Aziza Chaouni is the principal of Aziza Chaouni Projects (ACP) based in Fez, Morocco and Toronto, Canada. Aziza was born and raised in Fez, Morocco. She is trained both as a structural engineer and as an architect, with 14 years working experience in Morocco France, and the USA.
Aziza graduated Cum Laude from Columbia University and with Distinction from Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her work has won several top design Awards and Recognitions including the Holcim Gold Award for Sustainable Construction in 2009, and has been published and exhibited widely.
Aziza is also an Associate Professor at the Daniels School of Architecture Landscape and Design, where she leads the Designing Ecological Tourism lab. In 2007, Chaouni co-founded Docomomo Morocco with the late Mohammed El Hariri.
Chaouni has rehabilitated several heritage buildings, including the Qarawiyine library, the oldest library in the Middle East. She’s responsible for the Sidi Harazem Thermal Bath Complex CMP, supported by the Keeping it Modern Grant offered by the Getty Foundation. She recently won with Mourtada Gueye another KIM grant for the conservation of the International Fair of Dakar, Senegal.
About the lecture / September/23/2020 18:30 Central European Time /
Public space, water and arid climates: projects by Aziza Chaouni Projects
UrbanaArchitettura are a collective of architects, teachers and researchers with an interest in the relation between architecture and the city via the formation, reformation, and de-structuring of institutions. We have taught at the AA, the RCA, Central Saint Martins, the Leeds School of Architecture, the Cass, the University of Cagliari, Anglia Ruskin University, and Universidad Católica del Norte. Our work and writings are published on AA Files, Domus, OASE, MONU, San Rocco, and the Funambulist. Sabrina is Marie S. Curie Fellow at KULeuven with the research project ‘Territories of Incarceration’. Sabrina and Paolo Emilio direct Casting Castaways, a Visiting School for the Architectural Association on the disused prison islands in the Mediterranean. Francesco is a researcher and senior lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University. His research investigates the space of the university as a paradigm for understanding the modern city, and he is the author of the book ‘The University as Settlement Principle. The Territorialisation of Knowledge in 1970s Italy’. Marco is PhD candidate at the University of Cagliari and visiting professor at Universidad Católica del Norte (Chile) where he led the Urbanism-Studio ‘Through the Looking Glass. Alteraciones del proyecto territorial’ whose results were presented at 16th Venice Biennale in 2018. Their research investigates the architectures of higher education.
UrbanaArchitettura is a collective of Sabrina Puddu, Marco Moro, Francesco Zuddas, Paolo Emilio Pisano who participated at the Future Architecture Platform 2020 call for ideas.
ACAN is a voluntary network of individuals from within architecture and its related built environment professions taking critical action to transform our industry in the face of the climate and ecological crises.
ACAN exists to address the way our built environment is made, operated and renewed in response to the climate emergency. As a network of individuals, we channel personal energy, expertise and action towards a common goal – the systemic change of our profession and the construction industry as a whole. We see this as a matter of urgency.
Our mission is to mobilise a new movement of professional activists towards this goal by building an open, supportive and inclusive organisation. ACAN empowers individuals to proactively seek change and facilitates collective effort through a shared platform built on collaboration.
ACAN has 3 overarching aims that guide all we do:
1 – DECARBONISE NOW
We seek to radically transform the regulatory, economic and cultural landscape in which our built environment is made, operated and renewed in order to facilitate rapid decarbonisation of the built environment.
2 – ECOLOGICAL REGENERATION
We advocate the immediate adoption of regenerative & ecological principles in order to green the built environment, prioritise communities and ecosystems at threat and promote the recovery and restoration of natural environments.
3 – CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION
We call for a complete remodelling of our professional culture. We must challenge and redefine the value systems at the heart of our industry and education system. We seek to create an open network to share resources and knowledge to aid in this transition.
ACAN are Future Architecture Platform 2020 Selected Creatives.
About the lecture & workshop / September/18/2020 19:30 CET
Lecture + workshop about the climate and biodiversity emergency, architecture’s part in it and how YOU can get involved to make a difference.
ACAN formed in London over the summer of 2019, in this talk we will take you through how ACAN was conceived, founded and is expanding. We will explain the principles and activities fundamental to the network, talk through some of the actions we have taken and explain the changes we are trying to bring about. We will discuss how to build effective campaigns and make an inclusive network of engaged individuals working collaboratively to address the climate and biodiversity crises.
