Hélène Frichot - Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture

Creative Ecologies

Creative Ecologies

Theorizing the practice of architecture

HLNE FRICHOT

Contents

Cover: Tacita Dean, Fatigues, 2012 (detail). Chalk on blackboard, 6 panels, 230 1110 cm; 230 557 cm; 230 744 cm; 230 1110 cm; 230 557 cm; 230 615 cm. Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris and Frith Street Gallery, London

Thinking does not happen alone but in the company of companion thinkers. There are many students, colleagues, friends and family I would like to thank for helping me bring this book project to realization, for giving me the courage to think and in thinking to practice further. Pedagogical relationships and responsibilities should never be underestimated, and I owe a great debt to the students who have worked with me in seminars, design studios and in the context of their own research projects at KTH, Stockholm, and at RMIT University, Melbourne. I am thankful for the conversations I have had during the early stages of preparing this book, specifically, I am grateful for the time and space allowed me during a fellowship at Architecture Theory Criticism History (ATCH), University of Queensland, between June and August 2016, and I thank Geraldine Barlow for looking after me while I was in Brisbane. More recently, I am grateful for conversations and encounters with Gail Jones and Anna Gibbs in the Writing and Society Research Centre, and Stephen Healy and Katherine Gibson in the Institute for Culture and Society, both located at Western Sydney University. I thank Zo Sofia aka Sofoulis for letting me land on her doorstep in the Blue Mountains, Sydney, and talk to her about her work. I have presented work in progress at Manchester University, the Staedelschule Architecture Master Class (SAC) Frankfurt at the invitation of Johan Bettum, at the Graz Architecture Lectures, TU Graz (thank you Dubravka Sekulic), and at the Bartlett School of Architecture where I am especially grateful for the support and friendship of Peg Rawes and Jane Rendell. My colleagues and friends who have offered invaluable feedback on the manuscript include: Isabelle Doucet, Mattias Karrholm, Jonathan Metzger, Douglas Spencer, Karin Reisinger and Helen Runting. I thank the critical and creative practitioners whose work I have been able to discuss for trusting me: Michelle Hamer, Katla Marudttir, Chelle Macnaughtan, Julieanna Preston, Michael Spooner and also Alex Schweder. The architect-thinkers Alexander Mller and Mathieu Wellner kindly invited me into their temporary studio space, Argue Muller Wellner during the artistic occupation of the historic Ruffinihaus in Munich for a writing retreat exactly at that desperate moment when I was attempting to finalize the manuscript, and here I also thank Eva Krauss for putting me up in Munich. In February 2017, I took up brief residence in a cottage in Coasters Retreat, New South Wales, to write and think, and I want to thank Sally McInerney and my dear friend Julia Lehman for making this possible. I thank James Thompson at Bloomsbury for his encouragement, and David Kelly for his careful copy-editing. This book was in large part funded by a generous Riksbankens Jubileumsfond sabbatical grant, which allowed me the invaluable time to dedicate myself to writing as well as paying visits to a number of institutions. Finally, my family has been suffering for way too long with my all-consuming state of distraction, and so while I suppose they will not have the patience to read this book, I dedicate it nonetheless to Rochus, and Felix and Florian.

Prologue
Story one: Maria Reiche Surveying

To see a landscape as it is when I am not there .

SIMONE WEIL, Gravity and Grace (1952: 42)

A woman stands near the top rung of an aluminium ladder and looks out across a vast desert wilderness. Her hair is held back with a scarf and her cotton skirt gently billows in a warm breeze. Her arms are afloat, which means she is balanced somewhat precariously. She is wearing flip-flops and on the ground below is a leather satchel and what looks like a bundle of rope. Perched there on her ladder it is hard to imagine what this woman could have to do with architecture, or with any kind of creative, material, space-making practice. Instead it would appear that she apprehends a tabula rasa, which begs the question: Why was this image of a lady on a ladder to be found everywhere during the 2016 Venice Biennale of Architecture? She was spotted all over Venice, on billboards, on posters at ferry stops and at Marco Polo airport. The same desert vista repeated at small and large scales, the same lady on a ladder gazing out across a vast uninhabited landscape, searching for something.

Is she looking towards the past or towards the future? She could be the last modest witness of the after-effects of a devastating event of global reach, or else she could be documenting an ancient prehistoric site and its curious markings. Could she be looking for signs of architecture or purposeful design?

Her name is Maria Reiche. She is a mathematician and an anthropologist, and, like an architect, she knows how to read a complex site and then document it through drawings. The landscape vista she apprehends is the ancient Pampas

Maria has been appropriated by the curator of the 2016 Venice Biennale of Architecture, Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, as his mascot, his aesthetic figure, through which, I argue, he aims to produce certain effects and affects. She is the figure by which Aravena asks us how we (all whose practices are somehow related to architecture) might offer a report from the front.

When you open the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2016 website, the title of which was Reporting from the Front, or when you collect your ticket, catalogue, guide and other paraphernalia, you catch sight of Maria on her ladder. Immediately on entering the Giardini Exhibition, you are in Maria Reiches room. And Aravena has some interesting reasons for using her as his key aesthetic figure:

Maria demonstrates inventiveness in the face of scarcity. She has scarce resources, and must make do with her simple ladder-technology to gain a point of view over the landscape, which would otherwise remain a meaningless dry plane full of incomprehensible clusters of stone and gravel.

Challenge for architects: With scarce resources and minimal means how can we nevertheless produce valuable outcomes?

Marias response to the landscape is pertinent, Aravena argues, challenging the abundance of technologies she may have used, for instance, a truck to transport her across the plain with her ladder mounted on top for an even better point of view. But, as Aravena explains, such a mode of transport would have quickly destroyed the fragile ground that she wishes to document and preserve. Pertinence means paying attention to the situation at hand, which is what Maria does.

Challenge for architects: Pay close attention to your sites of engagement and be respectful amidst your encounters. Do not destroy what is of value in your sites before you have even begun your work.

It is essayist and traveller Bruce Chatwin who introduces Maria Reiche to the world when he writes an article about his encounter with her in the Sunday Times, and it is Chatwins essay that has aroused Aravenas interest. Maria had been occupying the Peruvian landscape for some forty years, since 1932, when Chatwin met her while travelling in the 1970s. She had taken it upon herself to measure and trace the ancient Nazca lines to determine whether their arrangement was coordinated with the movement of the planets, the cycle of the seasons and the winter and summer solstices. The Nazca lines are negative geoglyphs, shallow trenches dug into the ground, across an area of 450 square kilometres, by removing the reddish pebbles and uncovering the whitish earth beneath.