Legend has it that Victor Gruen, the Viennese émigré who in the early 1940s together with his wife Elsie Krummeck introduced the concept of a shopping center in the United States, ended his life disclaiming responsibility for this invention, snarling ‘I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments’. This attitude supposedly sprung from a grave disenchantment with what the shopping center had (in the eyes of Gruen) by that time become: a capitalist, consumerist shopping machine, depleted of any of the social or communal rewards that he had originally envisioned.
Since its inception in the early 1940s, much has been written about the shopping center. Particular emphasis has been placed on its ability (or rather ‘inability’) to function as a public space . While developers and managers of shopping centers usually cast them in a favorable, sunny light, architects and historians, by contrast, have been predominantly critical. Their views are based on opposing narratives; the former claiming that the shopping center is a common space, which facilitates community building, while the latter typically describing it as a space of contrived hyper-consumption and social control. Most criticism of the shopping center’s incapability to function as a common space is however based on user statistics and analyses of policies and regulations rather than on an in-depth architectural understanding.
As a discipline, architecture has more often than not dismissed the shopping center as a valuable subject, precisely because it is perceived a ‘prison of consumerism’, which—in turn—has led to the assumption that their formal design is merely a solidification of commercial forces and therefore unworthy of examination. Shopping center research is furthermore commonly biased towards Northern America. These observations lead to the question: would a profound architectural reconsideration of the shopping center reveal spatial concepts and social patterns that open up the opportunity to function as a shared space and to engender a feeling of ‘collectivity’?
August 27, 2015
in “De Witte Raaf” Editie 176 juli-augustus 2015.
September 12, 2015
Seamless Retail Design: The Store of the Future
Saturday, September 12—15:00
La Loge
Kluisstraat 86 | Rue de l’Ermitage 86
1050 Brussels | Map
In this talk Katelijn will present the results of the summer school “Seamless retail design: integrating the spatial, experiential and digital”. The goal of this 10-day summer school was to let students from different disciplines (interior design, architecture, product design/industrial design, marketing) collectively reflect on the challenges and opportunities of the “store of the future”. The general set-up was to combine the state-of-the-art knowledge coming from both academics and experienced practitioners with the creativity of students. Three major themes were highlighted during the morning teaching sessions: retail design (spatial), sensory marketing (experiential), and online & digital developments. In the afternoon sessions, students actively engaged in a design workshop in multidisciplinary teams, supervised by experienced retail designers. Each day, the teachers of the morning sessions also assisted in supervising the afternoon sessions to ensure an optimal integration of the knowledge. The results will be presented within a theoretical framework of the evolution of retail – from the past, present end future.
teacher: Katelijn Quartier
September 12, 2015
Inspecting ‘The Gruen Effect’
Saturday, September 12—16:30
La Loge
Kluisstraat 86 | Rue de l’Ermitage 86
1050 Brussels | Map
The Viennese architect Victor Gruen is considered the father of the shopping centre. His ideas about urban planning, both influential and abused, have (supposedly) led to cities that serve the new gods of consumption. This public school class will first screen the documentary ‘The Gruen Effect,’ produced by Anette Baldauf and Katharina Weingartner. By tracing Victor Gruen’s path from prewar Vienna to fifties America and back to Europe in 1968, this documentary explores the themes and translation errors that have come to define urban life. After the screening, a debate will be held to assess wether this negative interpretation of the shopping centre is a ubiquitous phenomenon or not. When Gruen’s shopping centre concept washed ashore in Western Europe, it encountered a peculiar socio-political climate; different to that of the United States. In the decades following the Second World War, and in part in response to the Cold War, governments across Western Europe had set out ambitious programmes for social welfare that aimed at improving the everyday lives of their citizens, thus facilitating the formation of a modern, socially responsible, culturally educated and politically responsive community. The construction of schools, cultural centres, sports facilities, holiday infrastructure, etc. was an important building block of this project. All these facilities provided spatial centrality, public focus and human density; characteristic that the shopping centre typology also possessed. We could therefore question if when Gruen’s commercial typology was first introduced to Western Europe, its underlying design principles were perhaps also consciously oriented towards eliciting a specific type of modern behaviour and building a modern community. Even from the United States suggestions have emerged that the shopping centre succeeded in creating such a reformative, community-oriented modern environment. In an article published in June 2014, the Guardian posited that ‘for mid-century Americans, these gleaming marketplaces provided an almost utopian alternative to the urban commercial district, an artificial downtown with less crime and fewer vermin … they were a place to see and be seen, something shoppers have craved since the days of the Greek agora .… it used to be where [the] young, middle-class[es] …, wearing their Sunday best, would come for weekend outings.’ Does the shopping centre thus merely serve ‘the new gods of consumption’, or is it a new figure of collectivity in the post-war urban realm?
