My apology for being very unproductive these last weeks since I am particularly busy with projects in which I'm directly or indirectly involved including the interview with Neeraj Bhatia (here and here) which, as I wrote in a previous post, may go to another platform. Again, when official, I will let you know where and when to read the interview. However, I may post not-selected questions/responses in this blog. Another project on which I am working is my first guest-posting but again I may content merely with posting abstracts as I'm thinking of publishing them. If so, this will be by 2014. **************************************** Last week-end I was in Lisbon for the triennial whose theme is Close, Closer. This was my first-ever trip to Lisbon, a very beautiful European city with its port, its very lively streets, and colored buildings, and its famous tramway. The Lisbon Architecture Triennial has been founded in 2007. For this third edition, the committee has elected as Artistic Director a young and notable British curator Beatrice Galilee who has co-curated the Gwangju Design Biennial 2011 with Helen Hejung Choi. For this Triennial, she teamed up with three curators Liam Young, co-founder of Tomorrow Thoughts Today, Unknown Fields Division and Under Tomorrow Sky, Mariana Pestana and José Esparza Chong Cuy, and co-curator Dani Admiss. The curatorial team's aim was to draw on a political manifesto that claims that a new form, (rather new forms), of architecture practice is emerging out. Of what? The 21st century? Multifaceted crises? As the curatorial team states, Close, Closer tackles "the political, technological, emotional, institutional, and critical forms of global spatial practice." At issue is new forms of practice. New forms of practice, still stammering but seething, still fragile but resolute (see here and here). Close, Closer is presented as "an intense and multiple debate network on 'what architecture can be,'" says José Mateus, Chairman, also founding Director of José Mateus Arquitecto at a moment when Portugal, but many European countries a well, is struggling against a profound economic and identity crisis. Seven months or so ago, I interviewed the curatorial team for a first look at the curatorial content, strategies — even at a primary stage — and goals behind Close, Closer. Remember the website. The curatorial team regularly posted new questions about what architecture could be: What else can architecture do? When does produce architecture? What answers should architecture be giving today?, and so forth. This website, particularly dynamic since based on a participative mode, invited us to reply to these questions, be you architect or not. Beatrice Galilee said that: The premise of this event is not to give answers, but to position questions about the condition of architectural practice today. These questions — pregnant with meaning or innocent in their simplicity — contain both a statement and a call to action. They resonate on a public stage beyond traditional discourse in order to find their way to a conversation between disciplines of culture and structures of real power. The theme — a generation of young architects in the face of an ever-changing world— reveals architecture's position today. This, the third Lisbon Architecture Triennale, has been commissioned and procured in the midst of the yo-yoing economic fortunes of a faltering Eurozone country where, currently, unemployment for graduates stands at 40%. This is the generation of young architects who may ask themselves if they should be designing the architecture of networks and systems, of societies or conversations, rather than buildings. What interested me in this third edition is the curatorial function of architecture, how architecture can tackle these complex, multi-faceted issues within curating, or what position, role or function curating can play within the architectural apparatus. At stake is the potentiality that curating can offer to architecture in going out of its ivory tower, just as some of the participants of Close, Closer said, to push the architectural practice to be more engaged with the world from the smallest scale to the extra-largest scale. For that matter, I decided to focus on one of the exhibitions programmed there, namely Future Perfect. I will profit from this occasion to discuss the contingent trait of architecture. As an evidence what is at issue, albeit partly, in this third edition, at least in accordance with my interest, is the relationship of the architect and his discipline, and, beyond this, the world. A unquestionable fact: The architect cannot content merely with the scale of building, or, to push further, the very act of building. On one hand, the architect is now extending his skillness in operating at a larger system — not necessarily the scale of the city, but that of the regional, the territory, the planetary — I'm speaking of infrastructure. On the other hand, the architect, more politically-engaged, uses other forms of practice, that is to say, curating, writing and publishing. Although many of them do not build, their influence on architecture is strong. Other build but use these extra activities as a means of leveraging their built projects. But what is common is that they aim to repurpose the architectural practice. An example, present in Close, Closer: Andrés Jaque and his firm the Office for Political Innovation, for instance, examines "the potential of post-foundational politics and symmetrical approaches to the sociology of technology to rethink architectural practices," as he states in his website. He participated in a three-day event 'Super Power of Ten' at the Triennial including two talks 'Radical Pedagogies: A conversation', and 'Phaidon Atlas Talks'. He also took part in 'Definition Series/OLD: from elderly to lateness' at Storefront IS Lisbon, a project curated by New York-Based Storefront for Art and Architecture, which was also part of Close, Closer. The list of the participants is long. And you should have been there at the opening days to profit from the program: exhibitions, talks, performances, etc. For those who couldn't be present, other events were scheduled within these four months including Spatial Agency composed of Jeremy Till, Tatjana Schneider, and Nishat Awan, who curated a two-day event (17-20 October), The Institute for Radical Spatial Education, an event part of the Institute Effect. The event's ambition was to re-imagine professional and pedagogical agendas for architecture through a series of 'actions' that will alter the space within the gallery and beyond, the curators said. If you have read Jeremy Till's Architecture Depends, you certainly are familiar with the purpose of this event. In his book, he defends a new contingently educational methodology for a better — or real — engagement of architecture with the uncertainties of the world. Not far away from Spatial Agency was Design as Politics, another two-day event (20-23 November) curated by Wouter Vanstiphout and Marta Relats. The event is declined as an exhibition "of the work undertaken at the institute and through a series of talks." The participants were invited to vote in the line of participative exhibitions. I decided not to attend the opening week despite the fact that a large number of events were scheduled in September. I decided to go to the Triennial the last week. Future Perfect ı Close, Closer, 2013, Image credit: ULGC, 2013 Future Perfect ı Close, Closer 2013. Image credits: ULGC 2013 Which brings me to one of the strongest points. Of great interest, indeed, was Future Perfect, an installation curated by Liam Young with a large panel of contributors, mostly scientists, technologists, designers, artists and science fiction authors, including Rachel Armstrong, Marshmallow Laser Feast, Bruce Sterling, Bart Hess, Tim Maly, Cohen van Balen, Factory Fifteen, and Warren Ellis, among others. As the curator presents Future Perfect ı Close, Closer, 2013. Image credit: ULGC 2013. Emerging in the shadows of the decaying towers of a post-oil Dubai, geo-engineered by climatologists and influenced by the imminent economic boom of the Indian subcontinent it is a terraformed urban island. A city is grown rather than built, a creature, living, breathing and computing, a seething ecology that has become a new metropolitan megaform. A speculative urbanism, an exaggerated present, where we can explore the wonders and possibilities of emerging biological and technological research and envision the possible worlds we may want to build for ourselves. For the future is not something that washes over us like water, it is a place we must actively shape and define. Through fictions we share ideas and we chronicle our hopes and fears, our deepest anxieties and our wildest fantasies. Spend time in the districts, read the fictions of those who live there, meet friends and strangers, listen to their stories and share their lives. Some of us will be swept up in what the city could be, others will be reserved and look on with caution. We have not walked these streets before, what things may come, in a Future Perfect. More explicitly, Future Perfect ı Close, Closer, 2013. Image credits: ULGC 2013 Future Perfect is trying to present a vision of the future that is somehow ambiguous. I don't think it is completely utopian or positive, but neither is a classical dystopian vision of the future with dark skies and endless rain. It is somewhere in between. Right now we are in a really interesting moment where there are so many unknowns about the future: biotechnology, climate change, failing economies. All these things are massive issues, which as a culture we just don't know how to deal with. We began the projects with a think tank of scienti