There will be a short Q&A session before we divide the audience into groups. With a facilitator from ACAN you will be asked to discuss what issues affect your region and areas of expertise, how these could be overcome and what would be needed to make changes for the better.
This will not be the a run of the mill lecture and audience participation will be vital! Don’t be afraid, we will create a fun, inclusive forum for people to speak their mind and meet others who share their concerns. The movement is building and we want you all to be a part of it.
In the first 20 minutes we will take you through how ACAN was conceived, founded and is expanding, we will explain the principles and activities fundamental to the network. We will talk through some of the actions we have taken and explain the changes we are trying to bring about. We will discuss how to build effective campaigns and make an inclusive network of engaged individuals working effectively to address the climate and biodiversity crises.
There will then be a short Q&A session before we divide the audience into groups to discuss what issues affect your region and areas of their expertise, how they could be overcome and what would be needed to make changes for the better.
This will not be the a run of the mill lecture and audience participation will be vital! Don’t be afraid, we will create a fun, inclusive forum for people to speak their mind and meet others who share their concerns. The movement is building, and we want you all to be a part of it.
All interested to join the workshop can register through the workshop Link.
Renzo Sgolacchia is an architect and urban researcher based in Rotterdam and PhD fellow at IUAV, University of Venice.In 2020 with the project Learning from Films, he became fellow of the Future Architecture, a European platform that connects architecture institutions and emerging creatives.
He graduated cum laude from the Faculty of Architecture of Roma Tre University in 2010. His graduate thesis, developed at TU Delft within the MSC Public Building, dealt with a housing project of a compact block in the city centre of Havana, Cuba. In 2012 he participated at the Istanbul Design Biennial with the exhibition Re-reading Giancarlo De Carlo, based on a collective research. The exhibition was also presented at the New Museum in New York and at the Limewharf in London.
In Rotterdam he worked as an architect at KCAP Architects & Planners, Atelier Kempe Thill and Studio Marco Vermeulen. Since 2015 he was commissioned for conceptual masterplans and researches on urbanism.
He is the founder of Cinema Architecture, a project combining research and film screenings, which investigates architectural space through cinema. Since 2015 this project is supported by Creative Industries Fund NL and City of Rotterdam. The screening events became an important cultural reference in the city.
Renzo is a Future Architecture Platform 2020 Selected Creative.
About the lecture / September/15/2020 18:30 CET
Learning from Films
The outcomes of a common architectural project are only verified when a building is constructed or inhabited. Architects mainly operate through abstract procedures and conventions such as technical drawings and financial measurements, which become tangible only during the final steps of a design process. Film reveals and simulates “a bodily experience of space”, and it can be considered as a complementary discipline to architecture, an accurate tool to perceive, articulate and verify architectural spaces.
Within the film discipline the architectural space is the real or reconstructed location where a film is shot, while the cinematic space is the viewer’s mental reconstruction during a film screening. The peculiarity of the cinematic space is concisely described by Juhani Pallasmaa, a Finnish architectural theorist. “Cinema constructs spaces in the mind of the viewer”, as he stated. A film director “constructs” the cinematic spaces and the viewer creates own mental maps that localise his/her position and re-construct the single spatial fragments.
Filmmaking is intrinsically an architectural project and the case of single location films is emblematic to understand the cinematic space. The single location films such as Last Year at Marienbad (directed by Alain Resnais, 1961) and High-Rise (directed by Ben Wheatley, 2015), are perceived as entirely shot in a single building. The film Marienbad takes place in a baroque hotel, which is, in fact, an imaginary building created by editing scenes shot in several locations, namely three royal palaces in Munich and a film studio in Paris. High-Rise is situated in a brutalist-styled tower that consists of a monumental garden and a leisure centre in Bangor, a ferry terminal in Belfast and a 3D model that simulates the exterior of the multi-storey building. In these cases, the cinematic space can be considered as a “Frankenstein” location, a mix of different rooms and buildings, which appears to the spectator as one. It is a re-composition of various fragments that are retroactively constructed by the viewer during the screening.
In order to demonstrate that filmmaking creates a tangible architecture, the lecture will explore how film directors have cinematically re-composed different and separated spatial fragments into an imaginary room, building or trajectory. The presentation will focus on selected films that are crucial to understand the configuration of their physical and inhabited spaces.