teacher: Janina Gosseye
June 23, 2015
June 18, 2015
June 13, 2015
Mediating [Infra]Structures—Shopping Centers
David Smiley
Jen Smit
Jeroen Dirckx
Gideon Boie (moderator)
Saturday, June 13—15:00
Espace Louise
Gulden-Vlieslaan | Avenue de la Toison d’Or 40-42
1050 Brussels | Map
Speakers
David Smiley received his PhD from Princeton University and currently teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (U.S.). A practicing architect and historian, Smiley has written extensively about architecture, housing and cities. In 2002 he edited Redressing the Mall: Sprawl and Public Space in Suburbia, a projective study for the re-use of ‘dead malls’ and recently authored the book Pedestrian Modern: Shopping and American Architecture, 1925—1956 (2013), which elucidates the significance of store and shopping center design to modernist architectural and urban tenets in the United States.
Jen Smit is currently a lecturer at the University of Tasmania, School of Architecture and Design. She is a founding partner of Mulloway Studio, an Adelaide based architectural practice specializing in interpretation projects and urban place-making. Smit previously worked with Daryl Jackson Architects in Melbourne and Sydney, Hassell Architects in Sydney as well as on community based projects in India. She has taught at Adelaide University, and UniSA. Smit writes and researches on public space and the value of terrain vague—neglected spaces within cities—and the opportunity that these spaces offer as a counterpoint to places of ordinary consumption and production within cities.
Jeroen Dirckx is associate and urban planner at KCAP Architects&Planners in Rotterdam. He has worked at AWG-b0b Van Reeth in Antwerp. Since 2005 he works at KCAP, building up broad experience in conceptualizing projects and leading multi-disciplinary teams in the field of urban planning. He worked on the NEO project in Brussels, the London Olympic Legacy masterplanning framework and the Stadium Park vision in Rotterdam. Currently he is involved in the competition for the Flemish radio and television broadcasting headquarters in Brussels, the Elbbruecken masterplanning competition in Hamburg and the strategic vision for the airport city at Sheremetyevo, Moscow.
Gideon Boie is a Brussels-based architecture theorist and co-founder of the research and activism firm BAVO that focuses on the political dimension of art, architecture, and urban planning. BAVO’s publications include Urban Politics Now: Re Imagining Democracy in the Neoliberal City which offers an in-depth analysis of the current repudiation of urban politics and Too Active to Act: Cultural Activism after the End of History, a critical analysis of cultural production and activism in The Netherlands. Boie teaches and conducts research in architecture criticism at the KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture campus Sint Lucas.
Location
Espace Louise: The Cornerstone of an Incremental Shopping Centre in Downtown Brussels
In the early 1950s architect Emile Goffay was commissioned to design a multifunctional complex in the south-eastern corner of the Brussels Pentagon. The core of this complex was the Galerie Louise, an enclosed shopping street with about fifty shops, which was to provide access to a residential bloc of seventy apartments. During construction, the residential component of the complex was however abandoned in favour of office units. Between 1963 and 1964, Goffay’s complex was expanded when the architectural office of Jacques Cuisinier designed the Galerie de la Porte Louise which connected to the existing Galerie Louise and extended the covered pedestrian shopping street to the Avenue de la Toison d’Or. The final addition to the shopping complex was created in 1987, when the Espace Louise was built replacing the blocks Avenue de la Toison d’Or No. 40 to 42 and Rue Capitaine Crespel No. 7 to 21. Although the original uniformity of the Espace Louise gallery is interrupted by the continuing renovations of the retail spaces, the gallery has retained its basic structure, with duplex retail spaces clustered along the broad shafts that are staggered at each resting area or square.
