Every Building in Baghdad: the Rifat Chadirji Archives at the Arab Image Foundation
Curated by Florencia Alvarez, Adam Bandler, and Mark Wasiuta
January 7 - February 17, 2018
LAXART, Los Angeles
This exhibition examines the work of Iraqi architect Rifat Chadirji through the collection of his original photographs and building documents held at the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut. With the work of his architectural office, Iraq Consult, and in his other professional and intellectual roles, Chadirji became a pivotal cultural figure in Baghdad during the period of its postwar modernization from the 1950s through the 1970s. As an architect, planning con- sultant, and Director of Buildings for various government agencies, Chadirji was central to the organization of Baghdad and to the consolidation of its postwar image. With nearly one hundred buildings Chadirji helped foster the emergence of the factories, colleges, monopoly headquarters, communication structures, and other new building types that appear in Baghdad following Iraq’s 1958 revolution.
Despite the long historical continuity evoked by his regionally inflected modernism, Chadirji was all too aware of the transformative effects of Iraq’s growing oil economy. His work as a photographer was informed by his exposure to Iraq’s political and cultural precariousness, while it foresaw greater disruption ahead. Over a span of more than twenty years, Chadirji recorded the street life, social practices, and spaces that he believed were threatened by the development driving Iraq’s postwar evolution. Over the same period, he meticulously photographed his own architectural work in an attempt to produce documents that could survive the damage, alteration, and potential destruction of his buildings.
The threat that lurks within the Chadirji archives reverberates with the current instability in Iraq and its region and with the continuing specter of building destruction and cultural violence. The texture of precarity within Chadirji’s photographs also underscores the institutional project of the Arab Image Foundation and its attempt to assemble, secure, and preserve the photographic history of the Arab World. In this sense, Chadirji’s photographs and building documents exhibit at least three identities: they are an informational system describing every building within his architectural oeuvre; they are a device to preserve the image of Iraq’s experience of modernization; and they are the charged signifiers of collateral damage and the historical and cultural vulnerability that marks the archives of the Arab Image Foundation.
“Every Building in Baghdad: The Rifat Chadirji Archives at the Arab Image Foundation” originated at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. It was curated by Florencia Alvarez, Adam Bandler, and Mark Wasiuta.
A second version of the exhibition was presented at the Graham Foundation in Chicago in Fall 2016, and was organized by the curators with Ellen Alderman, Ava Barrett, and Sarah Herda.
The LAXART presentation is organized by the curators with Makayla Bailey, Catherine Taft, and Hamza Walker.
LAXART would like to acknowledge the contributions of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery student workers including M.Arch and CCCP Assistants: Becca Book, Grete Grubelich, and Tania Tovar Torres; the M.Arch Exhibitions Crew: Valentina Flora Angelucci, Cameron Dean Cortez, Jiangyu Chen, Andrea Ayleen Chiney, Charles Hajj, Eugene Sen Chun Ong, Edward Joseph Palka, Angelina Andriani Putri, Miranda Shugars, Ilijana Soldan, Zachary Ross White, Haochang Yu, Evelyn Zhang; and the CCCP Exhibitions Crew: Maite Borjabad, Pedro Ceñal Murga, Rosana Elkhatib, Ruishi Ge, Joachim Hackl, Robin Hartanto, Chi-Chia Hou, Sara McGillivray, Iara Pimenta, as well as the GSAPP Fabrication Lab crew.
Generous support provided by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Curated and designed by Adam Bandler, Marcos Sánchez, and Mark Wasiuta
Role: Assistant Curator
February 18 - April 1, 2017
LAXART, Los Angeles
“We are a matrix for the use and distribution of media to express relationships in man’s environment. We explore and document physical and cultural surroundings through the use of still photography, film, sound and video tape.”
Environmental Communications Catalog, 1971
Working in Venice, California from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, Environmental Communications (EC), a collective of architects, photographers and psychologists, devised an image practice aimed at composing a new visual syntax for the late-20th-century city. With debts to LA’s electronically mediated counterculture and its conceptual photography movement, their practice was attuned to the spatial, mediatic, and social forces they documented in Tokyo, the American Southwest, and, most often, Los Angeles, their primary object of analysis. The group speculated that their “environmental photography” would transform architecture and alter the consciousness of architecture students via images distributed through university slide libraries. Its technique consisted of sensitizing oneself to the Los Angeles environment with the goal of registering normally imperceptible environmental conditions and mutations.
Environmental Communications eventually shot and organized hundreds of thousands of slides, forming a vast taxonomic system for documenting Southern California’s urban and environmental geography. Compiled into thematic slide sets with titles such as “Human Territoriality in the City,” “Ultimate Crisis,” and “Hardcore LA,” the slides were sold via the Environmental Communications Catalog to museums, cultural institutions and to an international network of architecture schools. Through their environmental photography and thematic slide sets, EC experimented with the behavior-altering capacity of images as they pursued their goal of developing “systems of perception.” Consequently, Environmental Communications expanded its street level photographic practices to encompass 16mm film and Sony Portapak video shoots from airplanes, helicopters and blimps, and extended the scope of action at their Windward Avenue studio to include film screenings, video festivals, and Venice Beach happenings. With their media experiments, events, and slide catalogs, they positioned themselves as interpreters and purveyors of new architectural and environmental trends, assembling a mass inventory of images that could disrupt pedagogy, counter conventional practice, and shift attention from the buildings and monuments that dominated architecture and its institutions.
Curators: Adam Bandler, Marcos Sánchez, and Mark Wasiuta
Assistant Curator: Florencia Alvarez Pacheco
Exhibition Design: Adam Bandler and Mark Wasiuta
Graphic Design: MTWTF
The exhibition was first produced by GSAPP Exhibitions for the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation.
This expanded version of the exhibition appears with the assistance of the University of Southern California School of Architecture.
Generous assistance provided by the Graham Foundation.
Detox USA | Curated by Mark Wasiuta, Florencia Alvarez, and Marcos Sánchez
Information Fall-Out: Buckminster Fuller’s World Game | Curated by Mark Wasiuta and Adam Bandler
October 22 - November 20, 2016
Galata Greek School, Istanbul
ARE WE HUMAN?
