ADS10: Savage Architecture: Empowering the Archipelago

The Savage Hypothesis

ADS10 explores design methods and practices that challenge the discipline as a means to concentrate and exert power. Intersecting anthropological gaze and political thought, design and curatorial practices, ecological strategies and construction techniques, ADS10 pursues architecture as a platform of emancipation, a means to the radical political change demanded by the unfolding social and environmental crisis. We search for built forms, protocols of use and construction processes that can empower collective subjects that are struggling against increasingly commodified relationships and unequal territories.

Against architecture as a tool of domestication and colonisation, ADS10 advances the hypothesis of a savage architecture, a practice grounded on the human urge to come together and engage in collective rituals. Looking at the primitive without the burden of development or progress, we embrace the freedom of the barbaric and the wisdom of the ancestral to imagine constellations of forms, actions and narratives that return value to architecture as a common knowledge. Rather than providing comforting solutions, a savage architecture must embody the human tensions between control and freedom, language and technology, individual expression and collective practices. Savage architecture occurs when need gives away to possibility, mere survival becomes will to power, and individual lives achieve a collective dimension and shared values are represented in the public sphere.

Collective Subjects and Urbanisation

As the biosphere is coming closer to an end, the global economy continues to expand. Our tragic condition is to depend on a cultural and economic system that cannot abide limits. For capital any crisis is an obstacle to circumvent, any emergency an opportunity to fuel its constitutive dynamic of accumulation and growth. Capital conceives change as a matter of problems and solutions, as a process of continuous adjustments that aims at its endless reproduction. Urbanisation is the embodiment of this political and economic framework. Cities are not anymore defined objects, but rather an infrastructure that endlessly expands to support productive relationships. To compete on the global market, cities have to consume land or multiply its value, demolish and rebuild. They have to attract investments and valuable workforce, displace and exclude. Urbanisation must be generic and flexible, replacing histories and values at will.

This incessant machine of social productivity is increasingly based on malleable forms of collaboration and knowledge sharing rather than on heavy and stable lines of production. Today, more than ever, we produce because we live together. However, in the same way in which capital needs to deal with our animal necessities because labour-power is inseparable from the worker’s body, cooperation requires a material and symbolic space. Beyond giving shelter, representing power or constituting an asset, architecture enables production because it provides the necessary framework for humans to gather, relate and share. Being on the threshold all what is immaterial relationships sublimates into matter, architecture can offer a form of resistance to capital’s totalising abstraction. Exposing the limits of an all-encompassing economic order, architecture can open towards the workers’ reappropriation of social productivity and the construction of other possible worlds.

As a matter of fact, within and against a world where every human thought and action is exploited for its economic value, movements and struggles are inventing ways of reclaiming and expanding social productivity for the common good. A glimpse of a post-capitalist society emerges when the immense productive resources and knowledge created by capitalism are used for the benefit of all rather than for the profit of the few. Workers cooperatives, community-driven projects, and alternative economic models demand material forms of organisation and representation in the public sphere that can instigate a diffuse change. As such, architecture, as a material space but also as the common knowledge of design and building, can be an instrument for existing collective subjects to regain control and direct labour and its products: an architecture that is conceived, built and used by workers and communities as a way to foster solidarity, collective action, and a commitment to a more inclusive, equitable and just society.

Archipelago Milano

This year ADS10 will use the territory of Milan as a context to explore the relation between architecture, collective subjects and modes of life and production. As the name Mediolanum announces – meaning “middle of the plain” in Latin and Celtic – Milan is a city that stands at the centre of the Pianura Padana, one of most productive territories in the world, where intensive agriculture mixes with industry and services of local, national and international relevance. Placed at the intersection of important commercial routes, Milan has historically thrived on trade and production. While never becoming as large as Rome or Naples, Milan has always played a very significant role in the country’s economic history, linking the plain’s production with the rest of the country and with Northern Europe.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the strong connection with the manufacturing of Turin and the harbour of Genoa, put Milan at the head of the rampant post-war Italian development. Already in the 1970s, Milan anticipated the decline of the fordist industry. Among the accelerating crisis of plants and workshops, an archipelago of students and workers political groups reclaimed the freedom and creativity of the city as the place and means of production, against the factory’s discipline of productivity. Merging the energy of these emerging generation with its traditional commercial spirit, in the 1980s and 1990s Milan became the undisputed centre of the Italian creative economy, based on services, marketing and media.

