Disegno #30

The Quarterly Journal of Design #30 Autumn 2021

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Disegno’s 10-year anniversary cover is designed by Jasper Morrison.

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Happy Birthday Words Oli Stratford

Disegno is 10 years old! It has hit double digits and now considers itself a journal of the world. It won’t listen when I tell it that it’s still quite young really and that its voice hasn’t even broken yet. It just wants to stay up late with all the rest of the mature journals, watching Newsnight or something. Happy birthday, Disegno!

Actually, I suppose that journals don’t have birthdays, on account of their being made from paper and glue and ink. In fact, it now occurs to me that the word I ought to have used is “anniversary”. Nevertheless, I’m already a paragraph in and don’t want to have to go back and redo it, so I’ll just stick with “birthday” if that’s alright with everyone. Our darling journal has grown up so fast!

I remember back when it was small. In mid-2011, I was summoned to Covent Garden’s Crown & Anchor pub by the journal’s proud parent/founding editor, Johanna Agerman Ross, and asked if I would like to be a part of the newborn’s life. I was proud as punch to be asked.

I was to play the role of a UK-domiciled au pair/online editor: a salaried member of Disegno’s family, who could help the journal find its way in the world while also running occasional odd jobs like carrying cardboard Disegno

boxes to and from storage. For the avoidance of doubt, Johanna did not make me live in her house.

In September 2016, however, everything changed.

Johanna took up with museological curation, leaving Disegno in the hands of the au pair – she now visits every other Friday and more frequently over the summer holidays. Keenly aware that the state rarely, if ever, awards full custody to an au pair, I realised that it was time to refashion myself. I have become a sort of foster parent – loving, concerned and, crucially, paid expenses.

Helping to steer the journal over these past five years has been a privilege. I have been lucky to work with colleagues, writers and photographers of enormous talent, all of whom have guided Disegno as its interests have blossomed. I am told that it takes a village to raise a child and so am very proud of the village in which Disegno finds itself. Without everybody’s sterling efforts, Disegno would likely have gone off the rails, and I would have been forced to argue to social workers that some children are simply born rotten and there was very little that I could have done to change matters.

So happy birthday, dearest Disegno – congratulations on your 10 years and here’s to many more. Or at least until you hit adolescence and inevitably become a real jerk.

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Contents 3 Introduction

Happy Birthday 6

Contents

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Contributors

10 Masthead

The people behind Disegno 13

At the Kitchen Table: 10 Years of Disegno A journey back through the Quarterly Journal of Design

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Discrete Contact A trip to Tadao Ando and the Bouroullecs’ Bourse de Commerce

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Embedded Design The troubled history of the contraceptive coil

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114 The Ground of Palestine Counterpoints

Archaeology as a tool A unified German history

for erasure in Palestine through design?

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e-Waste Agbogbloshie Ghana’s efforts to curb electronic waste

66 Fewer Pictures of

the Cigar-Smoking Architects appraise the legacy of Sigurd Lewerentz 78 Bend it Like Morrison Jasper Morrison’s singlepiece plywood cantilever 84 The Biggest Machine on Earth Can web design help the internet become sustainable?

104 The Seduction of the Bureaucrat Art, drugs and development in Vancouver

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Seven Excerpts About Seven Mirrors Front’s exploration of an ever-changing form

137 A Profound Immersion

Dorte Mandrup’s Greenlandic

centre for climate collapse

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Contents

Contributors Shawn Adams likes to talk a lot, but people only commission him to write. p. 60 Helen Brown has had an eight-monthlong obsession with the coil and it shows no signs of stopping. p. 44 Ariel Caine is a Jerusalem-born, London-based artist and researcher. p. 114 Ingrid Campo Ruiz won Columbia University’s William Kinne Prize. p. 66 Yung Ho Chang is the founder of Atelier FCJZ. p. 66 Muntaka Chasant is a researcher and a documentary photographer based in Accra, Ghana. p. 60 Alexandra de Cossette is a Parisbased photographer. p. 127

Magnus Englund is a hoarder of books about design and architecture, and occasionally adds to the collection by writing his own. p. 78 Tony Fretton is an architect and teacher. p. 66 Peter Kapos is a founding partner at London agency Systems Studio, and his passport isn’t where he last saw it. p. 53 Kieran Long is the director of ArkDes, the national museum of architecture and design in Sweden. p. 66 Jasper Morrison continues to design things for a long and useful life.

Front and back cover Lyndon Neri is the co-founder of Neri&Hu Design and Research Office. p. 66 Lola Sheppard has been working and travelling in the circumpolar North for more than a decade, but gets cold in Toronto. p. 137

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Alison Sinkewicz writes about art and architecture to pay her rent every month, on time. p. 104 Delfino Sisto Legnani sometimes takes pictures, and sometimes designs with NM3.xyz. p. 84 Felix Chabluk Smith, at age 33, and after years of obscurity, suddenly became famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. p. 34 Dima Srouji says, “pretty much everything #freepalestine.” p. 114 Nicola Tree has captured glass melting, floating chairs and sprouting lights, all in pursuit of telling a story. p. 78 Silvia Truini is a member of Depth Unknown and helps snails cross the street. p. 114

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Online entries from 20 July to 25 October, 2021

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The Quarterly Journal of Design #30 Editor-in-chief Oli Stratford oli@disegnojournal.com

Founder and director Johanna Agerman Ross

Publisher and commercial director Chris Jones chris@disegnojournal.com

Creative directors Florian Böhm Annahita Kamali akfb.com

Distribution The Logical Choice thelogicalchoicegroup.com

Subeditor Ann Morgan

Designer Jonas Hirschmann info@akfb.com

Circulation and stockist enquiries Adam Long along@thelogicalchoicegroup.com

Cover The cover of Disegno #30 was designed

by Jasper Morrison and shows his Isokon Iso-lounge chair, taken from a photograph by Nicola Tree. The back cover displays Morrison’s drawings of 10 objects that are meaningful to him: a drinking glass; three black lacquer bowls (monastery set); a clear glass bottle; a wine glass; a stainless steel teapot; a ceramic jar lid; an Indian puppet head; a palm frond fly swat; a Japanese fan; and a weaving comb.

Paper and print This issue of Disegno is printed by Park Communications on Munken Lynx Smooth 120 gsm. The cover is printed on Munken Lynx Smooth 300 gsm. All of the paper used in this issue is from G . F Smith.

Contents copyright The contents of this journal belong to Disegno Publications Limited and to the authors and artists featured.

If you are tempted to reproduce any of it, please ask first.

Creative producer Evi Hall evi@disegnojournal.com

Contributors Shawn Adams, Johanna Agerman Ross, Helen Brown, Ariel Caine, Ingrid Campo Ruiz, Felix Chabluk Smith, Yung Ho Chang, Muntaka Chasant, Alexandra de Cossette, Magnus Englund, Tony Fretton, Evi Hall, Peter Kapos, Kieran Long, Jasper Morrison, Lyndon Neri, Lola Sheppard, Alison Sinkewicz, Delfino Sisto Legnani, Dima Srouji, Oli Stratford, Nicola Tree and Silvia Truini.

Thanks Many thanks to Beth King and Stephen Larkin of Larking for our beautiful new website; Vitra and Clockwise for opening up their offices to us; the interviewees for ‘The Biggest Machine in the World’ for explaining the internet; Silvia Truini for her professionalism; Helen Brown for bringing Dima Srouji’s work to Disegno’s attention; Kristina Rapacki for a splendid idea to speak to Dorte Mandrup; and Maria Östman, Sofia Östlund and all the team at ArkDes for a wonderful collaboration.

We are very grateful to all our contributors, and for the help of everybody who has supported us and helped make Disegno #30 possible – not least Barnaby and Diddle, two stray cats who not only found a new home this summer, but who also managed to have a litter of kittens.

Congratulations to the happy parents!

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Contact us 50 Wenham House Ascalon Street London SW8 4DZ disegnojournal.com The Crit You can keep up with Disegno and our work by listening to The Crit, a monthly podcast focused on the design world and its impact on current affairs. disegnojournal.com/podcasts/the-crit Disegno Works Disegno also runs the creative agency Disegno Works. disegnoworks.com

At the Kitchen Table: 10 Years of Disegno Words Johanna Agerman Ross

What type of narrative would best suit this story?

Is it a linear one, taking us neatly from beginning to end? Or non-linear, using flashbacks and projections to unsettle the chronology? Maybe it’s based on a quest, where the protagonist works tirelessly towards a goal?

A bildungsroman?

Given that Disegno is the lead in this particular tale, a circular narrative may be most appropriate.

In a circular narrative, a story ends in the same place it began, only the main character will have grown richer from their experiences – they might even have undergone a transformation. Yes, that may be it, because in many ways this story actually leaves us in the same place it began 10 years ago: at a kitchen table.

Disegno

Having founded the title at my kitchen table – the journal’s first workspace – in 2011, the Disegno team found itself back at ground zero last year. Not by choice, but by virtue of the pandemic that has unsettled everything, Disegno included.

In March 2020, the editorial team left our office as a base for production; we moved all its contents, including our beloved cork flatplan, into a lock-up a few months later. Still awaiting a new permanent home, this issue, #30, springs from all our proverbial kitchen tables, with Slack our virtual office, Google Meet our breakout room. In this circular narrative, it is the design world itself that provides the tableau of events that contribute to the journal’s developing character, the key moments that drive the narrative forward. So, over these last 10 years, what have those events been?

Eeehh. I draw a blank, even though I shouldn’t, as I edited the journal for its first five years – a lot happened in design during that period, but now that it’s time to pin things down a bit, I find my ideas wanting. Our paper protagonist seems to have simply marched on unencumbered, regardless of what happened behind the scenes. My memories of the last decade of Disegno don’t make up a grand narrative of recent design history. They are instead of more mundane moments: driving a rental car back through the dark, empty roads of south London after sending the first issue to print (at a printing house that closed soon after, with many of its clients going out of business or going digital); packing and unpacking equipment for our many office moves (five in total); navigating through central London in a van, delivering boxes of freshly printed, ink-scented copies of the journal (we did much of our own distribution in the first couple of years); arguing with transport police in Munich over a lost train ticket (to avoid an extortionate fine); waking up colleagues while attempting to enter our tiny, Milanese Airbnb at 3am quietly

(we avoided paid-for press trips when possible, leading to cramped quarters); and, because of nerves, completely failing to deliver a coherent introduction to our first film night at RIBA (“Welcome very much”). The list of excruciating and hilarious moments – shared with wonderful and ever-patient colleagues and contributors – is long, but it seems to have had little or no effect on our protagonist per se.

Just over a year ago, there was an exchange about Disegno on Twitter that surprised the editorial team. It was a call-out for “long-form/non-traditional/ fringe” titles to add to a Google Doc on design and architecture publications.

Someone asked if Disegno should be included and the person originating the document replied: “I’ve added it under the commercial magazines tab.” While Disegno is available to buy on newsstands, and carries advertising to support itself, being branded a “commercial magazine” seemed at odds with how we regarded ourselves. Silly, perhaps, but it slightly stung our pride: we’ve always thought of ourselves as an independent title.

Ever since the beginning, Disegno has been a platform for long-form writing about design, reacting to current events in the field. Rather than supporting the commercial system of design, the journal has aimed to foster a critical discourse around the discipline, encouraging much-needed discussion and debate.

“For us, the design profession includes everyone who has a hand in shaping the products of industry for human consumption,” wrote Jane Thompson and Deborah Allen in their first editor’s letter of the American design publication Industrial Design, later ID, in February 1954. “The best way to serve a mature profession, as we see it, is not to offer advice but to explore the problems, and report the information.” We featured Thompson in Disegno #10 [‘Towards a Critical Mass’ by Aileen Kwun], six

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months before she passed away, and some of the intention of what she did with the now-defunct ID rings true for Disegno. While industrial design is far from the only type of design we cover, it is exploring the problems and reporting on the information we find that motivates the journal’s existence. As Jan Boelen, then director of Z33, said in Disegno #7 [‘Chaos at the Museum’ by David Crowley], “The medium is not that important. Topics are.”

The print journal has been produced against the backdrop of a drastically changing world, much indebted to the heavily increased presence of digital infrastructures in our daily lives. Just by launching as a print publication, Disegno may have been dated before it even began.

Smartphones, Instagram, memes, blogs, apps and streaming services have all shaped the public landscape over the last decade (and been the topics for articles in the journal) and transported it from the physical to the digital sphere.

And unlike many magazines launched in the 2010s, Disegno didn’t build an identity based on a key issue or specific approach (except for, we hope, engaging writing). We never wanted it to have anything that might be perceived as a gimmick. Instead, Disegno built its structure and content on topical debate.

As such, the journal has shape-shifted its way to 10 years, by bending its ear and pages to the topics of the day. It’s a physical, printed body of work that reflects 10 years of design history – each issue a neatly bound document of timely reflections that, as a result of its form, also becomes timeless. Or so we hope.

When studying design history, decades crystallise into defined periods, neatly summed up by movements and styles. We all have an idea of what the 1970s looked like, or an awareness of the key historic events of the 1950s or the 1920s, even if we didn’t experience them first hand. Applying that same lens

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Roundtable

to the 2010s is far more complicated, even if producing a journal dedicated to reporting on the design field provides a unique vantage point. So flicking through the first 30 issues of Disegno, what can be observed? One of the most overwhelming impressions is that of community, society and people. A quick scan of its pages does not immediately draw to mind Design with a capital D but rather the realisation that “design” is something that happens in the meeting of people and things, and people and setting. It’s a discipline that depends on discussion to remain relevant and connected to the society that it reflects and serves.

“I’m optimistic that design can improve life, but we need to be realistic and start addressing larger problems that don’t have easy solutions,” said designer Jason Dilworth in Disegno #6 [‘Forest as Idea Generator’ by Oli Stratford]. Disegno has covered many approaches to design over the last 10 years, from the creation of a cultural destination on Naoshima island in southern Japan in Disegno #1 [‘Island Odyssey’ by Julian Worrall] to a new type of community space-cum-storefront in Dumbo by Stephen Burks and Malika Leiper in Disegno #28 [‘Welcome to Contemporaries’]; and from the making of a decorative material with the farming traditions of a rural community in Tonahuixtla, Mexico, in Disegno #22 [‘Design for Rural Mexico’ by Martha Pskowski] to the 15-year development process of a consumer-facing quantum computer in a pristine IBM cleanroom in Poughkeepsie, USA, in Disegno #23 [‘The Quantum Race’ by Lemma Shehadi].

What connects these disparate and diverse stories – from ancient farming practices to future-facing technology – is that they are answers to or reflections on a specific situation or set of issues, which are both societal and personal.

They are not presented as conclusive

or as solutions to be applied across the board. In many cases, they are not solutions at all. And that is perhaps where design over the last 10 years has given us the most cause for optimism: in beginning to recognise itself as a discipline that doesn’t have answers for everything, and which is flawed, fractured, insecure, non-diverse and harmful, while simultaneously retaining the ability to become better, whole, confident, plural and healing. If we accept design as a discipline with a multitude of applications – not just in service to an industry that supports a commercial system (“Industry is just a stupid machine that follows the money,” said Hella Jongerius in Disegno #17 [‘Jamming the Stupid Machine’ by Matthew Ward]) – there is plenty of opportunity in what it can achieve by listening closely to its users. “In order to perform as designers today, we need to be aware of the macrodynamics of the context in which we operate,” said Andrea Trimarchi of Formafantasma in Disegno #26 [‘Formafantasma’s Findings’

by Alice Twemlow]. “Otherwise, we are reducing what we do to a form of styling or interface design. We can only be aware of our political and ethical responsibilities as designers if we are aware of this larger context.”

Few things seem as urgent at this moment. As we go to print, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just released a report that has been dubbed “code red for humanity”. The need for greater public understanding of climate change and how we all influence and impact on it is crucial – and one that we tackled with a special project in Disegno #9 [‘2°: Communicating Climate Change’].

Informing ourselves and our readers of that larger context is a cornerstone of what Disegno attempts to achieve.

Without an understanding of the larger context, there is no need for the specifics.

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It has become clear that there is utility in providing a steady platform for debate around design and its discourse, as a prompt, and call for change and action.

But the journal also serves another, altogether more simple function: as a record of a moment. When going over the almost 2m words written in its pages to date, I find what gives me the most pause for thought are the paragraphs and sentences that describe or set a scene – of a writer observing a designer or a community at work. Because within the so-called canon of design – and its many accounts of styles, movements and concerns connected to a specific period – there is often one thing missing: the first-hand account, the mundanity of the creative process, the moments outside the grand narratives. Disegno has had those moments in spades; the moments of anticipation, doubt and hard work.

It’s probably those bits that I enjoy reading the most, maybe valuing them more now when I am alone at my kitchen table, at a time when little or no direct interaction with designers and makers has been possible for nearly 18 months.

These descriptions give me a twinge of nostalgia for a time that I hope will come again soon. “Nathalie Du Pasquier is leaning over a table filled with neat rows of sheets of printed A4 paper,” wrote Hannah Gregory in Disegno #6 [‘A Construction of a Collection and Collection of Construction’ by Nathalie du Pasquier]. “Every now and then she swaps the pages around, takes a step back to get an overview, then moves in again, making another swap, creating another picture.” It may seem banal, simple, too everyday, but it is those engagements that have made Disegno what it is. We were there. E N D The following gallery of images are taken from the 29 back issues of Disegno. Each story will be republished in full online in September 2021 at disegnojournal.com.

Disegno

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1 ‘Island Odyssey’ by Julian Worrall and Iwan Baan (image), Disegno #1.

2 ‘Italy: The New Domestic Landscape’ by Pete Collard (image: Gae Aulenti), Disegno #2.

3 ‘Design Erotica’ by Will Wiles and Olof Svenblad (image), Disegno #3.

4 ‘Parrish Art Museum’ by Johanna Agerman Ross and Janette Beckman (image), Disegno #4.

5 ‘Learning from Kumbh Mela’ by Rahul Mehrotra and Giles Price (image), Disegno #5.

6 ‘The Construction of a Collection and a Collection of Constructions’ by Hannah Gregory

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and Nathalie Du Pasquier (image), Disegno #6.

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7 ‘Perverted Fashion’ by Madelaine Levy, Ola Bergengren (image) and Iwa Herdensjö (styling), Disegno #7.

8 ‘The Casual Ethnographer’ by Johanna Agerman Ross and Kevin Davies (image), Disegno #8.

9 ‘Disparate Threads’ by Oli Stratford, Iwan Baan and Thatcher Cook (image), Disegno #9.

10 ‘Reflections on Transparency’ by Matthew Allen and Dean Kaufman (image), Disegno #10.

11 ‘An Experiment in Sitting’ by Florian Böhm (image), Annahita Kamali (art direction), Nicholas Galletti (styling), Adrien Dantou (dancer) and Vanni Bassetti (photography assistant), Disegno #11.

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12 ‘Intersections: Roksanda Ilinčić́ and David Adjaye’

by Sabrina Shim and Max Creasy (image), Disegno #12.

13 ‘A Childhood Utopia’ by Aleishall Girard Maxon and Alexander Kori Girard (image: Alexander Girard), Disegno #13.

14 ‘Rail Baltica’ by Crystal Bennes and Maija Savolainen (image), Disegno #14.

15 ‘Countermeasures’ by Jeannette Petrik and Jonas Holthaus (image), Disegno #15.

16 ‘The Driver’ by Oli Stratford and Andrew Bush (image), Disegno #16.

17 ‘Jamming the Stupid Machine’ by Matthew Ward and Fabian Frinzel (image), Disegno #17.

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18 ‘Ciudad Rebelde’ by Laurence Blair and Nick Ballón (image), Disegno #18.

19 ‘Blue is the Warmest Colour’ by Sheila Chiamaka Chukwulozie, Fatoumata Tioye Coulibaly (image) and Fatoumata Diabaté (image), Disegno #19.

20 ‘Catholic Taste’ by Peter Smisek and Giulio Ghirardi (image), Disegno #20.

21 ‘A National Design?’ By Kristina Rapacki and Simon Skuteli (image), Disegno #21.

22 ‘Design for Rural Mexico’ by Martha Pskowski and Carlos Álvarez Montero (image), Disegno #22.

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23 ‘Here is the House’ by Joe Lloyd and Donald Milne (image), Disegno #23.

24 ‘A Company Voyage’ by Oli Stratford and Juho Huttunen (image), Disegno #24.

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25 ‘Rigorous Self-Referentiality’ by Glenn Adamson (image: MoMA), Disegno #25.

26 ‘The Tourists’ by Oli Stratford (image: Spirit Mars Rover), Disegno #26.

27 ‘The Power of the Poster’ by Zosia Swidlicka (image: Grzegorz Myćka), Disegno #27.

28 ‘Enzo Mari was a Universe’ by Francesca Giacomelli, Martino Gamper, Corinna Sy, Cat Rossi, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Lorenza Baroncelli (image: Enzo Mari), Disegno #28.

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29 ‘So Little’ by Mimi Zeiger and Ramak Fazel (image), Disegno #29.

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Disegno

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A collection of essays and discussions around design for autumn 2021.

Disegno

Discrete Contact Words Felix Chabluk Smith

I first saw the Bourse de Commerce, really saw it, in April of this year, but by that point I had been living in Paris for more than six. I’d visited the Louvre of course, a minute or so stroll towards the river, and the Musée des Arts Decoratifs just down the street. I had seen shows at the Centre Pompidou, a few minutes to the east, and I had been, grudgingly, to the vast mall at Les Halles right next door many times when a trip to Muji was unavoidable. I’d even met friends after work at Iovine’s pizzeria one bitingly cold winter’s evening, almost directly opposite the Bourse’s grand entrance, but still, I’d never seen it. It was just one more pile of haughtily beautiful pale Parisian stonework that my eyes slid over and my brain failed to register.

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Disegno

Image courtesy of Stefan Altenburger/Galerie Eva Presenhuber.

Then, deep into this spring’s second nationwide lockdown, my taxi was alone on the road, gliding up the Rue de Louvre post-curfew. The pavements were empty and the restaurants and bars had been dark for months. But then the car slowed and, to my right, a deserted De Chirico piazza opened up, almost computer-generated in its perfection, with shadowy

A giant ring of a building with the Medici Tower at its outer rim, it originally had an open-air inner court that was later roofed in wood, because no one likes wet wheat. The iron and glass dome was added in the 1810s. The building was subsequently assigned to the Commodities Exchange in the mid-1880s and extensively remodelled at this time by Henri Blondel.

Befitting its new status as a hub not only for buying and selling cereals but also sugar, alcohol, oil and rubber, vast murals were commissioned to celebrate the supremacy of France at the centre of global trade, wrapping around the inside of the building just below roof level.

In 2016, after falling into disuse, the building was offered by Paris’s mayor Anne Hidalgo to François Pinault, the billionaire founder of the luxury fashion group Kering, and latterly a passionate collector of contemporary art having founded the Collection Pinault in 1999. He had initially attempted a museum for his collection in 2004 on the Île Seguin, in the suburbs west of Paris, designed by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando, yet this fell through after tortuous environmental and planning objections, and so he and Ando went to Venice. Pinault bought the 18th-century Palazzo Grassi in 2005, as one does, and a year later won a competition to redevelop the then-abandoned 16th-century customs house Punta della Dogana, which was inaugurated in 2009.

After the Palazzo Grassi and the Punta Della Dogana, the Bourse de Commerce is Pinault’s third private museum under the Collection Pinault umbrella.

Both historic Venetian buildings were transformed with Ando’s radical, monastic politeness. “His architecture is silent,” said Pinault of his attraction to Ando’s work. “No artifice, no unnecessary details disturb his architectural gesture.”

As I walked down the Rue de Louvre to visit the Bourse weeks later, Paris was unfurling like a leaf in spring. The strict lockdown measures that had been grinding on for months had started to lift. Café terraces were open and it was no longer mandatory to wear a mask in the streets, which were beginning to fill again with life. An undulating sliver of silver beckoned in the distance. I thought it was a huge tarpaulin, torn loose from a construction site, but no less beautiful for it.

Instead, as I came closer, I saw it was a vast flag, one of several planted around the Bourse by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, who had been asked by Pinault to redesign the space surrounding the museum.

“Very often, constraints generate beautiful things.

Immediately after it was installed, we had a sense of a place, of enclosing and protecting people.”

—Ronan Bouroullec

arcades and cobblestones framing an enormous pediment, twin pairs of Corinthian columns and a balcony worthy of a we-won-the-war wave.

Stretching back from this was a drum-like building, all sober pilasters, huge, dark-framed windows and delicate, goose-necked lamps. The stonework and iron were so immaculate that I had a split-second impression of time travel, as if the belle époque masons had just downed tools that morning. The light diffusing from the windows and doors was a strange cool-warm, bleached-bone grey; clean and reassuring in a very dark time. The building seemed on standby mode, sitting calmly, waiting, ready when we were.

In the 1570s, architect Jean Bullant began work on a Parisian house for Catherine de’ Medici, not too far from the banks of the Seine. A lover of astrology, she had asked Bullant to add a tower from which the stars could be observed and the future could be predicted; she died before the decade was out. The property then passed through various aristocratic hands until the house was dismantled and the materials sold off to pay the debts of the last not-so-careful private owner, Victor Amadeus I, Prince of Carignano. The tower was saved, however, and purchased by the City of Paris, which commissioned Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières to build a grain exchange on the site in 1763.

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Originally consisting of a roadway and parking spaces, this area is now transformed. “I decided to put very basic stone on the ground, because I wanted to create the sensation that this square was already there, already existing for decades,” says Ronan Bouroullec. “The first project we did involved a lot of trees, but M. Pinault considered that it would be too expensive to maintain.” Instead, the brothers evolved their Ring benches into public furniture quite unlike anything they, or Paris, have done before. With the faintest echoes of Isamu Noguchi and Constantin Brâncuși, crisp satiny slices of gently curving, burnished-bronze pipe, and those liquid-like flags, emerge from great, black, rocklike lumps, the bronze supported either side by delicate metal struts.

They are for sitting on, for sunbathing on, for skateboarding along, but Bouroullec admits that “there were a lot of problems to solve. The first was that there is a road just in front of the Bourse, and it is very long and faces the museum. Terrorists could arrive with a car or a truck at almost 100km/h, and so we needed to find a way to stop this. The engineers did calculations and [our original designs] would not have been able to stop a truck. So we had to redesign it with 7cm bronze poles, and I think it is very beautiful like that. Very often, constraints generate beautiful things.

Immediately after it was installed, we had a sense of a place, of enclosing and protecting people.”

Despite the Bourse’s pixel-perfect restoration and refurbishment, this is no sanitised, exclusionary public-private space; it is still Paris. A homeless man occupied one of the doorways next to the ticket office, and behind in the meadow-like space between the Bourse and the regenerated Les Halles leisure complex the grass was dotted with more rough sleepers, prone beneath the blossoming linden trees.

Inside the Bourse, Ando’s intervention is remarkable.

The classical interior is untouched, but within it sits a huge, poured-concrete cylinder, 9m high and 30m in diameter – less a piece of architecture and more an enormous art object in its own right. It seems like a precision-engineered readymade, originally destined for some other purpose far beyond our comprehension: a slice of a subterranean flood defence system, a particle collider, or a nuclear reactor core that just so happens to slot with serendipitous exactitude inside this giant Third Empire hatbox.

As Ando explains, he was “to revive the building, honouring the memory of the city inscribed in its walls,

and slot another structure into its interior, inspired by the concept of Russian dolls. The idea was to design a lively space that would foster a dynamic dialogue between the new and the old, which is what a site dedicated to contemporary art should be. The architecture was to serve as the link between the threads of time, the past, present and future[…]

The spatial layout of the Bourse de Commerce consists of concentric circles and is designed to create an intense and more subtle dialogue between new and old.” Placing such an industrially alien component inside such an imposingly beautiful historical building is a perfect, brutal act of creation through desecration.

Like a Fontana razor-slash, the gesture seems simple, thoughtless, and violent, but much like Fontana’s sliced canvasses, such perfection in simplicity is only possible with immense skill, reflection and practice.

Computer modelling can only get you so far, and so “life-sized wooden prototypes were positioned in the central Rotunda to allow us to decide on the cylinder’s optimum height and diameter,” explain Lucie Niney and Thibault Marca, architects with the Paris-based agency NeM, who worked with Ando on the project and whose experience is documented in La Bourse de Commerce. Le musée de la Collection Pinault à Paris, a book published to celebrate the building’s transformation. “After several work sessions[…] we finally decided on a height of nine metres to open up the transversal views and provide a complete panorama of the dome from the ground floor. The diameter of the cylinder was also modified in order to find the optimal distance – almost five metres – between the historic facade and the concrete wall.” The cylinder not only works with the existing building physically, but the final dimensions are such that it visually slots into the Piranesian fantasy that surrounds it, with the cupola, the murals and the rows of upper windows and balconies seeming to cap the concrete perfectly.

The strict red tape that wraps and protects this monument historique meant that the fabric of the interior could not be altered, so as bracingly brutal as Ando’s gesture is, it treads lightly. It reminded me of how I lower my voice when entering a hushed antiques shop, drawing my coat around me in case a swish of the hem knocks something askew.

The interior walls of the central hall that Ando’s cylinder occupies were one of the few elements of the 1763 building kept by Blondel during his 1880s

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Top: The concrete rotunda that Tadao Ando has installed in the Bourse de Commerce.

Above: The Bourse’s iron and glass dome.

Right: One of the flags developed by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec for the space surrounding the Bourse.

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Images courtesy of Claire Lavabre/Studio Bouroullec and Marc Domage.

remodelling. At times the contact between the concrete of the 21st century and the limestone and plaster of the 18th is almost heartbreakingly bashful, seeming like the merest brush of fingertips across two and a half centuries. The slab-like bridges connecting the drum to the first- and second-floor galleries in the refurbished ring of the original building stop precisely 1cm short of the old stonework – more than enough of a gap to snap off an expensive stiletto – only making discrete contact beneath floor level for perhaps 30cm at the centre.

At ground level, the outside of the cylinder sits with less than a hand’s width of clearance within the unusual raised lip of the original terrazzo floor that encircles the building’s inner walls. Inside the cylinder, this raised terrazzo lip is replicated by Ando in a fine, ash-coloured cement, the forms politely mirroring each other on either side of the monolithic walls.

The hidden metal core of this huge reinforced concrete form interlocks neatly with the building’s 19th-century cast-iron floor structure.

For such a huge piece of architecture, the drum is remarkably changeable: in its centre it is calmly awe-inspiring; walking around the outside its bulk feels reassuring; and looking out of the original 18th-century inner windows on the second floor, across the central void, it is barely there at all, its concrete rim becoming just another balcony beyond the three-century-year-old glass. Because of its size, and the size of the building in which it sits, it is impossible to view it in its entirety.

I first saw it, or parts of it, immediately upon entering the Bourse. Framed by the woodwork of the grand old doors that surround the central space, the walls with their regular pattern of deep cylindrical holes from the casting process brought to mind the meditative repetition of Agnes Martin, or a Hirst spot painting put though an old Xerox machine. Yet before I could get to grips with the cylinder, I had to consider the carpets. The Bouroullecs were asked to furnish the interior of the Bourse in addition to the outside space, and they chose to put some rugs down. Even before you see a piece of art, you see the rugs, and their domesticating, calming effect is transformative.

“It was important to receive people in a certain atmosphere,” says Bouroullec, “a certain feeling that helps to enter into contemplation[…] It was very important to give to this place something which is very soft, [so that you are able] to go

to sit somewhere, to come back, to be well, to be relaxed enough to view a painting.”

In addition to the carpets and the sometimesmatching-sometimes-not upholstered benches that rest upon them, the Bouroullecs liberally scattered their Rope chairs about the galleries, creating a Rope bench to complement them. Upstairs, they also fitted out the restaurant with wrought-iron variations on their Officina furniture and handmade Alcove glassware, and hung lighting developed with Flos in the entrance hall and stairways. A deal-breaker for the Bouroullecs were the mass-production rights to anything they created for the Bourse. Nothing was exclusively Pinault’s, except perhaps a tiny speck of blue. “In the restaurant, in the fabric on the walls, there is a bit of blue inside the grey,” remembers Bouroullec. “We spent half an hour to discuss this blue – he wanted it stronger. And we had to redo the walls because [the fabric was] 10mm from the floor, and he thought 5mm looked better.”

The Bouroullecs’ interiors, the nubby textiles, twisted cords and undulating glass, add to what is an engagingly warm, textural experience. The only flat, uniform surfaces are the walls holding the art. Around these are aged oak, speckled terrazzo, and cloudy, unpainted plaster. The bag lockers and the leaflet stands are in a kind of mottled board that looks like porphyry rock. Even the wall-mounted information boards are printed on a fibrous, compressed substrate.

Within the central space, the drum becomes all-encompassing. The walls are like sheer cliff faces soaring up all around, but, with the cabinetry and plasterwork of the 19th-century interior visible through four huge portals, the concrete becomes as light as a theatrical drop-cloth, temporarily drawn across the distracting decoration. Inside I felt no sense of vertigo or confinement: with the mottled grey walls and the not-quite slate blue of the floor dully reflecting the light that filtered through the intricate fin-de-siècle spiderweb of the roof, the space had a hazy, misty calm to it.

At the very centre of the building, like the spindle around which it all revolves, is Urs Fischer’s life-size replica of Giambologna’s mannerist masterpiece The Rape of the Sabine Woman, surrounded by African thrones, a Monobloc lawn chair, an economy airline seat and an office chair. All of it is slowly melting away: giant candles, they were set alight at the opening of the Bourse, spattering the immaculate floor with hot wax, and will burn for the duration of Ouverture,

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the space’s inaugural exhibition. When I visited, the terrified woman held aloft by her kidnapper had already lost her right arm. The flame was guttering somewhere around her C5 vertebra and what remained of her face had been twisted downward by the weight of her anguished features, stalactites of marble-coloured wax hanging like Spanish moss from her shoulders.

Outside the cylinder, on the ground floor, a new space has been created between its outer facade and the inside of the original building. Named the Passage, in reference to the elegant 19th-century arcades that snake between the capital’s boulevards, this circular corridor is intimate, cocooned between calm austere concrete on one side and elegant classical repetition on the other. Lining the original interior walls, between each huge arched doorway, are bijoux display cases in glass, oak and iron. Originally installed at the time of the Paris World Fair of 1889 and immaculately restored, they have become like 24 micro-galleries, occupied for the premiere exhibition by Bertrand Lavier. A mini retrospective of sorts, his vibrant and irreverent sculptures and interventions drawn from half a century of work – a crushed moped, a Disneyesque cactus sculpture, a car headlight embedded in an ancient column – fill the ornate vitrines.

The first- and second-floor galleries that surround Fischer’s candles contain strange and sensitive pieces

by Cindy Sherman, Claire Tabouret, Lynette YiadomBoakye, Marlene Dumas, Kerry James Marshall, Luc Tuymans, Antonio Oba and Peter Doig, all drawn from Pinault’s personal collection, along with a suite of rooms on the ground floor with every David Hammons work the billionaire owns.

Writing that last paragraph gave me pause for thought. I remember that as I was walking through the second-floor galleries, lingering on the blotchy, bleeding Dumas works around me, I felt queasy and slightly outraged that one man could just reach out and scoop up all these beautiful things. Then there was a deep boom and a muffled cheer down in the rotunda as the Sabine woman’s head finally fell off.