THE DESIGN OF THE SPECIES
2 seconds, 2 days, 2 years, 200 years, 200,000 years
The 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial explores the intimate relationship between the concepts of “design” and “human.” Design always presents itself as serving the human but its real ambition is to redesign the human. The history of design is therefore a history of evolving conceptions of the human. To talk about design is to talk about the state of our species. Humans have always been radically reshaped by the designs they produce and the world of design keeps expanding. We live in a time when everything is designed, from our carefully crafted individual looks and online identities, to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes. The average day involves the experience of thousands of layers of design that reach to outer space but also reach deep into our bodies and brains. We literally live inside design, like the spider lives inside the web constructed from inside its own body. But unlike the spider, we have spawned countless overlapping and interacting webs. Even the planet itself has been completely encrusted by design as a geological layer. There is no longer an outside to the world of design. Design has become the world.
Design is the most human thing about us. Design is what makes the human. It is the basis of social life, from the very first artefacts to the exponential expansion of human capability. But design also engineers inequalities and new forms of neglect. More people than ever in history are forcibly displaced by war, lawlessness, poverty, and climate at the same time that the human genome and the weather are being actively redesigned. We can no longer reassure ourselves with the idea of “good design.” Design needs to be redesigned.
ARE WE HUMAN? : The Design of the Species : 2 seconds, 2 years, 200 years, 200,000 years invites a wide arrange of designers and thinkers from around the world to respond to a compact set of eight interlinked propositions:
DESIGN IS ALWAYS DESIGN OF THE HUMAN
THE HUMAN IS THE DESIGNING ANIMAL
OUR SPECIES IS COMPLETELY SUSPENDED IN ENDLESS LAYERS OF DESIGN
DESIGN RADICALLY EXPANDS HUMAN CAPABILITY
DESIGN ROUTINELY CONSTRUCTS RADICAL INEQUALITIES
DESIGN IS EVEN THE DESIGN OF NEGLECT
“GOOD DESIGN” IS AN ANESTHETIC
DESIGN WITHOUT ANESTHETIC ASKS URGENT QUESTIONS ABOUT OUR HUMANITY
These propositions will be explored over the coming year in events, classes, workshops, and online discussions – including open calls for responses to the propositions by short videos. This year of exploration around the world will culminate in a dense program of exhibitions, debates, broadcasts and publications during the six weeks of the Biennial in Istanbul that opens in October 2016.
This Biennial is an archaeological project. It is not about celebrating particular designers or about visualizing remarkable futures. It will be a multi-media documentary about the state of design today, when everyday reality has outpaced science fiction. It will place the extreme condition of contemporary design into the context of the extended 200,000 year history of our species – from the first standardized ornaments and the footprints of the first shoes to the latest digital and carbon footprints. A Biennial normally focuses on the last 2 years. The time frame for this exhibition will span from the last 2 seconds to the last 200,000 years. Ancient archaeological artefacts from Turkey and the region will be presented at the heart of the Biennial to reframe the latest real-time thinking about design.
http://arewehuman.iksv.org
Detox USA
Healing Experiences: Detox doubles as a clinical process and a form of appetite management, spanning methadone cures to kale smoothies. As the roster of contemporary addiction expands—drugs, sex, love, porn, phones—so do approaches to therapy and to “healing experiences.” There are now more than twelve thousand rehabilitation centers in the United States and tens of thousands detoxification retreats around the world. In the USA, the rise of detoxification relies not only on waves of dependency and the desires of health consumers, but also on the surge of drug courts that mandate “voluntary” rehabilitation in place of incarceration. Detox centers are the experimental, therapeutic extension of the American carceral network.
Withdrawal Center: Recovery centers provide the setting and clinical armature for the design of new human behavior. Withdrawal is their primary spatial and therapeutic device. It simultaneously describes the physiological response to drug cessation, patient sequestration, and the centers’ physical isolation. Through withdrawal and isolation the new clinics are linked to a twin history of rural retreats, centers and institutes, especially as they gained popularity in California in the 1960s and 1970s. If the early Esalen Institute at Big Sur, and other counter-cultural resorts, formalized drug use as a tool for expanding consciousness and opening the doors of perception, New Age retreats offered alternate avenues to enlightenment. Ecstatic contamination through LSD ceded to ecstatic purification through detoxification, meditation, diet, yoga, and a complex of therapies that substituted chemical ingestion with chemical recalibration.
Malibu Sublime: The double process of purification and self-improvement is the foundation of the current explosive growth of detoxification and rehabilitation centers. Around Malibu, California, alone there are thirty-four rehab clinics. Until recently, the Malibu clinics represented the top tier of luxury addiction care, treating celebrity patients and the extremely wealthy. With changes to health insurance policy in the United States, the strata of rehabilitation have been shuffled. Now, the most opulent centers have drifted to Bali, Ibiza, and other exotic sites, at which drug detoxification and spa services are often indistinguishable. However, due to their history and location the Malibu clinics retain their appeal. With panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean, the Malibu hills and cliffs offer a striking setting, itself considered and marketed as a form of therapy. Through setting and view the Malibu centers merge notions of the clinical with a west coast landscape, marked and inflected by association with the psychedelic sublime of Esalen and other early California retreats.
Domestic Cure: Rehabilitation clinics in Malibu are lodged within conventional, albeit dramatically luxurious houses, leased for the purpose of care and curing addiction. California law limits these clinics to a maximum of six beds per building—a regulation that engenders an unexpected intimacy and domesticity. However, the use and logic of the house is curiously modified and altered: group therapy halls replace living rooms, experimental neurological therapy chambers fill garages, and closets and pantries become replacement medication dispensaries. In Malibu, drug addiction, often born within domestic space, is also treated within domestic space. A therapeutic ethos penetrates even the most quotidian activities of domestic life. In some clinics patients eat meals designed for therapeutic benefit in the company of psychologists and counselors. Bedrooms are shared to foster mutual reinforcement and observation. The correlation between behavior and space, a fundamental premise of environmental and behavioral psychology, implicates the bedrooms, hallways, bathrooms and dining rooms of the clinics. The result in these centers is that domesticity is also reconditioned.