June 15, 2015
Guerrilla Picnicking: are shopping centers malleable public spaces?
Monday, June 15—12:30
Meeting point in front of La Monnaie | De Munt
Place de la Monnaie | Muntplein
1000 Brussels | Map
The public status of shopping centers is contestable. On the one hand they are controlled (surveyed and monitored) spaces of consumption; simply ‘hanging-out’ in their interiors may be conditional on a subjectively assessed ability to purchase. On the other hand, the shopping center is synonymous with suburban life, where often these are convenient and available civic places for entertainment, social gatherings and cultural engagement.
Conducting a public picnic within these suburban interiors serves to test out the extent of public freedoms, and stake a claim for the right of citizens to occupy these ‘quasi’ public spaces in an unconventional manner.
Recalling nostalgic practices of a mid-19th century recreational pastime, the picnic provides a disarming method of laying claim to the ambiguous public territory of the shopping mall. The picnic blanket acts as a visual marker of the spatial boundary that is being claimed, for a time, by an apparently transgressive public.
Part public celebration and part public protest, the guerilla picnic serves to increase the options for belonging within a shopping center by a non-purchasing public, affirming the potential of these spaces to cater to a variety of publics. Guerilla picnicking provides a ‘momentary rupture’ to the more orthodox view that shopping centers only provide for relatively fixed, tightly regulated and commodified identities. [1]
Bring: A picnic blanket, a packed lunch and a sketch book.
teacher: Jen Smit
[1] Hou advocates for guerrilla urbanism as a means to test out the erosion of public space and public life in the city in staking a claim for the right to inhabit quasi-public spaces. Jeffrey Hou, Insurgent Public Space: Guerilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities (London: Routledge, 2010).
October 1, 2015
Testing the Potential for Public-ness
Thursday, October 1—18:00
IKEA Anderlecht
Chaussée de Mons | Bergense Steenweg 1432
1070 Anderlecht | Map
This psfa-bxl class is an experiment in testing the potential of meeting strangers in one of contemporary society’s iconic shopping centers, the Ikea commercial center. Few people have never set foot in an Ikea. Almost all of us have at some point tested furniture in one of the ubiquitous Ikea showrooms, have had coffee or a Swedish meatball dish in the Ikea cafeteria, or have been anxious to find the proper shelf in the Ikea Self Service Store. Ikea commercial centers are actually places where you can find a wide variety of people with different backgrounds and occupations and from different cultures. As such, they have the potential to be places “in which strangers are likely to meet”. But how likely is it that you will actually be interacting meaningfully with the ‘strangers’ that you share the store with? Can an Ikea be a place for significant human exchange and interaction? Or do their commonly criticized qualities of being privately owned and controlled, or lacking authenticity stand in the way of a meaningful encounter with ‘the other’?
please send an email (to info@city3.be) if you want to participate, and we will send you the location for the meeting place for the class.
teacher: Jorg De Vriese
June 11, 2015
Conference—The Shopping Centre, 1943—2013: The Rise and Demise of a Ubiquitous Collective Architecture
11—12 June 2015
Delft University of Technology
This conference will offer a fine-grained, region-specific reading of the shopping centre. Reassessing this commercial typology’s key characteristics, it will investigate the shopping centre’s contribution to post-war built environments and architectural culture. The conference is subdivided into four sessions, each focused on a particular theme.