Goda is a spatial designer from Lithuania, currently based in The Netherlands. After graduating from the master of interior architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, she has been working in several architecture and urban research studios. Next to this, she is part of an experimental collective-platform for architecture and arts called No Purpose, which seeks for process-orientated, ephemeral, spatial experiments with a DIY approach. Also for several years she has been collaborating with TAAT (theatre as architecture, architecture as theatre) collective that operates as a performative spatial practice in between the fields of architecture, performance and artistic research.
In her personal work Goda combines architectural practice with more interdisciplinary approaches, such as video, mapping, recording, writing, and other media. She looks into speculative designs as tools to imagine future narratives. She has published several articles in different architectural magazines and platforms and also has presented her works in group as well as solo exhibitions. Her project Recycling Utopia received an Honourable mention at the Archiprix, 2019, and was one of the selected ideas at the Future Architecture Platform in 2020.
Goda who is a Future Architecture Platform 2020 Selected Creative.
Recycling Utopia. Bolo# Pleasure Futurists, 2018
Author: Goda Verikaite
About the lecture / September/16/2020 19:30 CET
Recycling Utopia
This talk focuses on the complex nature of mass-housing districts in the post-socialist cities in Lithuania. This industrialized housing was the physical outcome of the Utopian promise to provide every Soviet family with its own apartment. In the 1990s, Lithuania underwent radical changes in the wake of its transformation from a Soviet communist system into a democratic and independent state. However, the Soviet mass housing neighbourhoods remained unchanging relics of what had been built sixty years earlier. What is the next step for these prefab house-machines?
By embracing speculative narrative as a method, my project “Recycling Utopia” (2018) adopts the theory of bolos, which are independent and decentralized units of people. Represented as a visual narrative, it travels through different scales, starting from country infrastructures to urban neighbourhoods. Via this project, the first mass-housing district in Lithuania, Žirmūnai, is transformed into an experimental neighbourhood by using different concepts of luxury, equality, collectivity, and affordability.
The second case (my ongoing project ‘’What Is Eiguliai Talking about”, 2020) focuses on a new location, Eiguliai, another socialist mass-housing district in Lithuania built in late 1980s. This project aspires to listen to the existing stories of local people, yards, buildings, surroundings, and in doing so proposes a fresh look at the neighbourhood as a district of various micro-utopias. The project at its culmination will invite people to take a walk in Eiguliai district by listening to a narrated speculative audio-tour.
By presenting several projects, the talk suggests a creation of new narratives for socialist mass-housing districts as a tool to showcase different social, historical and political layers in these particular urban settings. By using different artistic media, my projects expand the traditional architectural research in order to imagine less conventional urban futures.
Grégoire Deberdt (°1986, France) is a licensed architect and urbanist based in Paris.
After studying landscape design (Institute of Genech), architecture (ENSA Versailles) and urban policies (Sciences Po Paris), Grégoire has worked in architecture, urban planning and real estate strategy consulting offices in Paris, Basel, London, Mumbai and Brussels. With his own practice, he works on spatial interventions, documentary projects and research for private clients, cultural institutions and public authorities. His spatial interventions and studies range from domestic scale to large territorial strategies. To investigate and document the diversity of our spatial environment, he uses cartography, storytelling, photography, audio/video recordings, exhibition design, and collaborates with film-makers, researchers and artists. After teaching spatial and urban representation at the ENSACF, he joined in 2019 the architecture school of EAVT Paris-Est.
Gregoire is a Future Architecture Platform 2020 Selected Creative.
About the lecture/ September/17/2020 18:30 CET
Diasporic Ties
While a lot of research has been done on how the diaspora can transform fragments of the city they live in, few has been investigated on the spatial manifestations of their ties with their departure city. In the European territory, the case of Prishtina is complex and radical, as a constant flow of remittances from the diaspora irrigates its economy and thereby its real estate and construction sectors. While standing in a position of openness and un-dogmatism, the observation of the urban evolution from post-conflictual informal constructions to the new unbridled residential developments raises environmental, social and economic issues. The Diasporic Ties project gathers a work of interview recordings, mapping and photo reports, identifying precise situations and their evolutions. Thereby the project wishes to create a new source of thoughts and debate within and beyond Kosovo, and to initiate new narratives crossing the territorial policies and the architectural disciplines.
