archis 2019 #1per issue 19.50 euro 55 · 2019. 7. 2. · model created spatial externalities:...

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INTANGI- BLE CUL-TURAL HERI-TAGE

VOLUME55

ARCHIS 2019 #1PER ISSUE 19.50 EUROVOLUME IS A PROJECT BY ARCHIS + AMO + ...

Francesco Bandarin, Amritha Ganapathy,Rory Sherlock, John Palmesino, Zach Pontz, Alex Retegan, Doina Işfănoni, Cameron David Warner, Troy Conrad Therrien, Saverio Massaro, Zachary Sweeney-Lynch, Will Tooze, James Hendrix Elsey, Chiara Bortolotto, KIEN

VOLUME_55_LAYOUT_24x33cm_28MEI19.indd 1 14/06/19 11:44

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WHEN IT COMES TO HERITAGE, THE MATERIAL REMAINS OF OUR PRESENCE IN THE PAST, THE MAX WE DO IS TO PROTECT AND PRESERVE. RESPECT FOR WHAT WAS TAKES OVER FROM ENGAGEMENT WITH WHAT IS, OR CAN BE. BUT CULTURALLY SPEAKING, DYNAMISM IS CRUCIAL. MAYBE THIS IS AN IMPORTANT LESSON TO LEARN FROM THE WAY INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE IS BEING APPROACHED: CHANGE AND ADAPTABILITY ARE THE TOOLS TO MOVE FROM PAST TO FUTURE.


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IMAGE FRONT COVER: MARCUS LYNCH

4. EDITORIAL PRICELESS

6. FRANCESCO BANDARIN THE ART OF SAFEGUARDING9. AMRITHA GANAPATHY ATLAS OF THE INTANGIBLE

HERITAGE

13. RORY SHERLOCK ALL IS FLUX 16. JOHN PALMESINO THE GEOPOLITICS OF PRESERVATION INTERVIEW21. ZACH PONTZ PHILADELPHIA: WHOSE HERITAGE?26. DOINA IŞFĂNONI THE ROMANIAN WAY INTERVIEW30. CAMERON DAVID WARNER TIBETAN HERITAGE IN URBAN CHINA

CULTURAL

35. TROY CONRAD THERRIEN STORY-LINE 39. SAVERIO MASSARO CONVERSATION ON WASTE AS CULTURAL HERITAGE42. WILL TOOZE SPAM HERITAGE 46. ZACHARY SWEENEY-LYNCH NEOLIBERAL URBANISM: KICKING OFF INTANGIBLE

51. JAMES HENDRIX ELSEY GILGAMESH IN A BLOCKCHAIN AGE 57. CHIARA BORTOLOTTO THE PARTICIPATORY COMMUNITY INTERVIEW60. ZACHARY SWEENEY-LYNCH THE MAKGEOLLI REVIVAL: TRADITION AND MODERNITY 64. KIEN SAFEGUARDING INTANGIBLE NL INTERVIEW68. ARJEN OOSTERMAN PICTURE POSTCARD AS CHRISTMAS GIFT

70. COLOPHON


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WASTE AS CULTURAL HERITAGESAVERIO MASSARO

The waste we produce speaks volumes about our pyramid of values. At a recent conference in Bologna, Saverio Massaro raised a few eyebrows when he presented spatial strategies treating waste as cultural heritage. Francesco Degl’Innocenti sat down with him for a conversation, ranging from archaeological field research to informational power structures.

Francesco Degl’Innocenti: In your PhD you researched spaces and civic strategies in relation to waste: how did you come to heritage?

Saverio Massaro: My considerations are meant to question the static concept of heritage; if waste was considered to ‘literally’ be heritage, this would trigger the race towards its commodification. Rather, seeing raw materials and resour-ces as commons would readdress what we consider valuable. Can a broader concept of cultural heritage change the relationship of humans and objects, extending it throughout the cycle of transformation of matter?