The first session, ‘Acculturating the Shopping Centre’ will investigate if ‘hybrids’ developed as the paradigmatic shopping centre concept, the American dumbbell mall, encountered different socio-cultural climates, and what region-specific typologies can be identified. It also questions if, as societies changed over time, the shopping centre concept also—in a true Darwinistic fashion—evolved over time. The second session, ‘Building Collectives and Communities’ focuses on the reformist underpinnings and socio-cultural ambitions of shopping centres. It questions the role of shopping centres as new figures of collectivity in the post-war urban realm. ‘From Node to Stitch’, the third conference session, conversely addresses the role that the shopping centre has played in urban planning from 1943 to today. It connects the shopping centre’s development to urban reconstruction and revitalisation efforts on the one hand and explores the role that this commercial typology assumed in (post-war) urban expansion and structured suburbanisation on the other. The final session, ‘The Afterlife of Post-war Shopping Centres’ seeks to set out strategies for the contemporary redevelopment of post-war shopping centres. By identifying ‘best practices’, speakers in this session will explore if for the increasing number of American (and European) ‘dead malls’ there can be new life after death?
For more information visit: www.shoppingcentreconference.com
“Three dominant narratives have shaped the history of the American shopping mall. The first depicts the mall as a building type based on a rigid and highly inflexible format, largely determined by real estate economies, marketing research, and architectural behaviorism. The outcome of this story is the generic suburban regional mall, reproduced from coast to coast. The second narrative portrays the mall as a fundamentally antiurban force, fostering the growth of what is commonly known as sprawl, defined as the antithesis of livable urban space and incapable of providing genuine urban experience. The third narrative sees the mall as a vehicle for a continuous process of commodification, through which a wide range of social and communal experiences and public spaces are swallowed up by commerce.
In order to broaden the picture of the mall, I would like to “deconstruct” these narratives—to question some of the assumptions on which they are based and to provide counter-examples that show that malls operate in ways distinctly different from the views offered by the usual narratives.
If we look at the history of suburban shopping malls, we find that these three views are not only misdirected but that they preclude a deeper understanding of how we might address the necessity of change. First, rather than acting as single, rigid forms, malls have been amazingly adaptable building types. They have continuously adjusted, reinvented, and retooled themselves in response to multiple economic and social changes; they take many forms and have flourished in a variety of settings. Second, malls have functioned not as agents of urban disorder but as agents of planning and order. This is especially the case in the amorphous suburbs that proliferated after World War II, where the mall provided a community focus and a centralizing element. As a result, many observers saw malls as a positive force in shaping suburban life. Finally, I want to suggest that in the long run, the processes that critics have seen as generating the malls’ debilitating social effects are more complex than they imagine. We need to see commerce and commodification not as inevitable, one-directional controlling processes but as a complex condition that can be partial, temporal, and even reversible, creating situations of decommodification.
In any study of shopping malls, the concept of “public space” also needs to be scrutinized. Public space should be viewed not as a single, unified physical and social entity but as a situation that can be experienced in multiple, partial, and even paradoxical ways. Thus, there is no single public space but as many different public spaces as there are different publics. All of this suggests that the complex process of malling can be directed in a variety of directions by changing any one or combination of such elements as public policy, regulation, financing, ownership, and management, as well as physical form and design.”
(from Suburban Life and Public Space by Margaret Crawford)
Transport hubs such as railway stations, airports, bus and train terminals are often dismissed as ‘non-places’, uniform, anonymous, functionally furnished places with people always on the move. According to French anthropologist Marc Augé these homogenized ‘non-places’ where we spend so much of our time create “neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude and similitude.” [1] Their anodyne and anonymous quality—a Muzak-filled supermodernity—offers the transitory occupant the illusion of being “always, and never, at home.” Here people meet but do not interact and social relationships remain insignificant.
However, not everyone shares Augé’s unsettling opinion. Transport hubs according to British architect and writer Brian Edwards, are complex social places that could be considered a new form of community hub, as their generous concourses draw in people from different social strata. But how can transport hubs facilitate encounters and encourage meaningful interaction?
Mediating [Infra]Structures tries to forgo the pessimistic approach towards transport hubs by questioning what types of human interaction take place in these spaces, and how their transitory nature could be conceived as relevant social space that still hold some public meaning and a potential for public-ness. The ability (or inability) of the transport hub to function as shared social space by ‘mediating’ interactions of its transient users is examined with a focus on the spatial concepts inherent in spaces of mass transport.
