Pierre D’Avoine: Collaborative Practice

Essay by Pierre D’Avoine

A short text by the Architect Pierre D’Avoine on the development of his teaching practice, his recent work as a diploma tutor at Kingston School of Art and the possibilities of resistance offered to architectural practice through a collaborative strategy, by the interstitial, the pre-existing and the transformed.

“Once upon a time, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly…flitting about happily enjoying himself. He did not know that he was Zhou. Suddenly he awoke, and was palpably Zhou. He did not know whether he was Zhou, who had dreamed of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhou.

I currently teach MArch design studios at the Kingston and CASS Schools of Architecture and have evolved a collaborative research based practice that is knowledge not form based. The main focus for teaching at Kingston is reflected in the course’s current context within an art and design based faculty. The curriculum builds on the fundamental creative processes of observation and making, and its ethos could be summarized as thinking through making. I have previously taught in the diploma school at Bath University School of Architecture with Patrick Hodgkinson (1992-95) where the pedagogical approach involved a considering the spaces between buildings rather than the design of the buildings themselves, and social engagement using ethnographic methods and spatial mapping. Teaching Diploma 8 at the AA School (1995-98) these methods were further developed, particularly in a programme set in the Bombay mill area where as a result of distress migration, over twenty five percent of the population occupied the pavements and the interstitial cracks and crevices of the city. The notion of an insurgent citizenship, that through sheer numbers in desperate circumstances created a tipping point – an active scenario where the state authorities were overwhelmed into tacit acceptance. Such models from the developing world are viewed with circumspection by western educated students when posited for global application and consumption. The cosmopolitan context particularly of London but also other major cities in European and North American which draws in architectural students from across the world, has an homogenizing effect as well as liberating opportunity for debate across cultures and societies where differences as well as similarities may be explored and evolved through the student project. Increasingly it becomes difficult to offer canonic critiques as conformity of response cannot be expected, desired or achieved.

There is evidence that students are once more increasingly interested in collaborative forms of practice and design methods that engage with socially-motivated outcomes. At Kingston where I have taught MArch design Studio 4 since 2012 with Pereen d’Avoine, Colette Sheddick and Alec Scragg, there have been initiatives set by Daniel Rosbottom (ex-head of School and currently professor of Architecture of the Interior at TU Delft) which engage the whole school community. In the period I have taught at Kingston we have focussed on World Heritage sites over three consecutive academic years. This provided scope and time to develop research tools and methods to interrogate issues of post industrial decline across the scale of territory, urban settlement and the domestic in the context of redundant landscape, infrastructure and building fabric in the Derwent Valley World Heritage site in Derbyshire in the English Midlands. Investigations have focussed on conditions which pertain to local context but aiming to inform a wider, even international application. The longer engagement with site and locale has enabled deeper-rooted speculations, which draw on relationships established with local people across the political and social spectrum to embed projects in a simultaneity of subversion and engagement with issues requiring time for students to process and find an individual and collective voice. Formal invention is part of a wider inquiry which embraces landscape, cultivation and new modes of dwelling.

We have referenced David Harvey’s book Spaces of Hope in which he distinguishes between utopias of spatial form and utopias of time. The former have been central to modernist architectural thought and practice and their political outcomes have tended to homogenising and totalising closure. Cosmopolitan neo-liberalism exemplifies the way utopias of time are  chimerical constructs in which the ‘trickle down’ effect is forever one of promise without fulinfilment, engendering a politics of frustration in an environment of disenfranchisement and dislocation. We have aimed for a radical emancipatory utopianism in our programmes in order to encourage students to engage with a repoliticized understanding of the potential role of the architect as well as an appreciation of architecture’s limits.

Our programme this academic year addressed the Thames in London between The Palace of Westminster and Putney Bridge where the Putney Debates took place in the 17th century and which resulted in the execution of Charles I. This revolutionary act led ultimately to the supremacy of Parliament, and the restricted role of British sovereigns as constitutional monarchs with limited executive authority – a model for democratic states challenged if not superceded by 21st century global corporatism. It opens up a demanding conversation about the radical transformation of a city which in many ways is the epicentre of the neo liberal project - the riverside a demonstration of privatised landscapes of exclusivity.

Students evolved their own critique in which ambiguity is much in evidence. Projects that resulted have been acts of optimism, heroism as well as attempted conciliation, drawing on the work of feminist artists Roni Horn and Helen Chadwick and Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates in which the interstitial provides an inspiration to find means of occupying and extending the city and leading to the creation of new common grounds. We engaged in conversation with Pat Brown and students in the Landscape Masters studio to further our mutual understanding of  the wider environmental discourse sometimes missing in the architectural project. 

Writing about Matta-Clark's practice, the artist Dan Graham emphasizes Matta-Clark's process of revisiting illegible spaces in order to renew phenomenal accessibility and to replace social legibility. The impulse of revisitation challenges the modern social ideology of progress that discards the old and moves quickly onto the new. In order to expose what Graham names as "the containment of the environment according to capitalist interests," Graham understands Matta-Clark's practice as "an attack on the cycle of production and consumption at the expense of the remembered history of the city.”

Notes

The image linking to this text from our front page is of a site model by the students of Pierre’s Diploma Unit at the Kingston School of Art in 2016. Included above is another image from that year by Rebecca Dillon-Robinson which is taken from her diploma project titled “Linking the Unseen” a précis of which has been included in our Archive.

This essay was originally published in DOMUS magazine, June 2016.

Published 30th November 2019