# MANIFESTO /// benandsebastian

benandsebastian

We work out of a need to explore, probe and question the world around us – through architectural constructions. For us, architecture is not only the buildings we inhabit, but also a way of thinking that can be explored through the spaces of mythical stories, utopian models, economic systems and power relations.

We create highly-crafted spatial constructions as a way of questioning our own assumptions about how we inhabit the world around us, inviting others in to question theirs too. Working through a process of serious play, we tackle our interests head-on and are not afraid to explore the dysfunctional and unfashionable. Our recent work has taken inspiration from mediaeval rituals, romantic ruins, office politics and a Manhattan urban legend.

We develop our work through a process of continual ‘story-telling’. Each project is built on stories whose endings have not yet been written. Our works are not ‘one-liners’, but inspire curiosity exactly because they beg for multiple readings.

photograph above: 'Made in Ruins' by benandsebastian (photograph by Niclas Jessen)
see the City of the (Re)Orientated published earlier on boiteaoutils

# MANIFESTO /// Usman Haque

Usman Haque

In the last year or so I've become once again very interested in non-monetary economies (1) and, more specifically, in twisting prisoner's dilemma (2) for useful and practical outcomes. This means I've been looking at cooperative systems and altruism (in an economic sense (3)) and how offering the option to be non-altruistic has, anecdotally, often seemed to be more successful in encouraging altruistic behaviour than systems in which the only other option is to *opt out*. Our consumption (and creation) of energy is of course particularly poignant in these kinds of system.

More specifically, with respect to conversations and 'debate' around climate change and the environmental crisis, I've become particularly interested in how members of the public can themselves contribute to the evidence gathering process; how people can convince themselves of what's going on, so that they don't have to rely on merely selecting which authority figure (scientist, religious leader, politician) to believe -- they all disagree on major and minor points anyway. I want to find ways to encourage people to learn to question the standards of evidence that are thrust upon them. When authoritative sources cannot be trusted, then citizen-led data acquisition/collection/creation/crafting is the only means of making sense of a situation.(4)

This kind of engagement is vital for us (i.e. humanity) to make sense of our situation, and is essential if any solutions are to be found -- Science (note the capital letter) is not the only arbiter of truth, nor is it the only framework for empirical analysis. We are all -- scientists, non-scientists, artists, non-artists (much as I hate those false-dichotomies - but I think that covers everybody, right?) -- in it together. (5)

The point is that there is no easy solution. We (designers, architects, and other pseudo-experts) have got to stop trying to sell people the idea that there are simple and obvious ways to deal with the kinds of complex systems that govern both our social and environmental lives. These things are *not* simple and obvious. If we say they are, then we imply that people who don't do them are stupid -- which is clearly not the case.

It is often said that it is the task of designers to "make things simple for people" - which I find patronising and counter-productive. If anything it is the task of designers to show how *complex* things are, and to help build tools for dealing with that complexity... *not* just simplifying it (which is the basic function of the perceptual systems we are endowed with, so it's definitely possible!).

This approach has manifested itself in a few recent projects which give clues as to how these vague and abstract notions turn into actual projects (6). As it happens though, most of the projects are not yet published online because we're a little too busy developing them.....

What has this got to do with architecture? Well, like all my previous work it has to do with the way we relate to each other, and the way we relate to the spaces around us - and that for me is exactly what architecture is about.

..................


(1) In the mid-nineties I co-founded an online currency portal called the Global Village Bank, that was meant to operate outside of conventional monetary systems. Unsurprisingly, (uh... due to timing?), it went nowhere.