We constantly hear about the Anthropo cene and the human ability to affect the environment. In analysing such a narra tive, Marco Armiero and Massimo De Angelis noticed the ever-neglected last part, that of concerning waste produced in the process. In light of this they renamed it the Wasteocene, a notion that is reasonable when we think of the trans-dimensional pervasiveness of was ted matter. Floating islands to particles, macro to micro, the cycle is beyond our comprehension. We eat and breath these remnants: the issue is almost post-human.

It’s absurd to think that societies still struggle to recognize the value of the not-immediately-evident, but only recently we’ve seen projects that have managed to give a density to materials after disposal, often through the use of technology. Previously, the value of a water bottle was strictly contingent to fulfilling its function; since its genesis and aftermath was barely traceable, it was programmed with a short use-value, containing liquids. Nevertheless, every artefact is loaded with an enormous informational value, material and proces sual, but also geo-graphical, intimate, at times even ideo logical. Present but lost because they are economically ungrasp able. Theoreti cally, in this context, infor mation tech nology allows a sort of cognitive ‘un-blackboxing’.

FDI: Latent potential is the value proposition of almost any technology…

SM: True, in fact there are contradictory aspects when materials become ‘smart’: their exponential complexity will require a new notion of disposal.

FDI: …and a new relation with the supply chain in place. In Volume #47: The System we tried to stress this systemic tension in the interview with Thomas Rau.

SM: I remember it. Beyond today’s hype, Rau’s understanding of circularity is fasci-nating, truly radical. We are finally realizing that there is an aftermath to any given product, the industrial push toward linearity is slowly exhaus ting. The extension of the life cycle of an object forces us to also think about its genesis. Moreover, most societies have been steadily moving from products to services in the last 50 years, and lately we see this transition happening to tech giants: Apple’s strategy doesn’t push products anymore, but aims at becoming a publisher, a bank, and who knows what next. But Rau goes one step beyond. The three syllogistic assump tions of his doctrine are: mate rials are services; products are banks of raw material (highlighting the informatio nal value); buildings are depots, in an everchanging landscape of tempora riness. Promoting a passport for materials he proposes a fil-rouge that is much longer, but constant across processes. Which is also a trajectory that Volume has been inquiring in the ‘Trust in the Blockchain Society’ research, right?

FDI: Yes, and for this I can tell you a revelatory example of what’s behind supply chain management. In late 2016 Walmart ran a greatly advertised prototype with IBM, tracking three of their food products ‘farm to fork’. Now, we both know Walmart is not an exemplar in ethics, let alone sustainability; so why did they embark on it? Talking to an Executive Innovation Architect of IBM, Kim Escherich, I found out that the moment you could track all steps, down to the very plant from which the fruit had been picked, customers were willing to pay twice as much for exactly the same product. Out of thin air, two times more! They were surprised themselves, he said.

But now think of the power asymmetry: you have a technology built on the promise of disintemediation, that doubles the economic value without redistributing

Plastiglomerate, Kelly Jazvac. Photo: Jeff Elstone


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it across all the supply chain of producers, handlers, distributors and so on. Less actors, double the revenue, artificially: transparency was their product, not food.

SM: They used information as a marketing trick, instead of the usual tools to increase sales: advertising, packaging, positioning etc. But I am intrigued by this case: the entire system of value-creation could be forced to re-adjust and adapt.

FDI: Of course, at the same time there were conventional mechanisms that fed graphic designers along the way, copywriters, product designer, and all the many professional figures plugged into the current economic system. Not just one company, one developer, and one interface.

SM: The owners of the infrastructure, once again.

FDI: To acknowledge the informational value of matter, you hint at waste as a field of archeologic investigation.

SM: When I say that I think of William Rathje’s sociological studies of the 70s, on what he called “Garbology”: for the first time, with his students he conducted archae-ological field studies in wastelands, similarly to what would have been done with Greek ruins, in order to understand societal habits and behaviours. These were the

precursors of several experiences dealing with industrial externalities as an ‘archae ology of the contemporary’, manipulating the conventional time-frame: not centuries or millennia but decades. And these studies showed designers a way to operate by decon-struction and stratification, to analyse and eventually knit the broken bonds generated by our ‘tyranny of the new’.

