How would you describe the contemporary state of architecture?

Ok … I think architecture is getting increasingly under pressure by the concept of the smart city. Under the labels of comfort, security and ecology there is a movement emerging, to transform cities into smart cities, to build smart cities. I believe, the city as we know it, with architecture as we know it or want it to be developed, is almost being eclipsed. If we take architecture as an empathetic term to designate a form of building that enables and empowers people, the biggest threat to architecture is the smart city.

In your opinion, which major shift is the profession of architecture undergoing at the moment?

What I observe is a bi-fold development. One is that architectural endeavours are becoming more and more small-scale which is basically a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing about it is that there is an increasing interest in bottom-up initiatives and ways to enable people in a neighbourhood to define their own environment. At the same time, I see the overarching design of cities if not countries more and more influenced and defined by private companies. What happened in New York in the last 15 years, shows how a city government shifted from a form of city life open to everybody, to a form of city design that follows in every respect the rules of a market driven idea of an efficient city-life. So, I think under the banner of city improvement and pedestrian friendly eco-cities, there is a disturbing form of overarching control and efficiency design that disables people to actually define what communal life could be.

There has been a shift from city design from the state into the hands of private entrepreneurs. I think the ‘Bloombergification’ of the city might be one of the undiscovered pitifuls of contemporary urbanism [ed: in the case of New York, Michael Bloomberg an entrepreneur became mayor].

I guess we do agree that we live in a global, capitalist, I would even call it an accelerated neoliberal, economic system that is all encompassing? Especially considering space as a shrinking, exclusive and exploited resource we probably need to question architecture's relation to this system. But what is your opinion on this topic?

I think that something that could be called architecture becomes the tool for a certain form of market-driven city design. Let us take for example the Shed in London or Thomas Heatherwick’s projects that establish a certain ideology of what a ‘city-drawer’ has to do and should not do in the city as a physical object.

What I'm interested in is the context of discussing the impact of neoliberal or market-driven ideology and its influence on the city. As you might know, there is a plan to build the first large scale smart city in the world at Toronto’s bay-front. There the former collaborator of Bloomberg in NY Daniel l. Doctoroff, who is now the head of the urbanistic department of alphabet-google, wants to try to create a starter-kit for smart cities that could be replicated all over the world (edit: the so-called Sidewalk Labs is Alphabet Inc.'s urban innovation organisation). As soon as you as an architect embark on an endeavour like that, things start to become problematic.

We are at a very exciting, difficult and dangerous point, where the city as a promise of liberty, self-determination and freedom is replaced by something that looks like a city and by things that look like architecture. I count Heatherwick’s honeycomb into this form of new, large scale urban furniture that can be called architecture but is rather the opposite of what we hope architecture would do. This shift needs a sharper analysis.

As I now understood, you would not use the term ‘neoliberal architecture’ or see it as a category to describe a certain portion of architecture?

I don't think there is such a thing as ‘neoliberal architecture’. Almost every architect is forced to work in the context of a neoliberal society because there is almost no alternative to that framework apart from some countries. Which doesn't mean you have to accept this framework. Then the interesting question is: what could be the strategies for architects to escape a seemingly inevitable condition where they only serve a certain form of market-economy. Is the refusal to build the only chance to take a critical action for architects towards neoliberal societies, or can we as architects infect and turn the system around and change it from within? We are at a very exciting point in the history of cities because one way or the other the market-economy driven city, as we know it, is bound to collapse and either will be replaced by a kind of totalitarian form of the smart city ideology or — by a ruin park that is created by, let's say, among other things, the revolution of work. We are facing the biggest emergence of empty buildings, like post offices, factories, office towers due to the changes in the nature of work. I think there is enormous potential in the city as ‘a park of ruins’.

Could you elaborate what you mean by ‘ruins’? Ruin might sound very dystopian for some people.