(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma

(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Bowles_(economist)

(4) Part of the reason why I launched http://www.pachube.com/

(5) Many of the thoughts expressed here have clearly been subtly (and unsubtly) influenced by conversations with Natalie Jeremijenko - http://www.environmentalhealthclinic.net/

(6) For example Natural Fuse: http://www.haque.co.uk/naturalfuse.php

# MANIFESTO /// Bob Sheil

Bob Sheil (Director of Technology and Computing at Bartlett)

PROTOARCHITECTURE

In the post digital age, how we design has become of equal importance as to what we design. Never before have there been so many, or so varied, techniques and methods at our disposal each with the capacity to leap frontiers previously only imagined. Designing has become a liquid discipline pouring into domains for centuries the prime possession of others such as mathematicians, neurologists, geneticists, artists and manufacturers. Post digital designers more often design by manipulation than by singularity, and what is designed has become more curious, intuitive, speculative and experimental. Each of these new techniques vies for dominance amongst the cut throat trenches of advanced tooling. They battle to outdo one another, predict the unpredictable, promise the unattainable, materialize the immaterial, solve all our problems, and so dazzle the beholder that all previous paths to architectural wonderment pale into the archives.

Our new tools are more malleable than before, so much so, that no sooner do they graduate from beta mode than a brighter, fitter or shinier sibling has emerged. As recently as twenty years ago, when I began my architectural education, the methodology of designing buildings had largely remained unchanged in 500 years. Drawings were prepared by hand and evolved from the tentative to the fully costed. Things got built, sometimes in strict accordance to what was drawn, but not always, as records later captured. A few well known but rare individuals such as Pierre Charreau managed it all without such dogmatic trappings, designing his magnificent ‘piece de resistance’ (1927-1931) in collaboration with Bernard Bijvoet and the craftsman Louis Dalbet, largely through conversation and modelling. Before them Gaudi, and later through Prouvé, Price, Eames, and others, pioneering efforts to rethink the verbal properties of design moved us forward but the tools to manage it remained largely the same.

Now we are spoilt for choice, and are frantically catching up with the latest definitions on how the design revolution is to unfold. I describe work from this period as Protoarchitecture. Not a recognised word in any dictionary, it is therefore only part real, and that is how I see the material, part real, part ideal. Protoarchitecture recalls propositions that are prompted by vision rather than convenience. It may be plural or singular, evolutionary or revolutionary, temporary or permanent. It is at once a construct of the physical and the virtual. It does not conform; it is by definition, an exception, a transgression between drawing and making.

# MANIFESTO /// Romaric Vinet-Kammerer

(sorry no English translation this time...)

Romaric Vinet-Kammerer

WUNDERKAMMER

« Imaginez les relevés spatiaux futurs, ceux qu’établiront les générations à venir pour tenter de comprendre où se concentrait l’habitat de leurs ancêtres, comment ils dessinaient les plans de leurs cités, pourquoi ils choisissaient ce delta, ce plateau ou cette baie pour se regrouper, bâtir des villes et les nommer… »

Les visiteurs défilent. Certains ne font qu’approcher des hauts rideaux qui séparent le pavillon du parc, d’autres pénétrent dans l’obscurité, y trouvent une place et s’y installent.

« … et lorsque les climats auront changé, à partir de quoi redessineront-elles les paysages dans lesquels nous vivions, la végétation qui peuplait nos villes et les environnait ?

Quand nos intérieurs auront disparu, qu’il restera très peu d’informations sur notre quotidien et moins encore sur nos vies intimes, certains tenteront d’écrire l’histoire des mutations de nos grandes métropoles et celle des existences qui s’y logeaient. Alors, à partir de restes d’édifices et de fragments d’étoffes, les mêmes réactiveront peut-être aussi imaginaires et visions de mondes disparus… »

Le promoteur achève sa présentation et se tourne vers l’écran. Un commentaire off enchaîne, sur la projection de plans et de vues en trois dimensions.

« Entre le conservatoire, la bibliothèque et le cabinet de curiosité, le projet vise à réunir non pas l’histoire de notre époque, mais les rêveries qu’elle provoque : journaux d’exil, utopies réalisées, rosebuds et possibilités paysagères… »

# MANIFESTO /// Norbert Palz

Norbert Palz

SUPER ROMANCE

To write about a future vision of Architecture asks for a systematic concept on how we can blend competing interests and possibilities, be they of technological, economical or social nature, into a building practice. I don´t have this systematic idea that is applicable for all cases at hand. I mostly work on "Wicked Problems" as Donald Schoen would call them. These are problems that mutate while you work on them. Maybe I am the wrong one to ask to write a manifest.
I am not Marinetti. But I know what I strive for.

