ADS10: Savage Architecture – All Set for Tomorrow

ADS10 explores the idea of a Savage Architecture, an architecture that is not just shelter or comfort, nor display and reproduction of wealth, but rather the basis of our urge to come together and engage in collective rituals.

Savage Architecture occurs when need gives away to possibility, mere survival becomes will to power, individual lives achieve a collective dimension and shared values are represented in the public sphere.

ADS10 looks for those cracks of reality where collective subjects can resist the all–encompassing logic of economy by carrying out alternative forms of life. Working at the intersections of an anthropological gaze, political thought, construction techniques, ecological strategies and curatorial practices, we practise a research and design method that aims at empowering these collective subjects. We seek to produce an architecture that gives concrete substance to struggles and ideas for other possible worlds.

Change and Innovation

Change is the great challenge of our age. The accelerating deterioration of the planet’s inhabitability demands a radical shift in the way we organise, produce, and relate with the environment. Instead, as the material end of the biosphere is getting closer, the global economy continues to expand. Our tragic condition is to depend on cultural and economic systems that cannot tolerate limits. For capital, any crisis is an obstacle to circumvent, any emergency an opportunity to fuel its constitutive dynamic of accumulation and growth.

An inexorably expanding force, capital conceives change as problems and solutions, as a process of continuous adjustments aimed at endless reproduction.

At the very heart of this mechanism lies the idea of innovation, a notion that profoundly informs the mentality of our time. Historically, innovation was considered a subversive force that could destabilise the given order of the world. Yet, since modern times, innovation has come to define change as the result of human knowledge and action, in contrast to the external changes associated with chance, nature, or God. Through the notion of innovation, new ideas of liberty could unfold into concrete actions and designs, which could transform the environment according to mankind’s needs, desires, and ambitions.

Defining the aims and limits of change is unquestionably a political matter. However, since the nineteenth century, innovation has become synonymous with economic development produced through technological advancement. Stripped of any political connotation, the idea of innovation was key in naturalising the idea of modernity, tying individual freedom to economic expansion. Today, innovation is still largely understood in economic terms. As a process to turn ideas into products or services with the aim of opening or enlarging consumption markets, or improving the means and organisation of production. In this conception, innovation turns scientific discoveries, technologies, manufacturing, and managerial systems from abstract knowledge into concrete and profitable solutions.

While the negative effects of innovation – such as job displacement, ethical issues, inequality of benefits, environmental or health impacts – are often scrutinised, the idea of innovation is understood as intrinsically positive. If something is innovative it must lead to progress, ensuring a continuity of the political-economic field. Ultimately, the role of innovation is to provide a universal framework where all human knowledge and action can be put to work. In this form, innovation can be considered an instrument of governance that is deployed to maintain and expand current forms of production and organisation. In political terms, such a conception of innovation is deeply reactionary – everything must change for everything to remain the same.

Territory and Architecture

When it comes to architecture, innovation is commonly associated with creativity and technology. Aesthetic novelties express the latest societal trends and the evolution of construction techniques for a more efficient, convenient, or sustainable building process. More rarely, innovation is related to use – to the ways architecture enables activities and relationships to take place. Yet, the most significant effects of innovation through architecture can be seen at the scale of the territory, where the transformative power of building unfolds in its full political, economic, and social potential.

Territory does not describe only the physical quality of a delimited area, but rather the network of subjectivities, relationships, and productive capabilities that constitute it. The territory is a political technology that orders land by distributing resources, establishing property regimes, and defining forms of production and control.

A canonical example is the skyscraper that emerged in nineteenth–century North America by combining the rising importance of the white-collar work with innovations in building technology, such as the steel frame and elevator. The architecture of the tall tower not only redefined the aesthetics and functionality of the office space, but also, more importantly, produced a new idea and material organisation of territory. The skyscraper fostered new infrastructures, land values, commercial activities, social structures, and behaviours that resulted in a new material, economic, and political forms for the North American and then global city.

Within the complex field of human and non-human agencies that constitute territory, architecture emerges as a powerful political tool because it provides a way of knowing, representing, and therefore transforming the otherwise ungraspable multiplicity of relationships. Taking advantage of the inherent spatial and material limitation of the built form, architecture can give legibility to the territory and produce change. Exemplary architectural forms are innovative not so much because of their styles, materials or construction techniques, but above all for their ability to reorganise human activities, habits, and relationships through their material presence. As such, architecture can be conceived as an instrument to retrieve the material and historical dimension of innovation, turning an economic ideology into a contested political field where radical change can unfold.

