| 1. |
- Bouman, Ole, et al.
(författare)
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Architecture is too important to leave to the architects
- 2024. - 1
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Ingår i: Agonistic assemblies. - Berlin : Sternberg Press. - 9781915609144 ; , s. 242-252
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- About the book:This anthology presents work on cultures of assembly. It stresses the relevance of small-scale and decentralized spatial formats of local knowledge production to community building and embedded political decision-making in the context of the socio-ecological transition. It reinforces the role of both individual and collective action while proposing distributed assembly and proximity as core attributes in the production of the contemporary and future city. It calls for a revised form of spatial politics.Miessen’s ongoing research trajectory Cultures of Assembly was initially kicked off during a Harvard GSD fellowship in collaboration with Joseph Grima, in which the two architects investigated the sociopolitical dimension of (urban) spatial design. Observing the Kuwaiti cultural and social landscape with a specific interest in the politico-spatial phenomenon of Diwaniya, this distributed urban form of para-institutional assembly established a starting point for a long-term body of research.Diwaniya can be understood and interpreted in multiple ways. Beyond a techno-futuristic idea of progress, it presents a showcase of an alternative that attempts to imagine a model of a (more) solidary city. On the scale of a city, and in fact small country, it interrogates how we—as a society—can learn from and produce alternative formats of physical exchange, working towards realistic scenarios of decentralized decision-making and spatial justice.Agonistic Assemblies asks: how can spaces—both physical and virtual—be envisaged to create publics? How is collectivity and society being generated spatially and in terms of policy? How do we “practice” society as a bodily, spatial form, and how does this practice contribute to spatial justice? Are there specific spatial settings that can intensify these practices? What kind of spatial design can we imagine as platforms for change?Central to this project is the reflecting on and rendering of the underlying driving forces of informal institution building at the interface of agonistic (urban) spatial politics—in a global political climate facing what Mark Fisher famously framed as “capitalist realism” in conjunction with the social-ecological transition while, arguably, also facing a crisis of imagination.This project articulates a curatorial impetus towards urban policy making in conjunction with spatial proximity as a tool to mediate between the individual, the collective, the neighborhood, the city, state politics, and society at large. If we understand assembly as a form of spatial gathering, and the bonfire as the prehistoric space of assembly, what constitutes its contemporary equivalent?
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| 2. |
- Carless, Tonia, et al.
(författare)
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Theory of architecture : UMA 1-3, supporting studies
- 2021
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Ingår i: UMA Works 20/21. - Umeå : Umeå University. - 9789178556236 - 9789178556243 ; , s. 40-41
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Rather than confirm existing identities and conventions, we believe architecture can be most effective when it allows us to become some- thing else by imagining and fabricating alternative models of inter- action towards a better future. In that sense architecture is one of the most powerful creative disciplines of world-making available.
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| 3. |
- Collevecchio, Carla, et al.
(författare)
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Theory of Architecture : UMA 1-3, Supporting studies
- 2020
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Ingår i: UMA Works 2020. - Umeå : Umeå University. - 9789178553082 - 9789178553099 ; , s. 32-33
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In Year 1–3 of the Architecture Pro- gramme, courses in History, Urban Planning, Technology and Theory are closely integrated with the studio work. The supporting studies courses provide tools for the architectural project, expand the notion of Architecture and aims to encourage critical thinking.