Maybe we have to rephrase ‘ruin’ then with ‘chance’ or ‘possibility’. If you look for example into shopping malls that have ‘died’ because people in America like to order everything online - which is in itself again a problem - you will find an increasing number, probably two hundred of those ‘dead-malls’, today. Huge structures that could be either torn down with an enormous cost and CO2 emission or they could be saved and changed into something else. What I'm currently doing with a group of students from Harvard is thinking about possibilities of occupying ‘dead-malls’ because if capital efficiency would be taken out of these structures, they could actually become something beautiful. Almost like the Phalanstèries of Fourier [ed: a type of building developed for a self-contained utopian community by French social theorist Charles Fourier in the 19th C.]. These structures could become inhabited in different forms of co-living, where the central court with a fountain can become a public pool etcetera. We are experimenting with the possibilities of developing these, basically, flagships of capitalism into the very opposite.

Are there examples of such ‘dead-malls’ or other ruins of capitalism that have been already re-used?

For sure there are attempts to occupy defunct spaces of a former capitalism. For example, artist-residencies but a bunch of trendy artists in a former factory, can also become a useful tool for developers in the framework of city redesign. We would have to look more into other forms of occupation of former capitalist spaces. In Berlin there was a beautiful moment when the wall came down and office buildings had been squatted by people who had just moved in and that lasted sometimes for five years. That was a moment of just occupation of these structures. When we think about squatting it was always squatting of unused domestic space in the 70s and 80s but there could be a new squatter movement that takes on empty city towers, using even public space different then it was thought to be used.

There we come to an interesting point, because in order to be able to occupy public space one got to have an empty plaza and what we see now in terms of city redesign it is all about occupying public space with city furniture to disable people to actually protest. In New York and in other cities, but also in Switzerland, we see the emergence of endless little benches and hedges and playgrounds that are being put like obstacles for big movements that could express public critique.

We shifted from open spaces for everybody to spaces that confine you to a certain form of movement in the city which is rather admiring the beauty of the Hudson river or walking through a labyrinth of public furniture - but you could not visibly demonstrate, talk to other people occupy that space or it is very difficult to do that. So, I think this is also a way to eclipse the critical city dweller - in reverse, through the occupation of these empty structures one can create new forms of collectivity that also allows for a certain form of critical gathering. I think we find that in parts of Japan where new forms of cohabitation are tried out by basically diminishing the space of the private, to the benefit of shared facilities. We also find it sometimes in Berlin and I would say, for example in ‘Baugruppen’, where they have shared spaces, shared courtyards, shared kitchens — the problem is, these are all private initiatives that lead to a homogenous structure of mostly middle-income families, these examples lack social diversity.

A political demand would be to actually open up the city to make these spaces available for everybody. That, I think, requires a different city policy which is highly unattractive to a concept of the city that fosters commercial aspects.

Do you have any example of a city where the political settings offer the possibilities to realise such a ‘city for everybody’?

Well yes, on different levels we witness it in Vienna. The decision of the city to basically keep large properties of land and buildings in the hand of the public for over a century, has an amazing outcome that could serve as a model to every big city. It shows also that it is not so much the architecture that we are dealing with but the question of property rights of the ground, in Germany we say ‘Bodenfrage’. I think the ‘Bodenfrage’ is the political starting point for a discussion about the city rather than architecture - architecture almost automatically gains certain quality if the state is in control of the main process of developing the city. So I think Vienna is clearly amazing on a political level when we talk about property rights.

Barcelona interests me a lot, not so much for it’s inherent architectural or urbanistic discourse, but there is a discourse about owning data and owning control over your own appearance in public space, which is really important. They implied Francesca Bria as an expert for the digital development of a city. I think what they try to do is really groundbreaking, basically to disconnect data raised by the city from the interest of big companies but also from the interest of a possible authoritarian state.

The main problem is an increasing privatisation of public space and also a disturbing number of cameras where we actually don't know to what benefit the raised data is used. Under the banner of comfort and security and ecological efficiency the whole city is turned into almost a nightmare version of a surveillance society.

Is this question of data in the city one of the main topics we would need to tackle if we want to bring a new paradigm to the city?

Yes, because if we talk about the city it is important to talk about the questions of access - if we talk about literal physical accessibility we also have to talk about the access to people's data. Because you have a right to privacy and the right to privacy is deeply questioned if all of your actions in public space are trackable and can be held against you. I think there is a moment when city design collides with elemental laws that are the very foundation of our society in the west.

