The seminar presented and discussed diverse perspectives including 20th century utopian design and social approaches, to examples of pedagogical practice dealing with border ecologies and occupations, from eastern Turkey to Cyprus to Palestine, as well as urban and periphery conditions.

The first session dealt with the issue of decolonization methodologies in contested territories, how border realities may create pedagogical structures and how a border becomes itself a methodology. It discussed what kind of social co-existence and pedagogical alliances may be possible in divided zones. The second session focused on initiations of small scales of open school or pedagogical platforms that deal with different urban issues, periphery scales and localism. It highlighted how open pedagogical initiations can engage with inhabitants and how such design methods can influence localism and the idea of commoning practices.

Participants included Sepake Angiama, Markus Bader, Joseph Grima, Sandi Hilal, Onkar Kular, Peter Lang, Tor Lindstrand, Mark Wigley, Merve Gül Özokcu, Magnus Ericson and Pelin Tan. The event was presented at Arter and as a collaboration between IASPIS and the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (Iksv).

Video documentation below

Introduction

2 pm Welcome
by Magnus Ericson and Pelin Tan

2.15 pm Historical overview
A Radical Occupation: the Remaking of Design Education in 1960’s Italy
by Peter Lang

Part 1: Border Realities, Co-existences and Methods

2:45 pm Introduction
by moderator Pelin Tan

3 pm Presentations
Borders as Pedagogies
by Pelin Tan
Doing Together
By Merve Gül Özokcu
The Tree School or Mujawara
by Sandi Hilal

4 pm Panel discussion
with Pelin Tan, Sandi Hilal and Merve Gül Özokcu

Break

Part 2: Contra-Urban Conditions, Periphery Scales and Localism

5 pm Introduction
by moderator Sepake Angiama

5:15 pm Presentations
Strategies of Unlearning
by Joseph Grima
Learning Situations in City Making, the open raumlabor university
by Markus Bader
System of Splines
by Tor Lindstrand

6:30 pm Panel discussion
with Markus Bader, Tor Lindstrand and Sepake Angiama

Short break

7:30 pm Conclusion
Reflection by Onkar Kular
Concluding panel with speakers, moderators and panel guests Jan Boelen, Onkar Kular, Mark Wigley and Merve Gül Özokcu, moderated by Pelin Tan and Magnus Ericson

Welcome and introduction
Magnus Ericson and Pelin Tan

Historical overview

A Radical Occupation: the remaking of Design Education in 1960’s Italy
Peter Lang

While debates raged in public, during the early post-war era, on appropriate strategies for rebuilding war-torn Italian cities, monuments and museums, universities in Italy remained largely mired in pre-war politics, raising stubborn issues about educational continuity and discontinuity. Many in the university directorate were Fascist-era-appointments and continued the elite and dated policies set out under earlier 19th century educational reforms. The questions raised in this talk are focused on how students´ and faculty’s frustration with the existing educational system led to a series of occupations, disruptions, but most significantly, a radical re-thinking of education that would change the nature of academic studies and practices through the sixties and the seventies. These hard-fought battles, inside the university and outside on the streets, would in many ways have come also to serve as critical precedents for further university occupations that exploded again in the early nineties. This discussion surveys the role of bad education in the emergence of the Italian Radical Design movement.