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| 4. |
- Frykholm, Hannes, 1982-
(författare)
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Building the city from the inside : architecture and urban transformation in Los Angeles, Porto, and Las Vegas
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Positioned in the research field of “interior urbanism” (Rice, 2016), this thesis considers entrance situations that occur between buildings and cities in order to develop new ways of investigating the relationship between architecture and urban transformation. From the main research question—How does architecture mediate urban transformation?—the thesis focuses on experience-driven narratives about the city (Pine & Gilmore, 2011). Looking at the means by which architecture situates the subject in an urban experience, the thesis asks how the experience contributes to a particular attention to the city. This approach intends to shed light on architecture’s role in both mediating and challenging neoliberal urbanism (Peck, Theodore, & Brenner, 2009; Fraser, 2019). The thesis argues for analyzing large-scale processes of urban transformation by placing a sharpened empirical focus on the built environment. This is tested by a transversal research method (Frichot, Gabrielsson, Havik, & Jobst, forthcoming) that intersects multiple investigative techniques. The three cases that are addressed—the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, the Casa da Música in Porto, and Wynn Casino in Las Vegas—each epitomize a particular discourse about architecture and urbanization. Through observations and the analysis of the three cases, the thesis unpacks three dimensions of architectural experience of the city: first, by highlighting the spatial logic of a stretched threshold; second, by considering temporality and ways of waiting; and third, by observing the labor that is necessary to keep the interior environment intact. A recurring narrative in these buildings lies in the suggestion that the process of urban redevelopment never ends. Together, the cases point to an oft-overlooked parallel between the refurbishment of building interiors and exterior urban transformations, adding empirical nuances to what has been labelled the “architecture of neoliberalism” (Spencer, 2016). The threshold between building and city is shown to be a fragile and unstable territory, which is under continuous negotiation and where the claims of multiple actors, conditions, and events come together. The thesis attempts to make a contribution in three ways: by developing transversal methods, by considering the threshold as knowledge device, and by exploring micro-scale investigations of urban transformation. The project points to how the stretched threshold of these projects speak of a transforming relationship between architecture and capitalism, where the city is reconfigured through the stretching of interiors out to adjacent sidewalks and squares. If the city is built from the expanding insides of architecture, the city is by definition an unfinished project. To think of the instability of architecture not as a shortcoming but as a virtue opens up for a continuous engagement with the city as the unfinished construction site of a democratic project.
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| 5. |
- Van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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Making architecture politically : from fresh conservatism to aestehtics as a form of politics
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This research comes from a particular place, a rather unique moment in the history of the Netherlands when Dutch architecture started to be much applauded for its radical approach and innovative design when the typhoon of another modernization swept across the globe. Architects, municipalities, investors, developers, companies, institutions, politicians, inhabitants, educators, researchers, critics and alike, were all thrown into a kind of experimental condition, one being both pragmatic and geographical. It has been a journey learning about the rise of another modernity and its architectural approaches; both in terms of mapping its condition, and through the experience of discrete designed objects within its larger urban and global landscape.The constitutive role Dutch architecture played as aesthetic practice giving form to another modernization has been organized around two different political approaches in this PhD by publication. Chapter One entitled Fresh Conservatism critically addresses how the much- celebrated Dutch movement in architecture paved the way of an upcoming Neoliberal phase of capitalism. The problem for many was not to make political architecture, on the contrary, its innovative practices — without being too conscious about the political — turned out to affirm what was later called the post-political. With Aesthetics as a Form of Politics of Chapter Two, exemplary alternative horizons of possibility are being discerned within Dutch architecture; ones that make architecture politically through their aesthetic regime. It has everything to do with how freedom can be created with constrains, how you can dance with enmeshment, can move beyond limiting adversary, and ‘dare to create lives of sustained optimal wellbeing and joy.’Making architecture politically is about the creation of running room; a sense of polity — an aesthetic regime redistributing the sensible — that allows for a multiplication of connections and disconnections that reframe the relations between people, the world they live in, and the way they are supposed to act and behave. Such a field of possibility concerns a multiplicity of folds and gaps in the fabric of the common experienceof the human and non-human that change the cartography of the perceptible, the imaginative and the feasible. As such, it allows for new modes of political construction of common objects and emancipatory possibilities of collective and private enunciation. Instead of slipping into paternalism or control, the idea of such a radical openness is characterized by indeterminacy, nuance, incommensurability, hospitality, dissensus, joy and the multitude of encounters it could generate. It is about becomings that breaks open the conventional way space is experienced, thought and distributed, one that displaces the binary dialectics of colonizer and colonized, the one against the other by introducing a third (And) that belongs to both the one and the other while opening alternative horizons.Making architecture politically will not be without consequences, it asks us to consider another path. Many of architecture’s properties, including its history of ideas, material legacy, form of content, and forms of expression are to be reconsidered. What must be taken in consideration is under what conditions, and with respect to what forces, architecture could become active and creative, rather than reactive or nihilistic, confronting the many crises of the world today. Such an architecture of polity is as much about ideas, as the discovery, and invention of new forms making architecture politically.By grappling with making architecture politically, finding it wanting through critical analysis, observing the exemplary and often a-political role contemporary Dutch architecture played in the 90ties and onward, it turns out the problem is not to make political architecture — all archi- tecture is political — but how to make architecture politically.
