FEDERICA ZAMBELETTI / KOOZ I would like to start with a somewhat personal question. What does it mean to practise from a place of hope?

ALINA PAIAS Maybe I can start. In our process, we always approached hope as the foil to a certain nihilism which can be quite comfortable, right? Assuming that there's not much we can change or that change is not possible — that means you can live with how things are configured at the moment. Working with or even through hope is working with the belief that change is possible — especially if certain beings or forms of life or livelihoods are dependent on that change. It's a very tragic position to assume that change is not a horizon at all. I also think it connects a bit to the notion — and I know it has been a little overused — of ‘staying with the trouble’. By that, I mean that working with hope is also about producing some sort of habitability; finding your mode of practice even in very compromising or difficult conditions.

THIAGO BENUCCI Thank you, Phineas. I think I can answer as a member of a collective Ruinorama, but also as an individual; it's hard to separate these things. But I think my answer is in the middle. I also think it's a difficult question to answer. Sometimes — even regularly — we are completely without hope. Especially when we are facing such violence; environmental and physical violence and abuse. But I believe there is a possible place of hope, when we can engage in an alliance with people and worlds — both human and non-human — worlds that we truly believe, and that make us believe that other worlds are truly possible. We can see, we can live, we can experience, we can sing with these worlds: the worlds of people who cultivate, people who nurture, people who protect the land, the biosphere — people who defy hegemonic power, for example. Those worlds that act historically, as an ontological challenge, to resist the cause and effects of the Anthropocentric climate emergency with joy and beautiful teachings to share with us. If we have enough hope, we can listen to those people.

JANNA BYSTRYKH I will try to keep it short as a lot of beautiful things have already been said. From the perspective of bringing a variety of practices into the exhibition and our position as multiple curators working on a single show, it was important to talk and be aware of the multiplicity of relations to hope and how various practices are envisioning and positioning themselves in relation to hope. Spanning from the meaning of hope, practice of hope, as well as the realisation of where optimism lies. In the exhibition we try to capture a spectrum of definitions and relations rather than focus on a singular term, and in doing that try to find more connections between practices.

KOOZ Thiago, you mentioned the words nurture and cultivating. Let’s take the opportunity to discuss your lexicon, which aims to disseminate practices and ideologies derived from encounters with Afro-indigenous philosophies and cosmopolitical knowledge to a wider audience. To what extent is architecture’s entanglements with the Anthropocene era the result of a linguistic flattening? How does your lexicon respond to that?

TB Thank you for the question. I wouldn't exactly say that it’s the result of linguistic flattening, but rather a kind of epistemological flattening. The lexicon is not just about words, or new words, but rather about ideas and practices. After all, we have been repeating practices and techniques for centuries that, at least for some decades, have proven unsustainable for maintaining life on the planet. So I think that creating new words is about weakening those terms, ideas and practices in which we no longer believe, and on the other hand, strengthening and giving more power to the counter-practices that we believe, in the sense of protecting the earth.

I would cite the example of a fundamental indigenous leader in Brazil, Ailton Krenak, who, in a recent interview, provoked architects and urban planners by saying, ‘Aren't you capable of thinking of another way of being on Earth? Other than the one that has been reproduced for millennia? Why would an architect in the 21st century have to repeat the same vocabulary that someone used three or four thousand years ago, to create what we call a city?’. We are repeating some practices that originated long ago. There have been many developments in the idea of the city, but fundamentally, it's the same thing: a big centre that extracts from its neighbourhoods and villages, to fill the belly of this great monster that has to eat, to make people feel well. It's about provoking these static ideas to engage in other practices, and to learn practices from other peoples.

AP What’s important about the lexicon, for me, is the ‘onto-epistemological’ register — it relates to an onto-epistemological flattening. As architects and practitioners, we don't really notice how the definitions of our practice generate certain types of production or certain types of work. The definitions of architecture inform how work is organised, or how a certain mode of living is produced. The work to change these definitions — especially at the level that Ruinorama is doing it, providing this block of new definitions for architecture for real — it's really destabilising certain denominations. It has this transformative potential to the extent that if it's taken seriously, there may be further ontological consequences — which I think is very interesting.

TB I would add one more thing. Through this site specific intervention that we developed, the lexicon is not intended to supersede the old flattening linguistic vocabulary with new sets of new words, like a new trend to follow. That's not our aim. Our idea is to define and nurture new words that are based on both ancestral and new practices, within which we have been cohabitating and co-learning. The intention is not to make another new flattening of concepts, but to really nurture practices from our own experiences here in Brazil.

