ADS7: Ecologies of Existence, The Architecture of Collective Equipment

For ADS7 ecologies of living bring together material, environmental, technical, social and mental domains. To think ecologically is not so much a matter of protecting existing ecologies, but more importantly, a matter of generating conditions for different ones to emerge and affirm themselves. Only on these terms can a properly ecological project take place. In 2017 we will focus a key object of architectural experimentation: collective equipments. Collective equipments have a long history in architecture, traditionally as instruments of religious and military powers, as tools deployed by the modern nation-state or increasingly today by private entities. Collective equipments have as well a tradition of emancipation and transformative politics. We are referring to the importance of collective equipments during post-colonial nation-building projects, from Chandigarh to Brasilia or Caracas, but also to the precarious experiments where equipments emerged from movements of social and political organization and solidarity, from popular theatres and social clubs to healthcare centres or schools. Thus, if their history is most famously that of the state, it is also that of any form of social organization. Due to their location at the intersection of multiple interests and constituencies in the 60ties collective equipments were object of important cross-disciplinary experimentation by the likes of Foucault and Guattari and the CERFI in France. Their purpose was to speculate on the transformation of equipments that were previously sites of governance by envisioning new alliances between institutions, spaces and practices. In ADS7 we want to recover this research. We see collective equipments as sites of radical institutional and architectural experimentation. This brief is all the more urgent in an epoch where all around the globe institutions are in urgent need of re-invention so they can address new forms of political and social organization.