[1] Augé, Marc, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995).
December 8, 2015
Ontwerp van kleinschalige Mobiliteitsknopen
Tuesday, December 8—19:00
morpho house
Gaillaitstraat 80 | Rue Gallait 80
1030 Brussels | Map
Ontwerpstrategieën voor stedelijke stationsomgevingen hebben we stilaan wel onder de knie. Niet-stedelijke openbaar vervoersknooppunten veel minder. Door de opmars van regionale OV-projecten wordt het steeds meer een relevant ontwerpvraagstuk. Wat zijn mogelijke ontwerpstrategieën om dit soort opgaves aan te pakken?
teacher: Matthias Blondia
October 21, 2015
October 14, 2015
Mediating [Infra]Structures—Transport Hubs
Christian Salewski
Nicolas Firket
Ruth Soenen
Lara Schrijver (moderator)
Wednesday, October 14—19:00
Gare du Nord | Noordstation
1030 Brussels | Map
Speakers
Dr. Christian Salewski is an architect and urban designer, and founder-partner of Christian Salewski & Simon Kretz Architekten GmbH, Zurich. As researcher, he has received grants from the German National Foundation, DAAD, Dutch Science Organisation NWO, ETH Zurich, and EIT Climate-KIC. Co-founder of the research platform Airports and Cities, Christian is an expert on urbanization processes at and around major airports, and an authority on scenarios in planning and design. He wrote Dutch New Worlds. Scenarios in Physical Planning and Design in the Netherlands, 1970—2000, winning the Medal of ETH Zurich 2012 and the IPHS biennial book price 2014.
Nicolas Firket is an architect and the founder of NFA Nicolas Firket Architects, an architecture firm based in Brussels. A former OMA / Rem Koolhaas associate, Nicolas Firket established the office in 2006 with the long term aspiration of valorizing a Brussels-based European identity fostering significant international collaborations. NFA focuses on Architectural and Urban design as cultural disciplines with fundamentally prospective natures. The office was involved in two major Masterplan competitions in Brussels, in 2009, “A New Skyline for Brussels” for the EU commission’s compounds along Rue de la Loi, and in 2010 for the Heysel plateau redevelopment. In 2012 NFA, in association with l’AUC, was appointed as the urbanists in charge of the Brussels-Midi station area redevelopment for the coming decade, a project involving infrastructures, public space, private and public programmes, in an interwoven complexity at a national scale.
Ruth Soenen has a Master degree in Educational Sciences. In 2009 she obtained her PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology at KU Leuven. Between 1995 and 2010 she was an ethnographic researcher at Ghent University and the KU Leuven. Her fieldwork is situated within western society, in the urban context of Flanders with special attention for disadvantaged neighborhoods and collectively used spaces like schools, shops, public transport and libraries. She participated in several international conferences on ethnography and urban anthropology. She is the author of the book Het kleine ontmoeten. Over her sociale karakter van de stad (2006), and of many national and international articles in her field of research.
Lara Schrijver is Professor in Architecture at the University of Antwerp, Faculty of Design Sciences. She was an editor for OASE for ten years, and served four years on the advisory committee of the Netherlands Fund for Architecture. Her work has been published in the Journal of Architecture, Footprint, and Volume. Her book Radical Games (2009) was shortlisted for the 2011 CICA Bruno Zevi Book Award. Her research focus is on twentieth-century architecture and its theories.
Location Map:
August 14, 2015
July 14, 2015
“I suspect that the airport will be the true city of the 21st century. The great airports of the planet are already the suburbs of an invisible world capital… The terminals and the concourses are the ramblas and agoras of the future city…”
(J.G. Ballard)
An ‘in situ’ lecture / debate in October, followed by workshops and classes in October and November. The locations will be announced in September. The speakers for the debate on transport hubs as Mediating [Infra]Structures will be announced in July.
