 The panel three is about politics and the subtitle is Front Observation to Engagement. Politics, we define it as the art of living together, had become more than a topic in architecture practice. The necessary understanding of the social and political content of design challenges beyond statistics is transforming architectural practice into a service to humanity and the quality of everyday life in all aspects and scales. We have invited three young colleagues to and ask them about the use of politics as an instrument of critical practice that finally tries to build a better living together world. Atelier Mazzoni, Maria Camara will be around, founded Maria Camara, founded Atelier Mazzoni in 2014 in May. Her work is guided by the belief that architects have an important role to play in thinking spaces that have the power to elevate, dignify and provide better quality of life. Through her practice, Marianne aims to discover innovative ways of doing so while maintaining an intimate dialogue between architecture, people and context. Kim Brickland and Aaron Roberts are the directors of Edition Office, an architecture practice based in Melbourne, Australia from 2008. Through the execution of their build, work and research, Edition Office displays its engaged practice understood as a series of simultaneous negotiations between modifiers, people and place, and conditioning objects, buildings and pre-existences. I'm sorry to communicate that Elizabeth Anyaños, founder of Cotidiano that perhaps we have seen her name in the posters, finally couldn't attend this symposium so we have these two offices for the panel, moderated by Anna Pujaner. Anna Pujaner is an associate professor of professional practice at Columbia ISAP and coordinator of the Core One Architectural Studies. She's also co-founder of Mayo, an architectural and research practice established in Barcelona. Actually, the survival of the first edition of constructing practice symposium, they were part of that panel at that time. Her work has a deep implication in the idea of living together through the developing of new models of collective housing, and her research work, especially the Kitchenless City, relates to the review of social, economic and political implications of the domestic domain. So let me please invite Atelier Masomi to come to the stage. Marianne Kamala, all of you. Thank you so much for coming over and thank you for having me. This is quite a treat and I'm really excited to talk about this topic, this subject matter specifically, because it's truly, I mean not just this particular aspect of politics, but all the other topics that have been talked about throughout the symposium, whether it's sustainability or technology, those are all things that are an integral part of the work that we do in Niger. As one was saying, I have a firm based in Niger in West Africa, but I split my time between the US and there, so I spent half the year there and half the year here. But the entire firm is actually based in Africa and the whole operation is over there. And I thought it would be really interesting to more have a conversation about how we work, what is it that drives us, what's the process, and what's the context in which we work and how that informs the work that we do. Just to give you kind of an idea of where Niger is because I know that no one knows, and I don't take it personally. Even in other parts of Africa when I meet people and they're like, oh, where are you from? I'm from New Jersey. Where's that? So it's not Nigeria, so I guess let's put that out of the way. It's surrounded by all these other countries in a way. One particularity of the country is that it's not kind of what you imagine Africa to be, I think in general where you imagine some kind of tropical place, lush and nature and things like that. It's a desert country actually, so in that way it has more in common with a country like Morocco or Algeria than it has a country like Ghana or South Africa or Kenya or something like that. And also because of its proximity and being in the Sahara Desert, it also means that it's a Muslim country. It's a 95% Muslim country and those are all the things that as part of that context affect the work that we do and the kinds of problems or the kinds of issues that we tackle on a daily basis. This is basically where I grew up. I grew up in a city really near this area in the Sahara Desert. It was a mining town and I think that's probably the single most determining aspect of what my architecture ended up being and both the preoccupations surrounding the building process and the quality of the projects I guess that we develop. Practice is in the city of Nehemi and though it looks a little green here, you really feel the desert actually, this is kind of during the rainy season so it feels a bit greener, but it's also a river city and that also matters and we'll talk about that later on which helps it be a bit more green but it doesn't shield us from things like climate change and sandstorms and things like that that actually come through that again affect the work that we do. This is a very typical kind of city shot of the streets of Nehemi and the firm is just very small and there are four of us actually and from kind of all over the country but the entire firm for now is from Niger and we work on the various types of projects. It's actually our projects, the project types are kind of disjointed. We don't focus on just residential or just cultural projects. We do a bit of everything and what our practice have in common is that we actually really involve ourselves or concern ourselves with the local history, the local context, local materials trying to figure out unearthing history in a way, trying to figure out what is it that's there in the place that we can then take, learn from and then transform and usher into a future essentially. These are some of the, this is the firm actually basically. This is everybody who works there. This is on one of the project that we have just completed in a village seven hours away from Nehemi and this is basically, this image shows everything that we have available. Essentially one of the biggest challenges of practicing where we practice and deciding to really be all about the context and all about what is available there is that we really have access to just three materials. It's earth, some cement and metal because again it's a desert country that means that we don't use wood. And termites are a big problem and that's the challenge for every project is to try to figure out how to actually take these three materials and every time wonder what else can I make with this. And so to give you a bit of context on me, I wasn't always an architect. I was trained as a software developer and I practice and I wrote software for many, many years. I wanted to be an architect since I was 12 or 13 years old. But coming from Nehemi, I just didn't think that it was reasonable to pursue a field that would be creative because it's not something that necessarily paid the bills or didn't feel like what people around would think of as having a successful life or having made it somehow. And it just seemed almost wrong in a country where so many people struggle and everybody was just trying to get ahead. And so I went in that direction. But many years later and that's where the politics aspect come into place. I started realizing the kind of impact actually architecture has on our everyday life. The fact that it actually is one of the main determinants in the way we feel about ourselves because it's the environment that gives us a reflection back of what is it that we think we are and who we are. It's one of the strongest markers of cultural identity really. And when I started thinking about it that way, it gave me kind of this extra push that I needed to go back and make that switch, you know, went back and did the three year program and all that and came back out as an architect. And one of the first projects I worked on and this was actually during my thesis, that was my first test of trying to figure out how do you actually study in a country like the U.S. and then directly go and apply all of that in a completely different context. Granted a context that I'm very familiar with but a different context nonetheless. Nothing in the classes that we had, even when it was situated elsewhere, nothing was really tackling the kinds of problems or the kind of issues that I was seeing in my home country. And so I did a bunch of research for almost a year actually and had several conversations with young people throughout the city. And one of the things that came out was that I realized that one thing that we do in a place where there's very little