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| 6. |
- van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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The idea of welcoming : studies from architecture in translation and open architecture
- 2022
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Annan publikation (film/video) (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Professor Roemer van Toorn is hosting a series of discussions about the Power of Gentleness in November 2022. Starting with two research seminars at Umeå School of Architecture, and concluding with a workshop at the Vetenskapsrådet Swedish artistic research conference in Luleå on 17 November.10 November 10.00 – 12.30: Esra Ackan, Professor in Architecture Theory at Cornell University, will give a lecture on ‘The Idea of Welcoming: Studies from Architecture in Translation and Open Architecture’, followed by a roundtable conversation hosted by Roemer van Toorn on gentleness, migration, and open architecture.15 November 14.30 – 17.00: Lars Lerup, Professor, and former Dean of Rice University Houston, will give a lecture entitled ‘There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in’. Followed by a roundtable conversation on gentleness and the role of architecture in breaking stereotypes and creating new assemblages of possibility.17 November 15.00-16.30: The Power of Gentleness in Architecture: Towards an Aesthetics of Hospitality workshop led by Roemer van Toorn, as part of the Vetenskapsrådet conference Transformations ‘22: artistic research in times of change, Luleå, Sweden.
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| 7. |
- Van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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The new normal : a goodbye to language
- 2020
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- We are at the beginning of a new renaissance, a new modernity, of which we are far from sure what it will bring or could enlighten. As an institution, architecture has always directed our sensuous experiences and conceptual understandings of the worlds we live by and look out for. The power to create images is a good partial definition of architecture's competetence. In my opinion, architectural imagination - and that very much includes the image - can be a staging ground for action, enlightening indviduals and cultural movements. An enlightenment not as universal trugh, but as temporality, one of provisional possibilites and lines of flight. Instead of disqualifying the spectacle - as the classical left used to practice in the safe haven of academia - we should investigate how ethical spectacles could be created. To do so is not simple. A spectacular culture is most often designed to manipulate people and take their money, not to set the stage for democracy. But at the same time, we have to recognise that popular culture - its crafted fantasies and stimulated desires - speak to something deep and real within us. The challenge is what these ethical spectacles could consist of. This urgent question is by no means an easy one, but without a framework of understanding and alterantive theory, any means of instrumentality will be futile.
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| 8. |
- van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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The power of gentleness in architecture : towards an aesthetics of hospitality
- 2022
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Ingår i: Transformations 2022 in artistic research. - : Luleå University; Swedish Research council. ; , s. 24-25
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The Power of Gentleness in Architecture. Towards an Aesthetics of HospitalityThe last decades the discourse of sustainability has expanded towardsother related approaches on the built environment in architecture theory and practice. These relational perspectives can be characterized by a move away from the architectural object itself towards a focus on the processes through which the architectural object is materialized, produced, con- structed, maintained, demolished, recycled, renovated, and experienced. Reconsidering architecture from these relational sustainable perspectives (of social - and ecological care), is of extreme and urgent importancegiven the multifaceted crisis of care today, but unfortunately the question of aesthetics has disappeared by reducing architecture to a by-product of processes, materials, and technologies. By neglecting the question of the aesthetics, it is underestimated how essential the visual, experiential, haptic and bodily engagement are for its users, architects and alike. The inevita- ble questions of affection, perception, beauty, joy and happiness need to be considered as intrinsically linked with sustainable issues for society and its different cultures as a whole.With my new research “The power of Gentleness in Architecture. The Aesthetics of Hospitality,” I aim to document, explore, define, and theo- rize how a particular aesthetics of hospitality can emerge and be devel- oped towards a sustainable future of social and ecological care by looked at exemplary contemporary and historical architecture practices and the different lifeworld’s that are created under influence of migration. Such sustainable practices of architecture are effective through both their in- novate material and technical solutions as well as their aesthetic regime, enabling the configurating of new experiences that create new modes of sense perception while inducing novel forms of social and political sub- jectivity beneficial for both the individual, society as a whole. It is about an approach and aesthetics how you can dance with enmeshment within the constraints of a particular time, in other words can enable provisional freedom by means of an aesthetic regime.In simple terms it comes down to an open architecture; one incorporating multiple voices, backgrounds, and ethnicities empowered through its sus- tainable aesthetic regime redistributing the sensible. It is about a research wishing to make a case for an architecture that accommodates and fosters diversity, liveliness, and unpredictability, in stark opposition to over-deter- mination, exclusion. Its gentleness is about a power that is also soft, a nobil- ity that is also humble, a sweetness that is also intelligent, a subtlety that is nevertheless striking. Gentleness is about a fragility and complexity that has the potential to subvert and change the status quo, a micro-politics of specu- lative construction towards an open, ecological, and socially just future.
