experiment, rather than an objective source, and thus positions it as a subject. This in turn expands the range of information that should be stored, as well as the number of people that have access to it. More importantly, however, the turn has the potential to shift the fundamental nature of the archive. Rather than being a locus of power, it can become one of empowerment. Among other things, this possibility has propagated the field of participatory archiving – using distributed networks to build a more pluralistic set of narratives, the validity of which does not require the approval of established regimes. In documenting the instability of the world, archives are increasingly used to restore justice.

The Living Archive questions, critiques, and formats ‘permanent’ forms of historical readings by inserting and expanding the role of the contemporary subject in the making of the archive. Going beyond the archive as a static container of information and transitioning the building from a site of power to a place of empowerment, the Living Archive situates the archive as a place of discourse and public assembly. By doing so, it brings this space to the forefront of public life and facilitates the reordering of information for the construction of new histories and knowledge. Moreover, these projects embrace an unstable and pluralistic reading of the archive and uses this to problematise questions of power. ◘

Garden Of New Worlds

GRAND METIS, CANADA, 2016

Exploration and discovery are not only key ingredients of playing, they are also the central characteristics of the botanical garden.The Garden of New Worlds celebrates five of the earliest Canadian explorers and botanists that gathered plant species from the New World to be displayed in the Old World. These plants were curated through the curiosities of the explorers and became symbols of Canada. Each of the five explorations represented through the plantings, are organized into five garden rooms. These rooms enact the geometric purity of the French formal botanical garden, but are organized in a non-hierarchical structure. These rooms are distributed as destinations within an enfilade maze structure that reinvents each user as an explorer. The multiplicity of paths and routes as well as the expansion and contraction of views is inspired from the English romantic botanical garden. As a hybridization of these two botanical garden types, the sculptural maze employs curiosity and play as the catalyst for rediscovering history.

A Room In The City

SAN FRANCISCO, USA, 2018

The current San Francisco restrooms act as hermetic objects that do not engage with their urban surroundings. Instead, we propose a porous object that welcomes the city and the plurality of its citizens to flow through this ‘urban room.’ If the urban room enables the frame that gathers a collective within the city, can the idea of a room be productive to consider how privacy can be enabled in public? The present toilet, while designed to accommodate only the most basic sanitary services, offers a rare moment of privacy in city. The range of activities that transpire within this room go beyond its basic program; from changing, to praying, to breast-feeding, and being vulnerable, the toilet offers a room for the individual within the bustle of the city. Amplifying this, we propose to extend this room and include both a garden and skylight to acknowledge this reflective space of privacy. Accordingly, our scheme erodes the object to create both an urban room as well as a space for the individual. Through an aggregated modular approach, these ‘mass-customized’ rooms are able to precisely engage a diverse series of sites. From restroom to washroom to bathroom to powder room, cultural distinctions name this space differently. What is agreed upon is that this is a room in the city. Both an urban room that reaches outwards and a reflective space for the individual, our scheme enables a range of uses and users to find their space in the city.

LOCAL OPPORTUNITIES

LOCAL OPPORTUNITIES

ROOM MODULES ROOM COMBINATIONS

WASHROOM MODULES

B2

— PLACE— SHELVING

NOTES: 1.ALL “A” MODULES ARE BASES

2. ALL “C” MODULES ARE CONNECTORS

WASHROOM COMBINATIONS

B3

— RENEW — Shower

D1

— ALONE— SECOND STALL (NON-ADA)

D2 — RENEW — SHOWER (ADA)

D — REFRESH — SINK / WATER FOUNTAIN

D — REPAIR — BIKE KITCHEN

D5 — INFORM — NEWSPAPER / MAGAZINE STAND

D6

— ORIENT— WAYFINDING / INTERACTIVE MAP

D7 — ABSORB — ADVERTISING

D8 — RECHARGE — CHARGING STATION / WIFI

PLURALISTIC MONUMENT

Profiles as abstraction of monuments

Afterword

Peggy Deamer

The Open Workshop closes the door not only to normative practice but also to the idea that an architectural project aims at harmony and well-being. Don’t be deceived! The beautiful, even peaceful, forms are meant to distract from the difficulties they unfold – of historical determinacy, of subjective agency, of representational stability, and of social cohesion. The latter in particular is the object of intense interrogation and it warrants these final observations. Their work mediates on two disturbing aspects of the social: the instability of the environment we inhabit and the incoherence of the multitude who inhabit it. The environment is portrayed at all scales simultaneously, guaranteeing that it is not just “out there”, but integral to our social and individual lives. One cannot, in The Open Workshop’s projects, disassemble domesticity from the imbalance of “nature”; the up of the ceiling and sky from the stool that sits below us; the city from the blades of grass; the room from a drop of water. Whether the social is reformed and re-inscribed by “articulated surfaces,” “soft frameworks,” “living archives,” “rewiring states,” or “recommoning,” the result is an existential connection between things human and non-human, big and small, in and out of our control. All of this is reinforced by the interconnection, representationally, between data and affect, making the environment both felt and abstract and the social both real and hyper-objectified.

The multitude inhabiting this condition is another matter. Indeed, we know that the demographic of happy, healthy, mostly white and western individuals, who run, jog, and walk their dogs are an essential player in global colonization. We know as well that within this homogeneity, these subjects are, as Neeraj Bhatia writes in “New Investigations to Collective Form,” “individual and collective,” “chaotic and ordered,” and “informal and formal.” As he observes, citing Hannah Arendt:

Human Plurality, the basic condition of both action and speech, has the twofold character of equality and distinction. If men were not equal, they could neither understand each other and those who came before them nor plan for the future and foresee the needs of those who will come after them. If men were not distinct, each human being distinguished from any other who is, was or will ever be, they would need neither speech nor action to make themselves understood.1

Bhatia’s observations about the possibilities of cohering the uncohesive social realm owes much to Arendt and Fumihiko Maki, who, besides modeling for Bhatia the design approach to “collective forms,” also points to the disparate nature of the individuals who make up the collective. But I think the real allegiance is to radical democracy, a concept emphasizing not consensus but disagreement and debate; a society of openness to contestation framed by equality and freedom.2 A connection can be drawn between radical democracy’s individualized citizenship and the inhabited environment: developing a sustainable environment within this current culture of limited political participation requires a politically active citizenry that understands the connection between the ecosystem and their own self-constitution. Another connection can be made between radical democracy and urban design/planning: as the geographer Doreen Massey has pointed out, the public realm is shaped by the acts of the citizens in the “forever unachieved” but always negotiated “articulated moments in networks of some relations and understandings,” not bounded communities.

If this afterword emphasizes the conflict that lies behind The Open Workshop’s elegant propositions, it is to draw attention to something strategic and intentional that might be missed if the images are not read closely or the texts not scrutinized. The doors are now open to an architectural optimism that sees the public realm as conflicted and unresolved— a democracy at it’s radical core. ◘

1. See the introduction to “New Investigations to Collective Form”; from Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press:1958) 175-176.

2. See Ernesto Laclau and Chatal Mouffe’s, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards A Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985); for a good secondary source that goes to the heart of the contemporary political consequences of radical democracy, see, Lincoln Dahlberg, “Radical Democracy in Contemporary Times,” e-International Relations, February 26, 2013.

PEGGY DEAMER IS AN ARCHITECT, ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATOR, AND EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE AT YALE UNIVERSITY. SHE IS THE FOUNDING MEMBER OF THE INTERNATIONAL ADVOCACY GROUP, THE ARCHITECTURE LOBBY.