available in terms of public space, in terms of all kinds of amenity that you can think of is that we actually use the street as the main common space. It's not really public space. It's like free for all. And so the street is used for commerce. It's used for housing. It's used for celebrating weddings. It's used for just sitting in front of your house and drinking tea and playing cards with your friends. But one thing that I quickly realized was that when I was growing up, actually, we didn't have a space. If you see in these images, all of the people in those photos are men. And so I started realizing that actually these streets might be available for all these different things, but actually it was not really well seen for a young woman specifically to be seen just sitting, for example, like those young men in front of the house. That's something, that's somewhere that you would never see a girl there because you immediately destroy your reputation. And so I started wondering, and I had this conversation with young girls in Nigeria in terms of, well, what is it exactly actually that we do? And I quickly started remembering that what we did was what these two young women are doing in that I would go to a friend's house and then she'll walk me home. And we live in the same neighborhood. And so we'll just keep walking each other back and forth to each other's houses. And it was just kind of like this endless circuit and it could last two hours. And that was basically our private, you know, space. Because when you're at home, maybe there are too many people and you have secrets to share. You're a teenager, you know, you don't want everybody to hear what you have to say. And it was just kind of this place that you had. And I called the project Mobile Loitering because essentially it was without realizing a tactic that we developed that allowed us to loiter just like everybody else. But because we were on the move, it wasn't suspicious. And so we worked with these young people from high schools, you know, who did a bunch of drawings, you know, a bunch of discussions, you know, and things like that. And kind of a program came out of all of that where we started talking about, oops, we started talking about, I don't know what's happening. Sorry, I have a slide missing. We started talking about the kinds of things that they would do, how they felt about being outside. And it was very split and very divided where some of them were saying that, well, actually you have no business being outside, outside of, you know, just going to school and coming back home. If there's something that you want to learn about the world and about, you know, life, you can just watch TV, for example. Or, you know, but other people were very adamant about, you know, really wanting to be part of the city, really wanting to experience things. And, you know, people watch and, you know, make comments about what they see, you know, whatever just like everybody else would do. And so throughout those conversations, we devised this project where there would be double take into account spaces they currently use. So for example, they told us about the fact that they go to the stadium a lot for sports and then they go to the museum a lot because our museum is kind of like this open, this series of pavilions really and a landscape. And so they would just keep walking around and socializing that way. And so it ended up producing this project where there was this itinerary basically that would allow this mobile loader ring that would join these two main spaces that they use already, create a path from the two, but then also make sure that it englobes a maximum number of schools so that, for example, they could find themselves on that path on the way home from school. Or studying in group is something that we do a lot. So whether they go into school or somewhere else, what they would study in group, they might actually be part of this itinerary and it can be part of, you know, a study break or something like that, you know, as they're going around. And so the itinerary was shaped by taking account in schools, kind of pushing it towards more lower income neighborhoods because they actually are the most conservative part of the cities and so those are the part of the cities where girls are more likely to be, you know, to be asked to stay home and not go anywhere. But most importantly, it was really also about peppering that itinerary with a series of spaces and a series of program, basically, that could also serve as a destination. Instead of just the destination being the stadium or the museum, then it became, you know, about creating spaces that are shaded, for example, just so that they would be really enjoyable to walk through because again, I'll remind you, if I haven't said it enough, that we're a desert country, so it's 45 degrees, you know, almost year-round, 40 to 45 degrees Celsius, sorry, year-round. And then it kind of became about creating these different program spaces, you know, for studying, you know, for example, along the street, but by co-opting this approach that we have already used in the street for different other kind of programs, mostly for economic programs, or just shacks for selling things, you know, and looking at that as an opportunity rather than looking at that kind of tactic as something that debases the city, which is often the case in African cities where what is quote-unquote called the informal economy or other kinds of enterprising that crops up along the street is always fought against and always destroyed. But I thought there was actually something really interesting there in terms of really using amenities that were just there to start doing something out of it and start using it actually as a language for urban design and for architecture to make actually even other kinds of things and amplifying it. And so really it was about creating all these different destinations that would be acceptable for the young women themselves, not so much for their families, but for themselves to not feel as though they were necessarily being incredibly transgressive, which is not really productive because that's the kind of effect that doesn't last. But it was really about them feeling safe and feeling that they could go around, you know, and partake in these different activities without anybody being suspicious of their presence there. And so that was a project that in the end triggered really my practice and triggered the kind of work that we do now. And after working on that project, I actually just decided to move to Niger and not take a job at all in the U.S. or get any kind of experience in the U.S., which I don't recommend. But that's what I don't recommend, honestly, because I know the students there. I'm not advocating you do this. But this is what I did because essentially, you know, since, as I was saying, because it was my second career, I really had a sense of urgency and I felt like I had already wasted so much time. I was well into my 30s when this happened and I was just thinking, no, I have no time to waste. I don't have time to gather up IDP points and work three years or four years or whatever and do the exams or whatever. I didn't want to do it. And I just really, really only wanted to work in these kinds of contexts. So there's also the thing about, you know, going back to school when you're much older, you know, it gives you kind of a greater sense of clarity in a way in terms of the things that you want, you know, out of life. But the question was, well, how do you go about and do it? I can't just come out of school, you know, and do this. Essentially, what that ended up being was I was fortunate enough to associate myself with three other architects who were really, you know, had more experience than I did, which was really important. And we tackled this project in Yamim, which was a housing project that was looking at issues of, again, because everything we do looks at issues of. So issues of density, as you can see in this image, it's a very flat city. Everything is kind of on one level and very spread out and sprawled. And so we started thinking about ways of very, of densifying with that necessarily, you know, going up in height and creating an apartment complex or anything like that, because it's not, you know, I find that going up, you know, starting towers really only makes sense in cities like here or cities where there's like, you know, at least 10 million people in there, you know, if that's not what you're facing, it's not always necessary. And so it was about really going back and analyzing the way you would live culturally, you know, the economic pressures and all of those different things, the