To ask “what is new knowledge in architecture” today, one must ask or rather define what “architecture” means in the first place. Over the last two decades the role of the architect, at least viewed from a critical perspective, has been interrogated and developed substantially. Practitioners today no longer rely on the belief that it is the architect who produces the physical reality of space, but that “A”rchitecture is an a-disciplinary collaborative practice that questions and produces the mechanisms, which alter our reading and perception of and engagement with space – ranging from socio-political to cultural-economic parameters of consequence.
The question of what does one consider to contribute to the production of space is one that circulates around the potential effects on space and how those effects are and can be generated, amended and influenced – and who are the people and practices in charge of those proliferating changes.
Architecture with a big “A” can only be relevant again once it takes responsibility - in terms of negotiating, mediating and enabling relationships and conflicts that individuals and groups, whether public or private, can perform within space. Anyone interested in a subject of societal relevance will by default realize that any reality is based on complexity. “A”rchitecture deals with precisely this complexity; socially, therefore politically and spatially.
Where critical and collaborative research, first-person singular participation (i.e. “I contribute”), and individual dedication towards an ethical position question the modalities of practice, new sets of knowledge are being generated.
Architectural Space as Agent: Notes regarding The Winter School Middle East, Kuwait (2011)
A text by Markus Miessen (MM), Patricia Reed (PR), Zahra Ali Baba (ZAB) Kenny Cupers (KC), Magnus Nilsson (MN) and Ralf Pflugfelder (RP); introduction by Markus Miessen.
The Winter School Middle East is a localized, small-scale hub, which regularly performs cultural and educational activities in collaboration with local NGOs, schools, and individuals, and -– through its new, longer-term local presence – houses a critical platform for exchange. Being launched as an idea in 2007, the Winter School Middle East was set up as a roaming, mobile institution that has undertaken a series of workshops, seminars, mini-schools and conferences since its inception in January 2008: ‘“Learning from Dubai’” (2008, Dubai), dealing with the Labour Housing issue, and “Spaces and Scales of Knowledge” (2009, Dubai), dealing with the question of institution building, both in collaboration with the Architectural Association (London), The Third Line gallery (Dubai), and the American University of Sharjah. In 2010, the Winter School moved to Kuwait for a longer-term involvement and local engagement regarding the setting up of a platform for critical exchange. Combining the Winter School’s workshop methodology with local initiatives, this intensive workshop-based programme was and continues to be run as a design- and discourse-led curriculum that combines conceptual and spatial research in the process of criticism and the rigorous production of ideas. Students and staff work in teams of up to ten in which they develop individual and group projects. These projects are tested against the criticism of the group, but also against the knowledge and expertise of local protagonists.
When the Winter School was originally set up in Dubai, the driving force was clear: to establish a model for localized education, which would set itself clearly apart from the US model of franchised campuses, one in which major US universities started up foremost satellite campuses in the Middle East. This model was based on the post-9/11 reality and rationale that many Middle Eastern families would no longer send their kids to the US, hence creating a serious financial lack within the administrative structures of the universities. As a result, some of those universities decided to bring the campuses where the money is. Most of them simply replicated the source campuses, with academic staff from abroad only, who don’t know anything about the region, nor build up any long-term local knowledge as they tend to be on short rolling contracts. The dilemma is clear: the UFO has landed but does not really engage locally.
The Winter School instead aims to generate local knowledge with individuals and groups from the urban area and wider region that it situates itself in. Vis-à-vis the US model, the Winter School attempts to generate knowledge with locals, toolboxes that will remain within the region and are specific to the context in which they are situated.
In 2010, the Winter School moved from Dubai to Kuwait. In addition to the geographical shift, the new setting in Kuwait is also different and more ambitious, as its model aims both at a longer-term engagement as well as a specific place in which the school will build up a small institution and platform for exchange. This ambition regarding a visible and permanent local responsibility in terms of informal education further intends to generate a turf for the concept and reality of consequence when approaching a space for learning, support, and discourse.
