VF Nick, you come from a nonplastic art with no need for function, with a different relationship with the public and space from the one architecture has. Does the process of composing music and designing architecture imply a different mental structure, or do they have common traits?

NR I don't see the difference between composing music, designing a cup or architecture. I always go to the simplest process: when you walk, you have to put one foot in front of the other, and this basic idea allows me to theorize creativity no matter the subject. The more I teach, the more I try to do the same with my pedagogy. Complexity in architecture doesn’t lie in the size of the project. Many architects don't make large buildings, some make small buildings, and some deal just with parts of the building, like the stairs or the facades. Some others don’t even design buildings at all, but participate in the discourse through writing or teaching. Understanding these tensions allows me to comprehend that music and architecture are not about a different way of thinking or mental structure. We think and express ourselves in drawing, writing, collaging, or composing, which are simply different instruments or tools of creative expression.

VF Alessandro, you teach at Columbia GSAPP, “Core Studio I”, “Advanced Studio IV”, and recently co-thought “Professional Practice”. Does teaching affect your design approach, method, and the way you run your firm? How?

AO Teaching has always been important to me. It is about the mutual idea that pedagogy is embedded into the design and vice versa. Through teaching, we constantly reinvent and challenge the questions of design, and this is even more true today when we tackle important issues about justice, race, finance, or sustainability. “Professional Practice” is about rewriting what practicing architecture is and what kind of alternative forms of practice we can envision. This is another way to decolonize the profession; we are coming out from the lessons of modernism, which have thrown very heavy questions and constraints about what architecture is and what it is not, who can practice it, and for whom. Today, we are challenging this paradigm, and I think we need to start by teaching and reenvisioning pedagogy. My studio's approach focuses on the research we are working on in the office or on what I’m writing at that moment. I interrogate the students to understand how that specific topic is evolving. Architecture tends to be very stagnant and made of paradigms, and the studio aims to challenge those same paradigms. We avoid top-down solutions: it is not about giving absolute answers, but further advancing the questions. We need to reconsider what is vernacular in architecture, removing references we don't need, either from buildings or books. It is important to reconsider all these parameters, not to erase them but to rewrite a different history. Architecture is a very problematic discipline, it displaces, colonizes, and divides. For me, teaching has always been central and instrumental to challenge the discourse. We, architects, don't do it enough, we need to be more radical.

VF Drawing is an essential part of your design research. What is its speculative role, and how does it affect your design process?

AO Today, our profession is shaped around the commodification of real estate. Architects alone don't have enough agency to challenge capitalism. In our practice, we see architecture as a way to rethink equality and the distribution of the space needed to protect our biological life. In other words, the commons, which was the subject of our recent exhibition at the Center for Architecture in New York. However, I believe we have agency in the acts of drawing and writing. I consider a drawing to have the same value as a built architecture and, sometimes, a higher one because we architects don't build, we draw. That's where our agency is. By drawing, we learn about tectonics, we interrogate the site, the prompt, and we theorize, something architects should do more. We often embark on competitions to learn how to work with building types that otherwise we would not be given the chance to work on.

VF Housing is experiencing a polycrisis. Compared to the evolution of human behavior and needs, housing —understood as the domestic space and its reiterations as a Western-driven mass product— is going through a stagnant moment. Is housing responding to contemporary intimate, relational, and functional needs and meanings?

NR Housing and domestic space are difficult subjects because sheltering against the natural elements is a right and an essential outcome of architecture. We have been slowly updating and changing housing, but because of the connection between built architecture, politics and economics, we've diminished a possible development process in favor of whatever is achievable on those same terms. Housing, especially in North America, because of its pecuniary value, is also a specific tool in the lives of people: it gives economic benefit, builds equity, and allows people to become “model citizens”. But for these same reasons, housing and domesticity have been, and still are, a symbol of economic violence, social separation, and racial inequality. One problem is that housing is designed around the Western idea of the patriarchal family, not representing what society is today. We need to give agency to different forms of aggregations and models that go beyond the traditional and patriarchal family. The house is historically the place for defining the individual and the individualization of society. Housing related to capitalism thrives on individualization but excludes the collectivization of social interactions and exchange.

VF You focus on the processes between architecture and humanity and often mention projects that, like New Babylon by Constant, aim to subvert the rules of a capitalist society. What is relevant about the ludic role of architecture, and which are the tools of the architect to enhance it?