The Bourse de Commerce is Paris’s second private museum of this kind, after the Frank Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton was opened in 2014 by Bernard Arnaud, LVMH chief executive and Pinault’s business rival. As easy as it would be to compare and contrast the Bourse and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the two are like chalk and cheese, and one is definitely cheesy.

“Like a loud LV handbag a glitzy relative might bring you back from a duty-free splurge,” wrote The Guardian’s Oliver Wainwright of the Fondation Louis Vuitton upon its opening. Gehry’s overly complicated crushed beetle of a building, Wainwright wrote, is “a brash monument to the fact that the country’s richest man can get his own way”.

Pinault himself diplomatically dismisses the constant use of the r-word when describing his relationship to Arnaud, but Jean-Jacques Aillagon, former French culture minister and the Pinault Collection’s CEO, was more direct when quoted on Artnet in May 2021.

“François Pinault didn’t want to associate himself with the type of collectors that bear the name of a brand,” he said. “He could have called it Fondation Gucci[…] but he wanted to distinguish his activity as an entrepreneur from his activity as a collector.”

There seemed to be some slight hand-wringing at another major privately-funded museum opening in Paris in less than a decade, yet personally I feel far more comfortable with one man deciding to spend €165m on an art museum than the state doing so.

Speaking as an art lover, I feel there are many more important things to spend that kind of cash on than art, particularly at this time. It’s his money; if he wants to spend it, he can. It is also significant that Collection Pinault is just that – a collection overseen by a public limited company, not a foundation that could take advantage of significant tax breaks.

Additionally, state-run museums tend to move at a glacial pace, especially in France, making it difficult for them to purchase pieces of contemporary art.

Prices inflate whilst debates drag on. As Pinault himself admitted, “only a madman like me can decide to buy them fast” – institutions like Collection Pinault, which are able to move quickly, can perhaps only come from the private sector. Such fast decision-making also means a museum can turn on a dime. In a New York Times piece from April 2019, which now feels blissfully unaware, we were told that “in late 2020, the Bourse and the Pompidou will team up for a dual-venue exhibition of a male artist whom Mr Pinault described as world-famous but declined to name.”

In the intervening two years, reality has shifted seismically. Instead of a bombastic exhibition by a single male artist, manspreading across not one but two huge venues, we get a calming, questioning hang of lovely yet dark, delicate, bruised and battered works from a wide range of artists whom Pinault 40

apparently adores, and has been collecting for years.

Some are famous, others less so, and all deal richly yet quietly with family, race, gender, sexuality. If that exhausts you, after the tumult of the recent past and the strain of the present, they are also beautiful to look at.

Climbing up the staircases that spiral around the outside of Ando’s cylinder, I reached the rim and suddenly I was on the bracing battlements of a citadel.

The iron and glass roof soars above and the 19thcentury murals demand your full attention.

Unlike at Tate Britain’s Rex Whistler restaurant, there is no image of a Black boy being led by a leash at the Bourse (the mural containing this image, The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats, was still being described by Tate as creating “the most amusing room in Europe” until as recently as 2020), but racist iconography nevertheless abounds, running the full gamut of grotesque colonial stereotypes.

In the Americas section, a white woman in a palepink gown relaxes on a bale of cotton, shaded from the sun under a parasol held by her Black maid.

In front, an Indigenous youth kneels to offer a parrot to entertain her, while behind her, ignored, two cowed slaves carry a log. A short distance away, her husband barters with a group of tribesmen, offering them a rifle and a basket of Western clothing.

In a brave, spiteful and stupid review of the Bourse for Dezeen, Aaron Betsky exasperatedly asked if “we really have to look at Black people serving and doing obeisance to their conquerors one more time, especially if it is in what is not a particularly good painting?”

Yes, Mr Betsky, we do have to. The lie of the whole work, of noble natives from all corners of the globe calmly, sometimes joyously offering their cloth and carpets to pith-helmeted, white-jacketed Frenchmen, is as thin as the canvas it is painted on, but it shouldn’t have been rolled up and forgotten about, as Betsky seems to suggest. Speaking to The New York Times’s Roger Cohen, Pinault acknowledged that “some will criticize us and say it’s shameful. We could have hidden the fresco – you can always hide something, that is cancel culture.” Yet the work is there for all to see: conserved, not restored. No glory has been given back to it. There is clear horror in the mural’s tastefully faded pastels and gentle jewel tones. The sombre form of Ando’s structure, sat quietly but firmly beneath this colonial fantasy, shifts again, taking on the form of an

abstract memorial. By engaging with the building and climbing the cylinder, you’re forced up far closer to this relic than the original artists ever intended.

The circularity of the Bourse lends itself to a slow wander around rather than a linear path through, and there is something generous and gratifying about not being on the usual conveyor belt of gallery, gallery, café, gift shop, thanks and goodbye of most museums.

A long while later, for instance, I was walking around the basement, trying to find the exit but not really wanting to leave, when I rounded a corner and came across a plate-glass window opening into some kind of powered-down engine room, with huge immobile wheels arcing out of the floor, slack drive belts and a wall of dials, their needles all at zero. On the wall next to the window was a you-are-here floorplan of the Bourse, the various floors and galleries neatly separated into hovering wireframe discs. I felt the whole place reconfiguring into a dormant Ridley Scott spaceship, embedded for hundreds of years in the Parisian soil, about to hum into life and lift off.

Yet the engines through the window turned out to be remnants of an early-20th-century cooling plant for the Les Halles food market, just next door, discovered during the renovations and restored as another layer of history. This building is going nowhere, so grounded is it in both yesterday and today.

Betsky writes that the artists assembled in the collection are “critical, evocative, and in some cases powerful beyond any Gucci bauble the billionaire can sell us,” yet there are no baubles for sale. Despite the COMMERCE carved into the stonework above the main entrance, there is almost nothing to buy. There is no mention whatsoever of any of the luxury brands that the Kering group owns, and the exit is not though the gift shop. The Bourse de Commerce is a deeply impressive, satisfying building, yet it is not an attempt at immortality by an egotistical billionaire and an ageing starchitect. It is not spectacular: it’s not trying to be. It’s better than that. From the loving restoration of the original building, through the delicacy of Ando’s transformation, and the Bouroullecs’ touch of human warmth, the whole project seems one of respectful, quiet modesty that is utterly lacking in cynicism.

Even the Pinault name is hard to find on the building, which doesn’t actually belong to him anyway. All this work, the hundreds of millions of euros spent, is on a 50-year lease from the City of Paris, so the central cylinder is designed to be removable, just as any

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Left: The Bouroullecs’ Rope chair, installed in one of the gallery spaces.

Below: Carpets and furniture that the designers have placed in the gallery to create a more domestic, relaxed atmosphere.

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Images courtesy of Claire Lavabre/Studio Bouroullec.

renter takes down the shelves and fills in the holes on their way out. With generosity and without being morbid, Pinault and Ando at 84 and 79 respectively will be gone in 20 years. Fischer’s giant candle will be gone in six months.

“When you design objects or furniture, you are designing something that is nomadic,” muses Bouroullec when I ask him about the temporary nature of the project. “Everything we did for M. Pinault can be disassembled in two or three days. We keep in mind that there is the ability, the possibility, that things can change very quickly. I like this idea a lot. Especially in this period, 50 years seems to be centuries and centuries. I am 50 and, just maybe, in 50 years I will be there when they start to dismantle it. But I have no idea if this phantasm can exist for 50 years. I hope so, but this world is changing so fast.”

It certainly makes you think. In 1978, for instance, the NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler proposed a theoretical future event, in which a collision occurs between two of the many pieces of space junk that orbit our planet. These two dead satellites or spent rocket boosters fragment, and these fragments, travelling at 10km/s and unfettered by the drag of gravity and atmosphere, hit other pieces of speeding trash, which fragment in turn. One collision triggers many more, cascading into chaos. At these speeds, nuts and bolts are 10 times faster than bullets; soon Earth is surrounded in a constant impenetrable cloud of machine gun fire. “We’ve reached a point where the collision rate between these larger objects, generating debris, is faster than it can be cleaned out by the natural environment,” explained the nowretired Kessler in 2013. Jeff Bezos might like to claim that Blue Origin is “opening the promise of space to all”, but by the time we’re all ready to leave this spent rock, I’m not sure it will be possible, assuming there is even anyone left to press the launch button. I used to idly worry about the Sun expanding in 5bn years and turning Chartres Cathedral, the Pyramids of Giza, and anything else too large to fit into an evacuation ship into molten glass, before vaporising them all completely. I now idly worry about what will kill me first: wildfires, flash floods, another viral epidemic?

Since visiting the Bourse de Commerce, I’ve been thinking a lot about a scene in Children of Men. As Clive Owen’s Theo, surrounded in the Ark of the Arts by what little fragments of human culture could be saved as society collapses, wonders, “A hundred

years from now, there won’t be one sad fuck left to look at any of this… what keeps you going?” If billionaires have to spend inconceivable amounts of money on things that do not reverse climate change, that do not bring about the end of world hunger, or put a roof over the head of that man huddled in a sleeping bag outside, then let it be this. Let it be beauty and intelligence and humility, today. E N D

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Embedded Design Intrauterine devices (IUDs) – colloquially called coils in the UK – hit the headlines recently. After Lucy Cohen suffered an agonising coil insertion that left her screaming in pain, she set up a petition asking for pain-relief options beyond a couple of paracetamol, and better information about the insertion and removal of the devices. “[Real] consent,” Cohen wrote, “can only be given once all risks, including that of extreme pain, have been explained.” Influential women rallied around Cohen’s cause: writer and feminist activist Caroline Criado Perez, The Times columnist Caitlin Moran and BBC presenter Naga Munchetty all shared their traumatic experiences of the procedure. “We all know that coils are safe and effective and lots of women have no problem at all with them,” Munchetty said, “but like all medical procedures, there’s a vast range of experiences.”

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Images courtesy of the Museum of Contraception and Abortion‚ Vienna.

Words Helen Brown

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Before Cohen’s petition, the coil had enjoyed largely good press. A 2014 Forbes article titled ‘Can the IUD Prevent Poverty, Save Taxpayers Billions?’, for instance, posited the coil as an effective means of reducing single motherhood, while a 2015 Economist article, ‘Taking the Bother out of Birth Control’ promoted it as a nifty solution to teen pregnancy. “They work better because once they are inserted, you don’t have to think about them again,” The Economist explained.

“This means they are less fiddly than the pill, which a woman must remember to take every day, or the condom, which a man must put on when aroused and perhaps not thinking straight.” Indeed, promoting access to Long-acting reversible contraception (LARCs) – methods that are either inserted or injected into the body by a doctor and can’t be meddled with by the user – has been part of NHS policy to reduce unintended pregnancies since 2005.

Yet a report published in June 2021 by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) revealed a side of the coil that is even darker than tales of blood-curdling screams during insertions: almost half of those using a LARC felt pressured into getting one. Even scarier, of those who wished to have it removed, 56 per cent were impeded from doing so. The aspect of the coil that is most celebrated – the fact that a woman1 doesn’t have to (or can’t) control it once it has been inserted – is clearly double edged. Users also felt that medical professionals withheld information about different brands and sizes, and played down side effects, limiting their ability to properly consent to the devices. “The UK mainstream framing of contraception and LARC is lacking in historical memory,” BPAS warned. As well as its many positive impacts as a form of contraception, the coil has a long history of tragedy that stretches into our present day. Its design has been left relatively untouched for more than half a century, but its shape, size and materials all have serious consequences and implications.

The modern coil came into widespread use in the 1960s, when America was in the thrall of

the population-control movement. In her 2011 book The Global Biopolitics of the IUD, gender and sexuality professor Chikako Takeshita sets out how advocates of population control believed that unless birth rates fell in the global South, “famine, economic collapse, environmental devastation, political turmoil, global instability, national conversions to communism, and even nuclear war were imminent”. With influential supporters in institutions such as the United Nations, International Planned Parenthood Federation, and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, population control was far from niche. Fuelled by this ideology, the Population Council, an American NGO, aimed to develop a contraceptive that could be tailored to control the fertility of low-income women and women of colour, and the coil was chosen as a promising method. “No contraceptive could be cheaper, and also, once the damn thing is in, the patient cannot change her mind,” the Planned Parenthood president Alan Guttmacher wrote in 1964 to the pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle.

Although the way in which coils work is not definitively understood, it is widely believed that placing a foreign object in the uterus produces an immune response that prevents fertilisation and egg implantation. In the case of modern coils, this is supplemented by either the spermicidal effects of copper wire, or the steady release of hormones to prevent conception. Early coils, however, depended on the immune response alone, with designers in the 1960s making them out of newly discovered thermoplastics, which could be stretched vertically on insertion and bounce into shape once inside the uterus. By funding various iterations and opening up the market, the Population Council kickstarted a design boom. There were coils shaped like leaves, Christmas trees, stingrays, lizard tongues and bowties.

There were coils that stretched out in the uterus like accordions. Designers all aimed to achieve the same goal: a device that was large enough to be efficacious, in a shape that would prevent it being expelled by the uterus. A lesser concern was women’s comfort and safety, particularly given that coils were intended for women deemed unworthy of procreation. “Suppose one does develop an intra-uterine infection, and suppose she does end up with a hysterectomy,” gynaecologist Robert J. Wilson theorised at a 1962 conference sponsored by the Population Council.

“How serious is that for the particular patient and

1 It is important to note that the issues I discuss surrounding coils do not only affect women: trans men, genderqueer and non-binary people may also be impacted, and their experiences should not be forgotten or erased. However, in this essay I am specifically focused on women, in part because the history of the coil that I discuss is bound up with society’s historic treatment and control of women, and in part because the scientific research I draw from was conducted on cisgender women.

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for the population of the world in general? Perhaps the individual patient is expendable in the general scheme of things, particularly if the infection she acquires is sterilising but not lethal.”

Wilson tempted fate. In 1971, the Dalkon Shield was released, a device with four or five spurs on each side that spoked outwards like crab legs – a design intended to prevent expulsion. In reality, the Shield’s claws embedded into the uterus, making removal extremely painful and even tearing out chunks of the uterus in the process, like a reverse vagina dentata.

The biggest design flaw of the Dalkon Shield, however, was its multifilament tail strings, which allowed bacteria to gather between the filaments and travel up to the uterus, causing pelvic infections. “Doctors, who were generally unaware of or unconcerned about the potential dangers of these modern contraceptives, often dismissed women’s complaints about severe pain and bleeding as psychological and called them ‘normal’ side effects,” writes Takeshita. The resulting untreated pelvic infections left many women infertile, and in women who became pregnant with the Shield in place, induced life-threatening septic miscarriages.

In the US, at least 15 women died and 200,000 women were injured.

Now that women are routinely screened for sexually transmitted diseases before insertions, the risk of pelvic infections is low, and liberating women from having to think regularly about contraception has earned the coil a feminist reputation. But we do not need to look far to see that using the coil to wield control over women’s bodies will always be a latent possibility. In June 2021, Britney Spears told a Los Angeles court that her 13-year conservatorship had prevented her from removing an IUD. “I wanted to take the IUD out, so I could start trying to have another baby, but this so-called team [her conservators] won’t let me to go the doctor to take it out because they don’t want me to have children,” Spears told the court. Meanwhile, in China, a number of reports have documented Uyghur Muslim women suffering forced coil insertions on the orders of the Chinese government – something the state denies. “I felt like I was no longer a normal woman,” Qelbinur Sedik, a member of the Uyghur community told The New York Times. “Like I was missing something.”

But concerns about consent and the coil aren’t confined to dictatorships or conservatorships. “There has been some evidence for several decades that

marginalised groups are more likely to be subject to contraceptive coercion and have their reproductive rights challenged,” says Annabel Sowemimo, co-director of Decolonising Contraception, an organisation that contributed to the June 2021 BPAS report. “This is historically bound up with perceptions that some groups, because of factors such as race, class or those living with a disability, cannot be good parents.”

Medical professionals’ internalised stereotypes

There were coils shaped like leaves, Christmas trees, lizard tongues and bowties. There were coils that stretched out in the uterus like accordions. are compounded by NHS targets for LARC provision.

“There’s always been that push, I think everywhere to try and get people on a LARC,” says one clinical provider. “It’s better for the NHS; it’ll save money; it’s better for the woman.”

In the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care (NICE) guidelines, LARC uptake is recommended for under 25s, people who have just given birth, and those who have had an abortion – groups who are particularly likely to want to avoid pregnancy.

But providers need to ensure that women are given the chance to weigh up all contraceptive methods available to them. “I got the coil after an abortion, and I was basically made to feel like I had to get it because I couldn’t let that happen again,” one woman told me during an interview for this article. The coil’s practicality can quickly slip into paternalistic control, and presenting it as the only method a woman can be trusted with raises questions around who is considered worthy of exercising control over their own body and who is not.

Side effects of the coil and other contraceptives can ease after the first few months, and doctors often advise leaving a bit of time for a method to settle in.

But BPAS also found that the cost of LARCs to the NHS, and the idea that a patient was too irresponsible for

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other methods, had been weaponised to convince people to keep them in. One respondent with the contraceptive implant, a device that releases hormones into the arm, tried repeatedly to have it removed: “I became so distressed that I couldn’t get it removed even though I didn’t want it in my body anymore that my mum and I tried to cut it out ourselves.”

Aside from life-threatening infections, early coils also caused pain and bleeding, which led many women to have them removed or resist getting them inserted to begin with. As such, the Population Council realised that if coils were to become a contraceptive for the masses, they needed to get smaller. In the mid-1970s, the first coils using copper and hormones were released.

Relying less on the uterus’s immune response for their contraceptive effect, these coils could have a smaller surface area, and adopted the T shape that is still the most widely used design today.

But was that T small enough? Although the coil’s surface area had massively decreased, T-shaped coils were still the same width as their predecessors. In the 1980s, Karl Kurz, a mechanic before he became a gynaecologist, invented the cavimeter, a probe which could gauge the width of a patient’s uterus before inserting the coil. A study of 509 women conducted using Kurz’s cavimeter found that the uterus was, on average, 24-26mm wide, yet all the coils on the market were 30mm or more. In response, Kurz initially customised coils for each patient’s uterus by cutting their arms to size, before inventing his own coil: the Flexi-T, a 23mm copper coil with bendy arms that curve inwards to avoid poking the uterus with any sharp edges.

A well-kept secret, however, is that the most widely used coils today are still larger than the average uterus.

Research into the impact of oversized coils is sparse, but in the early 2000s the Israeli gynaecologist Ilam Baram used a camera to look inside the uteri of his patients who complained of pain and bleeding. Although nothing appeared to be wrong on ultrasound scans, the camera revealed that their coils were too large – the arms of the T shape were bent inwards or were embedded in the walls of the uterus. He also noticed that coils causing pain were often badly positioned, lying horizontally or poking into the fallopian tubes.

To reduce these problems, Baram changed the coil’s size and shape, creating the first truly new design in

nearly half a century. Developed by FemTech startup Ocon in 2015, Baram’s IUB Ballerine was due to be released on the NHS in 2020, but its rollout was delayed due to the pandemic.

While other coils resemble torture devices, the Ballerine looks like a tiny, glittering solar-system diorama. Comprised of 17 copper balls threaded into a spherical shape, it doesn’t have any sharp edges.

“Back in the day the uterus was looked at as a flat triangle,” says Daniela Schardinger, vice-president of marketing and medical affairs at Ocon. “But the uterus is not a flat triangle, it’s a cavity, and it’s constantly contracting.” The spherical shape of Ocon’s coil means that it is impossible for it to be awkwardly positioned.

Its structure is made out of nitinol wire, an alloy of nickel and titanium which can be stretched vertically on insertion and then bounce into shape once in the uterus. Perhaps the best design feature of all, it comes in 12mm and 15mm sizes – by far the smallest available.

The Ballerine is a copper coil; a hormonal coil small enough for the average uterus has yet to be developed, although Ocon is working on it. In the mid-2000s, however, the German multinational pharmaceutical company Bayer released Skyla and Kyleena, two T-shaped hormonal coils which sound like they have their own reality TV show. Bayer’s designs are currently the smallest on the market, but, at 28mm, they are still too large. The size and shape of the coil remain a significant issue, and the fact that these physical discrepancies are not common knowledge prevents women from being able to push for better designs. There are ongoing lawsuits in the US against Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, for example, brought by women whose T-shaped coils snapped during removal, requiring surgery to gouge out the remnants.

In the UK, the hormonal and copper coils typically prescribed remain too large, and even though four smaller copper models are available with comparable rates of efficacy and longevity, women are rarely given a choice of brands. In the US, every single coil on the market is too large.

Although adding hormones successfully reduced the size of the coil and increased its efficacy, it opened the door to other complications. In 2001, Bayer released the hormonal coil Mirena, which is also licensed as a therapeutic treatment for easing menstrual pain and bleeding. Bayer aggressively marketed their new product, partnering with Mom Central, a US-based

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forum and blog for mothers, to sponsor “Mirena parties”, for which they sent nurses to tout the benefits of Mirena at get-togethers hosted by forum members. According to Bayer’s script, a nurse called Barb would kick off the evening by saying, “What we’re here to talk about today is how to find those simple ways to reconnect with ourselves and our partners.” She would then recommend Mirena as a means of fostering longed-for “spontaneous intimacy” by eliminating the awkwardness of both condoms and menstrual blood.

Meanwhile, blogs started to appear that threatened Mirena’s image. In 2008, an anonymous blogger started the Life After Mirena blog, where she revealed “the truth about the Mirena”. After getting her coil fitted in 2006, she started experiencing hormonal side effects.

“My stomach appeared swollen, and my breasts were getting bigger, as if I were pregnant,” she wrote. “I was understandably freaked out and bought a pregnancy test, which came out negative.” She lost her libido and felt depressed. “I felt like it was my fault. My instinct told me that the Mirena was causing my weight gain, but I wanted to trust the doctor.” After she finally had her coil removed, she began to see some improvement, which is not surprising. Clinical trials found that Mirena caused hormonal side effects such as weight increase, breast pain, acne, decreased libido and depressed mood in 5 per cent or more of patients tested.

Comments validating these descriptions flooded in. “I feel so detached from life which means my two young boys aren’t getting what they need from me,” one commenter wrote. “I can’t stand my body, don’t EVEN want my husband near me,” another chimed in.

In 2009, the FDA wrote a letter to Bayer admonishing the company for its dystopian Mirena parties and demanding that it change its promotional materials.

Referring to Barb’s presentation, the FDA curtly wrote that it was “not aware of any evidence that suggests that women using Mirena for birth control experience an increase in reconnection, romance or intimacy with their partners.” In fact, the agency continued, the clinical data suggested the opposite.

On the blog, Mirena sufferers wrote that their doctors said hormones released directly into the uterus would not cause systemic effects. “No matter where you administer the hormones,” psychologist Sarah E. Hill writes in her groundbreaking book This Is Your Brain on Birth Control, “they all end up in the same place. And that place is everywhere.”

In her book, Hill presents research suggesting that

hormones have an impact on our mate preferences, moods, sensitivity to smells, and our ability to learn and remember, amongst other key determinants of feeling like our real selves. Though Hill’s work focuses on the pill, a 2017 study by Erasmus University in Rotterdam showed that the hormonal coil heightens cortisol levels and speeds up the heart rate. “Women should be informed that the effects of an IUD aren’t just local, and a heightened stress response is partly caused by the effects of an IUD on the brain,” researcher Jurate Aleknaviciute said.

Waves of media attention about the hormonal side effects of Mirena show that even in recent years its hormonal impacts have been underplayed, with a subsequent increase in reports of adverse reactions to the device also implying that the frequency of side effects could be more common than indicated in clinical trials. A 2019 study published in The British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, for instance, found that “frequencies could potentially be much higher than expected for some known or suspected AEs [adverse events] of Mirena such as of anxio-depressive disorders, sexual disorders, alopecia or headache.”

Research into how birth control affects the brain is still in its infancy and other complaints women discuss online – such as the “Mirena Crash”, an abrupt hormonal imbalance caused by removing the coil – are yet to be studied.

Given these kinds of issues, the copper coil is often recommended as the preferred birth-control solution.

It is non-hormonal, and therefore not believed to cause any mental-health side effects. Although it increases menstrual pain and bleeding (which is enough for many women to reject it), there are no other medically documented physical side effects.

But as with Mirena, the internet has provided a space in which some women have raised concerns. A few months after Amy Hamilton-Daynes got the copper coil inserted in 2018, she started experiencing severe health problems. “I was really fatigued, I could barely walk or talk,” she says. “All my hair fell out in tufts, and my anxiety was through the roof, I couldn’t do anything without it being overwhelming.” She believes that the copper her coil was made from was responsible.

Copper poisoning from the coil was a topic of discussion on the Yahoo group copperiuddetox in the early 2000s, with women later migrating onto Facebook groups. The largest of these, Copper IUD 50

and Toxicity Support Group, now has more than 9,000 members. Schardinger says that Ocon has received emails about copper poisoning before. “It’s very hard to determine, because the release rate is so low that we do not necessarily believe it’s related to the coil,” she says. “But copper is also in food, so if it’s combined with a rich copper diet, it becomes a little bit less transparent.” Hamilton-Daynes has been a vegetarian since she was eight years old, and her favourite foods – such as chocolate, sweet potatoes and avocados – are all high in copper.

Scientific research on copper poisoning and the copper coil is extremely limited. Of the 12 studies that do exist assessing the blood-copper levels of women with the copper coil, a 2021 literature review by Lena Crandell and Natalie Mohler found that eight studies showed no increase, while four showed a significant increase. None of these studies, however, tested for free copper, the toxic form of copper, prompting Crandell and Mohler to raise “questions about the clinical significance of all research on this subject to date”. To complicate matters, measurements of free copper vary depending on the laboratory performing the tests and there is little consensus on what is considered a normal level.

Even though the copper coil is non-hormonal, natural hormones can still influence copper levels.

Research from the 1950s onwards has shown that when the body experiences an increase in oestrogen, either during pregnancy or from taking the combined contraceptive pill, copper uptake in the blood is noticeably higher. Given that there is a broad range of what “normal” oestrogen levels are, it is conceivable that women with higher oestrogen levels could be more at risk of copper poisoning, alongside women with high copper diets, or women who inherited high copper levels. But the simple fact is that we have no idea. “For millennia, medicine has functioned on the assumption that male bodies can represent humanity as a whole,” Caroline Criado Perez writes in Invisible Women,2 her 2019 book exploring the gender data gap, which sets out how women’s bodies and ailments are vastly underrepresented in medical research.

The lack of research into copper poisoning causes Hamilton-Daynes, who has a master’s degree in educational psychology and neuroscience, endless heartache and frustration. “I’ve always been someone 2 Reviewed by Kristina Rapacki in Disegno #23.

who lived in academia, so to live on fringe science is always going to be hard,” she says, “but you’ve just got to accept that, basically, women’s health is ignored.”

Unlike many of the problems linked to Mirena, copper poisoning has not been flagged in clinical trials. But women on Facebook are making similar claims regarding copper as women did on the Mirena blogs in relation to hormones: that copper from the coil can be absorbed into the blood in high enough levels to cause physical and psychological damage.

On the Mirena blogs, women wrote that when they complained to doctors about their symptoms, they were recommended anxiety medication, an experience shared by Hamilton-Daynes. “It comes across as: are you sure you’re not going through women’s hysteria?” she says. “Should I just prescribe you a vibrator and send you on your way?”

When painful coil insertions were splashed across headlines in 2021, it was not news to me. The majority of coil-insertion stories I have heard resemble horror fiction: a friend who fainted, another who described it as “having your insides stapled”, and yet another who suffered such terrible cramps post-insertion that she had to be taken to A&E. It was surreal to see something that I found so familiar being treated as news and depressing to think that it had never occurred to me before to be angry about it. In July, however, the UK’s Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare (FSRH) changed its guidelines to specify that women should always be offered pain relief during coil insertions.

“It saddens me to read these reports,” wrote Jane Barter, FSRH’s vice president. “No woman should endure severe pain when having their IUD fitted.”

I felt a sense of wonderment that something I had previously accepted as immutable could actually be changed.

The same is true for all contraceptives: we don’t have to like it or lump it; things can change if we kick up enough of a fuss. “A growing body of science is backing up what women have been telling their doctors for years: the pill changes us,” Hill writes in This Is Your Brain on Birth Control. Similarly, more research on the mental and physical impact of the coil is likely to reaffirm women’s lived experiences of hormones, metals and oversized coils. Dismissing women’s concerns about medical devices is likely to leave you on the wrong side of history: in recent years, large settlements were agreed for women suffering

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health problems from leaky breast implants, vaginal mesh and the Essure contraceptive device, all after years of fighting for recognition. In November 2019, for instance, more than 1,350 Australian women won a long-running class action lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson over the medical risks of its vaginal mesh implant products. “They have treated women essentially like guinea pigs,” said Julie Davis, the original claimant in the case, “lied about it and done nothing to help.”

One month prior to this, the company had agreed to pay nearly US$117m to resolve claims over its pelvic mesh products in the US. Critiquing birth control, however, is a contentious business. A 2019 article in The European Journal of Contraception & Reproductive Health Care argued that journalists should be careful to avoid whipping up contraceptive health scares. “The stated rationale is usually public concern,” wrote the author, who has worked for a number of pharmaceutical companies, “but this neglects the public health imperative to balance small risks against potentially greater benefits.”

Yet the mental and physical impact of birth control is as important a public-health issue as the rate of unintended pregnancies; believing otherwise risks prioritising the societal impact of women’s fertility over women themselves. We should ask ourselves: does the way we currently balance the “public health imperative” ultimately serve the taxpayer more than it serves women?

Many of the risks I have detailed around the coil in this article are probably small, but accurate data collection on women’s experiences of birth control is nevertheless essential. I also do not believe that informing women of side effects will necessarily make them abandon contraception – after all, I have the Mirena coil. Despite knowing so much about its potential side effects that it has given me nightmares, I am not reaching for my coil strings in a panic. Like many women, I have accepted Mirena as an imperfect solution and am thankful for the protection it gives me. But I deserve better than a device that is too large for my body and whose impact on my health is unclear. And although I have not experienced intolerable or life-ruining side effects, those who have done should not be left to advocate for themselves alone. Fighting this fight means interrogating what beliefs we have unconsciously digested about what women deserve and what benefits society. “Somewhere, somehow, we’ve all agreed that it’s okay for ourselves and for other women to live with

mental health problems, as long as no one is getting pregnant unexpectedly,” Hill explains. “This is – quite literally – complete insanity.” E N D

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Counterpoints Words Peter Kapos

German Design 1949-1989: Two Countries, One History is an exhibition curated by Erika Pinner, for the Vitra Design Museum, and Klára Němečková, for the Kunstgewerbemuseum. Fortunately for those, including myself, unable to travel under current restrictions, a 320-page catalogue has also been produced, recording key exhibits alongside some 20 essays by design historians that develop its themes.

Dieter Rams and Hans Gugelot’s SK 6 Stereo-Phonosuper, 1956/60.

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The exhibition’s co-curation through and movement between two German institutions – one in the former Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, West Germany), the other in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) – reflects the project’s aim to restore balance to the historiography of German design during the period of the country’s division.

The book and, I gather from it, the exhibition explore differences, commonalities and exchanges between the two countries on a variety of levels, from product

typologies and approaches to design pedagogy, to the politically freighted discourses on what was, and was not, considered “good design”. The structure of presentation is chronological, broken into three periods – 1949-1960, 1961 (the year of the construction of the Berlin Wall) -1972, and 1973-1989 (the year of the wall’s removal) – and each section concludes with a selection of exhibited works. Just before the 19611972 section, the flow is broken by a series of blackand-white photographs made at the time of wall’s 54

Images courtesy of the Vitra Design Museum: Andreas Sütterlin, Günter Höhne, Gunter Binsack, Luciano Castelli, Otl Aicher and Freital.

Horst Giese and Jürgen Peters’s Alex television set, 1957/58, and Ilse Decho’s 5100 teapot, 1963.

construction, presented wall-like across 12 consecutive, full-bleed double spreads.

In terms of its result, much like its subject matter, this is a divided project. By far the stronger part is its scholarship in working through the post-war reception of interwar modernism and, in particular, the German fate of the Bauhaus functionalist tradition. This analysis is fascinating in its detail and also serves as a useful corrective to commonplace assumptions that, lacking a design culture, the GDR was capable only of producing cheap and colourful plastic tat. Connected to this is an also useful negation of the notion that the GDR itself was suspended for some 40 years in a historical limbo, awaiting readmittance to the flow of meaningful events. Instead, a rather more complex picture appears of a modernist design tradition in both countries that first adapted to, and then withered under, a complex set of cultural, economic and political conditions.

There is valuable research here, and the curators have done well to preserve narrative and thematic continuity across the assembled writings. More problematic, however, is the curatorial purpose of framing this history in terms of Germanness in design, and on that basis to recast the period 19491989 as a unified and, thereby, unifying object of cultural memory.

Many writings collected in the first two sections of the book touch on different points in the so-called “formalism debate”. Whilst modernism in a functionalist mode was promoted as a plank of Western official culture, in the East it was denounced as a “weapon of imperialism” – a formal contrivance of no social value – and suppressed in favour of the contorted optimism of socialist realism. But as many of the essays show, the stark opposition was only apparent.

With a common intellectual formation under the influence of the Bauhaus, designers in both countries were rather more aligned. And, it turns out that throughout the period of partition, East and West were economically enmeshed to a far greater extent than the rhetoric may have suggested.

In the first section, 1949-1960, Siegfreid Gronert gives a fascinating account of parallel developments in design education between the two German states up to the 1970s. His condensed history shows that the legacy of the Bauhaus, albeit in different ways, provided a point of tension for both states. In the Federal Republic, the “Werkkunstschulen”, in many cases under the directorship of Bauhaus alumni,

were built on a model provided by the school’s preliminary course that had aimed at a holistic training. In the East meanwhile, whilst functionalism was initially suppressed by official doctrine, Gronert shows that the Bauhaus influence gradually surfaced as a practical expedient at the level of curricula – a unity of art and technology under the imperatives of the planned economy. The two sides of this history converge in the 1970s, when the elements of Bauhaus pedagogy, connected to the utopian, qualitative purpose of design, were eventually blocked in both states by the scientific-technical requirements of training for commercial industrial production.

Under the unassuming title ‘Plastics, Design, and Socialism in East Germany’, Eli Rubin develops a gripping account of the hallucinatory fusion of chemical science and communist world-building, in which Bauhaus-inspired industrial technofunctionalism combined with the intuition of an inevitable unfolding of human mastery over the material world that verged on the cosmic. Plastic’s infinite malleability seemed to recommend it as the ideal building material of the socialist future, “not worse but better – from a socialist standpoint – than ‘althergebrachte’ (authentic or traditional) materials”.

Plastic cities under plastic domes, in Siberia and on other planets, could be expected as the culmination of human history in the epoch of plastic. In the event, other realities encroached on the dream. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union restricted the supply of petroleum to the GDR, which struggled to suppress the environmental and human degradation caused by plastics production.

