Failed Architecture

[You can find a transcript of this conversation in the article version posted on our website] This episode focuses on Greece’s so-called new generation refugee camps, officially known as Closed Controlled Access Centres or CCACs. These are high-tech compounds located on islands such as Samos and Lesvos used to process, detain, and surveil people on the move. You’ll hear from voices across spatial practice, activism, and journalism to unpack how these sites operate as extra legal spaces, contributing to a wider ongoing project of the intense management of migration. This podcast was written by System of Systems, co-founded by Maria […]

[You can find a transcript of this conversation in the article version posted on our website] This episode is an unpacking of migration and border management with a focus on the US-Mexico border and European externalisation practices. Written and narrated by journalist, jurist and urbanism specialist Nuria Ribas Costa, it features an in-depth interview with Gabriella Sánchez, a socio-cultural anthropologist and global expert on border control. In this conversation, she explains how borders are fictional constructs that require vast amounts of energy and resources to be manufactured into dangerous spaces; but also how borderlands, and border imaginaries, are not just […]

[You can find a transcript of this conversation in the article version posted on our website] In an article published in the Guardian earlier last year Jon Henley reported on the state of the housing crisis in Amsterdam. The article’s title took a quote from one of the people that Henley interviewed: “Everything is just on hold”. For a lot of people in Amsterdam, everything really is on hold, as in, stuck where they’re living, usually with several other people, unless they’re a yuppie or coming from money or they somehow got a foothold on the housing ladder right before […]

For this episode, our editor Charlie Clemoes talks to Adare Brown, Elisa Iturbe, Geneva Strauss-Wise, Josh Barnett, and Ryan Ludwig from the Architecture Lobby’s Green New Deal Working Group. The Architecture Lobby (TAL) is a grassroots organization of architectural workers that advocates for just labor practices and an equitable built environment. Founded in the United States and international in membership, TAL  brings experience and expertise from many design fields—architecture, construction, planning, landscape, engineering, academia—to protect the rights and livelihoods of all workers. The Lobby’s Green New Deal Working Group focuses on organizing for ecological justice as it relates to architectural […]

We continue the conversation with Callum Cant about his book Riding for Deliveroo, which, as the name suggests, documents his experience riding for the UK-based food delivery startup Deliveroo, in a bid to understand the new form of “algorithmic management” that the company represents.  In the first conversation, we started by having Callum talk in […]

For Breezeblock #40, editors Maria Mazzanti, Juana Salcedo, and Maria-Victoria Londoño talked with Exutoire (Bui Quy Son and Paul-Antoine Lucas) about queer architecture practices, non-conforming gender and dissident methodologies and utopian futurities. In their conversation, they touched upon what are the norms and normativity in architectural practices and discussed how can we disrupt these codified […]

When the gig economy hit cities across the world in the early 2010s, gig companies promised flexible working hours to their “contractors” and on-demand ease to their customers. In reality, the companies and their algorithms have induced a monumental change in patterns of work and consumption, recomposing commercial districts in pursuit of more efficient last-mile delivery and invisibilising deeply exploitative and often criminally underpaid labour practices. In a bid to understand this new form of “algorithmic management”, researcher Callum Cant took a job riding for Deliveroo, a food delivery startup that was founded in the UK in 2013 by Will […]

For Breezeblock #38, editors María Victoria Londoño-Becerra, Juana Salcedo, and María Mazzanti discuss with Sidra Kamran questions on public space, domestic space, and workspaces for women workers in Pakistan. In the conversation, they explore what forms of experiences and encounters appear in these different spaces and how they shape connections between work, retail, the beauty […]

Para el Breezeblock #37, las editoras María Victoria Londoño-Becerra, Juana Salcedo y María Mazzanti hablan con el artista colombiano Iván Argote sobre como su obra se aproxima a diferentes tensiones entre espacio público, monumentos y memoria colectiva. El Breezeblock #37 es la quinta edición de la serie de podcasts On Discomfort (sobre la incomodad) y […]

