by Jesse Seegers

Al Manakh 2: Gulf Continued, published as special edition of Volume Magazine by Archis, OMA/AMO, Pink Tank and NAi.

If the monolithic Al Manakh 1 was an exuberant, unintentional propaganda machine, Al Manakh 2: Gulf Continued shows a maturity derived from its propaganda in all directions. Rem Koolhaas’ introduction admits the potentially embarrassing situation that all parties involved could have found themselves in if Al Manakh 2 embraced the same editorial manifesto as the first: an exuberant, progress-driven consortium of articles about development in the Middle East Gulf Region. Fortunately, through the heterogeneity of contributions and editorial positions, Al Manakh 2 is poignantly entertaining read, yet also seems destined to become a valuable anthropological resource in years, decades, and perhaps even centuries to come.

Gulf Continued is a compendium of over 140 articles, divided into six “chapters” of sorts: Crisis and Crises, Consultants, Vision, About (the Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council), Cohabitation, and Export Gulf. Every perspective-from the powerful Emirati national to the lowly architecture journalist in New York-is included to prove a point, pass a value judgment, or project an ideal: with varying degrees of transparency. These various and sometimes contradictory perspectives transform the book into a kind of newspaper, as if each article had been picked from a different gazette around the globe and translated into English. Imagine a broad experiment in opinion-mining by asking experts in various cultural fields the question: “What do you find interesting about The Gulf?”

It is equally important to distinguish the all-encompassing and inclusionary scope of Al Manakh 2. Most western perceptions of the Gulf focus on Dubai, perhaps because it’s architectural (sur)realities have become the subject of news headlines and sound bites, as perfectly parodied in Rory Hyde’s Dubai Bashing Article Generator. But the tome addresses the entire Gulf Region, focusing on Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Manama, Kuwait City, and Riyadh, as well as touching on the Gulf’s relationships with Lebanon, Northern Africa, and Southeast Asia.

The book’s multidimensional stance has its advantages and its shortcomings. Some articles enter incredibly unique or potentially prophetic territory, like Antonia Carver’s history of the UAE’s art and culture scene through it’s bohemian beginnings as the collective Mis from 2001 to 2004, and Mishaal al Gergawi’s Abu Dubai: A Forward Tale of Two Cities That Could Only Be One which predicts the conglomeration of Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Other standout articles are Kayoko Ota’s brief story of Kenzo Tange’s proposal for an urban system for the Hajj (tragically aborted upon King Faisal ibn Abdul Aziz Al Saud’s assasination in 1975), and the multiple research-compilation articles by Sandra Bsat, Daniel Camara, and Mitra Khoubrou. Interspersed pages of news headlines and full-page powerful images provide both a snapshot of a period in time and a glimpse into the mindset that must have been fermenting in different regions of the Gulf. All this is importantly (and painstakingly) self-referential by means of green asterisks throughout, providing references to related articles, by which the book can almost become a choose-your-own-adventure novel, jumping from article to article, viewpoint to viewpoint, on the hinge of a related anecdote.

Specific shortcomings of the book include Rem Koolhaas and Todd Reisz’s interview with Khalid Al Malik, which comes off almost as an (unintended?) sales pitch. A developer speaking in generalities about dedication to a vision, everything is always going well, unchecked proclamations of Dubai’s destiny to attract 15 million visitors by 2015. Somehow one could imagine the statement being touted as true even if it weren’t, as if it was simply not possible that the vision could not manifest itself. Additionally, the “About Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Authority (UPC)” chapter reads like a highway billboard compared to the rest of the book, which comes as no surprise: the UPC has exclusively sponsored the book. Filled with token images of urban plans, real-estate brochures and vague, redundant statements about community and wellness, it seems aimed at convincing the UPC itself of their mission just as much as any reader. It gives the impression that the group that has learned the least from the past decade are the ones bankrolling it.