Part 1: Border Realities, Co-existences and Methods
Introduction by Pelin Tan

Borders as Pedagogies
Pelin Tan

Pedagogical radicality in architecture deals directly with the knowledge-production of social realities, that demands us to invent methodologies in education. The radical questioning of the architectural discipline is deeply rooted in architectural education that still resists to go beyond studio work and usual design methodologies, to cross multiple disciplines and consider trans-local territories. Borrowing cross-methods, tools and engagement as an active researcher in everyday life, in order to experience other “knowledge” or the multiplicity of knowledge-production, urges us to alter our research methods. Reformulating forms of reactions in syllabuses, design studios or politics of academic structures of architecture faculties could lead to inventing new pedagogies. Furthermore, semi-independent research alliances have deep impact in developing alternative pedagogies. How can border ecologies co-exist and inform other pedagogies? How can the border itself function as a method in architectural research? What are the non-human elements that act as spatial agencies in social fabrication? The effects of war and the negotiation of borderlines transform our approach and methodologies of infrastructures which are not only a functional threshold of architecture, but also an instrumentalization of new conditions that are part of geontologies of landscape. Within the theoretical framework of E. Povinelli and F. Guattari, Pelin Tan will focus on terms and practice of decolonization methodology, and transversal pedagogies. By questioning the “field”, “affect” and “method” she will present examples of her teaching curriculums and ongoing territorial research cases in South East Anatolia, Palestine/Occupied Territories, Hong Kong/Shenzhen and Cyprus.

Doing Together
Merve Gül Özokcu

Herkes Icin Mimarlik (Architecture For All) is a non-profit and independent architecture organization based in Istanbul devoted to offering architectural solutions to social problems in today’s Turkey and beyond and promoting participatory design process in architecture education. Herkes Icin Mimarlik was founded in 2011 and today it has 96 members from various disciplines. Since its foundation, the organisation realizes its projects within a network formed mostly by students from design and architecture faculties in Turkey. With the idea to provide democratic and collaborative design processes between architects, urban designers, and citizens, the organization engages with the economic, political and social dynamics of the places where it works and aims to create sustainable communities through implementation of its designs.

As a multi-disciplinary platform Herkes İçin Mimarlık re-imagines the structure and scope of architectural processes. It focuses on creative ways to raise awareness about social challenges and mobilize communities in the pursuit of a social change. The organisation operates in both urban and rural contexts. With its projects, the organization leads volunteers in workshops that advocate environmentally responsible design as well as micro-economic development.

The Tree School or Mujawara
Sandi Hilal

The Tree School or Mujawara, which means “neighbourliness,” is both an installation and a pedagogical artistic practice. It is based on the concept of the decolonization of learning, where participants gather around the tree for experiential, communal learning. Under the tree school, all participants contribute to learning in a non-hierarchical common space that encourages free and critical discourse among participants. Mujawara is based on the principles of Campus in Camps, an experimental university that Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti established in Dheisheh Refugee Camp, Bethlehem in 2012. The practice integrates institutionalised forms of knowledge-production, with the marginalised forms of knowledge that are rooted in the living experience of communities, thus blurring the distinction between theory and practice. Based on long-term engagements, site visits, and shared research, the participants contribute to a “collective dictionary” of critical essays on keywords selected by participants, related to their environment and daily life in the refugee camp. Mujawara was originally initiated by Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti together with Brazilian-based art collective Grupo Contrafilé (Contrafilé Group), as part of the 31st Sao Paulo Biennial, Brazil (2015). The project draws on analogies and differences between Palestinian refugee camps and the Brazilian “quilombo,” communities established by run-away slaves in 17th-century colonial Brazil, that today encompass large areas that are spaces of refuge for the disenfranchised. The collaboration initiated a South-to-South dialogue, rarely witnessed at this level. Mujawara in Brazil brought together two worlds which share concerns around social justice and equality. The dialogue that followed examined relationships between land, exile and community. Mujawara is an on-going program that continues to seek new modalities for learning. In Brazil the participants gathered around the Baobab tree (one of the world’s oldest tree brought to Brazil from Africa). For the NYU Abu Dhabi exhibition, the artists selected the Ghaf tree, an indigenous tree in the UAE, often considered the national tree of the Emirates, as a symbol for the tree of knowledge.

