ADS2: Nowhere Not in Time

ADS 2 looks at the multi-temporal and trans–border implications that shape the life of our global cities. London is the site of imperial, colonial, and financial conquests where myriad time systems play out simultaneously, sometimes on repeat. The global city has become the central node of the time-binding network of global finance. It regulates temporal disparities and links geographically–disparate localities across the planet through extractive, logistical, and economic infrastructures.

In response to this chrono–spatial condition, ADS2 crafts hypothetical, yet restorative, architectural interventions that serve as destabilising and regenerative forces within the global city. Incorporating methods such as parafiction and collaboration, the studio fosters students to develop community activations, virtual and imagined environments, sonic atmospheres, urban interventions, and other spatial propositions that disentangle and reconfigure assemblages of time, power, and geography. While centring London as the primary location of investigation, the studio recognises that the translocal character of architecture facilitates engagements and invites design interventions in distant, yet connected geographies. Through this exposure to the spatial genealogies and futurities of the metropolis–site, ADS2 architectural projects reimagine and dismantle imperial aspirations of world-making by operating at the scale of the collective and the multitudinal.

Speculative finance has constantly reshuffled the metropole’s temporal order, projecting its own image of the future – enacted through concepts like ‘value metrics’ – to displace and socially cleanse neighbourhoods and allow for more profitable forms of investment. Such urban regenerative models are symptomatic of wider, more pernicious extensive financial policies that work to realise a ‘speculative image’ of development. This form of development displaces and substitutes those living human bodies and social entities that do not conform to the parameters of this image.

Entangled in such modelling, Western–dominant life sciences have actively shaped the material and affective infrastructures that sustain its perpetuation amidst socio-ecological crises. Rooted in colonial, climatic, and social epistemologies, these sciences configure specific ecologies and communities into racialised bodies that are presumed to be capable of weathering the harmful by–products of the developing metropolis. Through their categorisations, policies, and technologies, they construct a sanitised narrative of urban survival in the face of climate change, systematically othering histories of damage and rendering such life-worlds as peripheral externalities.

In the metropolis–site these timelines collapse, turning London into a technologically–enabled compress of endless despoiled places, ecologies, and peoples. In response, spatial interventions cannot be localised and restricted within the geographic confines of the metropolis–site, instead they reverberate across temporal borders.

By taking a chrono–political view on the architecture of the metropolis, ADS2 seeks to critically engage with the possibilities of resistance and decolonial imaginaries that are opened through critical spatial practices. We believe contemporary architectural and material articulations can play a significant role in accelerating the collapse of imperial chrono–logics. Our architectures are carriers of ecological, political, social, and economic histories. We seek to produce myths and infrastructures of relations that stretch from the past into the future, adapting to these trans–localities and trans–temporalities, while also offering more transformative spatial disruptions. Following this view, ADS2 interprets the metropolis–site as a dynamic, in–flux entity that also includes those zones of extraction within past, present, and potential colonies.

The studio engages with London as a focal site from which conceptual and spatial rationales can emerge and be explored. Practically and analytically, this exploration places significant emphasis on the metropole as a central node, which collapses multiple human and other–than–human contingencies. Our studio centres these explorations through case studies and site visits in London and its wider connected geographies overseas. Through long-term engagement with this city, ADS2 seeks to compile collective knowledge on the assemblages and forces that have shaped forms of life and living both in London and its greater zones of influence.

ADS2 analyses how temporal politics manifest across various scales of difference. These studies encompass a wide range of phenomena; spanning from interactions between minerals within building materials, to financial speculations affecting the urban fabric, and extending out toward the social interactions that reflect colonial stratifications and power structures. In 2024/25, we will use the material and immaterial conditions and performances of labour and real estate in London as lenses through which to investigate these politics.

Private development in London dictates the urban planning of the city and divides public space in violent ways. At 380 trillion US dollars, the property market is the largest reserve of global wealth by a clear margin. It is the prime indicator of both income inequality and the wealth gap, where inherited wealth is parked in an exponentially increasing rentier global economy. Entangled in the processes of accumulation and depletion driven by the real estate market, the labour market in London reveals how land ownership and control – from buildings to croplands and national territories – shape precarious conditions for marginalised and racialised communities. Late liberalism, exacerbated by the intensification of nationalist policies, consigns certain groups to ambiguous and spectral legal statuses, in which labour is often reduced to exploitative practices.

In a joint effort with our collaborators, ADS2 will examine the feedback loops between the property and labour markets. We will analyse the rising reign of landlordism, investigate the architectural practice’s modes of complicity in the real estate state, individuate the policies that (de)regulate labour and labourers’ movements, and design resistant interventions and epistemic frames for architects of the future.

ADS2 will take advantage of parafiction as a method for understanding, mediating, and negotiating space. In contrast to literary or artistic genres of fiction, which are often organised around imaginary worlds, characters and objects, parafiction maintains a relationship with the world as it is lived and experienced. Through this, parafiction engages with performance of trust and conspiracies that present fictions as lived facts. In interrogating the operation of these everyday make-believes and carefully replacing them with other (more just, or more insurgent) para-facts, the parafictional method repositions the practice of the architect within its material, social, and environmental conditions. As a fiction in the world, the performance of parafiction has the capacity to reactivate and dislodge the chronological and scalar planes that the metropolis rests on.