“The contemporary air terminal is like a city. As it became a multifunctional site, it also developed an urban culture. The implosive articulation of a many-purposed pedestrian crowd creates a critical mass of social density, much like the busy downtown district of a large central city. With enough interacting people, the scene itself emerges as a distinct feature of place, more than the sum of individuals. The terminal abandons its significance as a backdrop and assumes the power of independent character in the public melodrama. This reversal of foreground and background reduces the individual to a part of the mass and has been a characteristic of cities since the nineteenth century. To be sure, the airport still has scenes of immense drama, such as the reuniting of a family after a flight, but now the terminal space, as a mise-en-scene, dominates aspects of interaction despite the comings and goings of individuals. Terminal space in our biggest airports has transcended the human performances it contains.
[…]
For most of us, this postmodern characteristic of the airport is perceived by intention. Travelers are always only part of the general scene. Through years of media conditioning, we no longer marvel or even pause at emotional scenes like reunions or separations that punctuate the more mundane reality of waiting for flights. An encounter with terminal space is only a temporary stopping-off time between planes and locations. Who among us ever intended a trip to the airport to be anything more substantial? We do not live in airports nor do we make spending time there an important part of our social life, despite efforts by developers to marry the terminal with the mall form in order to attract general-purpose crowds. Time spent in terminals is dead time, a blank period during which we already find ourselves forgetting the experience while it is still happening. Terminal time, for most of us, is only an inconvenience while we wait for planes.
Yet if we abandon the subjective perspective of our individual dramas and look at the airport with more objective eyes, another dimension pops out, much like an optical illusion that once went unnoticed. Foreground and background reverse themselves in a postmodern sense. The terminal is a temporary container of the human drama, but by itself it assumes a reality and world of its own as the different functions it offers to the public become more developed in scale and scope by airport designers.”
(from The Airport as City by Mark Gottdiener)
In Cultural Capital Theory, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu identifies ‘culture’ as a device used by the dominant class to exclude the subordinate classes. Bourdieu’s assessment is seemingly confirmed by the architectural forms of the nineteenth century temples of culture, whose grandeur and inaccessibility seem designed to serve a double purpose: both as a representation of the autonomy of culture and as a means of social demarcation and distinction. In Europe, culture remained an elitist activity until the mid twentieth century, when expanding social legislation and increasing government intervention was paralleled by a call for democratization, leading to the democratization of culture. As a result, culture became more inclusive in the second half of the twentieth century and emerged as an agent of modernization in a democratic society. Its ideological function as a unifying and civilizing force relied on the explicit insistence on general access and the elimination of privilege.
To achieve cultural democratization, the distance between ‘high’ culture and ‘popular’ culture was reduced as ‘high culture’ was (quite literally) connected to ‘low culture’ in the cultural center; as a ‘new’ cultural typology that was promoted (as well as heavily subsidized by European governments) from the 1960s on. Specifically designed to encourage cultural participation by accommodating both (high and low) ends of the cultural spectrum, the cultural center received different ‘depositions’ all over Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. Destined to become an ‘open house’ for the community, which appealed to every citizen, the cultural center’s unprivileged disposition was to be expressed through its architecture. The logic that underlay the deliberate combination of the high and the low of culture in one building, was that those who visited the cultural center to partake in – or attend one of the popular, ‘low’-culture activities would ‘stumble across’ the ‘high-brow’ program that the center offered and would thus be ‘culturally educated’. The cultural center was to function as a ‘mediating structure’.
Given the high aspirations for cultural centers in the mid twentieth century and the proliferation of the building type since, how were these aims met? Were, and are, cultural centers successful agents of democratization? What has become of the old ‘bourgeois’ cultural palaces in such a democratized culture? Do they have the capacity to function as ‘mediating infrastructures’? What role can cultural centers – in the broadest term of the word – play in creating a social space today?