I will try to explain why I am doing what I am doing through an example.

A couple of years ago I was visiting the site of the Sagrada Familia Church in Barcelona with a group of students. I separated myself from the rest to experience the building alone. The site was under full production with stonemasons working and groups of tourists running through the aisles. I was going down to the basement, passing screens that showed some CATIA models and explained some geometric methods on how a specific part of the Passion-facade was developed. I descended into the model workshop and looked at the collection of analog and digital models that were at display, with the hanging model of the Colònia Güell church as the center piece.
I was looking at an architectural practice that worked with tradition and experiment, it seemed like a continuous romantic attempt to gather the best what a civilization could provide at that specific point in time, augmenting knowledge through practice. The idea of a building site that is still there when I will be gone someday was appealing since it negotiated the author through time, the Individual faded while the Whole became sharper in its contours. This experience had something uplifting humane that blended technology, spirituality, knowledge, geometry and death into a building.

At what stage this blend was taken place I was unable to tell; it seemed as if the disciplines were melting at a certain point of execution into another state that then "made" the building.

All this was not the factual reality, but my experience was.

I want to be part of a culture that does these things.

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# MANIFESTO /// Pedro Gadanho

Pedro Gadanho

LINKING BEYOND ARCHITECTURE - AN HYPERACTIVE MANIFESTO

A personal manifesto must start with a personal statement. Mine is this: I’ve become addicted to hypertext. And this is the magnifying lens through which I look at architecture’s augmented reality. With architecture being a cultural toolkit for permanently re-dressing the builtscape that surround us, today’s architecture can only go beyond itself.

Architecture is like the man whose head expanded. Architecture is not only dependent, nor otherwise oriented. As it asks for its own expanded field, architecture rejects the idea of its own autonomy. I claimed for the interdisciplinary before it became mainstream; I advocated diversity when it wasn’t yet such a daily fix; I’ve investigated architecture as urban practice, as open-source, and as performance... With ideology gone I reflected upon resistance and the ultimate incarnation of Marxism. But after all that jazz how can one devise a non-retroactive manifesto?

Architecture will no longer be about form making. Fuck parametrics. Architecture is and will be about conceptual groundbreaking. And architecture intelligence will no longer be provided by a declining star-system, but rather by emergent networks of alternative practices, community projects and architecture NGOs. For many, only now the language of architecture starts to be a benign virus from outer space.

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# MANIFESTO /// Eduardo McIntosh

Eduardo McIntosh (picture Judith and Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi)

THE ARCHITECTURE OF DECEIT

Setting the scene
The Law of (-1)

There is sometimes a minuscule flame burning inside people who do Architecture. The feeling in the back of their brain that something is terribly wrong with the world. A “splinter in their minds”. For many this feeling of wrong-ness, dissatisfaction and helplessness can never be explained, for its nature is concealed by The Law of (-1).

We need to understand that life is WAR, that we all are driven by the will to power, and that the lofty ideals of the “magnanimous human spirit”: equality, justice, freedom, etc are in practical terms absent from us, for we are not human spirits, we are flesh and bone. Quoting from Nietzsche's Beyond good and Evil: "Even the body within which individuals treat each other as equals ... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant—not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power."

