DATE: X-X-23
TIME: 20:58
AUTHORS: MANGA NGCOBO
DESIGNERS: MANGA NGCOBO
IMAGE COUNT: X
TAGS: X
“It is time to admit turbulence into the very core of the building, to the story about that building, and to the image of the person telling it.”
—Mark Wigley
The story of why I sent Luigi Cipini an email is less about him and more about my own turmoil. One summer, in the West of Amsterdam, I sat in Volume Magazines offices milling over their archives. The magazine, formerly known as Wonen Tabak until the mid 70’s, and Archis until 2005, was resuscitated and renamed by AMO (Rem Koolhaas), Archis (Ole Bouman) and Mark Wigley C-Lab (Mark Wigley). The inaugural copy announces itself as a “tour d’horizon of the new possibilities of architecture”. It coolly makes damning observations about the profession, reaching three crucial limits: its “definition as the art of making buildings”, its “discourse through scripted media and static exhibitions”, and its “training as a matter of master and apprentice”. It's clear that by 2005 there was already a sense that criticism was in its death throes and that architecture needed to reanimate itself with the vitality available to it in other disciplines and the world at large.
Taking stock of the gravity of those statements, and having just finished my 2nd trimester in architecture's deceitful womb, I wondered what kind of architect I would emerge into the world as. On the next page of the Micheal Rock-designed inaugural copy, the editorial redemptively continued that here was “an invitation to see yourself differently”. A statement decidedly not about architecture, but about identity.
By its 10th edition, a year later in 2006, the editors were convinced that architecture had not gotten the memo. They argued that architecture not only needed to look outside of itself, but needed to be shaken to its core. The edition aptly named Agitation began with a Jeffrey Inaba editorial declaring that architecture's “scarcity of agitation is agitating”. The field was congealing into a stable and lifeless enterprise, and Volume sat atop a pantheon of findings and criticism that it couldn't meaningfully wield against the barrage of mid-tier, “tight-lipped” architecture of the day. Even Mark Wigley chimed in with an essay titled Towards Turbulence in which he tears apart not only the stable image of an architecture whose “ensemble of materials, technologies, and sensuous effects speaks about the resolution of tension”, but also the never-smiling, doubt-absorbing, hyper-legible figure of the architect. Architects, like their buildings, were being “shaped to produce a synthetic sense of unity by removing all gaps, all sources of doubt or
stress.”
The party trick I had developed, coming out of my third year of architecture school, was being able to spot a building and swiftly put a name to a face— and I only grew more voracious in my ambition to know who was who. Despite what I learned in the mountain ranges of Volume magazine, the myth of the genius architect with an eponymous firm lived on insidiously in my head, and if any doubt arose it would be extinguished with the swiftness of a Google search. Search Bar. “Insert architect name”. Enter. Nod affirmingly at stern monochrome portrait of architect. Scroll down to put name to face and face to building. Smile to yourself as you remember the joke about how architects and buildings are like dogs and their owners— they slightly resemble each other over time. Go on your merry way.
Armature Globale are immune to this fool-proof formula. Their website does not satisfy us serial name-droppers either. If you can find their email, LAC is who will answer on behalf of the emergent Milanese firm. If you construct a long and verbose request to speak to whoever is in charge, you will be disarmed by the warm brevity of the response: “Ciao Manga!”
“Sounds wonderful — let me know when you want to chat! Luigi”.
My first acquaintance with the firm was in a Flash Art article by Octave Perrault, who described the practice as being ready to “adopt conflict, violence, force, and assault” in their practice, in opposition to the yes-men of architecture. With Wigleys’ sonorous words still ringing in my ears, the firm immediately struck me as a candidate to fill the vacuum. My fascination with Armature Globale, and Luigi Cipini as a figure, is not so much his ability to render the illegible and make it useful, nor is it his determination to undermine the standardization of exhibition making and the heterogeneous forces of architecture. It comes from his subconscious reconfiguring of the identity of the architect in a “world scraped of architecture in the way Richter’s paintings are
scraped of paint: inflexible, immutable, definitive, forever there.”
A year later I sent him an email. The questions and answers below are the result.
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It seems like in terms of naming the practice you’ve successfully avoided some of the habits of older generations who name their firms after themselves, or the current generation of young practise who usually use a number followed by a symbol or letter. I am curious about the name. Why and what led you to choose Armature Globale?
It was never about finding a name adversarial to any of today’s working practices, it was simply an unexpected discovery that made it very personal, hence something relatable. A friend, Alvaro Fernandez Pulpeiro, who I was studying with at AA sent the refusal letter from the Cannes Film Festival he just received. His career went into serious experimental filmmaking and he was running with the festival’s calendar. The letter stated quite directly that his was a beautiful movie but it missed “armature globale”, in the context of the text meaning “structure”. I thought it was perfect. Further investigation with French speaking people led me to the understanding that
such a name could only refer to two different realms, either a teen rock band from the middle of France or a construction company. I thought this was perfect and camp enough. I had to somehow put up a credits line for an exhibition with Japanese photographer Satoshi Fujiwara and that was it.