Eventually, as Rubin describes, the disappointments of socialist plastic joined the swell of popular discontent that finally led to the collapse of so-called “actually existing socialism”.

Katrin Schreiter’s informative contribution observes the resolution of the formalism debate from the standpoint of an international struggle over the title “German” conducted through industrial design. Initially, the Werkbund-Bauhaus tradition of functionalism was pitted against faux-folk socialist realism in a competition for “guardianship of the national heritage”. As Gronert shows in the field of education, the cultural tension was resolved at the level of economics. For, while the FRG refused to recognise the legitimacy of the GDR as a political entity, the two German states, remained closely linked through trade. As consumer taste in the West shifted

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towards modernist design, production in the East had little choice but to follow. Official GDR policy eventually recognised functionalism as the most effective means to both efficient production and international recognition, seeking, as Schreiter writes, “to secure a greater market share for GDR products by competing with the FRG over the modernist heritage of the interwar years, marked by the Bauhaus and Werkbund traditions”. From 1970, the GDR promoted its own brand of “humane” functionalism, exemplified in Margarete Jahny and Erich Müller’s elegant system of cylindrical glass containers, Europa. As an emblem of functionalism’s political rehabilitation in the East, the Bauhaus Dessau building was renovated and reopened in 1976, described in the speeches as “an integral part of the national socialist building culture in the GDR”.

It’s tempting to speculate on how this socialistbacked extension of the Bauhaus tradition might have developed in the East, at a time when the West, now enthralled by consumer-capitalist baubles, was beginning to regard functionalism as boring.

Schreiter notes, however, the suspicion of FRG design commentators that, confined to international-tradeshow displays, the GDR’s commitment to “humane” design was more strategic rhetorical posturing than representative of the reality of its industrial effort.

In fact, judged by the quality of goods on the shelves, the standards attained by GDR design by 1989 were, according to Katharina Pfützner, “lamentable”. Her engaging essay in the 1973-1989 section details the retreat of many GDR designers from formal industrial positions during the 1970s and 80s, circumstances being such that it was almost impossible for socially committed industrial designers, educated in the Bauhaus tradition, to practise with any sense of rationality, let alone professional dignity. Pfützner describes a situation of rising national debt, interest rates and prices for raw materials, in which the GDR found itself increasingly dependent on export sales of low-price knockoffs to fulfil its own domestic needs, requiring limited input from industrial designers.

Combined with demoralising working conditions, this prompted an exodus of designers – some to adjacent, more craft-based occupations in which they could exert more control over their activity, others from the country altogether.

As an account of the fate of modernist design in the two opposed yet linked German states, German Design provides a useful and accessible

guide. Scholarship aside, however, there is another aspect to the project, apparent in the curators’ framing essay as well as in the statements of the two associated museum directors and functionaries of the supporting bodies, which proves rather more problematic. The intended operation is first to show that design practices in the GDR and FRG during the period 1949-1989 were not only German in the trivial geographic sense, but also disclose Germanness of a more profound cultural kind. This presentation of the underlying cultural coherence of the two German states is, then, to form the basis of a reconfigured historical memory that substitutes unity for division.

As the curators acknowledge, the Bauhaus presents something of a problem for a notion of specifically German design, being at once a fundamental historical switching point, routing the major currents of the country’s design tradition from the 19th through the 20th centuries, while also being in certain key respects emphatically non-German. The international character of the influences flowing through the school – English arts and crafts, Dutch De Stijl, Russian constructivism, in addition to the German Werkbund – was matched by the cosmopolitan composition of its central protagonists – Breuer, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, Itten, Klee, Meyer, etc., not to mention that of its student body. Those factors combine with the internationalist – even world-historical, practical horizon of the Bauhaus in its own self-understanding – to render specifically national claims for its significance at best paradoxical. Far from critically destabilising the concept of national design, placing “German Design” in quotation marks and extending the category to include non-Germans educated at the Bauhaus, as well as German designers working in the Bauhaus tradition outside the country for non-German companies, tends to exaggerate it.

If the Bauhaus was too international in composition to ground a strong concept of specifically German national design during the period when the school’s influence still held sway (broadly to the end of the 60s), the difficulty in maintaining the notion of any national design from the 70s onwards lies in the increasingly international character of the field of practice. This, too, is partially acknowledged by the curators. They write: “most accounts of German design history generally lose direction after the 1960s. Whilst German modernism faded from the forefront of public consciousness, other, more colourful national design 56

Clockwise from left: Claudia Skoda’s Fruits knitwear, ca. 1978; Otl Aicher’s pictogram 0605 for the 1972 Munich Olympics; and Margarete Jahny and Erich Müller’s Europa glass series, 1964.

identities gained traction, leaving little space for German narratives of the 1970s and ’80s.” However, the framing of these conditions in terms of the eclipse of a German design culture by other (Italian?) “national design identities” is as unhelpful as it is inaccurate.

For the process of internationalisation, or perhaps better, transnationalisation already well under way by the 1970s, was not principally a matter of rivalry between national units, so much as the formation, across national boundaries, of a system of exchange

in which the transmission of information (culture) followed the ever-increasing material flows of goods, capital and peoples. This is why the categories of 70s and 80s alternative West German design practices (alternative to an increasingly homogenous global commercial-design culture) surveyed by Petra Eisele in the book’s third section, also reflect oppositional positions taken up throughout the industrialised world: critical design, humane environments, ecological design, recycling and DIY design. Even the nationally specific

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An advertising image for the Trabant 601 Universal, 1965.

“New German Design” has a ring of the universally cynical playfulness of postmodernism, as does the movement’s breathless confusion of design discourse with marketing publicity, repeated uncritically in Eisele’s hyperbolic commentary, where raw industrial materials are said to have appeared in hitherto “inconceivable and unprecedented combinations”. In the final analysis, neither the functionalist tradition nor the variety of its postmodern successors provide sufficiently stable footing for a strong concept of German design.

In a section consisting of a transcribed interview between Vitra Design Museum director Mateo Kries and Dieter Rams, Kries invites the designer to identify his well-known list of design principles as being quintessentially German: “If we look at your ten principles of good design, they contain notions that could be traced back to typical German design concepts: the simplicity, the honesty, staying true to the material.” Arguably, these might be described as typical international modernist design concepts.

But the specificity of Rams’s correction is informative: “I put them on paper because Braun was changing at the time – with the increasing international influence of Gillette and others – and I wanted to create a counterpoint to this development.” The source of the “international influence” that Rams refers to – the American multinational, Gillette – had acquired a controlling interest in Braun in 1967. By the time Rams felt compelled to set out his principles of good design in the mid-70s, a logic of strategic calculation and economic rationalisation, transmitted to Kronberg from Cincinnati, was in his view threatening to deform the output of the Braun design department altogether.

In this encounter we can glimpse a moment of that broad late-20th-century shift, in which the modernist tradition gradually became engulfed by a process of development, the global expansion of capitalist relations of exchange, whose subject was not the human being but merely capital itself. Since the 1970s, the contradiction between the logic of the market and human ends has only intensified, as has the need to posit appropriate “counterpoints”, to use Rams’s term.

The ascendance of the economic over the human, and the question of counterpoints, brings us to the contemporary relevance of German Design 1949-1989 and the notion of cultural memory towards which its dubious demonstration of German design is directed.

It isn’t at first clear what the contemporary relevance of the project could be, since the year 1989 that defines the limit of the project also marks the very beginning of the contemporary – that broad set of conditions that define our present. However dysfunctional they may have been, the existence of communist states in pre-1989 Europe and Russia indirectly served to sustain the possibility of Western social democracy by demonstrating the real possibility of social forms other than capitalism. The threat was held at bay through a settlement between labour and capital in the form of regulatory constraints on the expansion of capital and a welfare state (necessary in a Europe lacking America’s fanatical commitment to the bootstrapping “dream” of individual self-realisation).

Following 1989, however, the settlement was swiftly revoked, as capitalisms, from neoliberal to Chinese state, interlocked on a planetary scale. Through the subsequent dissolution of traditional institutions of 58

social solidarity, crises of democratic representation, unprecedented concentrations of wealth amidst atomisation and insecurity, the social consequences of the new arrangement have come to define the contours of contemporary experience in the industrially developed countries of the former East and West.

Also noteworthy is the general state of dazed bewilderment as to the causes of these consequences of globalisation amongst those populations worst affected by them, feeding the re-emergence of ethnic nationalism and populist right demagoguery. Thomas Geisler, director of the Dresden Kunstgewerbermuseum, remarks that “German society is still struggling with the process of reunification 30 years after the fall of the wall.” One symptom of this “struggle” is that the extreme-right Alternative für Deutschland claims a quarter of the popular vote in half of the states formerly belonging to the GDR. Unable to get to grips with this phenomenon, the condescending explanations of the establishment echo earlier highhanded dismissals of GDR design: East Germans, whose outlooks have been formed under a totalitarian regime, lack the cultural maturity for democratic thought. This is the contemporary political terrain on which German Design stages its intervention, seeking to overcome social division in a representation of East German culture as part of, and not an opposite to, the German whole. The project is an act of historical recollection with the aim of providing what the curators refer to as an “extension of cultural memory”, an act of political and cultural (re-)enfranchisement: “German Design 1949-1989 ultimately asks readers to reconsider a broadened understanding of German design in the post-war period as a means by which to reconnect the two halves that make up Germany today.”

Viewed in this way, the gap between pre-1989 Germany and its present provides the basis for the contemporary relevance of German Design 1949-1989 as historical recollection. It is also this gap, however, that limits what such salutary memories of national unity can hope to achieve. In her contribution to the book’s prologue, Jana Scholze cautions against Ostalgie, nostalgia for the former East. The danger of this longing, Scholze writes, is that it “moves the difficult process of transformation and adaptation exclusively into the sphere of sentimentality and emotional reaction.[…] What the term prevents, or even prohibits, is a constructive critique of the

process of reunification as an integration into a preferential and presumed-stronger political, economic, and social system.” This assessment seems entirely correct to me, but I would extend Scholze’s critique of the political limitations of romantic longing to encompass the discourse of historical memory more broadly. The issue here is not so much the mode of attention – whether it is feeling or critique – but where attention is placed. The focal point of historical recollection is an image of the past, not the present, which, indeed, as the site of projection, is structurally excluded from the operation. This, in the words of philosopher Peter Osborne, inevitably “turns memory into a form of forgetting”. What falls into the gap between past and present is the possibility of engaging with the past, not as a healing image, but rather as an ongoing process – one in which history is grasped in a critical mode as a web of forces active and effective within the present. The difference is that between consolation and the possibility of change.

Because it promises remedies to pressing problems without any of the awkwardness of engaging critically with the present, everyone can safely get behind the discourse of historical memory. Perhaps for this reason, historical memory is currently a prevalent, if not institutionally dominant, curatorial trope.

Supported by the Federal Ministry for Foreign Affairs, pandemic permitting, the exhibition German Design 1949-1989 will embark on an “ambitious journey around the globe”, during which its appeal for national unity is bound to be understood as clearly as its economically pertinent claims for the continued excellence (and coherence) of German design. Reading again Walter Gropius’s hopes for a Bauhaus that would “one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith”, I am struck less by the extravagance of his utopianism than by the fact that he had faith in the future at all. I have to admit that I’m not sure what kind of practice, or practices, might articulate historical resources of the kind presented by the Bauhaus as part of project to create a future meaningfully different from the present. German Design 1949 – 1989, however, is not that “counterpoint”. E N D German Design 1949 – 1989 is published by Vitra Design Museum, price €59.90.

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e-Waste Agbogbloshie Words Shawn Adams Photographs Muntaka Chasant

With the tech industry growing rapidly, consumers are now presented with endless amounts of physical electronic upgrades. From the latest smartphone to the newest 4k digital screen, this fast-paced market centres around the need to throw out old devices for new ones. While some organisations allow you to trade in dated items, the amount they offer is often laughable and, honestly, quite offensive. As a result, electronics typically have a short lifespan and quickly become outdated. Once they are no longer the latest edition, they are thrown out, no longer of value. This way of thinking is one of the reasons why there are several electronic-waste settlements scattered across the globe.

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Historically, e-waste was dumped in Asia, but by the late 1990s this had spread to West African nations such as Ghana. In Ghana, the demand for electronics has rocketed over the last decade as second-hand shops seek to upcycle and repurpose old gadgets.

However, due to a lack of stringent frameworks to oversee both the importation and disposal of e-waste, this unregulated industry is spiralling out of control.

Despite the Basel Convention, an international treaty signed in 1989 that forbids “transboundary movements of hazardous wastes and their disposal” (or, in practice, nations in the global North dumping unauthorised electronic waste in less industrially developed nations), it is said that more than 200,000 tonnes of e-waste still arrive in Ghana each year in the form of “donations”, a mode of export that skirts the Basel Convention.

While 180 countries have acceded to this treaty, the United States of America – which, according to the Basel Action Network, exports 50-80 per cent of its e-waste – is still not a member. Worse still, in 2008, Greenpeace investigated e-waste in Ghana and discovered that it predominantly came from the EU and US: “As part of this investigation, evidence was obtained that obsolete electrical and electronic equipment being exported to Ghana originated from the European Union and the United States, some being transported under the guise of second-hand goods in order to overcome restrictions on the exporting of hazardous waste from the EU.” It is clear that the global North is to blame for the birth of e-waste settlements, like Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana.

Agbogbloshie is a sprawling electronic graveyard and is widely said to be the centre of illegal e-waste exportation. Often referred to as “Sodom”, the Biblical city destroyed by God for the sins of its inhabitants, the site is a bleak, toxic settlement. Poised at the edge of the Odaw river, a once-flowing tributary, the area is a hazardous electronic wasteland where the natural has fallen victim to the artificial. In the 1960s, this 20-acre scrapyard was a bustling wildlife haven, boasting a rich wetland and green pastures. Today, however, it is characterised by its dark, venomous clouds, raging, red fires, and mountains of retired items. Less than an hour’s drive away is the Port of Tema, the harbour where the majority of Agbogbloshie’s e-waste comes from. On site, goats meander aimlessly as residents frantically search through vast heaps of decommissioned devices. The transformation of this place is a direct result of the urbanisation of Accra.

As the city developed, Agbogbloshie quickly morphed into an unregulated dumping ground.

To the south of the Korle Lagoon, Agbogbloshie houses a market that fronts the Abossey-Okai Road.

Here, yams and bananas are sold alongside stacks of second-hand air-conditioner units. In the distance, a network of unused computer cases floats along the river, while clusters of self-built shacks made from wood and scrap metal pepper the site and act as temporary homes for the workers. These one-storey structures lack basic sanitation and have no source of clean water. Other workers make the nearby slum area, Old Fadama, their home. Most of the people living and operating in Agbogbloshie are young men from Northern Ghana, Mali, Ivory Coast, Niger and Burkina Faso. The community is an amalgamation of different tribes, classes and lineages living and working collectively; the site, a complex network of roles, relationships and new forms of kinship.

There are dismantlers, grassroots makers, sorters, fixers, upcyclers, collectors, hackers, apprentices and masters who have all been drawn to the site by its onslaught of e-waste.

Agbogbloshie is a place full of stigmas. The workers are often judged by people across Accra and looked down on, despite the site being a result of the global North simply pushing its waste problems onto Ghana.

At surface level, the work is frequently seen as dirty and illegitimate, but, if you look closely and begin to unpack the former wetland, you quickly realise that it is a unique ecosystem where African men have created a wealth of opportunities within a complex and unregulated sector. Despite its grim appearance, Agbogbloshie is a repository of highly specialised knowledge and ingenuity. The global North could learn a lot from it.

Most of the young men living on the site stay for three to five months before returning to their families with their earnings. Many of them are practising Muslims and wake up as early as 5am for morning prayers. As you scan the polluted landscape, designated spaces for prayer away from the mucky soil and burning debris can be seen. In Agbogbloshie, there are also specific areas for the weighing, refurbishment, repairing, burning and dismantling of electronics. At the centre of the site, waste has been cleared to provide space for an ad hoc football pitch. As you walk further away, the ground slowly shifts into a burned, blackened shade, which signifies that you have entered the 62

poisonous burning zone. It’s here where workers, who have coined the name “burner boys”, set fire to electronic components and computer wires in search of copper. This is the most valuable material on the site; many companies buy recovered metals from these informal miners, while failing to consider the health implications these men face through exposure to

Despite its grim appearance, Agbogbloshie is a repository of specialised knowledge and ingenuity. The global North could learn from it. pollutants such as carbon monoxide and lead.

Many of these hazardous substances also end up contaminating the soil and water, and spread into the areas surrounding Agbogbloshie.

As a response to the increasing environmental pollution across Africa, in July 2020 the World Bank approved the African Environmental Health and Population Management Program – an initiative that aims to reduce the impact of air, soil and water pollution on human health and the environment in low and middle-income countries. “Recognizing that the e-waste challenge is on the rise and current policies and practices are insufficient, there is a growing need for improved policies, knowledge management and adopting environmentally friendly processing and recycling techniques to address this challenge,” the World Bank states. “The mismanagement of chemicals, releases of unintentionally produced POPs (UPOPs) [persistent organic pollutants and unintentionally produced POPs] from open-burning and other sources present serious threats to human and environmental health in many parts of Africa.” Under the Stockholm and Minamata Conventions, which concern POPs and mercury pollution, the programme will support Ghana, along with Tanzania, Zambia, Senegal, and Kenya.

Perhaps through this project Agbogbloshie’s toxic e-waste landscape will gradually improve.

The German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) has also

commissioned a two-phase programme for the sustainable management and disposal of e-waste in Ghana. Named the Environmentally Sound Disposal and Recycling of Electronic Waste (E-Waste Programme), this initiative is a result of a 2016 agreement between Germany and Ghana that aims to ensure the appropriate transportation, recycling and collection of electronic waste in the West African nation. The programme seeks to provide a coherent policy framework for the sustainable management of e-waste at both the micro and macro scale. Phase one of this project ran between 20162020, while the second phase is set to end in 2022.

Funded by the German Development Bank, Kreditanstalt fur Wiederaufbau (KfW), with technical support provided by Germany’s Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) in partnership with Ghana’s Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation (MESTI), the project will cost a total of €20m. As part of its work, an e-waste holding centre will be constructed in Ghana, with Kwaku Afriyie, a medical doctor and minister for MESTI, stating that he wants to incentivise the dismantling, recycling and disposal of e-waste in a way that reduces damage to human health and the environment. “The project will offer incentive packages to informal e-waste collectors to encourage them to use the proper channels of disposing of e-waste materials,” Afriyie said at a ground-breaking ceremony for the centre in March 2021. “It will also subsidise the collection and cover additional cost associated with e-waste recycling.” As part of these plans, the programme aims to employ 5,000 people, providing three days of training in battery-waste management and e-waste dismantlement. “The scrap dealers will be given incentive payment after their three days programme for the collection of waste battery for recycling,” explained Markus Spitzbart, the programme’s project manager at GIZ. “This initiative is done to minimise the negative environmental and human health hazard of battery burning.”

Nothing, however, has been mentioned about how the global North can reduce its e-waste production.

What will be the incentive to throw out e-waste at a slower rate? Despite the proposals put forward by the BMZ and World Bank, it still feels as if many nations are simply pushing the problem further down the line. What they need to do instead is develop strong financial systems that promote the sustainable

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handling of e-waste inside their own borders and stop the exploitation of low-wage workers operating in Agbogbloshie. The Environmentally Sound Disposal and Recycling of Electronic Waste programme needs to facilitate clear dialogues between the urban miners, municipalities and non-governmental organisations, while simultaneously providing appropriate training for the handling of e-waste.

While BMZ’s two-phase programme sounds good in principle, we only have to look at Pure Earth, an NGO that set up an automated wire stripping facility in 2014, to find evidence of an initiative that fails to live up to expectations. After considering the damage that workers in Agbogbloshie were doing to themselves and the environment by burning cables to retrieve copper, Pure Earth teamed up with Green Advocacy Ghana and the Greater Accra Scrap Association to develop an e-waste recycling facility. Despite its good intentions, however, workers continue to burn through e-waste daily. Pure Earth’s facility, which is based in a shipping container, houses wire-stripping machines that separate metals from their plastic coatings, removing the need for burning. But when the facility opened, its machines were unable to process the small cables that most people burn on the site.

While this problem was later resolved, it takes a considerable amount of time to untangle the cables, as they need to be fed separately through the machine’s granulator and separator. Contrastingly, burning takes only a few minutes. Furthermore, to use these resources, workers must pay a small fee.

It is clear that for any initiative to work, it not only needs to resolve an issue, but also be able to justify why these men would favour it over their current methods of obtaining metals.

Despite having spent nearly $150,000 on its project, Pure Earth has barely managed to scratch the surface of the burning problem. While there are myriad reasons why the inhabitants of Agbogbloshie should stop burning, if you consider the financial issues and immediate livelihood challenges facing them, you begin to understand that, for many, dayto-day issues are far more worrying than any potential long-term health risks posed by e-waste practices.

Hopefully, this is something that the BMZ will learn from. Additionally, if they can engage with local workers directly, and understand their needs and the reasons behind their practices, then the facility they provide will make sense for them to use.

Agbogbloshie challenges us to think about what we do with our unwanted electronics and how we must change the fast-paced electronic consumer market. While there is much that we can learn from the workers operating across the scrapyard – from extending the lifespan of dated devices to promoting a circular economy – we must not ignore the sheer levels of exploitation happening there. The former wetland is an incredibly complex area, with socioeconomic, political and environmental entanglements that go further than its immediate e-waste challenges.

While organisations such as BMZ and the World Bank are providing support for some of Ghana’s issues, unless they are directly informing and working with the inhabitants of the site, their initiatives are most likely not going to see great results. What the people of Agbogbloshie need is proper financial support from the government, and to be provided with safer infrastructure and resources that make sense for them to use over their current practices – in particular, for the burning of electronics – as well as better management for the flow of e-waste both nationally and internationally. Lastly, the stigmas attached to the work these young men do need to be drastically changed. If people were upcycling and effectively repurposing electronic devices in the global North, they would be celebrated and applauded. While these things are easier said than done, the first step begins with government, municipalities and non-governmental organisations genuinely listening to the local community and platforming their voices.

Just as this essay was completed, in early July 2021, the Ghanaian government demolished Agbogbloshie, destroying its structures and forcibly evicting those who work there. Its some 4,000 scrap dealers have now been moved to a 50-acre site at Teacher Mante, north of Accra. “Unemployment is too much in Ghana and scrap dealers – we came down and sat here, formed our own business and it is helping us, helping our families, and helping our kids,” one of the evicted men told GhanaWeb TV. “Now the government didn’t create any jobs for us; we created our own jobs and later on, they came back and demolished [our structures].”

Ghana’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has said that e-waste will not be permitted at the Teacher Mante site. “They are going to be directed to existing facilities that we have licensed, and [where] 64

Burning taking place at Agbogbloshie.

we know that they are working within the confines of the law and we can properly regulate them,” the EPA’s executive director Henry Kokofu told Citi Newsroom.

“We will be able to also gather them as small-scale groups wanting to work in these areas and get them more refined operational activities.” Without substantial change, however, it is difficult to see what will prevent Agbogbloshie from simply developing again, or else another site emerging to take its place: already, e-waste and scrap activities have been scattered across Accra, with some dismantling taking place in residential areas and inside homes.

As for Agbogbloshie itself, Kokofu has called for its rapid development. “The entire area belongs to the National Sports Authority,” he said. “The EPA has asked them to come out clearly with plans to develop the area or whatever needs to be done. Otherwise, if you leave it bare, by the time you realise, people will encumber it again.” E N D

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Fewer Pictures of the Cigar-Smoking Introduction Oli Stratford

Among the many surprising details to be found in Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life, a new book from Stockholm’s ArkDes museum, is a 1937 advertisement for Idesta, a brand of metal door and window units created by the architect Sigurd Lewerentz and civil engineer Claës Kreuger in 1929. The advertisement ran in the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet, and was created to promote Idesta’s shopfronts. “Glass and stainless steel are in her blood,” it declares (the “her” here being the modern consumer), while also displaying a prominent drawing of a contemporary shopfront. “Modernise the facade now!” the advert implores its readers.

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Assuming you can swallow its gender politics, there is nothing particularly strange about the advert itself – it arrived partway through a decade in which modernism made firm inroads into Swedish architecture, heralded by the triumphant 1930 Stockholm Exhibition. What may be surprising to contemporary readers, however, is to learn of the advert’s connection to Sigurd Lewerentz (1885-1975), a veritable giant of 20th-century Swedish architecture. Although Lewerentz was heavily involved in the creation of the Stockholm Exhibition, he is not typically associated with the more commercial aspects of modernism. “Lewerentz’s obstinate refusal to fit easily into stylistic categories causes problems for those trying to give an overview of Swedish modernism,” writes Kieran Long, ArkDes’s director and one of the book’s authors in his introduction to the publication. “[Not] pure enough in his modernity” for some, Long notes, Lewerentz created a body of work that was difficult to categorise within familiar -isms, and which was, instead, “so poetically, symbolically and materially charged that a lifetime could be spent contemplating it”. Lewerentz was, in the public imagination, “an obsessive, brilliant artist who spoke little and was fixated on details,” notes Johan Örn, one of Long’s co-authors. And yet here he was flogging shopfronts?

By the time of his death in 1975, Lewerentz had already begun to assume a sage-like role in Sweden’s architecture history. “Photographs from that era of a stooped Lewerentz, wearing a long black overcoat and holding a cigar in his gnarled hand,” writes Örn, “became the image of the architect that imprinted itself on the popular imagination.” Writing in Sydsvenska Dagbladet in December 1966, the critic Folke Edwards noted that “[for] many – especially younger – architects who have become frustrated and disillusioned by the conditions of the present, with its hardening standardisation requirements and increasingly narrow scope for a creative imagination, Sigurd Lewerentz appears as the great liberator, the enviable Master, with free hands to create superb architectural works of art and to realise the bittersweet dream that almost every architect harbours.”

In part, this reputation was driven by Lewerentz’s most celebrated works, four of which have come to define his reputation. There were the two great, brick churches: St Mark’s, Björkhagen (1960), and St Peter’s, Klippan (1966). The former church drew praise upon its completion from the critic Eva von Zweigbergk for its “medieval” sense of spirituality, which she predicted

would see it “become a place of pilgrimage for all friends of architecture”; the latter was selected by writer Poul Erik Skriver as evidence that Lewerentz was a modern-day William Morris, able to create architecture that could serve as a “a stance against industrialisation, perhaps, but also a generally valid, humanistic view”. Alongside these churches are the two cemeteries. Stockholm’s Woodland Cemetery, for which Lewerentz won the design competition in 1915 with Gunnar Asplund, includes a number of Lewerentz’s designs, including the Resurrection Chapel (1925), a tall slender facade whose smooth walls are brought into relief by its classical portico. Malmö Eastern Cemetery, for which Lewerentz won the competition in 1916, saw the architect focus on emphasising and refining the qualities of the site’s flat landscape, while also executing a series of chapels, a crematorium and flower kiosk for the project over the course of several decades. In the public imagination (and, to an extent, within wider architectural discourse too), Lewerentz is defined by these works: he is an “architect of death”, whose transcendent works and resistance towards theorising or otherwise explaining his projects in print, developed into mystique and mythologising. “He has become,” to return to Edwards, “a symbol of the freedom that has been lost.”

Architect of Life and Death, which accompanies a major exhibition opening at ArkDes on 1 October 2021, is an attempt to redress this mythology and provide a more encompassing assessment of Lewerentz’s work. Built from painstaking research into the architect’s drawings, personal archive and library (which are held in ArkDes’s collections), as well as careful study of the academic literature surrounding Lewerentz’s work, it is a project that knocks down the barriers imposed by the Lewerentz myth and restores the man and his work to their rich, full complexity.

As regards its accompanying publication, the famous projects are all there, albeit photographed anew by architectural photographer Johan Dehlin, but so too is Lewerentz’s work with Idesta; his designs for pianos, buses, wallpaper, furniture, posters, and neon signs; as well as the host of commercial interiors and shopfronts he created through Blokk (none of which now survive), a company he set up in 1930 and whose success saw the trade magazine Byggnadsvärlden identify Lewerentz as a “specialist in shop architecture”.

It is a far cry from the spiritual majesty of St Paul’s 68

or the Woodland Cemetery, but then “Lewerentz was much more than the author of idiosyncratic churches and cemeteries,” as Long notes in his introduction to the book. “Contrary to many of the clichés, we have discovered an architect who was at the heart of Swedish architectural culture, and was deeply engaged with questions of urban life

To explore Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life further, Disegno convened a roundtable focused on Lewerentz’s enduring influence and reception within architecture. Present on the panel were architects from around the world, all of whom are admirers of, or have studied, Lewerentz’s work and been influenced by his practice.

“Photographs of a stooped Lewerentz, wearing a long black overcoat and holding a cigar in his gnarled hand became the images of the architect.”

—Johan Örn

in a modern metropolis, trying to balance new technology with the need for enduring symbols.

Alongside the architecture of death, Lewerentz was concerned with an architecture that provides settings for the lives of modern citizens, with all their contradictions, beliefs, anxieties, fleeting pleasures.”

The Lewerentz myth is tantalising: an architectural sage whose works revealed the full profundity of the discipline, and whose acolytes saw “their master ‘as equal – or even superior to – the pioneers of modern architecture’,” as Edwards observed. Yet the complexity and contradictions of Lewerentz that are brought to light by Architect of Life and Death are richer, stranger and ultimately more satisfying.

At the time of Lewerentz’s death on 29 December 1975, his friend and follower Bernt Nyberg was working on a multi-volume book exploring his architecture. For the section on St Peter’s, Nyberg collaborated with the architect Per-Olof Olsson, who expressed reservations when shown a mock-up of the publication. “All in all, it’s nice but maybe a little too nice,” Olsson wrote in a 1976 letter. “I mean, one should be careful about making a book that revolves so strongly around the persona of Lewerentz. There should be fewer pictures of the cigar-smoking.” Forty-five years on, ArkDes has achieved just this.

The panel are: Ingrid Campo Ruiz is a practising architect and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellow at KTH School of Architecture and ArkDes, Stockholm. Her PhD thesis focused on Lewerentz’s work in Mälmo, and she has contributed a number of articles about Lewerentz’s work to peer-reviewed journals.

Yung Ho Chang is the founding partner and principal architect of Atelier Feichang Jianzhu (FCJZ). He has worked extensively within education, heading the architecture department at MIT between 2005 and 2010, as well as serving as Pritzker Prize jury member from 2012 to 2017.

Tony Fretton is the founding partner of Tony Fretton Architects, as well as emeritus professor at TU Delft and visiting professor at UEL. Alongside his own work on projects such as the Lisson Gallery and Camden Arts Centre, he has been a passionate and informed advocate for Lewerentz’s work.

Kieran Long is the director of ArkDes, the Swedish national centre for architecture and design. Together with Johan Örn, he is the curator of Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life, with the pair having authored the accompanying publication with Mikael Andersson.

Lyndon Neri is a founding partner of Neri&Hu Design and Research Office. Working with his partner Rossana Hu, Neri is active across architecture, furniture and industrial design, as well as teaching at universities including the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Yale School of Architecture.

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A colour perspective of a grocery store (1932).

A colour perspective of the restaurant interior at Hotel Eden, Stockholm (1930).

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Images courtesy of ArkDes, Karl-Erik Olsson-Snogeröd and Johan Dehlin.

What value does Sigurd Lewerentz have for contemporary architecture?

Tony Fretton Very little architecture achieves greatness.

There’s a lot of very good architecture, but greatness is rare, just as it’s rare in people. So people like Mies van der Rohe and Sigurd Lewerentz are important because they show the capacity or the possibility of architecture to talk culturally and experientially.

And that’s especially important now, when a lot of architecture is very superficial and people who should really know better – like art-museum directors – are seduced by it. We’re seeing a lot of architecture that has no social responsibility.

Yung Ho Chang I was a student at Berkeley in the early 80s, where I had a Swedish professor called Lars Lerup. I learned a few names from him, of whom Lewerentz was one. At the time, it didn’t do much for me, except that I remembered the name. It was only about eight or nine years ago, when I had an opportunity to be in Sweden to see the Woodland Cemetery and the two remarkable churches, that I realised what kind of architect Lewerentz was.

I was deeply moved. When you visit these buildings, it’s almost as if the architect is talking to you. I see him as a very special architect. Mr Fretton, you used the word “superficial” to comment on some of the contemporary work of architects and I feel the same way. I would say that Lewerentz is a “fundamentalist” architect because he believes in something so profoundly fundamental about architecture, which a lot of people today have forgotten.

Lyndon Neri I’m one generation younger than Yung Ho, but I was also taught by Lars Lerup. I remember that during one of his reviews at Berkeley, he proclaimed that he was really confounded by my presentation.

He said, “This is a Lewerentz quandary that I could not demystify.” I absolutely did not understand where he was going with this. I didn’t even know who Lewerentz was, let alone the quandary. Being a good Asian student, I went to the library to research Lewerentz. For the next two days, I tried to understand whether that comment was positive or negative. What I learned was that Lewerentz had the ability to allow his buildings to speak for themselves; this immense talent to work on his buildings, landscapes, interiors, details and furniture with the same intensity and rigour.

Ingrid Campo Ruiz In terms of my interest in Lewerentz, I initiated new research into Malmö Eastern Cemetery,

which had previously been considered a secondary project in his career. So my PhD thesis and subsequent articles in peer-reviewed journals have focused on Lewerentz’s works, assessing the relationship between his projects and their sites, and addressing the potential of architectural limits to connect a project with significant areas of people’s lives. Malmö Eastern Cemetery is a central project in Lewerentz’s career because, throughout its almost 60 years of construction, it yielded broader experiments than his other, shorter projects – from there, I have gone on to assess Lewerentz’s entire body of work, including religious and secular buildings, through field work and archival analysis in Sweden. I would like to congratulate the authors and the team at ArkDes for their new book and its valuable contribution to ongoing research on Lewerentz.

Kieran Long Sigurd Lewerentz is probably the greatest architect in Sweden’s history, and one of the great architects of the modern period, full stop. There are those four works that people tend to focus on, which have to do with the most profound understanding of our human souls and the relationship of architecture to existential questions, and they’re very brilliant.

But as soon as we started looking into Lewerentz’s archive, we realised that there’s a whole part of the chronology which isn’t really a part of the critical narrative. He also designed a lot of shops, a lot of hotels – commercial architecture, quite simply, which doesn’t survive because many of those interiors are not preserved in Sweden. If your building is listed, the interior is not listed with it, so very few of the interiors and shopfronts and department stores that he designed survive. But we wanted to explore this architecture of, I would say, a city life or a modernist citizen. He was as much a part of imagining this as he was his late works and his great cemeteries.

Lyndon I find it interesting that he was extremely prolific. Wilfried Wang [an influential writer on Lewerentz’s work, who penned the introductory essay to the two-volume Architect Sigurd Lewerentz (1997) and a+u: Sigurd Lewerentz Drawing Collection 1+2 (2016), ed.] said that it was a very limited body of work, but it’s not actually. Many of his works, the shopfronts and the retail, we just don’t know.