With the rise of neoliberalism and globalisation, the city faced a new challenge: compete for investments and qualified workforce on the international stage. Following the examples of much larger cities such as London, Paris or New York, Milan is currently undergoing a significant cultural and material transformation based on three interconnected strategies. First, a series of top-down transformations of former industrial areas, large enough to allow the steady inflow of global investments. Second, the incorporation of dissent through heavy marketing campaigns, leveraging inexpensive local transformations and artificial processes of participation catered less towards the needs of local inhabitants than to the development of opportunities for young creative agencies. Thirdly, the substitution of the existing population, especially in the medium and low income areas connected to the centre, with a transient international population. Wealthier, highly educated and above all removed from local histories and values, this new group of inhabitants is the embodiment of financial capital: mobile, flexible, rootless. On the contrary the “native” local population is pushed towards the fringe of the city, in areas with poor infrastructure and services and therefore with less possibilities of regeneration.

Studying this specific example of the global paradigm of urban regeneration, ADS10 will focus on Milan’s peripheral areas to understand the role played by architecture in the organisation of the territory, in the management of conflicts and contradictions, and in the construction of a set of values compatible with the neoliberal forces. Building on the understanding of the existing material and human resources the students are called to propose architectural interventions that can support the emancipation of forms of life and production that challenge the current dominant order. Designing the correspondence between built forms, land uses, property regimes, and construction processes the projects will be called to construct bridges between local and global instances, human and non-human agencies, towards a more inclusive, equitable and just city.

Research by Design

Over the last seven years ADS10 has developed a specific teaching methodology that brings together anthropological inquiry and formal analysis, theoretical speculation and design craft, curatorial strategies and representation techniques. This multidirectional approach allows to construct a rich and meaningful ground where the project of architecture can be positioned in relation with specific territories and discourses. For ADS10 research and design are not separate fields or consecutive steps in the elaboration of the project but rather intertwined moments of a dialectical process in which design hypotheses are continuously formulated, tested and verified. As such, architectural design is understood as a form of knowledge production, as a way to formulate and visualise conflicts and possibilities rather than as a problem solving practice. The studio values both collective work and individual research trajectories stemming from personal interests. One-to-one reviews alternate with collective discussions, supported by seminars on the specific themes and methods of the studio.

Model Making

In the elaboration of their project, students will experiment with a variety of tools, spanning from drawings to models, photography and video making, book editing and curatorial strategies. Physical models are the key instruments of ADS10’s investigation and the base that supports other forms of production – such as photographs, collages and videos, booklets, etc. Making models is a means of experimenting with forms and materials, but also testing production processes that can directly or analogically refer to the political, social and environmental contexts addressed through the project. As such, model making is intended as a way of thinking architecture and the territory through material relationships at multiple scales – from the body to the planet. The students will experiment with a range of model making scales and techniques, acquiring a specific skill set through intensive workshops organised in collaboration with MODELAB, one of the most renown model making ateliers in Europe.

Live Project

For the Live Project, ADS10 will partner with DROPCITY, a new centre for architecture and design located in Milan. In their spaces under the tunnels of the Central Train Station, we’ll have the opportunity to organise an exhibition and a seminar about our work and the city of Milan. As the Live Project is tightly linked to the program of ADS10, both 1st and 2nd year students are strongly recommended to participate.

Field Trip

This year ADS10 will organise two field trips.

In the last week of October we will visit Milan, where we will have the opportunity to explore the city, begin our collaboration with DropCity for the Live Project, and meet local architects, artists, journalists and other subjects that are debating and participating in the transformation of the city.

In the last week of Term1 ADS10 will travel to Rome where – beyond admiring ancient and contemporary monuments – students will take part to an intense model making workshop in the atelier of MODELAB, where Marco Galofaro will share with us techniques and secrets of his practice.

The structure of ADS10 follows the organisation of the academic year. Each term is dedicated to the development of a specific component of the project, combining conceptual speculation and material experimentation.

Term 1 – The Diorama and the Box

The first term focuses on the exploration and definition of the territory of the project, which comprises the study of both the material space as well as the subjectivity that the architecture will address and relate.

On the one hand, working in groups of two or three, students will study a specific condition of the territory of Milan. Analysing the material elements that constitute such a space of relationships – building types, street networks, land patterns, landscape morphologies, fauna and flora systems, etc..– each group will construct a diorama, a large scale sectional model representing a scene of the territory. The diorama is an analytic and faithful representation as much as a synthetic and critical interpretation of the territorial condition, in which the relationship between physical elements is deconstructed and recomposed in order to uncover and produce meanings. Being at the same time incredibly realistic and completely invented, the diorama uses the material qualities of the space to question existing relationships and envision future possibilities.

On the other hand each student will produce an archive, a collection of materials – drawings, diagrams, maps, photographs, models, videos, etc.. – that investigate and represent the form of life of a collective subject, a group of people with modes of production, inhabitation, gathering and sharing beyond capitalistic relationships. The collective subject should be unrelated to the territory of Milan and rather driven by personal interest and knowledge.

