Anya Sirota is an architectural designer, researcher and educator. With her partner, Jean Louis Farges, Anya directs the Detroit based studio Akoaki. Through a distinct synthesis of aesthetics, social enterprise and cultural programming, the practice has established a reputation for innovation in the urban realm. The work, grounded in an affection for collective, unrestricted and inclusive experiences, has recently been featured in exhibitions at the Vitra Design Museum, the Saint Etienne International Design Biennial and the Detroit Institute of Art. Anya currently teaches at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, where she directs the Michigan ...

Volume 8 is dedicated to The Reversible Destiny Foundation created by Arakawa and Madeline Gins. The Foundation is much more than an architectural practice. It articulates art, philosophy, poetry, architecture and, to some extent, science in a dialogue that benefits each of these disciplines and ultimately serves one of the most radical ideas that apply to architecture: the action of non-dying. Guest authors include Shingo Tsuji, Stanley Shostak, Russell Hughes, and Jean-François Lyotard. Volume 08_Arakawa + Madeline Gins includes: Introduction: Towards an Architecture of Joy — Architectures of Joy: A Spinozist Reading of Parent/Virilio and Arakawa/Gins’s Architecture — Applied Spinozism: Architectures ...

Now is not a time for metaphorical sticking plasters or vanity projects, it is a time for change and a time for action. The mandate of architects and urbanists today goes way beyond designing buildings, it includes changing behavior, influencing and impacting policy, and building bottom-up agency with new understandings of value, justice, and cultural production. This task is best achieved by sharing not just strategies but also practice – completely openly and freely. This sixth volume in the Archifutures series for the Future Architecture platform, therefore, focuses on emerging narratives and strategies that can help architects adapt their practice towards ...

For Nikolaos Patsopoulos, the current situation in Europe is similar to the one in Russia right before the revolution and so should be the architecture that accompanies these shift of social paradigms. We discuss about the role of the architect in revolutionary movements, as (s)he has probably more to unlearn than to teach in this matter. For Nikolaos however, each body that modifies the way the built environment (in particular the street) operates politically can be called architect. We therefore spend the time to contrast these two figures sharing the same name of architect, one that contributes actively to the production of ...

Performance is enhanced, targeted, tested, specified, reviewed and applauded. In each case, the design of performance is the orchestration of results. Architects might guarantee water resistance, for example, and calibrate this objective against cost, labor or the desire for exposure. Performance frames decision-making by metrics of efficiency, optimization and sacrifice (or yes, satisficing). In this familiar logic of technocratic governance, criteria are also codified in legal terms and challenged by architects who exceed lax building codes or undermine excessive ones. Beyond the technological, as argued in Perform or Else: from Discipline to Performance, engineered performance generates productive friction with that of corporate ...

On the ledger and the herbarium: the settling of financial and botanical accounts. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, the age of digital media and TCP/IP protocol architecture, the 1989 discovery of the manuscript of Jules Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century (1863) in a locked safe perhaps appears more dramatic than the unpublished novel’s retrospectively tepid dystopian prophecies. Yet its narrator Michel Jérôme Dufrénoy’s employment in the banking house of Casmodage et Cie. provides unexpected insight into what it meant to keep the books in nineteenth-century France. The novel is set in a Paris of the 1960s, when literary culture was ...

This essay looks at the case of Collective Towns in Iraqi Kurdistan as an example of how State interventions on the ground are often instruments utilised to implement broader political plans. Throughout the 1970s and the 1980s the Iraqi government made full use of spatial planning as a constitutive part of the strategy of “dealing with the Kurdish problem”. Recchia’s argument is that the Ba’ath regime adopted urban planning and space design as social engineering devices in its larger scheme of shaping society into a more homogenous and simplified form. The Iraqi government used the combination of ethnopolitics and a centralised ideology ...

Is degrowth an absolute term? As a multidisciplinary team our intention is to question how the concept of degrowth is understood in, and embodied across, the spatial practices of ecosystems in sub-Saharan Africa. Envisioned as an unconventional spatial experience allowing for multiple readings, the dynamic and interactive installation will offer the audience access to a collection of novel case studies. By challenging the reading of the South through the divisive lens of the colonial theodolite, the project presents a living atlas, a learning tool that subverts established modes of conceiving degrowth as an easily transported, translated, and imposed paradigm.

In this conversation that occurred before her presentation at New York’s Left Forum, Tings Chak and I discuss the historical and contemporary racialized treatment of migrant bodies in North America and Europe. Refused, expelled, marginalized, or detained, the migrant body is a precarious one. Through Ting’s upcoming graphic-essay book, we talk about carceral architecture, in particular the one that embodies the numerous migrant detention centers in Canada. What does that mean at a legal standpoint to be incarcerated not for punishing reasons but for administrative reasons? How does architecture unfold violence upon bodies through its very physicality? What would that ...

The Oslo Architecture Triennale, 2019 For the last two centuries, the engine of architectural production and the basis of societies around the world has been the pursuit of economic growth. The desire for infinite growth has forced aside common and ecological goals measuring acts of culture and community as mere bumps in GDP. Yet the limits to this paradigm have become abundantly clear. As equity, wellbeing and non-monetary measures of prosperity falter, rising sea temperatures, extreme weather and other indicators of climate breakdown converge on the conclusion that the days of growth’s predominance are running out. Architecture is no exception. The promise ...

The title of this project has been adapted with reference to the disputed concept of an Existenzminimum, which was conceived as an emergency measure to regulate the provision of low-cost housing for the growing working class between the World Wars, but has been criticized for perpetuating low- standard living conditions for the underprivileged. Existenzoptimum builds upon the ideals of the Existenzminimum while developing a proposal for cooperative living in opposition to family life and its ideology, considering issues such as class, gender etc.

Failed Architecture (FA) reconnects architecture with the real world. By opening up new perspectives on the built environment, we seek to explore the meaning of architecture in contemporary society. Since 2011, we have been providing an inclusive platform for critical urban discourse, fueled by unconventional narratives from an international network of contributors. Architecture continues to fail because we are stuck in a global economic system which puts profit above everything else, reproducing social and political conditions that undermine people’s control over their built environment. Meanwhile, the (architectural) media reduces the design of society to a spectacular image. As a result, the ...