KOOZ Staying with language, this one is for Phin: your career over the last decade has spanned curation, criticism, youth engagement and journalism. You contribute to The Guardian, as well as publishing in various design journals and reviews. How do you approach and navigate those phrases or terms which have become overused?

PH I'm quite sceptical of the tendency to use words that people don't know. Whenever I'm writing for a different publication, I try to imagine the reader of that publication and communicate in a way that the reader will find challenging, but also legible. Sometimes there's a tendency in architectural culture to reach for niche words or academic vocabulary, which doesn't actually help us to be understood, especially by people with different kinds of social classes or different backgrounds.

So I agree that you should try and say things as simply as possible, without diluting the meaning — and sometimes that does mean using words that are commonly used. I think then you have to define what you mean. The most obvious example probably is ‘growth’ — politicians or economists are constantly banging on about how growth is inherently a good thing, while feminist economists (or really anybody who's paying attention) might understand that it’s not really the case. Although the word ‘growth’ conjures positive associations — like the growth of a baby or a plant — when we're talking about the growth of GDP or gross domestic product, it is not necessarily good at all. Potentially, it's even quite bad considering the carbon cost and energy that goes along with a growing GDP.

In architecture, we try to tell stories as much as we try to build. We should try harder to communicate in a legible and accessible way, but that doesn't mean dumbing things down. Another example, at least in the English speaking world, is the use of the word ‘retrofit’ to mean improving a building or improving the insulation. Why? Why not say ‘improve’ or ‘upgrade’ or ‘repair’ or ‘refurbish’ — these words that already mean something to people? Why did they have to invent a new technical word, when there was no need?

JB To stay on the topic of vocabulary a little longer, Thiago and Phineas, a question for you both. Do you feel there is a shared narrative emerging in architecture that is linked to nature, transformation, and regeneration practice — and maybe also in sometimes more general terms such as sustainability… Are we at a point in our understanding of the transformation of practice and ongoing production of architecture where we are actually converging in a shared narrative?

TB I think there is a certain clique in a certain circuit of architecture — like biennales, journals, magazines, international congresses and these kinds of events — in which there is a growing shared language regarding nature and these regenerative ideas, I do believe this. A few years ago, it was not a common question for architects worldwide. However as a teacher — at least here in Brazil — I really don't see this transformation of vocabulary in the basic curriculum. Similarly, I don't see this transformation in the practices of more conventional architects involved. On some level, it's those persons that are producing most of the constructions and interventions around the world. So I think it's something that we need to worry about; we should really find a way to communicate with everybody.

PH The construction sector at large is probably not converging on a shared understanding of how architecture should be produced. But I still have a lot of hope, because I see so many practices and construction firms that — maybe even just a few years ago — would not have presented themselves as ecologically minded. I actually do see extraordinary work coming out of architecture schools at the moment. Personally, I was very lucky at architecture school; we studied indigenous construction traditions, building a lot with timber and thinking about climate, even in 2008. But the architecture schools that I visit today are designing with thatch, earth, stone and all these super low carbon materials in very adventurous ways.

KOOZ At Rotterdam, you will be exploring ideas ‘beyond repair’, whereby you advocate for a more exuberant form of repairing architecture. What frameworks must be redefined to enable this exuberance to thrive, and potentially to permeate the mainstream?

PH It's very easy to sort of show someone something — like a small thing — that you've repaired, and for them to enjoy it; to say, ‘Oh, that's wonderful — that's obviously better than throwing that thing away, letting it go to landfill or clog up the sea’. But at some point, when we get to bigger things, that attitude flips. A good building becomes one that doesn't really need any maintenance at all; people say it should be strong enough that you can just leave it to the elements and you’ll never need to repair or maintain it. There's something really interesting going on there, when we switch from sort of understanding, repair and care as something good, to something bad that we should try and avoid, and design out of our open environment. I suspect that there are all sorts of narratives embedded in that flip, tricking us into thinking that good places are places that shouldn’t be cared for.

So it's about unravelling that framework. Globalisation is part of it. Wage labour is part of it. The specialisation of skills, the fact that we spend all our time working on specific jobs or tasks, rather than being able to contribute more widely to care for our neighbourhoods — I think that’s a huge part of it; the professionalisation of all aspects of life.

One of the paradoxes when you think about reproductive labour — child caring, family management, home upkeep — those things are often unpaid. That lack of pay clearly disempowers carers of children or elderly people, or people doing housework. But on the other hand, I don't want to live in a world where those things are completely commodified, either. There are certain feminists who would argue that we should have wages for domestic labour and I understand the argument, but I'd almost go the other direction. Perhaps, rather than professionalising all informal caring labour, we should aim for an unravelling of formal work; a way of running society where you're not reliant on professionalised labour to deliver every aspect of goods and services in society. We should be celebrating examples of where people do care work that transcends the monetary economy. If I lend my neighbour a power drill, that's good. It would be really sad if we made a world where that became a financial exchange, rather than an act of mutual generosity.