need for outside space, the need for shaded space and all of that and create something of a puzzle almost, you know, this dense proposal that would allow for better use of space while still maintaining a sense of community, a sense of, you know, belonging, a sense of really feeling that actually all of your different cultural behaviors or, you know, cultural needs are met and especially in a city which used to be an ex-colony where actually a lot of the architecture is just pale copies of Western architecture that have nothing to do really with the way people actually live their lives. So it ends up becoming this exercise of constantly circumventing the architecture and going around, you know, what the architecture is in order to live your life, which makes no sense. And so it was really about also materials, local materials in order to make sure that the costs are kept down. People routinely save for 10 years, 12 years in order to be able to build a home. Mostly because also there's kind of this understanding that in order to be modern and to be civilized, you have to build a home made out of cement and made out of concrete. But again, in a climate like this one, basically we're just creating a bunch of ovens to live in because concrete retains heat and because also we're building houses again that are made out of a Western model of building houses which actually are focused on retaining heat. So all of that put together, we ended up creating this project where it was about, you know, light and shadow and shade and cooling and passive cooling using these different materials. Whoa, about affordability. I don't know what that was about affordability about actually being able to be public in the sense that if you remember one of the first images that I showed of people being outside on the street or sitting, you know, on the street, this is a behavior that's really important actually in the culture. It's called fada and fada is kind of, it's almost like, you know, a salon or something, you know, where you just come in and you're friends and you discuss politics and you discuss all kinds of different things. And it's really, really important and you see it everywhere in residential streets where young people or older people are just sitting in front of the house and the house is actually both an extension of where you live, but it's also an extension of the public realm. So that kind of in between, even though the current houses that are built don't really recognize it, it's always, you know, people just drag chairs, you know, and bring, you know, in front of their compound wall to sit anyway. So that behavior is not going away. So why not incorporate it in the architecture? It doesn't really make sense to just ignore it. So it looks like I'm running out of time actually. So I'm going to just run through a bunch of images real quick. But essentially this is the project that led me to create Activity Masumi and just really realize, okay, I think there's something there. The project was widely successful, it was really well received and it kind of started this thing that we were trying to get at of actually proving that no, contemporariness or modernity has nothing to do with either looking western or looking, you know, like something came out of California or came out of, you know, whatever. We can actually take whatever is available, the limited means that are available and make something that is of the time and make something that also projects itself in the future. And so that became really the ethos of the firm and that is the thing that really follows us throughout our different projects. This is, for example, this cultural complex that we built in a village in Niger where we brought together an old mosque that was built by a mason that everybody forgot about, but it turns out one Agakan prize for architecture for a very similar mosque just one hour away from this village and it was going to be destroyed and they just wanted to create a cement replica of it in its place just slightly bigger because it would last longer because the reality was that the society was changing so much that people forgot how to take care of these kinds of buildings and so it just became too much of a headache and so what we did was we really... So number one, we pointed out the fact that this is actually a cultural marker, I guess, you know, for the country and in terms of architecture, this was really precious building. It had just so many things that even we could learn from but the issue was, well, okay, what are we going to do because we're not going to maintain it. We don't know how to work with this anymore and on top of that, it's too small for the village now. They needed a bigger mosque and so again, you know, just like for the Moabah Luring Project, we went through a series of different workshops and discussions with different stakeholders in the village, with children, you know, et cetera and the idea was to keep the old mosque but to turn it into a library, actually, and create a new mosque next to it. Essentially, it was supposed to be two different projects. The library would be the only one in miles and miles and miles around. There's really no, even the village itself actually provides the only school for six different villages that come there and so the library is really kind of one of a kind thing that there's no such thing anywhere around so that's kind of what triggered the need and the desire to do something like that but they wanted two different projects where we would have a library and then a wall and then, you know, a mosque because obviously the two things are not the same and obviously also there was just a lot that had to be done in terms of convincing to turn a mosque into a library so we encounter all kinds of, you know, issues of, you know, accusations of blasphemy, you know, how dare you do something like this in a sacred environment which was actually a wonderful conversation because then it allowed us to really actually talk about religion to bring out the Quran and talk about, you know, the importance of knowledge in the religion and the fact that, number one, there's nothing in the book that says that you cannot turn a mosque into something else and number two, the pursuit of knowledge is a precept that's actually incredibly important it's written black and white in the religion so it was also a great kind of teaching moment and a great exchange moment that just, you know, once you actually show that it says so in the book that you're supposed to go and find knowledge as far as we're as Asia that's what it says, literally then how can you say that we cannot make a library? And so the second thing was for us to, I'm just going to slip through these, to figure out how to do it it was we were able to find the original mason of the previous mosque who helped to rebuild it but also we were able to introduce new things like, you know, modifying the materials and the clay and all that and having natural additives in them that will allow them to last longer and not need as much maintenance in order to just really stay as pristine as possible for as long as possible this is actually when they were rebuilding the facade which had kind of melted away and then using it just as many of local resources as we needed, whether it's for light fixtures you know, or whatever and using these masons also as teachers, you know, for us for example, when we're trying to build these domes for the mosque, we actually this in red is actually our contractor and we, he was not able to build them and we just struggled for days and days and days and we're just thinking the project is condemned we're going to have to change the whole approach because they were making all these formwork you know, and all that and it just was not looking right and this mason was just watching us he was working on resurfacing the old mosque and he was just watching us, you know in the kind of this kind of descending way and so I called him over and I go do you know how to do this? and he was like, yeah, of course I don't know what you guys are doing but yes, I know how to do it I was like, okay, well can you make one of them and you know, and let's see and he called over two of his other masons they just had a string they got on top of our beams and then they just started laying one brick at a time one brick at a time by hand and then made these perfect, you know, objects and just had it all done and this was the result and so the whole process was just really this give and take this learning, you know, experience this exchange both from us in terms of things that we can add in terms of making the construction techniques better for reinforcing the what