December 10, 2015
December 7, 2015
Mediating [Infra]Structures—Cultural Centers
Martine De Maeseneer
Christoph Grafe
Jennifer Mack
Hans Teerds (moderator)
Monday, December 7—19:00
Théâtre National
Boulevard Emile Jacqmain 111-115
Emile Jacqmainlaan 111-115
1000 Brussels | Map
Speakers
Martine De Maeseneer is the founder of Martine De Maeseneer Architects [MDMA]. MDMA has been around for two decades of practicing, theorizing and teaching within an international forum of schools, colloquia and competitions. Their (first) public building of a certain scale, the Bronks Youth Theatre in the center of Brussels, was honored in 2011 as the first ever Belgian finalist in the European Mies van der Rohe Award for Contemporary Architecture. MDMA has lectured widely across the world counting in cities as Kyoto, Chicago, and Los Angeles. De Maeseneer has taught at the Architectural Association in London, the KU Leuven and the Academy of Building Art Tilburg and has been teaching since 1990 at W&K Sint Lucas Ghent / Brussels.
Christoph Grafe is an architect and writer. He is Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal (Germany) and director of the Flemish Architecture Institute in Antwerp. His PhD dissertation People’s Palaces focussed on the architecture of post 1945 public buildings for culture in general and the building histories of the South Bank in London and the Kulturhus in Stockholm. The book Cafés and Bars: The architecture of sociability (co-edited with Franziska Bollerey) was published in 2007. Grafe is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Architecture and the editorial advisory board of Interiors (Berg publishers). He has been an editor of OASE since 1992.
Jennifer Mack is a postdoctoral fellow at Uppsala University and researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. She combines ethnography, history, and formal analysis to study social change and the built environment, with current projects on the design of large-scale mosques and churches, the politics of landscape in allotment gardens, and the Swedish town center (centrum). Her forthcoming book investigates the “segregated” Swedish town of Södertälje since the 1960s through her notion of “urban design from below.” There, she examines the collision between the norms of Swedish design and planning vis-à-vis the architectural projects and spatial practices of one immigrant group. Jennifer holds a PhD from Harvard University and an MArch and MCP from MIT.
Hans Teerds is a researcher at the Faculty of Architecture at Delft University of Technology, where he is writing a PhD thesis on architecture and the public domain, a theme he approaches on the basis of philosopher Hannah Arendt’s written work. He published the anthology Architectural Positions, Architecture, Modernity and the Public Sphere, together with Tom Avermaete and Klaske Havik in 2009, and published Levend Landschap, Manifest voor stad en land (Living Landscape, Manifesto for Town and Country) in collaboration with Johan van der Zwart in 2012. Teerds is a member of the editorial boards of architecture journals OASE and DASH.
Location Map:
December 1, 2015
“[The] capacity of cultural centres to address people from various social backgrounds, not as consumers, but as intelligent citizens, continues to hold appeal against the background of contemporary social realities. Their assumptions about a modernisation of society through access to culture and education, and the egalitarian ideals informing the process of their invention and realisation, may have been uncritically optimistic, riddled by internal contradictions and vain hopes; yet, as a model for creating enclaves in which commercial logics, social privilege or distinction are temporarily suspended, the cultural centres have retained some of the initial promise of a good society. The proposal that culture, the various forms of creative expression, but also of debate and dialogue, might constitute some sort of common ground for contemporary societies has not lost its validity. Rather, I suspect, it might have acquired a greater urgency against the background of the increasing social and cultural divisions, which have emerged over the past twenty or so years between different social and ethnic constituencies across Europe.
There was, in other words, an interest in reassessing, and perhaps rehabilitating, the cultural centre as an important part of the social experiment of the post-war period and its legacy. This desire was by no means unfounded. Many of the cultural centres (including the South Bank and to a lesser degree the Stockholm Kulturhus) went through extended periods of neglect and decay. Particularly in the 1980s and early 1990s many of them crumbled away, often just kept afloat by their administrators trying to make ends meet with less and less money. Sometimes these institutions, established to offer cultural activities for a wide audience, were replaced by new semi-commercial agencies whose main concern it became to develop the commercial potential of a site rather than exploring how these institutions might take a role in redefining culture and access to it. Sometimes, cultural centres just renamed themselves and operated under names designed to carry historical prestige, reverting to the older classifications of ‘theatre’ or ‘museum’, as if to hide their origins in the social experiment of the post war welfare state. Often the very existence of many of the cultural centres was called into question.”
(from People’s Palaces by Christoph Grafe)