KOOZ As architects, I think it's important also to plan our cities, to enable those exchanges more than designing isolated objects.

PH I don't know how it is elsewhere but in Britain at the moment, the police have huge influence in how cities, houses and streets are designed. The police agenda is to control people and to effectively keep people separated, because of the idea that crime happens when people convene. When this is taken as design guidance, it’s socially destructive because it means that you are dissuaded from building bonds with your neighbours. I've been ill recently and my neighbours have been cooking for me, because I can't do it for myself. If I didn't know them, I'd be forced to order takeaways. There's a direct relationship between the architecture of my housing estate and the way it promotes neighbourliness, and the fact that I may be slightly more able to live outside the growth-based economic system; I'm able to rely a little bit more on mutual aid and support, rather than resorting to commerce. There’s a very clear role for architects in trying, even within a growth-based economy, to find every single opportunity to promote mutuality and commonality — so that those little seeds of alternative micro-cultures can take root, even in the heart of a capitalist metropolis like London.

KOOZ Thiago, your lexicon draws upon the seminal work of Nego Bispo, Arturo Escobar and Alberto Acosta, among others. Each of the entries intends to promote a destabilising effect, unsettling normative conceptions of architecture and urbanism. What is the potential of the architect as agitator?

TB In a sense, all kinds of architects work as agitators. I mean, we work with projects and projects look towards the future. But for me, the most meaningful way to act as an agitator lies in the capacity to work also as a mediator — when one is capable of promoting really meaningful exchanges of mutual learning. And through design, the ability to translate ideas, words and practices between different worldviews; not guided by extractivism, but rather by sharing fairly and with sensitivity. This, I believe, is the potential of the architect as an agitator. Somebody that can engage with other practices and other philosophies, so that in the end we can really reinvent our own practice. That's necessary when we are facing several catastrophes.

KOOZ Going back to the idea of the architect as a mediator, as a translator — facilitating conversations, exchanges, ways of being — that’s something quite special, but not often recognised, right? It's a matter of stepping back and orchestrating the story and the connections.

TB Yes, that is the practice that I believe — not someone on the front line alone but in the background, enabling others to do something common together.

PH I've always tried to persuade people rather than agitate them. When I am agitated, that's a negative state. There are a lot of terms like that — disrupter, agitator, provocateur — they're quite macho, in how they would ‘take on’ the world. When I'm teaching students about writing, I'm always trying to get them to think that it's not about you; all you're doing is taking your reader on a journey. You're sort of nudging them one way or the other; you're either adding to what they already think, or gently challenging it. I guess that is a form of agitation but there’s a purpose there, it’s trying to be tactical. I see agitation is like one form of critically engaging with ethics, it's like to sort of challenge received wisdom in a constructive way and offer an alternative morality or tactics to move through the universe.

JB What about a term such as stewardship in the context of architecture?

PH Actually, I ran an architectural award called the Stewardship Awards! It was about rewarding long-term thinking in London’s built environment. One of the winners was the London School of Economics, because their head of the estates took a really thoughtful long-term view of how he manages their campus. As head of estates, he was able to put an end to the practice of outsourcing cleaners; instead he was able to hire cleaners as full employees of the university with much better workers’ rights. That was about establishing a long-term relationship with the cleaners, for them to feel like they've got a career, that this is an employer that takes them seriously and will look after them. I was very pleased that we were able to recognise that work, because actually that's really fundamental for any large building. How is it cleaned? Who is cleaning it? What are their working conditions? It's astonishing to me that it’s not a sort of bigger part of the discussion around architecture in general.

I really like the term stewardship, it's a good example of language that instantly resonates with people, even if they have no professional background. Smith Mordak, who's now at the UK Green Building Council, once described architecture as ‘spatial therapy’; I guess they were reaching for a similar idea where it’s not necessarily about creating stuff. It's about working with people and places in a caring way, with a long-term strategy in mind.

KOOZ So we return to the idea of taking care. Thiago, what’s your feeling in relation to the term ‘stewardship’?

TB I agree with Phineas. I think there is a responsibility of advocating for stewardship and regeneration, as well as other meaningful practices that, as we said, were not being discussed some years ago. I would not like to think about these ideas as a trend, but as something really necessary. In relation to students, it's important that we can really show, present and develop ways to recover other practices and follow other means of taking care, of sometimes not building or building less. All these things can sound really strange for students of architecture, but it's necessary now.