I know you’ve somewhat distanced yourself from curatorial projects, but in a lot of your shows, you were rendering architecture's complicity in hegemonic violence in quite a visceral way. What do you think the role of Emergent Practices is in the building landscape today in terms of a response to power and violence.
I think the response equals to zero. There could be theoretical responses generally within academic work or small scale direct action groups, but within the “in-practice” world of emergent architects there is — and this is only a personal view — none. The struggle you are confronted with everyday, the studio economical structure, the desire of fair wages for your employees, debt, sleep-debt, creative resolutions, the personal efforts most of young architects are facing within the clientele and developers network are too unstable and deep to intelligently argue for any real response that could either mitigate or truly tackle at-large economic, political and institutional power structures or theirs actual pervasive presence.
We can only speak of a sentient crisis within the spectrum of European and international small scale and emergent architectural firms, a crisis that does not at all censor intelligent responses. I personally — and I repeat that this is purely a subjective view in no way I will suggest to others— that I could operate only via a constant research and production of non-aligned operations. I am naturally tending towards risking everything anytime we have to go through a deadline or a submission, as I could not function via compromise. I took this career as though it was the perfect platform to provide non-alignment within our building environment and cities and I cannot do otherwise. This has of course recessed us to the 0,1% of en-course building production and with an heavier and somehow incredibly painful sustainment of the studio operations, I am an optimist as I enjoy all of this struggles as something I choose to do and my team as the ones I have to support through this process.
I am not sure if these ideas will change once we hit higher building volumes as we are
approaching and trying to intervene with “diverse” real estate developments; I think then the main struggle will be on how to keep capital and experimentation at a tense level in order to avoid the mitigation I see in most of the studios working today.
How does contemporary exhibition making, particularly in the EU-American axis, harbor or preserve power? (Legacy institutions, bienales, trianales etc as perhaps the biggest culprit)
It is never about conscious power. Think of something more in line with a format of “unconscious scanning”, searching for key and stable elements that will allow institutional dominance. I think no cultural platform shall avoid a direct confrontation with actual theoretical scarcity. Museum environments and cultural institutions are somehow a static recipient of casual views, most of them structured by a general attitude towards the visual arts that is inherently bourgeois (if we can still apply such a basic category), looking at things + getting enough cultural capital exposure as to project capacity and aim towards the last stages of class warfare, i.e. the complete transformation of critical practices into locked-in syndrome, mood-board savvy, easy access\easy consumption productive subjectivities. I hate that as much as possible, a teenage kind of hate, pure and simple. The exhibitions I worked on and the multi-year screening program
I curated were always antagonistic, to the general attitude of the public, to the perceived erasure of true experimentation in museum environment versus easy access made-on-demand shows I was seeing proliferating in Europe. I decided early on that I would re-set museums as a critical platform, and do my best as to confront viewership with kill-zones, the ugliest possibile shows, the hardest possible concepts. It was a process, and it was addressed at re-engaging public endurance. It was somehow a stressful critical process aimed at personal and conceptual divergence. I think the biggest issue at the moment is the complete reduction of aspirational shows, nothing can drastically change anything and it seems most of the biggest institutions or the international conglomerate of the art market is moving towards a new phase, a darker Louvre phase where all the promises of moving forward have reached a new minimal tolerance made of extreme engineered beauty, depth and scientific research, leaving almost nothing to chance. Although incredibly eye-pleasing I have the perception that this will simply forecast the erasure and disappearance of small and medium scale project spaces in favour of a constant, stable and peaceful worldwide array of pitch perfect led lights for perfects shows (fairs, biennales etc), eye-pleasing morphine. A book I recently read dealing with Institutional change in the French Painting World (Canvases and Careers by H.C. White and Cynthia A. White) had this passage: “ By Institutional system we mean sa persistent network of beliefs, customs and formal procedures which together form a more-or-less articulated social organisation with an acknowledged central purpose - here the creation and recognition of art. The purpose is realised through recruitment, training continuous indoctrination, a sequential process of appraisal and graded recognition, regularised appropriation of economic support from the environment, a graded system of discipline and punishment, acknowledged machinery for legitimation of adaptation and changes and controlled communication with the social environment.” The book was originally published in 1965 and deals with the suppression of the Royal Academy in 1792 led by Jacques Louis David, and to me is a very lucid and tragic origin
tale for what is happening today.
Armature seems to be interested in confronting the veneer that contemporary architecture employs to hide the true messiness of building and its more nefarious practices, usually by means of brutalization. Why is brutality the most appropriate answer?
It is not an answer it is a process. I had always serious problems in properly articulating how we do what we do... posing as a competitive yet rookie alternative to the way architecture is designed is sometimes too easy and sterile as purposeful point of departure. It’s always been mostly a nocturnal and painstaking application of berserk architectural intelligence, a personal restlessness and antagonism towards what I see as a global deployment of identical structures, identical agendas and identical concrete pouring schemes - something we are still far away from competing with.. but it nevertheless propels a rebellious mood. I will only say this, there is no rendering project of violence or brutality, I am happily devoid of any desire of edge-lording. I do believe - although - in formal violence, a process aimed at brute-forcing any banal attempt reverting on form. A necessary cruelty opening up static configurations to a verified format of freedom. Via this sort of severe and non-linear approach I believe we can then integrate design with unrestricted frequencies tapping in any other discipline with the maniacal passion ones believe is needed. I hope that through our work and hopefully the coming years we will be able to move and render formal and material procedures into an asymmetrically versed and conceptually receptive shapeshifter. A practice able to transform, adapt and host any format of contemporary production.
