ADS4: Temporary Works

While the climate impacts time, our conceptions of time also fundamentally impacts the climate. It is this relationship between the environment and temporality, captured in French by the dual meaning of le temps, which ADS4 will investigate this year. Taking time as a core consideration in the design, construction, and critique of the built environment, we will search for new forms of (con)temporary architecture.

This summer’s first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was a miserable 90 minutes of television. In the words of Guardian columnist David Smith, it ‘was the night that Democrats went from “Don’t panic!” to “OK, time to panic!”’.

And panic they did. Suddenly, that word was everywhere, as what was soon dubbed ‘Democratic panic’ took hold. After months of clumsy inaction, frenzied debate about the best way forward for the party led to Biden’s inevitable withdrawal. Within weeks, Kamala Harris had assumed the candidacy.

A mode of short-term thinking, focused on repairing a broken situation, infiltrated entrenched political structures. Whatever you make of the debate, the election, or the candidates, in this case panic was the medium through which effective political action was taken.

The word panic comes from the name of the ancient Greek god of the forest, Pan; with panikós literally meaning ‘pertaining to Pan’. The god was said to have occasionally caused humans to flee the forest in unreasoned fear, which is where the common use of panic comes from. Consequently, panic is a response to an environmental encounter’ a means of responding – urgently, but faithfully – to the radical otherness of the other–than–human.

In 2024/25, ADS4 will investigate the role panic, as a form of environmental short-termism, might play in confronting society’s various injustices. We are discouraged from engaging in moral panics, or panic buying, but what if – instead of these behaviours being seen as a problematic symptom of late-stage capitalism – panic was reframed as a route out of the various contemporary crises we face? Which, in their own way, are all downstream of the climate crisis?

Why? Because panic militates against an ideology of long-termism.

It has almost become an accepted given that one strategy which will help the planet diminish the damaging impacts of the climate crisis is to shift focus to the longue durée. Organisations like the Long Now Foundation and Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute are trying to encourage people and businesses to take the long view in order to undermine the damaging environmental consequences of the five-year political/financial cycle.

There is a pressing need to criticise the theoretical weaknesses of long-termism and identify its material harms. Especially because this view promotes an uncritical attitude toward existing political and economic institutions. Once timeframes stretch beyond concrete/lived time into abstract/deep time what occurs is a prioritisation of existential risks. Obsessing over what might lead to the extinction of the human race, and how to prevent such an occurrence, has diverted attention away from current misery, leaving damaging socioeconomic structures untouched. Long-Termists are often shockingly dismissive of ‘non-existential’ hazards, which might lead to mass short–term suffering, if they think these hazards are consistent with the possibility of a greater number of humans flourishing in the long-term. Worse, Long-Termism neglects the structural roots of our global misery and therefore weakens the political bodies that are capable of challenging those structures, ensuring the perpetuation of suffering.

This year, ADS4 will shun the toxic logic of Long-Termism in order to explore the ways Short-Termism, or ‘panic modes’, might confront climate catastrophe is a more urgent and effective way.

This Short-Term approach acknowledges the precarity the majority face from day to day. Whether waged or casualised workers, most of us are closer to being homeless than we are to being millionaires. As a result, we have inherited a world where both people and planet rely on a variety of support structures for survival.

For the artists Céline Condorelli and Gavin Wade, these support structures bear, sustain, and prop. They encourage, care for, and assist. Some of these structures advocate on our behalf, articulate our needs, stand behind, frame, and maintain our societies, cities, systems, and our planet.

While the work of supporting might traditionally appear as unessential, and therefore lacking value, this year ADS4 intends to restore attention to one of the neglected, yet crucial modes by which we apprehend and shape the world by critically enquiring into what constitutes ‘support’.

Taken literally, buildings require support: structures, scaffolding, temporary works. For us, however, scaffolding is as useful as a theoretical and sociocultural framework as it is a physical one. As a physical support structure, scaffolding enables the construction, maintenance, and repair of a building, which in turn has the potential to act as a social scaffold for the wider neighbourhood. These structures also help facilitate communication between people and ideas, providing a system that can be deployed to critique entrenched realities, allowing for new imaginaries to emerge.

