I just got back from Oslo where their Architecture Triennial has opened. I participated in its main conference, Man Made Tomorrow and will report on that event soon. But ahead of the conference, Bjarne Ringstad, curator of the Triennial, asked me to reflect on how the role of such set-piece events might evolve to match the new challenges design is facing.
Here is what I sent him:
“We are facing an array of ‘wicked problems’ that are simultaneously complex, uncertain and urgent. We have to learn how to adapt to unpredictable and possibly catastrophic disruptions to climate, financial systems, and resource flows.
A single-vision, top down approach to design and planning simply does not work in the face of so much uncertainty.
The new watchword is ‘adaptive resilience’ – a condition in which society, its experts, and its citizens, must learn how to adapt to change continuously.
In this situation, the design focus needs to evolve from the delivery of of large-scale hard-wired solutions, towards a focus on resource ecologies, land-use, and time-use.
The primary design activity, in this context, is more a conversation than the production of a blueprint.
Biennials and triennials are important ways to start these new conversations. They can bring new groups of people together to imagine sustainable alternatives to the way we do things now – and then identify design actions, some of them small, that would bring these alternatives closer.
To start these conversations the content of a design biennial and the kinds of people participating, needs to change.
Rather than focus on design objects or on urban ‘visions’, the focus needs to be on how, in practical ways, we will re-design the systems, institutions and processes that shape our daily lives.
Sustainable development requires a system discontinuity in the way we produce, consume and socially interact. A biennial should represent – not resist – that discontinuity.
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Design steps to heaven
I recently visted Luzern, in Switzerland, for a workshop at thethe oldest art and design school in Switzerland, Hochschule Luzern.
My host, Andy Polaine had asked me to set students in the first semester of the MA Design a challenge.
The task I gave them was as follows: find a neglected asset somewhere in Luzern, and design a service to increase its value to the city.
As the workshop began, I assumed that some groups of students would focus on the city’s new cultural centre [photo above]. Designed by Jean Novel, the building had taken twenty years to conceive and plan. With an overhanging roof 35m 100 feet) above the ground, the building had cost the city 130 million euros to build.
This was an iconic building with a capital “I”. I thought it must surely have potential as the focus of some new kind of civic activity.
But then a strange thing happened. When I asked the students what they thought of their new centre, they pronounced it to be “quite nice” – and hastened on to tell me stories about other features of the city that they had found more engaging to work with.
The first joint winner was called ‘Straight way to heaven’.
The team had identified a church as their neglected asset,and proposed to increase its value as a meeting place by opening it up to bouldering in the city.
The group did not expect the church authorities to be thrilled by their idea, but our jury found their service communication to be so engaging that they were made joint winners.
The second winning project in Luzern, Graveyard Alive, was especially enchanting. The group had discovered that the city’s Friedhof Cemetary contained a lot of as-yet-unused space.
They came up with a sublime closed-loop service concept: offer people the opportunity to donate their bodies, once buried, as nutrients to save endangered plants and cultivate biodiversity.
The group had already talked with workers in the graveyard [in favour] and identified a leading Swiss seed bank ProSpecieRara to provide the seeds.
The next step is to sign up the first customers….
Bouldering in the City/Straight Way to Heaven was the work of: Christoph Gabathuler, Myriam Gämperli, Erika Frankhauser Schürch and Antonio Russo
Graveyard Alive was the work of: Nadine Bucher, Anete Melece and Dominik Büeler