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.
Lecture + workshop about the climate and biodiverity emergency, architecture’s part in it and how YOU can get involved to make a difference.
Register here for the ACAN WORKSHOP on Eventbrite.
About the Event
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.
The Kosovo Architecture Festival this year will be held from the 15th of September till the 15th of October under the theme of “Publicness”. This year as well KAF will invite pioneering individuals and collectives from around the globe to present their work.
As one of the founding partners of the Future Architecture Platform KAF will be inviting a number of FA creatives to hold online lectures and workshops.
In the coming days we will be announcing the full schedule of activities for KAF2020.
La Biennale di Venezia announces that the 17th International Architecture Exhibition – How Will We Live Together? – curated by Hashim Sarkis, which was to take place in Venice from August 29th through November 29th 2020, has been postponed to 2021, to be held Saturday May 22nd to Sunday November 21st.
Consequently, the 59th International Art Exhibition, curated by Cecilia Alemani, which was to take place in 2021, has in turn been postponed to 2022. It will last 7 months and will be held from Saturday April 23rd to Sunday November 27th.
The decision to postpone the Biennale Architettura to May 2021 is an acknowledgment that it is impossible to move forward – within the set time limits – in the realization of such a complex and worldwide exhibition, due to the persistence of a series of objective difficulties caused by the effects by the health emergency underway.
The current situation, up to now, has definitely prejudiced the realization of the Exhibition in its entirety, jeopardizing the realization, transport and presence of the works and consequently the quality of the Exhibition itself. Therefore, after consulting with the Curator Hashim Sarkis and in consideration of the problems, the invited architects, Participating Countries, institutions, Collateral Events are facing, thanking all of them for their efforts so far, La Biennale has decided to postpone the opening date of the Biennale Architettura to the year 2021, extending its duration back to the customary six months, from May 22nd to November 21st.
“I am deeply moved by the perseverance of all the Participants during the last three months – stated CuratorHashim Sarkis. I hope that the new opening date will allow them first to catch their breath, and then to complete their work with the time and vigor it truly deserves. We did not plan it this way. Neither the question I asked How will we live together? nor the wealth of ways in response to it, were meant to address the crisis they are living, but here we are. We are in some ways fortunate because we are well equipped to absorb the immediate and longer-term implications of the crisis into the Biennale Architettura 2021. The theme does also provide us with the possibility to respond to the pandemic in its immediacy. This is why we will return to Venice in the coming months for a series of activities devoted to the Architecture.”
Kosovo Architecture Foundation is invited as part of the main exhibition of curated by the Hashim Sarkis. For more updated informations on the Biennale do check their website.
It is our greatest pleasure to announce that the Kosovo Architecture Foundation was invited to participate at the main exhibition of this years Venice Architecture Biennale 2020. It is the first time that a regional architect or a group of architects is invited to exhibit at the main exhibition of the Architecture Biennale.
The director of KAF and the curator of its exhibition at LaBiennale 2020 Mr. Bekim Ramku sees this as a great honor and responsibility, “the invitation by Hashim to exhibit at the Biennale 2020 is a great honor for us, not just for the fact that we’re the only regional institution to be invited at the event but also for the fact that we will be presented at the co-habitats section of the main exhibition”.
Our installation is titled “Prishtina Public Archipelago” and it analyses the public “islands” in the city center of the Kosovo capital. The work in Venice will be presented through diagrams and audio-visual documentation and has a large team of contributors behind it. As KAF director puts it: the work that will be presented in Venice will consist of diagrams, audio-visual documentation in the form of a documentary, as well as a book that will see contribution from regional centers.
The 17th Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale is titled “How Will We Live Together” and is curated by the American-Lebanese architect and Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Mr.Hashim Sarkis. Sarkis was a keynote speaker at the Kosovo Architecture Festival in 2017.
For more information regarding the theme and the participants in LaBiennale 2020 visit their website.
The official book for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture 2019 cycle
The winners of the 14th Cycle of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture are featured in this cyclical monograph. In addition to detailed descriptions of all the projects, this book gathers a series of personal statements from members of the Award’s Steering Committee and Master Jury on key issues that are crucial in the discussions for the final selection of the recipients.
in this cycle of the awards our founding director, mr. Bekim Ramku served as a technical reviewer and was tasked to evaluate two projects, the Ashinaga Dormitory by Terrain Architects in Uganda and the SOS Tadjourah Village by Urko Sanchez in Djibouti.
The Architecture In Dialogue, Aga Khan Award for Architecture book is edited by Andres Lepik
Co-published by Archi Tangle and Aga Khan Award for Architecture
Available in English and Russian (2019).
The Book can be purchased at Archi_Tangle’s website.