We need to understand that in a WAR everything is permitted, and that deceit is the strongest weapon (the first deception is to convince us that there’s no WAR being waged) and that its power is waged against us in every aspect during every second of our everyday life...we live through a parade of constant deceit. That is how we voluntarily become slaves, how we are lazy enough to not distinguish 1 from (-1). Not acknowledging the rules of the game, not even being able to see that there’s actually a game going on (WAR) is what makes Revolutionary Architecture a naïve endeavor

Here some examples of how The Law of (-1) is so pervasively and efficiently wielded upon us, telling us a tale that actually masks an opposite reality:

-How the United States Federal Reserve is actually totally the opposite (-1) of what its name implies: the Fed is a privately governed bank which’s sole interest is not federal well being but its proprietor’s own well being. Its mission is to regulate private banks, and yet it is the biggest most powerful private bank. How in the most hypocritical way the 100, 20 and 5 notes printed by the Fed show the images of citizens who were openly against institutions like it:

Benjamin Franklin:
“The inability of the colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III and the international bankers was the PRIME reason for the Revolutionary War."

Andrew Jackson:
“Controlling our currency, receiving our public moneys, and holding thousands of our citizens in dependence... would be more formidable and dangerous than a military power of the enemy.”

Abraham Lincoln:
“The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, but it is the Government's greatest creative opportunity...The taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest, discounts and exchanges...Money will cease to be the master and become the servant of humanity. Democracy will rise superior to the money power."

-How the 2009 Nobel Peace prize was awarded to the commander in chief of the most powerful army on earth, even after he has failed to keep his campaign promise of ending occupation in Iraq and furthermore, has started himself a new war in Afghanistan. Thus, this year the Nobel Peace prize was contradictorily (-1) awarded to the leader of the most powerful army in the world which is currently engaged in a war with one of the weakest. (Also it deserves pointing out that the deadline for submitting candidates came just 12 days after he entered the White House)

-How we feel so socially magnanimous when we design housing for the poor, but we don’t take real steps to end poverty (-1). How we want to give the poor pretty dwellings to sedate them and prevent them from uprising, but we don’t want to really end poverty, we only want to keep the poor from waking up and taking back what was stolen from them by law.

-How we make sure every project we make has a ‘green’ aspect, while we refuse (-1) to tackle the real socio political roots of the environmental problem. (Not produce more, but rather consume less and distribute more evenly)

Moving forward by seemingly moving backwards
Embracing The Law of (-1)

Nowadays generalization is a sin widely avoided because of the sovereign law of political correctness (exercising political correctness could be interpreted as following ‘the correct opinions’ which suggests that there is a fixed ‘one and only’ way of thinking. Could a Status Quo manipulated ‘political correctness’ be the (-1) of Freedom of thought?). For this reason, ‘Every’ and ‘All’ will be interchanged for ‘Some’ in the following examples of The Law of (-1)

Some priests are pedophiles
Some judges break the law
Some peace makers wage wars
Some safe keepers of your money steal it
Some people who say they want to make you smarter make you dumber
Some people who say they want to liberate you enslave you
Some people who say they want to give you democracy decide every aspect of your life

Some people say or sell themselves as exactly the opposite of what their real intentions are. So why don’t SOME OF US apply The Law of (-1) to our architectural endeavors. Let’s multiply our true desires by minus one to keep our real intentions hidden. Let’s create a façade for ourselves of being the most ardent followers of the Status Quo of our profession. Let’s strive to be socially oriented, technologically ingenious, politically correct, democratic, environmentally friendly, elegant, parametric, generative, responsive, et al….(all the jargon that actually keep us distracted from making projects that actually mean anything or have any chance to make a change) . Let’s operate under this guise within the empty carcass of our architectural profession (soon to be accompanied by the half eaten remains of architectural academia). Lets do all of this while we wage war outside of (the orthodox definition of) architecture (for the war inside has long been lost). Let’s not forget we can construct our own unorthodox clandestine operational field.