So there’s a breadth to his work, but there’s also a precision. I think it was Colin St John [see Sigurd Lewerentz, 1885-1975: The Dilemma of Classicism (1989), ed.] who wrote about Lewerentz by saying

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that his classicism was more refined, more deeply felt, more original than that of any of his contemporaries; his late work was more austere than any minimalist, more uncompromising than any brutalist. Reyner Banham completely dismissed him [Banham described St Mark’s in Björkhagen as the “hardest case” in The New Brutalism (1966), capturing his difficulty in fitting him into a historical narrative, ed.], because he could not group him as part of that brutalist movement.

I think it’s that relevance which people can look at, because with Corbu, you either like him or you don’t.

Mies is the same. But with Lewerentz, he surprises you. My youngest boy, who is thinking of studying urban design, was captivated by the narrative of

and efficient transport system. We characterise Lewerentz in the book with the Swedish word “motståndsman”. It doesn’t translate well, but it’s a person in resistance to the orthodoxies of their time in productive and interesting ways. Lewerentz is not exactly a rebel – he was also an institutional figure, won all the big prizes in Sweden, and was part of the establishment – but his work was, artistically, in creative resistance to the social-democratic project.

What is interesting in Lewerentz’s work is that rather than committing himself to a certain way of doing things, he holds them in tension. You have this sense that he’s a deeply literate classicist, but he makes it almost disappear. The Resurrection Chapel’s internal decoration is so thin, it begins to fade into the wall, for example – it’s almost not there, but of course it’s very much there. There’s this sense of things being held in productive tension with each other. That’s certainly true of the cemeteries, which I think comes from them being works that took his whole life to complete: 40 or 50 years. In these projects you begin to see the tensions, I think, in the history of Swedish culture – the tension between national romanticism and the modern culture that was built on top of that; the tension between the growth of the city and a desire to create these narrative, almost mythical landscapes.

It’s all written into the architecture and it’s extraordinary to see work like that.

Ingrid The way Lewerentz innovated is relevant for architects. Whereas other approaches have innovated by making a drastic break with the past, Lewerentz used tradition to produce novel designs. He transformed old construction methods to address the specifics of his time and place, and used everyday materials in non-conventional ways. In my research, for instance, I have shown that Lewerentz used both local and foreign resources and simple design solutions, adapting them to the specifics of users’ needs. He enhanced significant areas of everyday life through elements as quotidian as a window and as spiritual as a baptismal font. His projects established connections between the existing topography, local traditions, urban transformation and emerging social needs in a nonconformist way. In Malmö, for instance, you see an enormous landscape with barely any monuments in the traditional sense. Instead, the connection between the person and the landscape prevails.

Kieran Is it possible to be Lewerentz today? No, but that’s because architecture itself, at least in Sweden,

“Lewerentz was imagining our most shallow and our most profound ways of being a citizen. You can imagine how provocative that must have been.”

—Kieran Long

the Woodland Cemetery, which he described far more poetically than I possibly could. That goes to show you – this is an 18-year-old boy who can look at a blackand-white drawing and be mesmerised by the power of that landscape. You can see that breadth of relevance.

Kieran Lewerentz was passionately engaged with both the most profound kinds of experience of architecture a citizen can have – around birth, marriage, death, burial, mourning, sorrow, and all those kinds of themes. But also the most shallow: shopping, partying, smoking a cigarette while sitting on a nice couch, looking at your wife while she puts on a fashionable dress, staring into a shop window. He was imagining our most shallow and our most profound ways of being a citizen. And you can imagine how provocative that must have been in mid-century Sweden, which was building a social-democratic state with architecture and design at its core. The country was very engaged in the functional sides of being a human being, such as what it meant to have a well-functioning home, a well-functioning kitchen, an efficient public realm 72

is not strong enough. Like today, Lewerentz lived in a time of industrialised construction and unwilling institutional clients, but the people who came into contact with him wanted to make the things he designed. They wanted to make those things real.

We actually found one very small detail in the collection – a song that was composed for the topping-out ceremony (the completion of the roof) of St Mark’s. So there is this song, in which the client is mentioned and the bricklayers and everybody else, and then there’s a verse about Lewerentz. It’s all about how, try as they might, they can’t get Lewerentz to tell them how the project is going to turn out in the end, but they’re pretty sure it will be fine. Just imagine everybody working on that project, then singing a song to him as a kind of joke – he was definitely somebody who made decisions late on, who changed his mind, who wasn’t sure, and who was doubtful about his own work. But his collaborators believed in his doubt and in his process. They went with him down that road and made these works with him in a time when Sweden was full of industrialised building techniques. I think that’s his value. He shows us a way of practising that inspired others to make these works the works they became. They’re not all by his hand, but he had the artistry to inspire them.

Tony I don’t think Lewerentz necessarily talks to all architects, however. I think that, like a lot of very focused artists, many people just wouldn’t get it. If I show Lewerentz to my students, sometimes they are taken by it and sometimes they’re not. But that is the condition of somebody very great: they will not be widely understood.

Kieran Tony, my own first consciousness of Lewerentz is partly your fault. It was architects such as yourself and Adam Caruso, and then a younger generation of architects in London who found his work interesting, which brought him to my attention. What do you think it meant to those generations of architects?

Tony Well, I think for a fairly small group, such as Sergison Bates and others who worked hard at meaning and architecture, he was some kind of dynamo. The effect of a substantial architect on other practitioners is not direct. It’s a kind of encouragement. If I just digress a little, the architect Bernt Nyberg, who was Lewerentz’s great friend in later life, did work in Lewerentz’s late style and I think that was a mistake.

Lewerentz can offer nothing stylistically, in the way that Corbusier could for the generation of architects

in the 50s and 60s. But Lewerentz did offer a kind of stimulus for the architecture that you’re describing.

At that time, surprisingly, the space for architectural innovation was very open in London, and there was a significant creative moment. Creative minds are energised by other great practitioners, not just in architecture, and l take courage from that. Lewerentz seemed to offer a sense of there being great possibilities in architectural expression.

Lyndon I find Lewerentz’s work to be full of paradox.

This morning, just out of curiosity, I went around my office and asked the young architects if they know Lewerentz. To my surprise, 80 per cent did – clearly I have the right people in my practice. But if you were to ask them which projects they like, you’d be surprised.

You think it’s all going to be St Mark’s and St Peter’s, but it’s not. The National Insurance Board building held a lot of ground. The Flower Kiosk held a lot of ground.

And to my surprise, the Resurrection Chapel had some votes. I asked two people who voted for the Resurrection Chapel, why? And one said, “He was very precise with his classicism, yet despite that, he was also very clear about the building next door to it. It was not classical anymore.”

Ingrid Lewerentz’s projects are excellent and some have received exceptional praise. Among many other awards, he received the Kasper Sahlin Prize in 1962 – the highest possible award for architects in Sweden – for his design of Markuskyrkan [the original Swedish name for St Mark’s, ed.], while the Woodland Cemetery was eventually recognised as a Unesco World Heritage Site. He did have a specific personal interest in churches and cemeteries – he designed 21 cemeteries, of which six were built, and had an extensive personal collection of books about cemeteries and churches. At Malmö, he also found professional allies who supported his design initiatives.

Kieran The mythology of Lewerentz is really the theme of my introduction to the book and I think my conclusion is that we make the myths you need in our field. There was a moment where Lewerentz represented craftsmanship, commitment to material, commitment to care, and collaboration with bricklayers and so on, at a time when Sweden needed examples of that because we were going in the opposite direction.

And I think what Tony mentioned about London was the same thing, where Lewerentz was useful for a group of London practitioners. In Lewerentz’s particular case, however, it only captures a part

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of him. He also always dressed elegantly. He always had a grand piano in his house. He was a rather grand figure. His grandchildren talk about meeting him and always being struck by how nice his shoes were.

were fun.” Suddenly he’s somewhere else. Very charming and very compelling, but he’s a person avoiding the question all the time. We’re making a television documentary now, which more of that stuff will be in, but there’s no Rosetta stone in there.

Tony His lack of response reinforces something that I have been thinking recently. Currently there can be an anxiety about appreciation of architectural objects in themselves and pressure to replace it with verbal narratives, and more currently with narratives of social utility. An artist board member of an arts centre we designed said that while he accepted the necessity for social responsiveness, there always needs to be a space where an artist can just be an artist. In your text, Kieran, you talk about Anachronic Renaissance [a 2010 book by Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Woodand, which argues that art history’s focus on chronology and historical context obscures the capacity for a work to serve as a “conversation across time”, ed.], and make the point that we have to find a way to look at the work for what it is. Lewerentz was internalised as a thinker and not explicit, even to himself, but as a highly intelligent creative architect his only duty was just to be himself.

Ingrid Lewerentz left behind hardly any explanations of his architecture, which has opened up the possibility of many interpretations of his work. Although enthusiastic about practical skills, he was distrustful of excessive theoretical speculation. So I based my own research on field work, documentation that I found in more than 15 archives and libraries, and contact with people who knew Lewerentz closely. I also looked at his personal collection of newspaper clippings about philosophy, religion and politics, and his photographs, letters and books, which give a broader perspective of his way of approaching life and architecture. I found, for example, a letter from Lewerentz to Bruno Zevi [an architect and influential critic and historian, ed.] from 1949, after Zevi had asked him to write an article for his magazine, Metron-architettura. Lewerentz replied, “I have no means of finding time to write anything for your magazine.” Recently, a number of other researchers have also produced evidencebased PhD theses on Lewerentz, including Hector Fernández Elorza and José Quintanilla in Spain, and Carlotta Torricelli in Italy, after the initial cornerstone publications, such as those by Janne Ahlin, Caroline Constant, Colin St John Wilson, Nicola Flora, Paolo Giardello and Gennaro Postiglione.

“The lack of a spoken or written record by Lewerentz makes us guilty of turning him into something we want: a rebel or a mystic.”

—Tony Fretton.

He lived in the most fashionable addresses in Stockholm.

He enjoyed fine things. In Sweden, there can be a real suspicion of pleasure. We have to be equal to the point of not allowing people to have nice shoes and so on.

So celebrity is a problem for people here, and you have to play up the, “Oh, he’s very profound and speaks to the soul.” Yes, but he also speaks to having nice shoes.

Tony The lack of a spoken or written record by Lewerentz makes us guilty of turning Lewerentz into something we want: a rebel or a mystic. When I heard that Nyberg had made extensive film and tape recordings of Lewerentz with a view to making a publication, I hoped that this situation could be corrected. Kieran, was that material available to you when you were making the publication and did it give you access to Lewerentz’s thinking?

Kieran It’s interesting, because this is seen as the Holy Grail. Everybody’s always known there were these interviews with Lewerentz and even some phone calls that Nyberg recorded, seemingly without Lewerentz knowing. We’ve got those recordings. He was very old by that point, it’s right at the end of his life, but we’ll have some small sections of them in the exhibition.

They’re not tremendously revealing about the work, but they are very telling about who Lewerentz was. He constantly avoids answering questions directly. Nyberg plays the willing disciple, asking questions like, “Tell me about the famous windows (at St Peter’s). Where did they come from?” And Lewerentz starts saying, “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know. I remember in Berlin, we used to go to these boxing matches and, ah, they 74

Above: St Knut’s chapel at the, Eastern Cemetery, Malmö (1943).

Left: St Peter’s Church, Klippan (1966).

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Yung Ho The

architect was silent, but his buildings are not. And if we could truly talk about architecture with words, then we wouldn’t need architecture.

Architecture is an experience, it’s material, tangible, temporal and spatial. It’s about being there and experiencing it. That’s really what design is about.

I’m a little critical of academia, of which I’m a part myself, because there’s so much rhetoric that it really dilutes architecture. If there’s something we could learn from Lewerentz, it’s to have faith in the physicality of architecture. Explanation is not as necessary as we now tend to think it is.

Tony An architect like Lewerentz makes a statement in material. The value of commentators is that they find things in the work that the architect didn’t see that have a place in the formation of cultural knowledge.

That is where I see the conjunction of writing and architecture. Design always comes first and the interpretation is elucidation. Reading Kieran’s book will make me understand Lewerentz more deeply.

That’s the right kind of achievement – to start with the work, how it was made and how it affects, then read the commentaries.

Kieran This question of silent or not silent is such an interesting theme, but as a profession we have to be cautious to not equate silence in words with a lack of rhetoric. Lewerentz is a master of rhetoric, just not in written language. We did a little project that will be shown at the very beginning of the exhibition, in which students drew all of the floors of St Mark’s. St Mark’s has a different floor in every room and many different tile layouts outside the building, but we have no drawings of them because they were making these floors on site, with the workmen responding to oral instruction. But as we drew them, you realise there’s a whole language of thresholds, of territories, of theatrical reminders of medieval church floors and in particular early renaissance Cosmatesque Italian church floors. They become these distant echoes of historical practices, which are absolutely rhetorical.

They’re removed from any kind of architectural quotation, but this is rhetoric of its own kind – you just need to read a different language to understand it, and that language is architecture. That’s what I think is so valuable about his work. We must believe that our field has this potential. It has this power and we gamble it away at our own risk.

Yung Ho One very important aspect of architecture today is that it’s an open discipline. It prepares people

to do things materially and visually in all ways.

As well as an architect, Lewerentz was a designer and he made a beautiful clock for the National Insurance Board building, for instance, while some of his handrails were designed as if they were furniture pieces. I think Lewerentz serves as a very good example of this openness – architecture is about how one may engage the physical world in general.

Lyndon What’s interesting about your book, Kieran, was discovering all these other things about Lewerentz.

I did not know that he did a lot of interiors, a lot of hotels, and a lot of shopfronts under his company Blokk. And of course, what was really comforting was that when he was 55 years old, when he seemed disillusioned with architecture, he formed Idesta.

That just fascinated me. All of a sudden, he became a friend to all architects, because he was detailing for them. I saw this interdisciplinary side of Lewerentz, which I had never known about. Before, it had always been St Mark’s and St Peter’s, which we’re all aware of, or the Flower Kiosk. It was very comforting to see the diversity and amazing breadth of work that he brought to the table.

Kieran As I mentioned, Lewerentz was interested in the extremes of what it meant to be a human being.

You see that in the shops and you see that in the drawings of the interiors: people having fun, being vain, being bored, these kinds of ordinary emotions that we don’t see much in architecture. That’s his thinking and that’s what I mean about the most trivial and the most profound parts of being a human being, because being a human is both of those things. There’s not much in the middle. We’re either extremely shallow or extremely profound, and that’s the best of us. Popular culture is the best of us. And those ceremonies of death and marriage and so on are the best of us.

The rest of it’s just work. And that’s what I think the myth about Lewerentz misses. If you just let him be a priest on a mountain, who doesn’t say anything and just makes beautiful churches, you miss all of this playfulness and you miss all of this fantastic stuff that he also allowed to be architecture.

Lyndon It has actually made me feel better about and justify aspects of my practice. We’re designing a piano for Steinway, but for the longest time I kept that a secret because, as serious architects, you have to be a priest out on the mountain. And the fact that he had three kids, two sons and one daughter, like me. And 76

the idea that he was a loving husband with a beautiful wife, as opposed to this whole myth of architects having multiple wives or affairs that seems so prevalent.

It seems like the Frank Lloyd Wrights or Louis Kahns of our world are more interesting, but Lewerentz poses

“The architect was silent, but his buildings were not.

If we could truly talk about architecture with words, then we wouldn’t need architecture.”

—Yung Ho Chang

a completely different option. It was very refreshing to see that he was also helping other architects and being a salesperson for Idesta, trying to convince people that, “Look, I will make your building better by designing all this hardware.” It breaks away from this myth of the architect as an egotistical prima donna. And yet he could also build beautiful buildings, which is so liberating. And that’s the reason why your book, Kieran, blew open this idea and showed that it’s not just about death. It’s not just about St Mark’s, St Peter’s and Woodland, but it’s also about the life, because I do like my shoes and I do like my fashion.

When Mies van der Rohe left for the US, you have to remember that he came from the remnants of the Bauhaus school of thinking where social housing was important. And for him to be in the US and be given the Seagram office building was a cardinal sin among his peers. To be given Farnsworth House, a private home for the super-rich? You can imagine that his peers probably didn’t want to be friends with him after he took those commissions, but he changed the very conception of what a single family home is with Farnsworth House and the notion of an office with the Seagram building. I always argue that, when you come to China, don’t wait to be offered a museum.

If people give you a karaoke bar, do a karaoke bar.

Kieran One of the questions I posed is why Lewerentz never did any social housing. He lived and was practising through the greatest expansion of social housing in Sweden’s history. He was alive through

most of the Million Programme [the Miljonprogrammet was a Swedish government initiative that ran between 1965 and 1974, and aimed to create 1m new homes, ed.]. He was practising all of that time and didn’t do a single housing building. Why is that? He must have had the opportunity. I think it’s interesting to think about what Lewerentz didn’t do. He didn’t sign the Acceptera manifesto in 1931, which saw the great architects of the time come together to express their commitment to the new modernist style and try to make it make sense in a Swedish context. Lewerentz knew all of those people, was working with all of them, but he didn’t sign that. He was constantly avoiding, I think, diving into the rabbit hole of worthy modernism.

He stayed on the side of the human being, the complicated, venal, selfish, difficult, bored human being who also needs profundity in their life.

Ingrid Lewerentz has often been perceived as solitary, non-conformist and disgruntled, and José Manuel López Peláez, who extensively researched Lewerentz’s long-time partner Gunnar Asplund, unveiled letters between the two architects that illustrated some of these personality traits. Kenneth Frampton, meanwhile, has highlighted Lewerentz’s particular use of materials that contrasted with the ubiquitous white architecture of the early modern movement. To me, it is Lewerentz’s non-conformist production and personality that provide a more nuanced understanding of the extensive contribution of Sweden to 20th-century architecture.

Swedish architecture embraced mass production and standardisation, but also other individual high-quality, carefully designed projects. Lewerentz was an essential part of this.

Yung Ho One more thing I learned from Lewerentz is to live a long life if you can, because you never know when you’re going to do your better or best work.

Lyndon Yung Ho, that’s very interesting you should say that because I have an intern who said the same thing.

She said, “Well, he lived a long, long life compared to a lot of the modernist architects.” I believe St Mark’s was done when he was in his 60s, close to 70, and I think St Peter’s was when he was in his 70s. The Flower Kiosk was when he was 75, if I’m not mistaken. Some of his best work was very late on.

Yung Ho Lewerentz gives us all hope. E N D Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life is published by Park Books in collaboration with ArkDes, price €120.

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Bend it Like Morrison Words Magnus Englund Photographs Nicola Tree

Isokon Plus, the British furniture maker founded by Jack Pritchard in the early 1930s as the Isokon Furniture Company, has always been about innovation in plywood and pared-down, modern design. With the help of Jasper Morrison, it has now produced a single-piece, cantilevered lounge chair, something that eluded the great modernist designers of the 20th century. The result, named the Iso-lounge, is a distinctly 21st-century design, but as we look into the chronicles of Isokon, it becomes clear that the history of this chair stretches back in time, bridging the past with both the present and future.

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Roundtable

Mark Smith, who has worked with Isokon Plus since 2003, developing the Iso-lounge chair.

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When Pritchard began building the creative team of his fledging Isokon Furniture Company in the mid-1930s, he called on some of the biggest names of international modernism. As creative director, he appointed Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus school in Germany. He named Marcel Breuer, former master at the Bauhaus and head of its furniture workshop, chief designer. As graphic designer, he chose László Moholy-Nagy, the multi-talented painter, graphic designer, and photographer who had been Gropius’s closest ally at the school. All three had recently moved into Pritchard’s Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, London, after fleeing the Nazi regime in Germany. Pritchard had commissioned this radical building, Britain’s first reinforced concrete block of flats, from the Canadian architect Wells Coates, and it was with him that Pritchard had started the Isokon company, intending to make buildings and furniture.

By the time the three Bauhäuslers arrived, however, Pritchard and Coates had fallen out over both money and who should receive credit as the instigator of the much-publicised building. Coates had not been new to furniture design – he had done tubular-steel designs for PEL, the closest that Britain ever came to creating a homegrown Thonet. Pritchard had experimented with his own designs too, but their achievements paled in comparison with Breuer, one of the originators of tubular-steel furniture in the mid-1920s. Given the situation, there were obvious benefits for all parties: Pritchard needed a replacement for Coates, and the three recently arrived Bauhäuslers desperately needed paid work in their new home country. For Pritchard, good design was not about products being beautiful – his key words were always “efficient”, “logical”, and “economical”, and this was also how his freshly appointed Bauhaus designers saw best to shape the modern world.

Since 1925, Pritchard had been working for Venesta (“Veneer Estonia”), the UK subsidiary of A.M. Luther, Europe’s largest plywood manufacturer. Venesta had a factory and wharf on the Isle of Dogs in London and employed some 1,500 people in Britain. As their sales and marketing manager, Pritchard was so convinced by the possibilities of plywood that people called him “Plywood Pritchard” behind his back, and he extolled the modern material whenever he could. Early on in his new job, he had met Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand in Paris, and engaged them to design a trade-fair stand for Venesta in London, making sure

that the link between progressive architecture and plywood could not be missed. When it came to actually manufacturing Isokon’s furniture, Venesta had allowed Pritchard to set up the company as a sideline while he was still working for them. Isokon was a British brand, but the furniture was made at the huge A.M. Luther factory in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. For these reasons, Pritchard told the Bauhäuslers to focus on designs in plywood, the material of the future, and Breuer delivered a series of now-iconic designs, the most famous being the Isokon Long Chair. Plywood also inspired László Moholy-Nagy when Pritchard asked him to design a logotype for the Isokon Furniture Company. He came up with a modern typeface saying “ISOKON” over the slogan “For Ease, For Ever”, crowned by a curved cantilevered chair, made from a single piece of cross-laminated plywood.

There was just one problem with Moholy-Nagy’s logo design: there was no such chair in the Isokon collection. All of Breuer’s Isokon designs were made of several separate plywood components, held together by screws and bolts. Around the same time across London, Philip Morton Shand had started to import Alvar Aalto furniture from Finland through his company Finmar. Shand also commissioned a company logo that showed a single-piece plywood chair (although graphically less progressive than Moholy-Nagy’s logo design), but neither Finmar nor Aalto had such a chair.

Aalto used solid birchwood that was split, steam-bent and subsequently glued back together, because making a single-piece plywood chair was technically too difficult. Not only would it require a highly complex mould with several curves, but each curve would add a potential breaking point to the plywood, a material that strives to return to its original, straight form. The closest to achieving this was Gerald Summers and his company Makers of Simple Furniture, also Londonbased, whose plywood lounge chair looks as if it was cut out of paper. But Summers’s short-lived and small operation could never quite make the leap from arts and crafts to modernism, and his chair appears dated today. Using a single piece of this engineered, industrial, modern material to make a chair therefore remained a dream. After the Second World War, Charles and Ray Eames, Arne Jacobsen and several other designers experimented further, but the result was always part plywood, part metal – never a solid plywood chair in one piece. Verner Panton tried for years, starting in the 1950s, until he settled on injection-moulded plastic

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for his Panton chair for Vitra in 1967. Over time, plywood furniture went out of fashion, with aluminium, plastic and later carbon fibre replacing it. The material retreated into the shadows, becoming something builders used in sheet form as an underlay and then covered with more refined materials.

The war saw Isokon’s equipment given over to the production of aeroplanes, but Pritchard restarted the brand in 1963, now with production based in Britain.

A bestseller during the following decades was the Isokon Penguin Donkey Mark 2, designed by Ernest Race, a square bookcase that features no plywood, unlike its 1930s predecessor by Egon Riss. In 1982, Chris McCourt of Windmill Furniture took over the production after reaching an agreement with Pritchard.

With the introduction of new designs by Barber and Osgerby, Michael Sodeau, and Shin and Tomoko Azumi, McCourt renamed his company Isokon Plus to reflect the additions to the brand’s historical designs. When Isokon Plus, which was acquired by its new owner Very Good & Proper (VG&P) in 2019, set out once again to add to its collection, this historical background was never far away, with the 1930s Moholy-Nagy Isokon logo a constant reminder of Pritchard’s original ambitions. Here was an opportunity to use Isokon’s heritage to define its future.

In deciding on the brief for the first new Isokon piece since the takeover, there was also the question of what was missing from the current collection: the 1936 Breuer Long Chair remains suitable for residential use, but less so for contract clients. Breuer’s design is now more than 80 years old, so a contemporary lounge chair was a long time coming. Choosing to work with Jasper Morrison fostered a natural continuation of the designs Barber and Osgerby had added to the Isokon collection over the preceding 25 years – the two studios share a sense of restraint in their work, which suits the language of the Isokon collection. When setting out to design the new addition, Morrison was well aware of the Moholy-Nagy logo with its curved chair, the Summers chair, and the Zig-Zag chair by Gerrit Reitveld, another cantilevered wooden chair from the 1930s, but he wanted to make a contemporary piece that could take the company’s offering forward. Naming it the Iso-lounge chair was a play on the word Isobar, the famous restaurant and bar at Lawn Road Flats that Breuer designed in 1937 and furnished with Isokon plywood furniture.

Isokon Plus and Morrison now had to overcome the technical obstacles the 1930s modernists encountered when trying to make a single-piece plywood chair. This saw them embark on well over a year of experiments and prototypes. Little has changed since the 1930s when it comes to making plywood furniture, apart from better glues being available; it’s still essentially a process done by hand. But Isokon Plus has gained many decades of experience in pushing the technical boundaries of plywood, and it also now has the modern aid of computer-generated designs and calculations. These were essential for working out changes in the thickness of the chair, tapering it such that the back could be made thinner than the seat

“What we’ve done is take the very simple basis of an idea and execute it as purely as possible.

It’s a celebration of the technology of plywood.”

—Jasper Morrison

and base. This was not only visually important, but also made the back less rigid, adding comfort through the wood’s flex. Rather than running each layer of plywood throughout the chair, from top to bottom, the team tapered several internal layers, but they had to do so at different positions in order to create a seamless thinning out, which required detailed calculations. To give the user greater comfort, the back also needed to be curved, while the seat and the base remained straight, and all this had to be made in a single mould.

Further adding to the complexity, was the fact that plywood is usually cross-laminated at a 90-degree angle. This perpendicular layering creates a distinct edge, where each layer stands out. Morrison did not like this visual effect, however, preferring a less visible line that made the chair read as a solid piece. The solution, then, was to introduce a third angle into the lamination process, cutting across the other two. This 82

The Iso-lounge chair, photographed in VG&P and Isokon Plus’s factory.

addition makes the chair stronger, but in combination with the tapering it also makes it even more complex to produce. Ed Carpenter, VG&P and Isokon Plus’s CEO, stresses that the chair’s success is down to their manufacturing director Mark Smith, aided by the technical advice of former Isokon Plus owner Chris McCourt and the long experience of the designer.

“Jasper Morrison has achieved something extremely special with Iso-lounge,” says Carpenter. “It manages to both respect our heritage and define our future.

There is clearly a direct lineage to the Isokon of the 1930s and our classic Marcel Breuer pieces, however Iso-lounge has an identity all of its own.”

The Iso-lounge arrives at a time when plywood seems to have come full circle. The V&A gave plywood its own exhibition in 2017, and many kitchens and interiors are now clad with unpainted plywood, showing the natural grain of the wood. Perhaps it’s the honesty of the material that appeals – it may be engineered, but it’s not human-made like plastic, and the best plywood is still Baltic birch. So, while the Iso-lounge

chair may have a historical starting point, the design is clearly contemporary, and so is the material. Plywood doesn’t need to be covered over any longer – there is no need to paint or upholster it.

The final result is both elegant and restrained, comfortable and technically advanced, all at the same time. “What we’ve done is take the very simple basis of an idea and execute it as purely as possible,” says Morrison. “That has taken an incredible amount of collaboration, testing and prototyping to achieve. It’s a celebration of the technology of plywood in a way.

It is still cutting edge – there are not many materials you could do this with to achieve a practical result.”

The Iso-lounge is a chair that would have made Jack “Plywood” Pritchard very proud, fulfilling his almost century-old criteria of good design as being efficient, logical and economical. In this precise process, it has also become beautiful. E N D

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The Biggest Machine on Earth Words Oli Stratford Photographs Delfino Sisto Legnani

Like most people, I’ve spent a lot of the past 18 months online. With various lockdowns and Covid restrictions in place, not to mention the rise of the Delta variant, it’s been a year and a half of heroic staying in. My trips to the cinema have been replaced by iPlayer; my work meetings with Zoom; and the listless pottering that filled my pre-pandemic days with a financially ruinous e-commerce habit. If anyone asks what I’ve been up to, there doesn’t seem anything to report. Nothing really.

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I don’t know why that is. Doomscrolling Twitter and bingeing YouTube are something. They may not be a particularly enviable or interesting something, but they do fill the time and they’re no duller than anything else people have been up to during Covid. I’ve sat through (and, admittedly, delivered) enough anecdotes about discovering yoga during lockdown or home-brewing kombucha to be keen to hear from someone who neglected any bourgeois self-improvement in favour of staying up all night Googling famous animal mayors (wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-human_electoral_candidates).

Perhaps online bingeing is simply not perceived as being a particularly worthwhile activity, or maybe it’s just not seen as fit to mention in company, although I don’t know why that should be. When asked what you’ve been up to, there’s nothing embarrassing about admitting to largely pootling around on the internet – although that probably does depend on what you’ve been looking at. But going online can even be quite wholesome, as shown by the lifeline it’s provided to those kept apart from friends and family during the pandemic, offering a mode of connection every bit as authentic as any IRL counterpart. Which, actually, seems a very lazy phrase insofar as it doesn’t explain why the digital shouldn’t count as real life too. “[Our] inventions open doors to new frontiers of human interaction,” observed the writer Julianne Ross in a 2015 editorial for Wired, in which she criticised the perceived irreality or inferiority of online in comparison to the physical. “[We] need to move forward with enough openness and humility to understand that the places we’re going are real.” But it still feels like I’ve done nothing this past year. Zilch.

I suppose there’s just a certain weightlessness to it all. One thing you could say about the internet1 is that it offers a neat line in closing up distance. I mean, it’s that odd mixture of being both huge and easy: everything is there, all readily accessible, with minimal effort required. I found that earlier Julianne Ross quote, for example, in about a minute. I didn’t even have to read her article properly; I just searched it for “real” in order to truffle out a line or two that might lend this essay a bit of respectability. That’s typical of the internet though. In most of its functions, it exhibits

an ease and lack of endeavour that we don’t readily associate with meaningful activity. We’re inclined to think that good things are worth waiting for, but the internet’s native register is immediacy. Design exacerbates this. Infinite scroll and autoplay features churn content, emphasising the sheer volume of online data and facilitating its rapid digestion. There is always more to read, watch and see. “The size of the average web page (defined as the average page size of the 500,000 most popular websites) increased from 0.45 megabytes in 2010 to 1.7 megabytes in June 2018,” states Low-tech Magazine, a publication founded in 2007 to challenge ideas of techno-utopianism.

“For mobile websites, the average ‘page weight’ rose tenfold from 0.15 MB in 2011 to 1.6 MB in 2018.” And for anyone not predisposed to discussion of megabytes, you can put that same point in terms of physical distance. “For those living in Europe in 2019,” write Gabi Ivens, Joana Moll and Michelle Thorne in their 2020 essay ‘The Museum of the Fossilized Internet’, “the average user would scroll the equivalent of 180 meters each day, half the height of Berlin’s TV Tower.”

These are huge increases, but design keeps everything lubricated, such that you barely notice. It all slips down smoothly. I have spent hours refreshing Instagram and Twitter, for instance, swiping down to bathe in streams of pointless content. YouTube’s autoplay mechanism and its cavalcade of content suggestions are a contemporary feeding of the 5,000, turning one video into many. None of this is helped by the fact that online business models have a vested interest in keeping users on their sites. “Innovators build products meant to persuade people to do what we want them to do,” writes the tech author Nir Eyal in his ominously titled Hooked: How to Build HabitForming Products (2014). “We call these people users and even if we don’t say it aloud, we secretly wish every one of them would become fiendishly hooked to whatever we’re making.” Here, design has been a handmaiden to business. “The way websites are designed is to encourage people to stay on them for as long as possible,” acknowledges Marie Otsuka, a designer and programmer who works with the type foundry Occupant Fonts. “Part of it is a technical problem, but part of it is a design problem too. The way things are designed currently is not a sustainable approach for thinking about consumption.”

Sustainable or not, this ethos of easy, rapid consumption is dominant in the development of

1 And yes, I know there is a difference between the internet and the world wide web, and that what I probably mean here is more the latter, but everyone uses them interchangeably anyway, so I think we should pretty much just get over it in most cases, particularly as “world wide web” sounds a bit Encarta 95.

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digital design. Online, you’re encouraged to glut. On 14 June 2021, for instance, my laptop and phone logged 17h 50m of internet usage.2 That’s definitely something.

“The internet has a way of amplifying and enabling many of our latent desires – in fact, it’s what it seems to do best,” writes the artist James Bridle in his 2018 book New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. This seems apt: the digital is, by nature, an enabler. It makes whatever you want available, whenever you want it. Boundless in a way that scarcely feels real.

There are, however, some design measures that gesture towards greater restraint, at least at the level of individual web pages. In early 2021, for instance, the designers Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin announced that they had developed a new website for their studio, Formafantasma. Normally I wouldn’t have put too much stock in this kind of redesign – they happen fairly regularly – but there was something unusual about this one. For a start, the site’s design was very pleasingly pared back, such that it seemed as if it might have been technically achievable in 1997.

Its home screen looked kind of like Wikipedia, but like Wikipedia when it does that thing where it doesn’t load properly, and you just get a lot of text and links. There was a short biography of the studio, followed by a concisely indexed table of contents. There weren’t any images on the homepage (these only appeared on specific project pages), just standard black text and standard blue links, all in Arial and Times New Roman. “It’s visually simple, because we were interested in the idea of a book,” says Valerio Tamagnini of Studio Blanco, whom Formafantasma approached to develop the site with his partner Sara Tamagnini. “When you start to browse a book you’re saying to the world, ‘OK, leave me alone,’ but websites are the opposite,” he says. “When you start to browse a website, you have a lot of calls to action: click here, click there. You have so many hooks that you don’t have any space to fill with your imagination. We wanted to make something that didn’t promise anything more than it offers.”

The site aims to provide a more circumscribed online experience, with precisely demarcated limits and clear navigation. “Our approach was just to be essential,” adds Sara. “No unnecessary graphics or useless media. We deleted what we didn’t need.”

2 I felt a bit sick when I saw this stat. Then I just browsed Amazon for ages and bought loads of books to cheer myself up.

I thought it worked well: very straightforward, very neat, with a lot of effort put into providing clear navigation. “Usually with a website, clients want people to click and click, and go exploring,” says Valerio. “Here it was vice versa – Formafantasma wanted people to really think about what they were doing. If they were going to click, we wanted them to know what they were going to get.” But the really interesting thing was that Trimarchi and Farresin issued a press release in which they explained that the website had been specifically designed so as “to minimise the energy consumption and CO2 emissions that result from navigating the internet”. This wasn’t something I knew much about, but I was curious, particularly given that throughout the pandemic I’d heard lots of people put a positive environmental spin on the enforced prioritisation of digital services.

