CIVA PODCASTS: Recent Episodes
CIVA PODCASTS
CIVA is a museum, an archive, a library, a place to meet and debate, for all people passionate about contemporary and modern architecture, urbanism, landscape architecture and urban ecosystems in Brussels. The centre hosts exhibitions, lectures, debates, guided tours, book launches and children activities. All events take place in Ixelles (Brussels) and at Kanal – Centre Pompidou. CIVA will be integrated in the upcoming Kanal-Centre Pompidou project by 2024.
The podcasts produced by CIVA deal with modern and contemporary architecture and art, landscape architecture, the city and its history.
In this episode CIVA Artistic Director Nikolaus Hirsch talks to Mark Wigley about whiteness as part of our concept of health, our concept of cure and disease. Wigley is Professor and Dean Emeritus at Columbia GSAPP.
Read the Chronic Whiteness essay by Mark Wigley on e-flux Architecture
Architecture and sickness are tightly intertwined. Architectural discourse always weaves itself through theories of body and brain, constructing the architect as a kind of doctor and the client as patient. Architecture has been portrayed as both a form of prevention and cure for thousands of years. With Sick Architecture, CIVA and guest curator Beatriz Colomina (Princeton University) highlight a topic that has shaped our lives since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
More on the exhibition
Image credits: Hans Hollein, Non-physical environment, 1967 (detail). Private archive Hollein.
In this episode CIVA Artistic Director Nikolaus Hirsch talks to Beatriz Colomina (Princeton University), guest curator of the Sick Architecture exhibition at CIVA.
Architecture and sickness are tightly intertwined. Architectural discourse always weaves itself through theories of body and brain, constructing the architect as a kind of doctor and the client as patient. Architecture has been portrayed as both a form of prevention and cure for thousands of years. With Sick Architecture, CIVA and guest curator Beatriz Colomina (Princeton University) highlight a topic that has shaped our lives since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
More on the exhibition
Image credits: Hans Hollein, Non-physical environment, 1967 (detail). Private archive Hollein.
Podcast with Wim Cuyvers in the framework on Negotiating Ungers - The Materiality of the Social, an exhibition at CIVA (2021-2022) curated by Cornelia Escher and Lars Fischer.
Image credit: Bertrand Cavalier, 2020
A. J. Lode Janssens (b. 1941) is one of Belgium’s most radical architects and educators. However, for the past two decades he has been living in voluntary exile, resisting any form of public life. Throughout his career he had an ambiguous relationship with architecture, fascinated by its experimental possibilities but equally appalled by its often presumptuous nature. The CIVA exhibition on Janssens’ prolific yet understudied architectural attitude centers on his Balloon (Humbeek, 1969–86)—a temporary pneumatic home experiment, an uncompromising ephemeral attempt at de-architecturalization and harmonizing with nature. An experiment with and through life itself. The exhibition showcases a ¼ scale model of the structure as its centerpiece, allowing the public to fully grasp the architect’s experiment. Together with original and hitherto unexhibited archival material, the exhibition highlights Janssens’ trial-and-error spatial research practice.
Within the framework of the Institution Building exhibition, CIVA presents a conversation between architect Rem Koolhaas and Ingo Niermann on their VOTE project. The project was initially presented at Folly II as part of the Gwangju Design Biennale in 2013 and addressed public participation in terms of the vote. The folly by Koolhaas and Niermann is positioned in the middle of a busy shopping and entertainment district that is mainly frequented by teenagers. The street had been divided into three pedestrian lanes marked “Yes,” “No,” and “Maybe.” Votes are counted via a digital system and tallies are placed online to create a new form of direct plebiscite.
Architectural historian Daniel Barber, currently a fellow at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post Apocalyptic Studies in Heidelberg, and CIVA´s artistic director Nikolaus Hirsch speak about the role of architecture in the current climate crisis. The call for systemic change becomes increasingly loud. Architects and landscape designers alike seem to shift away from the object focus of starchitecture, giving way to a more integral practice and, eventually, a new aesthetics.
Daniel Barber is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and currently researches as a fellow at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post Apocalyptic Studies at the Universität Heidelberg. His books include A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War (Oxford University Press 2016) and Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning (Princeton University Press 2020) explore how leading architects of the twentieth century incorporated climate-mediating strategies into their designs, and show how climate adaptability was essential to the development of modern architecture.
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon is an nonagenarian artist, graphic designer, painter and landscape architect. In Mytopia Utopia, a 36 page comic book for adults, the collaged juxtapositions, visual and verbal references, play with intended associations of architecture and society. 'All these recent books I made are about the look of the word and the meaning of the word. I am wonderfully overtrained in that subject.’
Stauffacher Solomon tells stories about the Supergraphics she did for The Sea Ranch in California in the 1960s, the Green Architecture & The Agrarian Garden publication from 1989, and how she not only knows how to draw and play, but also how to write words.