Kuwait is of particular interest: tongue-in-cheek, it could be described as the most socialist-capitalist system that exists globally, with a democratically elected parliament, a benevolent ruler, free education, healthcare and housing. The political and cultural environment in Kuwait, other than in Dubai, is very liberal in regards to open discussion, with a tradition in platforms such as “Diwaniyah”: a spatial typology for political exchange. An open society driven by an “overdemocratisation”, the country is known for its vibrant society, in which all parliamentarians think of themselves as the prime minister, and everyone else – in the most positive sense of civil society – owns a non-expert expertise. Compared to Dubai, Kuwait has also been highly urbanized since the 1930s. This combination of liberalism and open politics presents an interesting starting point, but when it comes to public and discursive forms of education, Kuwait is only making use of classical and formalized structures, such as the centralized university. When it comes to education, especially from the point of view of spatial practices, urbanism and discourse, there is very little attention spent besides the formal and mostly outsourced planning of cities, as well as the classical architecture, mainly operated from within the discipline of engineering. So far, there has neither been an attempt to come to terms with alternative urban development, the serious outlining of problematic realities, and/or transparency in planning processes. There is an increasing need for the stipulation, development and growth of a local expertise beyond classical Western notion of urbanism, one that uses the specificities of the local context in order to generate new types of spatial practice.
The following conversation was recorded as a post-production of the January 2011 workshops in Kuwait.
MM The Winter School, which is now in its third year of programming, attempts to achieve to set up and offer a non-profit space that accommodates an opposition. An opposition not in the sense of necessarily being “against” something, but rather a space, which is based on the notion of both political autonomy within the context in which it is situated as well as to put forward an autonomous institutional framework, which is deliberately introduced from the outside, yet embeds itself within the actors, realities and questions of local and regional practices. The notion of Diwaniyah, as we have discussed it during the Winter School, could be read and interpreted both as a spatial phenomenon as well as a process. The Winter School – in the way it is set up, placed and structured – was meant to allow for a decentered perspective of politics, a re-understanding of everyday practice of the communal, even for locals, who are very familiar with the concept and everyday practice of Diwaniyah. In the sense of describing the School as an autonomous space, one could arguably compare it to the Diwaniyah as a “protected space”, a congregation space and lobbying device for political thought and opposition as the epicenter of constituency penetration into formal politics.
Patricia, in one of your seminars you explored the conception and understanding of what it means to set up a problematic as opposed to an understanding of the subject or object of investigation as problem. Could you please elaborate on this?
PR Firstly, I would just like to say, that I will refer to Diwaniyah, without an article in my contributions in this multilogue. The removal of the article treats Diwaniyah as a process rather than a thing. What became clear in our time in Kuwait was the ambiguity surrounding the definition of Diwaniyah, so it seems only apt to respond to this by apprehending Diwaniyah not as a static entity, but something quite malleable in fact, so in this sense Diwaniyah is always becoming. What I meant by introducing this more or less philosophical term of ‘problematic’ was not to suggest that we identify a problem of Diwaniyah per se, but rather that we form a particular approach, or angle on the complex issues embroiled within the notion of Diwaniyah itself. The basic maxim behind this discussion of establishing our individual problematics is to say that an interesting or relevant spatial intervention is wholly dependent on setting up an equally complex and novel problematic. So, for example, when we take up this term of ‘Protected Space’ coined by Marianne Tétreault in regards to the private/public dialectic at work within the spatial condition of Diwaniyah, we may possible start to approach the spatial problematics by further asking: From whom is Diwaniyah protected? Who is protected through Diwaniyah? How does Diwaniyah establish boundaries of inclusion/exclusion within the nomos of the everyday?
KC I think these are very good questions to begin unpacking the spatial agency of the Diwaniyah. For me, the notion of the “problematic” is less philosophical than simply analytical: it is about asking the right questions. The right questions here are the ones that open up the “black box” of the Diwaniyah. I think our position of outsider - which as Markus has mentioned shapes the politics of the Winter School - is crucial in this respect. The fact that the Winter School’s participants are either women or non-Kuwaiti, or both, undoubtedly shapes much of our questions - and the debates to which they have given rise. As a gathering of Kuwaiti men, the Diwaniyah is certainly a highly gendered practice. Its mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion are ambiguous to say the least: the regime of hospitality in the Diwaniyah generates both an explicit openness and an implicit closure. As outsiders, our approach to the Diwaniyah is shaped to a large extent by an imaginary rather than everyday experience. This situation I think reflects the nature of the Diwaniyah as a phenomenon in Kuwaiti society at large. As Mohammed Al-Ghanim - one of the invited public speakers and an officer in the national parliament - has suggested, the Diwaniyah structures Kuwaiti society not just as a concrete social practice, but perhaps even more importantly, as an imaginary. The Diwaniyah has given rise to political contestation at key moments in Kuwaiti history and as such has entered collective memory as a place of national success - regardless of whether many of these instances constituted actual political successes or rather failures.