Lockdown may be a drag, they’d say, but at least we’ve cut down on international travel. Can you imagine the carbon savings? There may be something in that. “As we all know, video-conferencing mushroomed during the Covid-19 crisis, as offices closed and flights were grounded,” wrote the researcher Mike Berners-Lee in the 2020 edition of his book How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything. “[The] world has learned that it is both possible and better to replace many a needless, high-carbon and time-consuming trip with a simple video call. In this respect, we will surely never look back.”

Well, perhaps not, but I still wanted to hear more about the negative environmental impact of digital that Trimarchi and Farresin’s website hinted at. So when Disegno held early editorial meetings to plan content for the year ahead, I volunteered to write a story about the project, thinking it might be a good way to check some of this stuff out. A week or so later, I was speaking to Formafantasma over Zoom and telling them that I liked their website. “I have to say,” replied Farresin, “we’ve had plenty of people telling us the website is ugly.” I told him that I was surprised by this because, personally, I was very fond of the design. I said that it looked kind of like Wikipedia, but like Wikipedia when it does that thing where it doesn’t load properly – this, you will soon gather, is my only aesthetic observation. They agreed, but quickly informed me that it wasn’t actually an aesthetic choice. “We don’t find it very new as an aesthetic – it has been around for a long time,” said Trimarchi. “But it was never really used for

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The photographs of data centres accompanying this essay were shot by Delfino Sisto Legnani for a photo campaign for the Milano Digital Week 2019, and for the first edition of the Biennale d’Architecture et de Paysage (BAP) in Versailles.

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this purpose before.” Everything that had been stripped out, he explained, was with an eye towards reducing the number of assets loaded when you opened the website. Times New Roman and Arial were employed because they’re fonts that come ready installed on browsers, eliminating the need to download a new typeface (“Although they’re not horrible just because they’re common,” clarifies Sara, “and they’re not too basic to be beautiful”); images on the project pages only auto-load as previews, with detailed information then provided about the size of the download if you wish to see a higher res version; the navigation is designed to stop the user from getting lost in the website, and thereby loading more pages as they search for the information they want; and Studio Blanco also redesigned Formafantasma’s logo such that it is no longer an image file, but rather “FORMA∫ANTASMA”, a string of Unicode characters.

“It has real value as a logo because you can apply it everywhere,” says Valerio. “It’s something you can type on WhatsApp or whatever,” adds Sara, “because you don’t need to load it.”

That might as well be the catchphrase for the whole project: the less there is to load, the less energy expended when opening the webpage. It’s a fairly common-sensical idea, and one that would be taken for granted in any other design field that considers efficiencies of material usage, but which is comparatively rare to see discussed in the context of web design – at least from the perspective of environmentalism.

“If a website doesn’t load quickly, people lose patience within a few seconds, so that’s definitely something developers think about,” says Otsuka. “But framing it as energy consumption is less common.” This, in part, seems to be down to a failure to see the digital as real and consequential – something that has a physical impact on the world. “There are limits imposed by the laws of physics when you’re working with objects and, on the one hand, it seems like those aren’t applicable on digital platforms,” says Otsuka. “But, actually, there are limits.”

In this respect, Formafantasma’s website seemed something of a curio: an unusual way of thinking about web design that frames slimming down digital, thereby creating “lightweight” websites, as a means of designing more sustainably. “And the idea of building a website like this has received some attention,” confided Farresin when I put this to him, “but the reactions of some people have been completely outrageous.”

“People tend to stick to the surface,” explained Trimarchi. “They really do not understand that the choices are not for an aesthetic reason.”

“It made me realise that a lot of people are really not aware of how much the internet is a heavy, complex infrastructure,” added Farresin. “Because at the end of the day we’re just applying simple, basic parameters of old-fashioned good design. But a lot of people thought that it was complete bullshit and greenwashing.”

“I mean, greenwashing what?” Trimarchi cut in.

“In a studio like ours, what do we need to greenwash?”

Which is probably fair enough. I can’t imagine that Formafantasma are big polluters, particularly given that most of the studio’s work falls in the realm of research projects. Cambio (2020) for Serpentine Galleries, for instance, was an exhibition and website exploring the global timber industry,3 while Ore Streams (2017) for Melbourne’s NGV Triennial and the Triennale di Milano used video installations to investigate e-waste.

By the standards of most studios, Trimarchi and Farresin don’t even produce that many products: a couple of lights for Flos, and some editioned furniture and objects for assorted design galleries. They’re not exactly ExxonMobil, but then that’s probably how most people think about digital, period: compared to the physical world of petrochemicals and industrial production, online just feels so much cleaner. You can happily click away an evening, with nary a thought for what those clicks are actually doing. That’s natural.

It’s what we all do, all the time.

“Digital seems like a great opportunity,” confirms Tom Greenwood, managing director of Wholegrain Digital, a design studio specialising in understanding the internet’s connections to sustainability. Greenwood founded Wholegrain in 2007 with his partner Vineeta Greenwood, having grown disillusioned with the lack of consideration for the environment within product design. “We thought that digital could dematerialise this physical world of products where materials are dug out of the ground and transported across the world,” he says. “We imagined you’d have this panacea of the digital, where there would be no impact at all.

It all sounded so wonderful at the time.” Utopian it may have been, but Greenwood’s account of the naive ecological allure of online actually has some fairly heavyweight adherents. According to SMARTer 2030, 3 See ‘Formafantasma’s Findings’ by Alice Twemlow, published in Disegno #26.

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Elsewhere, in perfectly reputable sources, I’ve seen that emissions figure listed as 2 per cent or 2.5 per cent. “There is basically no clear data you can get,” explains Roussilhe. “For a sector that is meant to handle data, it’s so hard to get data about its own materiality.” So take any statistics I give you with a pinch of salt, because once you start looking into the environmental footprint of the digital world, you find a lot of competing information. “When you’re looking at the footprint of digital, you cannot get precision.

It’s impossible – there’s just too much opacity,” says Roussilhe. “You can only assess for direction, never for destination.” Fortunately, that general direction is fairly clear: to date, digitisation has not curbed the world’s environmental degradation and its rise has been coincident with climate collapse. “There’s no evidence to really support the idea that digitisation is helping the environment,” says Greenwood bluntly.

“It’s as if digital technology has become a religion we all blindly worship. We think that more technology is good and will solve all our problems, but that’s really just like the economist’s principle that the markets will solve it. The technologist’s equivalent is, Don’t worry, technology will solve it.” And here, even those who are broadly positive about technology’s potential influence on the environment sound a note of caution. “Looking back over the last 70 years, it is clear that four things have gone hand in hand,” summarises Berners-Lee, who could be forgiven for a degree of family allegiance given that his brother Tim invented the world wide web. “1. ICT has become many thousands of times more efficient. 2. ICT’s [carbon] footprint has gone up by a factor of many thousands. 3. ICT has enabled enormous efficiency improvements. 4. The world’s carbon footprint has continued to go up and up.”5 It shouldn’t be hard to figure out why this is. “When I enter an address into my browser, a thousand tiny processes are set in motion,” writes the technology journalist Andrew Blum in his 2012 book Tubes:

for instance, a report from the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI), digital technologies have the potential to bring about a 20 per cent reduction in global CO2e4 emissions by 2030 through efficiency savings and by replacing heavy physical processes. In other words, the more products and services made intangible through digitisation, the better. This has the ring of plausibility, insofar as while emails and Zoom calls require energy, this pales in comparison to the environmental impact of their physical counterparts.

So if you switch to digital, the argument runs, you’re making a saving; the problem, however, is that this logic only works if the digital actually replaces the physical, which is comparatively rare. “Digital is an addition, not a subtraction,” notes Greenwood. “There are various voices in the industry who say that digital is always so much better than the physical equivalent, but what about all the things we do in digital that don’t have a direct physical equivalent? Social media doesn’t have a direct physical equivalent, for example. With email, it’s not as if we were posting hundreds of letters a day before its arrival. These things just don’t compare – they’re extra things we’re doing, not replacements.”

What’s more, the conclusion that replacing physical processes with digital ones will bring about a greener world is not as secure as it may seem. “People always assume that the impact of the digital is positive, but if by default we just think the digital sector is helpful, that doesn’t tell us when, where or how,” says Gauthier Roussilhe, a digital designer and researcher whose work focuses on the relationship between digital systems and climate crisis. “It feels natural because of the discourse of dematerialisation, but nobody is actually doing the research to verify it.” In fact, the research that is being done is fairly discouraging.

According to a 2019 study published by France’s GreenIT group, for instance, digital technologies now account for 4.2 per cent of the world’s primary energy consumption and 3.8 per cent of its greenhouse gas emissions – figures that show digital technology as more polluting than the airline industry, which is a bit like being more evil than Satan.

Now, in the interests of transparency, I should say that I don’t know how accurate those statistics are, at least in their finer details. In fact, nobody seems to.

5 It’s worth noting that framing the environmental impact of digital in terms of carbon misses a lot, and is a specifically Anglo-American approach to the issue. In countries such as France, where a significant proportion of the energy mix is derived from nuclear power, carbon is less prominent in the debate. “One of the biggest differences between the French approach and the English-speaking approach, in my opinion, is the way we select and assess environmental impacts,” notes Roussilhe, who specifies that France looks at CO2e, as well as water consumption, abiotic resources consumption and primary energy consumption. For an entity that is supposed to be supranational, the internet – and our grasp of it – is frequently grounded in national differences.

4 Carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) is a convention by which the ecological impact of the greenhouse gases emitted by an object or activity are expressed in terms of the carbon dioxide that would have the same impact over a 100-year period.

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A Journey to the Center of the Internet. “But in the most fundamental terms, I’m asking a computer far away to send information to a computer close by, the one in front of me.” This transfer of data between devices is the heart of the internet, but it requires vast amounts of physical infrastructure to actually operate.

The production of the machines and digital devices that allow us to store, transmit and read data is a polluting business, while the energy required to subsequently run that infrastructure is not only colossal, but growing. Society’s Bacchic production and consumption of laptops and smartphones is one part of this (and I’m not even going to try to get into that, but it’s worth thinking about why we don’t instinctively class hardware as part of the digital realm),6 but another driver is the world’s data centres: the server farms in which data is stored and processed ahead of being sent to a device whenever a user opens a website or app, or streams a video. “The 416.2 terawatt hours of electricity consumed by global data centres in 2015 exceeded that of the whole United Kingdom, at 300 terawatt hours,” writes Bridle in New Dark Age. “This consumption is projected to escalate massively[…]. In response to vast increases in data storage and computational capacity in the last decade, the amount of energy used by data centres has doubled every four years, and is expected to triple in the next ten years.”

The key element to retain from these statistics isn’t necessarily their specificities, but rather the physicality that undercuts any digital process. Everything we do online is the output of a physical process elsewhere.

No matter how insubstantial it feels, it’s fundamentally corporeal and it all gets added to the ledger. “I think that most of the time we all inadvertently focus only on the ‘window’ of our laptops – that is, on the content of the internet rather than on the infrastructure that underpins it,” notes the architect Pietro Bonomi, co-author of ‘Less than Zero’, a 2020 study of data centres published in AA Files. “Most people consider the internet as essentially immaterial. Even scholars and journalists often fail or seem to forget to address the ‘hardware’ and infrastructural aspect of it.” It is a point with which Roussilhe agrees. “If we look at the history of infrastructure and global infrastructure, there is only one that has come with the discourse 6 Although an excellent discussion of this is found in Shawn Adams’s ‘e-Waste Agbogbloshie’ on p. 60.

of dematerialisations, which was digital,” he says.

“So we have ended up with this weird sector where we assume there is no materiality, whereas actually it’s just materialised a bit further away. The digital sector has been good at hiding itself.”

One early attempt at revealing this materiality was provided by the designer and researcher Timo Arnall’s Internet Machine (2014), an installation that displayed video and stills from a data centre run by Telefónica in Alcalá, Spain. The footage shows the centre’s white space, those areas in which its servers and other ICT equipment are stored, but also devotes considerable attention to its grey space: those parts of the facility that house its support functions, such as the airconditioning and power systems that allow it to operate. “The thing that struck me most strongly was the sound,” recalls Arnall when I ask about his experience in Alcalá. “As you get closer and closer to the server rooms you can’t help but be oppressed by the hissing, the whining, and then the rumbling of generators and battery storage systems. It’s just this feeling of being on top of something that is incredibly energy hungry.” One of Arnall’s stills shows a Cat generator, fed by white, tubular tanks that are fat with diesel. “Data centres of this type must[…] be operational 99.995% of the time (they cannot be out of action for more than 26.3 minutes a year) and each must have 96-hour power outage protection,” Bonomi and his co-author Nicolò Ornaghi write in ‘Less than Zero’. “Redundancy in[…] data centres is not just for backup. Twin systems are active at the same time, and most data centres can facilitate scheduled maintenance without any impact on operations.”

At Alcalá, there are four diesel generators, “but they cycle and test them every day to make sure that if the power does go off, there’s something ready to kick in,” recalls Arnall. “I hadn’t anticipated the amount of space that would be given over to energy. If you mention server farms or data centres, people think of LEDs, ethernet cables and racks, but the amount of infrastructure devoted to power was equal to, if not greater than, the space given over to servers.

The noise from those power systems was greater and more interesting than the server rooms themselves.

Just this sheer power; the constant humming.”

The force of Internet Machine lies in the way in which it lays bare this physicality, stripping away the ephemerality of online. While parts of the data centre are gleaming and high-tech, others are shitty and

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mundane. One shot shows a room in the basement.

The concrete walls are roughly cast, with crummy holes botched through so as to provide passageways for cables. On the ground, directly below a cable hole, sits a small red and white box. “That’s for catching mice and rats,” explains Arnall. “Then that incredibly crude concrete hole is the main internet in and out for that entire building.” This, the film reminds us, is the internet too: rats and techno glory holes in an industrial park outside Madrid. Which is worth remembering. “In general, there is a distinct lack of a material approach to the internet and technology,” says Arnall. “We treat technology as separate from the material world and as being different, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.” Yet the approach outlined

by Arnall runs fundamentally counter to the idea of the cloud, the dominant model that society has developed for the way in which the internet ought to work. “Beginning in the 1950s, a new symbol began to creep into the diagrams drawn by electrical engineers to describe the systems that they built,” writes Bridle in New Dark Age. “The symbol was a fuzzy circle, or a puffball, or a thought bubble. Eventually, its form settled into the shape of a cloud. Whatever the engineer was working on, it could connect to this cloud, and that’s all you needed to know.” Blanketing and discarnate, the cloud suggests a space that is not a space – a borderline celestial realm that sits atop our own world, but is somehow not of it. It is, instead, a hammerspace for data.

“In the future we would have total storage, all of us would,” intones Joshua Cohen, the founder of Googlelike company Tetration in the author Joshua Cohen’s 2015 novel Book of Numbers.7 “[Our] media libraries would dematerialize and just float above us, books would no longer sit on the shelves reminding us that we had not read them, music and TV and film formats would no longer clutter the den reminding us of all we had not yet listened to or watched.” This is the cloud writ messianic large, swallowing up the physical and converting it to weightless information. By design, this metaphor is intended to reduce the complexity of the internet, which is no bad thing given that the various systems that enable online are hellaciously technical – if there’s one thing that writing this essay has taught me, for instance, it’s that I still don’t really understand

what a router is. In this respect, the cloud is liberating, insofar as it enables activity without understanding.

As opposed to the early days of the internet, when infrastructure was frequently held within and maintained by the universities and institutions using it, the cloud outsources work to data centres, freeing people up to just get on with stuff. “It allowed one to focus on the near at hand, and not worry about what was happening over there,” Bridle notes. The problem, however, is that it also emphasises what Connie Walsh, blogging for the University of Cambridge’s Sociology Department in 2020, has termed a “discourse of transcendence” – a perception of online that suggests that “the internet allows for free, harmless and entirely nonphysical relationships between users”. Now this probably is a bad thing, insofar as it’s both patently false and environmentally corrosive. “[The] first criticism of this cloud,” Bridle explains, “is that it is a very bad metaphor. The cloud is not weightless; it is not amorphous, or even invisible, if you know where to look for it. The cloud is not some magical faraway place, made of water vapour and radio waves, where everything just works. It is a physical infrastructure consisting of phone lines, fibre optics, satellites, cables on the ocean floor, and vast warehouses filled with computers, which consume huge amounts of water and energy and reside within national and legal jurisdictions.”

Should this matter to designers? In some senses it clearly does. “Designers work with materials, we help shape materials, and if we don’t understand them we can’t shape them,” summarises Arnall. For anyone working with digital, the infrastructure disguised by the metaphor of the cloud is the material reality of what they’re dealing with. “The point is that there should be an approach to understanding the world where you do understand its materiality and you understand at a high level that there are these things which have an effect,” adds Arnall. “You cannot treat digital as totally divorced from the material world.”

The difficulty, however, is that there’s very little that individual designers, or even all designers, can do about this. Formafantasma’s website redesign may have reduced its own footprint, for instance, but it’s not as if individual websites are the real problem – their contribution to climate collapse is infinitesimal.

California’s forests aren’t on fire because everyone is trying to find out more about Formafantasma. “I think there’s a lot else to do, honestly,” said Farresin when

7 Same name – it’s that kind of novel. The other main character, a washed-up writer, is called Joshua Cohen.

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I asked what he felt the impact of their web project was likely to be. “I don’t think things like this are necessarily a solution.”

This is a point taken up by organisations such as the Green Web Foundation, a not-for-profit that aims to highlight which portions of the internet are powered by renewable energy, and which run on fossil fuels.

As it stands, the foundation lists just 13 per cent of websites as hosted on servers powered by renewable energy, with its work devoted to providing tools that could help improve this ratio. Included among these initiatives are the Green Web App, which accompanies search results with a smiley or sad face to show the nature of an individual site’s hosting, as well as plans to launch a Carbon.txt online standard that would automatically provide internet users with an “indexed style way[…] to find and look up an organisation’s green claims” and systematically trace the energy source of any website across its “whole complicated supply chain”. Which would be very helpful, given that supply chains for web hosting are every bit as labyrinthine as those for physical manufacturing.

“If you have a way to identify your upstream provider, and they can update their upstream and so on,” writes Chris Adams, one of the foundation’s directors, “there should [be] a way to ‘walk the graph’, from all the way to the energy used to power your website.” At present, there isn’t.

This emphasis on structural change and energy flows, if achievable, offers a more impactful route to bringing about change than focusing on individual design initiatives. “There’s this discussion around making websites super lightweight, but it’s very difficult to unpick,” says Adams. “There are so many echoes here of the whole individual-versus-systemicaction argument that you see in the wider climate debate. But in my view, it’s very unproductive to shame individual users of the internet when they cannot meaningfully change their use of the web, even if there is an argument for designers and developers to think about this as part of their job.”

It’s not only unproductive, but it also doesn’t work.

Researching this piece hasn’t changed my online behaviour one iota – that 17h 50m of internet usage came embarrassingly late in the research process – because the tendency to think of the internet as incorporeal runs deep and online processes are too firmly embedded in everyday life to make opting out a realistic option for most people. “What we should be

thinking about instead is where the power comes from, because the internet is the biggest machine on Earth, and it’s mostly powered by fossil fuels,” says Adams.

“That doesn’t work in a climate emergency.” One difficulty in remedying this, however, is that the business model that dominates online is powered by consumption. “If you’re Google or Facebook, and your entire mechanism for making more money is essentially by increasing engagement, you are not incentivised to remind people of the environmental impact of them engaging with this stuff,” he says.

“You’re going to end up with a scenario in which we’re not encouraged to think about this stuff, because it goes counter to many of the drivers that are powering any kind of business. And I’m using the word ‘incentive’ because it’s not like people are trying to be mustachio twirling bastards or anything like that, it’s just the business model.” So if that’s the problem, I ask, what’s the solution? “Policy, bro, policy!”

Well, that’s all well and good. Everybody knows that we need to get off fossil fuels and onto renewables, just like we also know how that’s going: at the time of writing, fresh reporting had uncovered that the G7 nations had spent US$147bn supporting green energy between January 2020 and March 2021, but had also funnelled US$189bn towards the fossil fuel industry in that same period. As I write this sentence, the Gulf of Mexico is literally on fire – the result of a gas leak from an underwater pipeline operated by Mexico’s Pemex petroleum company. To put this in context, the Book of Job states that the primeval sea monster Leviathan made “the deep to boil like a pot”, but even Leviathan seems to have stopped short of actually setting it on fire – so well done to Pemex for a fuck up of beyond Biblical proportions, I suppose. The point being, that while Adams is right that decarbonising the energy grid represents an overarching goal for cleaning up digital, society’s track record on fossil fuels gives little hope that this process is going to be completed any time soon. And while politics may ultimately be the answer, it’s a realm whose operation was once likened by the sociologist Max Weber to the “slow boring of hard boards”, and whose glacial progress feels all the crueller when you consider the fact that all the glaciers are melting.

Anyway, even if the transition to green hosting and data services were achieved, issues would likely remain. “You cannot simply switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy and pretend it’s the same,” explains 94

Kris De Decker, a technology writer, activist and the editor of Low-tech Magazine. “It’s a very different energy source and you have to adapt your energy demands.” De Decker argues that renewable energy sources such as solar and wind are, by nature, intermittent: their availability depends upon the seasons and weather, and they cannot be relied upon as a steady 24/7 green-energy supply, even when deployed in combination with one another.

“There are some web-hosting companies who say that they run on 100 per cent renewable power, but their websites are always online,” says De Decker.

“To make that possible, these companies need to have very large battery storage systems, which makes them unsustainable in the sense that those take a lot of energy to produce and they have very short lifespans, or else they take in energy from the grid when there’s no sun or wind to power them – which comes at a huge environmental cost.” The second part of De Decker’s argument builds on this, pointing to the strain placed upon renewables by asking them to fill the energy breach left by phasing out fossil fuels. “We want to solve everything with renewable energy,” he says.

“We’re going to run electric cars, the heating, the internet, the healthcare system on renewable energy, but where is all that energy coming from and where are we going to put all those solar panels and wind turbines? You simply cannot do that.” None of which is to say that we shouldn’t transition to renewable energy – we should, because we can’t keep setting the Gulf of Mexico on fire – but it’s worth realising that even with this shift, issues surrounding our energy consumption will remain. “Renewable energy is a disaster as well,” says De Decker. “What we really need to do is reduce energy use.”

Now, in the interests of fairness, I should clarify that while Adams champions reducing the carbon intensity of the grid, he is alert to the issues raised

by De Decker. Alongside his work with the Green Web Foundation, Adams edits Branch, an online magazine that explores ideas for a more sustainable internet, linking environmental issues to social-justice campaigns.

Branch pushes “the conversation far beyond the green capitalism discourse[…] which is focused on cleaning up the energy supply powering the web while keeping its profit-driven motive – premised on endless digital growth – intact”, writes journalist Maddie Stone in issue one of the magazine. Instead, it aims to depict “new kinds of virtual spaces in which principles of

climate justice and even degrowth are baked into the digital architecture”. Perhaps the best evidence of this is the magazine’s website, which was developed by designer Tom Jarrett to be “demand responsive” to the realities of the energy grid at any one time. “There’s a need to reconnect the digital to the physical, from minerals and energy to the physical infrastructure that powers the internet,” writes Jarrett, who developed the site such that it displays different interface designs “dependent on the current energy demand and fossil fuels on the grid where the user is.” When demand is low, and the percentage of renewables on the grid is high, you see a version of the site that is rich in images and video. As demand rises, and the percentage of renewables decreases, the site begins stripping back features, offering “lighter Unicode renderings of images and videos”, or else not auto-loading media content at all and instead inviting users to “click to reveal the content” if they are dissatisfied with the alt text description that appears in its stead. “We have to repurpose our digital design processes to consider and reflect these ecological needs,” says Jarrett, “instead of optimising only for business and growth objectives, to achieve more transactions, interactions and attention.”

Other websites have trialled demand responsiveness too, including one developed by the Danish fashion brand Organic Basics (lowimpact.organicbasics.com).

“The energy mix of an electricity grid depends on various factors, such as concurrent load, weather and more,” writes the brand’s head of tech Jesper Hyldahl Fogh. “Your low impact website should reflect this fact.” It’s a good idea, highlighting the reality that websites exist within a material context, but it’s not above critique. “[A] fundamental problem with Organic Basics’s approach is that the less carbon the electricity has, the more the site uses,” writes Roussilhe, for instance, and the same could be said for Branch.

“The production of energy has other impacts than the emission of CO2,” continues Roussilhe. “Two problems then emerge, firstly, this is an example of a rebound effect: the drop in carbon intensity leads to an increase in electricity consumption. Second, under the pretext of reducing the impact of one factor, we increase the impact of other factors that we do not look at.

For example, in France, we know that the production of 1 kWh involves the use of 4 liters of water (production of electricity via steam).” This seems a fair comment, given that responsiveness presents a kind of digital

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feast and famine model, when what we probably need is digital famine and famine, but Branch and Organic Basics nevertheless illustrate that even if the principal goal remains switching energy supplies, there are things that design might try to help smooth that transition in the interim. “Lean is an acknowledgement that even when we use green energy, there is still an unavoidable environmental impact to most digital activity,” write Adams and Branch’s managing editor Michelle Thorne. “Our decisions of what to build matter, and so we chose to tread lightly.”

Branch’s lean approach falls largely in line with De Decker and Low-tech’s desire to begin reducing energy consumption, which is where both publications see a meaningful role for design. De Decker explored these ideas in a 2018 project developed with Marie Otsuka and the digital designer and researcher Roel Roscam Abbing: solar.lowtechmagazine.com, a solar-powered website for Low-tech Magazine. Although the site is comparatively recent, it has already become something of a bellwether for those interested in environmental web design and a direct reference for Formafantasma, to the extent that the footer of their website links to it – “I think it’s brilliant,” Farresin notes, with nearly everybody interviewed for this essay expressing similar enthusiasm. Low-tech’s influence is explained by a number of radical steps that its site takes towards reducing its environmental impact, as well as its wider efforts to fundamentally reframe our expectations of online. Most obviously, for instance, the site is hosted on a single board mini-computer housed in De Decker’s home in Barcelona, which draws its power from an off-grid photovoltaic solar cell installed on his balcony.

Given the energy limitations of a balcony-based setup, it means that the site runs on a tiny amount of power – 1 to 2.5W – which is partially made possible by the fact that solar.lowtechmagazine.com exists as a static website.

In web design, a site is static if it’s generated as a set of documents that exist on a server. This stands in contrast to dynamic websites, which are far more common, and are generated by server-side scripts that kick into action every time someone visits – a process that uses computational power in place of the less energy-intensive storage. “Static websites consequently require less processing power and thus less energy,” summarises De Decker. Although not all environmentally conscious websites are static – Formafantasma’s is not, for instance, because Studio Blanco determined

that a static website would be “complicated for [Formafantasma] to update[…] because every single page has to be created from scratch” – the approach does do something to challenge the ephemerality of online. Symbolically, a static site carries a sense of its own enduring existence, pre-generated and read off the disk, rather than being generated anew each and every time. On the other hand, a dynamic website is specifically geared towards receiving regular updates, feeding the cycle of online as a site for constant consumption. “A database-driven website is a bit like having a seven-seater car. If there’s only two in your household, do you really need it?” asks the writer Gerry McGovern in his 2020 book World Wide Waste.

“A great many websites do not need to be dynamically created from a database because they don’t change much. They can work perfectly well as static sites.”

One reason why static websites are not more common, however, is down to accessibility. “We get a lot of emails from people asking us to help make them a static website, because there are no user-friendly [platforms] out there,” explains Roscam Abbing, who notes that all of the well-known web design platforms, such as Wordpress, Wix and Squarespace, are focused on dynamic sites. “We should have a Wordpress for low-tech websites, but the ones which are out there are geared towards scratching somebody’s particular itch,” he says. “They’re straightforward enough such that anybody with programming skills can write their own, meaning that you then have one for every language or weird toolset, but there hasn’t been a concerted effort to make a project that tries to straddle both accessibility and usability issues. I’m not sure why, because if you want to be famous, then this is what you should be working on. There’s a real need for it.”

The effort to minimise solar.lowtechmagazine. com’s energy usage further extends across its frontend design. As with Formafantasma, the magazine’s logo is rendered using Unicode as “LOW←TECH” and custom fonts have been foregone. In fact, the design doesn’t specify any font – it’s set up such that visitors just see it rendered in the default font on their browser. “As a designer, determining which font you use is a big choice,” says Otsuka, “so removing that and using the default fonts is almost like removing yourself.

But it’s a good reminder that design is not necessarily about what you see, so much as the process through which you decide what you see.” In a similar vein, all images on the site are dithered, a compression process 96

by which images are reduced to a palette of black, white, and four shades of grey, with the resultant patterns of clustered dots creating the illusion of colour depth. The effect of the process, the team explain, is to “make images ten times less resourceintensive”, but it also generates a marked aesthetic – a kind of crackly visual static reminiscent of 1980s video games and which carries all the retro appeal you would imagine. In this respect, Low-tech pushes its design elements to aesthetic extremes, but the basic principles that it operates on – limiting use of resources, reducing the number of energy-intensive processes – are broadly identical to those that apply in physical design. “I did my thesis at university on sustainable product design and researching all the things you can do to make a physical product good for people and planet,” acknowledges Wholegrain Digital’s Greenwood. “Years later, when I learned about digital’s environmental impact, I was hanging my head in disappointment with myself: but you knew all of this!

The design principles are the same.” The reason why these ideas are little discussed, Otsuka and Roscam Abbing agree, is that digital has a tendency to mask its consequences. “Let’s be honest, when in a design process can we sit down and think about all the consequences?” says Roscam Abbing. “It’s rare, and with digital design all the more so because if you don’t see it, it’s really hard to grasp.”

“It’s that disconnect,” confirms Otsuka. “There are all these different parts that go towards making something work online and it’s hard to grasp how all of those connect. A lot gets lost in just trying to understand what’s there on your screen, so it’s hard to think about what’s behind it.”

To De Decker, these issues should push designers to adopt a new kind of role. “[Solar.lowtechmagazine. com] is about giving up control of the design,” he says.

“If you use Wordpress to build a website, like most people do, then that doesn’t care about sustainability – if you upload a 10mb image, it lets you do it. It doesn’t automatically compress that image or even suggest that you should compress it, which shows that the way websites are designed is part of the problem.

With Low-tech, we stripped all the design out and let the browser design the website instead, just how it would have done in the past. It’s quite a radical step for a designer to say, ‘Let’s not design.’” Not designing, however, is probably the most useful thing that a designer can do in an age of climate collapse, to the

degree that not-design, or anti-design, or let’s-notdesign-design, or whatever you want to call it, has rapidly gained credence as a form of design in and of itself.8 “There’s[…] a framing problem in design: every question starts with the assumption of a ‘thing’,” writes the designer and author Alexandra DeschampsSonsino in her 2020 Branch essay ‘Don’t Press Snooze: Design in a Crisis’. “The thing and the need for a thing is never really questioned because that would mean a deeper exercise in self-reflection. After all, without the thing, there is no project, no client, no budget and no designer. So once all those things have been put in place, I would argue it’s already too late. Whatever design work should have happened was in convincing the client not to make a thing at all.” This same principle applies in digital, just as it does in any field: if something has an environmental impact, which everything does, then we should think carefully about whether its benefits outweigh this cost. “The key is that we don’t need to assume that digitising is always the best answer,” explains Roussilhe. “One of the first questions I ask when working on digital projects is whether we should digitise or not. It’s what I call an agnostic opinion.

I don’t assume that digitisation is always better.”

Now, although solar.lowtechmagazine.com is a thing, it could be read as having adopted a similar position to Deschamps-Sonsino and Rousshile’s advice within its own structure by means of surrendering control of the design to the browser. In fact, those few areas in which the team made more “proactive” design choices are also those about which they now express reservations. “If there’s one thing I personally regret, it’s the pronounced aesthetic,” acknowledges Roscam Abbing. Although the site’s low-fi aesthetic is grounded in its environmental aims, he explains, it has unduly shaped reception of the project. “I stand by it, but one of my concerns with how the project has been picked up is that we have an aesthetic of ‘environmentally friendly’, which can then become a greenwashing front,” he continues. “You cannot control how people interpret things, but I’ve seen a lot of dithered images, for instance, that are definitely bigger and heavier than if you just used normal JPEG compression.” The point, Roscam Abbing says, is that while Low-tech’s aesthetic arises from its environmental goals, it’s not the only 8 Which is a very positive development, but probably also highlights the slightly weird rapaciousness of design in claiming things for the discipline: even the negation of design is an exciting new category of design.

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route through which these goals might be met – there’s more than one way to strip a website. “One of the things we would really like to see are low-tech websites that don’t look like the Low-tech website,” he says. “None of the principles we’re talking about with this predicate that a site has to look like a 1990s website and I actually think there are some great opportunities for modern typographic design that looks fresh and colourful within these same principles, whereas what we have done really speaks to a crowd that is interested in nostalgia and the retro.” More fundamentally, Otsuka highlights the fact that the site should not be read as an endorsement of solar power as a universal online solution. “A solar-powered website isn’t going to work in Seattle where it’s always raining,” she says. “We want to emphasise the fact that it’s solar-powered because it’s based in Barcelona – it’s specific to where Kris is working. We don’t want the solar-poweredness to be a cool thing that people think can apply to anything. Just because a website is solar-powered doesn’t mean it’s necessarily more sustainable.”

The central aspect of the project, the team insist, is the fact that solar.lowtechmagazine.com sometimes experiences downtime, and this should not be seen as deleterious to the design. “One of the more radical interventions we made was to say that it’s OK that it’s sometimes offline,” says Roscam Abbing, “which is such a shocker if you explain that to anybody in hosting.” In the site’s footer, a section labelled “Server Stats” gives updates on the status of the site’s server, thereby grounding the project in its material realities: “Location: Barcelona; Time: 13:46 CEST; Battery status: charging; Power used: 2.56W; Uptime: 12 weeks, 3 hours, 7 minutes.” That uptime stat is crucial, as if there are multiple days of cloud cover in Barcelona, the site goes down and remains unavailable until the sun returns to recharge it. One day after getting those server stats, for instance, I tried to return to the site to check some data, only for it to fail to load. Barcelona, I assume, must have been overcast, which is somewhat ironic given that the website’s approach is fundamentally a rebuttal of the cloud: an approach to online in which, to borrow Roscam Abbing’s words, “the material circumstances of the hardware and hosting location are made irrelevant”. In the case of Low-tech, the project’s central move is to highlight the materiality of the server on which it is stored and argue that this materiality ought to play a greater role in the decisions that digital designers make every day. “In web design

there is a clear distinction between ‘frontend’, the visual and content side of the website, and the ‘backend’, the infrastructure,” says Roscam Abbing.

“Outside of professional circles, the material conditions of the web or the internet’s infrastructure are rarely discussed.” With Low-tech’s website, however, “this distinction between frontend and backend needs to disappear as choices on the frontend necessarily impact what happens on the backend and vice versa.”

