See VisionArc’s contribution to the Arena Calcetto installation here and check out the text to “Ultradisciplinary Futures” below or find it online here

Features
Ultradisciplinary Futures
June 19, 2013
Issue: AR 130 Pawn

Lucy Humphrey and Claire McCaughan of Archrival explore an ‘ultradisciplinary’ future, which surpasses the previously specified extent and limits of practice.

Author Lucy Humphrey, Claire McCaughan

Architecture is a relatively newly defined profession and the practice of architecture, historically, is not a precisely defined term. ‘The architect’ has drifted between master-builder, engineer and artist for centuries, and it was not until the 1800s that the modern day profession was established. Today the profession of architecture has been described as being in a state of crisis and Archrival considers this to be the result of an ill-defined contemporary profession, one that is further limited by reinforcing ideas of practicing ‘within’ or ‘outside’ of a professional boundary. Without actively promoting a broader idea of practice, we fuel an ongoing identity crisis; and without challenging contemporary practice we cannot realistically define a strategic response to the discipline’s crisis.

Documents such as ‘The Future for Architects?’ report by Building Futures provide background and statistics about how architectural practice will operate or decline in a changing world. In response, many architects are developing ‘new practices’ and expanding their reach by working in ‘interdisciplinary roles’. As an exhibitor in Formations: New Practices in Australian Architecture at the 13th Venice International Architecture Biennale, Archrival strategically concerned itself with exploring and challenging traditional practice boundaries.

In seeking co-contributors for the Arena Calcetto installation, Archrival connected a field of international collaborators that revealed their own strategic responses to the forecast crisis. Business consultancies such as McKinsey & Company argue that with clear strategy there is no reason to fear uncertainty and responding to change can be used to one’s competitive advantage. In examining key projects by four of the Biennale collaborators, we consider that by utilising realistic and accurate strategies, these practices are able to look beyond the self-governed boundaries of practice, and ahead to new opportunities for the discipline, by actively contributing to a redefinition of the scope of architectural practice. Rather than being seen as interdisciplinary, these practices capitalise on their design expertise and reveal the potential for interdisciplinary work to become critically ‘ultradisciplinary’. We might define the ultradisciplinary architectural practice as one that is beyond or surpassing the previously specified extent, range or limits of practice.

In creating unique fussball players for Arena Calcetto, four collaborators linked to Gap Filler (Christchurch, NZ), Diatom Studio (Wellington, NZ and London, UK), CAN (Critical Architecture Network) (London, UK) and VisionArc (New York, US) offer exclusive insights into their own expanded views of practice. The first example occurred in the strategic pairing of Mark Leong (Gap Filler collaborator) and Tiago Rorke (Diatom Studio), who simultaneously explore new digital fabrication technologies and community activism. In their first joint venture, a hardwearing concrete and steel fussball team was created and shared online as open-source material for future replication. Leong is a collaborator with Gap Filler, who activate urban spaces in post- earthquake Christchurch. As an architectural ‘free agent’, his social-minded focus has been played out in renegade community works such as The Night Club for Gap Filler’s Playtime project (2012), a competition-winning scheme for a temporary outdoor cinema designed to activate one of many vacant blocks in a city undergoing a painful transition period.

The project is a critical urban intervention in Christchurch where, in the wake of the earthquake, architects wait for the ‘gold rush of reconstruction’, but neglect the urgent need for an immediate renewal of public space to avoid alienation from their own city. In his strategic involvement with the Biennale, Leong paired with Rorke of Diatom Studio – a small practice with a dual base in Wellington and London. Diatom’s interest lies in open-source digital fabrication and the potential to integrate designers, academics and online users with the design and making process. Echoed in the aesthetic of their metropolis- like fussball series, online projects such as SketchChair present cutting edge technology that embraces new opportunities for user-driven design, fabrication and customisation tools. Developed in collaboration with JST Erato Design UI in Tokyo, the project provides an open-source software tool that encourages the emergence of the user as co-author, while promoting the necessary role of the designer as facilitator, synthesiser and editor. Although operating at a small scale, both Leong and Rorke proactively explore potentials for community engagement and activation that preserve a critical future role for designers. Their facilitation of diverse community projects, whether urban regeneration or open-source digital design, strategically promotes the valuable application of their professional skills in response to contemporary conditions.

Working at a similar scale, CAN is a young, entrepreneurial practice within London’s bleak financial climate. The single object produced for the Australian Pavilion was a playful expression of CAN’s bold multidisciplinary approach, integrating fine art, architecture, furniture and graphics. Entitled Made by Many, the fussball object presents a meticulous composition of 1:100 scale human figures. Led by Mat Barnes and Eddie Blake, CAN mobilises specialists on a project-by-project basis. In creating the temporary signage system entitled Barbican Weekender Scenography (2012) CAN playfully implemented their spatial expertise within Europe’s largest multi-arts venue. Describing the graphic product as ‘scenography’, the project explored the creation of signage using ‘playful swarms of lo-fi electronics and parasitic floating signage’, juxtaposed against the Brutalist context of the Barbican. Having previously exhibited with other cultural giants such as Dezeen with Dezeen Platform in 2011, CAN demonstrate an atypical application of architectural skill, paired with their strategic alignment with dominant cultural institutions, in well-marketed public forums during an economic downturn.