Insurance Compression: One consequence of health insurance policy and the expense of care is that rehabilitation—the phase in which new habits and behaviors are formed—is often compressed from ninety to thirty days. Hence, the array of therapies and techniques during the shortened stay expands to fill most every hour of patients’ lives. No aspect of these clinics, from view, to landscape, to diet, to bed linens, is not considered for its therapeutic effect. The clinics are the condensation, compaction, and crystallization of therapy in its spatial and material form. Countering the abridged duration of rehabilitation, Malibu’s in-patient centers are encircled by a constellation of adjunct clinical spaces, from detoxification houses to sober living homes and intensive outpatient care facilities. Therapy is both compressed and stretched indefinitely. The rehabilitative apparatus for designing new habits and behaviors evolves in this simultaneous compression and extension.
Therapy Addiction: Administered by teams of psychiatrists and therapists, primary clinical approaches are founded on varieties of cognitive behavioral therapy, other intensive individual psychotherapies, family therapy, group therapies, and twelve-step based techniques. Around this core of conventional therapies, radiates a complex pattern of alternative and experimental therapies. Many of these, from somatic experiencing to acupuncture, aqua therapy, and yoga, attempt to remedy trauma and construct new bridges between behavior and corporal experience. Others, such as equine therapy, focus on establishing social bonds through empathy training. Even more innovative techniques have emerged, such as EMDR—Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing—which combines talk therapy and bilateral eye movement to excavate repressed and troubling memories. There is a renewed onus on the clinics to deliver empirically based evidence of therapy efficacy in treating addiction, and it is this pressure that contributes to the proliferation and combination of techniques. In the Malibu clinics, addiction is generally theorized as an over-determined condition requiring an expanded repertoire of therapy responses. As the schedule, variety, and categories of therapy accumulate, the boundary between the space of therapy and the space of life erodes, until an image of total environmental therapy begins to appear.
Urine Samples: While patient’s bodies are monitored as the site of chemical accumulation and alteration, core rehabilitation therapies are combined to treat underlying psychological causes of addiction. In court-mandated rehabilitation, and at the clinics where it is a routine element of care, urine samples are tested for chemical traces and drug metabolites. The rehabilitation enterprise is organized around evacuating transgressive and harmful chemicals. Detoxification, the initial period of care, is most closely monitored. As the body releases chemicals it is at risk of seizure, organ failure and is sensitive to pain or other discomforts. In legal and clinical contexts, initial urine testing delivers a positive or negative reading for an array of possible drugs and trace chemicals. Thin layer chromatography and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry serve screening and confirmation roles, as their patterns of chemical spikes and stains deliver more accurate evidence of drug concentrations. Other forms of testing, from brain scans to neurological assessment, are added to urine testing. At one extreme these are processes of intimate, corporal care. At the other they indicate a broad cultural and biopolitical regime of drug control. At both ends of this spectrum, patients are classified in relation to chemical additives and behaviors and identified according to pathological vectors of social, technical, sexual, and narcotic subjectification and addiction.
Photos: Sahir Ugur Eren. Courtesy of 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial.
Curated by Mark Wasiuta, Florencia Alvarez, and Marcos Sánchez in collaboration with Glen Cummings and Eduardo Tazón Maigre, with assistance from Sharif Anous, Joseph Chang, Kamilia Eldefrawy, Ayham Ghraowi, Joachim Hackl, Chi-Chia Hou, Jonathan Lee, Carrie Lin, Yuwei Ma and Eugene Su.
Graphic Design: MTWTF
Video Animation: Farzin Lotfi-Jam
Information Fall-Out: Buckminster Fuller’s World Game
Initially proposed for the US Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, Buckminster Fuller’s World Game was played for the first time in 1969 at the New York Studio School for Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture. Over the next decade the World Game evolved through workshops, strategy papers, and building designs. Emerging from Fuller and John McHale’s World Resources Inventory, the World Design Science Decade enterprise, and Fuller’s Geoscope, the World Game became increasingly central to Fuller's research at the University of Southern Illinois and the University of Pennsylvania. Across its different manifestations the World Game remained focused on the goals of overcoming energy scarcity and altering conventional territorial politics through the redistribution of world resources.
Ultimately, less a game than a design process for the planet, Fuller believed the World Game would also engender an alternative human, World Man. This new human type would be the fruit of winning game scenarios that reallocate global resources—from minerals, to livestock and energy supplies—arriving at the “bare-maximum” conditions under which the largest possible population would have sufficient calories to become “globally conscious.
Along with calories, World Man would be fed a diet of information. Borrowing from his Expo 67 proposal, Fuller’s plans for the World Resource Simulation Center described a vast electronic display to “envelop” players in data. The center would process and visualize resource information drawn from, among other sources, Russian and American spy satellites. Fuller claimed their sensors could detect the location and quantity of water, grain, metal, human population, or any form of energy. The World Game’s status as both alternative and mirror to cold war command and control systems was echoed in Fuller’s terminology for his atmospheric notion of data: informational fall-out.
Despite his plans for the World Game to become a photogenic, televisual, and cybernetic form of mass participation, through Fuller’s life the game remained largely speculative and pedagogical, appearing primarily through copious reports, studies and workshops. As it accumulated ever more data through the World Resources Inventory, the game anticipated an emerging economy of computational capacity and informational wealth. The World Game both tracked and embodied a shift from material to immaterial resources, while it envisioned and prepared a data saturated environment as habitat for World Man.
