Collective agency
Sam Spurr and Nicola Cortese offer their appraisals of the 2019 National Architecture Conference and its implications for practice.
This year’s National Architecture Conference focused on the profession’s engagement with Australia’s Indigenous culture and the power of activism. For theorist and designer Sam Spurr, the best discussions were those that addressed the “real work” architects do. Recent graduate Nicola Cortese came away wanting to exchange more knowledge and take more risks. Their reflections appear here.
The beginnings of disciplinary transformation Review by Sam Spurr
A conference on the subject of collective agency in architecture necessarily asks two questions: What would this look like for the discipline? And how do we make it happen?
The 2019 National Architecture Conference grounded these questions in a radical reconfiguring of Australian architecture through its relationship to Indigenous knowledge. While other issues emerged during the two days, this will be the remarkable legacy of the conference. Across diverse scales of practice, we heard how engagement with the First Nations people of Australia is not only a necessity but a way to enrich and propel the design of our built environment. I can’t imagine a more important topic to be brokered at this point in time.
The conference plunged participants directly into personal narratives, passionate declamations and uncomfortable truths, making visible and making heard stories rarely told in architecture. The first speaker, social justice advocate Dhakshayini Sooriyakumaran, set the tone with a direct and articulate framing of identity politics. She was passionate, without being hectoring, about a discipline in which gender inequity, and the absence of Indigenous and non-white practitioners, continues in extremis.
Conference directors Monique Woodward and Stephen Choi are to be applauded for their commitment to bringing these voices so forcefully into the mainstream of architecture.
Like the directors, many of the speakers were under forty and they used the conference as a platform to demonstrate the efforts of this generation in social justice fields. The majority of speakers were female, hopefully proving once and for all that gender parity at these kinds of public events is now the industry norm rather than the exception.
In their opening, Woodward and
Choi named key terms that resonated throughout the rest of the conference. They included the power of caring, generosity, courage and meaningful change. Elisapeta Heta, of Jasmax, explained that “Kahui Whaihanga,” the name recently gifted to the New Zealand Institute of Architects by local elder Haare Williams, describes a protective cloak over the built environment. This was a potent example of how a shift in the way we perceive ourselves in relation to Indigenous knowledge of country could be productively reimagined. Elisapeta’s presentation began with a song and ended in a haka. She described voice as both a metaphor and a mode of engagement, a way of making oneself heard and of bringing others along with you. Her call to “be comfortable with being uncomfortable because change doesn’t happen without some discomfort” could have summed up the aim of the conference.
During a key panel discussion, individuals from academia, Indigenous practice, urban design and government articulated the ways in which protocols inform, constrain and open up possibilities for architecture. They showed how different forms of architectural practice were, or could be, operative in the fight for
larger social and collective issues, and how architects can become critical and strategic thinkers and operators within the built environment.
The power of activism was evident in various sessions. Olivia Hyde described the extraordinary work of the NSW Government Architects Office in embedding design into public policy. Tania Davidge, director of OoPLA (formerly OpenHAUS), stepped us through Melbourne’s “Our City, Our Square” campaign, showing how collectives can successfully fight for better public spaces, even against a corporate behemoth like Apple. The work of Breathe Architecture in creating an alternative model for housing, driven by the discipline, continues to be an exemplar for what is possible.
The international speakers described refined and rigorously executed projects in regions including Ethiopia,
South Africa and Brazil. However, it was the Australian stories and their deep engagement with the ground (so beautifully visualized by local firm Baracco and Wright) that truly resonated.
Indigenous stories were forceful and articulate, including Sarah Lynn Rees’ diagram of protocols for Indigenous engagement and Ros Moriarty’s empowering work with her family’s collaborative design company, Balarinji. Sydney firm Future Method Studio highlighted the need to operate politically in market-driven and often opaque urban power structures. Their work was also a reminder that Indigenous frameworks are an issue of country that is situated in urban as much as regional scenarios.
The sales-pitch bravado and glossy built objects of Marcos Rosello from All Design threatened to return us abruptly to the male “starchitects” of past conferences. However, Shelley Penn’s summing up saved the day. The architect and urbanist engaged the room by asking, “Are you doing the real work? I don’t mean putting in the hours. I don’t mean being competent and professional. The real work is the stuff that hurts your brain or your heart. Creative work or thoughtful work or personally challenging work. The stuff we know we have to face if we want to be true to our values.”
While it might seem harsh to pick holes in a conference with such exceptional content, it is vital that we remain critical. Throughout the session breaks, I often heard variations of the question, “Are you woke enough for this conference?”1 – a question that exposes both the positives and negatives of its enlightened approach, and the generational and political divide it perpetuated.
In an era where the deeply divisive, binary politics of “us versus them” have been allowed to triumph, there is the need for progressive activists to operate with greater nuance and generosity. The conference’s byline – “Are you an attendee or an activist?” – alienated a sector of the audience before anyone even spoke a word, and one speaker began by addressing their talk to just “the activists in the room.” It’s easy, though, to preach to the converted, but harder to inspire and convince those on the other side. Here was an opportunity to bring this kind of agenda to the diverse public platform of Institute
members and convince them of its merit. Making a stand could feel easy, as long as you had a smart phone and could find the right app. Online polls and pledges lacked intent and meaning, representing simply another form of “clicktivism” and virtue signalling instead of a way to embark on the hard work of meaningful change.