do you call it the materials, et cetera and then for them everything that they could teach us in terms of the construction techniques that they were aware of and so that ended up being the result of basically more of an inclusive space where instead of having these two projects we turned it into one project where we broke down the wall and what we were really interested in was having a space where religion and secular knowledge didn't have to be two things that are kind of against one another which is becoming the case too often and all over the world it's not just a Muslim problem it's everywhere where it just seems like the two are cannot be synonymous and so what we were trying to say through this project was that actually this is a completely benign and non-problematic relationship where you can be in the library studying and then when it's prayer time since you have to pray five times a day you just walk on over to the mosque and then back to the library again and so in that kind of simple gesture just actually help break down this divide between the two by just making it this effortless non-issue type of way of dealing with these two different aspects of your life so I had one more project to show but I ran out of time so I won't show it and I will just stop there and maybe there will be some other opportunity at another time thank you very much thank you all so much for having us it's a real honour and a privilege to be asked to speak here today so the work of our studio emerges from an understanding that the site's landscape and the context that we work within are inherently charged with history and meaning and that this meaning is entirely dependent upon the group or the individual that is responding to it so what I'm talking about is not a genius loci there is any kind of inherent meaning in the physical cellular structure of replace it's that we are human beings we're culturally loaded historically loaded human beings and we project continuously on to our environments and the overlapping nature of that cultural projection is absolutely based on our historical, our familial and our cultural background all of which kind of overlaps into this palimpsest of how we understand landscape and we understand our role as architects is inherently a political one in that we need to understand the multiplicity of guises or multiplicities of viewpoints on any landscape that we work in because it's inherently charged the image behind me oh sorry the image behind me hangs on the wall of our studio so within this sublime landscape two elements that act as modifiers to how the image might be understood the winding road and the cars and the short text not to be reproduced the images are it's from a page from a book, Mirrors and Others by artist Andreas Schultz which is a collection of images harvested from the Louvre gallery in Paris associated with written text which has absolutely nothing to do has no relationships to the images they're completely random in their association and what we love and what's important to us to hang this in our studio is that it continuously talks about I guess this role of certain modifier or conditioning object in which is how we see architecture is placed in the landscape or has a capacity to be a modifier and in place which is has layers and layers and layers of narrative attached to it depending again upon the viewpoint of the person of gaze so moving through the examples of this are in Paul Verilio's documentation of bunkers on the western front left over from World War II these are all islands in their sights they're all conditioning objects and they modify their sight they have quite a strong relationship however with the degrees of separation both geographically and temporarily over time the charged nature of that relationship starts to slip and the knowledge or the understanding of what those things mean starts to change and we start to emerge to these or images by a Swiss photographer, Martin Lindsey documenting infrastructure in the landscapes of Switzerland which are physically structurally very very similar this kind of brutalist concrete architecture having an adjacency and an overlapping narrative with the landscape however that narrative is quite different I mean in some sense this image in particular speaks of a futurist or Balardian almost sexual lust for adventure and speed taming a primitive landscape though in our climate of climate change the kind of current climate we're in at the moment there's perhaps more of a pathos of technology shifting and getting out of our control this brings us to images of an Australian context an Australian landscape these images are incredibly banal and familiar to Aaron and I as places we've very familiar to us, places we've hung out and spent time with as kids and adults however these two photographs were taken in the Blangalos State Forest in New South Wales which were the site of a spate of serial killings by a person Ivan Malat in the late 80s early 90s in Australia they speak of without that knowledge these are banal images they're just another every space however with that inherent knowledge or the understanding of these actions that become sites of trauma bringing us to another again seemingly banal image Wargal Creek this was the site of a massacre in Australia's history of indigenous peoples where between 60 and 150 Gunna Kurnay people were slaughtered which takes us to Mile Creek another massacre site in Australia so Australia has a really deeply unresolved history the dispossession of the average of Torres Strait Islander people in Australia's colonisation profoundly unresolved in that we haven't gone through an appropriate reconciliation process or an appropriate truth telling process to understand the changes or the grotesque events that have happened in I guess the formation of the contemporary Australian state that we live in so this map here represents massacre sites that are recorded that are known across Australia the yellow circles representing between 6 and 10 deaths in each event and the brown circles representing more than 20 in each single event the two dollar coin that we all have in our pockets on one side has the face of Queen Elizabeth II on the other side has the face of Gorai oh sorry Gorai Generai who was a Warpere man from northern territory now he was the one of the sole survivors of the Canister massacre one of the last recorded massacres in Australia however that was not the purpose that was not the reason he was on the coin it wasn't a memorial to that event he was I suppose the image was a subjugation of the ideal native form so in a form of cultural appropriation which is I think profoundly shocking because not many Australians actually know the real history in terms of his survival in that massacre event which comes to this is a friend of ours and Aboriginal artist Daniel Boyd it's a representation of the memorial of the death of Captain Cook and he's a representation of that of his murder of his killing in Hawaii so Daniel has his early work his early painting work was trying to recontest the colonial gaze and reposition it from a colonised gaze so controlling that narrative so this is one of his paintings and on the right you can see the original example by Sir Joseph or a painting by Benjamin West of Sir Joseph Banks and Daniel's appropriation of this is on the left slightly changed with his own face in a jar in the bottom left corner of the painting and again a series of paintings where he's repurposed the colonial gaze and reconditioners probably should move much faster here what we don't have in Australia this is an example of the Altes Museum in Berlin which is a physicalised manifestation of the traumatic moments that have happened in that history the Noist Museum in Berlin I guess reborn by David Schifferfield's adaptation there the Jewish Museum with the shellacate artwork and Daniel Liebeskin's Memorial to the Murder Jews of Europe these are all memorials that speak of these past events in the history of Europe and in Berlin and Germany all of which we don't have in Australia we haven't come into terms of that and we don't have physicalised versions yet we are starting to in the last couple of years only I'll very briefly pass through this this is some artwork of my own which speaks of the settler history acting as an agent of that dispossession of indigenous peoples of Australia and the work manifests in a series of physical forms each one going through a state of trauma to form the next work in the series leaving the next piece made with the scars and the echoes and the shadows permanently etched within it of the piece before it having set an understanding of how we view landscape and