FDI: Lately artists have produced pieces of ‘not-so-speculative’ design with this geologic approach, to expose our collective madness.

SM: Exactly, we’ve come to a point in which we’ll actually find geologic traces not dissimilar to Kelly Jazvac’s Plastiglo-merates. The key of this type of archaeo-logical approach to waste is at last the recognition of the intangible, informatio-nal value of matter.

The notion of waste, especially in con-temporary western societies, acquired such a bad connotation that it doesn’t stop anymore at materials, but perco-lates down to people, communities, places. A wasteland is perceived as a spatial externality, and this has deep consequences. Take the debate on circularity: to move from a productive impasse we search spasmodically for new business models while blabbering about community, completely forget-ting the spatial dimension. We concen-trate on the finance, on the technolo g-ical infrastructure, but we don’t take into account the space in which a com-munity recognizes itself. The old linear model created spatial externalities: waste-lands, incinerators, treatment plants, these could never be close to the heart of the city due to their ontological conception.

FDI: The perception of a problem dic -ta tes its response, and this in relation to waste is fascinating: two years ago I had a detour in Foodtech, dealing with food waste and AI. With the other co-founders we looked at why previous endeavours had failed, and the split seemed evident: the communication strategy of the suc-cess ful ones focused exclusively on the ‘food’; a sharp re-positioning of food-waste away from general waste. Because, as Marc Schuilenburg explained in Volume #53: Civic Space, whereas the perception is immutably negative, the notion of trash has shape-shifted consis-tently in the last century: from dumped industrial by-products, we moved the frontier to ‘social waste’, now that Dutch stations don’t allow citizens in without

Porte de Pantin Recycling and Sorting Facility, Paris. Image courtesy of Data Architectes. Photo: Schnepp Renou


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a ticket. We adapted the concept of trash to the people that cannot afford to spend, and the spatial solution is always the same: to externalize it toward the margins.

SM: The smart city model still interprets waste as a negative externality. Rare are the cases in which this strategy has been changed, in contexts such as Copenhagen, they were able to handle political governance, technical design as well as the consensus-management. Through the bombardment of visions they managed to have the citizenship accept a treatment plant as a solution; as inno vative as it is, it holds still an amount of risks.

FDI: Beyond Copenhagen, which other cities stood out in this play between communities, consensus, and space?

SM: Paris has been at the forefront for at least a decade in the creation of a network of mixed spaces dedicated to waste management, recollection and treatment, also for the amount of information and reports made publicly available by Apur (Atelier parisien d’urbanisme), an urban planning agency responsible for several of these plans, from logistics to resource management for the municipality.

FDI: So, a very different communication strategy from the Danes.

SM: Well, the Parisian urban strategy is exemplary in its synergic integration of infrastructure and design. Take the Isséane Centre de tri in Issy-les-Moulineaux, for instance: the treatment plant is completely embedded in the residential neighbour-hood, taking the familiar shape of a shopping mall; it uses the river to transport waste materials and cut down on-wheel transportation. This programmatic mixité was conceived before the financial crisis, a period in which the narratives on waste were different, with few or no design guidelines and just a handful of virtuous cases to research. Now, every new building development applies this integrated approach in areas in need of regeneration around the Peripherique beltway, or beside railways. The case of Clichy-Batignolles is an example of an eco-district that included a centre de tri in its very first conceptual design: although with a less hybridized program than the Copenhagen example, the treatment plant incorporates civic functions to invite citizens into the process, and grafting its operations into the quotidian life of a commu-nity. It goes without saying, there have been protests and controversies like anywhere else, but it is important to highlight the design quality and intelligent approach.

FDI: It dignifies it as an architectural piece what is commonly a mere externality.

