Para este Breezeblock (el primero en español) la editora María Mazzanti habló con Juan Corcione, publicista y académico colombiano que trabaja sobre cultura visual, teorías de la imagen y políticas del placer y el ocio. Juan ha venido reflexionando sobre las protestas masivas en Colombia que empezaron el 28 de Abril de 2021. En el podcast, Juan y María discuten sobre las dinámicas de la protesta y su influencia en la conquista narrativa de un país en conflicto, donde a través de imágenes digitales y la resignificación del espacio público los ciudadanos batallan por la legitimidad de un nuevo relato político.

In a slight change from the normal format, this episode represents the first a series of conversations, where we’ll be talking to organizers engaged in the work of “Design Justice” that demands an end to systemic racism in architecture and design, and re-imagines a just and liberated future.

Nearly a year ago, architecture and design organisations joined countless others to mark their alignment with the Black Lives Matter protest movement by responding to the hashtag BlackoutTuesday with a black square. For the most part, their anti-racist commitment started and ended there.

Meanwhile, however, the initial meetings of Design As Protest and Dark Matter University began. In their words, “DAP is a collective of designers mobilizing strategy to dismantle the privilege and power structures that use architecture and design as tools of oppression”. Their list of demands includes calls to cease implementation of hostile design, center community leadership in the design process, and create anti-racist design models in education. In the past year, the collective has initiated a series of ongoing projects, including the Anti-Racist Design Justice Index, which is “a tool for architects, designers, planners, policymakers, and community activists committed to taking action towards identifying and dismantling systemic racism.” Emerging from DAP’s demand to create anti-racist models of design education, Dark Matter University is “an anti-racist design justice school,” which has since its establishment in early July independently expanded its network and mission to “radically transform education and practice toward a just future” from both inside and outside of academia.

Since last year, in support of DAP’s Anti-Racist Design Justice Index, Failed Architecture and the British social design and urbanism practice design collective, Migrants Bureau, have also been gathering the responses of architecture and design institutions following BlackoutTuesday in a Google sheet.

For this first conversation, we’re talking to Quilian Riano. Quilian is, an architectural and urban designer, researcher, writer, educator, founder of DSGN AGNC, and he’s also associate director of Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, a board member of the Architecture Lobby, and a core member of Design as Protest and Dark Matter University.

The release of this conversation was timed to mark almost a year since Blackout Tuesday, but also to coincide with the official release, later today, of DAP’s Anti-Racism Design Index. DAP will be hosting a national call for the launch at 2pm Eastern Time, a link to which is available below, along with the websites of all the initiatives mentioned.

Links (in order of their mention):

Design As Protest

https://www.dapcollective.com/

Design as Protest National Call event

https://www.dapcollective.com/events/national-call

Anti-racism Design Justic Index

https://www.dapcollective.com/index

Dark Matter University

https://darkmatteruniversity.org/

Migrant Bureau

https://www.migrantsbureau.com/

List: Architecture & Design Organizations on BLM

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QcwaZCG3fUYKAnAdf3XFMUsfihQxpA1xRTTR5diUIxo/edit#gid=866527355

Article from Black Femailes in Architecture, Design as Protest, Failed Architecture, Migrants Bureau announcing the list: “Let’s Remind Architecture and Design Organisations of Their Support for Black Lives Matter”

https://failedarchitecture.com/2020/08/lets-remind-architecture-and-design-organisations-of-their-support-for-black-lives-matter/

Quilian’s profile on DSGN AGNC

http://dsgnagnc.com/quilian-bio/

Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative

https://www.cudc.kent.edu/

This Spring, Failed Architecture initiated "Situations", an event series aiming to take critical reflections on architecture and space from the digital realm to the real world. This Breezeblock takes place shortly after the second Situation, "Swarming the Red Light District With Sound," when our editor René Boer hosted a conversation with some of the organisers and participants, at a moment when we were all pretty excited and also somewhat exhausted after having been swarming around De Wallen for the past hour.