So this is more a question of technology and legal questions. Then architecture is just interesting when it becomes part of a way to escape that program of surveillance and economic efficiency that is the true character of the contemporary or emerging city.

Would you then say that architects kind of – well I would not say change their role – but should also get active at those critical junctions? We could maybe call it lobbying (in the best meaning of the word) for the equal distribution of space. Because we as architects are specialists for space. I'm always questioning if architects should be engaged in the process of development earlier on?

I think the main difficulty with the education of architects is that most architects are not given access to actually understand the structure of control in public space. I think that as architects we first have to learn a lot about ways to control other people and also to be able to design spaces where people could basically escape that form of control. And I don't mean that literally in the sense of building labyrinths but also in the idea of building resistant cities for a global endeavour to basically get a hold of the diminishing of citizen' private life. In the education of architects it is important to talk about data security and property rights. Fields that basically have been left away because data came after architecture and the question of property rights came before architecture - in the middle was the architect lamenting about pressure from all sides.

I think it would be an almost revolutionary program to say we have to talk about things that come way before architecture and then just after architecture and start the design process from these two angles. Rather than to start with formal questions in the middle of an ever same boring idea of a physical context of a building. Taking about the political context in terms of an analysis of what happens to data produced in these spaces and the question of who owns these spaces is much more important. So, the starting point of a theory of design should be in these areas rather than in the traditional field.

Is communication or the intricacies of language something we as architects should be more aware of – because we have to negotiate with all the stakeholders of a project, clients, politicians etc.?

I would even reject the term stakeholders because it shows how deep the language of capitalism has invaded our thinking. There is a beautiful book by Roland Barthes called How to Live Together, it is a series of lectures from the College de France in 1977 where he raises all these questions of how we could be social animals and at the same time insist on the forms of intimacy and withdrawal. I think that is also beautiful because even on a level of language he is very critical with empty cliches that we use to describe the process of designing architecture and living in public spaces.

That’s also a crucial point: if you wanna be critical about a certain process in which the city is embedded and the development in the city is influenced by, then we have to start with a critical analysis of the language used, and I think that starts with the question: what is privacy? The term may be wrong, should we talk about intimacy rather than privacy? That goes on with the question ‘what is smart about the smart city?’ And we might come to the conclusion that nothing is smart about the smart city.

I think there is a need to critically question the overarching axiomatics of efficiency because in the end of the way everything to protect the planet is forced to be super efficient with our resources, with our time, but that again, is neoliberal thinking in the disguise of ecological responsibility. To get out of that vicious circle we need a clearly more critical analysis of language we are confronted with when it comes to future visions of the city and our life in it.

As you mentioned already before, the city will change anyway due to automation and increased numbers of robots.

Robots will take some jobs which is not necessarily a bad thing.

Definitely.

We have to be careful and cautious to reject all these transformations in the technical field, because I think it is not desirable that a woman sits at the cash desk for ten hours and just scans things, if we can robotise that why not? Then the next question is, if all these people lose their badly paid unattractive jobs, how do we secure them a living and participation in society? There again we come from narrow questions of architecture and design of public spaces to a more paradigmatic question of how a city or a collective habitat could look like. That's why I also think, and I wrote a lot about it, that the discussion of UBI (universal basic income) should be an inherent part of the discussion of future cities.

We have a very boring, technocratic discussion about making commuter traffic more ecologically viable, more sustainable to pollute less but the more fundamental question, where are these commuters taken to in the city is not raised. What am I doing in town if most office jobs have been rationalised or taken over by robots, if factory jobs are taken over by robots, if cashier jobs are taken over by intelligent algorithms? If you look at all these commercial videos for the (future) smart city, it looks like today, only that the individual cars with combustion engines are replaced by self-driving vehicles that transport high income minorities from one spot to the other. Whereas I think it would be more interesting to say, ok if the definition of the city centre by capitalist structures like office towers is a thing of the past then what could happen in that city. Then this whole discourse gets very exciting.

