Syracuse Architecture London Program
Fall 2016
Symposium
Inhabiting Artifacts
October 31st 2016
14:00 to 19:00
with
Aristide Antonas (Athens)
Pier Vittorio Aureli (Dogma – Brussels)
Liza Fior (muf- London)
Umberto Napolitano (LAN -Paris).
In a world that is quickly running towards saturation, architects are increasingly called to deal with the transformation of existing structures, and to work on a stratification of material elements and meanings that are recorded in the urban environment.
At the same time, immersed in a continuous field of production driven by the performance of affective relationships and rapid information exchange, we endure a dramatic acceleration of the processes of abstraction: we are constantly demanded to reduce the physical presence of reality to linguistic terms and numeric quantities.
Hence on the one side we are confronted by an excess of materiality by the inescapable and irrational power that objects exert on our bodies and minds. On the other side we are compelled to relentlessly rationalize the material dimension and neglect our relationship with the symbolic and epistemological dimension of objects.
The intertwining of these tendencies entails crucial shifts in the life and form of the city: the blurring of the traditional boundaries between private and public, the erasure of any distinction between home, work and leisure and, perhaps more importantly, a radical transformation of the very idea of inhabitation. Reduced to a purely economic datum to be capitalized, our living spaces, which we hardly can still call homes, have become a matter of managing growing numbers, conforming to regulatory frameworks, sustaining financial investments, and harvesting marketable information.
Within this landscape of saturation architecture appears to be at a turning point where it either dissolves into a pure form of economic management or turns the “excess of objectness” into an instrument of resistance and imagination. In other terms, can architecture – as a practice and form of knowledge – use the inescapable and powerful presence of the artifact to reclaim and expose a different form of life?
Inhabiting Artifacts intends to further investigate this question bringing around the table of the Syracuse Architecture London Program four European architectural practices with different backgrounds and methods but a common engagement with the disciplinary discourse.
Aristide Antonas (Athens), Pier Vittorio Aureli (DOGMA – Brussels), Liza Fior (muf- London), Umberto Napolitano (LAN -Paris) will present examples of their work that tackled the issues of preservation, building conversion and urban regeneration.
Rather than a formal academic event, the symposium is conceived as an open work session that will use project examples as an instrument to measure different methods, practices and positions. The ambition is to unfold and debate, among the guest and with the public, the vast array of social, economic and political implications at different scales, which the theme suggests, in the attempt to discover unexpected intersections, research trajectories and verify the presence of a common ground.
Aristide Antonas’ work spans philosophy, architecture, literature and art. He published novels, short stories, theater scripts and essays. His architecture has been featured in Istanbul Design Bienniale, Venice Biennale, São Paulo Biennale, Display in Prague and Bratislava, the New Museum in New York and had solo institutional presentations in Basel’s Swiss Architecture Museum and in Austria’s Vorarlberger Architektur Institut. He won the ArchMarathon 2015 prize for his Open Air Office, was nominated for a Iakov Chernikov Prize (2011) and for a Mies Van der Rohe Award (2009) for his Amphitheater House.
Pier Vittorio Aureli is an architect, founding partner of the office Dogma, and author of several influential essays and books on urban design, large-scale projects and the relationship between architecture and the city, including The Project of Autonomy (2008) and The Possibility of and Absolute Architecture (2011). He is Unit Master of the Diploma School at the Architectural Association of London and Louis I. Kahn visiting professor at Yale. Dogma’s work has been widely published and exhibited and won the 1st Iakov Chernikhov Prize in 2006.
Liza Fior is founding partner muf architecture/art and lecturer at the MA Architecture: Cities and Inoovation at the Central Saint Martins – UAL.
Based in London, the work of the practice negotiates between the built and social fabric, between public and private. muf authored Villa Frankenstein, the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2010 and has been awarded the 2008 European Prize for Public Space -a first for the UK – for a new ‘town square’ for Barking, East London. Previously visiting professor at Yale and co-author of, “This is What We Do: a muf manual”, Liza Fior continues to entwine research in every project.
Umberto Napolitano is a founding partner of LAN (Local Architecture Network), which explores architecture as an area of activity at the intersection of different disciplines, with a vision that encompasses social, urban, functional and formal questions. LAN his recipient of several international awards and their projects – which include the renovation of the Grand Palais in Paris, the Mallion Theatre in Strasbourg, the Saint-Jacques de la Lande Town Hall and the EDF Archives Center and various residential and office buildings in France and abroad – have been published and exhibited internationally including the latest 15th Architecture Biennale of Venice.