Knowledge and Interior

The rise of the contemporary knowledge economy has demanded a substantial reorganisation of the modes of production. The development of machinery and technology has not only increased our productivity, but has also created a vast collective knowledge out of the socialisation of production processes. As industries and technologies advance, skills and capacities multiply and spread across society, so workers become increasingly interconnected and reliant on the knowledge embedded in the means of production. The dependance on advanced technologies and collective knowledge foregrounds communication, affective relations, and symbols as tools of the dominant intellectual and cognitive labour. In a knowledge-based economy, we are expected to cultivate social relationships and make creative, individual, innovative cultural content. The production of new information, services, and products relies on our virtuosity, together with the ability to adapt and respond quickly and inventively to changing circumstances. Today labour does not just produce commodities, but innovates life itself.

Despite the increasing significance of the immaterial aspect of production, the knowledge economy has materialised in a global boom of corporate campuses, office parks, excellence centres, business incubators, research hubs, and coworking spaces. These architectures give substance to the immateriality of labour and financial capital. Corporate campuses and office parks are multiplying in Silicon Valley and Europe as much as in the new tech districts of China, India, and the main cities of Africa and South America. Innovation is building a planetary interior where human creative potential can be captured in an endless production web that constantly trains and exploits the ability to think, cooperate, and perform together. Such a totalising environment is a powerful accelerator of social productivity, a means to constantly expand, accumulate, and appropriate the collective knowledge, which is the basis for innovation. By blurring the boundaries between work and leisure, private and public, the domestic and urban, the planetary interior simulates a public sphere within which knowledge–sharing and collaboration are put to work and brought under the control of capital.

Architecture and Cooperation

The rapid expansion of corporate estates and campuses is related to a variety of factors, including an escalation in the number of employees, expansion of financial and real estate operations, and the provision of all-inclusive facilities to increase the workers' productivity and working hours. However, the main character of the endless interior of innovation is the concealment of its material limits. If the monumental scale was traditionally linked to a representation of dominant power, the sublime vastness of the new work landscape is a means to dissolve the limits of the productive horizon, akin to the famous dome that contains an entire town in The Truman Show (1998). The dissolution of architecture into optimised, measurable quantities that can be deployed across all possible scales, gives an aesthetic form and flexible organisation to the endless cycles of production. In the apparent neutrality of the urban interior, the freedom of individual creativity and collaboration can flow more efficiently with less friction.

Yet, cooperation and innovation require a physical framework to give a material and symbolic presence to relationships and knowledge. Just as labour-power is inseparable from the worker’s body, forcing capital to deal with our physical necessities, architecture is an indispensable vessel of the human needs to gather, relate, and share. Beyond providing shelter, architecture directly affects our ability to produce and live together. In the increasingly extensive interiors of the innovation factory, we can read the paradoxical attempt to provide a physical space that could include the totality of labour-power – a project that might become possible in the metaverse. Even when disguised and reduced to the thinnest possible layer, however, architecture still offers a form of resistance to capital’s totalising abstraction. By exposing the limits of an all-encompassing economic order, architecture can become an emancipatory tool for the workers’ reappropriation of social productivity and the construction of other possible worlds.

The Atrium Effect

While the planetary interior of corporate campuses and co-working spaces might vary according to local circumstances, its ethos and effect can be traced to a paradigmatic form – the atrium. An empty space within the building mass, devoid of any specific function, the atrium organises movement, regulates proximities and distances, and creates hierarchies and probabilities of interaction. At the same time, the atrium provides a stage for the spectacle of human relations, exhibiting power structures and knowledge exchanges within the controlled environment of the interior. Akin to the controlled environment of a scientific experiment, the atrium produces a space that can capture the productive potential of the city and reproduce it in vitro, globally. Half–street and half–theatre, the atrium manages and deploys the two forces that shape the space of capitalist production – circulation and performance.

The atrium was the central space of the Roman domus. Generally built on a narrow and deep plot with minimum street frontage and maximised density, the Roman urban house was organised around a void. Through a large rectangular hole in the roof, this open-air room brought light, cooled air, and collected rain water in a pool called impluvium. The atrium linked all the rooms of the house and at the same time hosted a multiplicity of public and private uses. It was the entrance, waiting, and reception room for the clientes greeting the pater familias – the salutatio being the crucial daily ritual – together with a temple for the household gods, and a ceremonial space for marriages, funerals and other rituals. This public dimension overlapped with the private space of the family, the atrium being the living and dining room, and the space where servants performed ordinary domestic activities such as spinning, weaving and cooking. The word atrium itself probably comes from the Latin ater, which means dark, from the colour of the walls covered in soot, linking back this space to the proto-historical huts that had roof openings to allow the hearth’s smoke out. Overlaying social, religious and domestic activities, the atrium gave to circulation a performative character that materialised in the lavish wall paintings, use of sculpture, and visual and acoustic presence of fire and water. These aspects were presented to the public realm through a deliberately framed view of the atrium from the street.