In more speculative form, these same ideas have been taken up by the designer Lucia Ye, whose 2020 graduation project from the Royal College of Art and Imperial College’s Innovation Design Engineering MA proposed a number of design interventions to nudge internet users towards less energy-intensive online activities. “When people talk about the internet, they often already see something going wrong with its current form, be it privacy or social media,” says Ye. “I was trying to think in that direction of, ‘OK, if you’re unsatisfied with the internet, then why don’t we try and reshape it in a way that’s also environmentally friendly?’” Coupled with this, Ye wanted to avoid any idea that simply mandated reduced usage. “People are so used to how they use the internet currently that it’s hard to tell them to simply reduce usage,” she says.

“It’s just not human.” As a result of this, Ye developed Onlign, a proposal for an operating system for digital devices that would provide users with information about the carbon intensity of the grid in the style of Branch, as well as that of the applications and websites they run on their devices, but which could additionally steer them towards more sustainable online practices. In times of high carbon intensity, Onlign would change its home screen launcher to direct users away from media content and towards less energy-intensive activities: “reading an article from your favourite column [in place] of watching those funny videos on YouTube.” Similarly, Ye’s project proposes a form of video calling named Connect Time, in which conventional video streams are replaced by a lighter visual alternative: traces of light that transmit the movements of the other person’s fingers across their touch screen. It would, Ye suggests, “[provide] an alternative evidence of presence” that is less energy intensive and which potentially “connects[…] loved ones better”. In developing Connect Time, Ye drew upon her experience of remaining in touch with friends and family in China while studying in the UK. “Some of

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my friends would just open the camera and place it on the table, shooting up at the ceiling,” she says. “They know they can see somebody’s face when they want to, but they still have a sense of connection and presence throughout. That’s the core of this – is there a way of sustaining that presence but with low data?”

Alongside her design proposals, Ye hosted a series of research groups in which she questioned people about intermittent internet access, and how they might react to having to plan their online activities around weather patterns and the energy availability they would enable. “The participants ‘hated’ the fact that their videos would become laggy when the wind is not blowing,” she explains. “But interestingly, some participants differentiated this feeling from what they experienced when the internet connection was ‘somehow’ bad in their current life. ‘You can complain to the infrastructure company, but you can’t really blame nature,’ said one participant. ‘If it was the future, surely I would learn to adjust to it.’”

The key, Ye argues, is to provide clear information about how our online systems are actually powered and maintained, as well as offering alternatives. “The first step is to provide information, but this is far from enough,” she says. “After providing this information, it’s essential to let people know what the alternatives are. If we can provide people with an added value beyond the environmental impact, it’s more likely that they can adapt to it.” One clear additional value that light websites could bring, for example, is within the realm of accessibility. “With our computers becoming more advanced and internet connections speeds becoming faster, web designers feel that they can have a bunch of full-screen, high-quality photos,” notes Otsuka. “What then happens is that older computers, or people who have access to connections that are less advanced, get left out.” The problem is compounded by the rapid improvement of mobile connections, which drives websites to continually adapt to that technology’s growing capabilities. “But then older phones become obsolete,” Otsuka says. “It becomes more and more about discarding and getting new things, which increases consumption at all ends.”

By contrast, websites that are kept light remain accessible to older devices, extending their lifespan to ensure both greater accessibility and a reduced environmental footprint – a kind of web development that isn’t driven by the planned obsolescence that lurks behind the curtain of smartphone producers’

business models. “Sustainable web design is just one entry point to get to all these other good web practices,” notes Roussilhe. “We need to think about maintainability and pick technologies that can last for at least 10 years; to optimise for the worst conditions of use and not act as if everyone has 4G or 5G, or ready access to data – we need to assume that you’re paying for your data, which we tend to forget remains the case in a lot of countries.” These ideas, Roussilhe says, pertain to notions of performance, but are strengthened by being framed in terms of sustainability.

“It’s super easy to do a performance website when you’re doing sustainability,” he says, “but sustainability adds something that the performance discussion doesn’t, which is to challenge the assumption that efficiency won’t lead to more consumption. We can’t put all our hopes on efficiency – it’s wishful thinking.”

The responses to digital’s environmental impact put forward by Ye and Roussilhe, as well as websites such as solar.lowtechmagazine.com, Branch and formafantasma.com are not solutions per se – cleaning up a handful of websites won’t help much, although that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done anyway – but they do have clear value as pieces of communication design. These are real, working websites that meet the demands of their operators, but which also cast into doubt aspects of the internet that have hitherto seemed set in stone. In the case of Low-tech, its solar website frames an essential problem of online as being constant availability, which is one of the shibboleths of digital design. “Something I’ve been trying to keep in mind is that although we’ve approached this project from a technical standpoint of reducing the number of resources loaded, it’s also about trying to encourage behaviour that is sustainable or trying to change people’s perspective,” says Otsuka.

“The reason why it goes offline is that maybe we don’t need access to websites constantly, especially for something that isn’t offering urgent information.”

While researching the project, Otsuka found a website that serves as a resource for a Jewish community and so goes offline on Shabbat when it’s not likely to be used. “I thought that was a great, contextually specific way of running a website,” she says, “because it is OK if things go offline sometimes.” It’s an attitude that could clearly be applied more widely.

“If you think about energy requirements,” says Roscam Abbing, “accepting energy unavailability rather than shoring up against potential downtime 100

could be a paradigm shift that can drastically sink energy usage without otherwise doing anything special.” While it would clearly be a problem if something like nhs.uk wasn’t available around the clock, for instance, it’s less clear that the same goes for most other websites. Even something pretty established, like uniqlo.com/UK, could probably keep the opening hours of a brick-and-mortar Uniqlo shop, with very few serious issues arising from an inability to purchase cheap T-shirts after 6pm. It might even be a relief to not have the option of 24/7 commerce, particularly if, like me, you’re prone to late-night drunk shopping – an estimated US$45bn per year industry in the US alone.9 Now, I’m pretty certain that limiting uniqlo.com/ UK’s uptime would be very difficult for any number of reasons, and also not help to solve the climate crisis in the slightest,10 but that’s not really the point: the idea is just to reflect on the immediate availability of products and resources that the internet offers, and the rapid digestion of content that it encourages, and think about how this is both a reflection and clear accelerant of wider social patterns. “My pessimism is focused on this greed and hunger we have as a society for constant consumption,” says Greenwood. “I don’t believe that’s innately a human thing, but it’s a core part of the culture we have created, which digital technology is reinforcing rather than encouraging us to step back from it.” Whether digital can play a part in negotiating that step back seems doubtful, but if we’re unable change online habits, then I’m not sure what hope there is for anything else. Online is a real part of our world, and its excesses mirror those of wider society. In Bridle’s words, it is “the best representation of reality we have built”, so if we can’t fix that, what hope is there for the rest? “Computational systems, as tools, emphasise one of the most powerful aspects of humanity: our ability to act effectively in the world and shape it to our desires,” writes Bridle. “But uncovering and articulating those desires, and ensuring that they do not degrade, overrule, efface, or erase the desires of others, remains our prerogative.” Our present internet, however, lets desire run wild.

To be honest, all of this is pretty discouraging.

When I started looking into the internet’s physical 9 The total industry, not just me.

10 Although nobody has actually tried this, so to hell with it – let’s give it a shot.

footprint, I’d hoped the issues might be resolved by a few small tweaks, ingeniously made. Perhaps there would be a YouTube.green or something, which would be entirely powered by a modest solar array in Yuma, or else an option to just toggle images off, hidden deep in Safari, probably close to the “Export as PDF” tab.

You know, a classic design solution to a classic design problem! Unfortunately, however, the challenges of creating more equitable, sustainable digital systems aren’t really problems for design, or at least not in any straightforward sense. “As in most proto-environmental claims,” Bridle writes, “the proposed solutions are either appeals to regulation (taxing data), conservative regressions (banning pornography, or switching from colour to black-and-white photographs to save transmission costs) or hapless techno-fixes (like the miracle-material graphene) – all ludicrous, unworkable, and unable to think at the scale of the networks they seek to address.” In this respect, I think he’s right, with meaningful change only likely to be attainable through some pretty heavy-duty socio-political reform. “When we talk about the environmental impact of tech, the phrase I use is that you’ve got to realise it’s about power, not just energy,” summarises Adams. “In our view we have a theory of change where you need to create these ideas and make them feel feasible and desirable amongst the people who are implementing and building technical platforms – once you have something that will not be laughed out the door, it’s possible to begin proposing these at a policy level so you don’t have people pushing back and complaining how unworkable this is.”

The point of creating this sense of feasibility is to stress that our present internet is not some fait accompli – it has reached its current form because of the interplay of specific decisions that could easily have gone another way, and which might still be revised given sufficient political and social will. “We’ve been taught to look at the digital system as a unique thing and something that is only one concept, particularly if you look at the GAFAM actors [Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft] who influence everything we do, especially in design,” says Roussilhe.

“But from that same system there is also Wikipedia, where you never accept any cookies because it’s a different business model – which is useful but not necessarily time consuming – and which has a very easy entry point and end point in the user experience.

That shows that we already know how to use digital

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tools with parsimony – we just need to get past the blinding vision of the GAFAM model.” And he’s right – the internet is not a system that we either have to accept or abandon wholesale. Our present internet was never designed as such; rather, it is the result of an accretion of different designed systems and networks. If you can change aspects of those constituent systems, as well as the ideologies that drive them, then potentially you could arrive at a different internet.

“The discourse on how we should do the internet has been dominated for far too long by a particular group in Silicon Valley who have priorities and concerns that are at odds with both environmental sustainability but also matters of social and economic justice,” says Roscam Abbing. “We need different narratives.”

If those narratives are to emerge, they will do so incrementally, but the emergence of alternative treatments of digital is an encouraging sign. “Technology does not emerge from a vacuum,” writes Bridle. “Rather, it is the reification of a particular set of beliefs and desires: the congruent, if unconscious dispositions of its creators. In any moment it is assembled from a toolkit of ideas and fantasies developed over generations, through evolution and culture, pedagogy and debate, endlessly entangled and enfolded.” What initiatives such as solar.lowtechmagazine.com and formafantasma.com are attempting is to fold in some new ideas for online, and hope that with time those may prove useful in shifting the overall recipe. “There are many commercial interests behind the internet that we think are inevitable, but they’re not,” says De Decker. “It helps very much to look back to the beginning of the internet when it was a totally different medium – it was going to bring information to everyone, it was accessible. These days, when I surf the internet, I often wonder what has become of it. Everything is locked up behind a paywall, there are constantly things popping up, there are videos running by themselves freezing your browser, you’re tracked by hundreds of companies you don’t know anything about. That was not how it used to work. We need to remember that you can make a totally different internet.” So while piecemeal redesign of individual websites makes little to no immediate difference, it does begin the work of suggesting alternatives, and revealing what has hitherto been hidden. “We’re just trying to avoid waste, and design and develop things efficiently, but the big thing we’re facing at the moment is lack of awareness,” explains Greenwood.

“If nobody even knows this is a thing or a topic to consider, we’re not going to take action. Our biggest contribution as designers to helping solve this problem is to get people talking and share the knowledge that we’ve gained along the way.” Wrapped up in this, he argues, is a need for humility on the part of design, paired with an acceptance that this needn’t translate into inertia. It may feel like a losing battle, but that’s better than no battle at all, particularly when the battle is about whether we should burn the planet. “So, is a website going to save the world? Well, no, obviously: it’s a website,” says Greenwood. “But if it gets people thinking and then individually taking action to help shift the industry into caring about these issues, that’s the real value. Because everything that modern people do is bad for the environment. The question is, is one thing less bad than the other? If it is, move to that step, and from that step we’ll probably be able to see what the next one is. We need that relentless forward progress, rather than getting hung up on perfection, because perfection isn’t an option for us right now.

We just need to head towards somewhere we think is in the direction of better.”

That’s probably fair. In the case of Formafantasma, I think their new website is an improvement – very nice, very clean. Very much like Wikipedia. Although, to tell you the truth, it’s been a long 18 months,12 so I can’t actually remember what their old website was like. I very much hope that this fact won’t invalidate everything I’ve just said – God, maybe it was brilliant.

“Good that you forgot it,” said Trimarchi when I put this to him.

“It wasn’t memorable,” confirmed Farresin.

“The coding felt ‘dirty’. We were just using one of those readymade infrastructures to build websites.”

“It took a bit of research, which Low-tech helped with,” said Trimarchi, “but we were able to strategise to make our website more sustainable and ecological.”

“To be honest, it was a surprise to us when we started looking into all of this,” added Farresin. “But this is not fully our work. What we did was to build an extremely precise brief and then ask someone like Valerio to design the website according to the questions that we had raised.”

“They’re great to work with,” confirms Valerio.

“But their old website – it was a real shit.” E N D

11 To be fair, it’s been a long article too.

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The Seduction of the Bureaucrat Words Alison Sinkewicz

“I went to the fridge to pour myself a drink, tried to remove the cap from a bottle of sparkling apple juice, and burst into tears, wondering: What has happened to this world, this new world of culture that we thought we were building, that has shapeshifted into a simulacrum of the world of finance and is equally unregulated, corrupt, and morally bankrupt?” —A.A. Bronson, ‘The Transfiguration of the Bureaucrat’

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Images courtesy of Capture Photography Festival and Steven Shearer, photographed by Dennis Ha.

In 1983, the Canadian artist A.A. Bronson, a founding member of the General Idea collective and former director of the Printed Matter, Inc non-profit book store and art space, wrote his influential essay ‘The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat’. It outlines and documents the formation of non-profit artistrun centres – a distinctly Canadian type of publicly funded organisation first developed in the 1960s and 1970s. The model was inspired by a youthful ambition to design a new kind of gallery – one in which artists would be in charge – and in 1976 the Association of National Non-Profit Artists Centres/ Regroupement D’Artistes Des Centres Alternatifs (ANNPAC/RACA) was formed to represent all such ventures to the government. Dedicated to establishing the exhibition of art as the artists’ domain, the artistrun centre was, Bronson argued, premised on its “beveled edge”: the humbling (ie: humiliating) process of bureaucracy. The artist in Canada, as Bronson saw it, should not be self-interested but indebted to their community and the general public. Bronson remained uninhibited in this optimism, writing in the ‘The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat’: “ANNPAC has a life of its own. We call it the living museum.”

In 2011, Bronson wrote ‘The Transfiguration of the Bureaucrat’, a follow-up to ‘The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat’ in which he mourns the professionalisation of the artist in Canada. Artist-run centres no longer serve as petri dishes of creative gestation, he argued, but have largely been swallowed by bureaucracy and careerism. They persist, but now operate within a terrain where an artist’s foremost occupation is to locate a doorway to the international art market: artists work neither for themselves, the community, nor the public, but for finance. In Bronson’s words, “What we seem to be looking for, both in the USA and Canada, is not a healthy vibrant culture bristling with ideas and innovation, but access to the international marketplace. This makes me sad.” It is Bronson’s bevelled edge, ground to a stub, and nowhere in Canada has the role of the local artist become more intertwined in the landscape of finance than in Vancouver.

I See Dead People “It made me want to vomit,” and “It reminded me of dead people.” These were some of the vitriolic responses that the Capture Photography Festival

received in April 2021 in response to its site-specific billboard installations of the artist Steven Shearer’s work along Vancouver Arbutus Greenway. The greenway is a 9km pathway stretching from False Creek to the Fraser River that forms the city’s southern boundary line. It crosses some of Vancouver’s most expensive neighbourhoods – Shaughnessy, Kitsilano and the rapidly gentrifying Mount Pleasant – but in a city where the benchmark price for residential housing is CA$1.175m,1 singling out wealthy neighbourhoods feels like splitting hairs. Regardless, residents the length of the greenway sent emails condemning Shearer’s work, while others expressed their concern via social media. “Some people were disturbed by the images themselves, others objected to the appropriated nature of the images, and there were those who felt the images were triggering,” explains Capture’s executive director, Emmy Lee Wall.

Shearer (who declined to be interviewed for this essay), informally belongs to the Vancouver School of photoconceptualism, employing a range of media in his work – drawing, painting, sculpture and found photography. His series of billboards for Capture, Untitled, were drawn from his archive (including internet searches, found print and eBay purchases) and picture people in various stages of sleep or unconsciousness. The images appear to be mostly drawn from the late 2000s: a woman sleeping in the passenger seat of a car wearing a cap-sleeve graphic tee; a man lit by a fluorescent flash that brightens his blond goatee and gaping mouth; a young man, his jacket draped over his head, with a ray of light hitting his closed eyes. The compositions recall canonical, art-historical iconography, such as Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Giorgione’s The Sleeping Venus and Fuseli’s The Nightmare. Shown in a traditional gallery space, the works might more closely conjure these associations, but blown up to billboard size and placed along a pathway, they have a more disquieting impact.

The images were removed after 48 hours following a decision made by Capture’s sponsor Pattison Outdoor Advertising, which was uncomfortable with the negative response. “It also seemed like a lot of the people just didn’t like the work, which is fine,” says Wall, “but [it’s] not exactly a nuanced critique and, in my view, an insufficient reason to demand its removal.”

1 And this statistic represents the greater Vancouver area – the actual housing price for Vancouver proper is likely much higher.

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Just a few weeks before, in March 2021, residents of the same neighbourhood (Kitsilano, average home price, CA$1,447,466) had voiced outrage at a proposed 12-storey supportive housing building. Developed by BC Housing, this building would supply 140 studios for those who are unhoused or are at risk of becoming unhoused, and would also provide a monitored space where residents would be able to use drugs safely.

“That’s a polite way of saying if you have drug issues,

Open-mouthed, passed out in cars, bare-chested and laid flat on dead grass – perhaps for residents along the Arbutus Greenway, Shearer’s Untitled did not recall the art-historical canon. Maybe, it was something more dangerously close to home.

City on the Edge Looking to Los Angeles may help contextualise Vancouver’s crises and paranoia. Vancouver, like Los Angeles, is an urban settlement on the edge of the world. Each evening, both cities watch the sun sinking into the Pacific Ocean. In both, oceanfront views are highly prized and economic-geographic inequalities are arranged west to east – the western-most neighbourhoods are home to the most expensive real estate, with rents and property prices declining eastward.

Both conurbations also have downtown areas of visible unhoused and drug-user populations, whose presence threatens tourism and depreciates real-estate values. Just as Los Angeles’s Skid Row is buttressed by the fine-art epicentre of the city (the blue-chip gallery Hauser & Wirth is just a few blocks away), Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is home to many art galleries and cultural institutions. Although the area has gone through a few stages of gentrification – it was once home to many studios, artist-run centres, and DIY galleries drawn to the neighbourhood for its cheap rents – the Downtown Eastside is now also home to larger commercial exhibition spaces such as Monte Clark Gallery and Catriona Jeffries, all of which recently moved from their previous locations, drawn to the larger, more affordable industrial units behind East Hastings Street. Meanwhile, developers such as Low Tide Properties (owned by Lululemon founder and billionaire Chip Wilson) have renovicted2 DIY galleries (including Index Gallery and Red Gate Art Society) along East Hastings Street to make way for more profitable businesses, such as breweries and office spaces.

Unlike Los Angeles, however, Vancouver is not home to a robust class of urban-élite art patrons.

Instead, Vancouver’s commercial galleries largely serve to introduce artists to the international market.

And unlike Los Angeles, Vancouver relies on public funds such as the Canada Council for the Arts and,

Open-mouthed, passed out in cars, bare-chested and laid flat on dead grass – maybe it was something dangerously close to home. alcohol issues, you are welcome in this project,” said Kitsilano resident Karen Finnan to CityNews. “[In] fact they don’t want to look at any alternatives that would not involve persons with drug or alcohol issues because they can’t find people willing to move in.” Michael Yaptinchay, principal of the nearby St Augustine School, also voiced concern that the building and its residents would overtake the neighbourhood.

Finnan and Yaptinchay’s dehumanising narratives of invasion are chilling and cruel, especially given Vancouver’s infamous unaffordability and its worsening overdose crisis. Since the 2016 declaration of a publichealth emergency, nearly 6,000 illicit drug overdose deaths have been reported in British Columbia and Covid-19 seems to have exacerbated the crisis. During the height of the pandemic, more people died of an illicit drug overdose in the first eight months of 2020 than all of 2019 combined. In May of 2021, an Oxford Economics report confirmed Vancouver as the most unaffordable city in North America, beating out New York City and Los Angeles. Bluntly stating that “North American housing markets are on fire”, the report’s authors went on to note that “[unaffordability] is a persistent issue in Toronto and Vancouver, and the recent price surge has served to exacerbate this more than decade-old trend”.

2 “Renoviction” is a term used in British Columbia that means exactly what it sounds like.

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of course, the artist-run centres to bolster opportunities and spaces for emerging professional artists. A small number of commercial galleries representing mostly Vancouver-based artists do exist, but of these Catriona Jeffries is the only one to regularly show at major international art fairs.

What has emerged amidst rapid financialisation and real-estate construction – “architecture as finance, finance as architecture,” as the University of British Columbia’s Matthew Soules describes it –is a symbiotic relationship between art and development. This trend is perhaps best represented by the public gallery Presentation House’s 2017 decision to re-name itself Polygon Gallery after a generous sponsorship from Polygon Development that facilitated its new, multimillion-dollar, waterfront gallery space.

It’s no surprise, given Vancouver’s primary moneymaker is real estate, that the city’s art patrons come from this world. In recent years, however, a quieter, more insidious relationship between finance, real estate, architecture and art has emerged. Like many cities, Vancouver’s developers, artists and their representative bureaucrats are reshaping the sociospatial makeup of the city under the guise of cultural amenities. In Vancouver, this accelerating process is made visible through a new kind of public art – one that is tethered to the imperatives of development, paraded beneath the banner of social service.

Vancouver is a city built on speculation. While resource extraction (fishing, mining, forestry) motivated and funded the city’s initial and ongoing colonisation of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwxúwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) homelands, it has been sustained by development. As the urban planner and architect Lance Berelowitz describes in Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination, “Real estate is Vancouver’s true passion, its blood sport.” Vancouver’s culture of speculation – and its reliance on economies predicated on expansion and progress – accelerated in the 1980s. Moving from an extraction-based economy to an increasingly abstract and financialised one, Vancouver aimed to attract investment on the global stage. Like Thatcher’s Britain and Reagan’s America, Canada took on policies that privatised formerly state-run sectors, ostensibly to generate what the economic geographer David Harvey termed a “good business climate”. As Melanie O’Brian describes in her introduction to Vancouver Art & Economies (2007), Vancouver’s actions in the 1980s

exacerbated a scarcity of low-income housing that had plagued the city since the 1970s, capitalising on investment in order to rezone downtown and facilitate an increase in condo developments. These new towers acted primarily as investment vehicles for luxury housing, pushing low-income residents towards the periphery, notably east Vancouver.

Living Sculpture “[Nikolas] Pevsner claimed that baroque art had rendered the supernatural tangible. After 1968, urban space had suddenly rendered capitalism tangible.” — Daniel Defert, ‘Foucault, Space and the Architects’ In 2019, Vancouver’s housing market was named the fourth most expensive housing market in the world for the second year in a row by a CBRE Group report.

Curiously, Vancouver still regularly ranks high on global “liveability” indexes, which extoll its public parks, waterfront access and bike lanes. “I think that it is no coincidence that Vancouver is such a famed liveable city but also so famed for its housing unaffordability,” says Soules. “[These] things go well together.”

Many of the factors that are weighed on such liveability indexes are captured in British Columbia’s unique Community Amenity Contributions programmes (CACs). CACs are in-kind or cash contributions made by property developers after the city council grants rights to development through rezoning. In lieu of giving money, developers can support a number of community initiatives, such as affordable housing, public spaces, childcare facilities, community centres, libraries, transportation, and cultural organisations.

As the journalist Christopher Cheung summarises, “For developers, CACs [get] them the density they want and sometimes result in a more attractive project, for example, if a new library branch on-site is part of the contribution. For the public, CACs capture a share of the increased profits from rezoning to pay for amenities that would otherwise require tax dollars.”3 CACs, however, are not simply an opportunity for developers to generously give back to communities – 3 Introduced in the 1990s, CACs took off under Vancouver’s centralist Vision Vancouver mayor, Gregor Robertson, with many urban planners utilising terms associated with “addiction” to describe his office’s relationship with CACs. In 2020, leftist mayor Kennedy Stewart made modest changes to the CAC programme, mostly aimed at increasing transparency, limiting refunds of cash and stopping alterations being made to CAC proposals without a public hearing.

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that is a fiction. In reality, CACs present a lucrative model for companies to market their product and, for the city’s most powerful firms, provide a statesanctioned avenue for orchestrating the city of their dreams. “In my mind, the pursuit of beauty and the pursuit of our advancement as a society are one and the same,” writes Westbank Corp. CEO Ian Gillespie in his manifesto ‘Fight for Beauty’, a meandering, audacious text that places Westbank Corp. on the same plane of influence as the Renaissance, Ming dynasty and Ancient Egypt. As one of Vancouver’s most successful and influential developers, Gillespie is nothing if not ambitious.

“A lot of people would look at this site and say, ‘Okay, it’s a weird area.’ I looked at it as this tremendous opportunity, this gateway into Vancouver,” Gillespie told The Globe and Mail in 2018, reflecting on land purchased by Westbank Corp. in downtown Vancouver in 2010. To build this gateway, Gillespie enlisted Danish it-boy Bjarke Ingels. More generally, in his efforts to rise above a Vancouver cityscape that, he told Bloomberg, “looks like shit”, Gillespie has imported a global vanguard of high-profile architects, such as Studio Gang and Kengo Kuma, to a city whose landmark buildings have previously been designed by largely homegrown practices. But Ingels’ Vancouver House – 388 condominium units with prices ranging from CA$225,000 for a studio to a CA$15m penthouse – is part of a new class of super-prime towers, marketed towards international investors, further decoupling Vancouver’s economy from the local housing market.

Gillespie, however, isn’t shy about his prosaic plans for the City of Vancouver, and he is increasingly claiming a presence in additional cities such as Toronto, Seattle, Tokyo and San Jose. “It’s about giving me a canvas to produce something I feel good about producing,” he told The Globe and Mail. Westbank Corp. has a strong presence in Vancouver, but it has not been won without controversy and public resistance.

The Downtown Eastside Woodward’s building was completed by Westbank Corp. in 2009, redeveloping the former Woodward’s department store, a site of social significance. As one resident told the Vancouver Sun in 1997, Woodward’s was “one of those places people could go and feel like a regular person instead of a poor person”. The store closed in 1993, marking the beginning of a years-long fight for control of the site. Social housing deals were made, and fell through, resulting in multiple protests and occupations of the

building. In 2004, the city awarded the development to Gillespie’s firm. The redevelopment features 536 market condos and 200 units of social housing – twothirds of the latter are segregated in a separate tower and not granted access to the development’s rooftop hot tub. Its ripple effect in the Downtown Eastside has led to increased rents and the further erosion of low-income housing. Or, as Westbank would have it, Woodward’s has served as “a catalyst for the economic, social and physical revival of the Downtown Eastside”.

It is Vancouver House, however, that stands as Gillespie’s magnum opus. A restrictive triangular lot gave rise to the building’s unusual tapered bottom, which expands and twists as it reaches its 49th floor.

The triangular base is 557sqm, but the floorspace expands to 1,300sqm by the time it has reached its rectangular top. The turned structure appears to defy engineering – its head much too large for its body.

The building’s international marketing campaign followed Gillespie’s penchant for borrowing art-speak to describe real estate, with Westbank employing words such as “practice” in reference to its business; “canvas” to describe what it deems to be the blank slate of the cities in which it operates; and “body of work” to describe its completed projects on its website. Vancouver House, meanwhile, is described and marketed as a “living sculpture”. Falling in line with Vancouver House’s artistic marketing campaign, Gillespie worked with the City of Vancouver on a CAC that would match the project in scale and impact.

For this, Gillespie partnered with Reid Shier, former curator of the artist-run centre Or Gallery, and current curator of the Polygon Gallery (he declined to be interviewed for this essay). Together, they commissioned Rodney Graham (who also declined an interview request) to create a site-specific installation mere steps from Vancouver House.

Spinning Chandelier is suspended under the Granville Street Bridge, a space that was formerly a gathering point for the city’s unhoused. The chandelier is 7.7m high and 4.2m long, its structure made of stainless steel with LED lamps and 600 polyurethane faux crystals. Inspired by an earlier video work of Graham’s, the piece is activated for about four minutes multiple times a day, during which it flashes its LED lights, illuminates its crystals and spins. Its 2019 unveiling was met with controversy, with many accusing the piece of stoking class warfare in the increasingly unaffordable city. Glibly, but prophetically,

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Mayor Kennedy Stewart called it, “the most important piece of public art in the history of our city.”

The artwork furthers Gillespie’s city-building aspirations. Westbank Corp. has branded the area around Vancouver House the “Beach District”, with both the phrase and Graham’s piece working to assert Westbank Corp.’s presence in this area. While Vancouver House is constrained by its triangular plot, Westbank Corp. is ideologically laying claim to the neighbourhood – its flag a CA$4.8m spinning chandelier.

The city made special considerations for Westbank Corp. to facilitate the work’s completion. The piece was initially presented to the city council as costing CA$900,000, but as a result of its complex installation and engineering requirements this quickly rose to the final CA$4.8m figure. Yet the project was never resubmitted to the Public Art Committee. Westbank Corp. was also allowed, for the first time in any CAC for public art, to pool CACs from three other developments into this single site.

There were further exceptions made. “Spinning Chandelier was a bit different because it came to the process as a direct selection, which we do allow occasionally but not frequently,” says Eric Fredericksen, head of public art for the City of Vancouver. “It came to the Public Art Committee along with various letters of support from various persons in the Vancouver and international art community.” This process of direct selection had not, in fact, been done previously.

Importantly, Spinning Chandelier is listed as a public art piece on the City of Vancouver’s website but is not owned by the city. As Fredericksen explains, this is “rare”. When asked what other privately owned works have been permitted for permanent installation on city land, he responds by email: “One other springs to mind, the Martin Boyce piece installed in the laneway at Telus Gardens.” Another Westbank Corp. project.

If we are to understand Graham as the artist chosen to represent Vancouver in this “gateway” to the city (specifically, the not-shit city of Gillespie’s vision) then Graham’s position as an artist whose practice is in Vancouver, but whose value exists in the international art market is worthy of consideration.

Simultaneous to the decoupling of the housing market from the local economy, Spinning Chandelier operates not as public art that is owned by its public, designed to engage and activate space for residents. Rather, it has a dual function: as a marketing tactic that assures condo buyers of Vancouver House’s investability; and

as a mechanism to annex public space as the ideological property of Westbank Corp.

The Mythical Artist “Since we cannot know what we cannot know, this mantra about the impenetrability of the realm of art is evidently nothing but propaganda.”

—Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated In 2021, a new kind of social housing is slated to open in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood. Thirty units of non-market housing have been procured on the lower floors of Second + Main – a 12-storey, 226 market unit development from Create Properties.

Its 388-483sqft studios start in the mid-CA$500,000s (a benchmark price for the neighbourhood). Unlike the 12-storey development planned for Kitsilano, these 30 live-work units have been specially reserved for lower-income artists and artist-led families.

The application process and units are being managed by BCA, a non-profit organisation formerly known as BCArtscape, that works to “develop cultural spaces in BC that serve the needs of artists and cultural organizations as well as the communities where they are located”. It is led by Caitlin Jones, former curator of Mount Pleasant’s artist-run centre, Western Front. Currently, it manages the rental and leasing of the Sun Wah building, a cultural hub in Chinatown, as well serving as the operator for a to-be-built 1,952sqm artist studio space in downtown Vancouver, a CAC for a 39-storey luxury tower. BCA represents a new kind of artist organisation – a liaison between the art world, city and developers.

“The artist bureaucrat is no longer the downstream recipient of urban planners or real estate – they are now taking an active leadership role,” says community organiser Vince Tao of the Vancouver Tenants Union and the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users. “The concentration of art power in real estate I think goes two ways – it’s not art being exploited by real estate, it’s part of the same machine.”

While its intentions are to allocate affordable space for artists and cultural organisations, BCA operates in contradiction to the recommendations of many housing experts and housing activists. In 2021, for instance, the provincial and federal government commissioned a far-reaching report looking at how to improve British Columbia’s housing supply in large urban areas; it recommended that the practice of 112

Image courtesy of Westbank Corp..

negotiating community-amenity contributions from developers end.

Second + Main (confusingly billed as 3rd + Main on the BCA website) presents a range of potential problems. Tao, for instance, heard of the proposed social housing for artists when he was an education librarian at 221A – an artist-run centre that also manages CAC spaces and independently run artist studios. “To have an artist organisation – and I guess it’s debatable whether BCA could be called that – be the arbiter of your domestic and work life, it begs a lot of questions I asked years ago,” he says. “Like, how are we going to evict people? What is the criteria for eviction? What if they stop making work? What if they hurt themselves and they have to stop making work? Who is going to do it? You or me?” The allocation of social housing for artists assumes special regard for the role of the artist in the city. Underlining this privileged place is the understanding that the artist should be able to both blend in with their environment and pierce through its capitalist context. It’s a heavy burden to bear.

Shier and Graham, for instance, surely did not intend Spinning Chandelier to act as a symbol of Gillespie’s influence. They most certainly had more nuanced, critical aspirations, and both artist and curator have yet to comment publicly on the response to the work, silently emphasising the assumed mystical, unknowable properties of art. But Spinning Chandelier nevertheless emerges from a cultural complex ingrained with the logics of financialised real estate. It is this guise of criticality that benefits city-builders such as Gillespie who wish to appear to be culturally engaged; the unknown unknowables of an ambitious artwork such as Graham’s are, for developers, its real value.

Because of its high maintenance costs, the city has allowed Westbank Corp. to retain ownership of Spinning Chandelier in perpetuity. Westbank Corp.’s permanence is one assertion the piece makes clear.

Imagine Spinning Chandelier years in the future.

Floating above the Beach District, illuminating the surrounding parks, waterfront walkways, bike lanes and green spaces. Some passing under its sparkling lights will look up and see Saint Teresa. Some will see a corpse. E N D

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Vancouver House, designed by Bjarke Ingels Group for Westbank Corp.

The Ground of Palestine Introduction Ariel Caine

Images courtesy of Dima Srouji.

Even as early as the 1900s, Zionism could be understood as a terraforming, climate-changing, time-warping and anthropomorphising movement. It sought to transform the land, architecture and archaeology of Palestine, make the desert bloom, and transcend and recast millennia of exile. Whereas the pilgrims to Palestine of the 18th and 19th centuries had encountered ruins that seemed to verify the Biblical prophecies of a deserted Zion, for the rising Jewish nationalist movement, the processes of construction and terraforming were validating acts of return.

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Meanwhile, Palestinians were being marginalised by the colonial powers that controlled the region – first the Ottomans and then the British. These empires developed and deployed technologies of survey, vision, engineering and archaeology across the region, which meant that, slowly, Palestinians were written, archived, visualised and mapped out of Palestine. In this respect, those colonial empires have left behind a living legacy: a juridical, scientific and technological violence that has been weaponised by the Israeli settler colonial regime. While this violence is clearly felt by the Palestinian populace, its gradual implementation has meant that it has been naturalised within swathes of Israeli society, as well as in many parts of the international community. As part of this, archaeological research has been co-opted as a mechanism of settlement and colonisation, with excavation of sites used to support particular national narratives, elide others, reshape territories, and allow for the introduction of extensive surveillance and security apparatus.

