Office Party is an international research and design collective specialising in the production of temporary events, installations, and exhibitions. With an attention to sustainable material systems and community resource-pooling, the office critically examines the role of parties and similar ephemeral spaces as the origin of complex social and material networks with urban, political, and environmental effects. In this interview, we talk about the aesthetics of play, organising parties as workshops and how the design studio setting is well suited for a good party.
KOOZ What prompted the founding of Office Party? How and to what extent does it stem from your own pedagogical experience and architecture education?
OFFICE PARTY Prior to founding Office Party, we were throwing a series of monthly parties at the school where we had been studying architecture together. Even though they were relatively small scale, these events were a starting point for each of us to reconnect with our personal histories and attachments to nightlife — parties, events, and gatherings, broadly considered. We had each explored event design and production in a more professional capacity outside of the architecture school as well and founding Office Party was a way for us to collectivise that experience and develop it into a critical practice.
The medium of the party was a way for us to think about more immediate means of engaging different publics.
Since we were still completing our architecture education at the time, the medium of the party was a way for us to think about more immediate means of engaging different publics than the projects we were developing for studio courses, which typically would only go as far as a final jury presentation. The party’s ability to be quickly conceptualised, designed, produced, and hosted with limited resources allowed us to test architectural ideas attending to various concepts of temporality, waste and material cycles, resource-pooling, collaborative design, assembly, and disassembly. Going through this process allowed us to think critically about the relationship between the materiality of events and their ability to perform certain social functions for their respective communities. One of our primary interests was how parties already serve as sites of learning or education and how they might offer new models to the often-rigid structures of an academic institution.
Parties already serve as sites of learning or education and how they might offer new models to the often-rigid structures of an academic institution.
We recognise that traditional settings for learning privilege a unidirectional mode of knowledge transfer, where a single professor projects ideas to their audience. It was interesting for us to then explore and take seriously what it might mean to think about the party as a model for informal gathering and the sharing of knowledge. Clearly different from that of a classroom, the logic of a party relies on closed spaces, large crowds, loud music, and dynamic lighting to dampen any clear sense of hierarchy, allowing collective discussion to build instead through private conversations. The inherently-collaborative material and social practices of the party became an important departure point for our work.
KOOZ The very term of “Office Party” seems to be an oxymoron, juxtaposing the logic and space of the office to those of a more ludic and playful activity of the party. Could you expand on this tension inherent in the name of the office, how it informs the way it operates and the spaces / situations it seeks to create?
OP For us, the name “Office Party” accomplishes several different things. It references the trope of architecture practices naming themselves after their place of work — like Atelier Bow-Wow or Office KGDVS. It is also a direct appropriation of the cliché of the “office party.” Both of these common cultural references are imbued with their own conceptions of what it means to perform work and what behaviours lie outside of professional limits. Since Office Party was founded, we have been interested in considering the performance of different kinds of work and the ways its formalities, conventions, and structures have been designed counter to the aesthetics and practices of the party — or fun, play, etc. By compounding these two terms in “Office Party,” we are suggesting to reevaluate these conceptions and look toward a number of unexpected overlaps. For example, a party might appear frivolous or excessive, but people gather, social networks are expanded and contracted, commodities are consumed and discarded, music preferences are broadened or narrowed, stories are shared and new ones made, and so on. With that said, it’s not about trying to make work fun or make fun work, but rather recognising in both ways that they already operate with similar goals — often, counter to the way they are held in any particular cultural imaginary.
A party might appear frivolous or excessive, but people gather, social networks are expanded and contracted, commodities are consumed and discarded, music preferences are broadened or narrowed, stories are shared and new ones made, and so on.
One way that we have begun to explore this is through the production of our annual publication, Party Planner, soon to be released in its third volume. The first two volumes included a number of different architects, artists, and historians in addition to front-line cultural producers whose professional work has been built around the development of parties. Some contributors, like architectural historian Beatriz Colomina, have shared with us how her exposure to queer nightlife and the AIDS crisis in New York in the 1980s restructured her perception of academic culture at the time and subsequently reverberated through the architectural community. Others, like nightlife producer Ladyfag, presented a series of floor plans for a previous party she threw, exposing the kinds of architectural thought necessary for the success of the party and ultimately the care and joy of her audience. While she is, in effect, the designer of her parties, she also made clear that the real outcome of the event lies with the guests—their actions and interactions being the primary driving force of any party. Like Ladyfag, we are very much interested in this potential for important kinds of work to be done through the act of gathering. Our projects — whether editorial, pedagogical, or design — think about these relationships and try to reframe them in ways that allow us to notice traditionally overlooked aspects of the party.