SM: We go back to what we said before: the dignity you give to matter trickles down all the way to the spaces. Automatically, it would make no sense to design under-par places of treatment. Paris plays a lot also with the double meaning of ‘residual matter in residual spaces’. Recollection areas for cumbersome trash are cleverly placed often under the Peripherique viaducts; this way they take advan-tage of the vehicular flux, no deviation, and slowly reconnect to their surroundings. The space is the glue, not the business model! This analysis is influenced by my field of research indeed, but until the space claims this role there can be no trend reversal; for sure not one lead by an economic model based on the summation of virtuous individual behaviours.

FDI: This has been the neoliberal trick of the last 40 years, shifting the responsibility on the shoulders of the individual. In the 70s, during the first backlash against disposable plastics, amongst the strongest lobbies for recycling were plastic producers … everything but modifying the productive logic.

SM: This is why Rau is radical: the responsibility is no longer that of the consumer, but of the producer. I don’t pay Philips for the ‘lightbulb’; I want light. Provide me with adequate lumen; the immateriality of the product’s service.

FDI: Such a drastic reinvention makes me question it: no system is innovated by mass rollout, there are countless frictions. Does it seem plausible to rebuild an industry from scratch, or should we tweak its logic for a different purpose? I mean, for instance, do you know DUS architects?

SM: The firm that 3D printed a house some time ago?

FDI: Yes. I recently passed by the inno-vation unit they opened, Aectual. The 3D printed home, to me, was a PR stunt, an overblown keychain. It did not really engage with materials, workflows, or expertise of the building industry. That’s because they were trying to reinvent a sector. Now instead, they are using that same technology in a more subtle way, integrating it in familiar building compo-nents such as a terrazzo floor. This allows them to bypass the need to explain what they are doing, and push the aesthetic render to the extreme: my mother has never heard of 3D printing, but under-stands a beauti ful pavement, you know? Their technology merges with existing techniques, entering an industrial context to modifying its processes inside out. Which is more or less the same strategy used in Paris: letting the neighbourhood familiarize with the hidden tail of its very productive cycle.

SM: Exactly: the collection plant of Ménilmontant hybridizes sport facilities with waste management. Quite the opposite to the spectacle of Copenhagen: the volume underneath, the inflows, the street interface and so on, they are all carefully designed to highlight the symbolic victory of normalcy.

The Paris territorial agenda acknow-ledges the interdependence of waste management and logistics always in a framework of mixed urban transfor-mation: the creation of new buildings is linked to infrastructure across scales, from the railway down to the delivery bike. An infrastructural ecology, reconfi g-uring the material exchanges of a neighbourhood.

And curiously, French and German speaking countries understand that a systemic change can only be achieved through a new imaginary, so their lexicon is also adapting.

FDI: And the communication of waste is back.

SM: In Germany recycling centres can be ‘Recyhof’, adopting the gentle term ‘Hof’, ‘courtyard’. In French ‘hôtel logistique urbain’, highlighting its temporariness.

New words to define new spaces: etymologically and philosophically.


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VOLUME Independent magazine for architecture to reinvent itselfwww.volumeproject.org

In 2004 Archis, the Amsterdam based architecture magazine with a pedigree reaching back to 1929, joined forces with OMA’s think tank AMO and C-Lab – a think and action tank at the GSAPP of Columbia University – based on the shared ambition to redefine and re-establish architec-ture’s relevance. Volume was created by Archis Editor in Chief at the time, Ole Bouman in collaboration with Rem Koolhaas (AMO) and Mark Wigley (Dean of GSAPP). From 2017 Archis/Volume changed its structure into more theme-based forms of collaboration, expanding the network of partners. Archis/Volume mediates its research in various ways like workshops, exhibitions, debates, its digital platform and Volume Magazine.

