Tahrir Square, Cairo
(source: Wikipedia)

Architectural history has been dominated by publications as a site and test-ground for ideas: at some point, paper was the most radical architectural material of all. Architecture has a very specific history embedded in the production and dissemination of discursive platforms such as books, magazines and self-published fanzines.

ACSP understands itself at the intersection of publishing as distribution of ideas – the production of a pro-active and self-initiated (public) debate as a test-site for spatial speculation. Students will be directly involved in the formulation of questions, outlining of possible inquiries, researching and mapping those territories of concern, distributing ideas and content as a proposition: an active involvement in the world surrounding them.

Within Critical Spatial Practice, the question of feedback is crucial. Its pursuits no longer hinges on the belief in individual artistic production, but heavily depends on often conflictual exchange with likeminded practitioners, collaborators, as well as potential adversaries. Publishing will become a central tool for students to think their projects through a common format, which will help them to address their concerns to a specific, developed and predefined audience. Within this format, students will develop their individual or group projects that form part of a larger yearlong trajectory. Consequently, student work will focus not on a ‘final design’, but an inquiry and documentation of an experiment, a discursively argued thesis towards a ‘spatial condition.’ This condition may result in an architectural scale proposal, a social event, a policy document, an analysis of spatial typologies, or a critical documentation of an existing situation.

ACSP will think about ‘space’ without necessarily intervening in it physically, but trying to sensitise, promote, develop and foster an attitude towards contemporary spatial production, its triggers, driving forces, effects and affects. As a group, we will speculate on the modalities of production and potential benefits of the role of ‘the outsider.’

The setting up of such scaffold and borderlines is important as each individual contributor to the project needs to take a position, which always has consequences. Only when a border is acknowledged, understood and recognised it can be broken, transgressed or (mis)used. By deliberately producing such antagonistic fields of productive encounters, ACSP nurtures and exploits misunderstandings and a pro-active outlook on the value of failure as the starting point of all experimentation. An annual thematic umbrella formulates the subject of our investigation. This central narrative acts as a test ground on which individuals and groups can experiment.

While focusing on the local, Frankfurt – as an international city – by default reveals global implications and therefore the project will attempt to unpack relevant questions of geopolitics. As the studio will deal with the question of the invisible, one of the aims of this ‘de-stealthing’ project will be to x-ray the city that we inhabit, to ‘make presence’ (Saskia Sassen): from informal trade to histories of hidden spaces, from programs without facade to faceless buildings – architectural scale projects that disappear in the city’s fabric.
Dealing with such questions of trade and urban practices ‘below the radar’ (Saskia Sassen) will also entail to study, understand, and speculate on the constructions of identities and communities in the contemporary city. To speculate on this further raises the question of ‘urban capabilities’ (Saskia Sassen), in other words: why does a particular city lend itself to a specific, localized and customized set of practices?
In the context of this project, the notion of exchange and trade will be interpreted and tested as ‘soft encounters’ (Siobhan Davis), everyday practices that embody and reveal different notions of presence, awareness and perception. While some phenomena that we will investigate may take place in physically remote neighbourhoods and sites within the urban environment, others may claim and occupy spaces, which change on a 24hr timetable: activities that only take place after sunset (specific kinds of markets, sexual services, gambling, drug trading et al.), activities that illustrate the relationship between practices that ‘contaminate and decontaminate’ (Saskia Sassen), being open and accessible at times and hermetic at other times. When they accumulate they generate a rupture in the often-homogeneous daily life of the city.
These ruptures produced by the invisible are based on a very specific and alternative interpretation and practice of ownership: one, which tends to often not be based on legal, but temporary ownership, in other words: presence as a result of occupation, creating presence not by “owning” (a specific section of) the public space, but producing presence by inhabiting. What constitutes the thresholds and borders of such practices and architecture? What would such space look like today?
This endeavour should entail site-specific and research-based investigations and projects. In the Weltkulturen Museum we have, for instance, organized research-based sessions, workshops and displays open to the public, where we take various and specifically scouted and produced mappings and objects as triggers for an understanding of trade & presence, in particular an urban political presence. The Weltkulturen Museum will dedicate several exhibitions and events to the overall theme of “Trading Perceptions” over the following years. The diverse relationships that determine the ways in which artefacts have been circulated and traded, the connections of the museum to global commerce and to changing political and economic incentives are all aspects of the inquiry.

