MASS Presenting at WAF in Barcelona
The World Architecture Festival, just three years old, is now an important stage for the architectural community.
Last year’s grand prize of “Building of the Year” went to Peter Rich of South Africa, for his Mapungubwe Interpretation Center, a project that the jury agreed heralded a new era in architecture, architectural form, and recognition for the work emerging unique to the African continent. In many ways it has. Over the last year, work from the continent has emerged in more publications as part of a larger discourse and not an essentialized subset. Studios are popping up everywhere, and the MoMA show, Small Scale Big Change, Architecture of Social Engagement which opened in October shows two projects, Frances Kere and Noero Wolff, whose architecture exemplifies what curator Andres Lepik frames as “pioneering site-specific ecological and socially sustainable practices”.
Jo Noero presented at the World Architecture Festival as well, showing his award-winning project that was featured in MoMA, - The Red Location Museum of Struggle. His comments outlined the local material innovation, the use of 50% local unskilled labor, and the aims of the project to activate property value, housing, regional and localized development through the creation of a vibrant cultural center and heritage site. His discussions were about form, process, cultural value, and social impact and yet, with a seemingly contradictory message from Lepik’s curatorial aim Jo’s final comments disregarded the terms ‘humanity’ or ‘socially engaged’ as a reduction to architectural value. “The work we do is quite simple”, he continued. ‘This is what architecture is, and should do to be architecture”. Any effort to frame or complicate a project as ‘socially engaged’, he implied, was suggesting architecture could be anything but. An idealist and activist approach, Noero is looking towards the future where architecture is not determined by the subset of which it is framed.
But framed it is and framed it needs to be. Otherwise, why would architects be in such an identity crisis? When MoMA and others are pushing an agenda of social engagement to highlight a critique of practice, it is not to denigrate work but to suggest an imbalanced perception of architectural value, instead memorializing architects instead of the people and places that Noero might say, is a ‘requirement’ for architecture to emerge at all.
This identity crisis of architecture is not lost to the WAF either. Where last year it shot to fame an architect whose whole project was the locally found, locally built, formally unique work of South Africa; this year, Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI was awarded the grand prize, much to the irritation of many in the audience. Zaha fatigue was evident in the room - if not the globe - and while few critiqued the work formally, my general impression was that this fatigue is not simply the diva, self memorializing, starkitecture that was once again being awarded, but something deeper abrew. Remembering what Jo Noero was saying, seemed to hint at what that could be - that there is something visibly vacant from this work. An emptiness is tangible from this approach to architecture that may not have been evident without the committed few over the past decade reinforcing the need for social change to emerge again through the built environment. Activists, like Bryan Bell, John Cary, Public Architecture, Diana Murphy, to name a few, that have pushed an agenda of social engagement to support those like Jo Noero and over and over referred to this work as Architecture all along. The irony of course is that in canonizing this at MoMA this month, its unintended consequence could be the very opposite this attempt at leveling, and instead a classic reproduction of the paradigm of the genius auteur - what Katie Swenson from the Rose Architectural Fellowship refers to as the ego of form, not the function of living.
MIchael P. Murphy / MASS Design Group
