NEW INVESTIGATIONS IN COLLECTIVE FORM

AUTHOR: NEERAJ BHATIA
CONTRIBUTORS: PIER VITTORIO AURELI, AND PEGGY DEAMER

“At a moment when designers and citizens feel powerless to adjust the larger systems of urbanization, this design-research provides a series of design templates that create new forms of collectivity”

“The problem of architecture is not just that architecture for too long has been complicit with institutions of power. The problem with architecture is that it often ‘naturalizes’ power, making it acceptable. The way in which architectural form naturalizes forms of (oppressive) power is visible in housing, parks, public buildings—all sort of constructions we now take for granted as inevitable paraphernalia of what we call the city. Rather than presenting these constructions for what they are, as ‘artifices’, architecture often tries to downplay its own artificiality and thus its real agency. This is not the case of The Open Workshop, whose body of work can be read as a deliberate production of form, but also as a reflection on the making of form itself. For The Open Workshop, form is always collective because it is the reification of forces that exceed individual intention.” 
—Pier Vittorio Aureli

‘New Investigations in Collective Form’ presents a group of design experiments by the design-research office The Open Workshop, that test how architecture can empower the diverse voices that make up the public realm and the environments in which they exist.

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