The danger of hope and the illusion of choice
Seen the un-see-able and becoming ourselves un-see-able

Let’s not forget either that the cause of Revolutionary Architecture is a lost battle. Let’s not covertly fight in order to have hope, let’s not covertly fight trying to have a choice, for no hope or choice really exist, only the illusion of them. Let’s covertly fight because even though there’s no escape, at least this way we know of our condition of slaves and we are aware that we are being raped mercilessly by the same custodians who we appointed to guard us... Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

This manifesto Is not written in allegiance to the Left or the Right, the Capitalist or the Socialist, Republicans or Democrats, for these factions are within themselves neither left or right, capitalist or socialist, republican or democrat…they are always the smoke screen puppet show put in front of us to keep us from seeing the ever present invisible third parties. This manifesto could actually be summarized as a wake up call to learn to see the un-see-able and to learn the art of becoming our selves un-see-able.

Revolutionary Architecture is ineffective when it’s visible. It itself becomes part of the problem, for it gives hope, and hope makes the masses think: “don’t worry somebody is out there doing something about it” plunging us all into inaction.

The true Revolutionary Architecture should be an architecture of sedition. It’s not carpet bombing, it’s smart bombing. It’s not broad strokes, it’s surgical intervention. It’s not diluted in a building, it’s concrete in an idea. For, as Aldo Rossi states “In a certain sense, there is no such thing as buildings that are politically ‘opposed’, since the ones that are realized are always those of the dominant class” (The Architecture of the City)

That is why, if the aim of some of us is to see architecture having real power to influence society in a positive way (again for some others this might not be an aim), Just imagining the future is useless because 99% of the time these ‘new futures’ are just personal interpretations of ‘what smell is floating in the air’ thus the most talented ‘imaginers’ are just the ones who have honed their olfactory organs the best, meaning that what we think of avant-garde and innovative and revolutionary is just a projection of the Debordian Spectacle. Then, the remaining 1%, which manage to escape from the traps of trying to find ‘the new’ and really develop projects which tackle issues at the root, (and not as a band aids) still fail to achieve any real revolutionary power in the end, for this 1% only create hope and the false illusion of choice (actually becoming the (-1) of revolution). Thus, the desirable scenario would be that that 1% which is lucid enough to work outside the pressures that homogenize us (even though we might think nowadays architectural production is incredibly heterogeneous) does so undercover.

And more importantly this 1% of truly alternative visions of the future should be delivered riddled and tangled in a shell that seemingly fits the smell of the other 99% to pass undetected, to grab the fluttering attention of the masses. But once the bait has been taken, this 1% should not give hope for free. (It should not give hope at all) it should compel its viewers to go through the tedious task of un tangling its true meaning…just to show then that there’s no hope. For hope is the drug that keeps us inanimate. Furthermore there’s no way to make any person interiorize this due to the fact that since our early childhood the word HOPE has been imbued with the most sensual connotations. For this reason a momentary glance at a project is not enough. Successful Revolutionary Architecture should be a journey, an undercover deceitful journey, which pretends to comply but actually lays the seeds of dissent.

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# MANIFESTO /// Emmanuel Dupont & Colin Priest

Emmanuel Dupont & Colin Priest
(picture The rise of Neptune Colin Priest/Greg Andrews -Nuit sans Opéra)


The Event MANIFESTO

In a world accented by youth and speed, edges rather than content are the physical reality.

Within those, human relationships make and un-make. Collaborating is the issue. Knowing and arguing your position is another.

Hard and soft matters as well as nothingness may hook, plant and position a place but the challenge of contemporary architecture is to get up close and personal to people not conceptually or physically but in a way to sustain opportunity across generations.

Why care about form that will suit no-body? Slow down, be selective. Forget the single function if everything else is multi-platform. Reconsider a sensitive adventure beyond efficient manufacture and towards an agile assembly evolution.

What if we cared more about time? Working the instant, the long term, the short term and the structure that makes any event magical (or any other basic terms that enhance everyday life).

Let us construct moments to remember and everything in-between.

