Common Field: Architecture Lecture Series
April 22–November 10, 2021
Common Field, curated by Diana Menino and Felipe De Ferrari, continues in 2021 with duo sessions to stimulate debates. It looks at architecture as an imperative for change, in its condition of approaching the world and appropriation of reality.
#3 On Publishing Architecture
Maria Shéhérazade Giudici and Moisés Puente
Thursday, April 22, 6:30pm (UTC+1)
This livestreaming conference looks at the production of architecture through printed publications. Architecture is here considered as strategic thinking, and a critical understanding of diverse and contradictory conditions, synthetized in different formats, including written research, the production of theory and discourses.
#4 On Building
AgwA + BAST
Wednesday, October 13, 6:30pm (UTC+1)
The lecture is focused on building—both its material definition and representation—as a fundamental stage of a learning process towards architecture understood as a common field of knowledge. Our guests will build a shared presentation introducing sites, procedures, worker choreographies and their specific attitude on the built world.
#5 On Designing the Brief
51N4E + REAL
Wednesday, November 10, 6:30pm (UTC)
The session is focused on the potential of self-commissions and designing briefs. The capacity to read the times and tactics to create the conditions for an architecture project to be born. It will introduce the attitude of these studio's practices and ongoing projects, sharing methodologies to enable concrete possibilities for spatial reproduction.
In English, these conferences start with a presentation of each guest, followed by a talk moderated by the curators. Buy tickets here.
About Common Field
In 2020, Common Field featured two lectures creating a dialogue between Assemble and baubüro in situ—on cooperation, reuse and upcycling—and Dogma and Harquitectes—on new housing models and architecture without status.
Architecture should be understood as a strategic attitude to space and resources. Common Field aims to discuss architecture in its most literal sense: as a collective and strategic body of knowledge that is and can be applied by everyone, in any community, environment or culture, through a series of mechanisms, devices, structures and forms. The development of a Common Field requires an assessment of the notion of common sense, a critical concept in the present context of global neo-liberalisation and political decay. In adopting a critical and optimistic attitude towards physical and cultural contexts, policies, briefs and clients, architecture can appropriate reality in radical and unexpected ways from research to construction—making visible their potential and contradictions, developing projects that enable emancipatory ideas, and thus building a Common Field. We argue that a radical architectural approach is not only desirable but necessary. Such an approach can be conceived as an accumulative process of constant appropriation, imitation, repetition, translation, and re-contextualisation with open-minded and generous thinking—with both pragmatism and humour—and based on the careful review of material reality and social conditions. Common Field will explore the threads that lead us towards this collective form of construction.