As the complexities of The Gulf Region begin to reveal themselves, it becomes necessary to reflect, to look back to the distant year of 2007, when the first Al Manakh was published. The two publications can be viewed as a point/counterpoint or an if/then. Hopefully we can also imagine them as the first two installments of a Hollywood blockbuster-trilogy-to-be. What kind of “three-quel” would Al Manakh 3 be: Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade, or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly?

by Sara Marini

Bolles + Wilson, A handful of productive paradigms, Bolles + Wilson, Münster 2009

The size, the graphics and the title of this recent book by Bolles+Wilson illustrate the meaning of their research which is deliberately paradigmatic and admittedly disorienting for anyone who approaches their work thinking of finding the trends or déjà-vu that set the aesthetics of their book-manifestos from 1994 on. The volume’s dominant images are not independent instruments of fascination; they are complex - utilized to explain a specific line of thinking. There is no temporal linearity; from the authors’ office, into which the reader is immediately invited, to the enigmatic rooms of the Hotel New York in Rotterdam illustrated at the end of the book; the reader is led into the city and into the reasons underpinning the making of architecture.

Three paradigms are illustrated at the beginning of the book: mass, shadow, tectonic; 2 of the book’s 295 pages are dedicated to them. The remaining pages are devoted to thematic chapters (Homebase; Elsewhere projects; Urban choreography; Floating signifiers; Reading places - Reading architecture; Rooms at the Hotel New York, Rotterdam) in which texts, but above all projects and buildings, substantiate the evolution of the German office - designers of numerous libraries including the City Library in Münster and the BEIC’s project in Milan. The volume corresponds, in fact, to a significant number of international projects from which one might simplistically deduce that the book is a catalog or a monograph, but its very structure - the way in which these experiences are narrated and the explanations of the title and the meaning of the publication illustrated at the book’s opening - highlights its difference. The graphic design by Peter Wilson is structured into clear commentary without overlapping or layerings, while the graphic material is diverse and disjointed, clearly not homogeneous, evidencing the steps necessary to clarify the research that leads to the realization of a building that wants to confront the city and its continuing evolution. It is a real and pinpointed setting down on paper of the office’s work. It is not a pretentious story of architecture’s backstage production but an exaltation of the contrived nature of the city’s materials. Some of the tools (renderings, technical drawings and photographs) used to conceive and build a project and test its results are intended to narrate unused space because they serve to control dimensional and technical data. Others, like the exemplary watercolors, reveal architecture as an incubator of humanity which, when populated, states its raison d’etre and its crossing as public space: interiors and exteriors are seamlessly interconnected. 

The paradigms narrated are offered as systems of production: what is shown clearly, what becomes a model is reasoning and not form or archetype; what becomes exemplary is the process defining the meaning of the building. The paradigms delineate a constellation of points: significant as a whole but at the same time able to operate independently.

Theory and practice coexist and intermingle in this work. Bolles+Wilson expound their personal research, nourished by history and “radical” thinking (likes Superstudio’s landscape presented on the cover of Casabella N°. 363, 1972 or Cedric Price’s Fun Palace quoted by Julia Bolles in her book on public space), by other cultures through which to embody dichotomies and not colonization or camouflage (like the Suzuki House, built in 1993, in which Japanese character is expressed in a building that is a declared relation to European culture, from Diderot to-Jeanneret Le Corbusier). They show ways of translating this “foundational” energy into real architecture, truly eager to participate in the city’s transformation, truly able to convey the pleasure of thinking about and making architecture for an inhabited world.

by Sara Marini

Antonella Agnoli, Le piazze del sapere. Biblioteche e libertà, Roma-Bari, Laterza 2009

It may seem a provocation to say that we can discuss the project, re-found its bases, seek new options and perhaps even remember forgotten options for the creation of public places today by starting from the library. What Antonella Agnoli calls “the marketplace of knowledge” could tritely be considered somewhere in considerable conflict with the ‘contemporary’ world as their raison d’être is undermined by technological advances and the difficulty of decoding the characteristics of shared space. Apart from anything else, the author, who studied architecture but has always focused on running libraries, has produced an openly specialist book in which she devotes a whole chapter to the profession of the librarian. However, it would be a mistake to brand this work as simply an investigation into libraries. The weighty words in the title provide a number of clues, especially for those planning and tracing a large backdrop. Public libraries can be run like marketplaces of knowledge and become new bastions of freedom.

