The Things Around Us

As the potential for architects to be transformative agents of space is increasingly swallowed up by the dominant planning logic of neoliberal urbanism, the salvaging of a modernist ruin and the adaptation of a nomadic structure for urban life has us rethinking the role of building and of the contexts in which architecture is built.

When systems of governance and market economies define community, ownership, and belonging, how can architecture intervene? What is the role of the architect beyond that of a service provider, the deliverer of building as commodity? With the wealth of material, spatial, and social potential already built into existing structures and across urban fabrics, is it possible to integrate new value into the built environment? 

At the CCA, we have been working through these questions with The Things Around Us: 51N4E and Rural Urban Framework, an exhibition and publication project curated by Francesco Garutti. As the title suggests, we see buildings as just single pieces of an extended system—each the final outcome of a long sequence of actions undertaken in the transformation of a territory by a web of agents. We are less interested in what architecture represents in and of itself than in its capacity to reveal the underlying conflicts, anomalies, and contradictions of dynamic territorial shifts. The entanglement of people, policies, economies, times, and scales with which the architect interacts not only generates the conditions within which to work but is itself the site in which and with which to operate.

Context, as we understand it, is today more than ever defined by a collision of forces that no single, professionalized form of expertise, like architecture, can decipher on its own. Whether in capital cities or the most remote villages, the term “building” ends up feeling less indicative of a process of creation than the output of a careful coordination—an intricate choreography—of conflicting influences. The architect, therefore, is necessarily just one player within this network. What does it mean for the architect to operate within an expanded network of players and assume a more humble, modest place in a rich ecology of practice?

At the CCA, we see exhibitions and publications as testing grounds, experimental sites for the production of disciplinary discourse. The Things Around Us is part of our Manifesto series, which brings contemporary practices together to reflect on topics fundamental to the discipline, including housing, technology, domesticity, the environment, and history. The project’s two featured offices, Rural Urban Framework (Hong Kong) and 51N4E (Brussels), incorporate a wealth of actors, alliances, and collaborations to strategically redefine disciplinary tools and methods. Their work provides meaningful case studies to explore how architectural practice can be reoriented in a landscape of overwhelming change. 

One year ago, our investigation of 51N4E’s and RUF’s practices started with journeys between Montreal, Brussels, Berlin, Ulaanbaatar, Tirana, Hong Kong, and Zurich. The two offices, embedded in seemingly distant and distinct geographical areas, began to react to one another’s work through the CCA’s curatorial framing, with Something Fantastic (Berlin) guiding the visual identity of the exchange. Conversations initially took place in the architects’ offices and on building sites, eventually moving over to Zoom and online whiteboards. As political, social, economic, and environmental crises continued to escalate over the course of the exhibition, the project of reframing the role of design and questioning our methods of production became ever more pertinent.

A key result of this reflection, featured in the exhibition, is the video essay Untitled (The Things Around Us), a catalogue of the various agential forces that the architects have been in dialogue with during their design processes. Conceived as a continuous narrative in which territories, things, and actors blend into one another, the film will be released online in early 2021.

In February, we will also release a publication, co-published with JOVIS and the final piece of our ongoing Manifesto series, that reflects on questions of practice and context. Our discussion of these themes will continue on the CCA website with the ongoing issue With and Within, which includes Andrew Scheinman’s unpacking of the weighty word “context” and its shifting significations throughout architectural history, and Irene Chin’s elaboration of a set of diagrams that illustrate the complex choreography and repositioning of the architect within an expanded ecology of practice. The issue also includes excerpts from our conversations with 51N4E and RUF on relinquishing control in the design process, and an excerpt of Francesco Garutti’s introduction to the project.