MM Might the Diwaniyah in this sense be comparable to the Agora in Western culture?
KC This myth of an open public space of participatory decision-making - a myth which continues to entice the collective imagination and has led to the baptizing of “Agoras” across Europe... in spite of the fact that historians continue to inform us of the outright exclusion of women, slaves, and non-citizens was at its basis. The Diwaniyah seems to serve similarly as a locus of tradition in collective consciousness, yet at the same time, it might be a crucial agent of Kuwaiti modernization. Some of the current uses of the Diwaniyah - a Playstation room for youth, or a space to collectively discuss weight loss goals - attest to this hypothesis. For me, the most fascinating aspect of the Diwaniyah lies in such seeming contradictions. My main question is therefore: If the Diwaniyah is a “protected space” - a specifically designated space for politics - might it protect the political from entering the realm of the street and the spaces of everyday life? Or is it the opposite rather: the Diwaniyah makes urban life debatable and therefore becomes the agent through which political and other tensions can be channeled into more organized, rational discussion? Certainly Jürgen Habermas would be happy with the latter possibility. But to me, the Diwaniyah’s regime of inclusion/exclusion suggests otherwise.
MM In many ways, the Winter School itself acts as an Uninvited Outsider. Through its temporal structure and nomadic appearance, it questions both the normativity of the space of the “School” as well as, in the case of the 2011 Winter School in Kuwait, the normativity of those communal spaces and practices defined as Diwaniyah, a historically protected space, originating from tribal society, the leader of the tribe would offer a gathering space within his private areas. Let’s talk about Diwaniyah as a means to formally register a thought in an informal setting, a means of maintaining private and public social network. How can one think through the written and unwritten rules as to the use and protocols of space? How does it become a site outside of itself?
MN/RP Our studio took on the notion of the Diwaniyah in a deliberately literal and direct manner. The students were asked to design a full-scale subjective enabler/disabler of communication that was placed in an imagined Diwaniyah in one of the courtyards of the school. We wanted to create our Diwaniyah. The studio consisted of Kuwaiti women and Europeans. All involved in the studio were outsiders of the Diwaniyah. Although everyone was very generous and welcoming it was very evident that we all were aliens in this environment and that there really is no way to become part of it. This sense of being or feeling excluded was strongly felt by all participants and this was a theme that in different ways occurred in all projects. One can say that a sense of seclusion was a lowest common denominator for all projects. Many of the projects tried to establish individual spaces within the Diwaniyah in order to be able to withdraw from a perceived male dominated spatial and social pressure. Other proposals tried to destabilise the formality of the Diwaniyah by, from the outside, impose gestures that intended to shake up the perceived rigidity of the Diwaniyah.
MM In some of the seminars we discussed the notion of politics versus the political, both read through the goggles of Mouffe and Rancière. Would you agree if I called Diwaniyah the Mouffian space in which one agrees to disagree, a space of potentially oppositional, non-violent encounter, a network or scaffold of sense-making, a common ground, conceptual framework and shared space in which one meets to become a political community?
PR I would agree, I think Diwaniyah is a potentially space of debate, so very much in line (again possible so, not always the case) with Mouffian agonism. Important though to mention, is the very normative codes of conduct or common ground/ethos instantiated with Diwaniyah. For me this means Diwaniyah is still caught up within the established symbolic orders of ‘the police’ using the language of Rancière (and in that regard is not a political eruption). Again, it depends on your understanding of ‘The political’ in Mouffe’s language, for me it doesn’t go far enough since her toned down antagonism as ‘agonism’ requires that we agree on a common grammar of disagreement, whereas for Rancière real disagreement lies in the contestation of the very grammar used that is understood as making sense. Again referring back to the initial dialectic of ‘Protected Space’ we deployed as a potential problematic of Diwaniyah, setting up relations of inclusion/exclusion – I think Rancière’s conception of politics is useful here, seeing as a moment of dissensus (a doing of politics) is always initiated by a part that has no part in the sphere of perceptibility. Let me briefly elaborate – within a Mouffian paradigm as I understand it, it is true that Diwaniyah can gather together a particular group of people to debate and create a presence of an oppositional position to a particular hegemonic condition. They can gather and discuss because they already have consensus on a normative grammar of presenting, contesting and debating issues. So, in short, this potentially productive force of contestation is based on a fundamental consensus, a profound paradox. That said, we cannot have politics all the time, so Diwaniyah, as a space of consensual disagreement can still be figured as a fruitful space for the proliferation of opinions and ideas, albeit from a part of the population fully accounted for.
