How would you describe the state of contemporary architecture?

Where we are getting to, is a point where architecture has become so embedded with the common neoliberal system, to the extent that it´s not just a reflection of it, it is not just a manifestation of it but it is also producing it. The majority of the architecture that is built today is reinforcing the capital market and is creating inequality through itself, so it is not simply a product, it is also producing those same systems. You know, at the moment we are just making money for rich people, mostly – and nothing that has got to do with the relationship with the client and ultimately who your client is [ed. in this case the future tenant, not the owner]

We spent the last month in Vancouver, Canada, writing and doing a series of workshops, trying to understand architecture as a different kind of practice, different to the way in which architectural practices operate today. It is definitely an ambition of ours to try and imagine what that practice might be. Both under the current system, but also with the view to change that system, being part of a transformative process.

Apparently we do agree that we live in a capitalistic economy. I would even call it an accelerated neoliberal system that is global and all encompassing. And especially architecture has always been connected to political- and economical power, as its realisation (built manifestation) is most of the time dependent on the funding of a third party. But how is this connection affecting particularly the production of housing? Maybe also referring to what Simon said in an interview (designing buildings wiki): “we’ve handed over the responsibility for housing the population almost overwhelmingly to the private market (...).”

I am sure you do as well constantly find, when you talk about the politics of architecture, that people say architecture is outside of politics or should try to be. What we are sort of arguing is that the architecture of today is explicitly a capitalist architecture. This is different from simply saying I am an architect, I make architecture, it has to be financed by capital, I live in a capitalist society, therefore my architecture is capitalist. What we say is that architecture today, not just architecture but particularly residential and housing development, is a tool of neoliberal capitalism. And the primary cause of the global housing crisis is the crisis of capital, its changing markets, the scramble for reduced resources and people who are trying to find something to invest their capital in. Production is kind of down, it certainly is in the West, so all those people are investing their money into housing. The effect is that we have a proliferation of [ed: housing] development – but it is not the housing we need. At the same time, in the so-called 3rd World, which has an enormous deficit of housing, not just affordable housing, absolutely nothing is invested at all.

Was that the reason to start your collective ‘Architects for Social Housing’ or were there other trigger moments too?

There was a series of triggers which led up to it around 2013/2014. We were becoming aware of the changes around public space, the accessibility of public land and the fact that it was getting sold off – this is more about an observation not necessarily as an architect but as a citizen of a city, recognizing that more and more parts of the city would not allow access. It got to a point where we were thinking, well there must be something that we can do as architects, this is clearly an architectural process there must be some way that we could engage.

And then we were getting involved in the housing campaign movement – things like Focus E15 who are extraordinary and amazing - but again coming from a grassroots position. It came to a climax when a series of bungalows on the [ed: Fairford House] estate, we are in right now, were threatened with demolition. The existing residents have been given three options: demolition, demolition or demolition. Up until this point the people we have met [ed: while campaigning] have been residents of estates all across London but this was literally on our door-step. It suddenly became very real and the former residents would never be able to afford moving back into the new estate, losing all their local connections, their friends, their doctors, all of this social world they have lived in. Yes, that's when we started ‘Architects for Social Housing’.

So the term socialist architecture that you use quite often on your website came a bit later?

That came a lot later actually – it didn’t come through as an image until about 9 months ago as part of this residency in Vancouver. Until that point we had quite often been working from project to project: a resident group would contact you, they would need your help and you would just address what was directly in front of you. Essentially, over the last few years we have been extracting, I suppose, the knowledge that we have acquired and the principles that have emerged as a result of this practice. Trying to understand what this stuff was, the term socialist architecture emerged as a kind of ‘umbrella term‘. We feel that a socialist architectural practice is the one that is gonna be necessary to make a world in which we can still be.

Architecture today, I would say, is not even capitalist, it is undoubtedly neoliberal. And socialist architecture has to find out how to break this cycle and not just simply become a tool. There is no neutral space for an architect, there is no way outside of that, we have to make our choice.

