Architecture of Informality: October 2013

Summary

This seminar aims at building up the agenda which purpose is to track the informal building processes and to uderstand its consequences on architecture development. Architecture of informality is a worlwide indicator of concurrent, non-institutionalized, but systematic building practice, which gradually leads to city malfunctioning, segregation and social exclusion, but, it can also serve as a starting point for proposing systematic changes of the established architectural practice, which would then become an instrument for creating sustainable and convivial living environment.

Reasoning

Architecture of Informality is a marker of the destabilization of institutions and inefficiency of the mainstream building policy in developing countries all over the world. It is the consequence of a series of derailed political rights and deviant market initiatives that have culminated in the maximization of land use and the privatization of city structures. Such inadequate building policy reflects through infrastructure mailfunction, environmental damage, economic and social segregation.

The ineffectiveness of the official building policy is rendering chaos at all levels of society, compounded by a lack of theoretical research and a scarcity of practical experience, thus being not able to explain and recognize architecture of informality. Instead it is pushing it away and declaring it ‘illegal’. As a consequence almost half of the world urban population who are inhabiting informal buildings are pushed outside of institutional horizon – people’s needs, demands, activities and social relations are not recognized neither by authorities nor by architects. Althought architecture of informality is declared as deviant and distorted (in terms of legal and technical rules, environmental and architectural quality) and has been ignored for decades, it is still remaining as the dominant way of building (bearing in mind the great number of actors involved in this process) , and have to be included in debate about future architecture development.

Objectives

Architecture of informality offers remarkable possibilities for redefining professional participation in making architecture more responsive to present conditions. It occurs between distributed and hierarchical systems; innovations are created through conflict and negotiation between individuals who are building and institutions. While building patterns are fairly basic, the complexity that arose from distinctive blends of non-regulated and regulated building operations maintains a time-based character of an emergent system. In nearly all informal buildings, pulsating and flexible structures are achieved, resembling profoundly hybrid spaces. Their potentials provide a ground for cultivating an alternative architectural discourse that confronts official architecture system remaining rigidly attached to the proposition of the autonomous identity of the designed object. It takes architecture production beyond the impulse to reaffirm identity and speaks to the very being of others, discovering the world from the perspective of many different people involved in the building process.

Understanding the architecture of informality as a consequence of perpetual interactions between the people questions whether design and building procedures can be shifted from a top-down, immutable delivery mechanism into a transparent, inclusive, bottom-up, and open-ended approach. In this respect, the production of a living space becomes radically incompatible with the idea of object autonomy representing a shift from object-oriented design to a relational space constructed as the domain of communal exchange among its participants. The apparent direction for architects is to influence, steer, and shift the process themselves, which means a change of focus from designing objects to designing programs for navigating the process of social exchange and sharing. Thus, a new methodology and a practice to identify, visualize, and, to a certain degree, predict architectural changeability must be developed.

The architecture of informality lays claim to designing and building as part of an ongoing process, where classical architecture values such as purpose, durability, and beauty are not given in advance but are gained though relationships. It supersedes architecture of static geometrical objects with the introduction of dynamic and participatory processes and systems. It is distinguished by code over mass, relationships over compositions, networks over structures, adaptation over stasis. It reconstructs architectural relevance, hidden beyond official protocols, by enabling people to control and shape their living space. Design and building become an evolutionary process that can respond to many different initiatives. An open-ended system enables everyone to share and compare knowledge and collectively optimize spatial transformations. Its sustainability is embedded in the construction process; in a world of growth and change, a building is never completed.

Activities

In order to provide coherence and continuity to the class, three specific methodological phases will be followed through semester in the format of discussion lectures:

Divergence - the research on architecture of informality will start with questioning its values in order to establish provisional taxonomy of its attributes. Each student will put one question and the others will brainstorm their reflections. Student who asks will make keynotes that will help him/her to find relevant references.

Archiving – students will work in couple to organize their references in line following the inherent logic of keynotes in order to create a provisional archive of existing knowledge on the subjects asked by their two questions.

Convergence – in order to conceptualize new knowledge on the architecture of informality couple of students will create text that connects their references. It should be no longer than 3000 words.

Outcomes

At the end of semester new knowledge on the architecture of informality will be organizad around questions that have been posted at the begining of the semester. Production of knowledge and learning thus become a simultanious activity.

Architecture of Informality

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Mapping Informal

Friday, October 18, 2013

We Brasil

Iwan Baan

Uneven Growth

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Quest to Learn

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Homework

Bibliography

Course Brief

Contributors