in this context and this notion of the cultural gaze linked to multiple and layered readings of place in Australia we move on to how our practice has then engaged with making architecture within these conditions and later to two examples of how this has manifested in projects with the political, cultural and social focus we often speak of sights and modifiers and understanding that an object or a building people in the landscape they sit within all modify our perceptions and sometimes physical manifestations of one another from the beginning our practice began to catalogue our projects in a particular way to speak to a sharp singularity of each project a model, a drawing and a sight portrait, all seen as essential to understanding the core essence or singularity of the project each model is produced to enable a reading of the building which cannot necessarily be best translated by a render or a plan or a section it is more an immutable, tangible sense of the real we believe architecture is about a bodily reaction a bodily experience that is spatial and volumetric our models aim to capture this link to the conceptual framework of the building and its relationship to the sight and to ourselves the models allow a sense of uncanny or the foreign object which for us raises questions about its relationships in ways we feel typical architectural models cannot enable we believe that these raw elements particularly the physical totem-like models allow greater access to understanding a more complex and layered narrative rather than a self-evident nature they are produced to prompt a questioning their objects in the round and have a presence which is unlike other models of representation the different modes of representation aim to capture particular aspects be it volumetric or a broader narrative landscapes are photographed in a way to capture an essential quality in a singular image we aim to create buildings which are both sympathetic and dissonant to its context and inhabitants a dual contradictory state whereby the architecture is seen externally as other as having an uncanny quality which we believe opens a fissure between our expectations and understandings of what the architecture could be and allows a questioning of its inherent qualities and in doing so a question of its relationship to place and to ourselves this is not a didactic scenario as discussed earlier we all come to a situation with a different cultural gaze within this gaze however the uncanny the foreign promotes a questioning of the relationships and in doing so the potential to reveal old or new narratives and motivations in the same way the buildings are entirely sympathetic to the landscape and its inhabitants with a heightened experiential nature linked to the particular qualities of that place and an application of the particular brief the notion of the other or the foreign we believe allows the architecture to be translatable across cultural boundaries and across underlying meanings to be questioned in relation to broader thematics beyond the core brief of the architecture our recent winning entry for the 2019 National Gallery of Victoria pavilion to be built this November runs to the very core of this Australian condition it seeks to shine a very public light on the fact that the fact that Australia was founded on a false claim of terran alias so terran alias was basically the idea that there was no indigenous agriculture industry or solid settlement that the indigenous people were basically a nomadic and under that presumption Australia was colonized and the sheep and the livestock came in and destroyed meant much of the evidence of a very civilized nation that was thousands of years old the pavilion that we ended up designing with artists aims to represent this agriculture, this industry and this architecture and it aims to bring about a questioning of how Australia sees itself in many ways this is some of Yehani's previous works which feature in the project so set up on an axial pathway through the gallery proper the pavilion split into two halves a void in the middle representing the evolution of terran alias and the two halves in the center full of this idea of the smoking tree where eels were basically smoked out in large old gum trees and Yehani's glass yams which yams were part of the agricultural product that the indigenous peoples farmed, seeping out of the walls and I guess reflecting in nature of these sort of narratives which have been resilient over time and gradually pulling through into this pavilion and representing many of those old stories we see these spaces as a series of spaces for program so for indigenous elders to come in and start to tell the stories of these productions the agriculture and the architecture and the industry and so that those stories live on and this myth and lie of terran alias is exposed So quite pointedly in collaborating indigenous artists previous project this next one that's on the screen now physicalized manifestations the architecture memorials that allow an engagement with the content that needs to be addressed in Australia which as Aaron described almost entirely all of the physical history of 60,000 plus years of indigenous settlement across Australia has been destroyed by the colonization of Australia and there's little apparatus available to communicate those stories so this pavilion in front of us is actually one that was opened just yesterday it was a collaboration with artist Daniel Boyd whose paintings we showed previously it's an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander wall memorial the first of its kind commissioned by the federal government of Australia that represent indigenous and Torres Strait Islander servicemen and women but it represents all conflict that they fought for pre and post colonization and it's the first of its kind in Australia and it's a profoundly meaningful project for many many many communities many many many people in Australia the surface in front of us is this screen which is has a matte black ceramic frit over the top of it allowing this pattern this kind of point cloud point to this pattern to appear and it reflects the landscape that is behind you and it reflects yourself and the people gathering in front of the screen and it creates a it others you, it creates a fracture or a moment of temporal dissonance as opposed to where you're inside the screen you're not simply seeing yourself in a reflection, you're seeing yourself other so it creates a portal of a kind to allow for a very specific kind of memorial where it's not, there is no description on how you meant to respond to this work it sets up a trigger or a facilitator with responding to yourself as other in both time and place the basalt the basalt stone field on the foreground represents basalt as a material used to make axes and spearheads for again the oldest recording 60,000 years old at the center of the work is a this is from the other side, the inside of the rammed structure the earth being kind of swept up to nurture and protect you and it creates an interior sanctum within the memorial where you look out through a point cloud of 10,000 windows back out onto that landscape you were just in this is Daniel Boyd, the artist that we collaborated with on the work and this is the diggers just yesterday walking through it for the first time and the light dawn as it penetrates into the center of the space this immersive space of reflection at the center of the memorial is a cast bronze earth vessel which goes down 5 meters into the ground and it's a sealed ceremonial chain with an invitation elders from indigenous and trite communities around Australia invited to come to the wall memorial and bring their earth, their country, the soil from their grounds which is a profoundly meaningful element the dances for millennia have been used to dance up the dust of ancestors of the grounds where they belong, where they come from so these earths and this soil has been brought together as a very potent element to bring together the history of Australia in this place and I guess the lens is in a sense they obviously get time and place it allows you to temporarily connect to who and when you need to connect with in a space of memorialization but it also transfigures race it allows everyone to be reflected and blurred as equal, their bodies in that space they're not gendered, they're not racialized they become simultaneously equal so it's a way of both a profound vehicle we hope for the communities that it represents but it's also hopefully another physical manifestation, another piece of architecture that acts as a site for knowledge, sharing and storytelling and cross-cultural engagement in