The claims of disciplinary transformation were set up as a fait accompli by the directors. However, real, lasting change takes more than sitting passively in a conference centre for a couple of days or making a stand via an online pledge. How do you truly mobilize collective action, developing solidarity among stakeholders who may lack common backgrounds and even common values? Those stakeholders are clients, they are colleagues, they are employers and employees – and they are the public whom architects may never speak to but whom they impact every day.
Through words and the rich sound of the didgeridoo, Louis Mokak of Indigenous Architecture and Design Victoria (IADV) and Alex Splitt of Yarn Bark ended the conference with a dignified and eloquent message. Here was the heart as well as the head and a sense of what a meaningful relationship with Indigenous Australia might actually feel like.
— Sam Spurr is an architectural theorist and designer working across academia, installation art and curatorship. She was founding director of the Interior and Spatial Design program at the University of Technology Sydney.
Footnote
1. “Woke,” a contraction of the vernacular phrase “stay woke,” is a term used to describe alertness to issues of racism and social injustice. The term has been used widely since 2014 as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States.
Finding space for new knowledge Review by Nicola Cortese
“You can’t see architecture as a game of power, but as a knowledge exchange.” These words were spoken by Julie Eizenberg in her Gold Medal address at the 2019 National Architecture Conference, where she spoke alongside her colleague and partner, Hank Koning. They echo a key message of the conference, themed “collective agency.”
Having just completed my studies in architecture, I find myself stepping out of one game of power (educational institutions) and into another (professional practice). Sitting in this no-man’s land, new graduates like me are fortunate
– if daunted – to have the opportunity to consider how to develop our practice beyond personal economic gain alone.
Over two days, conference sessions discussed practice in several forms: practice as a vehicle for social activism, practice in the space of cultural and historical recognition, practice as research and practice in relation to policy. It was a series of provocations that questioned our intentions and left me feeling both overwhelmed and enthused by the possibilities.
The diversity of speakers highlighted that we are more than architects alone.
The value of an extensive team made up of experts in various fields was summarized by Emanuel Admassu of AD-WO, who encouraged “finding a balance between producing knowledge and producing buildings.” Sarah Lynn Rees discussed one of the difficulties associated with this – that, as architects, we are taught to be experts (or, at least, to act as experts), without fallibility. However, as AD-WO advocated, it is just as important for us as a profession to acknowledge and reckon with our blind spots. Unless we accept these blind spots, we will not allow ourselves the opportunity to engage in and find space for new knowledge. Although relevant on many levels, this point is particularly pertinent to the way we start to incorporate the currently invisible but vital Indigenous narrative into the way we design.
The conference was heavily centred around the idea of knowledge as a means of social change and how architects can establish a valued position within this. I believe that before our industry can truly find this position, the infamous architect’s ego needs to be confronted and our intentions examined. Who needs our work the most and how can we best meet their needs? Instead of being hamstrung by ego, we just need to do something.
Sol Camacho of Raddar spoke of the struggles of practising within Mexico City and Sao Paulo, including the difficulties associated with zoning and achieving a project permit. Rather than letting their design for a mixed-use civic hub – including a ballet school – fall by the wayside,
Raddar set up an impromptu stage made out of stacked crates. Sure, it wasn’t the beautifully detailed building seen in the renders, but it achieved a positive result for the community, regardless of its market value or the “brandability” of the outcome. This idea was also reflected in a research project highlighted by Marina Otero Verzier, director of research at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam.
She spoke about the squatting culture in the Netherlands, recognizing an ephemeral and ad hoc urbanism as an increasingly important means of attaining social agency in the city. The outcomes of both these projects encourage us to assess the intentions of our own practice, both individually and within a larger group of Australian practitioners. We are lucky as Australian architects to practise in a country of abundance; however, with this comes the responsibility of being cognizant of why we are doing what we are doing and whether our social values align with this.
These international examples also prompt us to question whether we have the opportunity in Australia for a more impromptu and ephemeral approach to the way we practice: an approach that is less risk-averse, that encourages (and applauds) experimentation and methods that aren’t necessarily tried and tested; an approach that could allow us to realize socially minded projects, such as Future Method Studio’s Redfern House, even if the result is not strictly “architectural;” an approach that may not involve architects alone but a whole team of experts such as those we heard from at the conference; an approach that recognizes the role that ego currently plays within the industry and encourages us to become more conscious in allowing each other the space for imperfection.
As I reflect on my time at university, and look forward to my future in practice with both excitement and trepidation,
I feel that if we were taught to limit the pressure we put on ourselves to strive for perfection, the ad hoc or “messy” solution might feel less daunting. By exchanging knowledge with the team beside us, we can perhaps become less afraid of risk and more exhilarated by the potential offered by experimentation. Regardless of how we get there, we need to allow ourselves the agency to just do something. It might be messy, maybe incomplete, perhaps even a failure, but at the very least, it will start a conversation.