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| 9. |
- van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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The power of gentleness in architecture : towards an aesthetics of hospitality
- 2023
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Ingår i: Proceedings 11-12 / 2023. - Talllinn : Estonian Academy of Arts. - 9789916619858 - 9789916619865 ; , s. 96-105
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Today we live in an increasingly violent world, a state of emergency, with many crises on many fronts. According to Roemer van Toorn, the power of gentleness gives us an opportunity to imagine what we miss most today: a caring and welcoming world. But be warned, gentleness is not about making something cute, what needs to be restored is its greatness, its ‘warrior’ greatness, because it is a force of resistance, even a weapon. And it is a principle of life, of lived experiences, shared and situated with liberative potential. As philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle has observed in her book The Power of Gentleness, any beginning is necessarily rooted in gentleness: the birth; the beginning of love (Dufourmantelle 2018). As Antonio Negri and Defourmantelle stated says Van Toorn, love is a genuine passion, a shared construction: ‘... it is precisely its open character that is so moving: a feeling of strength, a need to create (...), in other words, a need for communality, sharing, cooperating. In that sense the personal project (of love) is also a political project. It is not enough to want freedom: the point is to make freedom productive.’ (Negri and Dufourmantelle 2004). Fred Moten and Stefano Harney speak of something similar in their thought in All Incomplete, with reference to the ‘jus generativity’ (Moten and Harney 2021). Here gentleness concerns a quality and capacity to give, not in economic terms, as in the managing of scarcity, but as in generosity (as in the abundance of the rainforest). When being with nature, being with trees, for example, it is all about experiencing – not a scripted space to make you consume but all about the experiences of relationships-in-action, a kinship in relation to otherness situated where architecture can play a formative and emancipatory role. Gentleness here is not simply a delicate, pleasant contact, it is recognizing and accepting the other, the construction of the human and the non-human, in their fragility. To Dufourmantelle, and Van Toorn, gentleness is a way to relate to the world, it allows emotions and feelings, thought and experience, it is located upstream and affects the very principle of life as deployment. It is open ended. And, gentleness is more than taking care, gentleness is lavished and received with experiment and dolce vita. In other words, it has everything to do with how freedom can be created with constraints, how you can dance with enmeshment, move beyond limiting adversary, enact, imagine, and dare to create lives of sustained well-being and joy.Through a listing of eight tableaux, with reference to contemporary architecture projects (a visual essay), and the philosophy of Dufourmantelle, an aesthetics of hospitality is outlined, as part of an atlas of hospitality the author is currently building.
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| 10. |
- van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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"There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in".
- 2022
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Annan publikation (film/video) (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Professor Roemer van Toorn is hosting a series of discussions about the Power of Gentleness in November 2022. Starting with two research seminars at Umeå School of Architecture, and concluding with a workshop at the Vetenskapsrådet Swedish artistic research conference in Luleå on 17 November.10 November 10.00 – 12.30: Esra Ackan, Professor in Architecture Theory at Cornell University, will give a lecture on ‘The Idea of Welcoming: Studies from Architecture in Translation and Open Architecture’, followed by a roundtable conversation hosted by Roemer van Toorn on gentleness, migration, and open architecture.15 November 14.30 – 17.00: Lars Lerup, Professor, and former Dean of Rice University Houston, will give a lecture entitled ‘There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in’. Followed by a roundtable conversation on gentleness and the role of architecture in breaking stereotypes and creating new assemblages of possibility.17 November 15.00-16.30: The Power of Gentleness in Architecture: Towards an Aesthetics of Hospitality workshop led by Roemer van Toorn, as part of the Vetenskapsrådet conference Transformations ‘22: artistic research in times of change, Luleå, Sweden.These seminars are hosted as part of Roemer van Toorn’s Small Visionary Project supported by UmArts. For more details email roemer.van.toorn@umu.se
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