And it is also bringing us back to architecture because as you said office buildings or these ‘ruins’ of the past need to be modified for new and different purposes.

I think I would call them ‘ruins of late capitalism’ because that form of late capitalism has killed itself through a wave of efficiency innovations. In terms of urbanistic planning these ruins are very interesting to discuss.

And also in terms of the reorganisation of the city and the adaptation of those existing structures on a small scale.

Yes. But then if we talk about that ‘park of late capitalist ruins’ I think it is very important and crucial not to step into the pitfalls of amusement park ideology which in its core again is very capitalist. The transformation of the city centre from a field of production in the tertiary sector into an amusement park for tourists and elderly people is in itself very problematic. And I think the old empathetic claim for ‘the right to the city’ for everybody is very important, because what we see now is a transformation of office buildings into luxury apartments or the replacement of office buildings by luxury apartments for a view rich investors or wealthy retirees.

Once more I would like to reflect on a possible future and your ‘dead mall’ project. While it is easy for me to imagine a fast adaptation of ‘late capitalist ruins’ in the city centres, where all the needed infrastructure is already around, I am not too sure regarding those malls in the outskirts. Is infrastructure a problem when adopting those ‘dead malls’?

The interesting thing with many malls is that they are not so far away from public transport, there are buses, there are train stations, they are strategically put into positions where they are easy to reach. That was also part of the mall's promise, that even young people without a car can go there. In a way I like malls because they were designed, of course under questionable promises, to be open to everybody. There was a layer of control to exclude homeless people - but if you even would take away that aspect of control, you could really come to a truly revolutionary redefinition of society and its spatial consequences. What also intrigued me is that a mall is never just a mall, but it is always a giant parking lot. So there is a giant empty field which, if you take the cars away, is for me almost the epitome of the democratic plaza. Because then you have a square the size of the biggest public squares in the world, like Tiananmen - every supermarket has a Tiananmen square in front of it - and I think that in itself is so beautiful as a space of gathering, of playing, of exuberance for everybody.

You have a massive concentration of spaces and programmes in the mall and massive emptiness in front of the mall. Again, if you take our capitalist expectation from the mall and if you take individual transport from the parking lot then you have enormously generous spaces for no money.

As long as they are active, malls have a very strict programming of space and every space has its specific purpose. So now that we discuss them as empty and open for experimentation and new forms of cohabitation, what kind of new spatial configurations do you or your students envision in these ‘dead malls’? Is it a mix of housing and production, or?

Well, it starts with the question of how do we define the unit, because architects are still talking about units. But what is a unit? I think the unit is the first confinement that we should question. We should say dwelling will have nothing to do with units, if two people feel comfortable just creating a bubble for their intimate life, or if two people and two kids want that, they can easily do it in a former small shop of luxurious goods because it has sixty or eighty square metres. But you also have shops with a ground area of five-hundred square metres and then people who don't wanna be forced into the model of the nuclear family could try new life forms on five-hundred square metres by just defining also degrees of privacy. I know many people who would be totally comfortable to live in an entity for thirty people and just have some jungle plants and pots around their bed and that's their private space and that is enough for them. Others want a bedroom in a box but a shared table, others want to sleep together in a room as ten people. All these desires that are latent can never become a reality because we are always forced into either the single men or women unit, the nuclear family unit or the nuclear family with a grandma addition unit.

I think that a shopping mall with these different sizes of spaces encourages people to try out new forms to dwell together. If we talk about architecture and its emancipatory potential, it is always happening when architecture encourages people to try new life forms that would be more accustomed to their personal situation than the existing three forms. It is absurd that in a late capitalist society of like total diversification — we can choose between eight-hundred shoes and thousand-eight-hundred forms of cars — you only have three typologies to dwell and eventually some ‘Baugruppen’ model where you share a kitchen, which is not so revolutionary. We should start from scratch and reject the terminology of the unit.