Listen to this episode and subscribe to the FA podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Overcast, or wherever else you usually get your podcasts. For Breezeblock #36, editors María Victoria Londoño-Becerra, Juana Salcedo, and María Mazzanti discuss with Todd Brown how architecture in its different scales is perceived as racialized. During the conversation, they delve into […]

For this episode, Maastricht-based editor Charlie Clemoes spoke to Zamaney Menso, Director of the Bouwen section of the FNV (Federatie Nederlandse Vakbeweging, in English the Building Section of the Federation of Dutch Trade Unions). The FNV is the largest trade union in the Netherlands and its Bouwen section serves architects, as well as construction workers […]

Listen to this episode and subscribe to the FA podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or Overcast. For Breezeblock #34, editors María Victoria Londoño-Becerra, Juana Salcedo, and María Mazzanti discuss with Sasha Plotnikova her most recent article: A Cage by Another Name, where the author delves into the carceral logics behind the LA’s tiny home villages.    

This episode is the second of a two-part interview with Marisa Cortright (the first episode is available here). Marisa is the author of the Failed Architecture article “Death to the Calling: A Job in Architecture is Still Just a Job” and, more recently, Can This Be? Surely This Cannot Be?, a book composed of three essays on […]

Listen to this episode and subscribe to the FA podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Overcast, or wherever else you usually get your podcasts. This episode is the first of a two part interview with Marisa Cortright, author of the Failed Architecture article “Death to the Calling: A Job in Architecture is Still Just a Job” […]

Listen to this episode and subscribe to the FA podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or Overcast. Continuando con la serie de conversaciones, podcasts y artículos sobre protesta y espacio público en Bogotá, la editora María Mazzanti habló con el artista colombiano Felipe Arturo sobre la exposición FURIA, Efectos palpables de los afectos (políticos) en los cuerpos (colectivos). La […]

Listen to this episode and subscribe to the FA podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or Overcast. For Breezeblock #30, editor christin hu chats with community organizers Maggie Luna, Avalon Betts-Gaston, and Sashi James about their recent action at HDR (Henningson, Durham, Richardson), one of the largest architecture firms in the world, who are responsible for designing hundreds of […]

Listen to this episode and subscribe to the FA podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or Overcast. For Breezeblock #29, editors María Victoria Londoño-Becerra, Juana Salcedo, and María Mazzanti discuss with FA editor René Boer his upcoming book: The Smooth City*.Framed in the conversations around discomfort and space*, the editors talk about how the homogenization of urban environments and […]

Listen to this episode and subscribe to the FA podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or Overcast. In Breezeblock #28, editors María Victoria Londoño-Becerra, Juana Salcedo and María Mazzanti introduce a new series of Brezeblocks about the concepts of comfort and discomfort and how they are entangled with dynamics of power and the production of space. Departing from Sarah […]

Listen to this episode and subscribe to the FA podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or Overcast. Para el segundo episodio de FA Breezeblocks en español la editora María Mazzanti habló con Manuel Correa, artista Colombiano que hace parte del equipo de Forensic Architecture. En el podcast Manuel y María discuten sobre la exposición Huellas de desaparición. Los casos de […]

Listen to this episode and subscribe to the FA podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or Overcast. On June 8th 2020, 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 […]

Listen to this episode and subscribe to the FA podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or Overcast. We’ve reached the final instalment of interviews with the participants of the Stories on Earth project, an experiment that brings together spatial designers and writers to devise new spatial narratives that accommodate the inherent interrelationship between humans and the non-human. Together, these […]

Listen to this episode and subscribe to the FA podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or Overcast. We continue our coverage of Stories on Earth, an experiment that brings together spatial designers and writers to devise new spatial narratives that accommodate the inherent interrelationship between humans and the non-human. Together, these artists have crafted three […]