Beyond the strategic effectiveness of these emerging practices, the final collaborator demonstrates the extraordinary potential for ‘interdisciplinary’ projects to increase the architect’s professional value. VisionArc’s graphically didactic fussball team represents the studio’s strategic global reach through cutting edge research projects. Design thinking has emerged as a valuable skill in the last decade and yet architects have been slow to understand or capitalise on the market. Founder Toshiko Mori and director Landon Brown operate VisionArc, a think tank dedicated to exploring ‘how designers might use this moment as an opportunity to catalyse their own transition into new modes of practice and broader fields of engagement’. Strategically operating as a research and visualisation consultancy, VisionArc mobilises design initiatives and fosters new and inspiring design futures through the integration of landscape, architecture,politics and science. Research is presented through engaging films such as Design Blind Spots 2050, commissioned by the DesignSingapore Council in 2009 as a speculative research project for the ICSID World Design Congress. The project coins the term ‘design blind spot’, a concept defined as ‘fields not currently known to integrate design thinking or strategy’. VisionArc outlines the enormous potential for designers to reframe global issues and new models of design practice by identifying and presenting solutions to global design blind spots. By designing how to facilitate collaboration itself, VisionArc suggest the key lies in the architect’s ability to operate across complex networks of stakeholders and policies, as well as to integrate competing ‘information silos’.

In dissecting the issue of oil sands mining in northern Canada, Design Blindspots 2050 presents a critical design future for architects, where by 2050 designers are sought out ‘as intermediaries capable of identifying blind spots across a wide spectrum of issues all crucial to the future of production, mobility and resources’. The project convincingly highlights the architect’s valuable role in global policy-making and development initiatives, demonstrating a critical future for architectural practice through extensive ‘ultradisciplinary’ projects.

The spectrum of practice represented by these studios underlines an expanding architectural profession. Instead of portraying a practice as outside of a professional boundary, we might consider the strategic value in actively promoting a wider and more marketable view of our discipline – one with greater opportunities for engagement. By determining realistic and strategic responses to economic, political, environmental and social conditions, and by operating in an ‘ultradisciplinary’ format, these practices are actively redefining the constructs of the profession and expanding the agency of architectural practice. Gap Filler, Diatom Studio, CAN and VisionArc are leading examples of professional advocacy and disciplinary adaptation across a range of scales, bringing about change from the level of the individual practitioner to the profession as a whole. The evolving profession must celebrate these examples as they walk the tightrope between artistic endeavour and business success.

VisionArc’s analysis illustrated the interconnected environmental, economic and political dimensions of the regeneration plan. The analysis formed the basis for a series of proposals that were designed to negotiate multiple stakeholders and scales of concern. The proposals offered strategic design as a vital tool for moving beyond conventional urban typologies towards more holistic standards for urban development in ecologically important regions. Taken together VisionArc sought to create a picture of Pasaia as a place that can become a model for regional innovation and economic growth while also reinforcing an ecologically vulnerable but culturally rich locality.

Recommendations for the Bay of Pasaia regeneration plan are currently under ongoing consideration by the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa.

Here’s a link to the article. The original text is below.

Systems Thinking: A New York City think tank, puts design at the service of complex global challenges.
Written by Mimi Zeiger

VisionArc is a consultancy run in tandem with Toshiko Mori Architect, the practice founded by Toshiko Mori (pictured) in 1981. Mori also teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and chairs the World Economic Forums Global Agenda Council on Design.

Toshiko Mori, FAIA, is unfazed by the kind of large-scale, thorny issues—the fate of the Earth’s 332.5 million cubic miles of water, the infrastructure underlying peak oil—that might leave some designers a bit weak in the knees. In fact, where some might see imminent environmental crisis or a geopolitical quagmire, Mori, 59, sees an opportunity for systematic thinking. In 2009, she launched VisionArc, a think tank that probes complex global issues, which operates in parallel to her New York–based architectural practice, Toshiko Mori Architect, and her teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD).

In 2008, Mori was appointed to the World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Agenda Council on Design. As chair of the council, she recently attended the WEF’s 2011 Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland. So, although VisionArc is a young strategic consultancy, it has quickly attracted the attention of government officials, CEOs, and venture capitalists who were wooed by the ability of Mori and director Landon Brown, 32, to use design skills to both structure and visualize complex problems.

