RCA Architecture's Adam Kaasa at Theatrum Mundi: Debate about Urban Culture
RCA Architecture Research Fellow Adam Kaasa is the newly appointed Director of Theatrum Mundi, where he is founding Fellow alongside renowned Professor of Sociology and Humanities, Richard Sennett. Based in London, Theatrum Mundi – which translates to ‘the world stage’ – is a network of researchers and practitioners from across disciplines and contexts that come together to engage in productive debate about urban culture.Â
Kaasa takes up the role following two years as a Research Fellow in Architecture at the RCA, on the AHRC–FAPESP project ‘Public Spaces and the role of the Architect: A comparative study of influential Modernist and contemporary examples in London and São Paulo’. He completed his PhD as an SSHRC Scholar at the London School of Economics, where he continues to work with the international research centre LSE Cities. His new position at the helm of Theatrum Mundi bridges the interests and expertise of the two institutions, and the disciplines contained therein, with the aim to merge architecture and urban study with art and design methodologies.
At the heart of TM is a deep commitment to the notion of the interdisciplinary. Within the framework of the organisation, the performing and visual arts, the built environment disciplines and community and social collectives combine to produce novel approaches to questions about the condition, inequalities and politics of contemporary urban culture. Outcomes range from intellectual discourse based on an investment in long-term and individual conversations, to large-scale public events –conferences, workshops, publications and exhibitions.
Kaasa describes the
possibility for fruitful intellectual, practical and creative exchange with
regards to the idea of ‘imaginaries’: in art and design, the approach, the
mode of investigation and its material or formal expectations of outcome is
different—the question is located in a different place. What can architecture
and other disciplines learn from this? How can we – as thinkers and makers alike – learn
to see things from another angle, through a new and unfamiliar lens? Kaasa’s
promotion of the interdisciplinary focuses on the potential richness of
connections that are not always obvious, and with an emphasis on making—the way people make, what they
think about when they are making, what is shared across boundaries and borders
both conceptual and material.
Theatrum Mundi is about generating collegial, provocative venues and circumstances in which people are able to freely push analogies between the seemingly disparate: raising questions becomes a hypothesis in itself, a productive activity through which something unexpected will cohere. A key notion is vulnerability – to consider a form of liberal research that unfolds according to a radical openness, directed but non-instrumentalised, and which entails the kind of intellectual risk required to produce progressive thought. TM examines what types of physical and pedagogical spaces allow this variety of activity to take place, to foster ambitious, critically engaged outcomes.
As Kaasa begins his tenure as Director, TM sees a number of exciting programmes and partnerships on the horizon. ‘Writing Cities’ considers the relationship between language and urban experience, the manner in which modes or practices of writing participate in different iterations of the city – with an emphasis on language, discourse, texts, manifestos, performance, inscription and notation. The project will manifest in ‘Uncommon Building’, a symposium organised in conjunction with Alice Honour Gavin at the University of Sheffield; and a four-day summer workshop with the Onassis Foundation in Athens, which will bring together Greek and international practitioners to consider ‘the structure of revenge’ in writing the city.
Another theme, ‘New Spaces for Culture’, looks at urban cultural infrastructure in relation to the production, display and consumption of art and performance. In keeping with a vision to expand its resources from the intellectual sphere to the reality of making and enacting ideas, testing concepts in the real conditions of the world with which they grapple, Theatrum Mundi will travel to Venice this summer, during the architecture biennale. Working alongside Jane da Mosto and weareherevenice, participants will look at the actual living population of Venice, its socio-cultural, political and environmental experience beyond tourism. Considering craftsmanship and display, the group will run an academic workshop to develop a research agenda that addresses ideas of regeneration and gentrification.
One of TM’s most ambitious long-term projects is an ‘ideas challenge’ that tackles notion of design and politics in New York City, London, and Rio. The inaugural event took place in NYC, and invited a wide variety of participants to propose real or imagined public spaces for free speech. The activity culminated in two juries – professional and public – who voted to determine the ten best proposals. Similar events took place in London focusing on the commons, and this year’s challenge launches in Rio in May, with the possibility of further additional locations, ending with a global summit in 2019.
In this new role, Kaasa hopes to promote an investment in a long-term, critical conversation about design and politics – one that works to expand the possibilities of what is mean by ‘space’, ‘culture’, and ‘the city’. The aim is to continue to build a network underpinned by an ethos of diversity alongside a rooted commitment to research as experimentation – to privilege the imaginative possibility of thought, conversation, debate and discourse. The longevity of this opportunity within Theatrum Mundi has been generously facilitated by James Anderson, who has endowed the organisation with a five-year grant.
Kaasa says, ‘I’m thrilled and humbled to lead Theatrum Mundi at this moment of transition. TM is built on collaborative structures of intellectual vulnerability, and a political ethos around non-instrumental scholarship, debate and cultural making. I’m committed to expanding and diversifying the network, and the questions we ask in the face of growing global inequities and their locations in urban culture and urban form.’