NR I'm researching homo ludens and, interestingly, there's also negativity within play. What happens in a playground is not always fun: “the bully” and other direct interactions happen even though these places are designed for fun. There are unexpected outcomes. That is why Coachella’s idea was to critique the sites of leisure: we facilitated a paradox that speaks about the transformation of the homo ludens’ leisure into unpaid labor. This is because leisure and labor coexist in the same plane, they are in mutual need of each other: we labor, we need time away from work, but we want the remuneration, which is used also for leisure time. It is a cyclical situation and I think that's where the tension lies. We cannot talk about labor without leisure. This topic is not brought up enough in the architectural discourse, unless it is about typologies for sports, where leisure is split between recreation and entertainment, which is capitalism feeding itself. Designing an installation for Coachella asks many questions about the relationship between architecture and leisure, how capitalism applied a transformation of the space for leisure, and the meaning of leisure itself. The word leisure in Latin means to “be permitted”, but then it became a synonym for doing something freed from work. In early societies, leisure was embedded into the house. Then, modernism helped change this condition, brought it outside and codified new typologies. Today, capitalism put it back in the house through digital platforms, but Covid-19 has also brought work into the house again, making the distinction with leisure very thin. So, we are researching what parameters to apply to reintroduce leisure into the design of different spaces and typologies and what are those paradigms in which direct life experience informs leisure instead of the economic regimes of capitalism. We created a society based on continuous work and the production of capital, where only the privileged can afford time off from work for leisure, which may not only be entertainment. So, the question is exactly this: who can access these spaces for leisure, and what kind of leisure do they experience?

VF To design with paradigms that differ from the context and to work on the imaginary, outdistances the project from the logic of the built artifact. Thus, I always believed that your “Gilded Tale” project was a speculative operation… but then it became a reality with Coachella's “The Playground”! What was the transfer that allowed this change of status?

NR The first transfer was the form itself, it was the grid. The “Gilded Tale” is an unbuilt site-specific project, it is a grid where local people display objects representing their values and the identity of their community. It is a critique of capitalism because gilded objects attract people, but, in this specific case, they do so to promote social values, the community, and the collective. Since we didn't want to produce a project that was top-down to the community, the project stemmed from the Situationist’s idea of direct life experience. The second transfer is that the collective makes the space.

VF Coachella’s “The Playground” is not a built project as we commonly mean it, but rather a giant model. It is not a real playground because there is almost no interaction between architecture and the users, it asks for the users' imagination instead. Its strength lies precisely in its inability to interact and to represent an aspiration at the scale of a building. What does this project aim to achieve in terms of the construction of the urban and social imaginary?

NR It is a project that remained under development for a very long time and that we drew in many possible ways. Our idea was to make a project that would inspire people toward direct experiences, and our question was “where is the leisure space happening today?” The more we were asking the question, the more it was apparent that leisure today is removed from the public eye, but when we arrived at the site, we were shocked by seeing people using this space as a piazza. The ground level is where the interaction between architecture and the people happens. The two variables that changed everything are the context in which it exists—which is indeed the festival—and the shadows it creates. These variables allow people to use the space as a piazza, there's a collective gathering just like I've seen in Italy, even if there are no facades that enclose the piazza. At the same time, homo ludens occurred: people started doing physical exercises, playing in front of the mirrors, and so on.

VF What is the paradigm you are trying to change with your work?

NR First, we're trying to facilitate new modes of discussion, practice, and theory, because I believe that architecture can be part of changing some issues in society. But to do so, we need to abandon any self-referencing disciplinary approach and look also at the social, the political, the environmental, and the economic. For example, we are interrogating ourselves on how to bring to the table the vital topic of social justice. We live in a racialized world, which is inescapable as capitalism. I think that it's very important to understand how we can improve our life by parsing through the issues of our time through architecture.

AO Changes require time and I think that designers all around the world are thinking about these same questions: politics, finance, the physical space—which is attached to the realm of freedom—and the possibility of expression, of living collectively, which are crucial in our work. I would say that our work wants to push the boundary of collectivity against the atomization of the individual, and I think that it can be done through drawing, writing, or teaching.

Bio

Alessandro Orsini is an architect and founding principal of Architensions. He holds licenses in Italy and the United Kingdom, with experience working on a wide range of projects both internationally and in the US. His work focuses on architecture at the intersection of the political, social, and environmental spatial networks with specific interests in redefining new modes of collective living. He teaches design studios at Columbia University GSAPP and has served as a guest critic in several architecture schools.

Nick Roseboro is a designer and musician with experience across many creative disciplines. Roseboro’s research revolves around interpreting urban and rural contexts as complex organisms of social, environmental, political, and ludic insertions within an ever-changing reality. In addition, he is interested in redefining architectural practice through curatorial, pedagogical, and cross-disciplinary means of exploration toward new architectural and creative outcomes and cultural production.

Valerio Franzone is an architect licensed in Italy and the UK with a focus on the relationships among architecture, humanity, and nature. He holds a Ph.D. from the “Villard d’Honnecourt” International Doctorate in Architecture (IUAV, Venice). A founding partner of 2A+P and 2A+P Architettura, he later established Valerio Franzone Architetto. His projects have been awarded in international competitions, presented at exhibitions such as the International Architecture Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezia, and published in magazines including Domus, Abitare, and Volume.