What would we need to change in the production of housing - also coming back again to the phrase social architecture? Do you have any strategies or ideas?

What we did was to break the topic down into a series of diverse ways to look at the production of architecture. We identified four different categories: the political, the social, the economic and the environmental – four different perspectives on the same thing essentially. And what we found was that the key thing is about the process, it is not about the product you make, it is about the way you make it. What we try to identify is a series of moments of agency, we talk about this phrase ‘an agent of a socialist architecture’ - and that's not necessarily an architect. So it’s somebody who has some kind of agency within the architectural process: at a very simple stage it could be a planner, it could be a politician, it could be a teacher, it could be a resident, it could be an architect, it could be an artist, it could be an engineer, it could be a whole range, including developers and house-associations. What we are trying to do is to open up some of those moments of agency, going right back into policy making, you know, that segment which so much of our city is predefined by.

In the UK we have the so-called Architects Registration Board – if you are an architect you are a member of it – which has a series of codes of conduct and they are very weak. It used to be stronger but has become weak to the extent that it almost has no teeth at all anymore. The architect has some sense of responsibility, or duty of care to the residents and users, ideally on top of the needs of the investor – that is our take on that. And yet 99 % of architects will not put the interests of local residents above the demands of the investor. Thus precisely those codes could be a place to put pressure – saying that an architect needs to have a responsibility like a doctor you know, you have a duty of care to the environment that you are creating or destroying.

Fees are coming from the client/investor – the bigger the project the higher the fee – and that is also a conflict of interest there. The role of the architect in society, you know at the moment, is mostly to make money for rich people. I think that is something that needs to be explored in terms of different ways of working and in a different fee structure.

When you look back into the early days after the 2nd World War in the UK, when we were building the welfare state, hospitals, schools, housing etc., around 70 % of architects were working for local governments. Your responsibilities there are quite clear, aren’t they? Clearly towards the civic, the public realm, towards the society, and there is no conflict of interest because you are being paid whether you are working on a museum, a school or a block of flats.

Is the welfare state of the 60ies/70ies and the idea of more architects directly working for city councils and governments something you would like to have re-invented? I mean, most city councils don't even have the money or are not allowed to spend it.

I think funding mechanisms in different forms of land ownership are interesting in this regard. We look at models like Community Land Trust (CLT) for example, where the land is taken out of the market. Because essentially what is going on at the moment is a real break-down in democracy. The fact that residents on council estates are basically being told that their home is gonna be demolished and they will have to move elsewhere. And they don’t really have any instrument against it. Public land should be our land, collectively owned by the taxpayers, the citizens of the UK – that's the theory, in practice the government is selling it off. So there might be a specific need for such land trusts. To be able to take land out of the market and in fact in this case, to take it out of the public hand. The public is not a safe place anymore, which is kind of crazy. Though also CLTs won’t necessarily solve the problem of supporting the people who are most in need.

You state on your website that the key lies in the way in which projects are financed. We have talked about CLT’s now but what are other ways of financing, of taking land and buildings out of the market? Crowd-financing (micro credits)? Or cooperative housing which I only know from Germany and Austria as the so-called Mietshäuser Syndikat. But since those projects are rarely able to integrate people in need, because you also have to have the resources to invest, are those at all a solution?

You know we have an initiative at the moment from the GLA [Greater London Authority] which is supporting community led housing. And yes this is good. We are working with a couple of housing coops at the moment and some of those are great, I mean they really are about supporting the ones with low income. But it is not a requirement. If you look at the funding which is given from the GLA the majority of that funding is going to so-called ‘affordable’ housing and that can be anything up to 80% of market rent-prices, which is not affordable. Or they support things like ‘shared ownership’ and ‘help to buy’, so all these different financial products which are basically kind of pushing prices up. They are not really addressing the most in need, which I think none of these initiatives at the moment really do.