In the context of „Environment“, the seventh chapter of the exhibition „Institution Building“, CIVA´s artistic director Nikolaus Hirsch talks to John Palmesino, together with Ann-Sofi Rönnskog co-founder of London-based Territorial Agency. Territorial Agency is an independent organization that promotes and works for integrated sustainable territorial transformations, combining analysis, contemporary architecture and urbanism, advocacy, and action. Projects include the Anthropocene Observatory (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2014), Museum of Oil (since 2019) and Oceans in Transformation (commissioned by TBA21–Academy and co-produced with Luma Foundation).
Sharona Franklin is an artist and advocate for empathy and care working with mixed media sculptures. “Axioms of Care” is the title of her current solo. In the conversation Sharona says: ‘Institution Building should deconstruct able normativity and not just the normativity of the body or the mind or the experience. But also the bureaucratic structures that have allowed disability exclusion, able-centric ideologies and ableist capitalism to perpetuate and continue on for so long. Education and change is needed to not include but to more importantly centre people who are racially marginalised, people who are low income, and people with disabilities. A lot of it comes down just to people having empathy and taking the time to learn about the uniqueness of each person's access needs.’
Juan Perez-Amaya and Félix Beytout, founders of REA and EL ATELIER, speak and read texts in French and English about Jacques Hondelatte, the late architect who created mythogenic architecture. ‘Jacques was smart in building the house with words without showing images. Today, when contemporary architects try to sell ideas they look better in the fictional sense than they are build’. After two exhibitions at Betts Project in London, and one in arc en rêve, France, Perez-Amaya and Beytout developed an installation around reflections of non material aspects of architecture for chapter 6 Emancipation of Institution Building. ‘An institution is a fiction of what we believe is right or wrong.’ they say.
With its contribution entitled 'Wetland' curated by Wael Al Awar and Kenichi Teramoto, the United Arab Emirates has won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the 2021 Venice Biennale. Nikolaus Hirsch talks to Wael Al Awar (waiwai) about the relationship between waste and production on a global scale, the architects' responsibility when it comes to the use of materials and the search for (more) sustainable cement, which is at the core of the Wetland project.
Vera Sacchetti is a critic and curator working collectively on systemic change. Her recent pressing and urgent contribution to how architecture should look like today is a multi-form conference titled Archipelago: Architectures for the Multiverse. 'It is important to be open for complexity and to acknowledge that transformation is not an easy job. It is constant work, work you do every day, work that continues. In the moment you see structural issues you cannot unsee them. I think one should step back and listen before you actually build. Maybe before Institution Building we should Institution Listen.'
In the context of ‘Collection’, the second chapter of ‘Institution Building’, Nikolaus Hirsch talks to Ghanaian-British architect Sir David Adjaye about the Edo Museum Of West-African Art in Benin City. As an exemple of a museum founded by processes of restitutions, it finds itself a the forefront of a new institutional paradigm. What does the restitution of artefacts and collections mean for a community, for a museum and for the architecture of a museum?
Adjaye talks about the changing role of the museum: a museum as a return to cultural values, a palace of culture for the community, a reminder of the dignity of their past but also an opportunity to use that platform to imagine a possible future.
In the context of ‘Audience’, the third chapter of ‘Institution Building’, Nikolaus Hirsch talks to Keller Easterling about her recently published book ‘Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World’.
Medium Design looks not to new technologies for innovation but rather to sophisticated relationships between emergent and incumbent technologies and the drastically changing role of an architect-designer in that respect. The guiding principle is that everybody is a designer, managing the potentials of their environment with a focus on forms of interplay and designing a series of relationships.
Keller Easterling is an architect, urbanist, writer and professor at Yale University.
Parasite 2.0 are Stefano Colombo, Eugenio Cosentino and Luca Marullo. Their work 'The desert, the net, and the bones’, a conceptual sofa and active architectural prop, was added to the second chapter of Institution Building: Collection. It's a piece from their first solo show conceived for a gallery space in 2016. 'The title of this work represents everything. The concept of the desert can apply to a concept of an institution. It is a place where something can arise when people can interact and play.’
Architecture and design curator Aric Chen is the newly appointed general and artistic director of Rotterdam's Het Nieuwe Instituut. With Nikolaus Hirsch, Chen elaborates on the difference between an archive and a collection. In this episode we ask: how can we recontextualize existing collections, how do we integrate them in other formats like exhibitions and conferences and how do we collect in the digital era?
In this episode, Nikolaus Hirsch talks to Samia Henni about the creation of an archive collection, its accessibility and how to decolonise an archive.
What is a 21st century museum of knowledge? In this podcast, Nikolaus Hirsch talks to Vikramaditya Prakash about Paul Otlet's Mundaneum and the way Le Corbusier spatialized this classification system in Chandigarh in an attempt to build an endless museum.