The increased complexity of houses in the Imperial period demanded a multiplication of the atrium spaces, leading to a functional differentiation and a semantic shift in which the atrium became a large entrance and waiting room. In the paleochristian and mediaeval basilica, the atrium identifies the courtyard in front of the church – often dedicated to the catechumens, people waiting to be baptised – while from the Renaissance, it will indicate the lofty entrance space to the internal courtyard of the Palazzo.

From the nineteenth century onward, the atrium regained a centrality as the archetype that could combine the latest development in iron and glass building technology with the emerging world of industrial goods and bourgeois consumption. The performative interiors found in the arcades of Paris and London, or the gallerias of Milan, Naples, and Rome are famed examples of this combination. Deployed at the scale of the city, the glass-protected atrium constructed a new idea of the street and city as a controlled environment. The ‘natural’ lightning, which came from the sky or artificial lamps, was reflected in the slick terrazzo or tile pavement and multiplied in an array of vitrines, producing the experience of a kaleidoscopic world in miniature. Not by chance, the arcade’s architecture was directly derived from greenhouses and conservatories, which emulated exotic environments in the European metropolis through plants imported from the colonies. By reconstructing fragments of ‘discovered paradises’ inhabited by ‘primitive’ populations through the most sophisticated technologies, the glass houses reaffirmed the colonial power of Western nations. The very effect of the interior was to provide legitimacy to the colonial project.

The image and the experience of a captive Eden was not only used in the arcades, but also in the interior of country houses, where private collections of plants, animals and art were displayed together in galleries and conservatories. The atrium was also found within such vast interiors as the Crystal Palace – erected in Hyde Park for the London Great Exposition of 1851 – the glass membrane turning material and social production and consumption into a mesmerising spectacle. The artificial culture of nature, now conflated with an abundance of industrial production, was extended to society as a whole. The atrium crystallised a universal interior that could incorporate nature and culture, the street and the park, embodying the ideology of such techniques as the tool for unlimited human possibilities.

The planetary potential of the atrium began to be fully developed from the 1970s and 1980s, when the so-called atrium-building expressed the global expansion of capitalism. The atrium emerged as a distinct way of conceiving and constructing the city in response to the crisis of the American downtown. While the car and highway fueled the suburban expansion of the city, its very centre epitomised the crisis of this model of urbanisation, allowing a new frontier for urban speculation. Inserted into a network of pedestrian links, the atrium became a tool to remake the city, inscribing its savage potential within an architectural spatial and organisational repertoire. The interior void of hotel atriums, such as the Regency Hyatt in Atlanta by John Portman, turned stairs, elevators, and structure into elements that emulate the complexity of the city. The interior was immersed in the ‘natural’ light pouring from the glazed sky, perfectly climatised and blended with water pools and dripping vegetation.

By dissolving the boundaries of natural and artificial, public and private, the atrium reorganised the perception of space and time in the city through architectural means. It concentrated the home, garden, square, café, office, club, and shop, and further simulated the urban experience by erasing the boundary between day and night-time activities. This environment presented a perfectly controllable future city in which fiction is a norm, while socialisation and work completely coincide. In fact, the atrium effect was also successfully deployed in the office space, which, from the development of the Bürolandshaft in the 1950s, was conceived as a landscape where the hierarchies of corporate organisation are deployed in an ‘informal’ setting conducive to creativity and cooperation. With the development of the digital technologies, the totalised environment of the atrium informed the model of the city, with a proliferation of diffused campuses, co-working spaces, and virtual offices which combine the real and simulated city in an indistinguishable network of production.

In 2023/24, ADS10 will explore the potential of the atrium archetype to illuminate the contradictions of capital and provide a platform for emancipation. Within and against a world where every human thought and action is exploited for its economic value, it is vital to invent ways of reclaiming and expanding social productivity for the common good. A post-capitalist society might emerge if the immense productive resources and knowledge created by capitalism are used for the benefit of all, rather than the profit of the few. Workers cooperatives, community-driven projects, and alternative economic models demand material forms of organisation and representation in the public sphere which can allow change. From this perspective, the architecture of the atrium can become an instrument to allow workers and communities to collectively control and direct labour and its products. An architecture that is conceived, built, and used as a way to foster solidarity, collective action, in order to commit to a more inclusive, equitable, and just society.