A book that reminds me of your approach is Andreas Malm’s to blow up a pipeline, in that it's not necessarily about blowing up pipelines to confront the oil industry, but it's about chartering a path towards a world where other forms of dissent and confrontation can be imagined. Is the brutality you employ about imagination? Maybe like a first stepping-stone in the diversity of tactics one can use.
A couple of weeks ago I intervened online in a class at Sci-Arc. A student kindly invited me to show the work to his fellow classmates, totally unofficial as I think my presence in any university is hilarious - nevertheless - one of the students asked how something as uninterested as it seems with sustainability could be apt for a word where in any university class there is no presentation that doesn’t start with the word “sustainability” in its first three sentences. My reply simply mentioned eco-terrorism, a format of dissent that went from radical ecological protection to the low consumption and re-use of contemporary production waste as a purposeful mechanics of diversity, I remembered an article on a music magazine I read as a teenager that analysed the gear, garments and action of what seemed to be the grungiest and most aesthetically friendly organised antagonism group at the edge of 2000s. I don’t necessarily think we are brutal, I fight for an ever-changing and perpetually in-crisis identity as to never be able to stabilise what we do or what my obsessions are, this of course encompasses our production and formalises as finished engineered projects. It is dissent but in a way less negative.
I've also heard you relate these Gallery environments to retail environments, both in terms of their relationship to the economy but also in relation to histories of mechanization.
I simply believed gallery environments to be a generalised and ever-present manifestation of the politeness structuring the art world towards a soporific mandate of commerce, and their engineering as the simplest format of pain, an array of neon, some storage and controlled temperature. I am not sure I can say that anymore as I refrained from engaging with the art world. I think gallery environments are the most autistic format of production for anything related to applied arts or visual culture at large, their comfort-ridden integrated spatial features are simply never direct to provide confrontational values - as recent development in architectural production and high-end fixtures are more and more preventing the historical chaos that has always accompanied ground-breaking exhibition. I would risk to say that what I hope for is a sort of genetically modified mix of the Ludwig Museum in Koln by Peter Busmann e Godfrid Haberer together with Image Shop Camp, a 1976 founded Japanese gallery hosted in a white space with black pvc running on the floors and walls as a protection features against the in-house tanks of picture development acids used to develop the photographic materials that was on display.
The language you use is also employed in a kind of militaristic way, is this on purpose?For example you use the word tactics when referring to exhibition making and other phrases like stacking and venue stabilization. These are words that seem to outline an agenda you’ve identified that exhibition makers use.
I was of that idea, I thought as I explained before that exhibition-making had to conquer a space that everybody forgot existed and in order to achieve that everything had to be potentially belligerent, I keep that as a sleeping thought of course but I am more inclined to the scanning of the current situation with a remote pleasure. As an intelligence analyst would enjoy the performance and deployment of crisis management on a global scale, he will see everything streaming out of his preferred comms channels and would simply alternatively construct an ever-changing coping strategy with the world.
The presentation of your work and sometimes the work itself is quite enigmatic. It's like you're resisting an easy reading of your work. When architectural representation has traditionally been concerned with legibility, why have you chosen to go the other way?
It's very simple, as explained before I am restless, I cannot stabilise comms as a unified
corporate branding, I have the necessity of being able to respond to the general way things are displayed, showed and transmitted. I can’t stand the mass communication of architectural production as a plain HD unproblematic content. I can’t bear the almost achieved erasure of complex culture in favour of an “in-lexicon” “in-discipline” easy access item. I am for divergent comms, non-linear image presentation, explicit and comic deployment of any language, aesthetics or image protocol that might undermine a perceived necessary behaviour and legitimation. That is why I sought to use cartoon gifs, post-graphic slides, boomer collages, fake-underground cinema, unreasonably zoomed videos, wrongly sampled last-released American hard-noise + the Pixies, fast-taped models. It is natural to me to end a project and simply had friends dancing to dark metal in a flat - of course It is a favorite hobby of mine, it deals with impact and with freedom, the freedom you are entitled to have when communicating your practice in your personal terms. It is also sort of a test on how reducing the deployment of visual content to something commercially unviable your production goes more directly to the point, and we have less problems with finding like-minded clients.
Are you suspicious of progress ? You seem slightly disillusioned by certain technologies such as CGI, and BIM and their respective techno-solutionist approaches.
I am not at all, I enjoy experimentation - I am not worried by the tools but simply by a perceived systemic standardisation of what you can do with these technologies. It is years I am working on finding a more personal software alternative that could stream-line infrastructural process throughout a design project and its output. In the meantime we are simply using whatever is available in our own terms.
Are you an optimist ?
Yes I am.