From care to cure and back

How will architecture change in the future?

It will change drastically. I ask myself all the time is it ethical to build anymore, or should we be focusing on “the Great Repair” of the broken world? Or is it more a case of broken architecture, or a broken mankind, or the creation of a more than human environment? These questions arise because for more than half a century we have been witnessing the capitalist modernity, with its emphasis on innovation, growth, and progress, its economic system based on consumerism, waste and profligacy, which has led to a ruthless exploitation of humans and nature. Architecture has played a huge part in this, as the statistics on greenhouse gas emis- sions and construction and demolition waste prove. As a counter-strategy to capitalism’s creative destruction, we should focus on the issue of repair, in which nurturing and main- tenance should become the key strategies for such action. And this is not just my idea, as the notion of care in architecture has been part of many international exhibitions, starting with the exhibition Critical Care Architecture and Ur- banism for a Broken Planet at the Architek- turzentrum Wien curated by Elke Krasny and Angelika Fitz, then the term “the Great Repair” was put forward by Milica Topalović and her team at ETH, and there are also the so-called pedagogies for a broken planet. I see the future in developments such as these.

What does your critical spatial practice include?

My critical spatial practice has components of artistic research, documentary filmmak- ing, curating, publishing/broadcasting, exhi- bition design, activism and post-disciplinary de-schooling. This is work that overlaps, diverges, converges, runs in parallel, in cir- cles, and in many cases came before and goes beyond. A whole multitude of practi- tioners and theorists have been developing work in an expanded field such as this, quite different perhaps from the one Rosalind E. Krauss identified in 1979. The term critical spatial practice was coined by the theorist Jane Rendell in the 2000s as a helpful way 213 of describing projects located between art and architecture, that both critiqued the sites into which they intervened as well as the disciplinary procedures through which they operated. Taking into account the wide spectrum of intellectual fields close to architecture and space – from urban anthropology to human geography – I consider connecting architecture with feminist theory crucial for the development of critical spatial practices. Gender-based analysis of architecture, its multiple forms of representation, where sub- jects and spaces are viewed as performa- tives and constructs, is aimed primarily at questioning the world around us. Moreover, critical spatial practices are necessarily self- critical and aim to change society, in con- trast to orthodox architectural practices that seek to maintain and strengthen the existing social and spatial order of inequality.

How is the LINA platform important for the development of an architecture of care?

I started working on the architecture of care based on the concept of pedagogies of care within the predecessor platform to LINA, the Future Architecture Platform. The Publishing School: Pedagogies of Care was an exploration of how we learn and produce knowledge collectively through emancipa- tory practices of care. The programme built upon the three experimental editorial workshops, titled Publishing Acts, and their collective efforts in shaping extraordinary publications, unlikely publics and unortho- dox spatial imaginaries.

Can radio once become again a media for architecture, as in the time of Frank Lloyd Wright, and how do you work with it?

Regarding radio as a powerful architec- tural tool, or the other media that architec- ture uses, I agree with those who say that architecture has now become transmedial. We don’t create only in the offline world, in the brick and mortar world, but in the on- line sphere as well. All media are useful, or rather necessary, to attain the goals of ar- chitecture. I’ve been involved in radio for a very long time, as I’ve been working for the Croatian radio station HR3, and have been developing the radio schools with artists during the Pedagogies of Care project. Like our colleagues from dpr-barcelona, whose motto is Books are louder than bombs, we say that radio is louder than bombs.