MM Is Diwaniyah a horizontally accessible space?
PR When we use Diwaniyah as an example however, it was often presented as a space open to all, yet this very notion of ‘open to all’ is of course determined by the normative grammar of who constitutes ‘all’ in the first place. We know that Diwaniyah is a particularly male dominated institution, and furthermore, one ‘open to all’, who are passport holders, and often those who are friends of friends. So the very normative grammar of ‘open to all’ is for me, is the potential site of politics, rather than debating objects within existing grammars of common sense. The larger question of politics, as such, would become rather how to renegotiate the normative grammar of ‘open to all’, in terms of who counts in making an appearance, who and what could be understood as being a part of the order of hospitality.
MN/RP We think it is probably fair to say that we are somewhat suspicious of the notion the Diwaniyah as a place where one agrees to disagree. The issue here is that the allowed or admitted participants of the Diwaniyah, at least the Diwaniyahs with some social and political gravitas are a relatively exclusive and homogenous group. In other words, male Kuwaitis that are economically well off. As this group share cultural background and have vested interests, the discursive openness is already from the beginning rather limited. In other words, there is a very strong underlying sense of consensus in place and the disagreements are, we suspect, more or less variations on the same theme. As pure nearly cartoon-like speculation, our impression is that when we as westerners talk about politics we more or less tend to refer to various strands of ideology whereas the Kuwaitis tend to think of politics as a from of wheeling-and-dealing. Western attitudes are tied up with a sense of rigidity and longevity whereas in Kuwait politics is much more flexible and perhaps even opportunistic. Thus, we should be very cautious that we don’t romanticize the Diwaniyah by projecting western frame-works on to something that is quite different in its operation.
KC I think it is important not to impose a theory which reduces the spatial and political complexity of the Diwaniyah. I don’t think it is at all possible to identify the Diwaniyah - as a space, a phenomenon, or an event - with either of the categories established by Mouffe (politics/the political) or Rancière (the police/politics). From the many invited speakers during the Winter School, we have been able to learn about an amazing diversity of potential instances in which the Diwaniyah became a political agent. I think the Diwaniyah can historically be both an institution of politics as “business as usual” (for a privileged group of Kuwaiti men), and an agent of political contention and social change, in which women and youth can begin to play a key role. Rancière’s redistribution of the sensible - the emergence of a new common sense - might already be taking place, yet whether the recent establishment of certain exclusively female Diwaniyahs can be seen as such a positive change is not entirely clear. The question about social change is perhaps a question of which regimes of hospitality are imaginable in Kuwaiti society.
MM Patricia, in one of your talks you unpacked the notion of de-skilling – or what I would call un-learning – as an unsettlement of normativity, an unsettling of the given coordinates and datums of convention. Could you please explain this further in the literal context of the 2011 Winter School?
PR The notion of de-skilling was brought up in the context of mapping the sorts of characteristics of an ‘Uninvited Outsider’ as a kind of aesthetical-political agent. In the field of visual arts, de-skilling – as identified by Boris Groys in Art Power – was mentioned as a residue of the gesture from Marcel Duchamp with his infamous ‘Fountain’, the purchased and signed urinal he submitted to the world as an art object, by authorizing it as art, by contextualizing it as art. So de-skilling has more to do with a downplaying of a particular ability with materials and techniques, craftsmanship and virtuoso capacities , in order to be a ‘professional’ artist. In the specific context of The Winter School I thought this was important to impart to students in terms of heightening the agency of non-expert abilities, that interventions and important contributions are also thinkable outside the realm of master techniques, and can also be forged through re-contextualizations. In regards to unlearning – I’m not sure if I would create a parallel between these two modes. I think un-learning is perhaps a result of de-skilling (we unlearn the definition of an artist, for example through the pervasiveness of ‘de-skilling’ in art – so that the artist cannot be defined as a master craftsman/artisan any longer). For me un-learning is always a kind of conceptual violence, a necessary violence and a struggle with ones own cognitive schema of the world. For Kant, the schema is the result of experience and intellect, transformed into imagination – so we can figure something without having it directly represented. I use this example quite often, but when I describe to you ‘a red pen’ we have a common schema in mind as to ‘penness’ and ‘redness’, so we can communicate about something without having it present, simple enough. The more complicated issues arise when we start to communicate about inclusion/exclusion, the human and even Diwaniyah! What is the schema of being human? I situate unlearning as a deforming of our schemas, what I like to call contaminating imagination.