The book is structured in several sections that trace the advances made, from the data in a national overview to examples of libraries bearing the connotations of public space. The start is somewhat dramatic with Antonella Agnoli providing the figures on books, readers and libraries. The fate of ‘the book’ seems sealed - it will come out of the library and end up in a museum, perhaps more for a lack of admirers than technological competition. But the first pages, which remind us of the destruction of books described by Hrabal in Too Loud a Solitude, is followed by the author’s true purpose, which is to paint a militant and surprisingly optimistic picture. Without making any allowances, Agnoli considers the responsibility of those who manage library space and, naming actual names including the San Giovanni library in Pesaro which she ran for years, says that this space can be turned into a marketplace. She performed a ‘miracle’ in Pesaro, a miracle that has been repeated elsewhere in Italy and more often abroad. And, as the author tells us, it is a miracle based on the management of the space (when presenting her work, the writer remarks with well-earned pride that mothers in Pesaro used to stop her in the street and ask why their teenage daughters had changed their Saturday or Sunday afternoon habits and would now go to the library!).

This highlights a first, crucial point in the construction of a public space: its management. Taking the library in San Giovanni as an example once again, the fact that it was a building-passage, a shortcut from one part of the city to another, was seen as an opportunity for its management. By eliminating communication barriers, as too furnishing ones, they removed the boundaries between library and city, prompting the local population to nip in, perhaps just out of curiosity or to ‘pass time’.

In this way, the civic library accepts its due urban and social role; by intentionally and to some degree rejecting the cultivation of the religious silence required for study and thought - and deferring this mission to more specialist libraries and quieter spaces on the top floors - they traced a rightly varied landscape of knowledge and its safekeeping.

The spaces in these buildings are compared to those of marketplaces because they are open, are structured with flexible components that facilitate their fruition (it is important to point out that, unlike architecture photographs, what Agnoli shows in her book are places ‘contaminated’ by the presence of locals) and are more willing to embrace than impose actions. One chapter is entitled Dell’imparare dai supermercati (”Learning from the supermarkets”) or how to facilitate user orientation and reception. This issue is also addressed on the basis of proxemics, a discipline that studies the ways people move around in space and how this knowledge can guide the construction and management of library space and that of the marketplace. Crucially, the user rather than books is placed at the heart of the text and the book’s worth rests on the relationship it can establish with its hypothetical readers. By pursuing this standpoint, the library can cross-fertilise with other functions, embracing and offering services and activities that will catapult - virtually and according to personal needs - users into their own private space, where they can sit comfortably in an armchair or enjoy a particular view of the city. Indeed, the city becomes the subject of this book, which is about libraries but that, in seeking fresh energies for public space (wrenched from shops and home), in bringing books closer to everybody and in bringing people closer to each other, partly via the mix of functions present in one place, it is actually telling us about freedom and how this “substance” can permeate the project.

“In a world where we have traded an all-pervading control of our lives in exchange for an illusion of safety, where we press for more cameras to watch over public spaces and more guards to protect private ones, libraries, marketplaces and parks must be defended as anonymous areas of casual encounter and metropolitan freedom.” (Agnoli, p. 154)

by Laura Bossi

Unifying Africa, edited by Uche James Iroha, Lagos 2010

Simon Kuper is a keen scholar of the football universe: in Soccer Against the Enemy (Calcio e Potere), one of the most intelligent essays that has ever been written on the relationship between football and politics, the Dutch journalist says that when the national team field of any African country takes the, the whole continent is on its side. The same certainly can not be said for Europe. When France loses, the Italians certainly don’t shed a tear. On the contrary…

It isn’t strange, therefore, that an institution so deeply committed to, and involved in, developing countries like the foundation of Dutch Prince Claus Fund, has backed the publication of Unifying Africa, with football. Edited by James Iroha Nigeria in collaboration with some of the Africa’s most interesting photographers, this collection brings together over 500 images that are able to show that football really is an element of social cohesion and can cross borders between individual nations. In other words, football succeeds where politics fails.

At the same time, Unifying Africa, with football is a kaleidoscope of colors and human faces that reveals the passion for this sport even in the bleakest urban landscapes, for example, in the slums of Monrovia, Liberia, or in the makeshift camps Banku in Ghana. And, finally, it’s a kind of visual journey through the African continent, with particular emphasis on Nigeria and Ghana, which, of course, are countries that hold a kind of hope in the future.