# MANIFESTO /// Vito Acconci

Vito Acconci (for Iconeye)

A tale of two or more architectures
(An architecture of fairy tales)

It is the best of architectural times, it is the worst of architectural times. It’s the age of lightness, of fluid architecture; it’s the age of architecture that’s only constructed into forms of fluidity and lightness that themselves remain solid and heavy. It’s the epoch of architecture that emerges and grows as a living creature; it’s the epoch of architecture that only looks as if it emerges and grows, that only looks like a living creature. It’s the era of sensual architecture; it’s the era of an architecture of visual affects. It’s the season of virtual architecture, science-fiction architecture; it’s the season of architecture that, when built, comes tumbling back down to earth. It’s the spring of code-writing and computational architecture; it’s the winter of generic architecture generated by and justified by numbers. We architects and designers practice operations now that will make architects ultimately unnecessary, we anticipate architecture that designs itself; in the meantime, we’re narrowed down to the chosen few starchitects. We architects and designers harness multiple complexities; all the while we refine complication into elegance, we revive aesthetics, we do something that smells like art, we resort to taste and sophistication, we tag onto an ‘upper class.’ We architects and designers make places for people; but the more parameters we use to design, the less our design-process can be read in the places we build – if people can’t ‘get’ the buildings we make, then those buildings are meant to appear as a force of nature, and we expect from people only belief.

# MANIFESTO /// Marcos Cruz

Marcos Cruz

NEOPLASMATIC DESIGN

The rapid development of innovative technological approaches in the realms of biology, microbiology, bio-technology, medicine and surgery are becoming of immense significance to architecture, demanding our attention due to their inevitable cultural, aesthetic and technical implications. Marcos Cruz investigates with students of Unit 20 at the Bartlett School of Architecture the impact of these emerging and progressive biological advances upon architectural and design practice. The unit has been looking at the current groundswell of experiments and creations that utilise digital design as a method to explore and manipulate actual biological material. A notion of design is emerging in which interdisciplinary work methodologies, traded between physicians, biologists and engineers, as well as artists and designers are increasingly occurring, giving rise to hybrid technologies, new materiality and hitherto unimaginable potentially living forms. The results of these conditions, defined as neoplasmatic, are partly designed object and partly living material. The line between the natural and the artificial is progressively blurred. More than derived from scaled-up analogies between biological conditions (cellular structures) and larger scale constructs (architecture), as commonly expressed in much contemporary bio-architectural work, Neoplasmatic Design implies ‘semi-living’ entities that require completely new definitions.

Caption:

Work featured by Marcos Cruz and Unit 20 students Samuel White, Jens Ritter, Hannes Mayer, Yousef Al-Mehdari and Steve Pike.

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# MANIFESTO /// Viktor Timofeev

Victor Timofeev

My vision of a near future metropolis is tied to my experience of growing up skateboarding the streets of New York. To a skateboarder, urban objects lose their immediate practical functions and are forced to behave as objects of pleasure, transforming a simple street into a funzone. In this way, a skateboarder's vision of the metropolis sees the dreams of the 60's era collectives such as Archigram and the Situationists come true. This logic led me to explore forms found from the street on paper, joining the lineage of fantastical, hypothetical and quasi-utopian architectural situations. With time, street objects were expanded to include all aspects of design that a normal inhabitant of a metropolis is confronted with on a daily basis, recycled and juggled in a non-sensical, humorous way.

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# MANIFESTO /// Nic Clear

Nic Clear (picture extracted from Unit 15's work by Ben Marzy)

1. The Architecture Of The Near Future will not be what you think it is going to be; it certainly wont be the big bright shiny world depicted in the pages of the architectural press and fostered by the architectural profession. The architecture of ‘bigness’ offers nothing but a vacuous future of shopping malls, cappuccino’s and antidepressants.

2. The Architecture Of The Near Future is not the architecture of the architectural establishment, which has proved itself to be intellectually and philosophically bankrupt, the corporate architectural complex does not produce a vision of the future only images of the future.

3. The Architecture Of The Near Future needs to re-capture the speculative and the imaginative aspirations of earlier utopian movements without becoming mired in the internecine squabbling and neurotic formalism that plagued such tendencies.