What we are seeing at the moment is that housing estates are being demolished to make space for more homes, so maybe they double the size of it but there will be fewer homes for social rent. In many cases that will be removed all together and replaced by these other forms of ‘affordable’ rent which at the end are higher. These initiatives which are proposed to be solutions are actually part of the problem.

So, it is a lot about policies actually, right? About some kind of rulebook …

It is a problem that a lot of architects are not really questioning, you know: what is our relationship to policy? What kind of agency do we have in that respect? And I can understand that a lot of architects don’t want to get involved on that level – they kind of think: my job is to design this building. But what I think they are kind of ignoring or pretending not to notice is that by designing that building they are contributing to the neoliberal economy.

For example the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) should be an organisation which is lobbying the government and making the changes that their members would like to see. I am not a member of the RIBA, in fact we are protesting against one of their prices, the Sterling Price. Because the price is awarded for demolition schemes where we are losing social rent housing. If the main institutions are sort of saying that is perfectly ok, more than perfectly ok we are celebrating this, how is the average architect meant to take any stand? The institutions certainly aren’t.

So, it has to come down I suppose to individuals and organisations like ours to give people confidence a bit. I think there has been a change in terms of architects taking a bit more responsibility, but I don’t think they are willing to take the necessary steps to really change.

Do you then believe that how we educate architectural students could at least prepare for changes in the future? If you start early on to show alternatives, especially alternatives to this monumental and glossy architecture?

Education has definitely got a large part to play and I think that it still has a huge way to catch up. In each architecture school you probably have one tutor or somebody who is pushing a kind of social and environmental agenda, you might be lucky to have one. But it is even beyond that, before students come to university, they are looking into magazines - it is a kind of cultural thing before it even becomes an educational thing. What is it what we value? So an architect, the first job, the biggest probably the most valuable thing is the front page, a photo in a magazine. That is the one thing that I want to have changed in terms of cultural senses of what is important.

You know, in the age between 7 and 12 the way you see the city is created, the stereotypes you gonna have. Yes it is about educating architects but I think it is a bigger kind of cultural education which is so embedded for example in all the films you watch. Whenever you have a crime it is always set on a council estate, when policemen are chasing the criminal, they are always going through the modernist estates. When you are a teenager, these scenes are so embedded in what you expect of these connections between crime, anti-social behaviour and architecture. On all the council estates we have worked on, crime rates are lower than in the surrounding areas. And when you say this to residents who are campaigning to save their homes they don’t believe it. Because they have been told: “Oh you live on a council estate, it is full of criminals and drug users and all that kind of stuff” – which is just nonsense.

But yes you are right, architecture school is definitely a place to begin and I think it is starting to turn gradually. So, we want a student revolution in architecture. I think – again looking at this environmental attention which is all coming from young people – they are much more aware than older people about what is happening to the world. And you are also the ones that are confronted by the housing problem.

Resources or capacities for things like communication or advertising within projects that are social or would create (real) affordable housing are seldom because they already have such a tight budget. So I guess there are many socially progressive projects that aren’t really visible and thus we are just not aware of them – instead what we get to see is a new opera house.

Yes, I agree and I am sure there are lots of projects out there and if they would be more visible, they would start to change things. But I think that visibility is also being suppressed – I don’t think I am a conspiracy theorist suggesting that – it is just not in anybody's interest to support things which challenge policy. If you look at the central influence in government, the MPs, I would say that pretty much all of them are either landlords or have second homes or probably both. There is no incentive for them to change the policy. But they still want to get voted in and public pressure is one way of getting some sort of change to happen, but even public pressure is difficult to galvanise.

You also say, and that is now a citation: “socialist architecture must take the refurbishment of existing homes”. It has already become clear that you are critical of the constant cycle of demolition and rebuilding but could you please elaborate on your opinion?