KOOZ Back in May at the ETH Zürich Department of Architecture you hosted a workshop which explored parties as a site for the generation of critical and counter-discourses in the institution. Unfolding over the course of two days the project aimed to explore how parties hold the potential for exercising a more horizontal process of knowledge production and validation than that enforced through typical classroom hierarchies. To what extent did the fact that the workshop was hosted within an institutionalised space as that of ETH inform the outcome? Could we think of moving the office-party classroom out of the institution?
OP The workshop at ETH Zürich took place in the Department of Architecture, but it was actually located about 20 minutes away from the main campus in a former factory, currently occupied by several of the school’s design studios. The myth of this location is that the building was purchased by ETH Zürich and then offered to the chemistry department, which ultimately declined, citing that it couldn’t conduct laboratory research in open, industrial spaces. However, the large halls, high ceilings, and multi-use potential were attractive to the architecture department who found them familiar to studio culture. Conveniently, these same qualities also make for a good party.
The first day of the workshop took the form of an actual party running from the evening into the early morning hours. For this reason, it was important for us to host it in a location that allowed us to push the limits of what kind of conduct might be allowed in an institutional setting. The strategic location of this space — free from many important dimensions of the university’s surveillance (security, noise regulations, etc.) — gave us some room to bend, if not blatantly break, the rules that govern the use of institutional property. This logic is not so unfamiliar to many queer and underground party cultures that elude documentation and surveillance in an effort to free their attendees from rigid cultural and institutional frameworks.
Rather than defaulting to common rules for classroom behaviour, we decided to develop a “safer space policy”—something you might see in contemporary club spaces—to ensure the care and safety of the participants.
The tension between expected classroom behaviour and the partying was something very important for us to address in this first iteration of the workshop. It forced all of the participants — ourselves included — to navigate the boundaries of behaviour, interaction, and care for both each other and the space itself according to the terms of this very unique, peripheral-yet-still-institutional building. Rather than defaulting to common rules for classroom behaviour, we decided to develop a “safer space policy” — something you might see in contemporary club spaces — to ensure the care and safety of the participants.
We spent a lot of time debating where the party should be held and ultimately settled on this location as a provocation to address these difficult dynamics. The second day of the workshop took the form of a more structured discussion where participants were invited back to clean the space and use the notes, trash, and lost goods that were left behind from the night prior as a point of material reflection aided by a series of assigned readings. During this discussion, several of the participants challenged us not to take the workshop further outside of the institutional context but rather to reproduce it in more common educational settings. By this they meant to throw a party in a lecture hall or proper seminar room where the party would have to more directly confront the university’s forms and policies.
A significant component of our practice is recognising the ways the existing parties and club culture already serve as pedagogical settings for their own respective audiences.
While the format could hypothetically be transitioned out of an institutional setting, we would need to rethink its intentions and the forms of critical thinking that it can offer. A significant component of our practice is recognising the ways the existing parties and club culture already serve as pedagogical settings for their own respective audiences. Our adaptation of the party into a workshop serves as a way to familiarise the party to an institutional framework by adopting common signs of a productive classroom — like reading and discussion — and to bring its potentials for new kinds of learning to otherwise rigid educational structures.
KOOZ The party’s price of admission was the completion of a reading “selected from a predetermined bibliography that explores the role of collective gathering in relation to urgent concerns of architectural space-making, gender and sexual identity, and the politics of pedagogy.” Going back to the very notion of knowledge production as well as the inclusivity that the office/ project strives for, could you imagine expanding the price of admission to other formats and mediums? Could we re-imagine a pedagogical model which draws on the multitude of diverse references which daily inform our practice and the shaping of us as architects beyond the written book?
OP In short, yes — the “price of admission” could be restructured according to a different format or medium from the traditional reading requirement of an academic seminar; however, we would still insist that the use of reading is important in this context. If seminars use readings to provide people with common vocabularies, frameworks, and theories, etc., to allow for a discussion that moves beyond any one individual’s particular experience, parties also deploy tools towards this end. Music, location, and posters, for example, all work to establish commonalities across attendees, whether it be shared tastes in music, neighbourhood preferences, or aesthetic sensibilities. The party, like the seminar, is a device for shaping the type of exchange that occurs within it.
The party, like the seminar, is a device for shaping the type of exchange that occurs within it.