Curators: Mark Wasiuta and Adam Bandler
Assistant Curator: Florencia Alvarez
Curatorial Research Assistants: Rayna Razmilic, Tania Tovar
Exhibition Design: Mark Wasiuta and Adam Bandler
Exhibition Design and Coordination Assistant: Joachim Hackl
Information Fall-Out: Buckminster Fuller’s World Game originated at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. The curatorial team would like to acknowledge the contributions of the gallery student workers including the M.Arch and CCCP Exhibitions Assistants: Becca Book, Grete Grubelich, and Tania Tovar; the M.Arch Exhibitions Crew: Valentina Angelucci, Min Chen, Andrea Chiney, Cameron Cortez, Charles Hajj, Yujing Mandy Han, Bo He, Eugene Ong, Edward Palka, Andri Putri, Ilijana Soldan, Zoe Wang, Zachary White, Haochang Yu; and the CCCP Exhibitions Crew: Pedro Ceñal Murga, Rosana Elkhatib, Ruishi Ge, Joachim Hackl, Robin Hartanto, Chi-Chia Hou, Sara McGillivray, Iara Pimenta
Graphic design: MTWTF
Acknowledgements: Howard Brown, Daniel Gildesgame, Matthew J. Gorzalski, Ed Hauben, Jeffrey Head, Tim Noakes, o.s. Earth Inc., Roberto Trujillo, Shoji Sadao
Photos: Sahir Ugur Eren. Courtesy of the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial
Curated by Galería Monoambiente and the Canadian Centre for Architecture
Role: Participant (UR architecture magazine) and Curatorial Research (Pidgeon Audio Visual)
September 24 - November 26, 2016
Galería Monoambiente, Buenos Aires
Collaboratory is a curatorial experiment that invites three institutions to develop a specific proposal for Monoambiente gallery space in Buenos Aires. As a result, Storefront for Art and Architecture (United States), The Canadian Centre for Architecture (Canada) and LIGA, Espacio para Arquitectura, DF (Mexico) are collaborating for the first time on a single project, with support from the Graham Foundation (Chicago), and in the process reinforcing the concept of a pan-American network.
M#16: El Otro Arquitecto (The Other Architect)
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CIRCO (España), Art Net (Inglaterra), Take Part (Estados Unidos), Design- A-Thon (Estados Unidos), Center for Urban Pedagogy (Estados Unidos), Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (Estados Unidos), Corridart (Canadá), Architecture Machine Group (Estados Unidos), AD/AA/Polyark bus tour (Inglaterra), Forensic Architecture (Inglaterra), Multiplicity (Italia), AMO (Holanda), Architectural Detective Agency (Japón), Kommunen in der Neuen Welt (Estados Unidos), Global Tools (Italia), Anyone Corporation (Internacional), Delos Symposion (Grecia), Urban Innovations Group (Estados Unidos), International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (Italia)
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Tyrannus (Argentina), Revista Pasajes (Argentina), Revista UR arquitectura (Argentina), Revista Circular (Argentina), ÁREA (Chile), LIGA, Espacio para Arquitectura, DF (México), Mesæstándar (Colombia), Supersudaca (Internacional), M777 (Argentina), Rally Conurbano (Argentina), Al Borde (Ecuador), RUA Arquitetos (Brasil), Moderna Buenos Aires (Argentina), Atlas/Archivo (Argentina), MILM2 (Chile), PICO Proyecto de Interés Comunal (Venezuela), C.A.P.A. Colectivo Arquitectura Pública Asamblearia (Argentina), Banco de Trabajo (Argentina), Post Post Post (Internacional), Mextrópoli (México), Grupo Talca (Chile)
Every Building in Baghdad the Rifat Chadirji Archives at the Arab Image Foundation
Curated by Mark Wasiuta, Adam Bandler, and Florencia Alvarez
September 15 – December 31, 2016
Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago
This exhibition examines the work of Iraqi architect Rifat Chadirji through the collection of his original photographs and building documents held at the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut. With the work of his architectural office, Iraq Consult, and in his other professional and intellectual roles, Chadirji became a pivotal cultural figure in Baghdad during the period of its postwar modernization from the 1950s through the 1970s. As an architect, planning consultant, and Director of Buildings for various government agencies, Chadirji was central to the organization of Baghdad and to the consolidation of its postwar image. With nearly one hundred buildings Chadirji helped foster the emergence of the factories, colleges, monopoly headquarters, communication structures, and other new building types that appear in Baghdad following Iraq’s 1958 revolution.
Despite the long historical continuity evoked by his regionally inflected modernism, Chadirji was all too aware of the transformative effects of Iraq’s growing oil economy. His work as a photographer was informed by his exposure to Iraq’s political and cultural precariousness, while it foresaw greater disruption ahead. Over a span of more than twenty years, Chadirji recorded the street life, social practices, and spaces that he believed were threatened by the development driving Iraq’s postwar evolution. Over the same period, he meticulously photographed his own architectural work in an attempt to produce documents that could survive the damage, alteration, and potential destruction of his buildings.
The threat that lurks within the Chadirji archives reverberates with the current instability in Iraq and Syria and the continuing specter of building destruction and cultural violence. The texture of precarity within Chadirji’s photographs also underscores the institutional project of the Arab Image Foundation and its attempt to assemble, secure, and preserve the photographic history of the Arab World. In this sense, Chadirji’s photographs and building documents exhibit at least three identities: they are an informational system describing every building within his architectural oeuvre; they are a device to preserve the image of Iraq’s experience of modernization; and they are the charged signifiers of collateral damage and the historical and cultural vulnerability that marks the archives of the Arab Image Foundation.
The exhibition includes 60 photographic paste-ups documenting Chadirji’s own building projects, as well as hundreds of his photographs shot in the streets of Baghdad from the 1960s to the early 1980s. In the first floor galleries, Chadirji’s documents are surrounded by a folio of etchings that he produced in 1984. On the second floor, Chadirji’s photographs are accompanied by those of Iraqi photographer Latif Al Ani. A contemporary of Chadirji, Al Ani chronicled newly emerging urban conditions under the shifting political regimes of the 1950s to the 1970s.
Installation Photos : RCH | EKH
Every Building in Baghdad: The Rifat Chadirji Archives at the Arab Image Foundation originated at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and was curated by Mark Wasiuta, Adam Bandler, and Florencia Alvarez.