You can get more information about the event, swarming, and the forthcoming fourth Situation "Reclaiming the Red Light District" on our website:

https://failedarchitecture.com/events/fa-situations-3-reclaiming-the-red-light-district/

https://failedarchitecture.com/events/fa-situations-2-swarming-the-red-light-district-with-sound/

For this Breezeblock, FA NYC editor Michael Nicholas spoke to Andi Schmied, whose book Private Views, documents her experiences being shown around high-rise luxury apartments in New York disguised as a Hungarian billionaire. Through transcripts of conversations with brokers, photos of views not intended to be seen by the public, and a number of essays from contributors on the subject, the book illuminates how inequality is built into New York City's real estate market.

Local government budgets were among the first to be hit by austerity measures imposed by the UK government after the global financial crisis of the late 2000s. With seemingly little room for manoeuvre, councils were forced to close libraries and community centres, sell off their fixed assets, and outsource social care, catering, park maintenance and other services to private providers whose business model has tended to depend on the erosion of workers’ pay and conditions and tax avoidance. In London, in particular, we also saw borough councils pursue highly controversial regeneration schemes that replaced social housing with luxury developments that have often effectively served as empty containers of global finance capital.

Out of this inauspicious context, an exciting experiment emerged in the small Northern English city of Preston. Fresh from the cancellation of the much-vaunted Tithebarn shopping and leisure centre development and shortly before its central government grant was cut to zero, the city’s council decided to embark upon a radical project aimed at transferring economic, social and political power back to the local community, following the principles of the growing community wealth building movement.

This is the subject of Paint Your Town Red a new book out this May on Repeater Books, which is co-written by Preston’s council leader Matthew Brown and writer Rhian E. Jones, author of several books, including Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender and Triptych: Three Studies of the Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible. For Breezeblock 19 we talked to Jones about Preston, community wealth building, and its capacity to radically transform our approach to development.

FA organiser René Boer talks to the founders of Radio Alhara, architects Elias and Yousef Anastas, on the one year anniversary of their radio project. It was launched in Bethlehem at the start of the global lockdown and by now has become a sonic public space reaching well beyond the confines of Palestine.

In this second installment of a two-part episode, Failed Architecture editors Michael Nicholas, Kevin Rogan, and Joshua McWhirter dive into the weird world of traditional architecture revivalism, or “trad arch” for short. Where the first part of this discussion focused on a critique of the intellectual undercurrents of the trad arch movement, here, the editors explore how the trad impulse folds back onto the real world, from historic preservation projects, to former president Donald Trump’s infamous, and recently revoked, executive order mandating a “classical” style for government buildings in the United States.

A few weeks ago, Yale Architecture professor Keller Easterling penned an article titled “On Political Temperament,” which became the subject of heated conversation about the role of architecture theory in discussions of politics. In response, Marianela D’Aprile wrote “Not Everything is “Architecture”’ for Common Edge. For this Breezeblock, FA editor Michael Nicholas spoke to Marianela and fellow editor Kevin Rogan about Easterling’s new book Medium Design, the role of architects as workers in the class struggle, and the politics of the architecture profession at large.

Keller Easterling, "On Political Temperament," The Double Negative

thedoublenegative.co.uk/2021/01/on-political-temperament-keller-easterling/

Marianela D'Aprile, "Not Everything is Architecture," Common Edge https://commonedge.org/not-everything-is-architecture/

In this first installment of a two-part episode, Failed Architecture editors Michael Nicholas, Kevin Rogan and Joshua McWhirter discuss the weird world of traditional architecture revivalism, or “trad architecture” for short. Starting with a critique of pop philosopher Alain de Botton’s recent article, “Why is the Modern World so Ugly?”, the three editors examine the surface-level aesthetic fixations and flattened historical perceptions of the trad architecture movement — so often a cipher for the exaltation of “Western” culture, even as it makes claims to an apolitical stance.

Link to "Why is the Modern World so Ugly?":

https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/why-is-the-modern-world-so-ugly/

Last week members of trade union United Voices of the World — Section Architectural Workers (UVW SAW), walked out of two architectural offices over COVID-19 safety concerns. Charlie Clemoes interviewed UVW SAW elected organiser Keri Monaghan for Breezeblock #14. As well as the strike, they discuss the recent work of UVW SAW, its first year as a union amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and what the future holds for workplace organisation in the architecture profession.