2A+P/A ALTERNATIVE DESTINIES

DD series

Alternative Destinies

2A+P/A

Damdi Publisher Seoul  2013

Luca Galofaro: Your studio was founded in 2006, and after subsequent reorganization it has reduced the number of members to just two directors, which has resulted in a change in its name. What kind of relationship do the projects of these two separate creative phases have? How strong is the new studio’s desire to distance itself from the collective production of the old one?

2A+P/A: The office has changed in many ways, transforming from a collective production into a more traditional architectural practice. 2A+P was originally established in the late nineties as the editorial board of a design magazine. We published a trilogy of monographs entitled Body, Home and Landscape, and at the time we were still students at the University of Rome, “La Sapienza”. Parallel to this we started to participate in a series of competitions and to produce our first installations, but we did all of this as part of a loose, open group of collaborators and friends called nicole_fvr. Those were very intense years in which our sharing of knowledge and experience enriched the creative personalities of all of the participants. In 2005 after several years of collaboration, we founded 2A+P architettura, which represented the first step toward a more professional practice, and this brought with it an inevitable reduction of the group’s numbers.

In 2008 we decided to bring this experience to a close, but at the time we did not know what the next step would be, even if our intention was certainly to continue the same kind of activity. When we were invited to participate in the 2008 Venice Biennale curated by Aaron Betsky and Emiliano Gandolfi, we decided to present a large picture gallery in which we displayed all of the work we had done over the preceding years. It represented a final collaboration that gathered together the experience of that period of our lives. Immediately thereafter, we established the firm 2A+P/A.

It is evident that a line was drawn in doing so, and this was not only a result of our own choices. A collective experience of engaging in design is very different from participating in an architectural firm comprised of two partners in terms of both the organization and the production process itself. Compared to our current activity, some projects from our first creative phase still feel close to us, but others less so. In this monograph we have chosen to present a selected group of projects from our early body of work that we believe still represent our thinking today.

LG: In your work you make constant reference, sometimes in an almost didactic way, to radical architecture, particularly the work of Superstudio and Archizoom, and you also recently oversaw a competition in collaboration with Andrea Branzi. But your approach seems to be more about making reference to the iconographic imagined world of a particular historical period of architectural design rather than about revisiting issues that were raised by radical architects’ projects. In particular, I am thinking about your solo exhibition and the installation you designed with Salottobuono in Rome, for which the project is essentially an abstract space and seems to lack any sense of continuity with your other projects. It is as if you want to define your own references in a time when architecture is becoming meaningless.

In my experience as a designer belonging to a different generation than yours, it was not necessary to identify our mentors, for our references or interests were revealed by a critical reading carried out by others.

2A+P/A: We have no real need to identify our mentors. In some of our projects, although not many of them, we try to reflect upon some specific issues. Our manner of working involves a desire to create opportunities for collaboration, a mode of production that we try to make interdisciplinary, without ideological choices. We do not agree with the way you oppose iconography and meaning. We are not just aesthetically fascinated by the imagery produced in the 1960s and ’70s. Rather, we believe that some of the work of those years, which was defined as utopian by contemporaries, now represents very concrete assumptions, strategies or visions. There seems to be a general difference between our generation and yours, even if we are separated only by about ten years. Your generation has struggled to come out from under the shadow of a theoretical phase in Italian and European architecture that optimistically focused on trying to make radical changes in how we think about architecture.

Our generation, in contrast, has shaped itself in part in response to the thinking of yours, but it has done so with the understanding that at a certain point your efforts had not produced a strong enough body of theory. Much of this approach was already present in the final phase of 2A+P architettura’s activity, and it is most certainly the basis of our current studio’s most recent research. We collaborated well with Andrea Branzi, for we were all on the same wave-length, but we would be equally ready to work with people who possess the same passion but are totally different. We think that the ability to use different critical tools from those used in cultural debates in the past years is a new aspect of contemporary research.

LG: Maybe I used the wrong expression. It is not about identifying one’s mentors; rather, it is about identifying a very precise moment in recent architectural history and using this as a constant point of reference, whether in graphic design (e.g., your solo exhibition that was a tribute to the Memphis group) or in architectural language (e.g., by treating buildings as autonomous objects that interact with the environment on different scales) or in writing, which has often been conceived in the format of a short story (Superstudio).