The Graham Foundation presentation is organized by Sarah Herda and Ellen Alderman with Ava Barrett, Ron Konow, Tom Leinberger, Molly Brandt, Angel Harrold, Claire Morton, Zoe Kauder Nalebuff, Rachel Spek, and Zak Group.
The Graham Foundation would like to acknowledge the contributions of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery student workers including the M.Arch and CCCP Assistants: Becca Book, Grete Grubelich, and Tania Tovar Torres, the M.Arch Exhibitions Crew: Valentina Flora Angelucci, Cameron Dean Cortez, Jiangyu Chen, Andrea Ayleen Chiney, Charles Hajj, Eugene Sen Chun Ong, Edward Joseph Palka, Angelina Andriani Putri, Miranda Shugars, Ilijana Soldan, Zachary Ross White, Haochang Yu, Evelyn Zhang; and the CCCP Exhibitions Crew: Maite Borjabad, Pedro Ceñal Murga, Rosana Elkhatib, Ruishi Ge, Joachim Hackl, Robin Hartanto, Chi-Chia Hou, Sara McGillivray, Iara Pimenta, as well as the GSAPP Fabrication Lab crew.
All documents and photographs appear courtesy of Rifat Chadirji, Latif Al Ani, and the Arab Image Foundation.
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University
Organized by GSAPP Exhibitions
For one week each spring the GSAPP End of Year Show converts the seminar rooms, hallways, and stairwells of Avery Hall into temporary exhibition spaces. The show organizes the work of students across all programs into a comprehensive image of the school’s present research interests, conceptual orientations and design approaches.
Begun in 1988 under Dean Tschumi, a flipbook sequence of the yearly exhibitions since would illustrate the school establishing new directions and agendas while responding to shifts in architectural discourse and to evolving political, social, and technological conditions. Students at GSAPP are both focused on their work inside the school and connected to the world beyond the campus through research travel and through the international orientation of the school and its Studio X network. This attention to global migration, borders, conflict zones, and ecologies, as well as to the evolution of architecture and cities elsewhere, is one of the most legible aspects of the schools current priorities.
Students in each studio or program conceive, design and install their exhibits. This format underscores the independence with which students are able to pursue their own direction at GSAPP, and the results allow a glimpse of the exploratory culture and the vitality of debate at the school.
The End of Year Show includes two exhibitions in Buell Hall. Every Building in Baghdad: The Rifat Chadirji Archives at the Arab Image Foundation is in the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, and Iraq Damage Surveys is in the South Gallery. These two exhibitions highlight the tensions that historical research sparks in relation to contemporary architectural concerns, and the critical importance of sites such as Baghdad for the school as it seeks to foster new forms of intelligence about architecture and urban developments globally.
Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture
Felicity D. Scott, Mark Wasiuta
CCCP Thesis
The second year of the CCCP program is dedicated to the research and production of a thesis. Demonstrating the program’s breadth of approaches to architecture thesis projects take a variety of forms. They may be manifest as a written thesis on a historical or theoretical topic, a portfolio of critical writing, a developed exhibition proposal, a print-based or digital visualization of research, or as a publication project, among other possibilities.
Class 2016: Virginia Black, Maite Borjabad, Pedro Ceñal, Pedro Correa, Lai Jing Chu, Martina Dolejsova, Rosanna Elkhatib, James Folta, Maryam Fotouhi, Gabrielle Printz, Rayna Razmilic, Tania Tovar Torres.
Class 2017: Dan M. Cooper, Chloe English, Ruishi Ge, Joachim Hackl, Robin Hartanto, Chi-Chia Hou, Sara McGillivray, Iara Pimenta, Camila Reyes, Gizem Sivri.
South Gallery, Buell Hall, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University
Organized by GSAPP Exhibitions with research by students in the Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture program (MS CCCP).
This exhibition compiles extracts from six digital photographic collections focused on damage to buildings and structures in Iraq from 1991 to 2015. A team of student researchers examined various archives that exhibit different approaches and criteria for surveying sites of damage. In most cases the photographs are informal snapshots taken for reports, or for personal collections by military personnel, scholars, contractors, civilians, and NGO researchers. Each collection offers documentary evidence on multiple perspectives of the wars in Iraq, as well as the way in which they impacted the city and led to reconstruction efforts.
The National Security Archive briefing book presents satellite images featuring building targets released by the Department of Defense in 2002-2003. “Operation Iraqi Freedom” appears in The National Archives and Records Administration through photographs taken by military personnel. Photographs within the collection “Pictures of Damaged Libraries in Iraq” are drawn from a report produced by the Committee on Iraqi Libraries. The series “Baghdad Looted Ministries, 2003” by photojournalist Ed Kashi depicts the destruction and looting of public buildings that followed the US-led occupation of Baghdad. The personal blog of Steve M. Florence narrates the restoration of twelve telephone exchanges from the Iraqi Telephone and Postal Company in Baghdad in 2003-2004. The Human Rights Watch Archive contains visual documents, shown publicly here for the first time, that document destroyed and damaged buildings in Tirkrit after Iraqi government-backed Shia militia forces recaptured the area that had been under the control of ISIS.
CCCP Exhibitions Research Team: Ruishi Ge, Joachim Hackl, Robin Hartanto, Chi-Chia Hou, Sara McGillivray, Iara Pimenta
National Archives and Records Administration. A view showing bomb damage to the Baath Party Headquarters building located in the International Zone in central Baghdad, July 10, 2005. Photograph by Jim Gordon, CIV.
Middle East Librarians Association. Iraqi Academy of Sciences by Rifat Chadirji, External view. Baghdad, 2003. Photograph courtesy of Nabil al-Tikriti.
Ed Kashi/VII Photo Agency. Scenes outside the burned and looted Ministry of Information. Baghdad, 2003. Photograph courtesy of Ed Kashi.
Steve M. Florence Blog. "Iraq Telecommunication Project and Sites," 2003–2004. Central Post, Telegraph and Telephone Administration by Rifat Chadirji. The Sinek exchange occupies an entire twelve story building in the downtown area. It is a landmark, and can be seen from almost anywhere in Baghdad. It was particularly notable for the chunk of missing structure, taken out by a tomahawk missile, which nearly toppled the building. Baghdad, August 4, 2003. Photograph courtesy of Steve M. Florence.