In the history of architecture no one talked about units before the advent of capitalist efficiency, then people had to be put in units because also human labour was organised in units. The whole idea of the unit is inherently capitalist and cold hearted in its articulation. Using these ‘ruins of late capitalism’ as spaces of experimentation, also to reject categories that force us into life models that have nothing to do with our own desires, is a very valuable and important process. I think that the shopping mall in its openness and its shared monstrosity in terms of empty space would encourage people to nestle in and build in their own habitats and try out and correct and redevelop truly new forms of collective and private being. That is something we have to orchestrate as architects.

So, when the people organise and experiment themselves and everyone tries to develop their own ways of cohabitation, what is the architect's role? Referring to what you just called to ‘orchestrate’.

Very good question. It is a question of time also because still the traditional model of architecture means that you would design an object or even a process that ends with the production of a certain form. And I think that we could also imagine a redefinition of architects as people, who with their expertise, are consulting people over a stretch of ten or fifteen years. I think Marc Angélil of ETH in Zurich has developed a beautiful proposal of a form of city for Latin America which only provides you with boxes with infrastructures, access to water, basically — a concrete shelf where you could just install things. Certain concrete frames could become a public square or a kindergarten or an extension of a house and to negotiate the use and the redefinition of these forms the architect could come back again and again as a consultant to that habitat.

In a certain way that was the role of the public architect of public services in the welfare state of the 50s and 60s and 70s, who would critically accompany the development of a neighbourhood, of a building, of a city. That role has been eclipsed or forgotten after the impact of the market economy on state and town planning. That would almost be a rediscovery of the modern, public service architect who would be paid by the state, by taxes to develop with a community, with a neighbourhood in an ever changing format where things could be replaced, changed, altered and questioned. That would definitely be the definition of the architect who doesn't think in a spectacular sequence of singular buildings and primarily wants to publish a big book with own projects that are basically depicting one sculpture after the other. That’s why I think that many architecture collectives that are emerging now are redefining that role into almost being consultants to the people and working with them over a very long stretch of time.

For me it is also tackling another thing, because now in the process of architecture it seems often that you plan a building and during its construction you as the architect are already designing the next one. By the time a building is finished you are somewhere else and at least openly there is almost never a self-reflective discussion on already done projects. I am pretty sure many architects visit their completed buildings and examine how they work while being used by inhabitants, but it never really nourishes an open discussion, and it is presumably hard to articulate own mistakes in the profession of architecture.

That is true and partly also through technology I think they are possibly seduced to use elements or things that have been done before to paste them into a new design and then you also create this form of annoying DNA of an office. Which also in parts happened to great architects like Frank Gehry, there is a kind of a Gehry DNA which is constantly reused and reproduced. That is way I think his Facebook Campus is quite remarkable, it is a complete formal break with Gehry's former architecture — then again a very problematic thing in itself because it promises leisure and almost looks like a factory occupied by bottom-up initiatives, but of course that is only an aesthetics of start-up implemented by one of the biggest commercial companies in the world.

Another thought to answer your question, in which you basically talk about a sequence of objects produced by architects, is to question: if architecture means the production of spaces through actually building spaces, or if it means the production of spaces by discovering or reinventing existing space? That again is a thing I was thinking of a lot in the last two years.

Connected to a project I'm doing in San Francisco, where a group of friends of mine wanted to create an afternoon school for less affluent people and they did that basically in their living room. There was so much influx from people who were happy that their kids could get access to knowledge and education that there was a space issue and then they wanted to buy some land [ed: areas far from the neighbourhood would have been affordable]. I thought, can't we do that in the area where they actually live? However, even leftover spaces, where you possibly could plant in some micro schools, were completely used by investors.

But then I thought what all these houses do have, even if it is a Victorian building after a renovation in the 60s, is a garage space for three cars. What if we ask, let’s say ten owners to drive out their two or three cars twice a week for some hours - we could then put some beer benches in and a chemical toilet, and their garage could be a school for an afternoon. We would create a plug-in school in the garages and have approximately five-hundred square metres which is already a lot. So we started to talk to people in the area and they were extremely generous and helpful and my very ambitious hope is that we can convince a hundred people to open their garage twice per week to create a plug-in school. This would be a public building that meanders through private space and redefines private space and parking space, as not only public space but as a space of experience, community and education.