Australia goes to that idea of the cultural gaze and that multiple city of culture and yes, the point cloud that we see is that every single one of these lens dots of mirror represent the thousand million views or gazes from every individual cultural perspective and that I guess is two works only across the spectrum works that we are involved with in our practice but two very important works to us that we hope is a starting point for many more pieces that are engaging I guess with this kind of cultural or political contents in Australia thank you for having us Thank you for this couple of fantastic talks I actually had prepared several questions that you already answered all of them so I was trying to reframe my questions because you clearly answered to the topic of the panel and that was quite obvious so for me what has been really interesting listening to you today is the relation with conflict initially I was going to ask directly about your political agenda the political agenda behind the practice and I think that that's quite obvious but for me also what has been interesting that I already read in some of your articles and looking at your process is actually that that political agenda is deeply related with the context with the specific context so you both are aware of the values of the local but you both work with the idea of transgression in your case for instance the transgression of a program clearly or even transgression of constructions methods and I think that the idea of transgression is quite interesting because you at the end of the day that political agenda is understanding that somehow to be political means also to accept to the conflict so you're aware of the reality and you're aware that that reality somehow has to answer to change in order to answer to contemporary needs and those transgressions inevitably produce conflicts and the idea of conflict in both practices is quite different for instance in your case is the need of physicality of a former conflict and in your case actually you're facing conflict because through your process you are generating conflict so my question is how do you deal with the idea of conflict and I think that it's quite important to think about conflict nowadays mainly because we come from a tradition that we understand architecture as in a quite positive manner so we have been trained that architects we mainly solve problems but nowadays we are facing the fact that we can't generate problems and then not necessarily is negative so how do you deal with conflict in your own practices it's interesting actually this notion that by doing the things that we do on time conditions that we do potentially create conflict I actually never looked at it that way because I think also yes there is conflict inherent to the context in that there are just always these dichotomies in places like Niger or Australia you know places that have known the trauma of colonization that have known an amount of exploitation and you know a certain subjugation and all of those things when you fast forward to the 21st century or even the 20th century it's automatic conflict in the sense that these are places that have been impacted by history where certain things were imposed on those places that are completely disconnected with that place so then now the idea or the thought for me is well how do we actually reconcile how do we make an additional bridge where you know these are all places where something was interrupted at some point and something was put in its place and so now I think there's a lot of thinking happening around how do we actually on earth everything that was forgotten or conveniently kind of pushed under the rug and then you know move forward with it and so in the end you know the conflict is not so much about I mean the idea for me is not so much about creating conflict through the work but more so actually having a dialogue that changes the way that we approach things or view things but make it be acceptable because I think conflict for conflict's sake at the end of the day is not very productive so I'm really interested in how can if we're thinking something and if we're thinking well this is wrong or we should do things differently it's much more interesting for me to think of how can I bring you to my side like how can we share this idea and both agree that it's better to move in this other direction and then everybody adopting you know this kind of other option essentially yeah from Australia in an Australian context sorry let me know if I'm speaking properly into the microphone conflict is quite required we have a very particular form of amnesia or there's an Australian myopia in terms of our history in that the atrocious events atrocities that have happened in the colonisation in Australia and the possession of the First Nations peoples have been eradicated from our history and they haven't been dealt with so conflict is required in the sense of truth telling and telling those stories and allowing those events to happen the current population or the indigenous population is about 2% of Australia and they're almost entirely locked out of the contemporary condition through an enormous amount of social yeah social bridges that aren't available to them and a huge amount of them come from I mean there are so many political and social agendas at play but a large amount of that is the unresolved story around the birth and the trauma of this country that is unable to be spoken publicly and we need as many opportunities for those things to come forward and to be resolved so we can actually move together as a whole country instead of a broken one and I think we see it as a quite a positive step forward being able to I think it's a positive thing to be able to try and bring together the dialogue and try and spread that dialogue as far as we can but I think there's also, it is architects we need tools ourselves in Australia to enable us to understand how to deal with that landscape in that I would argue that we are quite conflicted about the way that we would deal with it or understand it and it's not just for Kim and I, we're obviously very interested in the indigenous side of things but Australia actually has a very diverse ethnic mix and we're interested in the stories and I guess this different cultural gaze across all sorts of both historical and contemporary conditions and I think if we can start to think about how architecture might start to either try and engage with those multiple narratives or begin a sort of process of dialoguing with them I think it will make for a much richer experience of architecture and I think it will lead to a more meaningful architecture that can live, I guess pass on some of those lessons that we've learned by engaging with them. I was also curious to listen a bit more about politics with big P capital P and because I come from a city of Barcelona that when architects were directly involved with political institutions or public institutions the city changed radically and you can see that that happened during the transition after our dictatorship years and it stopped up to the Olympics and nowadays after the 2008 political crisis it seems that architects are more involved with public institutions directly so my question is in both of your context how architects or architectural practices are engaged directly with public institutions if that is the case or if not which kind of relation do you have? I think fundamentally architects need to be advocates for in a grand of public conversation buildings that exist in our built environment have I mean they are engaged with in a very particular way and I think it's incredibly unfortunate if we don't use that opportunity to have a voice and to speak out across an incredibly wide range of issues that need to be discussed and engaged with constantly in our ongoing contemporary condition in this case it speaks to class, inequality, wealth, gender, race, all of these things architecture has the capacity to deal with every single day and I think it's our because of the leverage from a single body to these large buildings that have they act as vehicles for a level of exchange beyond ourselves and forums like this then we have I guess an obligation to engage with those battles In many ways I think you could argue that any active architecture is somewhat political in a way like in the way that you think about planning in the way that you think about how where particularly spaces of rooms go in terms of how a building might relate to the urban environment how it relates to a particular to gender or to a particular minority group or whatever it might be or even just like how things are planned for safety or whatever it