KC I would like to connect this notion of un-learning back to Markus’ comment about how the Winter School’ temporal structure and nomadic appearance promises to unsettle and redefine the “School” as institution. I am wary of celebrating “un-learning,” because I think it might result from a misconception about learning. If learning is understood as the flexible adjustment to change rather than the encyclopedic collection of data, it comes much closer to a continual becoming rather than the attainment of expertise. Similarly, I think the current infatuation with the figure of the amateur is a dubious trend. Becoming someone else (whether amateur or expert) is of more interest to me, since it denotes an active process of engagement. Un-learning then threatens to equate a purely negative or expulsive approach. This relates back to the notion of an alternative school. The Winter School I think is unique not because of its temporal structure and nomadic appearance (study-abroad programs of similar structure abound in US and European university institutions), but because of the more reciprocal linkages it has forged between the local and the non-local. In this sense, the Winter School works through a different regime of hospitality. And this is also where its ethics lie. Markus’ notion of the “uninvited outsider” is useful to bring up here. I agree with him that the notion of the uninvited outsider has great potential. But it also brings with it a great responsibility. The questioning of certain state of affairs, accepted knowledge, or set of norms, often happens from a realm outside of or relatively removed from this relatively coherent yet closed condition. This is I think the positive challenge an outside perspective can offer. That said, the outsider, in its worst incarnation, is a ruthless colonizer. Whether the outsider is a respectful instigator of debate or its opposite depends of course on the concrete ways of engagement. But it also depends on the circulation of capital - whether it be economic or cultural. And it depends on the modes of reciprocity. Patricia in her seminar mentioned the words of art critic Jan Verwoert - and his suggestion that the artist’s ethics lie in inhabiting the consequences of her/his making. I think this is very relevant to the Winter School: to what extent can it live the afterlife of its own instigations?
MM Unlearning here is meant in a flexible and at the same time specific sense, moving towards the education of architects and other disciplines dealing with the conventional tools regarding the production of space, i.e. building buildings, infrastructure, devising master-plans, thinking about and directly acting upon the city. When we look at the way in which this/these disciplines are taught in many schools and universities, it seems to me that indeed one of the most important things to teach is how to not fall back into the default modes of practice how it is being transferred in many international courses. We need experts, yes, and there are many experts already. What I am personally interested in is the person, who is not so keen to be the expert, but manages to smartly manoeuvre between ‘things’ – not necessarily disciplines, but within the whole apparatus of a diverse set of practices, relations and social networks in order to pro-actively raise questions, which are usually not being raised, at least not in the environment in which they are now posed. Concerning your point about responsibility, Kenny. Yes, of course. The notion of this role, this Uninvited Outsider of course brings with it not only a great deal of responsibility, but also consequence. If this was not the case, I would also not be interested in it. I think that any practice that denies either responsibility or consequence – or even worse: both – should not be considered critical. I agree, as argued in my book, that one of course has to be careful as to how this role can be achieved. And it can also easily be misused. Since I am an optimist I tend to usually think about possibilities rather than problems, I guess we don’t need to use the example with the half-empty glass here. The future of the Winter School, in terms of its ongoing afterlife, mostly during the calendar year when no major workshops are taking place, is based on a relationship of trust towards those practitioners and actors in Kuwait, such as Zahra, who could potentially develop this further and elevate it to the next level. This was always the idea right from the start: that it would precisely not just occur in January every year, but that it would start to build an ongoing platform for critical exchange. After the final presentation this year, local architect and educator Ali Al-Khaled told me that he could not believe that this was the first time he actually saw all these locals together in one place. This is the point: to develop a shared space for criticality in a place in which such model does otherwise not exist. Call me a colonizer, but I think the moment that people were realizing this, it was already Winter School 2.0 and had nothing to do with me any more. The process had started, and this is what counts. With the little financial means we have, I hope that this also helped to have the Cultural Council rethinking its protocols in the future. This way, we can hopefully also have an active role in the reshaping and influencing of what I would call the institutional everyday. We should not forget that this is all happening in a context, where a female student getting a bank account at NBK (National Bank of Kuwait) can receive up to 5'000 KD (ca. 13’000 EUR) when opening a bank account, This money can be accessed only for plastic surgery. At the same time, there is not a single programme that the bank offers for educational loans.
