New Investigations in Collective Form

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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.

Today, society continues to face urban challengesfrom economic inequality to a progressively fragile natural environmentthat, in order to be addressed, require us to come together in a moment when what we collectively value is increasingly difficult to locate. Organized into five themes for producing collectivityFrameworks, Articulated Surfaces, the Living Archive, Re-Wiring States, and Commoningthe projects straddle the fine line between the individual and collective, informal, and formal, choice and control, impermanent and permanent.

Author Bio

Neeraj Bhatia is a licensed architect and urban designer from Toronto, and the founder of THE OPEN WORKSHOP. His work resides at the intersection of politics, infrastructure, and urbanism. He is an associate professor at California College of the Arts, where he also codirects the urbanism research lab The Urban Works Agency. Bhatia has also held teaching positions at UC Berkeley, Cornell University, Rice University, and the University of Toronto. He is the co-editor of the books Bracket [Takes Action], The Petropolis of Tomorrow, Bracket [Goes Soft], and Arium: Weather + Architecture, and co-author of Pamphlet Architecture 30: CouplingStrategies for Infrastructural Opportunism.

THE OPEN WORKSHOP is an architectural urbanism practice that focuses on the relationship between form and collectivity. Specifically, the firm is interested in the agency of form to impact political, economic, and ecological systems. Using a transcalar approach to design research, the office straddles a complex line between permanence and ephemerality, control and choice, legibility and illegibility, the individual and the collective, determinacy and indeterminacy, the figure and the field. The office name, THE OPEN WORKSHOP, is a reference to Umberto Ecos 1962 treatise The Open Work. The office is dedicated to evolving Ecos concept into architecture by expanding the subject to include the pluralistic public realm and transforming environmental context. Select distinctions include the Canadian Prix de Rome (2019), honourable mention for The Architects Newspaper Young Architects Award (2018), the Architectural League Young Architects Prize (2016), as well as the Emerging Leaders Award from Design Intelligence (2016).

All Contributors: Pier Vittorio Aureli, Neeraj Bhatia, Peggy Deamer, Clare Lyster, Keith Krumwiede, Jenny Odell, Albert Pope, Rafi Segal, Charles Waldheim. Foreword by Pier Vittorio Aureli