This attempted overwriting of Palestine, escalated since the Nakba of 1948, has been resisted on the ground as well as through scholarly research and the development of counter practices. The late Edward Said was one of the first to clearly outline the ways in which Western empires imprinted their imaginary perceptions of the East onto Palestine. The researcher Salman Abu Sitta’s reconstructive cartographies of pre-Nakba Palestine have, for several decades, painstakingly retraced the dense network of habitation that existed in British-mandated Palestine. Meanwhile, anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj, in her groundbreaking work Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, has continued this research into the construction of social imaginaries and political structures though Israel’s use of archaeology and architecture. An attempt to grasp and reconnect with a landscape or memory that is out of reach or under threat of erasure drives many Palestinian artworks, such as Yazan Kahlili’s Landscape of Darkness (2010), a video and photographic work that is shot at night, documenting the West Bank’s Israeli-controlled Area C. To explore these issues, I met with the Palestinian architect and artist Dima Srouji and archaeologist Silvia Truini (both of the group Depth Unknown) to speak about their work around architecture and archaeology, the manner in which these disciplines

are inherently political, and the ways in which they have been operationalised and come to serve as tools for violence and dispossession in Palestine. In both their individual practices and work with Depth Unknown, they have researched and explored not only a critique of Israeli occupation and settler colonialism, but, first and foremost, the vocalisation of a Palestinian-driven archaeology and imagination of space. Working in Silwan and Sebastia – Palestinian communities in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, both of which house Israeli-controlled archaeological sites – they have formed wide circles of collaboration and participation, inviting us to rethink spatial-practice-led research, art and political action. In the conversation that follows, we spoke of the past but predominantly of the unfolding political present and the urgent need to rethink the future.

Ariel Caine To quote a question asked by Depth Unknown,

what does the ground of Palestine say? How can new modes of architectural and archaeological practice allow us to be more attuned to what the ground in Palestine has registered?

Dima Srouji Our collective started in late 2018, when we were commissioned to work on the Sharjah Architecture Triennial Project. I had been working on Sebastia for an art residency in 2018 and I grew up going there with my family. I realised, during this residency, how much it has changed over the years, and how much it had been affected by the occupation.

I thought at the time that Sebastia would make a great case study. So I invited Silvia, an archaeologist and anthropologist, and Dirar Kalash, a sound artist, to start thinking collaboratively by linking multiple disciplines together.

Silvia Truini Archaeology, sadly, is a child of power.

It arrived in Palestine with Western imperialism, and it remains very colonial. All archaeological activity, everywhere, is regulated by specific laws of the state.

The ground of Palestine and the material that it contains are regulated by the Israeli 1978 Antiquities Law, which was inherited from the British Mandate period, but subsequently enhanced. The fact that that law was passed after 1967 [the Six-Day War between Israel and a coalition of Arab states, which saw Israel seize the Golan Heights, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula, ed.] is indicative, because that law serves to deal with Palestine’s past in a very specific way. In the West Bank

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and Gaza, the laws currently enforced are really an accumulation of British Mandate law, plus Jordanian or Egyptian law with minor amendments. This, together with the political and administrative fragmentation of historic Palestine, generates a fragmentation in terms of how archaeological grounds are dealt with. When it comes to archaeology, if you want to act on the ground in any way, you need to ask for a permit from

earlier in the process, whereas Silwan is maybe 10 years ahead in terms of the ways in which the occupation has transformed it. There’s already the City of David tourist attraction in Silwan [an archaeological site speculated to constitute the original settlement of Bronze and Iron Age Jerusalem, ed.], which has massive amounts of funding coming in. It’s almost foreshadowing what could happen to Sebastia. We’re currently looking at surveillance in archaeology, for instance, and the idea of people and objects both being watched in archaeological sites.

Silvia There are so many intersections of archaeology with landscape, including surveillance. Usually, the discussion of archaeology around surveillance is very narrow and based on balancing the preservation of the site: how do we prevent the site from being damaged by tourists, while at the same time providing the best tourist experience? The scope of the conversation is how to maximise the experience of paying visitors, whereas there is almost nothing about the broader surveillance of specific social groups that live around or inside archaeological sites. These archaeological issues can sometimes be considered counter-intuitive, because we are so used to thinking that archaeology is all about the past that we forget the present and the future. But those are key functions of archaeology too.

Ariel Silwan is an interesting site within those parameters of surveillance.

Silvia Silwan has been under consistent pressure from settler NGOs for years. So there is the Ir David Foundation or El’ad, for instance, which is interested in expanding a Jewish-only residential settlement and has been doing so by obtaining the management of the archaeological area. This continuous expansion is foregrounded by increased surveillance and, in turn, brings more surveillance after each step. As an established policy, the state gives, and this is their wording, Jewish citizens living in Arab areas paid-for protection for their own safety: guard posts, guards, cameras and all this kind of apparatus. But also, surveillance prepares the expansion of settlement, because you need to know what the situation is – you don’t parachute yourself into a situation you don’t know. So surveillance is a sort of enveloping case – it embraces the settlement activity before it happens and it’s reinforced after it. Sometimes it passes unnoticed because of how the cameras are placed respective to the archaeological sites – they are perceived as being in connection with the

“Archaeology’s colonial character can be mitigated, but probably never fully subverted. Archaeology itself is limited.”

—Silvia Truini

the authorities. The same goes for when you find artefacts: you must handle them according to the provisions of the law. Archaeology has domesticated a traditional Palestinian way of dealing with ground and artefacts within these legal frameworks, such that it cannot be easily adjusted and the grassroots participation is severely limited by the constraints of the law. Its colonial character can be mitigated, but probably never fully subverted. Archaeology itself is limited, which is the added value of creating bridges with other professions such as architecture and art.

Dima Sebastia was our first case study for these ideas and it took us quite a few years to gather all the data and build our networks on the ground. We met one of its residents, for instance, who owns the Al-Kayed Palace, and is very historically knowledgeable about not just Sebastia’s written history, but also its oral history. His grandmother for example, was one of the people hired as a labourer during the excavations in 1908 [a project led by Harvard University that used Sebastia locals as cheap labour to excavate the land, ed.]. There are a lot of stories like that there, which we wanted to make sure we archived. Obviously over the last few months, since the revolution started up again, if you want to call it that, Silwan has been on our minds, but the reason we initially decided to focus on Sebastia was that it felt more urgent. Sebastia is 116

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protection of the antiquities, and not so much to do with policing and surveillance of the Palestinian population. Correct me if I’m wrong, Dima, but a few months ago a new police station was also opened at the very edge of the archaeological site in Sebastia.

Dima About seven months ago.

Silvia It’s in an area that is classed as an archaeological zone, but it’s also a public space which the people of Sebastia have always engaged with. It was also – traditionally, historically and presently – used as a marketplace, a parking spot, a playground and before that it was a threshing ground. So it had this history of use and engagement, but now there is a police station there. There is this perceived communication that the Palestinians are inherently dangerous to the settlers and, at the same time, an idea of conveying to the settlers that they are being protected against that danger through complex surveillance and policing.

Dima It’s important to note that as tourists go into the City of David, as they call it, they’re coming in from higher ground. As they arrive, they go through the tourist attraction, which is a new addition developed on top of the archaeological site, and then they move towards the edge of the cliff looking over Silwan where you have this theatrical performance space. It presents the archaeological site almost as if it were a stage, with everybody sat with their backs towards the village. Then you have guides who are not archaeologists, but rather religious tour guides, performing a particular narrative to an audience of mostly Zionist settlers and tourists, as well as the birthright buses that come to the sites.

So there’s this idea of orientation, which we’re playing with a lot in our practice – they’re physically orienting your body to the archaeological site and away from the village, and they’re also orienting the cameras away from the archaeological site to the village. The tourists are watching archaeology, but the surveillance and the cameras are watching Palestinians. We also think about the way in which things are labelled and categorised. The terminology is also being censored and watched – conceptually, it’s reframed to cater to a specific audience – and that is definitely not a Palestinian audience.

Silvia So instead of things being labelled “Iron Age”, for instance, you would have “First Temple period”, which is the traditional religious chronology of biblical origin.

Dima It’s a constantly shifting form of language, as well as a constantly shifting orientation of the body and lens.

Ariel The

expansion and entanglement of the City of David into Silwan takes place through the manipulation of the spatial layers, controlling sight and movement, as well as the levels of opacity and erasure of non-Jewish presence. This is achieved through the use of things like archaeology, architecture and landscaping of the site, but also with the use of language as you both mentioned. A section of my PhD focused on Silwan, and examined the use of optics in the site. I looked at the ways in which El’ad was directing the excavations of various sections of archaeology, while burying, bypassing or erasing parts of the village – that may take place through the routes by which people are led through the site, the excavation lines, or through the landscaping and gardening that literally hides the remaining Palestinian houses still within the City of David. But there are different types of archaeologists working on these sites.

Silvia There’s an established framework in the specialised literature that articulates a substantial difference between the so-called settler pseudoarchaeologists and the university/state function of secular archaeologists, which runs along the lines of inaccurate/accurate, bad/good, politically motivated/ objective. In my analysis, I try to take the point of view of the Palestinian people of Silwan. I want to understand what archaeology does, more than what it says it does.

Archaeologists tend not to acknowledge the colonial present of archaeology much. They’re very willing to go into discussions about its colonial legacies or imperial origins, but when it comes to talking about the colonial present of archaeology today, everybody gets very defensive. By contrast, I want to take the point of view of people who are not professionals, who do not have a formal education in archaeology, and who are just on the receiving end of all these archaeological operations, be they operations led by El’ad and the rest of the right-wing, religious-aligned groups, or be they the University of Tel Aviv or the IAA [Israel Antiquities Authority, ed.]. Palestinians are still on the receiving end.

Ariel As you say, those distinctions don’t help when it comes to the question of rights to the ground.

Silvia When the excavations in Silwan started they were privately funded, and they relied on enthusiastic scholars who were ideologically motivated. Those excavations were then criticised by Israeli secular archaeologists as bending facts for the sake of religious and political narratives. Eventually, 118

the IAA itself started to excavate in Silwan, and went from overt opposition to something like a compromise solution in which they now work together. So the question is, how did the IAA turn 180 degrees? Is it likely that the entirety of this good, methodologically solid Israeli archaeology has become aligned with the so-called pseudo archaeology of religiously oriented settlers? The answer is absolutely not, because the excavations of the IAA are state of the art. They’re

“I grew up several hundred metres from Silwan, I know the City of David well, yet only in recent years saw and acknowledged Silwan.”

—Ariel Caine

providing a better interpretation that is more methodologically accurate. But does it improve the situation? Does it contribute to better representation of all local stakeholders? Does it include the Palestinian people of Silwan more? The answer is always no – there is no substantial change. Settlement has not stopped, and the kind of history that is being portrayed in the archaeological park is not more inclusive. So in regards to this dichotomy between secular archaeology and religious archaeology, the bitter conclusion that I have to come to is that it just obfuscates the fact that Palestinians do not have a stake in all this. The Israeli archaeological sphere saturates all the possible space for discussion, and while there may be two different kinds of Israeli archaeology battling for the truth of Silwan, for the truth of what happened in Palestine and for the truth of the ground in Palestine, where are the Palestinians? They have no space because everyone is occupied by this split between religious and secular. Zionist thinking generally constructs itself with internal dichotomies between secular and religious, but it’s a way of taking the Palestinian other out of the discussion. Neither archaeological practice fully accounts for what the Palestinian people suffer, nor for how Palestinians understand the past of their village.

Ariel As

an Israeli growing up in Western Jerusalem, I can – sadly – say that life was so confidently centred around the Jewish Israeli presence, culture and language that there almost seemed to be no Palestinians. I grew up several hundred metres from Silwan, I know the City of David well, yet only in recent years saw and acknowledged Silwan. Even if one is relatively politically aware, the slowness of the violence through which this process is taking place and the depths of its normalisation within Israeli society mean that there is a deep de-politicisation and naturalisation of the urban environment, including, of course, within the areas of occupation. You have these extreme rightwing ideologists like Gush Emunim going to Sebastia and establishing a settlement [Gush Emunim was the group that led the religious settlement movement, ed.], but in the Israeli ethos we also have Yigal Yadin and Moshe Dayan making their own collections of archaeology [Yigael Yadin (1917-1984) was an Israeli archaeologist and politician who led a number of excavations; Moshe Dayan (1915-1981) was a military leader and politician who used his position to loot antiquities – upon his death, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem paid $1m for 1,000 objects from his collection, ed.]. And you have a series of generals, heads of state and presidents re-articulating the past in order to enable a narrative of continuity of Jewish presence in the region. But only a marginal minority acknowledges and prioritises Palestinian life in Silwan.

When petitions were brought to the courts that the foundations of people’s homes in Silwan were being undermined by the archaeological tunnels, the judge responded by saying that there was no proof or that the proof was not enough to necessitate stopping culturally significant finds, such as those that come out of the digs. The professionalisation of the practice only works to solidify this, in that to most Israelis and, I believe, also to most international eyes, it makes the digs legal, scientific and to some degree ethical.

Silvia You’ve hit the nail on the head – that’s exactly what it does. Whatever happens in the name of science gets a general stamp of approval, because science is believed to be objective and apolitical.

But archaeology is one of those social sciences that like to pretend to be an exact science because it uses instruments of the hard sciences. So we use mapping and quantitative research methods, and we use lab technology – so a lot of science is used by archaeology, but that doesn’t mean that it’s an exact science.

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The images accompanying this conversation are drawn from the collection of Dima Srouji, and document archaeology in Silwan and Sebastia.

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Eventually, the results are heavily interpreted and build narrations about what happened in the past.

Of course, there are also doubts about whether exact sciences are apolitical, but those doubts are especially strong in the social sciences, which are inherently political because they come from a society, belong to that society, and express that society’s needs.

What archaeology does is present something as if it is objective, which means that it is seen as a sort of absolute non-political truth that cannot be disputed because it comes from this ivory tower of science.

Dima There is also the expectation from the funders themselves for excavations to bring value to the funding institution, which has been the case for 100 years. The Harvard excavation in Sebastia in 1908 was funded by a Zionist, Jacob Henry Schiff, who was the founder of the Harvard Semitic Museum [in 2020 this institution was renamed the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, ed.]. He became quite frustrated towards the end of the excavation because the Ottoman Empire dictated that they weren’t able to take the artefacts they excavated back to the Semitic Museum. They were only able to keep the diaries of the archaeologists – a lot of the artefacts ended up going to the museum in Istanbul – and those diaries reveal the funder’s frustration and desire to claim ownership of the artefacts, as well as of the narrative that was being excavated. That expectation is still the case in the City of David today – to excavate and claim the value of the narrative that’s there. Obviously, they now have the support of the state too, so there are no blocks in this case as there were in the past with the Ottoman Empire.

It’s a much smoother ride.

Ariel Can we re-repurpose the methods and tools of archaeology and the state? With Ground Truth, a project that I led with Forensic Architecture [a project exploring the village of al-’Araqīb, which has been demolished more than 170 times over the past 60 years, and which Israeli authorities claim did not exist prior to the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel, ed.], I was in the Naqab desert. In that environment, you’re talking about ongoing erasure through physical displacements, as well as the afforestation projects of the KKL [the JNF-KKL or Jewish National Fund was founded in 1901 to buy and develop land in Palestine for Jewish settlement, ed.], which also owns land in Silwan. So we were working with activists from al-’Araqīb and helping members of the village create

community-led mapping of the land using various constellations of media, media practices and testimony. By using, modifying and repurposing different tools normally associated with the state, as well as introducing DIY or low-technology practices, such as kite aerial photography, we were able to not only challenge the dominant claims of the state and its experts, but also, together with the families, begin proposing a different way of thinking and practising surveys, photograph and politics from the perspective of the Palestinian Bedouin families. The most important part for me in all of this was building a community of practice. What form of community practice could you both imagine there to be around archaeology in Silwan or Sebastia? What form does that take and how does that equip people for the long run, because it’s a very slow process of resistance?

Dima Since the Oslo Accords [a pair of agreements between the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization that were signed in 1993 and 1995, dealing with questions of borders, settlements and Palestinian autonomy, ed.] Sebastia’s archaeological site has been split into Areas B and C. Area B is managed by the Palestinian authority and the mayor of Sebastia, whereas Area C is untouchable to that community. But Area C covers almost the entirety of the archaeological site, so that has now become an Israeli national state park and with that comes zoning loopholes. So there are military archaeologists, funded by the state, and settlers who can come and go into Area C, bringing bulldozers and guns with them – that is something you don’t see anywhere else in the world. Area B is partially under Palestinian control, which means that it’s a living and breathing city, but even Area C, as an archaeological site, is still a living and breathing public space. Because of the density in Sebastia and the way that zoning laws work around there, public space is very hard to come by, so the archaeological site has always been a space where kids can play football in the Roman forum.

Historically, that site functioned as a public space where kids could play and men could hang out and smoke shisha, and the more forested areas let lovers walk down the street as teenagers, where no one would be able to see them. It’s not an area that’s frozen in time and it’s not an archaeological site that’s partially excavated – this isn’t a dead space.

Silvia When you said that Silwan is 10 years ahead of Sebastia, that is very true. The archaeological site of Silwan was once all public space, which is still very

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much alive in the memory of the generation of people who are now in their 40s. They remember when those spaces were available for public use and how they used to go into the ruins or use those spaces before excavations resumed in the 1990s – people still feel that loss. Let us not forget that the excavated areas in Silwan lay between Palestinian houses, so there have always been pathways for Palestinians to move from place to place that crossed through those areas. Over the course of the last 10 years or so, all the excavated areas have been progressively fenced in and closed with gates, the opening times of which respond to the opening hours of El’ad’s park and not to the Palestinian patterns of movement. In some areas, like the water sources, Palestinian access must now respond to the commercial dynamics of this tourist attraction, which means buying a ticket. That is a massive social wound and I have collected the testimonies of many people who are completely crushed by the fact they have lost the public space that they used for weddings to a massive excavation, or that they have lost access to the water sources of the village that their grandmothers used for water and which became a swimming pool in the summer. These changes mean the disaggregation of the social network.

Dima What that means for Palestinians is that we don’t understand archaeological sites as being of the past.

They are specifically part of our lineage and history and we value them, whereas a lot of tourists come in thinking, “Wow, this is really ancient.” In speaking to a lot of the kids who collect pottery shards from the Sebastia site, the way that they talk about them isn’t, “This is part of my heritage” or “This is part of my history and I’m romantically, emotionally connected to these things.” It’s more, “I’m from here and these are cool things that I’m collecting” – almost as if they’re at the beach collecting seashells. There’s something really freeing about that – it’s those objects’ presence in the moment that is valued, whereas the state values lineage. So a lot of the anger that’s coming out of Sebastia today is around not having the right to live in the moment and not being able to use the public space. We don’t question or push our indigeneity.

Silvia Sebastia is still in the very embryonic stages of this development, but in Silwan this has already happened and its impacts are devastating. And whatever the people decide they want to do in terms of resisting or counteracting this is necessarily symbolic, because you need permits to materially

act upon archaeological areas, and everything that happens in the archaeological site is legal.

This doesn’t mean it’s fair, but it is legal, and its effect on Palestinians has been wilfully unacknowledged.

Unfortunately, this is just yet another one of the sore spots of the situation. On top of the dispossession,

“As Palestinians, we don’t understand archaeological sites as being of the past.

They are specifically part of our lineage and history, and we value them.”

—Dima Srouji

on top of the impending demolitions, on top of the tunnelling beneath houses, there is this crushing of the social and symbolic spirit – the connection between people and place. It’s a very refined alienation of the Palestinian people from their land.

Dima As a Palestinian and someone who grew up going to Sebastia as a tourist, we’re fighting for the rights of the future generation and making sure that Sebastia doesn’t end up where Silwan is today. So Dirar Kalash, the sound artist we work with, is recording Sebastia’s underground voids, in which you can sometimes pick up the sounds of kids playing football, just as you can also hear the bulldozers or the birds chirping in the trees. The site itself is incredibly complicated, but also somehow very simple. It’s just a public space and there’s something beautiful about that. We want to try to use Dirar’s recordings and all the data that we’ve collected to shed light on the living and breathing part of Sebastia, rather than focusing so much on the underground, which is the spotlight for archaeology.

So, yes, we want to highlight the ways in which the system is oppressive and, yes, how bulldozers and machine guns are there, and, yes, how settlers are burning olive trees that will never grow back, but we also want to move a step beyond that and think about what public space means in Palestine today How do we, through policy, save public space and actually create a soccer field for the kids, or provide funding for a youth club. There are interventions that are on 122

the periphery of architecture and archaeology, but which are very much relevant to daily life in Sebastia.

Silvia The huge question is: how do we make a better archaeology without losing archaeology? It’s a difficult question, because archaeology is so inherently colonial, and it’s great that there is now an open discussion in archaeological academia about decolonising archaeology, but it’s going to be hard because archaeology is a method. It’s a way of analysing things or an instrument. But instruments in themselves are neither good nor bad. A hammer is a hammer – the fact that I can use it to hammer a nail into a wall to hang up a picture, or else to smash someone’s head, doesn’t make the hammer inherently good or bad.

The problem, however, is that the hammer has the capability of hurting people. So the problem is, do we still hammer nails into the wall if we also have people’s heads lined up all over that wall? Do we still want to hammer nails or should we try to do things differently?

Dima We’re thinking about archaeology in a way where you’re thinking about excavating the ground as a means to better connect with the land and our own individual memories, but also the collective memory. Talking to people from Sebastia, they speak about their connection to water and the absence of water, and to the polluted water that’s there today because the Israeli settler factories produce cosmetics and leather, and then pour their wastewater into our fields. It’s not just about the lands being polluted, but it’s also a lot about what is no longer there. It’s about absence and recognising the memory of what used to be there. It’s about being able to walk down into the valley, filling your jug with water, and going back up to the house. That absence and the memory that remains is incredibly powerful.

Ariel It’s not just a matter of the public space being cut off either. The plans for that area include a new public park, so there’s a whole green belt that’s also threatening to demolish more parts of Silwan. A lot of this is the process of terraforming, of reconfiguring the earth around the space and creating a future that is, in my mind at least, done in a way to not just banish these places into the realm of memory, but to not even allow residents to imagine themselves as being a part of that land. There’s an estrangement that is starting to happen. Speaking to Aziz al-Tūri, a man in al-’Araqīb, he gave the sense that the landscape is transforming under their feet, in front of their eyes, and they are

literally starting to get lost in their own land, becoming unable to imagine that land as theirs, not able to pass on those memories in connection to the space to his son, his daughter. It’s this inability to actually connect yourself to the place from which you’re from.

Dima There is a nostalgia that captures every Palestinian.

There is this running joke about Palestinians being excessively nostalgic and there’s a film that Elia Suleiman made called It Must be Heaven. There’s only one line in the whole film, where Suleiman is at a bar in New York drinking with a Lebanese man. And the Lebanese guy looks at him and says, “Everyone drinks in the world to forget and only Palestinians drink to remember.” There is this idea about memory that is so embedded in our psyche, which I like to call nostalgic paralysis. There’s definitely a nostalgic paralysis that Palestinians carry with them as a remembrance of the Nakba, which is never over. There’s an ongoing Nakba that continues in our bodies, and which continues from one generation to the next. Every single Palestinian has this story from their grandmother or great-grandmother that stays in our memories, in our bodies. Whether you’re from Silwan, Sebastia or any other Palestinian city, you carry their stories with you.

Ariel During one of his artist talks, John Akomfrah spoke about the Caribbean sociologist Orlando Patterson’s notion of life in the absence of ruin as a part of the state of diaspora [Patterson has explored the poet Derek Walcott’s assessment of West Indian consciousness as being informed by “an absence of ruins”, stating that “To be a West Indian is to live in a state of utter pastlessness”, ed.]. As this slow erasure happens in Palestine, this confiscation and blocking off and transformation of the lands, the erasure of pre-1948 as well as of the post-1948 ruins, people are increasingly living in the absence of the remains of places that define them to some degree.

Dima I really like the idea of an evocative object in the ground – ruins themselves embedding memories and the potential for these space to exist beyond the human being. An archaeological object that’s maybe four or five strata down, contains within itself a memory, with or without us. There’s a lot of safety in feeling that way, because it takes a little bit of weight off of us to continue telling the ground what to say, and having this anxiety around making sure that the ground can speak through us. I like the idea of the ground speaking for itself. And maybe within that idea, there’s this sense of the ground telling its own truth, without

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archeaologists trying to superimpose narratives on top of it. There is an intensity and debate about the subjectivity and the perception of an archaeologist , so if we remove ourselves from the equation, what does the ground say? That’s why collaborating with a sound artist to try to get the ground to speak was really exciting.

minds between their religion and the way in which they understand Israel. Their relationship to the state is changing very quickly, or at least it is for people in my community. Those people who grew up in Zionist homes, where their families were a big part of AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, ed.] and so on, came to me over the last two months saying, “We’re changing our minds.

We’re having conversations with our parents and we no longer relate to the state of Israel the way we did growing up. We understand that our relationship with it does not need to be the way that we grew up understanding it to be.” I’m quite hopeful, actually, that the Jewish community abroad is having an easier time with this than Jewish Israelis. It seems to me that physical separation from the state is useful, because I know a couple of people here who are starting to speak up openly, but they’re having a very hard time.

I feel like it’s definitely time for a serious, much more direct collaboration with anti-Zionists in Israel. I just don’t know enough of them.

Ariel There aren’t that many, sadly. It’s also shrinking as a community.

Dima Because they’re leaving or because they’re being converted to Zionism?

Ariel Some are leaving, but there are many levels to this process. On a very small, prosaic scale, I believe for some there’s the need to just conduct daily life.

After battling against your environment for decades, at some stage many people feel the need to pull back and say, “Okay, I still have to take my kids to kindergarten or to school. I need to go to work. I need to rest a bit.” They’re no less political intellectually, or even vocally, but in terms of feet-on-the-ground existence it is quite attritional. Just as an anecdote, the soldiers or university students today never lived under a non-right-wing government; most of those within this age range have lived most of their lives under Netanyahu, where leftism, even Zionist leftism, has been equated with a form of national betrayal.

There’s also an ideological and political loss of direction for the socialist counter-nationalist leftist political parties and social movements that we can see on a global scale. In the context of the depoliticization we spoke of, all the globally relevant issues that come with the rise of nationalism and neoliberalism are also having a considerable effect on the diminished possibility of a leftist anti-Zionist presence within Israeli society.

“The only thing that the collective and I are trying to do is continue the conversation, because there are hundreds of sites that we need to look into. ” —Dima Srouji

Ariel Part

of the changed understanding within my own practice – a change that has taken place very much through learning from people close to me, like the photographer and activist Miki Kratzman and hugely through Eyal Weizman [the founder of Forensic Architecture, ed.] – is how to use, let’s say, my privilege as an Israeli Jew within this system to form networks that stretch and challenge the disciplines of archaeology, mapping, photography and juridical structures. How can we return to the question we started from – that of listening to the Palestinian ground speak? What communal practices do we form? And, lastly, how do you see the connection or collaborations with Israeli Jewish people, for instance?

Dima First of all, the only thing that the collective and I are trying to do is continue the conversation, because there are hundreds of sites that we need to be looking into. Collaborating with multiple institutions, individuals and collectives is really important to get the ball rolling on this investigative work. I was actually in New York over the last four months, which was crazy timing, and the biggest allies during that period were Jewish friends whom I met at protests. It seems to me that there is this new phase, where there is finally a separation in people’s 124

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Dima The Palestinian community seems quite demanding

there’s nothing there. A friend of mine, who was born and raised in a settlement, moved to the US as an undergrad and then became quite politically radical, completely changing her ideas about the occupation.

She went back home to visit family for the first time in 15 years and told me: “I heard the mosque for the first time in my life. And I saw the village across the valley for the first time in my life. I asked my family whether it had been there the whole time and they said, ‘Yeah, it’s always been there. It’s not a new mosque – it’s been there the entire time.’” She was suddenly able to see it and hear the Azaan for the first time in her life. So there’s this sense of seeing and being seen, which is also relevant to the idea of surveillance and who is watching and who is being watched. In terms of collaborations, I think that a big part of it is determining who is doing the labour and who is putting the effort into explaining or crossing the border. The general Palestinian community will say that it’s not up to us to collaborate and not our responsibility to reach out – it’s in Israelis’ hands to make that effort and to approach the Palestinian community with generosity and care and understanding.

And it seems like that’s starting to happen. For us, however, it’s a question of how do we make space for that? We also need to be caring, generous and graceful in the way that we make room for that to happen. E N D

from the Israeli perspective. I have a couple of friends who are artists living in New York and they’ll say things like, “We speak up about this all the time and a lot of our work is about shedding light on Palestinian craft and heritage.” Well, there’s a little bit of a trick there in terms of talking about Palestinian art and craft history as an Israeli, so how do you navigate that, but also are you still working with Israeli institutions? To them, we look like we’re being quite demanding, and we do have a lot of red lines and there are expectations to not work with specific institutions. So I can imagine how it would be quite hard, not because of identity politics, but just because of daily life to check off all of those boxes and say, “Yes, we will not work with any Israeli institution. We will call ourselves anti-Zionists publicly and abide by BDS [the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, ed.] regulations.” Those are almost impossible to do living in Israel, but our demands are quite basic at the same time. There’s a long way to go.

Ariel The direction where I’m asking it from is that I have the feeling that, since Oslo, this cutting off between the different societies has led to a huge amount of radicalisation and extremism. Just by the fact that everything is regulated, there’s no flow between different perspectives in communities.

Everything is either speaking for one or the other.

We need another type of group that can speak across the, let’s say, border and mix the two, not erasing the differences between Israeli and Palestinian members, but forming different constellations or groups of activists, who can keep communication going and allow for different viewpoints that are so crucial in imagining something else.

Dima You’re reminding me of something you said earlier in the conversation, which was about Israelis growing up and not knowing that there is this whole other world that exists in parallel. It is exactly the opposite for Palestinians. You grew up your whole life knowing that you’re occupied, knowing that there is something on the other side that is creating this intolerable life.

You grow up looking at settlements across the valley and seeing an apartheid wall in front of your face, and checkpoints, and being treated like a second-class citizen. The presence of Israel and Israelis, at least in a Palestinian life, is so overwhelming. It’s so present and it’s so loud and it’s so visceral, whereas the experience of an Israeli is the exact opposite. It’s almost like 126

Seven Excerpts About Seven Mirrors Words Evi Hall Photographs Alexandra de Cossette

“I’ve given Evi two tips for her article,” my boyfriend’s dad tells him, gesticulating wildly with his fingers.

“One. She should use the verb ‘reflect’ as much as possible,” (the “much” is bordering on a shout).

“And Two. Sleeping Beauty.”

“I think it’s Snow White?”

“No, no, it’s definitely Sleeping Beauty.”

It’s Snow White (of “mirror, mirror on the wall” fame, if you weren’t following). Even without the rebuttal, this advice isn’t met with universal approval.

“No, no, no,” retorts my boyfriend, “what she needs to do is start it with something like…” he pauses, gazing into the distance, “…‘I finish typing on my phone, turn it to lock screen, and see myself staring back: a black mirror.’” He finishes with a dramatic flourish of the hand.

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Honestly, I wasn’t thinking of either of these opening lines, not that my opinion mattered much at that point.

Reflecting1 on the significance of mirrors in my life, the thing I can’t get away from is not really about mirrors – the object – at all. I’m mostly worried about how many times I fix my hair on a video call. My family have had the good grace to complain about it. “Stop fiddling with your hair!” my mum interrupts exasperatedly three pandemic family calls in. Work, if they have noticed it, are too polite to say anything (at least not to my face).

But I can’t help it. It’s disconcerting spending a year constantly confronted with how you look for such extended periods of time. Noticing how I react to my friends’ stories; then changing how I react to those stories (does my nose really do that when I laugh?); even adjusting my screen to alter the lighting, and seeing how instantly I can transform my face from healthy glow to withered crone.2 These platforms were built, it seems, around the collective design decision that we might want to have conversations sat side by side with one another, staring at a large, glass mirror.

It’s like having a conference call at the hairdresser’s.

To moan about the ubiquity and negative impact of seeing ourselves is, like most contemporary gripes, a modern luxury. There was a time when mirrors were precious, mystical, religious and powerful. They are an object that, once noticed, anybody with an interest in design should love: simple, endlessly useful, redolent of our everyday lives, but with a rich material and craft history. Mirrors have played a role throughout history in art, science, craft and industrialisation, with the object continuously reinvented as a vehicle for new forms of material and cultural expression. Or this, at any rate, is what the Swedish design studio Front tell me when I meet them (online, of course) one summer morning.

Front’s Sofia Lagerkvist and Anna Lindgren have just completed a new exhibition and collection for Galerie Kreo in Paris: Seven Stories About Mirrors (2021). It’s a culmination of almost five years of research supported by Kreo, with whom the studio has worked since 2007, although the duo has never previously produced a solo show for the gallery. “It’s a rare opportunity to work with as great a gallery as Kreo,” says Lagerkvist, who pays tribute to founders Clémence and Didier Krzentowski’s willingness to

support experimental forms of design practice.

“To properly research, and work at the highest level with each craftsperson, takes a long, long time.”

Front, however, did not initially know that they would settle upon mirrors as their area of research.

“We were interested in finding one typology of objects and then thoroughly researching its background, trying to understand how it changes with time and according to the culture it’s in,” explains Lagerkvist. When they started looking at mirrors, it seemed the obvious

“Throughout history, the development of mirrors has always been a hightech process.”

—Anna Lindgren

choice. “It’s all there,” says Lagerkvist. “The strong symbolism, but also the fact that the typology has changed so much in its materiality throughout history.”

Their research into this history, Lagerkvist explains, “is perhaps not the way a scientist or a historian would explore the same subject, but it is the way that we as designers look at and understand it.”

The show is set out chronologically and materially, with each piece representing a historic shift in the way in which mirrors have been made. To inform their work, Front relied on museums, archives and galleries, but the studio also collaborated with a number of different craftspeople – from bell makers to Venetian glassblowers – to create the collection’s seven pieces.

“Even though mirrors are now very common, there’s still a lot of craftsmanship around them,” Lindgren points out, highlighting that this lineage of craft provides a route into understanding the gradual industrialisation of mirrors. “Throughout history,” Lindgren adds, “the development of mirrors has always been a high-tech process.”

Water Reflection Table “A water mirror was a very inconvenient object,” says Lagerkvist. “You had to lie down and you then only saw yourself in what was almost your own shadow – water has quite poor reflectivity, so the picture is very faint.”

This low reflectivity is why the momentary glimpse that you might catch in a puddle seems so dark, its colours

1 See what I did there?

2 No, you’re exaggerating.

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Previous spread: The glass surface of the Water Reflection Table.

Left: One of the Reflection Vases.

Images courtesy of Galerie Kreo.

Below: The Secret Mirror.

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thin looking – it is only a phantom version of yourself, peering back.

For a collection focused on the materiality and history of mirrors, Seven Stories About Mirrors cheats from the off – its first piece, Water Reflection Table, is definitely not water. From the side, its translucent

predict the future from the dark reflections they saw.