MM The Winter School is a project of pro-active instigation, a localized, self-authorized trigger of sorts. If one was to assume such role of the Uninvited Outsider, one could describe the potentiality of such self-authorized project as one, which is based on an underlying principle of questions rather than answers, a destabilizing momentum, which attempts to contaminate the imagination of others. It as it were performs itself as an autonomous agent, enacting and producing in relation to the given context and its specific audience producing affect. As an agent for the instigation of dissensus, the Uninvited Outsider arguably opens up alternative avenues for the staging of new formats or frameworks of production by proactively generating and directing a set of unprovoked questions. Such practice of “opening up” is being enabled by, as Patricia called it, the “partial unpredictability” of a foreigner re-setting the rules of engagement. Patricia, could you please elaborate on your reading of Agamben in the context of a playful character that allows for what you named the practice of “inappropriating”?
KC I will insert myself as the uninvited outsider here and interrupt. First of all, I think we need to question the notion of the autonomous, “self-authorized” actor here. The success of the Winter School lies not in the way it acts autonomously, but in the way it engages contingency. I think what needs theorization here is not the actor or organizer, but the situation or the encounter that is created. How can we invite contingency and incidence instead of celebrating individual agency? That brings us back to Rancière’s notion of dissensus, which I think is less about intentionality then about the afterlife of an event. How can we make sure that what we think is dissensus is not just temporary transgression - which, just like the medieval carnival or the contemporary art festival, basically threatens to reinforce rather than challenge the status quo and the reigning normativity?
MM Exactly. This is why the issue of permanence and consequence in this context is so important.
PR I don’t want to be a stickler, but I think we have to be careful when using terms like ‘the foreigner’ in our discussion since they enter our imagination in a fairly specific way. I prefer the Greek term xenos since it has a multiplicity of meanings. It of course signifies a foreigner (someone from outside a given community), but also an enemy/stranger and a guest friendship. So xenos possesses all of these qualities simultaneously, a menacing, friendly outsider – rather that just being from the outside. In regards to the playfulness, another quality we attributed to the potential agency of xenos, Agamben discusses this in several texts from his prolific output, but in particular he sees it as a manner of determining other uses for things that have been locked down in a reified capacity for functioning within a given symbolic order. In the discussion of play in ‘In Praise of Profanation’ he cites the example of the child who takes an official legal contract and transforms it into a paper airplane. So the legal contract, something most of us would regard as precious or untouchable to some degree, becomes something wholly other by transforming its symbolic functioning. In our case of Diwaniyah, I am not suggesting that we are thinking within the coordinates of ‘Profanation’ per se, for Diwaniyah is not sacred or removed from the sphere of use. Nonetheless, if we think about play in general and as a political tactic, it is something that renders a reified use inoperative, the gesture of play is always about imagining other uses, not to mention introducing a certain lightness into the discussion of spatial politics. In play, one neglects a certain use, but a kind of neglect that opens up other possibilities of use. Play is always, in a sense inappropriate – if we consider appropriateness of use to set up a relation of memesis to a given order. Henri Lefebvre describes the body in space as that which appropriates codes and materials in space to produce (and reproduce) the spatial; interfacing this description of the Lefebvrian body and his project to revolutionize the everyday with the agency of play, we could further infer that to revolutionize our experience of the everyday requires an ethos of play through inappropriating the codes and materials of the spatial. Through inappropriation I think we open more possibilities of use and thusly experience, rather than through the reproductive of appropriation alone. Speaking of the body, its’ time we take a break and have some lunch!
Markus Miessen is an architect, consultant, and writer based in Berlin. He runs the collaborative agency for spatial practice Studio Miessen, is co-founder of the architectural practice nOffice, and director of the Winter School Middle East (Kuwait). Miessen has taught at institutions such as the Architectural Association (London), Columbia, and MIT. He is currently a Professor for Architecture and Curatorial Practice at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe, Germany, a Harvard Fellow, and completing his PhD at the Centre for Research Architecture (Goldsmiths, London). In various collaborations, Miessen has published books such as The Nightmare of Participation – Crossbench Praxis as a Mode of Criticality (Sternberg Press, 2010), Institution Building: Artists, Curators, Architects in the Struggle for Institutional Space (Sternberg Press, 2009), When Economies Become Form (Berlage Institute, 2009), East Coast Europe (Sternberg Press, 2008), The Violence of Participation (Sternberg Press, 2007), With/Without: Spatial Products, Practices, and Politics in the Middle East (Bidoun, 2007), Did Someone Say Participate? An Atlas of Spatial Practice (MIT Press, 2006), and Space of Uncertainty (Müller+Busmann, 2002).
No comments:
Post a Comment