I’m curious to know if this is a choice with regard to language or a specific theoretical approach. And how is this attitude reflected in your projects?

2A+P/A: It is true what you say, that part of the experience of the ’60s and ’70s – as well as the experience of 1980s Italian design, such as the work of the Memphis group and, more generally, all of Ettore Sottsass’ production – has been repeatedly debated in our work. We then gradually expand the very precise period to which you are referring, turning it into a much larger slice of architectural history. The point is that we are interested in using the architectural project as a research tool; that is, we consider the project as an instrument with which to investigate reality and, at the same time, to imagine the world. We believe that the construction of alternative scenarios is a key feature of our work. Each project represents an opportunity to experience another step in a sequence of moments, and the sum of these fragments is what shapes our vision. This approach allows us to link our design research to our publishing activities, the world of graphic design and communication in general, the written expression of theoretical considerations and video production, thereby expanding our field of activity in all sorts of directions.

In a sense, we reject strong theoretical thinking, for we have tried to foster the idea that design projects are thoughts that have the potential to interfere with reality. We have tried to craft a method with which to approach our discipline rather than a theory. If observed carefully, your generation, in contrast, has been trying to create precise lines of development – trends or theories that are in continuity with the past but, at the same time, capable of providing critical operative tools – and this difference seems very interesting.

LG: At this point I want us to return to a discussion of your projects. I’d like to understand, for example, the genesis of and the motivation behind the installation you did in Rome in collaboration with Salottobuono, for which you created a continuous space. Can you tell me about the project and the meaning it holds for you?

2A+P/A: We do not profess faith in inflexible theories, but perhaps not having participated in a period of conflict like the one in which you have lived – with the challenge of the Pantera student protest in Italy during the 1990s – we can address various theoretical perspectives with greater ease, because we are free from the burden of ideological contextualization, which is something that we have not actively lent our support to but only studied after the fact. This allows us to deal with all Italian theoretical production – from that of the Radicals to that of the proponents of the Tendenza movement – with an awareness of their respective and opposing philosophical and political references, but without a sense of fracture or division between the two. Therefore, we have a greater capacity for synthesis and the objective identification of useful operational tools. We often feel that this casualness on our part angers many Italian critics because they interpret it as being inconsistent, but to us it seems very natural to draw upon a body of “knowledge” that belongs equally to all of us.

In the case of the installation Planetary Rites, which was our collaboration with Salottobuono, the idea was to retrace part of the experience related to the work of Superstudio’s “Atti fondamentali”, and, more generally, to the anthropological aspect of their research, which Salottobuono had already been working on. Many of our projects, as we have said, try to reflect upon the notion of public space, which means imagining how people will use such space, and what behaviours that space can either accommodate or generate.

In Planetary Rites, a sequence of five portals divided up a fifty-metre-long tunnel following a geometric grid derived from the shape of the space. Visitors were free to move through the space and interpret the constraints that the structures imposed upon them in a hypothetical procession through five undefined “rites of passage”.

LG: For the Italian radical architects, there was no difference between architecture and theoretical writing. Why do the texts you have produced not follow a clear line of development? Instead, each seems designed independently to suit the occasion for which it was written. Your various projects and articles and your contributions to the magazine you launched (San Rocco) often have very different narrative forms from one another. What are you trying to achieve with this? And what is the value of text in the way you approach architectural design?

2A+P/A: Text is very important to us. Our research projects are often designed in the form of stories. Over the past ten years, we have edited the magazine 2A+P, we have written articles for such magazines as Domus and Abitare, and we have written a blog dedicated to Yona Friedman. About a year ago, we became co-founders of the new editorial project San Rocco together with Baukuh, Salottobuono, Office KGDVS, the photographers Giovanna Silva and Stefano Graziani and the graphic design studio pupilla grafik. We try to find different ways of communicating or recounting our thinking by playing with different communication tools, ranging from comic strips to videos, as we did for the project Castrum, whose written description was just like a storyboard that was later transformed into a video. Recently, for the second issue of San Rocco, which was dedicated to the concept of islands, we designed an imaginary section of the island of Mr Scaramanga (the villain in the James Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun) accompanied by a short story in which we described a hypothetical meeting between the evil character and his architect, the designer of his hidden base on an island in Thailand, as a means of describing our thoughts on the relationship between ecology, technology and architecture. Considering the relationship between space and people as the core of our research, we often create projects that are narratives, and in this context the role of text is often crucial. We believe that the sum of all of these elements contributes to and helps to complete our projective thoughts.

