Ads9-Intro Brief

ADS9 THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE: Urban Logics and Institutional Forms Philippe Parreno, Palais de Tokyo ADS9 THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE: Urban Logics and Institutional Forms Alison Crawshaw & Beth Hughes workshops by Ryan Neiheiser Abstract Until recently the two understandings of institution; the organisation and the physical building hosting that organisation, have been inextricably linked. Understood as one in the same thing, these architectural artifacts have guided our reading and perception of the city. Currently, with shifts in technology, governance and society, and the more overall processes of urbanization, these two entities – the material and organizational - have slowly started to drift apart. ADS9 will take its own position on what defines the contemporary institution. Projects will test the spatial consequences of these new definitions and explore the relationship between the material and immaterial constituents of the institution to make new proposals for architecture and for the city. Introduction As the earth’s surface is rapidly consumed by the ravenous process of urbanization, a formless mud that creeps ever outward and seeps into our cities under the guise of the regeneration schemes and masterplans, ADS9 asks what is the role of architecture in this squalid jumble? Architecture is the threshold, the defining moment between interior and exterior, it frames operations, configures exchange – it is the physical organisation of our coexistence. With this understanding we ask how the singular architectural intervention, or network of interventions, can be instrumental in today’s rampant disoriented scape of urbanization? Punctuating the endless space of the urban are its institutions: vessels of civic organization and culture that orient us in the isotropic fabric of the city. From post-office to prison, psych-ward to school, the city is laden with atmosphere and ethos, imbued with character and control, from the various institutions that are embedded in its fabric. These places give definition, body and inflection to their entire neighbourhood and the territorial city that surrounds them. They form multiple networks from which we read the city. Through these networks, combined with their recognizable form and architecture, they gain their agency. Masao Komura, 1968 Masao Komura, 1968 Noli plan of Rome The institution was effected in the French Revolution. Replacing royal societies that had been established through patronage, the ‘institut’ was like an automaton; collectives that were liberated from the demands of aegis, setup with symbolic purpose and loyal to their own demands. Their architecture operated as the receptacles of the human energy dedicated to the establishment, people would flow in and out but the architecture, the institute, would stand – architecture and organization itself inextricably linked in the material world. The size, distribution, even the interior décor of institutions, tells a story of the city’s machinations. In London or Vienna, they are far too big, bloated and heavy as befits imperial capitals. They sit like ziggurats in the city accumulating power like they accumulate dust, entire lives lost in their corridors. In Switzerland they are deceptively small – a villa here, a villa there, but all connected by subterranean passages, a secret network of power. In Paris they spread out along the boulevards in resplendent glory, boasting France’s cultural supremacy. Australia, a teenage nation still clinging to the mother monarch, has almost neglected to build institutions at all. In the currently shrinking field of architecture, a paradoxical condition where architecture is hugely populist and yet in a tragic state of decline, now more than ever the heroic starchitect is employed to generate the images of power, their buildings testimonials to political will and favour. Institutions are the key victims of this architectural extravagance. Museums and churches alike are contorted into ever more complicated forms to symbolize the success and benevolence of the leading power. Inherently symbolic in their nature, institutes have always demanded a certain type of architecture, but increasingly these buildings no longer serve to host the civic function they were once intended, but are rather scrims for the image they present. As patterns of power divest themselves into further more diffuse and opaque systems, where the end of public and beginning of private can no longer be distinguished – how is the institution situated within new forms of economy and power? Digital technologies compete with local services until the post office, police station and local council are reduced to a call centre and a website, these traditional bastions of the community are all but gone leaving behind the generic city. Streamlined services and greater inter-community care means that the large facilities of health and security are either discarded or shunned to the periphery. What happens, as these glorious behemoths, stranded in the city fabric, are declared redundant and their patients and prisoners cast out onto the street? These relics of architecture are then left to wallow conspicuously – abandoned giants in the city. Conversely we see the emergence of new institutions, a proliferation of organisations that supposedly transcend national borders and local governance to constitute trans-global intergovernmental bodies with their own treaties and laws. This ubiquitous collection of acronyms (WHO, ICC, IPCC, UNESCO) offers the potential of a new idea of the institution. They represent the opportunity to argue for re-establishing the idea of insitutions in a new way; institutions that are organized around contemporary problems that cut across national boundaries and private concerns. If we accept the changed nature of our cities, our politics and networks of power, then what is the role of the institution and the architecture that shapes it? Do they simply cease to physically exist? Do we still need this idea of the civic organization as a formal gesture in the city? Does the institution need to change, to become flexible, intangible and insubstantial in its physical manifestation forever morphing to the ever-changing needs of the new mobile city? Or in the face of all this opacity and ambiguity, the fluidity of boundaries and the sliding slippery nature of our governance, is that when we need architecture to be slow and bespoke, to stave off the confusion and to anchor our consciousness and understanding to something palpable and solid. Should it amass itself into ever-heavier more immovable forms, critical mass in the face of adversity, or conversely should it disintegrate itself into a far smaller, insidious stealth network of tiny architectural devices. Can we imagine a new architecture that matches the changing nature of the institutions they host or should we do away with them and contemplate a new vision of the city all-together? These questions the point of departure for ADS9 and frame the conceptual ‘site’ of intervention. Interpretations on the definition of institution are deliberately wide ranging and form the lens through which to discuss the agency of architecture as a whole. Hans Haacke Method ADS 9 will work together on a collective research project to generate our definition of institution. This research will serve as the platform for studio discussions and debate, framing the presentation of our collaboration and for launching design proposals. The studio will occupy itself with 3 scales: territory, urban, architecture. Projects will readily move between these scales throughout the year – it is not a linear process. We will consider architecture through details, plans, and networks in the city. A series of briefs working alternately through these scales, switching between research and design, will ensure that the two disciplines and all operative gauges of architecture, intimately inform one another. There is no specified program or site for the thesis project although it should be generated from explorations and research into institutions, the mechanisms behind them and their occupation of the territory. Projects will investigate the tactics and spatial innovations latent in institutions and deploy them for new speculations on the potential and instrumentality of architecture and its role in the city. Structure (Disruptions) While we open the thematic frame of Institution up to broad interpretation and interrogation and hope to be surprised by what we discover, ADS9 design solutions to launch from a very specific focus – structure. Understanding the structure of the building to be a fundamental element in the shaping of space, and essential in setting up the relationship of the interior to the exterior - the city - we want to explore the potentials of structure in the design of a bespoke architectural object. A series of design workshops will occur at critical junctures of the year and will act to disrupt and destabilize the studio’s thinking and assumptions. The workshops demand that initial hunches about the relationship between architecture and the institution are quickly (and even somewhat recklessly) are translated into specific spatial organizations. Taking Lars von Trier’s film “The 5 Obstructions” as a model, extreme constraints will be placed on the design process during each workshop, forcing unorthodox solutions for organizing load, program, and circulation. Structure’s elemental capacity to evoke meaning – democratic sheds, heroic towers, fleeting pneumatics, immutable load bearing

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