Our project was an attempt to incorporate existing seminar elements and remodel them under other configurations of gathering. The inclusion of readings was not intended to exclude other forms of knowledge such as those that might be more predominant at parties. Throughout the night, people discussed and exchanged in many different ways: conversations regarding their surroundings, rumours and gossip, their morning commute, or the dream they had the night prior to dance, personal meditation and eye contact. This is why we decided to focus the discussion of the second day on the trash, which stood as material evidence for participants to reflect on their personal experience from the night prior. It de-centered the text as the focus of discussion and allowed people to reframe their own positions and their observations through an extended lens beyond the classroom context.
KOOZ Our second issue which is running throughout September - October is titled Fair Play and asks for academic and cultural institutions what it means to play fair. Focusing on the very of playing, what is for you the value of play in re-imagining a more inclusive practice? What are your aspirations and expectations for Office Party?
OP We think it is important to clarify that parties aren’t inherently positive or fair. While we are interested in their ability to infuse certain kinds of work — community gathering, stabilisation, education, etc. — with excitement and joy, we think it is equally important to reflect on the ways that the aesthetics of play often conceal extractive and violent behaviours. Blinded by strobe lights, surrounded by fog, and distracted by heavy bass, it becomes difficult to detect and regulate attempts at deceit and coercion. For some people, this leads to parties becoming a space of fear, anxiety, and intimidation. What we think is necessary to counter these risks and play fair, is to first acknowledge this potential and then to develop strategies that ensure the mutual support and protection of all involved.
Parties aren’t inherently positive or fair, that the aesthetics of play often conceal extractive and violent behaviours.
“Safer space” is a concept that has been used in the context of underground dance cultures to refer to this exact process — acknowledging certain potentials for harm and then establishing resources and frameworks for protection. To exercise fair-play in our own practice, we have learned from similar ways of thinking that have helped us to navigate potentially extractive or unbalanced power relationships by producing an awareness of not only our contributed value but also that of our collaborators and participants. Our work, like any party, is a necessarily collaborative endeavour, and this comes with many risks of its own.
We think it is important to establish these fair-play practices in the design and production of our work, but also to extend it to those who participate in the process as attendees. The moment the doors to a party open, it requires a certain amount of letting go — where authorship is distributed beyond the organisers to all attendees and artists involved; however, we see our responsibility as producers and hosts to ensure that proper frameworks for protection are in place. We see this as necessary, not only for the production of parties but for any practice of architecture and design.
To exercise fair-play in our own practice, we have learned from similar ways of thinking that have helped us to navigate potentially extractive or unbalanced power relationships.
As we progress in our practice and gain more expertise in navigating these tricky relationships, we hope to have helped to produce new types of conversation and knowledge that would not have existed otherwise. In the future, we intend to move towards the production of many different forms of gathering, from seminars and lectures to club nights, fashion shows, exhibitions, performances, galas, and beyond. In each case, we intend to develop new and more meaningful ways of gathering and therefore new and more meaningful opportunities for exchange.
Bio
Chase Galis (he/him/his) is a doctoral candidate and lecturer at ETH Zürich jointly appointed between the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) and the Institute of Landscape and Urban Studies (lus). He obtained his Master of Architecture degree from the Princeton University School of Architecture in 2021 where he was awarded the History and Theory Prize and a certificate in Media + Modernity. While at Princeton, Chase was an editor of Pidgin and an assistant instructor in the school’s graduate and undergraduate design programs. Chase previously worked as an exhibition designer for institutions including the Amant Foundation and the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and he has worked as a curator leading exhibitions including Architecture Arboretum (2019) under Sylvia Lavin and assisting various projects at Materials & Application under the direction of Jia Yi Gu.
Christina Moushoul (she/her/hers) is the Assistant Editor at e-flux Architecture and the R&D Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art. She obtained her Master of Architecture degree from the Princeton University School of Architecture in 2022 where she was awarded the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Prize, the History and Theory Prize, and a certificate in Media + Modernity. While at Princeton, Christina was an editor of Pidgin and a co-founder of Salon Series. She was the curatorial assistant for Model Behaviour (2022) curated by Cynthia Davidson and Architecture Arboretum (2021) by Sylvia Lavin. Christina previously worked for the media artist Refik Anadol, serving as project manager and designer for projects such as WDCH Dreams (2018) and Das Paradies (2018) at the LA Phil, among others. While an undergraduate student at UCLA, Christina produced a series of events for the Center for the Art of Performance, including shows with the LA Opera, Connan Mockasin, and Doja Cat, among others.
Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and digital curator whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2015 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.