Human Rights Watch. "Pro-government Iraqi forces destroy buildings after ousting ISIS," Iraq, 2015. Civilian residence, Tikrit, Iraq, 2015.
Curated by Florencia Alvarez, Adam Bandler, and Mark Wasiuta
April 4 – May 6, 2016
400 Level, Avery Hall, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University
Latif Al Ani trained as a photographer in the 1950s working for the Iraq Petroleum Company magazines, People of Oil and IPC. By 1960 he had founded the department of photography at the Iraqi Ministry of Information, where, for the magazine New Iraq, he was tasked with documenting the agriculture, industry and working life of the country after its 1958 revolution. Recognized early as an important photographer in Iraq, he was also visible internationally, with exhibitions in the United States in 1963, and in East Berlin in 1965. As with other Iraqi artists, cultural figures, and intellectuals of this period, Al Ani’s work chronicled newly emerging urban conditions under the shifting political regimes of the 1950s to the 1980s, while also attempting to record the last vestiges of the region’s pre-colonial and pre-modern history.
Although the majority of Al Ani’s work archives were destroyed or dismantled in 2003 when the Ministry of Culture was looted, some of his personal photography collection has survived. The photographs on view are printed from negatives held by the Arab Image Foundation. Accompanying the exhibition of works by Iraqi architect Rifat Chadirji in the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, these photographs document Baghdad’s urban transformation during the same period that Chadirji was active. Chadirji’s Monument of the 14th of July Revolution, his Monument for the Unknown Soldier, his Abboud Building on Rasheed Street, and his Federation of Industries Building appear as the subjects, or as the background extras, within Al Ani’s aerial and street level surveys of Baghdad modernization.
M.Arch Exhibitions Crew: Valentina Flora Angelucci, Cameron Dean Cortez, Jiangyu Chen, Andrea Ayleen Chiney, Charles Hajj, Eugene Sen Chun Ong, Edward Joseph Palka, Angelina Andriani Putri, Miranda Shugars, Ilijana Soldan, Zachary Ross White, Haochang Yu, Evelyn Zhang
CCCP Exhibitions Crew: Pedro Ceñal Murga, Rosana Elkhatib, Ruishi Ge, Joachim Hackl, Robin Hartanto, Chi-Chia Hou, Sara McGillivray, Iara Pimenta
Graphic Design: MTWTF
Produced by GSAPP Exhibitions
All photographs appear courtesy of Latif Al Ani and the Arab Image Foundation.
Every Building in Baghdad: the Rifat Chadirji Archives at the Arab Image Foundation
Curated by Florencia Alvarez, Adam Bandler, and Mark Wasiuta
March 31-May 14, 2016
Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Buell Hall, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University
Opening Discussion with Amin Alsaden, Reem Akl, Zainab Bahrani, Mark Wasiuta, and Ala Younis
The exhibition examines the work of Iraqi architect Rifat Chadirji through the collection of his original photographs and building documents held at the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut. With the work of his architectural office, Iraq Consult, and in his other roles, Chadirji became a pivotal cultural figure in Baghdad during the period of its postwar modernization from the 1950s through the 1970s. As an architect, as a planning consultant, and as director of buildings for several government agencies, Chadirji was central to the organization and consolidation of the image of the postwar city and helped foster the emergence of the factories, colleges, monopoly headquarters, communication structures, and the other new building types that appear in Baghdad following Iraq’s 1958 revolution.
Despite the long historical continuity his regionally inflected modernism evoked, Chadirji was all too aware of the transformative effects of Iraq’s growing oil economy. His work as a photographer was informed by his sense of Iraq’s political and cultural precariousness, while it foresaw greater disruption ahead. Over a span of more than twenty years, Chadirji recorded the street-life, social practices and spaces that he believed were threatened by development and the forces driving Iraq’s postwar evolution. Over the same period he meticulously photographed his own architectural work in an attempt to produce documents that could survive the damage, alteration and potential destruction of his buildings.
The threat that lurks within the Chadirji archives reverberates with the current instability in Iraq and Syria and the continuing specter of building destruction and cultural violence. The texture of precarity within Chadirji’s photographs also underscores the institutional project of the Arab Image Foundation and its attempt to assemble, secure and preserve the photographic history of the Arab World. In this sense, Chadirji’s photographs and building documents exhibit at least three identities: they are an informational system describing every building within his architectural oeuvre; they are a device to preserve the image of Iraq’s experience of modernization; and they are the charged signifiers of collateral damage and the historical and cultural vulnerability that marks the archives of the Arab Image Foundation.
Installation photos: James Ewing
Curators: Florencia Alvarez, Adam Bandler, Mark Wasiuta
M.Arch Exhibitions Crew: Valentina Flora Angelucci, Cameron Dean Cortez, Jiangyu Chen, Andrea Ayleen Chiney, Charles Hajj, Eugene Sen Chun Ong, Edward Joseph Palka, Angelina Andriani Putri, Miranda Shugars, Ilijana Soldan, Zachary Ross White, Haochang Yu, Evelyn Zhang
CCCP Exhibitions Crew: Maite Borjabad, Pedro Ceñal Murga, Rosana Elkhatib, Ruishi Ge, Joachim Hackl, Robin Hartanto, Chi-Chia Hou, Sara McGillivray, Iara Pimenta
Red Tape has been reproduced on the occasion of Les Levine: Bio-Tech Rehearsals, 1965-1975, at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Columbia University, February 4 to March 12, 2016.
