In this studio, you will identify examples of archipelago communities facing existential threats, analyse their histories, spaces, and rituals, and propose syncretic architectures—designs that work within and against the existing systems, transitioning away from the logics of property and exploitation towards architectures of care and reciprocity.
Archipelagos and Architectures of Crisis and Care
How can architecture help us move from a world dominated by exploitation and crisis to a multiplicity of different worlds based on care and pleasure?
This studio invites you to explore your personal experiences and fascinations—particularly practices you engage in or things you consume when feeling anxious or disoriented. Through a kind of detective work, we will trace the origins of these materials or activities, uncovering the communities and places where the exploitation of resources, labour, and architecture contributes to crises for others. We aim to understand how these communities stand to protect and care for their ecologies and people, which they are inseparably connected to.
As development, profit-seeking, and urbanization continue to expand, leading to the extraction and exploitation of minerals, labour, water, monocrops, and more, communities worldwide face increasing existential threats. These threats endanger their survival, the well-being of their loved ones, and their ability to enjoy life with meaningful, caring relationships with people, animals, plants, land, and sea.
At the root of these crises lies the concept of property—an almost universal instrument governing every aspect of our lives. Property has long dispossessed communities of their means and forms of living, destroying relationships with their ecologies and communities, which were once based on care and reciprocity. This pervasive logic of property and exploitation commodifies our relationships, ways of seeing, and interactions. This is evident in the way we design, settle, and build, as well as in the urban landscape, which has consumed nearly every square meter of the earth, pushing all forms of life—human and beyond—toward extinction. This is legible in our forms of architecture and settlement from our houses, to our walls, fences, gardens, streets, paths, to forests, beaches, and crops.
However, the etymology of “crisis” is rooted in the Ancient Greek “krísis,” meaning “a separating, a power of distinguishing, decision, choice, election, judgment, dispute.” Derived from “krínō,” meaning “to pick out, choose, decide, judge,” crisis involves making decisions and choices.
In the studio “Archipelagos and Architectures of Crisis,” we explore how, when faced with crises, people begin to question, distinguish, expose, decide, and carve out alternative architectures—within and against property and extractivism’s monopoly on reality. These alternatives create figurative, and sometimes literal, islands that form archipelagos of distinct communities, identities, and spaces within the sea of an incessantly expanding hegemonic system.
Examples of decisive responses to crises can be found in how indigenous peoples organize against the dispossession and destruction of lands, ecosystems, and forms of life across the Andes to the Indonesian Archipelago. Other examples include how people organize new ways of working together to counter increasing droughts and fires in places like Greece, Italy, California, or Australia. Activists are also forming alliances and designing alternative models of tourism and agriculture to combat the increasing impoverishment, lack of housing, and basic services in major European tourist destinations like the Canary and Balearic Islands.
In this studio, you will identify examples of archipelago communities facing existential threats, analyse their histories, spaces, and rituals, and propose syncretic architectures—designs that work within and against the existing systems, transitioning away from the logics of property and exploitation towards architectures of care and reciprocity.
Syncretism, or Hybridizing Ontologies as a Method
Syncretism involves inhabiting two or more radically different worlds simultaneously, practicing sometimes diametrically opposed ways of seeing, being, thinking, and “building” relationships and architectures.
I. Find a Movement Addressing a Crisis
You will individually find movements or groups that organize themselves against a particular crisis. Examples are provided below.
II. Analyze the Situation and Formulate a Thesis
Analyze the group and the historical, political, and architectural context of their situation. Map out the problem they are facing and how they are responding. Document the group’s practices, rituals, and spaces they organize to counter the crisis. Formulate a written and visual thesis that will form the basis for your intervention in this situation.
III. Propose a Syncretic Architecture
Based on your thesis, propose an architecture that questions, confronts, and transforms the status quo.
As a broader framework for the studio—both for analysis and for selecting sites for your projects—we suggest using the literal archipelago of the Mediterranean, a traditional and contemporary venue of crisis. For centuries, it has been a frontier of different cultures, climates, empires, and worlds.
Examples of Syncretic Architectures
Example I: Mosques of the Bosnian Migrant Community in Vienna
After the devastating wars that led to the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, thousands of Bosnian Muslims fled to Austria, setting up their new lives in Vienna. In Bosnia, their traditional residential arrangement involved individual houses grouped around local neighborhood mosques, which were not only religious centers for daily prayer but also venues for communal gatherings, discussions, and festive activities.
In Vienna, these Bosnian mosques as community centers were adapted to the vacant ground floors of multi-story residential buildings. Thus, the traditional Viennese block was overlaid with the rituals of Islamic prayer and Bosnian gatherings, incorporating the necessary typological elements and creating a syncretic architecture of parallel existing worlds.
Example II: Protecting the Ecologies of Tindaya Mountain on Fuerteventura
Tindaya Mountain on Fuerteventura is a protected natural monument due to its environmental significance and indigenous engravings. Since the mid-1990s, however, the site has been under threat as state institutions push to develop a stone quarry to clad banks and government buildings, as part of a monumental project by Eduardo Chillida to boost tourism. Activists argue that these proposals jeopardize the archaeological sites, ecologies, species, and the mountain’s free use by locals.
Given that the mountain served as a ritual center and sacred site for the island’s indigenous population, activist groups and descendants of the Mahos have organized protests, talks, festivals, concerts, and guided tours to highlight Tindaya’s importance as an indigenous heritage site. They advocate for the mountain under the slogan “Tindaya is already a monument.”
Example III: Community Fire Management in California
In California, collective burning practices—hybrids of modern state institutional methods and indigenous knowledge—are radically changing how people relate to land, property, trees, plants, neighbours, and the entire cultural construct of the Californian suburban dream. In Paradise, California, neighbourhoods are constructing communal structures to organize collective burning practices that will prevent the massive fires that previously destroyed their town despite the extensive suppression and surveillance systems in place.
Organizing these burns can take months and emphasizes local politics and planning in relation to care for ecologies. It also means that clear property boundaries are beginning to dissolve. When not used for organizing burns, these communal structures become free spaces for events, workshops, or simply for the community’s enjoyment.
Methods:
Students will analyse a case study, its spatial frameworks as well as its archetypical types and on the basis of that propose a syncretic architecture that confronts an existing situation.
THE COURSE WILL BE HELD ENTIRELY IN ENGLISH!
Lecturers:
Eldar Hajdarević
Brendon Carlin
further information:
Kick-Off: Thu, October 3th 2024, 10.00 – 12.00, in Hörsaal 14, Stiege 3, 3. Stock
Meetings every Thursday 10:00 – 17:00.