Adventures in Absurdistan
Minor architecture in the age of total bureaucratization

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Giacomo Borella is an architect. He founded studio Albori in Milan with some friends almost thirty years ago. In these three decades, the work of the studio has increasingly concerned the practical and bodily dimension as an antidote to the abstraction, alienation and counterproductivity of late modern architecture. He has collaborated with various magazines, newspapers and radio stations, and some of his writings have been published in the booklet “Per un’architettura terrestre” (Letteraventidue, 2016). He has edited and translated into Italian books
by Ivan Illich, Petr Kropotkin and Colin Ward. He’s currently visiting professor at the Accademia di Architettura of Mendrisio in Switzerland.

Care-Make-Engage

Care-Make-Engage tries to question the role of architects and urban designers as intermediaries among a vast arena of actors embedded in complex territories. To do so, Care-Make-Engage explores Ilot d’Eau (2014 > ongoing), a three-series project, during which LATITUDE Platform has engaged by continuously changing its posture—from architect to activist—and by experimenting with a multiplicity of co-design tools to engage local actors with water in the context of Brussels-Capital Region.

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LATITUDE Platform is a collective of architects, urbanists and anthropologists strongly engaged in context-based research and design. LATITUDE Platform aims at understanding space in its multiple dimensions focusing on emergences, space-place issues, the everyday and the unexpected. It takes works on well-established urban conditions and territories, as well as liminal physical and social contexts, experimenting with a wide range of tools for investigation and dissemination at the intersection between urban design and anthropology. LATITUDE Platform collaborates with universities, design offices, civil society organizations, public institutions and artists.

As a member of LATITUDE Platform since 2012, Andrea Aragone is an urbanist and a researcher with primary interests in urban transformations and socio-ecological processes. He focuses on the relationship between water dynamics and urban transformations as well as on local and regional planning, and participatory design, in the Global North and Global South. He is currently PhD student in co-joint program at the faculties of architecture of the Université Libre de Bruxelles and IUAV Venice.

Gong Dong (Vector Architects) and Stefano Pujatti (ElasticoFarm)  – in conversation with Davide Tommaso Ferrando

A conversation between Gong Dong (Vector architects) and Stefano Pujatti (Elastico Farm) moderated by Davide Tommaso Ferrando will explore theoretical backgrounds and intentions of the two architectural approaches and perspectives.

Architectural Anthropology: Six Methodological Suggestions

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Albena Yaneva is Professor of Architectural Theory and Director of the Manchester Architecture Research Group (MARG) at the Manchester Urban Institute. She holds a DEA from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and a PhD from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris (2001). She has been Visiting Professor at Princeton School of Architecture (2013), Parsons, New School (2015) and Politecnico di Turino (2018). She held the prestigious Lise Meitner Visiting Chair in Architecture at the University of Lund, Sweden (2017-2019). 

Her research is intrinsically transdisciplinary and crosses the boundaries of science studies, cognitive anthropology, architectural theory and political philosophy. 

Participatory design in the context of displacement – Stories from Lebanon.

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CatalyticAction is a charity that works to empower vulnerable children and their communities through participatory built interventions. We champion the co-production of dignified built environments where everyone can take part in the creation of equitable, inclusive and sustainable communities. Through this process of co-design we build local human capacity that ensures our work has a lasting impact.

Our work has a direct positive impact on:

– Children’s wellbeing: We aim to improve children’s wellbeing through the process of co-design, creating safe and nurturing places that address their needs, acknowledge their rights and materialise their desires.

– Social Cohesion: Our projects encourage collaboration between diverse groups of people as they come together throughout the project cycle. This fosters a sense of ownership and belonging amongst different community members.

– Local economy: We boost the local economy by hiring local labourers, adopting context-appropriate technologies and purchasing local materials.

– Local capacity: We enhance the skill-set of local labourers and small contractors by transferring knowledge around innovative design solutions. We train professionals in participatory design and just-decision making processes, including child protection officers, teachers and city council staff.

– Built environment: Our projects create and rehabilitate spaces, delivering good quality, sustainable and cost-effective built interventions that are dignified and inclusive to all community members.

L’algoritmo impossibile.
Edoardo Benvenuto (1940-1998) e le radici della storia del costruire.