The materials of this anthropological study will be gathered in a specifically designed box. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s famous work 'La Boîte-en-valise', the box is a portable mixed media assemblage that represents and displays the collective subject and its form of life. The design and construction of the box will be in itself a practice of reflecting on the complex relationships between territories, subjects, collective rituals and forms of representation.

In a third conclusive montage operation each diorama will be inhabited by the collective subjects. By introducing ways of gathering, producing and living observed in a different material and cultural context, the dioramas will reflect on the relationship between global and local conditions, uncovering present and future possibilities of the territory. The quality of these realistic and surprising scenes will be further interpreted through photographs, videos and booklets with the aim of constructing a coherent and provocative narrative for the project. The dioramas and the boxes will constitute the material to be exhibited at the Work In Progress in January and the ground on which the architectural project will be elaborated in the following terms.

In the first term, YR2 students will follow a slightly different path. Having to elaborate a thesis, they will be free to address their own context of choice, different from Milan. Each YR2 student will produce their own diorama and box, but will be also linked to one of the groups exploring Milan by addressing the same type of territory in a different context. As such, the studio will be able to compare the specificities of Milan with other territorial conditions, discussing similarities and differences and giving further depth to the entire investigation.

Term 2: The Architectural Project

The second term will be dedicated to the design of architecture. The project will focus on the relationship between the collective subject, its specific mode of living and production, and the territory as a network of processes and resources. Departing from the materials and the reflections collected through the diorama and the box, the design will propose built forms, techniques of construction and modes of organisation that addresses the peculiarities of the collective subject. The ambition of each project is to envision collective processes and built outcomes that can empower the collective subject, representing it in the public sphere and linking it to the specific material qualities and resources of the territory. More specifically, the design should provide spaces for the specific rituals and activities of the collective subject, including living and production, but also allow the provision of self-managed services and forms of participation of the local communities and the city at large.

Students will experiment with models, drawings and diagrams in order to investigate the relation between form, construction and use. Rather than resolving the whole project at one level, the investigation should vertically intersect a variety of scales, including the large dimension of the territory, the overall formal and tectonic rationale, the specific quality and use of the interior spaces and the characteristics of technical details.

Particular emphasis is placed on the construction processes and on the building phases, as the realisation of the project has to be understood not just as a consequence of the design but rather as the engine that strengthens collective organisation and processes of change in the territory.

A key aspect of the project is the relationship between architecture and time at different scales. The design will have to address cycles of use, maintenance, expansion and demolition that relate with the span of days, months, seasons or years, intersecting the needs and desires of the collective subject with the ones of other human and non-human agencies of the territory.

Term 3 – Narrative and Representation

The final term will focus on the elaboration of narratives and representations, which communicate the project in drawn, written and cinematic forms. Students will focus on the construction of large scale models that will provide the base for the production of photographs and videos. A particular attention will be placed on the construction of narratives that could articulate collective uses and building activities throughout time.

For the YR2 students models and videos will be the key elements around which the Graduation Show Exhibition will be organised. For YR1 students the models will be a crucial instrument to experiment and integrate in the project the knowledge acquired with Environmental and Technical Studies.

On Common

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CAMPO is a space to debate, study and celebrate architecture founded in 2015 by Gianfranco Bombaci, Matteo Costanzo, Luca Galofaro and Davide Sacconi. CAMPO has collaborated with various cultural institutions in Europe and has recently published a collection of its projects in the book Zibaldone.

Davide Sacconi explores buildings, cities, production and research through designs, exhibitions, books and pedagogical projects. Associate lecturer at the Royal College of Art, he is also Diploma Unit Master at Architectural Association, where he earned his PhD. He edited the books Interior Tales (2015), The Supreme Achievement (2016), Savage Architecture (2016), The London Workshops (2020) and he is part of the editorial board of STOÀ, a journal about architectural education.

Gianfranco Bombaci is an architect, holds a PhD and is a founding partner of 2A+P/A. Associate lecturer at the Royal College of Art in London and Diploma Unit Master at Architectural Association, he directs the School of Design BA at the IED in Rome and is the editor of Design and Anthropology by Gian Piero Frassinelli.

Matteo Costanzo s an architect and founding partner of 2A+P/A. He is a cofounder of the magazine San Rocco and has contributed to several international periodicals and publications. Associate lecturer at the Royal College of Art in London and Diploma Unit Master at Architectural Association, he has taught architecture and design at a number of institutions in Europe

Amanda Dolgā is a London-based architectural designer that understands the built environment as an integral part of ecological systems and everyday community rituals. After studying at UCL and RCA Amanda joined Sanchez Benton Architects, where she has led various projects focusing on retrofitting and sensitive landscape interventions.