LG: Often you refer to a non-figurative architecture, but in browsing through this book, it seems to me that “the figure” assumes a very precise meaning against the background before which it is placed in your work. I perceive a desire to restore power to architecture – a power transformed through programmatic choices that generate strong architectural forms.

2A+P/A: Not all of our projects work with non-figurative architecture. This misconception is surely a result of our collaboration with Andrea Branzi on the project for the museum in Maribor or the House of Memory in Milan.

In contrast, some of our other projects seek to react to context, and in these cases the figure–ground relationship becomes crucial. We often employ a very strong architectural language in which the sum of the components of a project becomes a means of elaborating an alternative response to the trend of extreme simplification that has been emerging internationally, whereby architecture often becomes the straightforward materialization of a simple programmatic concept that is hypothetically capable of solving any problem.

LG: One thing that attracts me a lot in your answer is the idea of a continual reminder of the concept of fun, as well as of developing architecture through collaborative work. And I must admit that the experience we have had together working on the project for the school in Herat, Afghanistan, brought back a feeling of light-heartedness that has facilitated the possibility of sharing ideas and personal growth through debate. You have worked with Yona Friedman, Andrea Branzi, Salottobuono, IaN+, ma0 . . . How do you reconcile these diverse experiences in the construction of your own architectural language? I ask because so far people like me have felt the need to define a personal avenue of architectural research that we have only recently been able to begin sharing and discussing with others through collaborative experiences.

2A+P/A: The point is that we try to interpret our work as a real experience. In this sense, the most interesting influence we can cite is Aldo Rossi’s scientific autobiography and his biographical conception of architecture itself. We believe that the best way to define our work is with the idea of a story comprised of a sequence of experiences, as suggested in the title of our installation for the Venice Biennale, Experience, in which our work was framed like a picture gallery in order to communicate the notion of a sort of collection.

The working partnerships we’ve had thus become important moments in an overarching narrative beyond their individual value as specific projects. They are occasions that allow us to try to understand the logical processes of the creative draughting techniques of the people with whom we work, which are often different from our own. We are fascinated by the idea that through ​​comparison, we can refresh and refine the way we ourselves operate. It is always a question of knowledge, and we believe that architectural projects themselves are one of the most effective opportunities for learning, finding, discovering . . .

Basically, we could say that our architectural language is this: architecture is knowledge and therefore must necessarily be shared. Therefore, we do not agonize that much about the need to define a clear line of paternity for our projects.

LG: What do you think is needed in order to reinvent the architectural profession in Italy today and how do you intend to bring this about? Do you still believe in using architectural competitions as a research tool?

2A+P/A: We don’t know if it’s necessary to reinvent the profession; maybe it’s just a matter of rediscovering the fundamentals. Through our work, we try to activate a critical reflection on the value of architectural and urban planning research in relation to society. We are aware of the need to return to the ethical foundations of architecture, and to propose concrete visions of the future of urban space. Participation in competitions provides a way for us to conduct this research. Each competition project is a response to a specific call, as well as part of a process that we try to engage in with consistency, pursuing the main avenues of research that interest us and characterize our work. They are also part of our experience. Right now we are considering the possibility of expanding the spectrum of our activities with cultural projects that are capable of helping us think about architecture in new ways and that, we want to believe, can be transformed into actual architectural works at a later stage.

    

                    

LG: In Italy architects begin to actually build things at a late age. How do you compare yourselves to international architects of your same generation who build more?

2A+P/A: First, we try to be aware of a context of activity that extends beyond the borders of Italy and Europe. We are very familiar with the many studios similar to ours that operate at the European level, and we try to collaborate and establish relationships with them. In this sense, the San Rocco publishing project serves as a window onto the international scene, which has reacted very positively to the debates the magazine has opened up.

Italy plays host to many professional companies capable of dealing with the international context through projects, exhibitions and publishing initiatives. We know, however, that this condition is temporary. Only thirty-five young European architects have succeeded in realizing important projects. We try to exploit this slowness, which is very Italian of us, and this prompts us to seek other, equally valid ways by which to affirm our idea of ​​architecture. The projects we have produced represent the winding path we have taken through different disciplines and modes of operation.