Edited by James Graham
Designed by MTWTF
Michela Povoleri, Glen Cummings, with production assistance from Mélanie Davroux, Cong Huynh, and Iara Pimenta
Published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City
Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Buell Hall, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University
Opening Discussion with Les Levine, Michelle Kuo, Felicity D. Scott and Mark Wasiuta
“If I only have one life to live, let me live as a video tape.” Les Levine
Les Levine: Bio-Tech Rehearsals, 1965-1975 revisits the early, multi-faceted practices of Irish-Canadian artist Les Levine (b. Dublin, Ireland, 1935). Drawing extensively from the artist’s archive, the exhibition brings together his: early plastic disposables; remote-fabricated, systems-oriented, and “real time” environments; cybernetic sculptures, audio-surveillance, and other “body control systems” works; early-video; graphic pieces; curatorial projects for the Architecture League including The Big Eye and Your Worst Work; The Museum of Mott Art, a service-based “intelligence corporation” that staged “hearings” on the art world and published Culture Hero; additional conceptual works such as Red Tape, and; documentary turn in the early 1970s exemplified in The Troubles: An Artist’s Documentation of Ulster. Throughout this period, as demonstrated through video, audio, press releases, posters, postcards, publications, and other print-based works on display, and further documented through photographs, 35 mm slides, print ephemera, and a film of Slipcover, we find Levine interrogating and playing with different facets of information flow, the logics of which he understood intimately from his early work as a process designer. Hence in 1968 critic Jack Burnham could proclaim, “Methodologically Les Levine is possibly the most consistent exponent of a systems esthetic,” soonafter attributing to Levine the title of his legendary 1970 exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum, Software: Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art. Levine’s fascinating and often-ironic engagement with the technologies and material products, as well as the post-Fordist systems and operations of the contemporary media-technical apparatus was directed both to the art world and to what he termed “living patterns;” indeed his work consistently spoke to ambivalent mechanisms of institutional, environmental, and subjective regulation. Les Levine: Bio-Tech Rehearsals, 1965-1975 returns to this early decade of Levine’s work, excavating rarely shown works and documents and demonstrating his connection not only Burnham but to Gregory Battcock, William Burroughs, James Lee Byars, John Giorno, Jill Johnston, Charlemagne Palestine, and more. The epistemic nexus of industrial and information technologies with conceptual and institutional strategies that Levine forged during these decades retains a haunting contemporaneity as artists and designers continue to struggle with the shifting vicissitudes of a expansive apparatus of power, from which their work emerges and within which it operates, hopefully to critical ends.
On the occasion of the exhibition, the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery and Columbia Books on Architecture and the City are issuing for the first time the artist’s complete documentation of Red Tape of 1970, a project “to engage the university in a useless task which will allow it to expose a working model of its own system.” An excerpt of this remarkable project appeared in 1970 in Design Quarterly’s famous special issue on Conceptual Architecture, guest edited by John Margolies.
Installation photos: James Ewing
Curators: Felicity D. Scott and Mark Wasiuta
Assistant Curators: Adam Bandler and Florencia Alvarez Pacheco
M.Arch Exhibitions Assistants: Becca Book and Grete Grubelich
CCCP Exhibitions Assistant: Tania Tovar Torres
M.Arch Exhibitions Crew: Andrea Ayleen Chiney, Angelina Andriani Putri, Cameron Dean Cortez, Charles Hajj, Chuxue Wang, Edward Joseph Palka, Eugene Sen Chun Ong, Haochang Yu, Miranda Shugars, Ilijana Soldan, Valentina Flora Angelucci, Jiangyu Che, Bo He, Zachary Ross White, Yuting Zhang
CCCP Exhibitions Crew: Maite Borjabad, Pedro Ceñal Murga, Rosana Elkhatib, Ruishi Ge, Joachim Hackl, Robin Hartanto, Chi-Chia Hou, Sara McGillivray, Iara Pimenta
The Other Architect: Another Way of Building Architecture
Curated by Giovanna Borasi
Role: Curatorial Research (Pidgeon Audio Visual)
October 27, 2015 – April 10, 2016
Canadian Centre for Architecture
The Other Architect:
Urban Innovations Group is a clinic
ILAUD is a laboratory
AMO is an observation
Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies is a halfway house
Center for Urban Pedagogy is an urban educator
Atelier de Recherche et d’Action Urbaines is an alternatives coalition
Corridart is a street museum
Architects Revolutionary Council is a pressure group
Architectural Detective Agency is an inventory
Take Part is a workshop
Kommunen in der Neuen Welt is a pilgrimage
AD/AA/Polyark is a bus tour
Design-A-Thon is a televised charrette
Architecture Machine Group is an interface
Forensic Architecture is an evidence agency
Lightweight Enclosures Unit is a bibliography
Art Net is a chatshop
Global Tools is a crafts school
CIRCO is a thought exchange
Pidgeon Audio Visual is a lecture kit
Multiplicity is a research network
Delos Symposion is a charter
Anyone Corporation is a dialogue
The Other Architect presents 23 case studies that emphasize the potential for architecture to identify the urgent issues of our time. These international and often multidisciplinary groups, with examples from the 1960s to today, invented and adopted new methods outside of traditional design practices in order to create architecture without building.
The alternative approaches shown in the exhibition challenge the concept of individual authorship in favor of establishing collaborative networks or partnerships with permeable roles. Their work took on non-traditional forms such as bibliographies, surveys, databases, conferences, posters, questionnaires and manifestos. By avoiding the built form, these unexpected ways of practicing allow architecture to actively shape a cultural agenda.
The exhibition is organized by CCA Chief Curator Giovanna Borasi with design by MOS Architects (New York) and graphic design by COCCU Christian Lange (Munich).
A series of public programs will expand The Other Architect within a contemporary context, inviting responses and additions from practitioners and thinkers who are constructing architecture in new ways today, and reflections from participants of the selected case studies.
Publication
The Other Architect is also a book, edited by Giovanna Borasi with contributions by Florencia Alvarez, Pep Avilés, Greg Barton, Samuel Dodd, Isabelle Doucet, Ole W. Fischer, Anna Foppiano, Kim Förster, Owen Hatherley, Larissa Harris, Alison B. Hirsch, Douglas Moffat, Whitney Moon, Pierluigi Nicolin, Kayoko Ota, Panayiota Pyla, Angela Rui, Deane Simpson, Johanne Sloan, Molly Wright Steenson, Rebecca Taylor, and Mirko Zardini. A co-publication with Spector Books, Leipzig, designed by Jonathan Hares (Lausanne and London). 416 pages and over 300 colour facsimiles of traces left in letters, books, drawings, photographs, budgets, videos, mission statements, meeting minutes, T-shirts, boats, and buses. Available October 28.