Meanwhile, the star mirrors of Machu Picchu were used for scientific endeavours – flat, shallow stone basins can be found on the hilltop citadel, collecting thin films of water that were historically used for astronomical observation.

The decision to replace water with glass – as opposed to plastic or resin, which would have been easier to work with – tells a deeper story. For much of the mirror’s history, glass has been the form’s material of choice. Yet the initial move towards the use of glass, and its subsequent refinement, was a defining material leap forward. It is fitting, then, that the concept of the water mirror should be captured as a pool of glass – a material innovation solidifying those first reflections.

“For most of history the mirror has been such a rare object. People might have only ever seen a mirror once in their lifetime.”

Obsidian Mirror “The archaeologist told us how, when they looked into this old mirror for the first time, they could still see some reflection in the surface,” Lagerkvist tells me. “They could see themselves in a mirror that somebody would have looked at themselves in 8,000 years ago.”

While the Water Reflection Table was thickly poured from molten glass, its chronological successor was formed from a flow of fierce, liquid rock. Obsidian is a dark, dense volcanic glass, created when lava cools rapidly. Front’s experiment with the material is closely modelled on the oldest stone mirror yet discovered: an obsidian mirror unearthed at the Neolithic archaeological dig site at Çatalhöyük, Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), which has been recognised as a Unesco World Heritage Site. In the site’s Unesco nomination, its backers cited the significance of the highly polished obsidian mirrors discovered there: “The fact that the number of mirrors found is small and that some of them were used as grave goods, suggests that these objects were much prized, and further indicates that in certain forms and contexts obsidian could enjoy a highly symbolic role, alongside its utilitarianism.” The Çatalhöyük’ mirrors are not only the earliest mirror objects yet found, but also evidence that these were items of cultural value, not just tools.

These Neolithic objects proved ripe territory for Front, who based the shape and form of their Obsidian Mirror on the archaeologists’ drawings. “We have always been fascinated by these small drawings that archaeologists make when they find an object, which are part of their method to describe or simplify the

—Sofia Lagerkvist

tabletop looks like chubby resin floating atop a glossy, black pedestal. Look closer, however, and you could imagine that someone has prised a frozen puddle from the earth, placing it on display in a Parisian gallery.

That’s actually not far from the truth: the shape of the table is 3D-scanned from a puddle that Front found in a forest, with this scan subsequently transformed into a mould. Molten glass was then poured in and cast, “to make a simple lake of water,” Lagerkvist says.

“We were very happy to see that the surface tension of the glass created a water-like puddle, with faint ripples,” she adds. “In a natural environment, water is rarely completely still: this was a symbol of that.”

The Water Reflection Table combines the most ancient form of reflection with the heaviest use of digital technology employed by any of the pieces in the show: the ancient and natural, saddled to a distinctly 21stcentury digital technology, thereby uniting the huge swathe of design history that Front wish to explore via the mirror form. “For most of history, the mirror has been such a rare object,” muses Lagerkvist, “People might have only ever seen a mirror once in their lifetime and thought it was some kind of a religious phenomenon, an unearthly object.” Indeed, water mirrors have a number of pagan and magical associations. European scryers in the early Middle Ages gazed into still bowls of water, oil or ink (and sometimes the shiny livers of animals) to try and 130

objects in different ways,” Lagerkvist tells me. Front subsequently worked with two stone masons to create a replica of the Çatalhöyük stone mirror, sourcing the obsidian from the same region and mimicking the ancient crafting techniques. “It was made manually – chiselled with another rock,” Lagerkvist tells me.

Like its Neolithic counterpart, the Kreo mirror was polished by hand to create its inky, flat face.

For all the glamour of its glossy, black surface, the Obsidian Mirror is diminutive – small enough to cup in your hand. Front worked with a silversmith to create a setting for the stone, which was designed to enhance the colour of the obsidian and the irregularity of its sides. “For us, this stone was symbolic of the journey that [the mirror] has gone on,” says Lagerkvist.

“From very dark materials, slowly transforming into lighter and lighter ones. Of course, people were trying to get as light and accurate a reflection as possible, but it was the black stone that actually made the strongest reflection. It’s a bit like when you look at your iPhone and you see yourself in its black surface.”

This tension between the contemporary and the historical is suggested in the way in which Front’s research is presented. “We want to create contemporary objects where you don’t necessarily need to know the history to be able to appreciate them,” says Lindgren.

Yet key design choices still anchor Front’s objects to that history. “We wanted to keep it to the same exact size as the original mirror,” says Lindgren. “We thought that was very beautiful - to experience how small the image was that you saw yourself in 8,000 years ago.”

Bronze Mirror The Bronze Mirror is the most decorative piece in Front’s collection. While its amber colouration hints at its material inspiration, the mirror is actually made from glass, held within a cast-bronze rim that is suspended from an intricate, handmade rope.

Although earlier iterations of metal mirrors, chiefly copper, have been found in Egypt and Iran, the next piece in Front’s collection is inspired by the small bronze mirrors that were made in China from around 2,000BCE. These mirrors had a reflective bronze surface, and were hung from a ribbon or silk cord that attached to the clothes of those wealthy enough to afford them.

Their backs were highly ornate and often imbued with meaning, decorated with flowers, plants, dragons, or phoenixes, as well as inscriptions by the maker, which frequently indicated the objects’ links to spirituality.

“If you carry this mirror, you will see great divinities,” reads one, highlighted by Mark Pendergrast in his book Mirror Mirror: A History Of The Human Love Affair With Reflection. Others had links to love and religion. “They made mirrors that broke into two parts,” Lagerkvist explains. “You gave one part to a loved one, such that you would be buried with a part each. It was like a portal – they would know that they could move into the next world together.” Less profoundly, but of no less interest to a history of design and manufacturing, some of these mirrors also exhibited examples of early marketing. “Mr Tu has made a precious and marvellous mirror,” Pendergrast reports reading on one mirror’s inscription. “[There] has never been such a one in the world.”

Bronze mirrors were, however, high maintenance.

The soft surface scratched easily and had to be polished daily. “Each of the types of mirror [in the show] have reasons why they were continually developed [after they were made],” Lagerkvist notes. “They were not perfect. It was almost impossible to make these metal mirrors completely flat, for instance.” As such, bronze mirrors were often slightly dented or imperfect, producing a distorted image. Indeed, although Chinese bronze mirrors were sophisticated materialisations of cultural and economic value, metal mirrors have traditionally been seen as technically inferior to their glass counterparts. “We haven’t found many people actually still making metal mirrors because the reflection is not perfect,” says Lagerkvist, who nevertheless notes that the form does continue to exist in a particular context. “Of course, you can still buy metal mirrors – in an area like a public bathroom, you might have a metal mirror instead of a glass one.” I know the kind she means: fuzzy, scratched panels in the sadder type of service station bathroom, graced with scraps of spikey graffiti and a lingering aroma of urine. Places where breakable glass is not to be trusted.

Lagerkvist explains that a driving aim of the project is to feature “techniques that have some background in craft,” exploring how these skills persist and are passed down throughout history. Bronze, therefore, led Front to the Marinelli Bell Foundry in Agnone, Italy, which made the rim of their mirror. Founded no later than 1339, the foundry has been run by the Marinelli family for just shy of 700 years. “They’re still in the same place, doing the same kinds of work using very similar techniques to those that they were using at the start,” says Lagerkvist. “We feel like bronze has a story

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Above: The Obsidian Mirror.

Right: The Convex Mirror Vase.

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to tell about the continuation of any type of technique that relies on people passing knowledge down about how we make things.”

Convex Mirror Vase Travel around a mile outside of Venice, over bridges and through lagoons, and you reach the island of Murano, the historical glassmaking capital of Italy.

It’s here where the Barbini family work, mirror makers who “don’t blow glass,” as Lagerkvist clarifies, but are responsible for making the coating that creates the crucial reflective backing for a mirror. The Barbini family produced three pieces for Front’s collection, but it is the Convex Mirror Vase that represents their oldest glass craft tradition. “Around 100 BCE Syrian craftsmen near Sidon discovered that they could dip a long hollow metal tube into a batch of molten glass, retrieve a glob on the end, and blow it into shape,” Pendergrast writes. “Within the well-organised Roman Empire, this revolutionary new method spread quickly.”

Pliny the Elder even notes it in his Natural History Book XXXVI: “Sidon was once famous for its glassworks, since, apart from other achievements, glass mirrors were invented there.”

These new glass mirrors were created by coating the inside of glass orbs with hot lead, which could then be broken open and cut down to produce small, slightly domed mirrors used throughout the Roman Empire for cosmetics and toiletries, or else employed as magical amulets. Suddenly, this production method enabled a bright, clear reflected image, with the fish-eye distortion caused by the mirror’s curvature deemed preferable to the murky darkness of the metal mirrors of the period. “There has been so much importance placed on different mirror coatings throughout history,” Lagerkvist reflects, “and the importance of not revealing secret recipes, such as putting lead onto the glass in a very specific way, harks all the way back to the Roman era. Throughout history, it’s been a bit of a power play between those who have the knowledge and those who don’t.”

Front’s convex mirrors have thick, bevelled frames, executed in silver and matte gold, with the small mirror element set in the middle. The studio floats these mirrors above the forms from which they were cut – a pair of enormous orb vases with long, straight necks, and bodies that show the circular cut-outs punctuating their generous circumferences. These parent forms instantly reveal the process of their mirrors’ making,

with their silvered shells cut away to reveal vivid, gold interiors. Convex silver, concave gold. “It’s a beautiful contrast to have the convex and the concave mirror in the same piece,” says Lindgren.

Although they provide an imperfect reflection, convex and concave mirrors have, historically, proven useful tools. “People placed convex mirrors behind a lit candle to [help] spread the light, or in theatres to direct light to different areas,” notes Lagerkvist.

Even concave mirrors had their uses. In his Natural Questions, Volume I, for example, Seneca memorably – and perhaps a little too vividly – recounts the case of Hostius Quadra, who made use of concave mirrors in order to “take delight in the false size of his partner’s very member”.

Cut Mirror Vase Being a glassmaker from Murano in the 14th century came with perks: it was well paid and craftsmen were allowed to marry eligible noblewomen above their station. There was, however, a catch: leaving Murano was illegal, with threats of the death penalty used to keep the craftspeople, and their embodied knowledge, in Venice. In 1291, Venetian authorities had moved the city’s glassmaking industry to the island – both to protect the city from the risk of fires and to reduce the risk of foreign spies gaining trade secrets. “The [craftspeople] were sworn in and that made it possible for them to keep this secret for many hundreds of years,” says Lagerkvist. “And, of course, that really added to the value of the objects.”

“The Murano mirror had a couple of different secrets,” she continues. “First of all, they added a specific ingredient to the glass, so it was clearer than any other glass that had been made until then. Then there was the matter of how they foiled the material on the back, and details of the components within that technique. That all made for very highly soughtafter mirrors, which were considered the height of luxury throughout Europe. It became a massive industry in Venice and was a big part of their income.”

Alongside the desire to make brighter and shinier mirrors, there was an ambition to create sheets of glass (and thus mirrors) that were bigger and flatter.

One early method was to blow glass and “make it bubble and then just open it up,” explains Lagerkvist, “which made very big, flat, round sheets of glass.

Of course, they have a little point in the middle where they blew [the glass], which created a very uneven

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part.” It is, Lagerkvist points out, a technique that many will have seen before. “If you see old pub windows, they have this little ‘nipple’ in the middle, which is actually the centre point from this bubble,” she explains. “The sides were cut out and sold as window glass for big grand houses, while the middle parts were the cheaper ones that poorer people could afford.”

Front’s Cut Mirror Vase represents this leap forward in manufacturing. “People were trying many different methods to find a way to make flat glass,” says Lagerkvist. “There’s a technique called broad glass, recorded in 1226 in Surrey, which the Cut Mirror Vase shows”. This method, with slight variations, began to appear concurrently throughout Europe as well.

Pendergrast describes how “certainly by the early fifteenth century, glassmakers in Germany, France and Italy learned to blow relatively large cylinders of glass, then open the ends and slit them down the side.” By heating and blowing a large cylinder, glassmakers could cut this form before rolling it out like a reverse Swiss roll to make a true, flat sheet.

To demonstrate this method, Front created a mirroredglass vessel that is caught halfway through the process.

The Cut Mirror Vase has been sliced down its middle, then across, like an upside-down T. The top corners of each cut peel away, revealing another iteration of the interior gold foiling seen in the Convex Mirror.

The repetition of this foiling technique reveals the involvement of the Barbinis – a nod by Front to the influence and skill of Murano’s craftspeople. The combination of this large-sheet method, coupled with the island’s startling, clear glass and bright coating, allowed Murano to establish a dominance over mirror making that amounted to almost a monopoly – at least until the 1600s.

replies in which the wives asked their mates to come and fetch them”. These forgeries, however, did not fool the fugitives, Pendergrast explains: “the letters were far too literate.”

The Secret Mirror, of all Front’s objects, is the most conventionally “mirror-like”. It has the most familiar shape – one you might see in a museum or palace, or on the set of one of those period dramas with

“It was very tricky to have big pieces of mirror. So they had a decorative system of using smaller parts of flat mirrors. If something was ugly, they just put a flower on it.”

—Sofia Lagerkvist

lots of heaving bosoms. Its central hexagonal mirror is framed by a faceted border, angled up and away from the looking glass so as to resemble a shallow geometric dish. On either side of this are two smaller mirrors: each cut from a copy of the central mirror, and then attached such that the whole thing can open and close like a cabinet. Where these cut sections meet, the light refracts, causing kaleidoscopic glints. This jigsawed design harks back to the techniques of the Murano craftspeople. “It was very tricky to have big pieces of mirror,” explains Lagerkvist. “So they had this very decorative system of using smaller parts of flat mirrors. If something was a bit ugly, they just put a flower on it. It wasn’t just extravagance – it could cover cracks.”

The Secret Mirror is multifaceted in both history and shape. “For a long time, Louis XIV tried to make mirrors in France, but was not successful,” explains Lagerkvist. Desperate to rival Venice and create mirrors that would – spoiler alert – eventually culminate in the famous Hall of Mirrors in the palace of Versailles, Louis, “managed to get five people to leave the island [of Murano] and come to France,” Lagerkvist explains.

They set up a mirror-making factory in Saint-Gobain, just outside Paris. Perhaps because old habits die

The Secret Mirror In the late 1600s, having escaped Murano, a group of mirrorsmiths were holed up in a secret location outside Paris. It was here where they received letters of desperate entreaty from their wives in Murano.

“Oh, you have to come home because they are treating us so badly and we miss you so much,” Lagerkvist paraphrases. “You have to come back and rescue us!” These letters were likely fakes. Keen to preserve their hegemony over glass manufacture, the Venetian authorities intercepted letters to the escaped mirrormakers, Pendergrast notes, before sending “fake 134

Right: The Bronze Mirror.

Below: The Cut Mirror Vase.

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hard, perhaps due to a streak of loyalty or simply a sense of economics, these mirrorsmiths still refused to reveal their secrets. “The masters did not let the secret out,” says Lagerkvist. “They became valuable to the French king because they had supplied him with mirrors, but not with the secret.”

The establishment of the Saint-Gobain mirror factory tolled the death knoll for Murano’s stranglehold over mirror making. The sheer scale of production for the French king meant that, inevitably, the secrets of the Murano mirror-makers got out. From here, the craft became more popular and ubiquitous. Glass mirrors remained expensive, but they were now a luxury item that was attainable outside the sphere of royalty and aristocracy. “The idea with the Secret Mirror is that it’s like a closed cabinet, but now it’s open and the secret is out,” says Lindgren. “It’s not possible to close it again.”

a real reflection and what are ghostly designed images of windows or trees that lack physical counterparts.

“We wanted to have [the reflection] ‘inside’ the thickness of the glass,” says Lindgren. “So it’s not on the surface and you have this mix of the real reflection and the reflection built into the glass.” In one image of the vessels, I can see an uncanny layering of trees, grass and hills, mixed up with elements of Galerie Kreo’s space; in another, a number of curved sash windows that I’m almost certain aren’t in the gallery itself but, even so, a slight doubt creeps in. “There have been times when we get confused too,” laughs Lagerkvist.

Although created using a 20th-century technique, the ideas behind the Reflection Vases are strikingly contemporary. They represent: “how an object changes with its surroundings, literally reflecting the room it is placed within, and metaphorically the values of their eras,” Front explain on their website. “Of course, reflection surrounds us everywhere and it affects us,” says Lagerkvist. “It’s not only just a tool: it’s really reflecting who we are. One’s self image has become more important in society and it’s become everything for many people.” I think back to my Zoom selfconsciousness with a twinge of recognition. E N D

Reflection Vases “We wanted to create an object that talked about the reflection within every object, but also talked about how an object, just like the whole journey of the mirror, reflects its context,” says Lagerkvist. The last pieces in the collection, the Reflection Vases, are tall, smooth vessels, filled with dancing shadows and trapped reflections. Lagerkvist tells me that this mirror has a more philosophical intention than the others.

“Very early on, within nature, there weren’t many highly reflective surfaces,” she says. “But today, you can see a reflection in a spoon or… anywhere really. Reflections have become something that we see every day, but we don’t even notice. We wanted to make an object that celebrated the idea of a reflection in a regular object.”

The process that allows you to trap these curved and elongated half glimpses is the Graal technique.

Developed in 1916 at Sweden’s Orrefors glass factory

by Knut Bergqvist, it is a glassblowing method that traps coloured layers between transparent sheets of glass. Designs may then be etched or sandblasted onto the glass, before the material is reheated and blown into its final shape – sealing the image in. The first pieces credited as using this technique were part of the Swedish art glass movement, and favoured red glass that looked as if it was flowing freely within the vessels. The similarities to blood earned them the name “graal” or “grail”, as in “Holy Grail”.

There is still something of this mysticism in Front’s contemporary piece: the confusion between what is 136

A Profound Immersion Introduction Lola Sheppard

Until relatively recently, our northern circumpolar regions remained outside most people’s imagination or consciousness. These are places that few have travelled to and which are little known by those of us living in the urbanised (read: southern) parts of North America, Europe and Asia. They are frequently perceived as pristine and empty.

The Ilulissat Icefjord Centre, designed by Dorte Mandrup and built close to Greenland’s Sermeq Kujalleq glacier.

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The building twists, such that there is a path up onto the roof,

Images: Adam Mørk and Cecilie Lindegaard Jensen (portrait of Dorte Mandrup).

which then serves as a public space for the local community.

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There are, however, few regions that have seen more dramatic environmental, economic and cultural transformation over the past four decades.

World powers vie for the Arctic’s resources and navigation routes; climate and local ecologies are undergoing dramatic changes; and indigenous peoples are increasingly asserting their sovereignty and cultural practices. Simultaneously, tourists have become willing to venture further afield, and are now encountering the Arctic’s exquisite landscapes and peoples. As architects extend their interest beyond urban centres and familiar design references, rural and remote regions offer a new challenge for thoughtful design.

Greenland, a territory of Denmark with a population of 56,200, of whom 89 per cent are Inuit, has been working toward political and economic autonomy since Home Rule was established in 1979. Its landscape is one of mountains, fjords, rocks, glaciers, moss and snow. There are no trees, making the articulation of topography the main expression of landscape. This landscape, however, is fragile and ever-changing, a reality amplified as the Arctic becomes the canary in the coal-mine of global climate change.

The Ilulissat Icefjord, a fjord in Greenland’s western Avannaata municipality, is of particular interest in this regard. The fjord is a Unesco World Heritage Site, designated for its natural beauty and the significance of the scientific research being conducted on its rapidly transforming Sermeq Kujalleq or Jakobshavn Glacier. “One of the few places where ice from the Greenland ice cap enters the sea, Sermeq Kujalleq is also one of the fastest moving (40m per day) and most active glaciers in the world,” notes Unesco. “Its annual calving of over 46 cubic kilometres of ice, i.e. 10 per cent of all Greenland calf ice, is more than any other glacier outside Antarctica, and it is still actively eroding the fjord bed.” The annual parade of icebergs in Disko Bay has made the town of Ilulissat (the Kalaallisut word for “icebergs”) the country’s most popular tourist destination. Despite this, the country remains remote and travel to and within it is relatively difficult. Even internally, Greenland’s communities are largely accessible only by boat, helicopter or plane.

It is impossible to consider architecture in the Arctic without thinking about the impact of the local landscape, climate and geography. The recently completed Ilulissat Icefjord Centre (IIC) is, therefore,

highly significant. It sits in the landscape – half pavilion, half public viewing platform – overlooking the small lake that leads to the icefjord. The architect of this remarkable building is Dorte Mandrup, a Danish practitioner whose Copenhagen studio has developed a number of projects that are located in unique, fragile ecologies or else on sites that grapple with troubled historical events: the thatched-roofed Wadden Sea Centre (2017) is based in Denmark’s Unesco-listed Wadden Sea, a system of intertidal sand and mud flats, while Mandrup’s unrealised competition proposal for the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center outside of Kyiv marks the site of Nazi Germany’s massacre of 33,000 Jews in 1941. In both cases, Mandrup’s designs serve to reveal the landscapes and histories in which they sit. Her structures question the environmental and cultural ground upon which they are built, and often seek to remake it. Originally trained in sculpture, ceramics and medicine, Mandrup has built her practice with projects that pursue sculpturally bold yet simple forms, and material choices rooted in local culture and narratives.

I have researched the Arctic for 15 years and a question that has long shaped my reflections on architecture in this region is: what constitutes an Arctic vernacular today? How, as designers, can we listen to and learn from the cultural and material practices of this unique place, rather than importing familiar, Eurocentric references? This is a particularly difficult question in Greenland, which was under Danish control for more than 200 years, but which maintains a vibrant Inuit culture. Equally, Greenland is a country with no permanent building tradition of its own; most of its architecture reflects building styles largely imported from Scandinavia. Mandrup suggests that in an environment such as this, “contextualism” is less about relating to formal (imported) building traditions and more about how architecture relates to the landscape and environment such as wind forces, unstable ground and seasonal differences.

Several times in our discussion, Mandrup used the term “house” in describing the IIC. This, she explains, is an unintentional translation from the Danish, but it also seems appropriate for the intimacy of the project.

As Mandrup suggests, the wider European landscape is groomed and tamed – it is rarely threatening or out of control – whereas Greenland’s topography and climate are quite different. Responding to the immensity of this landscape, however, the Ilulissat building offers

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opportunities for both outlook and refuge. Its protected interior evokes a tent-like shelter or an over-turned boat hull, while the roof provides a generous viewing platform. Both of these allow visitors to better immerse themselves in the dramatic geology and ecology of the icefjord, with its slow, cinematic sweep through the landscape.

As the theorist Timothy Morton argued in his 2010 book of the same name, “ecological thought” imagines human and animal species, ecology and culture working as an immeasurably vast mesh of interconnectedness.

We cannot understand phenomena in isolation; “the ecological thought needs to develop an ethical attitude we might call ‘coexistentialism’”. In Ilulissat, geologic time and the Anthropocene collide, and the IIC bears witness to it all with a profound immersion in its environment. Perhaps the only question is: do we deserve Mandrup’s exquisite building as a setting for witnessing the ecological upheaval we have authored?

Lola So

the exact site was something that you decided?

Dorte There was a given site that was not large, but what was a little bit disappointing when we first came there was that you couldn’t actually see the Icefjord from that site. There’s quite a large rock facing the Icefjord, so you had to go right up to the edge to be able to see the ice field. Part of our design was to make the building overhang the site. There’s a small lake and steep hill that we cantilevered over to make sure that while you’re moving through the museum, you discover the Icefjord on your route. Part of the formal language was to shape it as a boomerang, because we really wanted to exhibit the Icefjord as well as the exhibition itself. Another part of the design was that it twists from one side to the other to create a ramp onto the roof, so that when you’re there, you don’t necessarily have to buy a ticket to go through the exhibition – you can still have the experience of moving up this ramp and then discovering the Icefjord as you move down the other side. So, in a way, creating this movement through and over the house marks a kind of gateway between the civilisation of Ilulissat and this amazing geography.

Lola This site is significant scientifically, but also as an amazing landscape – what were your impressions of it when you visited? Had you been to Greenland before?

Dorte No, which is so interesting. Danes travel a lot, but Greenland somehow feels difficult – “Oh, going to Greenland is a big expedition.” It’s also quite expensive to go there.

Lola I took a group of students to Greenland almost 10 years ago and the experience felt like our Canadian North – very few Canadians go there, partly because it seems inaccessible; it is very expensive to travel there and you have to fly. I think it stays outside our collective imagination, in the same way that Greenland does for Denmark.

Dorte Yes. The first time I went to Greenland was actually in October, when it is already very snowy and extremely cold. But the area changes a lot in the summertime because the snow melts at the end of May and you have this short window of June, July, and maybe August, before the snow comes back.

That window is just amazing. I’ve now been there several times and visiting in the summertime is magical, because you have the midnight sun and a feeling that you’re somehow missing out if you go to sleep. Life is around you all the time and people are up all night, fishing or hunting. I now can’t understand why I didn’t go before.

Lola Sheppard How

did you become involved in the project and how did the community of Ilulissat decide to develop it?

Dorte Mandrup There have been people working on this for many years – both to get it funded and to get the idea through, because Ilulissat is a really small town.

It’s just 4,500 people. The idea was initially funded by a group of people in Nuuk and Ilulissat, and I think they actually tried to get Peter Zumthor to do the project without hosting a competition, but later on the Danish foundation Realdania became involved and they then ran a competition. So we applied and were pre-qualified together with [firms including] Kengo Kuma and Olafur Eliasson. It was a two-stage competition and quite a long process before we actually won. The brief was also put together by Realdania. It featured a thorough investigation into sustainable tourism in the area, also looking at how to make sure that the centre would be used both locally and for research. The brief specified an exhibition, of course, but also a café that could be used by the local community, offices for researchers, and an office for the ranger who looks after the Unesco heritage area.

It also focused on how to place the building such that it didn’t disturb the views from the Unesco heritage park, because it’s right in the buffer zone. Part of our work was to make sure that you couldn’t see the building from anywhere on the trails of the Unesco heritage park.

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Lola So

how does the project address that seasonality, because as you noted the landscape changes so dramatically. Does the project change its reading as a building from summer to winter?

Dorte In a lot of ways, you could think of the building as being a part of the landscape, changing with the season. In Greenland, when you have snow, mobility is very much through dog sleds or snowmobile. Since the landscape is covered in snow, the roof of the IIC becomes a part of that landscape. In the summertime, it’s much more like an animal that is resting on top of the rocks. The idea was that the building should reflect time, because Greenlandic bedrock is one of the oldest in the world, whereas the building has a much shorter timespan, so the idea is that the building just rests on top of the rock. We wanted to do as little blasting of the bedrock as possible, both out of respect for its longevity, but also because the marshes and small plants growing there are very fragile – if you blast something, it can take 30 years to restore the nature around it. So we’ve tried to land on the rock as sensitively as possible.

More practically, when the snow is melting there’s quite a lot of water that you need to drain, so lifting the building up and letting the water drain into the lake in front of it was obvious. When you look at most of the buildings in Greenland, they are all constructed on small stilts because it means that when the snow melts you don’t get the water in your house. Another practical issue is that the wind is so strong that it blows the snow around, so you get snow buildup which can be huge. To prevent that, the shape of our facade is aerodynamic, so the snow blows away from it. We tested the building during the competition in a wind tunnel to make sure that snow would not build up on its facade.

Lola What other challenges were there in building for that extreme climate and how is the building designed to accommodate the environment?

Dorte It was always part of the idea that we should make a building that is sustainable within the climate that you’re placing it in. In this context, you have to think about the extreme cold of the outside compared to the interior: when you are designing a highly insulated building, you need to make sure you’re not creating any cold bridges that might cause deterioration.

Originally, for instance, the house was [going to be] 100 per cent wood, but because of climate change, the permafrost is not there anymore – you have much more volatile movement between frost and not frost.

Wood used to be a great construction material in Greenland, but it is now less durable because it doesn’t withstand the humidity. So we used Accoya on the exterior, which is a modified wood that is extremely durable, and we used steel frames for the main structure. The rest is a wooden construction to create the most sustainable building possible.

Everything was designed to be packed in shipping containers, shipped to Greenland and mounted quite rapidly to use the short construction window of two or three months in the summertime and close off the building as quickly as possible, leaving builders with the winter to work on the interior. Construction was extremely thoroughly planned.

Lola Is the project site not just pure bedrock? Is even that affected by the permafrost changes?

Dorte It’s gneiss, which although a rock is not pure bedrock, so there is still a bit of soil. And what is interesting is that Realdania has also been restoring Greenlandic buildings from the 17th century – old trading stations an hour away by ship. Those were placed right on the permafrost when they were built, but they’ve now had to make foundations for them, because everything is changing. It’s devastating, like how the Icefjord is withdrawing so quickly. You see the effects of climate change very clearly here.

Lola On this question of climate change, communicating that to a public is difficult. You probably have a more enlightened tourist in Ilulissat – people going there are presumably curious and interested – but what strategies have been adopted by the centre to communicate the story of the landscape, climate change and the people living there? How do you hope the building might alter people’s perceptions?

Dorte Well, one of the things is how you hear about the glacier withdrawing. When you go to the Icefjord and see the site, you’re not able to see the glacier, because it has withdrawn so far. You have to travel by helicopter to see it. So, in a way, it is already a communication of the climate change that is happening there that you are not able to see the glacier. Then there is the idea of the centre exhibiting ice cores, in which you actually see the history of the world – you can see the industrial revolution go by, with a few layers of ice that are absolutely black.

There’s a kind of “revelation” when you see them.

You suddenly understand that everything you do around the globe affects everybody else. There’s that idea that you can take those cores from the ice cap

Disegno

Alongside community spaces and offices, the centre houses an exhibition that explores the glacier and people’s relationship to ice.

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and see what has been happening around the world – large volcanic eruptions, changes in climate. Everything is visible in them. I hope that people will understand that we have a responsibility, no matter where we are and what we are doing personally. As well, the Icefjord Centre works with rangers and their activities are part and parcel of understanding the importance of the ice and the Arctic, and not just seeing it in terms of natural resources and oil. I was actually in Kangerlussuaq, west Greenland, with students from Cornell a few years ago.

Even though we’d been working for a whole semester on Arctic issues. Without being too sentimental, being in the Arctic really gave them the experience of being human within a global continuity. It is very healthy for everybody to understand we’re quite small.

Lola Let’s come to this question of cultural heritage – the challenges of designing for a landscape that is protected and where the act of adding a building might be controversial. How do you create an architecture that plays a scientific and cultural purpose, but which also sits lightly on the land?

Dorte Well, one of the things about the Arctic and which, especially as a Dane, I haven’t experienced before, is this feeling of endlessness. The Arctic has no trees and so no scale; there is no measuring tool and the feeling of being human in that vast landscape is very different from any of the other places we’ve designed for. The feeling of creating shelter and creating a starting point for understanding that landscape has been important to us. At both ends of the house, we have these open shelters, where you can find protection from the wind. There is that contradiction between enormous beauty and danger. The cold – and the sense that if you walked out, you could die – is somehow a very exciting or exotic experience, for most Europeans, at least. The idea of creating shelter in this landscape and a departure point was important.

Lola The project is seen as important for Greenland’s tourism strategy, but there is a constant battle between wanting to bring tourism and recognising that it’s a force that actually threatens these fragile ecologies and cultures. Most of the communities are small, so what does it mean when you have twice as many tourists coming through as there are local people?

Dorte It’s extremely important that we work consciously to create sustainable tourism – which is kind of a strange buzzword – because tourism is necessary for these areas to survive. It is no secret that there are a lot of social problems in Greenland and that its transition

from being a traditional culture has been really tough.

Being conscious about how to create tourism in a decent way is part of creating jobs and dignity, and in that sense the Icefjord Centre is important. It goes handin-hand with the Greenlandic government’s initiatives around creating education through tourism. To me, it’s not a contradiction to create tourism here, because you can’t leave Greenland with all the problems that modernism has created for it; you can’t just ignore it.

Lola And I think that Greenland doesn’t want to be “left alone” – part of its devolution from Denmark is developing economic autonomy. Flipping the question around, how is the building being used by local residents? One of my revelations from being in Nuuk was the Katuaq cultural centre [a 1997 building designed by Schmidt Hammer Lassen for Greenland’s capital, ed.]– coming from Canada, where there’s nothing like that, it was so lovely to see and I got the sense that locals really used it.

Dorte That’s the hope. I haven’t been back since its opening because of quarantine rules, but the idea is to make this a place that is locally anchored. In Ilulissat, they have this tradition that when the sun rises for the first time in six weeks, you come out, go to the highest peak and see the sun come up to celebrate, which is very poetic. By having the roof of the house as part of the landscape, it becomes a potential gathering place.

You are outside, but you’re still creating a sense of place.

And so the hope is that the roof will be a Greenlandic plaza, you could say, or a public place where you actually meet and gather. As far as I understand, people are already all over the roof, and that’s local people, not tourists, which is really wonderful.

Lola One of the things that I have thought about a lot is how one understands a modern architecture vernacular for the Arctic, and of course that vernacular would be different in Canada from Greenland and from Russia.

In this case, it would be a Greenlandic Arctic vernacular.

Dorte Most of the design was addressed towards the Arctic climate. We didn’t want to do what many Danish architects have done when designing in Greenland, which is create – with no ill intent – buildings that you would see in Copenhagen or Norway or Sweden. This creates problems technically, but also culturally. Most Greenlandic houses are freestanding for functional and cultural reasons – it’s partly for melting snow, but also because there is no private land ownership. When you live in Greenland, you don’t buy land – your house is on everybody’s land and you create your life around

Disegno

that. It was really important to us that we did not create a culture that belonged to a Danish way of life or else a kind of urban setting. We created shelter at the centre against the western and eastern winds, and we did not landscape anything; we just left everything as it was.

We were really trying not to recreate an urban setting in a Greenlandic context – which is certainly not urban at all. So when you enter the building, the entrance is quite large because you need to wear spiked shoes when you walk around in winter, otherwise you’ll fall.

And, of course, they have large winter coats on too.

You need an area where you can take off your shoes and leave them there, or take off your coat and dry your clothes a bit.

Lola These sorts of seemingly banal observations about having a lot of clothing, having gear, are the things that are unique – which architects often don’t look at, but which make a project a place. I’m interested in how architects learn from these cultural and material practices, rather than importing familiar influences from elsewhere – Denmark or southern Canada, for instance. This is critical, now more than ever, because many countries are coming to term with their colonial legacies. I’m curious – was it difficult being a Danish architect working on this project?

Dorte It’s an interesting discussion and balance all the time. Especially in Greenland, there is no real building or vernacular tradition, because it’s often just been imported from Scandinavia. Think about those wooden houses that we now know as typical Greenlandic houses – while their use of colour is very Greenlandic, the building tradition itself is Scandinavian. In a way, I would rather not relate to the building tradition itself, but more to the way in which the buildings relate to the landscape, or the way that you conceive of buildings in comparison to landscape. I would much rather discuss the building as a shelter for human beings in the landscape. It’s quite amazing: there were people here 1,000 years ago – how is that even possible? I have great respect for that culture of survival. It is not something that I understand, but I admire it. E N D

Dorte Mandrup.

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23.09.2021 > 06.03.2022

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