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Antonio Becchi (PhD 1994) studied in Italy, France and Germany and he is now working at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin). His research interests include the history of construction, mechanics, art, architecture and science. He is the author or co-editor of several books, most recently: Naufragi di terra e di mare. Da Leonardo da Vinci a Theodor Mommsen (Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome, 2017), Construction History. Survey of a European Building Site (Classiques Garnier, Paris, 2018), Leonardo’s Intellectual Cosmos (Giunti, Florence, 2021).

Museum as Laboratory

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Ekaterina Golovatyuk is a Russian architect and researcher, co-founder of GRACE, operating between Moscow and Milan. Golovatyuk’s past work experience includes a long term collaboration with OMA/AMO, focusing on cultural and research projects in Russia, Europe and Hong Kong. On behalf of OMA, she was directly responsible for the design and realization of the Garage Museum for Contemporary Art in Moscow, as well as the development of the educational program for the post-graduate Strelka Institute for Architecture, Media and Design in Moscow. A substantial part of Grace’s portfolio is dedicated to exhibition design and museum architecture. The exhibitions, occasionally also curated by Grace, reveal key themes in the bureau’s work, questioning the relationship between the artwork and its context, and the ubiquitous notion of “white cube”.

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Fosbury Architecture (F.A.) is a collective of design and research collective founded in 2013, and based in Milan. F.A. is currently curator of Prato Urban Center at Centro Pecci (2021). Other recent curatorships include Milano 2030, for Milan Urban Center at La Triennale (2019) and the monographic exhibition Characters at Magazin, an independent space for architecture in Vienna (2022). F.A. has taken part in numerous Architecture Biennials, including the Lisbon Biennial (2019), Versailles (2019), Chicago (2017) and Venice (2016). F.A. was selected for the TYoung 2021 Award, with the set design for the exhibition Verde Prato (2019), at Centro Pecci in Prato. F.A. curated with Alterazioni Video the book Incompiuto: The Birth of a Style (2018), supported by MIBACT which received the honorable mention for the Compasso d’Oro (2020). F.A. he is lecturer at the Domus Academy in Milan and has organized several international workshops including two editions of the Incompiuto Summer School, in Palermo (Manifesta 12) and in Matera within the European Capital of Culture.

DigitalFUTURES: Human-machine Collaborative Intelligence

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Philip F. Yuan Associate Dean, tenured professor of the College of Architecture and Urban Planning (CAUP) at Tongji University. He is also Editor in Chief of Architectural Intelligence.

Yuan is the visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, 2019) and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT, 2021) and ThomasJefferson professor at University of Virginia (UVA, 2019).

Yuan founded DigitalFUTURES Assocation in 2011. He is also the founder of Archi-union Architects and Fab-union Technology.

Yuan plays a leading role in the Frontiers of digital architecture. His research has over 16 publications in the realm of computational design and robotic fabrication. His works have been collected by Moma New York, M+ Hongkong and Centre National d’art et de Culture Georges Pompidou. He has also participated in Venice biennale, Chicago biennale, Milan triennial, Russian biennale etc.

Fields of Evidence

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Perry Kulper is an architect and Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan. In a prior life he was a SCI-Arc faculty member for 17 years and held visiting teaching positions at Penn and ASU during that time. Subsequent to graduate studies at Columbia University he worked in the offices of respected mentors Eisenman/ Robertson, Robert A.M. Stern and Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown before moving to Los Angeles. His primary interests include: the roles and generative potential of architectural drawing; the outrageously different spatial opportunities offered by using diverse design methods in design practices; and in broadening the conceptual range by which architecture contributes to our cultural imagination. He was the Sir Banister Fletcher Visiting Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL 2018-19. In 2013 he published Pamphlet Architecture 34, ‘Fathoming the Unfathomable: Archival Ghosts and Paradoxical Shadows’ with friend and collaborator Nat Chard. They are at work on a new book to be published by UCL Press. Recently he optimistically ventured into the world of the digital, attempting to get a handle on ‘cut + paste’ and ‘magic wand’ operations in Photoshop—as a result he has encountered one of his steeper learning curves. Even more recently he has also been snooping around under the hood of said digital realms. Fantastic beasts have also been on his mind…