In what ways do the trans-local transformations of a site unfold across different periods and scales? How are these narratives articulated within the peripheries beyond the metropolis? How do diasporic and other marginalised groups craft unconventional yet adaptive spatial practices within the current hostile environment? By engaging with such questions, our studio conversations will emphasise the centrality of the site as a place that is not yet fully formed but must emerge from a systematic inquiry of the present. In this context, ADS2 understands the site not simply as a geographical location, but as a spatial condition shaped by legal, ecological, material, and social interactions and regulations. By investigating the spatial, social, and material dynamics of sites undergoing transformation, students will learn to employ systematic research to decode spatial conditions and re-encode them through parafiction.

Our projects are situated in collaboration; it cannot exist outside of the social fabric in which it is located. We encourage collaborations with external partners, including urban activists, scientists, community campaigns, and research organisations in our research and design process.

In 2024/25, ADS2 will develop our work in dialogue with The Autonomy Institute and Material Cultures. The Autonomy Institute is an independent, progressive research organisation that creates data-driven tools and research to strengthen democracy and build a fairer economy. The work of Material Cultures investigates how material and industrial cultures shape the world and attempts to challenge the regulations, supply chains and processes that dictate how the buildings we inhabit are made, function, and feel.

Ethical considerations are central to spatial practices that engage with marginalised, diasporic, and disenfranchised communities. In the form of field data, these components, including interviews, site visits, community–based activities, and site-sensitive materials, will be led by a code of ethics. These guidelines are emphasised in ADS2 to counter the extractive routes such projects might take. The site selection and investigation are inseparable from the affected communities that occupy these places. We will apply political, ethical, and conceptual lenses to establish a long-term engagement and exchange with these external actors and communities that will extend well beyond the academic year. Our scenarios, speculations, and design interventions will also adhere to this care and accountability due to parafiction’s relationship with the world.

Intervention

Following the initial research phase, our design interventions – derived from parafictional scenarios – can take different forms. These avenues will be materialised in community activations through collaborations with site-connected groups, urban interventions, and on-site performances. In addition, further tools will be explored in the studio, including virtual and imagined environments through which different speculative scenarios can emerge. These generative worlds are not limited to visual representation, with ADS2 students actively engaging in the design of sonic atmospheres. This method emphasises sounding and listening as practices that unpack the site's unseen, but always present conditions. We will use these tools in relation with other counter–mapping practices that reconfigure and disentangle the established cartographies.

ADS2 places considerable emphasis on the collective dimension of the studio. Alongside the development of individual interventions and materials, students are expected to collaborate in the various activities of the studio throughout the year, including: participating in seminars and roundtables; taking turns to lead weekly readings and actively engaging in constructive discussions; taking an active part in organising the field trip and live project; and participating in workshops and working with our studio collaborators.

Tutors:

Bahar Noorizadeh looks at the relationship between art and capitalism. In her practice as an artist, writer and filmmaker, she examines the conflictual and contradictory notions of imagination and speculation as they suffuse one another. Her research investigates the histories of economics, cybernetic socialism, and activist strategies against the financialization of life and the living space, asking what redistributive historical justice might look like for the present. Noorizadeh is the founder of Weird Economies, a co-authored and socially-connected project that traces economic imaginaries extraordinary to financial arrangements of our time. Her work has appeared at the German Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennial 2021, Taipei Biennial 2023, Tate Modern Artists’ Cinema Program, Transmediale Festival, DIS Art platform, Berlinale Forum Expanded, and Geneva Biennale of Moving Images among others. Noorizadeh has contributed essays to e-flux Architecture, Journal of Visual Culture, and Sternberg Press; and forthcoming anthologies from Duke University Press and MIT Press. She completed a PhD in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London where she held a SSHRC doctoral fellowship.

www.baharnoorizadeh.com

Lodovica Guarnieri is an Italian-born researcher and designer based in London. Her practice grapples with technoscience as it relates to colonialism, extractivism, and their enduring toxic legacies in the environments. She uses performance and scriptwriting as counter-pedagogical tools to address colonialism’s long-standing impact and uncover new material imaginaries for socio-environmental justice. Over the years, Lodovica has held curatorial research positions at Van Abbemuseum (NL) and at Manifesta 12 (NL/IT) and collaborated on the projects “Hostile Environment(s)” by Border Forensis and "Non-Extractive Architecture" publication and exhibition. She developed performances, public programmes, and lectures for TBA21, Stroom Den Haag, Lisbon Architecture Triennial, Bureau Europa, Bozar, and The Anthropocene Campus/HKW among others. Currently, she is part of The Tidal Garden, a research agency based in Venice (IT) that explores the edible potential of salt-tolerant plants as a tool for cultural adaptation to climate change. She holds an MA with distinction from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London.

https://lodovicaguarnieri.com/

Mhamad Safa is a sound artist, architect, and researcher, based between London and Beirut. His work focuses on multi-scalar spatial conditions and their sonic make-ups. He explores their intersections with the aural legacies of traditional and subcultural practices as well as environments of conflict and violence. He graduated from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University and is currently a PhD researcher in International Law at the University of Westminster. He is an Associate Lecturer in Media Studies and Architecture at the Royal College of Art. Safa had shown individual and collaborative artwork and performances at the Bergen Assembly 2022 (Norway), Goteborg Biennial 2021 (Sweden), Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2019 and Alserkal Arts Foundation (UAE), Sursock Museum and Goethe Institute (Lebanon), Showroom Gallery and The Institute of Contemporary Arts (United Kingdom), among others.
Mhamadsafa.com