Fabio Ciaravella (Palermo, 1982), Architecture of Shame project director, teaches sociology for architecture and urban sociology at University of Florence Department of Architecture where he also holds the Social innovation and public art module within the graduated master Futuro Vegetale: plants, social innovation and design.
Focus of his research are the relationships between social science, architecture and art. He has been fellow at MIT Art, Culture and Technology program in Boston and is part of the LabSo Sociological Laboratory on Design, Architecture and Territory. He is also one of the co-founders Studio ++ artists group with which he has exhibited in Italy and abroad, creating exhibitions and interventions in the public space including the Terzo Giardino project, today a public park on the river banks of Arno in Florence.
Architecture of Shame (Cristina Amenta,Fabio Ciaravella, Mimì Coviello, Clara Cibrario Assereto) is a research group that investigates the relationship between architecture and shame in Europe. The group has been established in Matera in dialogue with the application process of the European Capital of Culture 2019. Today AoS is triggering a “group psychoanalytic sitting for European architecture” whose main aim is to create a documentation and research center based in Matera and focused on relationships between contemporary values and the way we perceive places we live.
Fabio & Architecture of Shame are Future Architecture Platform 2020 Selected Creative.
About the lecture / September/29/2020 19:30 CET
LET’S TALK ABOUT SHAME AND ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE
A group psychoanalytic session about what we consider value, disvalue and what we could recognize as heritage soon. How many places, buildings and/or entire cities considered “shameful” should be instead recognized as part of our heritage?
How many places, on the contrary, we have been used to accept as part of our public life, today are far from what we feel as a public good, far from what we want to share as a public statement about our values?
The lecture will use the “Shame” lenses to question the meaning of heritage in architecture and its relationship with our changing world. People will be involved into a dialogic process aimed to verify, publicly and collectively, where is the limit that allows to recognize or negate built spaces as representative part of our public values. Shame will be proposed as a productive tool, a way to share ideas that everyone feels at the edge of intimacy and publicness.
Based in Matera, Architecture of Shame (AoS) have been triggering a European dialogue on Architecture through a critical approach related with its city story of cultural change. Called “the Shame of Italy” in 1950 because of its pre-modern architecture, the city of Matera and its historical center have been abandoned, blamed, and refused for many years by Italy in the post- second world war modernization period. After 40 years, in 1993, UNESCO recognized the same “places of Shame” a world heritage as one of the most “outstanding troglodyte settlements in Mediterranean area” and as one of the existing oldest city.
The radical change occurred in Matera is similar to many other cases in the world and in Europe. Cultural, social, political and other sort of changes make us reconsider our perspectives on architectures, cities and shapes of built space.
Changes creates strong and shared feelings towards architecture and sometimes we can reinforce our judgment through the feeling of shame that comes from a style, a story or a misunderstanding related to a building. Also awareness creates the same reaction, and sometimes we understand to live in, or close to spaces that negate our values, and then we feel ashamed of our normality. There is no a final truth in this opposite approach, and it is an ongoing never ending topic. We can only discuss about the problematic bond between history, changes and feeling in architecture and our times, to better understand values we believe today. To do that we have to face our ideas honestly, starting from what we can deeply share: shame is one of these things.
After an introduction on the theoretical and methodological frame AoS will shows some case studies afforded in the last years before touching topics related to Kosovo, architecture and shame. Participants will be asked to contribute with their ideas on specific buildings in order to open a discussion on contemporary values as the way to understand existing and future architectures.
Mies. TV is a documentation and investigation platform, discussing with architectural thought thinkers of today and the architects of tomorrow, in order to provide audio and visual content for a global audience. With the goal to initiate discussion on the topic, resolve understanding and reflect on how the role of an architect is changing. The channel has to date, filmed over two hundred interviews ensuring a vast archive of data to enable a thorough and widespread illustration of different standpoints and how these are positioned within a global perspective.
Mies. TV evolved from a network of architecture students spanning from Austria to the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Mexico, with the initial idea to explore and record all aspects of architecture.
The group delves into the ideas revolving unique architectural cultures, the different teams within the network procure and produce interviews and events within their own context and language, which illustrate and strengthen the international online-platform. Through open screenings, architecture festivals, television shows and panel discussions Mies. TV aims to communicate architecture to an audience internal and external to the realm of architecture with the use of modern tools.
The project is fueled by the enthusiasm of young, motivated students documenting their journey and experiences through the places of ideas – visiting architects in their offices, talking with them at their desks piled high with hard drives, books and empty coffee cups.