Listen to this episode and subscribe to the FA podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or Overcast. We continue our coverage of Stories on Earth, an experiment that brings together spatial designers and writers to devise new spatial narratives that accommodate the inherent interrelationship between humans and the non-human. Together, these artists have crafted three […]

Listen to this episode and subscribe to the FA podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or Overcast. Stories on Earth is an experiment that brings together spatial designers and writers to devise new spatial narratives that accommodate the inherent interrelationship between humans and the non-human. Together, these artists have crafted three stories that open up […]

Listen to this episode and subscribe to the FA podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or Overcast.  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 […]

Subscribe or listen: Apple Podcasts / Spotify / Stitcher / Overcast (This podcast is in Spanish) The notion that public space is for everyone, a place where we are all equal, has been used ambivalently to legitimize the exclusion of marginalized and vulnerable populations and to defend their presence in these spaces. Authorities and other social groups, uncomfortable with the presence of the homeless, loitering teenagers, street vendors, sex workers, and protesters, among other ‘undesirables,’ tend to justify their expulsion from public space by appealing to the “public good” or the prevention of “social harm.” The use of public space as a strategy for either “social justice” or “social order” led geographer Bernd Belina to question the pervasive use of this idealized notion of public space and its abstract promise of equality as a vehicle for social change. Instead, he argued, it might be more important to ask “why the ‘reserve army of labour' as a socioeconomic reality and its feared visible presence in urban spaces as a moral problem exist in the first place.” For him, such a stance would direct the conversation towards how our current economic model often entails the punishment of the poor and move us from the idealism of public space towards identifying concrete demands and struggles of specific marginalized populations. This is precisely what the Colombian NGO Temblores, which translates to quakes, has been doing in Colombia since 2016. Founded by siblings Alejandro and Sebastián Lanz, Temblores works in the realm of what they refer to as Strategic Community Litigation. Through this approach, they have worked with homeless, trans communities, and protesters, identifying their concrete struggles and making a case to change the structures that maintain the exclusion, violence, and discrimination and the systematic negation of their rights. In the work of this NGO, equality is not an abstract aspiration that carries within a normativized way of being. On the contrary, their work refers to very concrete lives at stake whose right to access and inhabit public spaces have been persistently denied, criminalized, and subjected to police violence.  For example, Temblores proved that the lack of free public restrooms in Colombian cities and the prohibition of public urination and defecation in the Police Code affected citizens and particularly harmed habitantes de calle, peoples whose private lives take place in the public realm....

This spring, FA initiated ‘Situations’, an event series aiming to take critical reflections on architecture and space from the digital realm to the real world. Breezeblock #21 was recorded 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 everybody was pretty excited and also somewhat exhausted after having been swarming around the neighborhood for the past hour.

For Breezeblock #20, 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.

Subscribe or listen: Apple Podcasts / Spotify / Stitcher / Overcast Heroin is an urban thing. That's the image we've been fed by movies, music, literature, news, public service announcements, and school curricula ever since it became a subject of moral panic over a century ago. The problem is, heroin was only ever a drug of the city because this image has focused almost entirely on the (historically very urban) point of consumption. What has been left out is a whole geography of production and distribution that has tended to encompass large and often very rural parts of East, South-East and Southwest Asia where the opium poppy could be cultivated. Now, the image continues to distract us from the fact that heroin users can no longer support themselves in urban centres, our modern globalised world having long since forced all but the most economically productive subjects from the centre of cities, and out to the periphery, while at the same time still managing to support supply chains that can bring heroin, and all manner of other opioids, to even the most far-flung places. By hiding this more extensive geography and focusing instead on the individual and the urban, this representation of heroin has prevented a proper confrontation with the often very intentional harm caused to vast swathes of humanity who have been exposed to the drug over the past century. For this episode, therefore, we’re going to zoom out, and try to connect the dots between some of the disparate spaces and places that have been touched by heroin, exploring some of the main historical shifts in where heroin is produced, who uses it, how it gets to the places where it’s used, and why it ends up in these places. Sonja Groot Obbink gives tours of Amsterdam's Red Light District, she is a former sex worker in recovery from addiction to heroin and cocaine. She lives in Amsterdam. Sam Quinones is a freelance journalist and author who lives in Southern California. Contact him through his website. Prof. Andrew Hussey, Andrew Hussey OBE is Paris-based English historian of French culture. His writing is focused primarily on 20th century French history. This episode was directed by Charlie Clemoes//The Failed Architecture Team References: "This is Your Brain on Drugs" "Heroin Screws You Up" Vangelis, "Prologue" Blade Runner soundtrack Trainspotting (1996) opening scene Tam Stewart, The Heroin Users, Pandora Press, 1996 Vanda Felbab-Brown, Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs, Brookings Institution Press, 2010 Trainspotting (1996) final scene Sam Quinones,...