KOOZ This conversation — between a number of geographies, across Europe and Brazil — has already brought to the surface various cosmologies and unconventional approaches, which this edition of IABR seeks to nurture. So what is the value of curating such a project within the context of a city like Rotterdam? What do you seek to leave behind?

JB That's a question that brings quite a few things together. Indeed, what we’ve really been seeking are actions or trajectories where people are envisioning, practising and basing their work on ideas of stewardship and long-term engagement. Because as has been said, there's still a lot that still needs to change across the practice of architecture. The positioning of this edition is specifically intended in such a way that people are included in the way they envision their practice, or in the way that they hope they can practise. We've had several conversations about the terminology of this: sometimes more experimental practices may be referred to as peripheral practices, as opposed to mainstream — but we have really tried to stay away from definitions and focus on different examples and relations and ecologies connecting practices as they exist or how they are emerging. We’ve also been trying to find different ways to relate different types of practice to each other as well, so that there is also some unison in the diversity that we are able to connect to and are presenting — which hopefully amplifies the work that already is happening.

It's important to note that we have around 80 contributors in the exhibition and what’s really inspiring is that this is just the beginning. There are so many wonderful practices at the moment that are finding ways to practise despite the lack of policy or funding to support them, people who are trying to navigate their roles and interrogate how can we practise architecture really different in such ways that it is not exploitive, and who want to demonstrate that there is way to contribute to a positive practice of architecture. In terms of legacy, going back to the title, it's really this emphasis on the relationship to nature; we really need to shift in our relationship to nature. The exhibition spends time on that as well; similar to the multiplicity of definitions of hope, we want to articulate our relationships to nature, the richness and also the power of it.

AP Amazing. Maybe I will connect to this notion of multiplicity, the very many different practices that we're working with. In terms of how we practise in the context of Rotterdam — and I would also argue, in the context of the Netherlands — I guess we do have this generative intention, which is to inject architecture here with this impetus towards change. There's a certain inventiveness and resourcefulness that we have tried to tap into, to show that there are so many ways of working in and with hope. Rather than talking about only unconventionality, we want to shift the conversation towards an openness to these many different strategies.

Concerning the idea of legacy, I was really into how Janna reframes this; it’s not necessarily about what to abandon. Within our curatorial collective, we have always avoided talking about things in this way; this idea of leaving things behind can be treated almost like a pruning; a pruning of the future. Maybe you have to cut back on certain things to allow more hopeful streams to move forward. When practising you need to think of what definitions in terms of knowledge are involved in this production of the future; what material configurations and types of work are involved in its production and what types of care are involved in its maintenance. Perhaps when something doesn't really work in this ecological, interconnected way, then we shouldn't amplify it anymore.

KOOZ Super. Thank you all, so much, for your time.

Bios

Phineas Harper is an innovative leader in developing sustainable cultural programmes that engage broad audiences with architecture and design. A regular contributor to The Guardian, their career spans criticism, curation, education, youth engagement, journalism and sculpture. Currently a columnist at Dezeen, alongside writing, their work spans kinetic sculpture, film and print making, and has been exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, the Architecture Biennale in Venice and the London School of Economics. As Chief Executive of Open City until 2024, Phineas led far-reaching and impactful change across the organisation steering the charity through the challenges of the pandemic while transforming and growing its programmes.

Ruinorama is a collective of researchers based in Brazil approaching the concept of the Anthropocene, multispecies studies, and afro-Indigenous cosmopolitics through the lens of Architecture and Urbanism. Their aim is to delve into the ramifications of these practices and contemplate potential avenues for environmental stewardship, regeneration, and care of the e/Earth.

Janna Bystrykh is an architect and researcher. She is the head of the Master in Architecture program, at the Academy of Architecture Amsterdam, where she is leading the development of a climate curriculum for architecture, and runs her design and research practice BYSTRYKH. Janna Bystrykh has experience with complex urban projects, museum transformations, experimental educational projects and installations. At OMA*AMO she worked on the ‘Elements of Architecture’ exhibition for the 2014 Venice Biennale and on the research and exhibition project Countryside: The Future.

Alina Paias works as a designer, researcher, teacher and curator. She uses feminist philosophy, new materialism and philosophy of technology to explore the work, the forms of knowledge and the technologies involved in the production of architecture. She has years of experience as a spatial designer, having worked on projects in Brazil, the United States and the Netherlands.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and storyteller whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2022 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Parallel to her work at KoozArch, Federica is Architect at the architecture studio UNA and researcher at the non-profit agency for change UNLESS where she is project manager of the research "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.