4. The Architecture Of The Near Future, if it is to survive as a discourse and not just as a job, must embrace new ideas, new modes of practice and new forms of communication.

5. The Architecture Of The Near Future will be open and inclusive, the top down approach to architecture is already on the decline, architects must become enablers rather than iconoclasts, the heroic concept of the architect is a romantic fiction and largely a hangover from a late C18th conception of the ‘gentleman’ architect.

6. The Architecture Of The Near Future will be fun, play should be at the heart of the creative processes that inspire all architecture, we have reached a point where we understand the typological and programmatic issues that underpin the banalities of production, however we have lost a sense of purpose and joy that should be at the heart of every project.

7. The Architecture Of The Near Future needs to engage with a new set of values and develop new goals, the architecture of late capitalism predicated on consumerism and the false ideology of growth has to be abandoned; greed and conspicuous consumption are the false idols of a redundant epistemology.

8. The Architecture Of The Near Future will not see technology as an end in itself but will embrace technology in surprising and original ways, the very foundations of how we think about technology need to be reconceptualised.

9. The Architecture Of The Near Future will not be predicated on the technology of the visible, but rather technology as an extension of the visceral. The idea of technology as ‘other’ has ceased to be viable; we are intimately connected with it and by it, we are technology.

10. The Architecture Of The Near Future will be a social discourse and as such it has to adopt social forms of communication; architecture is trapped by the conventions of its representations, which are insular and hermetic, we need to question the efficacy of our current forms of representation and adopt tactics derived from other disciplines.

11. The Architecture of the Near Future will utilise design skills developed by the current generation of young architects that allow migration across a range of different disciplines, young designers are no longer defined by the names of their courses or their jobs but by the software they inhabit.

12. The Architecture Of The Near Future will utilise open source methods and protocols, ideas and techniques will be collectively developed and disseminated, mutual co-operation is becoming the norm in the development of software and in on-line communities, if we can operate in this way in virtual environments we must be able to apply these ideas into our actual worlds.

13. The Architecture Of The Near Future will embrace the abstract and the speculative; it will not be constrained by client, cost or patronage but only by the limits of the imagination.

14. The Architecture Of The Near Future will not be a thing it will be many wondrous and complex things, it will be inclusive and non-hierarchical, it will be about creating narratives that celebrate diversity and differance.

15. The Architecture Of The Near Future will be a hybrid, it will use ideas of collage, montage and bricollage, it will be an architecture of copy and paste, the architecture of purism and the mono-culture is already dead.

16. The Architecture Of The Near Future will embrace DIY and the role of the amateur, professionalism masks a discourse of vested self-interest and the perpetuation of a set of false values.

17. The Architecture Of The Near Future will not be an exercise in shape making, whether we are talking about blobs or cubes we need to move on from reductive formalist concepts, shapism is the art of the banal and we need to look beyond the banal and toward the extraordinary.

18. The Architecture Of The Near Future will not be simply about buildings, architecture has always been about more than buildings anyway, the first question an architect must always ask ‘is a building even necessary?’

19. The Architecture Of The Near Future will redefine aesthetics and good taste; the hegemony of morality, hygiene and functionality will be re-imagined as a playful intersection of the impossible, the improbable and the dirty.

20. The Architecture Of The Near Future will not be about the plan, the section and the elevation, the new architectures will be generated, developed, represented and experienced through time based means.

21. The Architecture Of The Near Future is already with us, though many people do not yet realise this. The ground has already shifted, the certainties that were once taken for granted have, to use Marx’s phrase, melted into air, we have entered a state of global flux, however it will take some time for the world we think we are living in, to be the same as the world we are actually living in.


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# MANIFESTO /// Teddy Cruz

Teddy Cruz (for Iconeye)

In the context of a post 9-11 political equator that divides the world and the city between enclaves of mega wealth and sectors of poverty, urbanities of labour and surveillance, the formal and informal, our institutions of architecture have lost their socio-political relevance. Instead, the architecture avant-garde has become fully complicit with an international, neo-liberal project of privatisation and homogenisation, by camouflaging gentrification with a massive hyper aesthetic and formalist project.