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Contributors:

Francesco Bandarin is Assistant Director-General for Culture of UNESCO, and Professor of Urban Planning and Conservation at the University IUAV of Venice. From 2000 to 2010 he was Director of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre and Secretary of the World Heritage Convention.

bmd is a Belgium-based office specializing in architectural visualization, founded in 2002 by Peter Hoste and Kyra Frankort. With backgrounds in graphic design and architecture respectively, they enjoy combining their expertise and interests with other disciplines such as art, film, and photo-graphy, in a refreshing view on visualization. www.bmd3d.com

Chiara Bortolotto is the principal investigator of the project ‘UNESCO frictions: Heritage-making across global governance’ at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Her research is based on participant observation of the implementation of the UNESCO Convention for the safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage at international, national and local levels.

James Hendrix Elsey is an artist and trans-disciplinary researcher, currently on the MA Contemporary Art Theory programme at Gold-smiths, University of London. Other lines of enquiry at the moment are conspiracy theories, working through trauma with fiction, and the relation between sonic memory and displacement. @jameshendrixelsey

Amritha Ganapathy is an architect and researcher who studied in India and the Netherlands. Her current interests include the new newsroom in the age of digital consumption and the architectural visualization of political imaginations.

Doina Işfănoni holds a PhD in art historian and is associate researcher-collaborator at Dimitrie Gusti National Village Museum in Romania. Previously, she was the head of the scientific department of the museum and lecturer at the National University of Arts Bucharest. Until 2016 she was member of Romania’s National Commis-sion for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage.

KIEN is the Dutch Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage. It aims to promote intangible cul-tural heritage and to make it accessible, to stimulate and professionalise the sector and encourage people to participate in it. www.immaterieelerfgoed.nl/en/

Saverio Massaro holds a Ph.D. in Architecture Theories and Design at Sapienza University of Rome with the dissertation “Integrated urban strategies to face the issue of urban waste in contemporary cities. New opportunities for a civic architecture”. Visiting scholar at KU Leuven (Belgium) and Adjunct Professor at University of Basilicata (Italy), he is also partner at the architectural office Deltastudio. As a civic designer, he promotes and coordinates partici-patory processes with non-profit associations Esperimenti Architettonici, Urban Experience and CivicWise. He is editor of books, publications and essays in the architecture field, and has been co-editor of the webzine On/Off Magazine.

John Palmesino is an architect and urbanist. Together with Ann-Sofi Rönnskog he founded Territorial Agency, an independent organisation based in London that combines research and action for sustainable spatial transformations. Recent projects include the Museum of Oil with Greenpeace and ZKM, and Anthropocene Obser-vatory with Armin Linke and Anselm Franke and HKW Berlin. They are Unit Masters at the AA School of Architecture, London, and are fellows of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths,

and AHO The Oslo School of Architecture. They lead the research at ETH Zurich/ Studio Basel. John is a founding member of Multiplicity, an international research network on the contem-porary city, based in Milan.

Zach Pontz is a photographer and writer. A native of Philadelphia, he now splits time between his hometown and New York City.

Alex Retegan is a Romanian architect, researcher and editor based in Rotterdam. He works at OMA in the public relations department.

Rory Sherlock is an architectural designer, writer and educator living in London. He works at OMMX, teaches History and Theory Studies at the Royal College of Art and co-founded the FOAM co-operative.

Zachary Sweeney-Lynch is a graduate in History from the University of Sussex. He is now a student on the Heritage and Memory Studies MA programme at the University of Amsterdam, where his research focuses on the politics of memory and culture.

Troy Conrad Therrien is the curator of archi-tecture and digital initiatives at the Guggen heim and teaches at Columbia University and the Architectural Association.

Will Tooze is 22, currently working as an architec-tural assistant in London. He is interested in what architectural thinking can do.

Cameron David Warner is Associate Professor and Director of the Anthropology Research Program at Aarhus University, with an expertise on Tibet and the Himalayas. He recently served as co-curator of an exhibition at Moesgaard Museum, ‘Museum of Impermanence: Stories from Nepal, Tibet, and Papua New Guinea’.

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