What does ‘site-specific’ mean when everyday life has a global impact?
In the 21st century, ‘context’ has to be recontexualized. Dwelling is now data (and data is dopamine). In the world-factory of your bedroom, your iPhone is both the water cooler and the machine. It’s coated with the unique mix of microbes hosted by your body and powered by the pulverized remains of millenia-old flora and fauna. With every like on Instagram, you’re helping inch the planet towards catastrophic global warming while your purchase history on Amazon racks up its own tally of geological implications: deleting forests, rerouting the Amazon river, voiding entire ecosystems. Meanwhile, the places where you sit and scroll are designed according to century-old patriarchal norms for gender identity and performative behavior – as is what you look at and what you click.
(Oh, and you’re definitely being watched, maybe by your own home.)
While our access to virtual space allows us to operate at a global scale while lying in bed, we aren't able to witness the consequences of our actions, which are often nonlocal or spectral. Never before have we been so individually empowered, but neither have we been more responsible for bolstering hegemonic forces. We’re caught in this web where any action we take has unforeseeable consequences and any position we take inheres hypocrisy.
What does this mean for the practice of architecture today?
Traditionally, architecture was produced through a patronage model. An architect would produce ideas and these ideas would be realized as built form through funding provided by a wealthy individual, limited and constrained by the amount of capital available, as well as physics, etc. Essentially, ideation meets capital to produce a building.
Then, sometime in the 60s and 70, the developer model began. Here, capital generates buildings largely outside of the architectural discipline. A developer usually has a few architects on staff who design buildings as cheaply as possible, and in order to appeal to the presumed tastes of the public, rather than for the advancement of ideas, form, etc. Essentially, watered down ideas. Occasionally, a developer might select architects of notoriety, which has created a canonized class within the discipline: the so-called “starchitects.”
Meanwhile, another class of architects either resign themselves to working in the big practices, where their own ideas have virtually no chance of realization, or resign themselves to work, as they say, on paper. These, incidentally, tend to be the more radical of architectural ideas, the ones that have the capacity to really modify the way cities operate. For these architects, the architectural exhibition – alongside books and journals – presents one of the only venues to showcase their ideas and work.
But architecture exhibitions tend to appropriate their model from the art world, favoring representations of built or speculative practices Yet unlike art, architecture has no choice but to be site-specific: it is its context. If architecture is a spatial practice and exhibitions typically occur in the three-dimensional world – why shouldn’t a work of architecture work in these spaces? We believe an exhibition of architecture is architecture (or at least can be).
More importantly, within a model borrowed from a different market, architects have little to gain from exhibiting their work. Their speculations will remain unrealized and their pockets remain empty. There are few collectors of architectural representations in the world, and little incentive to invest in practice with no chance of return. Architects aren’t artists, and their work doesn’t accrue value in the same way.
Social capital, if generated at all, tends to be disproportionately allocated to curators and hosting institutions. And these curators, infected by the art world’s desire for an ecclesiastical purity, attempt to immunize themselves from the "dirtiness" of the economy in order to construct some "pure space" for conceptual revelation (while cashing checks from CitiBank). Architecture can never be isolated from the economy. Space and capital are linked, now more than ever.
In short, the architecture exhibition as it exists today is outmoded, just as architecture’s reliance on a patronage model for funding leaves the field increasingly irrelevant. Architecture can only regain agency through redesigning its relationship to the economies in which it is embedded. If reimagined, the exhibition can serve a crucial role in presenting and advocating architectural ideas to a greater public and hopefully help architects fund, manage, and realize their own projects.
HOMESHOW is an exhibition project that investigates the position of architecture in relation to evolving notions of domesticity and labor within a context marked by the confluence of ecological enmeshment, globalized economies and information networks, as well as persistent patriarchal and racist structures. It focuses on architecture and design practices that locate the interaction of architecture with its others – those external forces that produce a place and determine how we use it – as a site of design.
HOMESHOW serves as an envelope for a series of discrete, architectural projects in an existing structure, where ‘curation’ is deployed to link these works, both conceptually and literally, through the organization of flows of energy and information. Located in an existing space in Los Angeles, the project will temporarily modify the relationship between the site and its expanded context. We’re trying to take seriously the idea of designing the economy of the project through components like revenue-generating programming (ie. coworking hours, AirBnB); a retail space for designed objects; innovative relationships to institutional and/or corporate sponsorship; and, most importantly, a crowd-equity model (click on the spinning coin for more information/to invest in the project). The project will also serve as a space for more traditional programming, such as talks and panels, as well as include an integral virtual component.
Rather than rely on a donation-based model to raise funds, which mirrors the patronage model of architecture, we’re developing a new platform that allows interested parties to become equity shareholders in our projects. One “modifier” (or “mod”) – a digital asset built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain – equals one share in Adjustments Agency and costs $10 during the crowdsale period.
Later on, you can redeem tokens for goods and services in our exhibits, or receive dividends from any profits earned.* Certain decisions we make will be put up to a vote, and the amount of shares you have equals the weight of your vote.
*This is an art project, not an actual business venture, so we can’t guarantee returns––but we’ll try.
Check us out at adjustments.agency!