Many is beautiful

2015

The Gezi Park barricades in Istanbul, the OWS occupation of Zucotti Park in New York City, the tents of the Indignados movement in Spain, the London Blackberry riots and the seizure of Tahrir Square in Cairo to demand the overthrow of a dictator. As new forms of social coexistence and relationships are being configured, and new spaces for encounter and conflict are produced, architecture feels that essential questions regarding its activity are being addressed in each and every one of these situations. And yet we seem unable to relate to them and grasp their significance as we repeatedly turn to old metaphors and tools. If modern architecture pursues the modern liberal state techniques of management and administration of life, then recent forms of political action, which claim a new relation to the sensible, demand – and might help develop – a new understanding of architecture. We are moving from technical and disciplinary knowledge towards a critical practice that integrates with the action of the multitude. Starting from a definition of commons as the production of the multitude, we seek not only to understand the spatial dimension of this production, but also to acknowledge space as common.

Resilence and the City- Art, Education, Urbanism, 2019

This paper offers a concise glimpse of the research that lies behind the creative non-fiction slide/text presentation “Finding the Self in the City of Multitudes,” given at the 15th ELIA Biennial Conference, 20-23 November 2018, Rotterdam. It also gives an account of the workshop that accompanied the presentation and reflects on its impact. It is published with selected conference papers in Resilence and the City- Art, Education, Urbanism.

2011

This thesis is concerned with the difficulties that the discipline of architecture has encountered in thinking about and articulating ecological questions in recent years. I argue that it is precisely because the problems posed by the environmental question have so many personal, political and social dimensions, and are so radically trans-disciplinary, that architectural discourse and its metropolitan mediations is well positioned to reflect upon, articulate and stage as a new modern project, this multidisciplinary and socio-ecological complexity. The content of this thesis therefore crosses a number of different fields within the arts and sciences. I scrutinise a series of contemporary and historical moments in the development of systems thinking-or what Alfred North Whitehead described as "the philosophy of organism"with particular reference to a socio-political re-conception of architecture, urbanism and the wider environment today. I describe a network of relationships which traces the surprisingly dynamic histories of a series of concepts-including nature, matter, organism, ecology, network, mind, emergence, system and dialectics-as they unfold across a wide range of disciplines, including architecture, cybernetics, Marxist theory, ecology and the cognitive sciences. Ultimately, this thesis suggests that critical urban ecology-the architectural investigation of ecological aesthetics and urban political ecology-will be a key field of both theoretical investigation and practical design activism in the coming years, as the deep contradictions of capitalism unfold at an ever more intensified global scale.

2015

The Plan journal, 2019

This article seeks to trace a history of Team X's experimentations on the issue of housing for the great number and more specifically around the theoretical background leading to the question of impermanence and indeterminacy in the architectural process. Through the writings of the Smithsons, Oskar Hansen, or John Voelcker, a theoretical framework will be defined and then put into perspective in a contemporary context. Two case studies will be discussed: Lacaton & Vassal, and Elemental. Connections will be made on the issue of indeterminacy and the concepts of "open structure" and "open aesthetics" will be promoted. These concepts presented here offer an alternative for some other possible formal developments around the question of indeterminacy. We will assess whether the pragmatism of these two contemporary architectural offices allow their proposals, beyond responding to specific situations, to claim the status of a reproducible model, such as one imagined during the 1960s.

2021

2020

How do technicians represent the complexity we are living in? Which are the processes for an appropriate reconstruction of this always-changing portrait? What they see and how they observe landscapes? What architecture must learn from other disciplines if it wants to get into the era of communication? In a time of emergency, old examples and new ones will make visible how the traditional technicians would practice in a different and more concerned way if they want to play a more fruitful role in the regeneration of the living environment. This work wants to show the transforming attitude of observation an architect experienced in his laboratory during last fifteen years, in order to bring all the technicians together in a more complex discussion about the future of the living beings and the ecosystems they transform everyday. It wants to make visible how architecture could review its ways of representation if it wants to get into the future, the era of ecology.

Civil Engineering and Architecture, 2020

Multiple Perspectives on Interiority, 2018

Paper presented at [in]arch conference - THE STORIES OF INTERIOR Multiple Perspectives on Interiority, 30-31 January 2018 Universitas Indonesia, Jakarta. This paper addresses the current emphasis on interiority in the discipline of interior design with a particular focus on the urban environment. The Situationists are a much-cited precedent for this line of thinking; their constructed situations aimed to ‘provide a décor and ambience of such power that it would stimulate new sorts of behaviour, a glimpse into an improved future social life based upon human encounter and play’ (Sadler, 1998, 105). In the twenty-first century, the relation between interior/exterior, interiority/exteriority continues to be a critical topic in relation to the question of inhabitation. The philosopher Gilbert Simondon’s concept of individuation offers a different way of thinking about interiority from one which is premised on the subjectivity of the individual. He writes of the individual as a product of individuation where movement and temporality, change and contingency are foregrounded; inverting individuation as something produced by the individual. This moves interior design from phenomenological and psychological frameworks, which centre the subject and work from the inside out, to an ecology of subjectivity and entertaining the potential of the production of interiority as a ‘subjectification isn’t even anything to do with a “person”: it’s a specific or collective individuation relating to an event (a time of day, a river, a wind, a life …). It’s a mode of intensity, not a personal subject’ (Deleuze, 1990, 98–9). Urban + Interiority, a workshop held in Nicosia, Cyprus I was invited to lead as part of the 10th IMIAD (International Masters of Interior Architectural Design) Workshop – Inhabiting Nicosia: Interior Strategies for the Public Realm – is a key project discussed in this paper. Keywords: individuation, urban, exteriority, Deleuze, Guattari

International Conference on Architectural Education in Asia (eduARCHsia 2017), 2018

The genesis of human settlements is a continuous process of production and layering of patterns, forms and spaces in different scale levels across historical periods. Our urban morphology is the product of the cosmopolitan communities, the articulation of the multi layered tangible and intangible urban traditions and modernization processes. Diversity, eclecticism, fusion, acculturation, adaptation, are the nature of our architecture and urbanism. However, at present, we are in an urgent need to find resolutions to address serious problems posed by the climate change, ideological conflicts, economic greediness, depletion of resources, and social justice. One of an essential elements in humanity is empathy, and this empathy has been anesthetized or lost due to ignorance and greed in almost all aspects of our relationships with others and nature. The design and planning profession and education should reflect on the mistakes that have been created which have caused cultural, social, and environmental issues. We need to reconsider our present practices, i.e., to reflect on, to interrogate and perhaps to present alternatives to our existing pedagogical paradigm.