The Pidgeon Audio Visual kit “Technology Is the Answer But What Was the Question?” by Cedric Price. 1979.
About CCA
The CCA is an international research centre and museum founded in 1979 on the conviction that architecture is a public concern. The institution is a leading voice in advancing knowledge, promoting public understanding, and widening thought and debate on architecture, its history, theory, practice and role in society today.
The CCA Collection holds one of the most significant collections of architectural material and ephemera worldwide. It promotes global, interdisciplinary research by scholars and students while continuing to grow, with a special concern toward acquiring and addressing recent digital architectural production. It offers a unique environment dedicated to the study and presentation of architectural thought and practice.
Environmental Communications: Contact High at Chicago Architecture Biennial
Curated by Marcos Sánchez, Mark Wasiuta, and Adam Bandler
Role: Assistant Curator
October 3, 2015 – January 3, 2016
Chicago Architecture Biennial
Environmental Communications: Contact High is the first major presentation of the prolific West Coast media collective, Environmental Communications. Formed by a group of young architects, photographers, and psychologists in the late 1960s, Environmental Communications argued that in an era of accelerating image proliferation, university slide libraries were the emerging centers of institutional and pedagogical power. The group’s core members, David Greenberg, Bernard Perloff, Ted Tokio Tanaka and Roger Webster, speculated that by infiltrating slide libraries with their “environmental photography” they could alter the visual cortex of architecture schools, subvert conventional pedagogy, and spark a revolution in student consciousness.
With debts to LA’s electronically mediated counterculture and its conceptual photography movement their practice was attuned to the spatial, mediatic, and social forces they documented in Tokyo, the American Southwest, and, most often, Los Angeles, their primary object of analysis. They eventually shot hundreds of thousands of 35mm slides, forming a vast visual taxonomy of Southern California’s urban and social geography. Assembled into thematic sets their slides were packaged and sold via the Environmental Communications Catalog to museums, cultural institutions and to an international network of architecture schools. Their slide series mapped the domes, inflatables, communes, and media experiments of the late 1960s and 1970s, compiling an almanac of the era’s alternative architectural practices.
Environmental Communications: Contact High surveys the group’s process images, videotaped road trips, blimp tours and group therapy sessions as well as their sales catalogs, increasingly polished slide sets, and their extensive distribution network.
Installation Photos: Chicago Architecture Biennial
The exhibition was first produced by GSAPP Exhibitions for the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation.
Generous support for research on Environmental Communications provided by the Graham Foundation.
Curated and designed by Mark Wasiuta, Marcos Sánchez and Adam Bandler
Curatorial Assistant: Florencia Alvarez Pacheco
Exhibition Assistants: Daqian Cao, Martí Amargós, Alissa Anderson, Virginia Black, Rebecca Book, Maite Borjabad, Maryam Fotouhi, Liyana Hasnan, Andrew Hite, Emily Mohr, Megan Murdock, Sareeta Patel, Brittany Roy, Yang Chun Su, Tania Tovar Torres
Information Fall-Out: Buckminster Fuller’s World Game
Curated by Mark Wasiuta and Adam Bandler
Role: Assistant Curator
September 18 – November 20, 2015
Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Buell Hall, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University
Symposium with Eva Díaz, Medard Gabel, James Graham, Ed Hauben, Laura Kurgan, Yates McKee, Shoji Sadao, Felicity D. Scott, Mark Wasiuta, Mark Wigley, and Gene Youngblood at Wood Auditorium, GSAPP, Columbia University.
Initially proposed for Expo 67 in Montreal, Buckminster Fuller’s World Game was played for the first time in 1969 at the New York Studio School for Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture. Over the next decade the World Game evolved and expanded through workshops, seminars, strategy papers, and building designs. Across its different manifestations, the World Game remained focused on the goals of overcoming energy scarcity and altering conventional territorial politics through the redistribution of world resources. This anti-Malthusian, anti-war game was meant to discover conditions for perpetual ecological peace and to usher in a new era of total global resource consciousness. Mirroring cold war command and control infrastructures, proposals for World Game centers described a vast computerized network that could process, map, and visualize environmental information drawn from, among other sources, Russian and American spy satellites. Fuller claimed that their optical sensors and thermographic scanners could detect the location and quantity of water, grain, metals, livestock, human populations, or any other conceivable form of energy. Among Fuller’s abiding obsessions was the limited range of the electromagnetic spectrum available to human vision. Fuller argued that the World Game would serve as a corrective to this limitation by rendering visible global environmental data patterns that evaded normal perception.
Assembling documents related to various iterations of the World Game conceived, proposed and played from 1964 to 1982 and material from the World Resources Inventory, the exhibition examines the World Game as an experimental pedagogical project, as a system for environmental information, and as a process of resource administration. A related symposium will bring together scholars and architects with Fuller partners and collaborators to speak about the World Game in relation to its ecological, informational vision, and to the current stakes for environmental data and its representation.
M.Arch Exhibitions Crew: Valentina Angelucci, Andrea Chiney, Cameron Cortez, Charles Hajj, Yujing Mandy Han, Bo He, Eugene Ong, Ed Palka, Andri Putri, Ilijana Soldan, Zoe Wang, Zachary White, Haochang Yu
CCCP Exhibitions Crew: Maite Borjabad, Pedro Ceñal Murga, Rosana Elkhatib, Ruishi Ge, Joachim Hackl, Robin Hartanto, Chi-Chia Hou, Sara McGillivray, Iara Pimenta, Rayna Razmilic
Acknowledgements: Howard Brown, Daniel Gildesgame, Matthew J. Gorzalski, Ed Hauben, Jeffrey Head, Tim Noakes, o.s. Earth Inc., Roberto Trujillo, Shoji Sadao