Well that is interesting, just on the weekend we were at this event around degrowth and it was part of a festival of maintenance, which in itself is another interesting idea. I think it is really about changing the relationship that we have with the world of products, manufacturing and consumption. And that is something that we think is really important to keep hammering home, that you can’t just make changes without fundamentally changing the way the system is operating. Capitalism is built on a cycle of extraction, consumption and waste.

And having said that, yeah I mean fundamentally, if you just look at the refurbishment of a home or a council estate, it is on every level more economical. There is a financial benefit but it is also much more efficient, there is almost no waste. We did a project with the Central Hill Estate and we had an environmental engineer coming to do a calculation, just a rough estimation of the amount of embodied carbon that would be released through the demolition of that estate. It was something about 7.000 tonnes of embodied carbon. Which was something like the electricity used by 4.000 residents over a course of a year. This is huge and yet this is not accounted for in any kind of the landlords assessments, it is no requirement, they are not obliged to address that.

Chris Jofeh was one of Arup’s engineers who worked with retrofitting and he said – and this is a common phrase – that it takes pretty much thirty years to recuperate the losses caused by demolition. So not just the demolition, the kind of pollution, the waste, but also the costs of constructing the new building. Even if that new building was super, super excellent in green energy, it would still take thirty years to recuperate. And I mean, how many of these new buildings will even last thirty years? It just doesn’t make sense but for the capitalist cycle it is brilliant.

I think a lot of architects struggle and think: “oh where do I fit into that?”. But actually there is a huge amount of work to be done, for example, looking at how to build something in the first place. The majority of the work that I do and did before setting up ASH is about reconfiguring existing buildings. Something like 80 % of all the buildings that will be here in 2050 are already here. It is just still not seen as very sexy, you know, refurbishment and that's why we need to change the way we appreciate and value things. I think this is the bottom line. What is it that we value?

So you are saying that as a socialist architect you need to intervene in this process and disrupt it?

Well that is what we are doing with ASH, we try to intervene in that process. It is a balancing act of survival. One of the things that we do when they want to demolish an estate because they need to build more homes, is to say: “ok we don’t want to have it demolished, you could also refurbish it”. Then the government says: “there is absolutely no funding for refurbishment or social housing”. And then we will say: “ok we will take a portion of it [ed: the building site] and build luxurious flats for the market; then sell them; and by that, subsidise and refurbish the rest of the estate. So, you can interact with the capitalist system, there is a certain amount of leeway in which you could work. Unfortunately at the moment, architects aren’t doing that, they are simply becoming the tools of the development process. It is very very difficult – we were just talking the other day and met some planners – all the big decisions about a development project, the use of the site, are already determined by the investors right in the very beginning and the public sector is simply an administrator.

Would you then say it would help if some architects engage actively in politics - also to really go into politics and try to change the political system from within and with the spatial knowledge of our education?

I don’t think we believe much in politics anymore. After years of trying to work with various political parties. There is political agency outside of that I think. It is not about encouraging architects to become politicians or get involved in politics, it is about them realising that they already are part of that [neoliberal] system through any of their actions.

I suppose what we are trying to do is explore the different ways in which you can have political agency as an architect or as anybody practising a socialist architecture.

Is the goal then to gather a big enough number of architects that say ‘no‘? Because in the moment if you say ‘no!‘ just simply someone else will do it. That is also a response I get very often in my discussions: ‘Better I do it and I create something good and responsible than someone else who cares even less‘.

Yes, that is definitely often used.

The other thing about the capitalist system is that it makes it very very expensive to live. So when you are a young architect and you are trying to survive in London unless you got something [own property] or live in council housing, you have to kind of become part of the system. It is one of the ways that capitalism makes you fall in line. I mean there are some architects who do a better job than others but there are far too many architects who don’t care.

Could you please name those who do a better job? I’m always curious to hear names.

Well, Lacaton & Vasall and Frédéric Druot in France: refurbishing and expanding estates and not contributing to the demolition or the profitisation of these projects.

