Groundwork

At the CCA we have been concerned about architecture’s complicated relationship with the environment for a long time, and this concern includes an ongoing exploration of new forms of practice that respond to the urgency of the climate crisis. 

Today we are launching Groundwork, a three-part film and exhibition project to ask how we understand the making of architecture in our present moment, and how architects situate themselves in relation to changing natural and disciplinary boundaries. What to build, or not build? Is a building the end point of architectural production? What to do with the existing building stock? How to intervene in the landscape? How to engage with the increasing environmental and social complexities of a site? 

To explore these questions we chose to delve into a journey with three contemporary practices that cultivate deep relationships and forms of engagement with project sites and their ecosystems. The first chapter follows Xu Tiantian of DnA (Design and Architecture) to Meizhou Island where, in collaboration with local communities and her team, she is creating a set of small, distributed interventions to mediate pressures of heritage policies, tourism, and farming on marine ecology. By recording Xu Tiantian’s dialogues with villagers, fisherfolks, and biologists, we aim to focus on the significance of field research and the conceptual work that stems from it.

The result of this first journey is Into the Island, an exhibition opening today at the CCA that displays a documentary film (2024, 41 min) alongside artefacts, documents, specimens, and site fragments as evidence of an ongoing creative process. We decided to primarily use film as a tool to witness how research and encounters on site affect architectural thinking. The project deploys a small-footprint, intimate, journalistic approach to tell overlapping stories of the communities of Meizhou Island and their engagement with the land, while presenting the conception and development of Xu’s interventions. Into the Island is a narrative composed through the fragments of an evolving culture and fluctuating landscape.

“Groundwork deliberately observes when ideas, rather than buildings, take shape. It seeks to witness conceptual responses to context and conditions, political and economic constraints, cultural and geographical transformations. Detours, failures, and tactical shifts become revelatory moments to understand new modes of practice and critical ways of engaging with given sites and communities.” —Francesco Garutti, curator of Groundwork

Guided by an urgency to understand the fundamental ways that architects are enacting change in the built environment, the curator, alongside film director Joshua Frank, decided not to report on the result of a project, but to document design during its nascent stage. For further insight into the process of making the film, read the article "A Story of Encounters" that we have just published on our website.

In upcoming months, Groundwork takes us to Berlin with b+ as they launch a European Citizens’ Initiative intended to shift culture and legislation toward preservation and rehabilitation of existing buildings, offering a way to actively fight forms of inequitable urban speculation (10 October 2024 to 11 May 2025). The series concludes with the third chapter by following Carla Juaçaba to the heart of Minas Gerais, Brazil where she is developing pavilions in a coffee field—minimal support structures in a territory where collectives are resisting extractive industrial agriculture (12 June 2025 to 14 September 2025).

In the meantime, and continuing with this focus, our new web issue, Forces of Friction, is going to expand the reflection on how contemporary voices from both within architecture and beyond confront the conditions that challenge and define the context of their work. We approach friction as both a catalyst and a method, bringing together architects and professionals from other disciplines in conversation to dwell upon the forces and conflicts that shape our built environments. 

To find out more about Groundwork and upcoming conversations, or about our film, research, publication and curatorial projects, subscribe to our newsletter.