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
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