Decolonizing Architecture Can and must architecture be decolonized? The western-centric master narrative of architecture is questioned. All around the world new projects, curricula and syllabi are being proposed and implemented. The Italian-Palestinian duo Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti discuss the potentials and contradictions of breaking free of the Eurocentric canonical categories that still structure the current narrative.
Can and must architecture be decolonialized? The western-centric master narrative of architecture is questioned. All around the world new projects, curricula and syllabi are being proposed and implemented. The Ghanaian-Scottish architect, academic, and novelist Lesley Lokko discusses the potentials and contradictions of breaking free of the Eurocentric canonical categories that still structure the current narrative.
Transmission Architecture embraces the idea that architecture is more than buildings. On the contrary: it claims that traditional architecture disappears through transmission technology. Embedded in a history of anti-architecture such as Constant´s New Babylon and Buckminster Fuller´s World Game, invited guests Apparatus 22 speculate about a new architecture without architecture. Apparatus 22 is a multidisciplinary art collective by Erika Olea, Maria Farcas, and Dragos Olea. Based in Bucharest and Brussels, Apparatus 22 they define themselves as poetic activists and futurologists.
Exhibition curator Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou talks to Gian Piero Frassinelli (Superstudio) about the exhibition at CIVA and the origins of the group.
CIVA's Artistic Director Nikolaus Hirsch talks to Johnny Leya of Brussels-based agency Traumnovelle and the way Superstudio inspired the next generations of architects.
Transmission Architecture embraces the idea that architecture is more than buildings. On the contrary: it claims that traditional architecture disappears through transmission technology. Embedded in a history of anti-architecture such as Constant´s New Babylon and Buckminster Fuller´s World Game, invited guest Mark Wigley speculates about a new architecture without architecture. Wigley is a New-York based historian, theorist, and curator who explores the intersection of architecture, art, philosophy, culture, and technology. His most recent book “Konrad Wachsmann´s TV” describes the disappearance of architecture through the means radio, TV, and other human prosthetics.
Together with Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou, CIVA worked on a series of podcasts that highlight certain aspects of Superstudio’s oeuvre. In different episodes, the curator elaborates on a number
of crucial themes and ideas that offer a better insight into the work and reasoning of the Florentine group. She is joined by Beatrice Lampariello (UCLouvain, EPFL), who teaches architectural theory and history and is the author of various publications on Superstudio. In this episode we are pursuing a figure: that of migration, travel, nomadism. We go through Superstudio's work in search of a setting in motion: of thought, of architecture and of humanity as a whole, with or without destination, with or without luggage. We take you on a journey in search of the architecture that has mysteriously disappeared, we cross the "regions of reason", and we go to the Supersuperficie...
Together with Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou, CIVA worked on a series of podcasts that highlight certain aspects of Superstudio’s oeuvre. In different episodes, the curator elaborates on a number
of crucial themes and ideas that offer a better insight into the work and reasoning of the Florentine group. She is joined by Beatrice Lampariello (UCLouvain, EPFL), who teaches architectural theory and history and is the author of various publications on Superstudio. In this episode, we close our exploration of Superstudio's work by focusing on a specific dimension: the place occupied by reason and the capacity of the human mind to organise its relations with reality.
Together with Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou, CIVA worked on a series of podcasts that highlight certain aspects of Superstudio’s oeuvre. In different episodes, the curator elaborates on a number
of crucial themes and ideas that offer a better insight into the work and reasoning of the Florentine group. She is joined by Beatrice Lampariello (UCLouvain, EPFL), who teaches architectural theory and history and is the author of various publications on Superstudio. In this episode, we focus on one project: the Misura (or measure) series, developed between 1969 and 1972, and the joint projects: the Istogrammi d'architettura and the Supersuperficie.
Together with Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou, CIVA worked on a series of podcasts that highlight certain aspects of Superstudio’s oeuvre. In different episodes, the curator elaborates on a number
of crucial themes and ideas that offer a better insight into the work and reasoning of the Florentine group. She is joined by Beatrice Lampariello (UCLouvain, EPFL), who teaches architectural theory and history and is the author of various publications on Superstudio. In this episode, we follow our main characters in their multiple journeys, both physical and through different media, from Florence to Tokyo, from Naples to New York, from architecture schools to gallery walls and magazine pages.
Together with Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou, CIVA worked on a series of podcasts that highlight certain aspects of Superstudio’s oeuvre. In different episodes, the curator elaborates on a number
of crucial themes and ideas that offer a better insight into the work and reasoning of the Florentine group. She is joined by Beatrice Lampariello (UCLouvain, EPFL), who teaches architectural theory and history and is the author of various publications on Superstudio. In this episode, we plunge into the era and discover the main characters of this creative, intellectual and human adventure, between the history of architecture and fictitious autobiography.
CIVA artistic director Nikolaus Hirsch talks to curator Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou about the Superstudio Migrazioni exhibition in Brussels.