About the lecture/screening/ September/15/2020 19:30 CET
During the Kosovo Architecture Festival 2020, the Future Architecture selected creative Mies. TV will be screening their documentary film “Why Does Beauty Matter”.
The Tallinn Architecture Biennale (TAB 2019) curated by Yael Reisner has raised the issue of Beauty in architecture. A term, often ignored by todays architects, is the focus of the exhibition and symposium. Reisner has invited not only architects, but also experts from philosophy, mathematics and neurosciences to discuss their research on beauty.
The video features in-depth interviews with curator Yael Reisner, along participating architects Sou Fujimoto, KTA, March Studio, Space Popular, Fologram, as well as Nick Luscombe (DJ), Graham Harman (philosopher), Ron Aharoni (mathematician) and Taylor Enoch (neuroscientist).
The Architecture Foundation brings you a daily diet of online lectures, interviews, building tours and panel discussions – all live and all free.
Boccaccio’s fourteenth century classic The Decameron takes the form of 100 tales told by a group of young people who have retreated to a villa while waiting for their native Florence to escape the grip of the Black Death. The 100 Day Studio is a new initiative devised by The Architecture Foundation that adapts this model to our current health crisis. For 100 weekdays from Monday April 6th to Thursday August 27th, the 100 Day Studio will bring you a daily diet of online lectures, interviews, building tours, panel discussions and quizzes. Each Friday we will publish the curriculum for the week ahead.
The second week highlights are the presentations of the GSD-Harvard students from the “Mass Timber and the Scandinavian Effect” course of professor Hanif Kara (AKTII) and & Jennifer Bonner (MALL). The presentations start from 6PM CET on the 15th and 16th of April 2020. The presentations can be accessed on these links: 15th link and the 16th link
To learn more on the upcoming 100 Day Studio events visit the Architecture Foundation website.
KAF 2020
online workshop by urbanaarchitettura
3 – 13 October
There is a chandelier in every room
We live in an age of ruins. The ruins of the welfare state in its various ideological and geopolitical embodiments in the form of those institutions that have been carefully choreographed to shape modern territories of top-down, domesticated, collectivised life. From education to hospitality, confinement to mental treatment, their architectures have often been relocated, sent to exile, vacated, forgotten, repudiated, or simply left to their own destiny in a state of controlled decay. Yet they might still be a resource for reinventing modes of living together.
As opposed to market-driven neoliberal euphoria to reinvent these places – read: the cultural center, the luxury hotel, the creative hub, the innovation campus, etc. – these ruins raise the question: what to do, beyond their musealisation, or final commodification? But also beyond a nostalgic reiteration of past ideals of total (forced?) socialisation? We think that precisely in the ruin of an institution lies the prospect of a de-institutionalised idea of collectivity; the drawing of, in the words of Robin Evans, a new picture of the sociable as opposed to the socialised.
The Prishtina Public Archipelago is one example of a territory made of large cathedrals of publicness laying in wait for reappropriation. Using it as a case study, we want to pull together a twofold reflection on the meaning of publicness.
Firstly, we will engage with one specific component of the Prishtina Public Archipelago: the Grand Hotel Prishtina. The hotel stands as a paradigm of publicness in which the space of appearance is sparingly negotiated within a territory of rooms. Rather than magnifying the open-plan capacities of its communal spaces and atria, we will aim for a de-privatisation of its matrix of rooms.
Secondly, we will question the publicness of architectural education by experimenting with the very format of this online workshop. A constellation of 8 ‘isolated’ participants will produce a collective work by experiencing and enacting the propagation, articulation, and ramification of their own spheres of influence. From their home-base, each participant will take part in a relay design race, developing a time-limited task as an essential fragment of the collective work while at the same time defining the rules for the subsequent participant’s contribution.
The workshop will run 3-13 October, but the students will not be expected to work for the whole duration. Within this period each participant will be required to work for 3-4 days.
All interested must send by 25th September to institutesofcare@gmail.com, a portfolio of selected design work (max 5 pages) and a brief cover letter specifying:
I do like…
I am quick at…
I am good at…
(collage, line drawings, renderings, photographs, physical models, writing, directing movies…)
Also please specify what devices you have (laptop, desktop, A4 printer, A3 printer, scanner, good quality photo camera, etc.)
The selected 8 students will be notified by September 30th and they will receive a welcome package with instructions for the workshop.