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. Out of this inauspicious context, an exciting experiment emerged in the small Northern English city of Preston. Shortly before its central government […]

For Breezeblock #18, 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 follow-up of Breezeblock #15, FA 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 Breezeblock #16, 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.

In this first installment of a two-part episode, FA 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 […]

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. For Breezeblock #14, FA’s Charlie Clemoes interviewed UVW SAW elected organiser Keri Monaghan to discuss the strike, the recent work of UVW SAW in its first year as […]

FA editor Joshua McWhirter speaks to Jilly Traganou, editor of the recently published book ‘Design and Political Dissent: Spaces, Visuals, Materialities’. Near the end of a year filled with mass protests on streets across the United States and the world, Jilly talks about some of the book’s themes and their significance during a moment when many architects are thinking about how to leverage their skills in the service of social justice movements.

In the 12th Breezeblock episode, FA editors Charlie Clemoes and René Boer discuss the future of De Wallen (aka Amsterdam’s Red Light District), which is under increasing threat from the so-called “smooth city”: the safe, clean, well-functioning and homogenous urban environment that has been taking over cities around the world in the past few decades. In the episode, they talk about the ways in which the municipality, developers and various old white dudes are conspiring to frame the neighbourhood as an “urban jungle” and pushing to replace it with a “monumental garden”. Against these moves, René has written a counter-manifesto, “Wallen 2020”, which is intended to galvanise resistance to the neighbourhood’s creeping sanitisation.

For #Breezeblock 11, FA editors Chiara Dorbolò and María Mazzanti discuss Failed Architecture special series A City of Our Own: Urbanism for the 99%.

Breezeblock #10 acknowledges that land reparations have remained largely unaddressed by the architecture profession, despite the glaring adjacency of building, landscape, and planning to land and the colonial concept of property. What do land reparations really mean for the many communities who have been harmed in different ways by white supremacy? Having connected through recent movements on work seed distribution and community gardens in the midst of the BLM protests, kuwa jasiri and FA’s Christin HU share recent personal experiences and current work, as well as thoughts on the unanimous city council vote in Asheville, North Carolina (US).

Breezeblock #9 departs from the fact that in the early days of the protests following the death of George Floyd the Philadelphia Inquirer published a cover story written by Inga Saffron whose headline made the infamous claim that “Buildings Matter, Too”. Responding to the article, our editors Bassem Saad and Kevin Rogan discuss the value of looting and destruction of private property, with special reference to recent uprisings in the US and Lebanon.

For Breezeblock #8, FA editor María Mazzanti spoke with Arielle Assouline-Lichten about the invisibility of women architects, Denise Scott Brown and the Pritzker Prize, and Wikipedia editing activism.

In the seventh Breezeblock episode, FA editor Charlie Clemoes speaks to Pune-based architect, journalist and researcher Shruti Hussain about the current situation for migrant workers in India amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

For Breezeblock #6, FA’s founding editor Michiel van Iersel and architect Anne Dessing discuss the Swedish city of Kiruna with Carlos Mínguez Carrasco, curator of the exhibition Kiruna Forever at ArkDes Sweden’s National Centre for Architecture and Design. Kiruna is experiencing one of the biggest urban transformation projects in recent history. The city is being relocated by three kilometres due to the expansion of a mine, around which Kiruna was built. A third of the population must relocate, housing blocks and landmark buildings are being demolished or moved, and a new city is taking shape.

