How to: not become a “developer”

Developers (and architects who want to be like them) don’t fit in with the crowd that idealizes pure architectural thinking, and are rarely found on platforms like e-flux and CCA. An architect facing an architect-developer confronts a problem they might prefer to energetically ignore: traditional unhyphenated architecture claims that its most important values are beyond profit. Then this other kind of architect comes along with a lack of purity right there in their name.

Can a role we first associate with financial interests and complicity with the status quo successfully challenge either one? Over three weeks, we talked with different kinds of architect-developers and we found that this is not a model of practice at all, but a space of invention. And now we have some advice for you.

Looking into the architect-developer mirror forces a confrontation with the assumptions of traditional architecture practice. If you have problems with the status quo, hyphenation may be for you. The architect-developer can make new moves and the game differently; they can enter into larger negotiations, choose and invent development models, and pick supporters and allies. The architect-developer doesn’t have to be a service provider, unable to shape decisions upstream or to define briefs. 

But, in many ways, that’s the least interesting part. What often begins as a search for greater agency within the typical construction process has the potential to create other processes. Hyphenation can force architects out of the gray zone and to explicitly define an architectural identity and values.

If you’ve got values to begin with. If making money is your goal rather than a tool, hyphenation will bring limited change. The architect-developer struggles with the same structural issues of representation and privilege that dictate access to opportunities today. The current inequities and lack of access felt by those not white, not male, not cisgendered, not heterosexual, not middle-aged, not able-bodied, and not from the global north, must be challenged by critical practice–hyphenated or not.

For this fourth iteration of CCA’s annual “How to” residency, conceived as a platform for rapid tool-making in response to specific opportunities and needs, and starting a new three-year cycle focused on accelerating changes in architecture practice, we invited eight participants following an open call: Mingjia Chen, Ewa Effiom, Melanija Grozdanoska, Rebekka Hirschberg, Harriet Powell, Thea Renyong, Duncan Steele, and CoCo Tin. After research, discussions, and interviews with practitioners like Verena von Beckerath, Teddy Cruz, Issa Diabaté, Elsie Owusu, Amin Taha, Louis Schultz, and Dijana Vučinić, we responded to questions from architects who were thinking about getting hyphenated. 

How to: not become a “developer” is curated by Lev Bratishenko, CCA Curator, Public, and Joseph Zeal-Henry, who co-founded Sound Advice with Pooja Agrawal to explore new forms of spatial practice through music.

Since 2018, our annual “How to” residency has produced interventions in para-architectural activities like publishing (How to: not make an architecture magazine, co-curated with Douglas Murphy), curation (How to: disturb the public, co-curated with Mariana Pestana), and awards (How to: reward and punish, co-curated with George Kafka). 

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