“Architecture education and our discipline at large can contribute beyond building buildings,” Mori explains, before listing the three components she sees as needed for any successful enterprise: “hardware,” “software,” and “the network.”

“Our profession is focused on the hardware, meaning the building craft,” she says. “We are somewhat involved in the software, meaning infrastructure and engineering. And architecture has always been part of a civic network. But we need to look at the other problems surrounding us—to use our talents to think comprehensively, collaborate, and connect the dots.”

Design Blind Spots 2050, one of VisionArc’s first endeavors, exemplifies this approach. A research project, exhibition, workshop, and video commissioned by DesignSingapore Council and presented at the 2009 International Council of Societies of Industrial Design World Design Congress in Singapore, it suggests that there are unseen linkages between international economies, population centers, and the environment. Or, as the project distills them: production, mobility, and resources. By using the example of environmentally destructive oil-sands mining in Alberta, Canada, as a case study, Mori and Brown identified areas where strategic design could address critical issues at a top level and ultimately create a new mode of practice. “Architects see spaces in plan, elevation, and section; we have a way of analyzing problems in a three- or four-dimensional way. We can slice through an issue that may not connect in plan,” Mori says.

In their case study, issues went far beyond the standard purview of architecture and included the environmental impact of pipelines on natural habitats; existing mining technologies; mine workers and the health of populations living near the oil sands; and policies governing mine operations. VisionArc’s research led to proposed solutions for the near future, such as new regional legislation and localized pollution-monitoring by nearby communities, and longer-term visions such as remediated forests and low-impact transportation.

“We mine data that is already there and rigorously and imaginatively translate it in order to find potential connections to industry and natural resources,” is how Brown characterizes the VisionArc process.

Which is not to say that architecture itself falls out of the equation. VisionArc produced a study last year for the Ocean Energy Institute in Rockland, Maine, a think tank and venture-capital fund addressing offshore renewable energy. The study included the proposed development of a 50,000-square-foot R&D and venture-capital operations facility, the need for which arose out of VisionArc’s comprehensive research on the impact of offshore wind energy on Maine’s economy and environment.

If there is any ambivalence in the VisionArc model, it is here, where altruism meets business-development opportunities. Presently, VisionArc is a small, self-sustaining counterpart to Mori’s firm that is run by Brown, who brings in consultants and interns as needed. As it grows into a more robust enterprise, there are sure to be tensions between the social mission that drives VisionArc and the bottom line of conventional practice. (Mori’s 11-person firm is very much engaged in traditional practice, having recently completed a building for the Syracuse Center of Excellence in Environmental and Energy Systems, in Syracuse, N.Y., and the vistors’ center at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin D. Martin House in Buffalo, N.Y.) Mori speaks of VisionArc as a platform for systems research and a growing network of firms and institutions; although it’s self-sustaining financially, this is an untested business model.

Like Mori, Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, is also a member of WEF’s Global Agenda Council on Design. His book, Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation (2009), is often cited as a bridge between the worlds of business and design. Indeed, VisionArc’s agenda can be seen as part of the “design thinking” trend (see Mark Lamster’s “Business Philosophy?”) as well as part of a slower architectural drift toward research-driven work, which began in earnest in 1998, when OMA founded its own think tank, AMO.

Once considered a holding area for Rem Koolhaas’ more academic exercises in datascaping and branding, AMO is now engaged in top-level consulting on a global scale. In February, the firm released The Energy Report, a study on renewable energy for 2050 developed with the World Wildlife Federation and the sustainability-minded consultancy Ecofys.

Mori is not interested in carrying the mantel of design thinking, which she categorizes as often limiting itself to the “hardware” side of things, to products and goods. She’s after the application of architectural thinking to global policy, politics, economics, and business. Recently, she and Landon Brown were in discussions with members of the WEF and the Japanese prime minister’s office about a study called the Carbon Portal, for the design of a system of incentives and monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, to track (and reduce) regional and national carbon footprints in Japan. When the earthquake and tsunami struck, the two redirected their efforts toward the design of risk-response mechanisms. “As we had already been exploring concepts for interconnected tracking systems … we repurposed this model, but with a focus on how such a system might be employed in a crisis context,” Brown says.

In October, Mori was instrumental in organizing the WEF’s first Design and Global Challenges conference and workshop at the GSD. The daylong event brought together architecture students, Harvard faculty, and WEF experts on trade, human rights, population growth, and the international monetary system. The workshop, split into six cross-disciplinary working groups, pushed the students beyond the cloister of design, exposing them to the languages of economics, business, and law. Asking students to engage with the multiple crises facing the world expands their architectural education and primes the next generation of practitioners.

On this point, Mori is passionate. “With this type of work, we can be engaged with people who are making decisions,” she says. “We can help identify the right problem, instead of inheriting the wrong one.”