What does an architect’s office look like?

The London Festival of Architecture returns this June 2014 as a “month-long, city-wide celebration of architectural experimentation, thinking, learning and practice. In 2014 the festival will take ‘Capital’ as its central theme, and explore its various manifestations; from London’s place as the UK’s seat of government and finance, its flows of social and intellectual capital, the politics of regeneration and its impact on the city and its position as a world capital of architecture, through its practices and its built environment. RIBA London will again be coordinating focus days and Open Studios in Shoreditch and Fitzrovia. This is a fantastic opportunity to get your practices involved with a public audience. It’s a chance for you to open up your studio, showcase your projects and demonstrate ‘behind the scenes’ of how architects work, as well as a good marketing & PR opportunity.” Read: don’t look like a sweatshop, look like a boutique. We are resolutely NOT cynical at all about a public engagement with private design-production space, merely optimistically offering a reality antidote which could make your dreams come true! Okay, so we might clean up, add some magic…

Using this invitation WHAT_architecture reflects on what an Architect’s office actually looks like, rather than should look like. That’s PRODUCTION vs PR. [John Pawson, the ultimate minimalist had a sleek 1990’s office manifest as 80% client space (boardroom table) vs 20% employee space (window less shelf of computers)]. To augment our RMiT Practice-based Research we also ask: how does the internal/input configuration of an architectural office influence its output production? How does y/our workspace affect what you/we design? Our new office’s internalised configuration is the polar opposite of our previous TransWorld House ‘goldfish bowl’ exteriorised configuration.  Given the recent 5y shift in office rental costs since the David Cameron-Boris Johnson exaltation of Silicon Roundabout, our SME was nearly forced out of East-Central London aka Shoreditch. Our new office is therefore pragmatically modelled on the USS Enterprise from Star Trek with it’s minimal windows to space out there and its increasing proliferation of computer screens. Less retail windows, more MS Windows. How many passerby clients, apart from Shek, did we get from being prominent in the street scape? (See also Doors of Perception 1: Herzog and De Meuron where the entry into a Starchitect’s office seems to be more about the reality of working – a front door looking resembling that to you grandparent’s flat – than say the swagger of say Foster+Partners grand staircase entry vista to a glass-tabled mini-skirted supermodel receptionist greeting your expectant large walleted client steps towards engagement). (See also Anthony Hoete vs Jacques Herzog 2007 RIBA Gold Medal interview…)

Forget Paris Metro tiles… long live the white hexagonal mosaic as imbedded into our Lubetkin flat refurbishment: 056mod! And subsequently promoted by the band St Vincent in their video:

8-bit projections of a Saturday BoyzNight at the Islington crib…

Three sided football was devised in 1962 by the Danish artist Asger Jorn, and this version of the beautiful game is an extension of his links to the Marxist-inspired Situationist movement. Jorn saw traditional football as a representation of the “us versus them” class struggle of the time and wanted to create an alternative which reflected the complexity of society and encouraged cooperation. In this game, three, not two, teams would strive on a hexagonal pitch, collaborating rather than competing, agreeing amongst themselves what was allowable and not allowable, rather than being controlled by an outside force. In other words: no rules, no refs. It is little surprise, then, that the bulk of those drawn to the sport are left-leaning, although Geoff Andrews, from Philosophy Football FC, believes its popularity is also linked to a growing disillusionment with modern football. “There’s an emphasis on teamwork [in three-sided football] but it’s also about individual expression, and at a time when there is a worry about the commodification and corporatisation of football this brings back the true essence of the sport,” he said. Two decades on from the first-known organised three-sided match, there remain no rules beyond a handful of basic principles: the pitch must be hexagonal in shape and equally divided into three, halves can last for any length of time, teams can vary in size, there are no offsides, and goalkicks, throw-ins and corners operate on the basis of each team having two sides on the pitch: if the ball goes out on either of your sides you get the set piece; if it went out off you, it goes to the team whose goal is nearest to the ball. The key principle is that the team who concedes the fewest goals wins, with goals scored only counting in the event of a tie, and it is this which leads not only to the cooperative nature of three-sided football but also to what Dyson described as its “element of bluff”. Gazzetta dello Sport’s Filippo Ricci calls it “organised confusion”. In 2010, Sally O’Reilly, then writer in residence at Whitechapel Gallery in east London, organised a match in which three teams would represent the main political parties in a game designed to demonstrate the shifting allegiences and balance of power in party politics. Philosophy Football FC formulated a set of rules which could be used in a real situation. 1. Scoring A team does not count the goals it scores, only the goals it concedes. The winner is the team that concedes the fewest goals. 2. Throw-ins / goal-kicks / corners On the hexagonal pitch, each team has two sides of the six-sided pitch: the side with the goal (the ‘backside’) and the side opposite to your goal (the ‘frontside’). If the ball goes out on one of your two sides, you get the throw-in / goal-kick. If it went out off you, the throw-in or corner goes to the team whose own goal is nearest to where the ball went out. 3. Referees While there is a temptation to have no referees with the following dictat in mind: ‘The game deconstructs the mythic bi-polar structure of conventional football, where an us-and-them struggle mediated by the referee mimics the way the media and the state pose themselves as “neutral” elements in the class struggle’, the match will have two referees, able to make discerning philosophical judgements. 4. Duration of match Ideally, teams will play until people get bored, start to wander off, fall asleep etc: however, three thirty-minute ‘halves’ with teams rotating goals would work well. 5. Other rules There will be no off-sides. There will be rolling subs, rush goalies etc.

As the Spanish in our office will tell you, “Guerrilla” means “little war“ and guerrilla actions in the city are ways of protesting, retaking and reconquering urban spaces within a framework of expressing political ideology. Guerilla knitting, also called „yarn bombing“ is an urban art form where people change public spaces by knitting in public objects. The knitting can be just because of brightning up urban areas or it can also contain a political message (often feminist ones). When the guerrilla group “Örgü-T” heard that the trees in Gezi Park were going to be cut down, they gathered more than 8m² of knitted wool to cover a tree. This made us wonder: what if the façade of our Women’s Student Housing in Çeliktepe had have been knitted, literally, into the urban fabric?