Panel discussion
Pelin Tan, Sandi Hilal and Merve Gül Özokcu

Part 2: Contra-Urban Conditions, Periphery Scales and Localism
Introduction by Sepake Angiama

Strategies of Unlearning
by Joseph Grima

When Paulo Freire introduced his ultimate educational learning philosophy in the 70s, learning from each other, breaking the hierarchy among the pedagogical structures and experimenting the unlearning, it coincided with many experimental learning practices from the 70s utopists to other architects’ experimentations in design. How such unlearning actively and collectively can be transferred to design education and schools, is for me not only a question about how to challenge the visions of design from tools to craft in engaged community levels, but also the very institutional structure of design academies itself. In my pedagogical strategies from Eindhoven Design academy to Matera Open Design School, I aim to propose instead of a school, an instrument to grow tools at community level, a place in which everyone learns from everyone else, and where there is a continuous process of exchange between the creative skills brought by the various members. My intention is to experiment on how a design school can become a platform to give students the possibility to make things, preferably not simulations or prototypes. A school that is not a vehicle for the indoctrination of dogmas or that draws from what’s familiar, but an incubator and ideas laboratory that draws its inspiration from real life and also designs for it. In my presentation I would like to show examples of process from these platforms and my research in various local conditions, from Shenzhen to Matera and others, in order to provide a planetary urgency of an assemblage between manual skills, simulations and the very idea of design tools in unlearning. Furthermore, I would like to discuss the limits and fluidity of pedagogical institutional structures.

Learning Situations in City Making, the open raumlabor university
Markus Bader

The open raumlabor university (ORU) is a fictional institution offering workshops, excursions, summer schools and open discussions as educational formats. Founded in 2015, it builds upon a long history of learning-related formats by raumlaborberlin, at the same time offering a new framing for the many participatory and exchange-oriented formats of the work. Iterations include Osthang Summer School, Urban School Ruhr and The Floating University, among others. The ORU is part of a wider move to shift from project to practice, and essentially seeks to open up a common space for exploration, improvisation and collective experimentation. It focuses on the curiosity and sense of wonder of participants, who will be encouraged to exchange experiences and develop practices together. The ORU is not fixed in time and space, and its structure and methods will vary with the context of each occurrence. The ORU seeks to create a learning environment based on dialogue, deep collaboration and lasting relations. Educational interactions extend beyond the members of the university, to a wider network involving local actors as well as international partners.

Markus Bader brings educational experiences from institutional and self-organised contexts as well as addressing the specific learnings out of open raumlabor university and how they can be related to institutional educational works.

System of Splines
Tor Lindstrand

In 1968, Jean Baudrillard, the French sociologist and philosopher, would expand on Marxist theories and suggest that objects, interiors and architectures are not only material but also vehicles of communication, they operate as signs within a system. In the book ‘System of Objects’ he argues that the analysis, the way we interpret and understand commodities in contemporary societies, should no longer be based on production, but rather on its opposite, consumption. According to Baudrillard, consumption is not merely the passive recipient of production, but an active endeavour in “the manipulation of signs” towards the creation of the “person” and its integration within the system. There is a close relationship between the subject which consumes, and the object being consumed. Baudrillard argues that to be human in contemporary society 1968, is to be an interior designer. A manipulator of signs in space, to reflect — to build an identity.

So, did this understanding leave architecture and design education today? If everybody in capitalist society is to be understood as a designer, are then architects, interior architects and designers just facilitating the smooth infrastructures needed to expand the territories of consumption? Western architecture education, as we know it today, was founded in a time (i.e. modern) when power was defined through politics. To be critical in architecture, meant formulating critique within a political matrix. The present power structures are increasingly defined through economies (i.e. postmodern). If this is true, an important question would be to ask how to think critically about the architecture of economy? How can we teach about the phenomena of consumer society without just producing even more capitalist concepts? How to imagine, in a time when architecture is about producing desire, an architecture for the fulfilment of needs?

Panel discussion
with Markus Bader, Tor Lindstrand and Sepake Angiama

Reflection
by Onkar Kular

Concluding panel
with speakers, moderators and panel guests, moderated by Pelin Tan and Magnus Ericson