New experimental practices of intervention in the collective territory will emerge only from zones of conflict. The radicalisation of the local in order to generate new readings of the global is transforming the neighborhood – not the city – into the urban laboratory of the 21st century.

The micro heterotopias emerging within small communities across the world, provoked by social emergency, are producing non-conforming spatial and economic contingencies that will incrementally pixelate the large with the small. These economic and political informalities generate a different idea of density and land use, a counter form of urban and economic development that thrives on social organisation, collaboration and exchange.

Contemporary art and architecture’s task is not only to reveal ignored socio-political territorial histories and inequalities within this polarised world, but also to generate new forms of sociability and activism.

# MANIFESTO /// Geoff Manaugh

Geoff Manaugh (for Iconeye)

If architects, critics, historians, bloggers, professors, journalists, construction magnates, city planners, etc really want to talk about architecture, in a way that has any meaning at all for anyone who actually lives in this world (and who doesn't teach at Columbia), then they need to talk about architecture in its every variation: whether a structure is real or not, built or not, famous or not, or even standing on the surface of the earth.

Everything is relevant to architecture - from plate tectonics and urban warfare to astronomy and the melting point of steel. There is architecture lining the streets of New York and Paris, sure - but there is architecture in the novels of Franz Kafka and WG Sebald and in The Odyssey. There is architecture on stage at the Old Vic each night, and in the paintings of de Chirico, and in the secret prisons of military superpowers. There is architecture in our dreams, poems, TV shows, ads and videogames - as well as in the toy sets of children. The suburbs are architecture; bonded warehouses are architecture; slums are architecture; NASA's lunar base plans are architecture - as are the space stations in orbit about us.

Stop limiting the conversation.


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# MANIFESTO /// Guy Rottier

Guy Rottier

MANIFESTO

Architecture is being invented just like one invents a car or a plane. It has no boundaries and can be exported like any other creation. Sites never compelled a predetermined architecture.

Architecture has no public interest but private, except for some public buildings or monuments.

It is the synthesis of all arts including every discipline and in that regard it should be free and should only obey to technical constraints, security, hygiene and land planning.

But Human beings have a different judgment. Deep frozen in the past and crazy about tradition, they added such useless constraints that any evolution seems to be impossible. Housing is yet the basis cell of any society is currently the only field where progress, especially in France, is almost impossible, in the global indifference of users and most of architects.

French (original) version:

MANIFESTE

Toute réalisation créée par l’homme, sur terre, sous la mer ou dans l’espace est architecture.

L’architecture s’invente comme on invente une voiture ou un avion. Elle n’a pas de frontières et peut s’exporter comme n’importe quelle création. Les sites n’ont jamais exigé une architecture prédéterminée.

L’architecture n’est pas d’intérêt public mais privé, sauf pour certains bâtiments publics ou monuments.

Elle est la synthèse de tous les arts incluant toutes les disciplines et à ce titre elle doit être libre, ne devant obéir qu’aux contraintes techniques, de sécurité, d’hygiène et d’aménagement des sols.

Mais l’homme a un jugement différent. Congelé dans le passé et malade de la tradition, il y a ajouté de telles contraintes inutiles que toute évolution semble vouée à l’échec. L’habitation, pourtant cellule de base de toute société est actuellement le seul domaine où le progrès, surtout en France, est quasiment impossible, dans l’indifférence générale des utilisateurs et de la plupart des architectes.

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# MANIFESTO /// Introduction

MANIFESTO
MANIFESTO
MANIFESTO
MANIFESTO
MANIFESTO

October thematic will be tackling the way we (architects and others) are able to express a vision thanks to words via a manifesto. We thus proposed a certain amount of people we admire the work to write a small text expressing the involvement of their work. We don't have much answer yet but it will be probably coming during the month...
We hope that hopefully it could create a very interesting corpus...