For Breezeblock #5, FA editors Juana Salcedo and María Mazzanti discuss the situation in Bogotá since the COVID-19 lockdown, especially as it affects the large informal sector of the Colombian economy.

In Breezeblock #4, FA editor Charlie Clemoes talks to Los Angeles Tenants’ Union (LATU) organiser Sasha Plotnikova about the situation for tenants in LA amid the current Covid-19 pandemic crisis, as well as discussing the organising efforts of LATU in recent years, the prospects for a permanent rent strike, and how to get involved in tenant organising.

In the third Breezeblock episode, FA editor Christin Hu talks to Leijia Hanrahan about sirens, their role in enforcing control and their heightened presence in the New York City soundscape since it became a coronavirus hotspot.

Paris’ famous Louvre Museum was forever transformed in Summer 2018 when it was spectacularly appropriated by megastar power couple Beyoncé and Jay-Z, by way of a music video for their single “Apeshit”. Timed to coincide with Everything is Love, their surprise joint album as The Carters, the video saw the couple, and Beyoncé in particular, performing in front of several significant paintings and sculptures in the museum’s vast collection. Needless to say, two of the world’s most visible and successful black cultural figures seizing control of a space so synonymous with Western imperialism led to a lively debate in the days and weeks that followed. This episode reflects on that debate, in order to explore the wider relationship between buildings and power, questioning how a building like the Louvre comes to be invested with power, but also, how its seemingly immutable marriage of social and architectural order can be challenged by the sheer defiant presence of the historically excluded, doing something new in that space. With some time passed since the video’s release, we’ll be reflecting on its impact on the Louvre, what it expresses about the museum’s position in contemporary society and what it portends for the future of museum spaces in general. – Sarah Huny Young is a creative director, artist/photographer, and New Yorker based in Pittsburgh, PA – Heidi Herrera is an art historian based at the University of California – Christopher Dickey is World Correspondent at the Daily Beast – Paige K.Bradley is a New York-based artist and writer, and an editor for Artforum.com This episode was directed by Charlie Clemoes/the Failed Architecture team.

In the second Breeblock episode, FA editors Kevin Rogan and Charlie Clemoes talk about Kevin’s recent article for Failed Architecture The City and the City and Coronavirus.

In the first Breezeblock episode, FA editors Eda Hisarlıoğlu and Charlie Clemoes talk about the spatial effects of both Covid-19 and ongoing construction in Istanbul.

We tend to think of architects as professionals rather than workers. Architects design, create, delegate, follow a special calling, but they’re not often seen as “working for a living”, and they’re certainly not much like the workers who actually construct or extract the resources for the buildings they design. And yet, architectural work in the twenty first century has become ever more precarious. As with other white collar workers, architects are becoming increasingly accustomed to short-term contracts, overtime without pay and other traditional hallmarks of exploited labour.  In light of this new reality, for this episode we’ll be talking to architectural workers from the UK, the USA, and Brazil, about the role a labour union could play in the contemporary architectural profession. We’ll discuss the difficulties, limits and challenges of organizing architectural workers and speculate as to why architects have, until recently, been relatively absent from the history of the labour movement. We’ll also consider how unionisation could give ordinary architectural workers greater control over the buildings and spaces they design as well as over the wider spatial production sector. – Keefer Dunn is an architect based in Chicago and a national organiser for the Architecture Lobby – Fernanda Simon Cardoso is an architect based in São Paulo and a former Director for the FNA (Federação Nacional dos Arquitetos e Urbanistas) – Sam and Alex are architectural workers based in the UK and organisers for Workers Inquiry: Architecture This episode was directed by Charlie Clemoes/Jake Soule/the Failed Architecture team.