Director of PhotoGarage Lagos, a platform for cultural exchange with a special emphasis on photography, James Iroha was honoured with laureateship in the 2008 Prince Claus Awards. Among others, the following also participated in the project: Michael Tsegaye (Ethiopia), George Osodi e Andrew Esiebo (Nigeria).

by Jessica Reynolds

Architecture on Display: On the History of the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Aaron Levy and William Menking, AA Publications, London 2010

In this preliminary history of the Venice Biennale of Architecture, consisting of eleven interviews with consecutive directors and the ongoing president, Levy and Menking investigate the curatorial, political and economic complexities behind this incredible “living institution.”

While formally inaugurated in 1980 with “The Presence of the Past” exhibition directed by Paolo Portoghesi, the book locates the Biennale of Architecture’s unofficial origins five years earlier in Vittorio Gregotti’s “On the Subject of Molino Stucky” show of 1975 at the Magazzini del Sale in the Zattere, exhibiting design competition proposals to transform derelict granary mills on the Giudecca (today Hilton Venice Hotel). The thematic progression from Gregotti’s original vision to Sanaa’s current “People Meet in Architecture” exhibition demonstrates continuities in curation regarding urban and social agendas, as well as new directions such as Deyan Sudjic’s literal “Next” (2002) and Aaron Betsky’s inclusive “Out there: Beyond Building” (2008).

Arguably as important as themes are the techniques of architectural display. Conversations in the book repeatedly refer to the exemplary “Strada Novissima” installation of 1980 conceived by Portoghesi, who invited international architects to design facades to form part of a real model of a street inside the Corderie of the Arsenale. He explains, “The idea was not to show images of architecture, but to show real architecture.” This desire to push representation towards the experiential and theatrical is evident in the use of interactive media (Richard Burdett’s choice of video and projection to create an exhibition contained on a cd), large scale models and installations (Kazuyo Sejima speaks of “atmospheres” - incidentally the only female voice in this book), life-size mock-ups of building fragments (Kurt Forster’s “Episode” room), and events (Sudjic’s firework display proposals). The problem of engaging a public, from cultural critic to architectural student to generic tourist, is explored through these different modes of communication, Massimiliano Fuksas humorously positing that it is not people but architects who meet in architecture.

Surprising given its size and reputation, the lack of funding (together with time) is revealed to be the Biennale’s biggest constraint, with each director having to find their own ways of increasing its shoestring budget. Originally predominantly an Italian event, Francesco Dal Co describes his pivotal role in encouraging in other nations to fund the Biennale. It is fascinating to gain insight into the various administrative structures of each national pavilion, together forming a type of micro geopolitics in Venice, with the latest additions of China, Abu Dhabi and other emerging countries.

The process of archiving the Architecture Biennale - both the subject and ambition of this publication - is explored on two fronts: firstly in the permanent constructions of the Biennale including the appropriation of the awesome Arsenale by Portoghesi, the re-landscaping of the Giardini envisaged by Kurt Forster and completed under Betsky, the creation of a new bookstore designed by James Stirling on the invitation of Dal Co (now housing of the “bibliography” of the Biennale), and Hans Hollein’s creation of the Golden Lion award for architecture; and secondly in the plethora of transitory ephemera such as exhibition catalogues, and blackberry and email trails that usually vanish with each director. The Biennale’s president Paolo Baratta discusses his plans to focus on the collection of this material in the archive, as well as his visions for a parallel permanent research body, particularly timely with the arrival of architectural curation as its own academic discipline.

Symmetrically framed between Levy’s Introduction and Menking’s Afterword (who together represented the US in 2008), and prefaced by Brett Steele, these chronologically-ordered anecdotal dialogues convincingly present the Venice Biennale of Architecture as operational infrastructure rather than a series of disconnected events. The book’s minimal graphic - cream pages enclosed in a white cover filled with large black text - reflects an informality suitable to its Hans Ulrich Obrist-style oral format, emblematic of the temporal nature of the biennale itself. In keeping with the conceptual tightness of the project, the sole missing interview is represented in a single image on the inner leaf of the back cover: a black and white photograph of Aldo Rossi’s floating Teatro del Mondo of 1980, to leave us contemplating the theatrical possibilities of past and future Architecture Biennales, and in anticipation of a comprehensive sequel to this publication.