might be like I think you know the act of making architecture is true but for instance in Melbourne now there's you have seen that it's quite similar to what's going on here in Manhattan with this new real estate developments luxury housing that at the end there are international investments they're changing radically the way the not only the way the city is shaped but also the political capacity of inhabitants because we are draining the city from inhabitants as those buildings are not actually inhabited So architects are complicit in that it's directly how do you answer to that we also we have such limited tools on one hand we have such great power and on the other hand the current housing that you're talking about I guess the rampant amount of apartment buildings going up in Melbourne in the last decade which is what you're referring to all stems from big P politics which is the I guess the corruption the connection between generally state federal politicians and developers having too close a connection to the planning laws which allow a massive amount of apartments to go that make a huge amount of short term profit and leave terrible long term housing opportunities for generations to come unfortunately that's not a that's not default of architects that's beyond architects that's within planning and government however that needs to be witnesses to this and we need to see it and we need to kind of try and change those conditions I mean there are small steps where that's happening in Melbourne there's kind of a ball grip and style projects but again it's like a single grain of sand against a much bigger fight you really to change to have that kind of change at a greater scale that's required you need to step outside of that architecture role the single building the fight per single building you actually need to go back and change the levers which control thousands of buildings being built to allow opportunities for houses or housing that are built by designers and are built according to planning codes that see all of the different people that live in them all of the different ranges of requirements again making sure the cultural gaze is understood of the population that matters so the buildings are designed to accept and promote diversity and from diversity of viewpoints from requirements I think you need also architects to act as a group act as a come together in a way because if it's just singular voices what do we design five percent of buildings in the world or whatever it might be so we need to come together and get a bit more of an authority on the voice I think of any profession we've been able to marginalize ourselves so well I think also we have to be very careful and not I think as an architect we like to be very heroic we have to be careful so to understand that that we are not the answer to everything and so not everything is an architectural problem this particular example is not an architectural problem however it doesn't mean that we don't have a contribution that we can make in terms of certain decisions that we make one building cannot solve one housing project cannot solve all housing problems however there are certain small steps that we can do in any given project that actually it's not a zero sum game so I think also that's what's helpful so often is to in my view remember that even if you cannot impact the global view of things it's not a zero sum game there are still certain steps that you can take in certain types of projects because then it's about mindsets you can use projects and push forward a certain idea that can actually work towards an inception so perhaps the power is not necessarily it's just the dialogue that comes around a small project that can actually move things forward but then at the end of the day you're answering to my questions they're not architects involving in capital P politics so we need to like get out there and become politicians well actually I think we need to take us but I do agree that actually we do have to take position like I think at this point you know in this century those days of just kind of being in our little ivory tower you know like our little world you know should be over honestly we have too many problems there are too many challenges and there's really none of us actually get to just do our own thing you know I feel like we just you know either by being vocal by you know injecting that in our architecture by talking about it you know but I feel like as architects we have the responsibility as you were saying to actually take position we do do a lot of talking though don't we as architects we do a lot of speculation we do a lot of writing but we probably you know like maybe it's like we need activists exactly like we it's the things that we say you know you have to take position I mean I think you have taken position quite well so I'm going to open the conversation here I'm pretty sure there's a lot of questions yeah I think the discussion about the relation between architects and politicians is very interesting but politicians have a certain agenda and they're there for a certain period of time right and we're like professionals and we're there all the time and I noticed that when you talk about urban planning I'm from the Netherlands and there's a very strong urban planning apparatus and there's very strong control over cities etc but still the people that are in their positions that are just for three or four years it's sometimes not enough time to oversee the problematics for the longer period so what you're just saying about for example the housing I noted and for example Amsterdam there's a huge problem with these developer projects and they're actually architects that made the city aware of the long-term effects of these kind of projects and then the city took action and say you can only buy a housing project if you're going to live there yourself now so they put rules in place because architects notified them and I think it is maybe you cannot solve problems with one project but just being there and being an expert in your own profession I think it's a very good place to give advice to people yeah in Australia the Institute of Architects are seemingly generating a larger voice as a group as a body and like we may not see a great deal kind of overtly but in behind the scenes they are as a group shaping policy all the time and trying to kind of improve policy around a lot of these issues that particularly do with housing or planning or urban design whatever it might be but yeah I agree like I think long term strategic planning that's associated with planning regulations pretty powerful people I just want to say thank you guys it was really great talk so much of what you discussed is it like questioning of the places of your homes and in particular political, social and historical context how would you apply the same principles within context of an unfamiliar location and I guess kind of backtracking a bit as architects do you think it's possible to create genuine meaningful and effective spaces within spaces that you don't necessarily have meaning caring meaning for you yeah you just research yeah exactly research just I mean ruthless deep really involved research there's really no way around it but that's you know I think even whether you're familiar with the context or not you have to go through that it's really interesting isn't it to like find out what the problems are or the kind of like issues exactly like the history the you know like all those layers and it's like because I think maybe you know the reason why we're even having to have this discussion is because we've been you know really concerned with architecture in terms of form instead of aesthetics you know and all of those things but really like we're doing architecture for people to inhabit so fundamentally I mean you might need to collaborate with somebody that's local because I think as an outsider like we've got a particular Kim and I were talking about this idea of cultural gaze like we would come into a place and we would think that we would know what was happening and even by talking to people we might think we might know that but in reality that you know the way that they see things the way the local architects see things or the local people involved in issues we can't impregnate that cultural gaze so I think collaboration is a big important tool there I think it's a really good question and it's a really complex answer the answer is both yes maybe you know and all of the above sometimes you'll often know within a 20 minute framework the talk that we gave specifically went down the path of indigeneity in Australia and the gaze I guess the white colonised gaze and