In London or the UK, architects don’t want to be associated with campaigning or so. One of the few architects that does is Peter Barber, he is outspoken.

When we first started, we initially were going out to look for architects to help and I approached four different architectural organisations – none of them would do it. They didn’t wanna be associated with it; it was potentially gonna threaten their future client relationships.

The agency of an architect or anyone who is interested in stopping what’s happening, is not limited to what we build: you can lobby; you can write articles; you can speak about the stuff in lectures and conferences; you can try to create a culture of refurbishment and maintenance vs. demolition and redevelopment; if you are a teacher in the world of architects you can promote that sort of stuff – and almost none of that is happening.

The neoliberal project has been going on for so long, at least forty years in this country and it has seeked into every aspect of the development process and now architects are saying: ‘you know our hands are tied‘ – but no, you tied your own hands. To stop doing that, to free their hands, they need to get involved in this process. Young architects nowadays are experiencing the consequences of previous generations' complicity with the neoliberal project.

I’m always wondering, because for me the typical process in an architecture office – you design a project and as soon as it is built you are already working on the next one – never or very rarely offer time or resources to reflect on your own environment and the successes and failures of past projects. At least it is not happening openly, there is no open discussion on certain things in architecture.

Yes, I think that goes back to the relationship of the architect to the project. And if it is an ongoing very long relationship that you have with a client [or community] then you really understand the needs. You have been there from the beginning, you have understood what the problems are. In a way that’s what we are trying to do in some of our projects. You are trying to understand the context, the people, the built environment, the natural environment and so forth … That sort of relationship is not a typical architectural relationship but I think, would change very much what you produce. And that goes back to what I was saying earlier about the fact that in the 1970s, something like seventy percent of architects worked for the local authority. They would have a job for twenty, thirty, forty years, you would be revisiting your old projects. There was a much longer term investment in your relationship with the buildings and those environments.

At the moment, certainly in London and the UK, architects are trying to create a brand, that is the ultimate thing, that is what they have dreamt to do. And you can imagine people just sort of buying it because it has a brand identity and the people who invested in it can say ‘oh I have a Richard Rogers building‘.

But isn’t that tied up in the fact that, without a brand you can’t get the kind of clients you want and you can’t charge the same amount of money. So again that is part of the system, if the rates were all fixed …

One last question about ASH. First of all, how many people are you?

ASH is not a group, we have four board members. We set up working groups depending on what we do. We will invite people that we know, whether it is engineers, academics or whatever it is to contribute to it. That is how we set up working groups and the people working on it will work there for as long as they can, or can afford to. So it is not really a fixed group, we are rather an organisation and we organise groups, we make connections to certain people.

It really depends, each project is very different. [Whenever we have such a group] people are not all working on it at the same time, partly because we don’t have enough money to pay proper wages like a full-time job.

But do you sometimes get funding for your projects?

For some of the architectural projects we can manage to get funding. And things like crowd funding could be a mechanism to sustain ASH and its projects in the future.

Or cross-subsidisation! You know we have made a bit of money doing this residency in Vancouver but also from private practice as well. It is difficult but we struggle through it. We are very lucky because we live here in a council estate which is very cheap. Or public funding, that would be great.

But yea, for the first couple of years it was pretty much all for free and we couldn’t continue like that, it was just not sustainable at all.

Yes sure!

I teach as well and academia has a lot of resources. I try my best to find ways, you know, to take that resource and try to make it useful. Because a lot of the time the academic world doesn’t necessarily engage the way which is that useful to people. I think there could be some really interesting relationships with academic institutions and practice based opportunities – but they are not quite there yet.

There is definitely more interest and more support for the kind of ideas that we got from architectural academia than there is from architectural practitioners. There is a really blatant division actually.

Well we are threatening the other practitioners – kind of.

Which I think is utterly necessary …
Well, thank you for your time and the interview.