Models

Models are a key tool of research and design for ADS10. The act of making models is not only a means of experimenting with forms and materials, but also testing production processes that can directly or analogically refer to political, social and environmental contexts addressed in the project. As such, ADS10 utilises model–making as a way of thinking and materialising ideas, relationships, and processes that operate at multiple scales, from the body to the planet.

In 2023/24, we will expand this method of teaching and inquiry by working on three different types of models, which relate to three scales of innovation.

We will start at the scale of the interior (1:10/1:50) – using the diorama to investigate the archetype of the atrium by producing models that are both analytical and critical reinterpretations of existing examples. Using large scale sectional models, photographs, and films, the students will investigate the role architecture plays in orchestrating the relationship between space, production, and use. The diorama will focus on circulation and performance as techniques of production that are deployed in space through architectural form and interior devices, such as furniture, appliances, environmental systems, etc.

A second set of models will focus on the scale of the territory (1:500/1:5000) – illustrating the human and material resources of a chosen site, together with their current and proposed web of relations. The models will investigate the existing spatial dimensions of political, economic, and social systems that constitute the territory – networks, boundaries, structures, patterns, etc. – to trace historical genealogies and propose strategic architectural interventions to change existing conditions.

Inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s La Boîte-en-valise (1935–66), students will produce a mixed media assemblage within a portable box as a representation of the territory of the project. The design and construction of the box will constitute a practice that reflects on the complex relationships between territories, actions, and forms of representation.

Field Trip

In mid–December, ADS10 will travel to Rome to visit key buildings related to the theme of the studio and engage in an intense model–making workshop in collaboration with Marco Galofaro and the space of Modelab, one of the most important model–making studios in Europe.

Live Project

ADS10 will continue the collaboration with Imperial College Business School and Wicked Acceleration Labs (www.wickedacceleration.com) through a seminar in Term 1 and workshop in Term 2. The seminar will discuss the fundamental notions and questions that characterise the field of innovation theory and practice, with a particular focus on the relationship between innovation and space. The workshop will give us the unique chance to test ideas about innovation through an intense design and model–making charette, focussing on the Araucania region in Chile. Since the 1990s, this territory has been characterised by increasing levels of conflict between the Chilean State, agricultural estates, big forestry corporations, and the Mapuche indigenous communities. The workshop will build on the ongoing research project of Wicked Acceleration Labs to propose strategic architectural interventions stemming from the archetype of the atrium studied in term one.

Tutors:

Gianfranco Bombaci is an architect. He studied at Sapienza University, Rome, and KU University, Leuven, where he obtained a PhD in Environmental Design. In 1998 he cofounded 2A+P magazine and was a partner of the practice 2A+P architecture until 2008, when he founded 2A+P/A Associates. The office works on architectural, urban and landscape design with a particular interest in the nature and condition of the contemporary city. It engages in a broad range of activities including public and private buildings, housing complexes, urban spaces, event pavilions, temporary installations and interior design. Since 2010, Gianfranco has served as co-founder and editor of San Rocco magazine. In 2015, together with Matteo Costanzo, Davide Sacconi and Luca Galofaro, he founded the gallery Campo in Rome as a space for debate, study and celebrating architecture. He has taught in the Faculty of Architecture of Ferrara, in the Master In/Arch in Rome and in the School of Architecture, University of Miami, Rome. He teaches and coordinates the Interior Design BA Course at IED Rome.

Matteo Costanzo studied at La Sapienza University, Rome, Oxford Brooks University, Oxford, and the Netherlad Architeture Institute). In 1998 he cofounded 2A+P magazine and was a partner of the practice 2A+P architecture until 2008, when he founded 2A+P/A Associates. The office works on architectural, urban and landscape design with a particular interest in the nature and condition of the contemporary city. He has been a visiting critic and run workshops at several architecture schools, including: Istituto Europeo di Design; Istituto Nazionale di Architettura, Rome; Nuova Accademi delle Belle Arti and Domus Academy, Milan; Syracuse University, London; Cornell University, Rome; University of Miami, Rome; San Rocco Summer School at the University of Genoa; TU Munich; University of Liège; and at the Everything Out the door workshop at Campo, Rome. He teaches on the RCU (Radical Cut Up) at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam and publishes widely.

Davide Sacconi is an honours graduate of the Università degli Studi di Roma Tre. He founded Tspoon Environment Architecture in 2004 – a research practice that has received awards in national and international competitions for architecture, landscape, urban design and editorial projects. He completed his postgraduate studies at the Berlage Institute, Rotterdam, and is currently a PhD candidate at the Architectural Association, London. He has taught at the University of Liverpool, The Bartlett UCL and is currently Director of the Syracuse Architecture London Programme.