I think that is also an approach to architecture that for me is very important, we can create space through communication, by talking to people. That at least was my conviction that we can deal with the idea of creating space and creating public space in a more inventive way.

Let us move to another topic now. What do you think about the general working conditions of architects?

I think they are terrible. And when architects accept a certain form of production from their commissioners (which follows the narrative of efficiency and exploitation), immediately and almost inescapably, it will infect the work in their own companies. The architect nowadays is in a chain of efficiency demands and basically has to force his collaboratives to satisfy his commissioner. It requires a lot of stamina to escape that system, you are still dependent on commissions and then at a certain point the commissioner dictates the economic principle. To partly escape that, I think especially for younger architects it could be helpful to create their own commissions, to basically develop a concept and then look for an investor who is interested and also accepts the conditions of production.

As a final question, who are the architects (or others) that interest you, that influenced you and your idea of architecture? Maybe the main, important actors.

I come from the field of theory so the most important influence on my architectural thinking was Jacques Derrida and his theory of unconditional hospitality and the subsequent discussion on what that would spatially require to deal with questions of unconditional hospitality.

Reading Charles Fourier was very influential, unfortunately I still struggle with him as he was trapped in terrible discourses with a clearly antisemitic undertone. But there is a part of his thinking that influenced very important people like Godin who built the Familistère in northern France [ed: Jean-Baptiste André Godin was a French industrialist who built a communal housing scheme inspired by Fourier’s Phalanstère for his workers (19th C.)]. And that is almost a blueprint for how to take a crazy theory and turn that into a valuable and liveable reality and how to not give up on utopia under very precarious circumstances.

Architectural offices like Assemble or even ON Design in Japan. Sanaa were very important for me when it came to the question of how to rephrase or reframe the idea of architecture. Of course there are some figures from recent architectural history — I think for me Renée Gailhoustet was very important, a French architect, in the 70s she was building revolutionary social housing in Paris, very desirable terraced houses. Together with Jean Renaudie she redesigned the whole idea of social housing and how it could look almost in one single draw. That again was killed by market efficiency concerns. But I think she is still a total hero of the recent history of architecture. Same goes for Claude Perron who in a way critically reframed the whole idea of the interiority of domesticity. Roland Barthes, I quoted him earlier on, is very important to me. And of course also reading Rem Koolhaas’ The Generic City, Junkspace or even his early work Delirious New York, was clearly important to me as an inspiration.

I have one last question because now you mentioned Renée Gailhoustet's housing schemes, seemingly utopian social housing projects that made it to reality. Do you feel that a utopian moment like the Gailhoustet example is still possible in neoliberalism? Or is the all-encompassing commercialisation, individualisation and alignment by the neoliberal logic of exploitation impeding a courageous and playful (utopian) architecture?

Utopia is maybe not the best term because it means ‘no place’ in a way. But I think an appetite for revolution and axiomatic criticality has been diminished by the sheer pressure to make a living. I'm always trying to encourage my students, when they have their master in architecture, not to surrender just trying to make a living in New York while working at a prestigious firm but to excavate some time to really pursue their own ideas.

You could argue that it is a good time for utopia because, inevitably, capitalist efficiency has accelerated the physical shape of the city in a way that it will inevitably collapse in the next few years. Either it is completely excavated like a dead corpse and filled with indefinite things controlled by companies and a minority. Or that collapsing, late capitalist city will be used and squatted by a big group of critical thinkers and activists and turned into something different which will not necessarily reflect the consumerist expectations of large companies. That is the new battle line that we have to deal with and I think, the sheer amount of change or the intensity of change will lead inevitably to enormous possibilities to redefine the whole system.

I think it is a very good time for utopia, it is also a very good time for young architects because there is an enormous need to create spaces not only to dwell but also to communicate, to be sociable, to be intimate for a massively growing world population. It is all a question of space, so architects have a key role in defining how these spaces will be used and how people will feel when they use and live in them. Definitely a very good time for utopia, a very good time also to excavate some of this old seemingly forgotten or unrealisable utopias.

Very hopeful last words! Thank you for the interview and your time.