In 2024/25, ADS4 will explore the nature of support through different lenses and different scales. We will examine the physical support of the body, the building, the environment, and the social support of people, ideas, values, together with the institutional/legislative support – through such contemporary questions as the ‘right to repair’ – that govern our ability to act collectively.

We are advocating for support structures that are temporary rather than permanent. Yet what is temporary is, of course, always relative, and deciding what counts as temporary will be a key task for the studio this year.

In architectural terms, temporary works support or protect a structure during the construction of permanent works. Irrespective of the length they are built for, temporary works are an essential precursor to any act of architectural repair/support. Yet, despite the significant embodied carbon associated with these structures, their design is rarely given much attention. For us, it is the temporal nature of such structures that give them the untapped potential to provide extended forms of support, which go beyond the architectural to the social, cultural, and environmental.

As in society, the adoption of a long-term perspective has been accepted as a moral imperative in the design of sustainable buildings. Longevity and flexibility are the common justifications for both high embodied carbon construction, and the pursuit of demolition/rebuild rather than retention/repair. Yet this position often fails to ignore two critical factors. Firstly, only rarely does a building’s instability or age lead to demolition, rather than the economic imperatives that make destruction more ‘economically viable’. And secondly, the sluggish transition away from fossil fuel dependency does not give us the time to payback the carbon debt this approach is predicated on.

In response, ADS4 will embrace the shonky, insubstantial, and ad hoc. We will build on the studio’s experience in stage design, production design, and theatrical practices to develop proposals which acknowledge the temporariness of everything. Students will first identify things that need support – such as communities, systems, buildings, and environments – before developing methods of propping – including physical, technological, social, and political – as a way to generate proposals for time-based spatial proposals. In short, during 2024/25, we will engage with producing Temporary Works.

This year’s Live Project will address the idea of ‘temporary works’ through a series of different lenses. We will work within an existing building that is in a state of limbo, recently vacated by its previous tenants and awaiting planning permission for an extensive retrofit, it is currently being structurally propped up by temporary works and culturally held together by temporal works.

From November 2024, an immersive theatre company will be transforming the building to create a sequence of life-changing experiences for one audience member at a time. ADS4 will assist in the fabrication and installation of these sets, allowing studio members to directly experience the multiple forms of support offered by the temporary works of theatre and construction. In other words, we will seek to understand how theatrical props are working at propping up property.

Tutors:

Matteo Mastrandrea is Director of 1 0 0 9, a scenographic design studio based in London. He is an architect, but primarily designs stages for theatrical spaces, having previously worked as Design Director for the artist Es Devlin. He is also completing a PhD at the University of Cambridge. His research explores theatrical practices in 20th Century Hollywood cinema, and has been published by Tate, e-flux and RIBA. Since 2016, Matteo has taught in ADS4 at the Royal College of Art.

Tom Greenall is a Director of London-based architecture, landscape and research practice DSDHA and has taught ADS4 at the Royal College of Art since 2011. He is a trustee and steering group member of UK Architects Declare, the Chair of both the Wandsworth Design Review Panel and the Brent Quality Review Panel, and an external examiner at the AA. In 2019 he guest-edited an issue of AD magazine titled “The Business of Research: Learning and Knowledge Redefined in Architectural Practice” and recently co-authored “Towards Spatial Justice: A guide for achieving meaningful participation in co-design processes” with Jane Wong and Lydia Toohey. In 2016, Tom was awarded the Built Environmental Fellowship by the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851.

Nicola Koller is a designer with over 20 years’ experience in the fashion industry and architectural education. She has worked for acclaimed fashion designer Sir Paul Smith, designing and commissioning retail spaces worldwide. In this role she led an in-house multidisciplinary studio of furniture designers, interior designers, industrial designers and architects, and oversaw more than 300 projects in 24 countries, including major flagship projects in London, Paris, New York, Antwerp, LA, Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing and Shanghai. Nicola has been a tutor at the Royal College of Art since 2005.