Green Room

The Green Room on the upper floor of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt is a laboratory space, which has been explored as a temporary production-in-residence in which the team has worked on an installation and display of process(es). The studio has been invited by the museum to undertake research in this laboratory-like condition, formulating new interpretations and creating original artworks based on the findings, superimposition and conflicts generated by the contemporary condition of Frankfurt (our findings) and the historic depth of the museum’s existing and outstanding collection. The space has been used as an archive of mapping and research work on stealth spaces and objects relating to formal and informal modes of trade, based on our ongoing investigation in the city of Frankfurt. In order to enhance the historic contextualization of the project, we have also worked with architectural photographs from the image archive as well as with selected architectural artifacts and objects of the collection of the Weltkulturen Museum.

The Space of Agonism

Markus Miessen, Chantal Mouffe
Critical Spatial Practice 2
Sternberg-Press, 2012

Edited by Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen
Including an artist project by Rabih Mroué

The second volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series presents a selection of conversations between Markus Miessen and political philosopher Chantal Mouffe. Taking place intermittently between December 2006 and October 2011, the dialogues attempt to unpack current dilemmas and popular mobilizations in terms of consensus-driven formats of political decision making. The conversations were alternately driven by Miessen’s specific concerns regarding his ongoing investigation into conflict-based forms of participation as an alternative (spatial) practice in democratic systems, and Mouffe’s understanding and theory of a “conflictual consensus.” Thinking in terms of agonism and “demoicracy”—a union that acknowledges the plurality and permanence of its different populations—the book proposes new approaches to countering and responding to the globalizing thrust of neoliberalism.

Design by Zak Group
November 2012, English
10.5 x 15 cm, 148 pages, 23 color ills., softcover with dust jacket
ISBN 978-3-943365-41-2
€15.00

What Is Critical Spatial Practice?

Nikolaus Hirsch, Markus Miessen (Eds.)
Critical Spatial Practice 1
Sternberg-Press, 2012

In September 2011, Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen invited protagonists from the fields of architecture, art, philosophy, and literature to reflect on the single question of what, today, can be understood as a critical modality of spatial practice. Most of the sixty-four contribu­tions presented in this volume were composed concurrently with the evictions of many of the Occupy movements, sustained turmoil in countries of the Arab Spring, and continued spasms in the global financial system, which, interestingly, all pointed at the question and problematic of whether archi­tecture and our physical environment can still be understood as a res publica. A response by the editors takes the form of a conversation.

This book is first in a series on critical spatial practice developed alongside the Städelschule program of the same name. Each edition includes work by invited artists—the first includes newly commissioned work by the photographer Armin Linke, who documented the Occupy camp around the European Central Bank in Frankfurt.

Design by Zak Group
September 2012, English
12 x 16.5 cm, 240 pages, 8 color ill., softcover
ISBN 978-3-943365-27-6
€15.00

Architecture+Critical Spatial Practice, 2012
CULTURES OF ASSEMBLY

Design by Studio Matthias Görlich
(Matthias Görlich, Charalampos Lazos)

Download PDF:
Cultures Of Assembly, Newspaper, 2012 [8.8 MB]

Architecture+Critical Spatial Practice, 2013
STEALTH ARCHITECTURE

Design by Studio Matthias Görlich
(Matthias Görlich, Charalampos Lazos)

Download PDF:
Stealth Architecture, Newspaper, 2013 [8.2 MB]

Researchers:
Ana Filipovic, Dunja Predic, Petter Hoff, Phillip Zach, Elif Erkan, Iva Baljkas, Joel Roy, Flaka Haliti, and Christoph Esser.

Guest Critics:
Nikolaus Hirsch, Matthias Görlich, Mirco Becker, Beatriz Colomina, Joseph Grima, Federica Bueti, Armin Linke, Dr. Clémentine Deliss, Dr. Yvette Mutumba, Diogo Pereira, Yulia Startsev, and Zak Kyes.

Acknowledgements:
Nikolaus Hirsch, Dr. Clémentine Deliss, Dr. Yvette Mutumba, Caroline Schneider, Tatjana Günthner, Matthias Görlich, Charalampos Lazos, Patricia Reed, Zak Kyes, Gregory Ambos, Armin Linke, Jonas Leihener, and all contributors to the Critical Spatial Practice project.

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