the gaze of first nations people in Australia but that's not the entire population of Australia we have a really diverse multicultural population each of which has its own I'm a white educated cisgendered man I've got that slim set of things that kind of represents me or defines me and everyone else has their myriad different positions on that spectrum and you can't consult with everybody it's not possible and so no one's fully representative of their communities I think there's something absolutely interesting about architecture at least having an understanding that there's I guess as architects we come from a perspective where no matter what building we do be it a single private house for a client or a cultural building or a gallery we know that it's in a position where it's understood from a diversity viewpoint so we go in knowing that but we certainly don't go in knowing the answers of what that is we certainly don't go in knowing what that's meant to me or anybody but we know that it will be in this kind of overlapping narrative spectrum that goes to what we're talking about in terms of this idea of the uncanny or the sort of foreign object in the landscape or wherever it might be and that uncanny or foreign object opens up the possibility of questioning its relationship with place or its relationship with people of that place or the inhabitants of the building and it allows the questioning to be there and what people overlay onto it I think one thing to keep in mind is that often this notion of doing architecture in a place that you're unfamiliar with often is unnecessary because I think the first step is always actually questioning the motives behind behind that the motives behind putting yourself to a different place that's something that certainly in Africa you struggle with a lot in terms of architects from elsewhere doing projects in Africa in African countries for example it's depending on the project it's not always appropriate and you don't always have any business going out somewhere else collaboration would have to it's definitely key but maybe it's a no and it's fine stay in your court one more question if not could you close it up yeah I have many actually it's a bit related with what you were saying about the courtyard because somehow you both have an outsider point of view in your case it comes from the art world you have been always interested in the art world and that allows you to go away a bit of your own context the disciplinary context in your case and in your case it's actually the fact that I was not even aware that you're like actually have the year here have the year there which are the values of being detached yesterday I was actually talking to my students because now I'm reading Retif de la Breton a writer from the 18th century and he writes about Paris and about the the ambience of the city right before the revolution is really interesting he was a fetishist so you know this kind of writing that you really enjoy and he actually wrote all those fantastic books about Paris outside of Paris so he always needed to go outside in order to write and come back for months to leave the city and then back again outside so how do you how do you use that capacity of being outsiders within your own for me actually it's been it's very conflicting actually I'm very conflicted about having one foot here one foot there I think the ideal would have been to just be based there but regardless I've lived outside of Niger for so long that I do have an outsider's look as well and it's useful in many ways in that it allows to step back and actually allows me to appreciate all the things that are possible and that are available rather than whenever you're in an environment for too long you lose the side of the forest because you're among the trees so it's very useful for being able to just step back and take stock and actually even check myself even emotionally sometimes you get so involved in it you lose side of the big picture so it's really useful for that but I would say that I don't think it's necessary but it does help you maybe have clarity faster and just in a more immediate way by being able to relate what you're working on to other things and see things a bit differently and see maybe opportunities that you wouldn't see otherwise I think quite crucially architects need to be far more than just architects I think being siloed and myopic within an industry obsessed with itself is we have to fully form people first and then architects second architects should be the vehicle for being a human in the world in terms of our work I think it's incredibly important to kind of isolate between having an insider gaze and an outsider gaze and I say that incredibly knowingly that I have a profoundly privileged position from my background and a huge amount of people in this world don't get that opportunity to slip to the insider side they're only ever given the opportunity it's thrust upon them to be an outsider only I'm going beyond the fact that probably is the way to be creative or critical with one's context in both of your cases clearly has been the way to start a practice and one of the values of this conference is to visualize different young practices worldwide and what you actually have in common that thanks to the fact that you are a bit aside of the former discipline or a bit aside of your context it actually has helped you to start the practice or do you agree or disagree because it's a totally assumption it's allowed us to create a framework through which we can practice through which we can enable work that feels meaningful to us I think that's been important for us in terms of otherwise I don't think there's any right or wrong way to start a practice but it's certainly being outside of or being able to view architecture in the way that we've decided to view it or come at it has set that framework up I think in some ways that sort of edge condition of being able to sort of see from outside of it it helped set that up in that Kim and I probably were we kind of came at the Melbourne school of architecture and so forth from regional spaces and so we kind of probably were taught more in a phenomenological kind of way or yeah and I guess we were sort of obsessed with critical regionalism for a while and then we kind of came back around to a different way of thinking but I think going then through into a sort of more theoretical university through RMIT kind of allowed a re-questioning of a lot of that stuff but you might feel different than Kim I think it's just a personal journey I think yeah I've been practicing as a visual artist for many years and the the the ability to you know manage ideas and use communicate your ideas through artwork as a facility to form them as a medium for them I think has been profoundly important for me in the way I think about architecture in how malleable they are and how malleable you know knowledge and thought is and how it can be wheeled and shifted incredibly mercurial the way we can throw these things around and so knowledge is a weapon in that way the way we talk about these things the way we're framing debate is very very potent certainly clarify the way that we or the way that I come to architecture the way we come to architecture in that it's it is an incredibly important thing I was also curious in the case of Mary and how is it perceived on side the fact that you're a little bit an outsider it hasn't really come as an issue because I actually don't think I'm seen as an outsider or maybe sometimes if it's the case it might be a plus because there's also the advantage of studying outside or having degrees from another country is seen positively so maybe for that actually it makes my job a little easier in terms of credibility in a way so that's a little ironic but yeah I mean overall I think because the thing is in the context in which I work and also the kinds of projects that we do I'm actually an outsider by default because also a lot of the issues that we tackle I come from a privilege point of view the issues that we tackle are from people who are far less privileged than I am so I'm an outsider from that point of view anyway so it's automatic and the people you're working with the people you're working for and I'm not talking about clients I'm talking about users the people that we communicate with but in the end it makes really like a very rich dialogue and a very rich back and forth that is very not only inspiring for the work that we do but really allows us to have these just ongoing conversations for years and years with all kinds of people it's amazing time to close the conversation thank you very much for attending those fantastic lectures thank you