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WITH GREAT POWER…

A CONVERSATION WITH JACK SELF

REAL Foundation, Glass House, 2017. Rendering. Image reproduced with author’s permission.

Jack Self is a prolific architect, editor and author based in London. He is Director of REAL Foundation, a cultural institute and architectural practice notable for its critical approach to architecture and design, informed by a deep engagement with politics, philosophy and economics.

With design studio OK-RM, REAL Foundation were responsible for the British Pavilion at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016, entitled Home Economics. In the years since, they have designed gala openings, museum exhibitions and mortgage products. To date, they have published six issues of the magazine REAL Review as well as the collection of essays Real Estates.

Jack visited Melbourne in October 2017 to deliver a talk as part of the annual MPavilion program. During his visit, he participated in a conversation with students at the Melbourne School of Design convened by Colby Vexler and Scott Woods.

Inflection spoke to Jack in March 2018. Our wide ranging discussion attempted to define the designer’s position in relation to the vast network of agents and actors that we must navigate. From our discussion, we gained an understanding of how designers can practice and communicate critically—and ethically—within the confines of a capitalist society.

We think of big data as an objective, quasi-scientific procedure of analysis. But its parameters are currently being dictated by external forces. How can architects and designers exert influence over how data analytics are implemented within the built environment?

Architects certainly can have an influence on this. It has to do with the ‘meta-metrics’ that we use to assess the value of different types of information. During the early days of parametricism in the mid-2000s, many parametric projects that were executed by Zaha Hadid Architects or under [ZHA partner] Patrik Schumacher at the Architectural Association, presented design as a logical and inevitable consequence of data-sets. They would say, for example: “We analysed the site for ten weeks, and using that data we’ve designed a building that is a perfect response to the existing patterns of use of the site.” The difficulty with that is, first of all, you’re not making a proposition; you’re just making something which is a reaction to existing conditions. It would be an insane prospect to design a building that perfectly responds to the conditions of 1922 when you’re actually building a hundred years later than that. During that intermediate time, societies change in their structure, human use patterns change—so you cannot only respond to data. You have to also make a proposition.

Then comes the value judgment, which is to say: “this data set is more valuable than another.” For me, it comes back to a core principle of mine, which is: I want to be free, and I want everyone else to be free too. What does a value judgment like that mean? It can be drawn into dangerous territory of ultra-libertarians who think that everyone should own guns and who don’t believe in the nation state. But it can also lead you to more progressive and liberal ideas about freedom, and particularly the right to privacy.

The right to privacy is one of the most important values that is at the core of democratic societies. Therefore, it is important that you have a space which is your own; which is anonymous; which is private; from which you can form ideas about what you believe is the right way to engage with society. The problem with big data at the moment is that it’s being used to undermine the right to privacy of individuals. And architects can certainly have a role to play in terms of how we manage those data-sets, and then how we translate them into built form in order to promote the possibility of being unobserved.

As building industry and construction jobs are made redundant by automation, are architects obliged to take a principled stance in defence of those whom that transition is disadvantaging?

The future of automation is highly problematic. Automation is happening in a way that it hasn’t happened in the past. Previously, new technologies destroyed old industries but created new jobs that tended to be better paying, and often there were more jobs as a result. That’s no longer the case. Automation is reducing the number of total productive hours in society, and this a global first. Previously, when you replaced the horse and cart with the car it created huge new industries of many kinds, everything from drive-in cinemas to road infrastructure, new models of housing and transport and so on. But the self-driving car doesn’t do that. It doesn’t create new work.

As technology advances in the built environment we have to be very careful that, in engaging with these technologies, we’re not disadvantaging not only the general public, but also the architectural profession ourselves. Any augmentation to our previous mode of working is great, but when a CAD program makes the architect as designer obsolete that becomes a more problematic question. That’s another danger that’s inherent in labour automation. Therefore, there needs to be a social argument that goes along with it. The pursuit of technology in itself is not an end.

We can always move ourselves towards greater efficiency, but I don’t know where that gets us.

Well, we just end up working longer. Technology is actually accelerating the amount of work that you have to do. Work days are getting longer. The blurring between public and private activities is of particular concern, because it means you’re always working. That undermines a non-commercial sense of ourselves. I don’t even know if I have any personality left, actually; there is really only my work.

So you become this kind of abstracted vector within a system, which is driving you towards ever more work and ever more involvement with these systems. I would say that we have to resist them, and find ways to resist them in our daily life. The day is probably the largest amount of time that any human can realistically hold in their head as a prospect. Therefore, if you alter your daily patterns, you alter your entire life. And therefore, habits become very important.

The work of architects and designers seems to be largely dictated by market forces. Addressing issues like social inequality seems out of our reach. As a result, many of us will move into risk-averse corporate firms. Conversely, your work attempts to question the underlying forces which govern the property market. Is this part of a wider strategy?

At the level of an ideological strategy, I don’t know to what extent it’s moving outside of architecture for me. Architecture already is a discipline which involves a huge variety of different data sets as part of the design process. It’s one of the most sophisticated forms of design. If we’re thinking already about environmental conditions, historical context, technology, planning, legal considerations, regulations, materiality, the politics of space, then extending that to include an understanding of financial systems and the real estate market seems quite integral.

The wider strategy is simple but also extremely ambitious, which is to understand whether it’s possible to resist capitalism from within the world of architecture. It is my firm belief that the only existential threat to capitalism has to do with altering real estate markets. It’s only through changing the way in which housing is valued—or particularly the way in which land is valued—that we can have any impact on the current economic system.

Max Mein, 2018. Photograph, Melbourne. Image reproduced with author’s permission.

Can this change be initiated by architects, or can it only occur through a combined efforts with some other industries or actors?

The architect has always orchestrated other industries and agents, and is subject to other agents as well. I would question the idea that an architect is the author of a building, because the architect is only one part of an entire mechanism. The majority of the built environment is not generated by architects, so I’m not so sure the architect can make broad systematic changes.

My hope would be that the architect as a designer is able to see the opportunities and the weaknesses from inside the system itself. This is why I’m also not hugely interested in the design of one-off buildings. I’m interested in what I would call the model: the idea of the building as something that can be imitated and replicated at scale. It’s only through leading by example that architects can have any influence.

Do you think that the conditions exist at present for the architect to assume that role? It seems to us that the building industry is increasingly focussed on producing private wealth rather than proposing alternative models.

We can’t be nostalgic for the historical relationship between the state and private enterprise when it came to the built environment that existed during the 1950s, ’60s and early ’70s. That type of relationship is not going to come back. However, when we think about the economic situation we’ve arrived at today, there’s an assumption that through deregulation the state has passed off its responsibilities onto the private sector, who have not taken up any social ambition with that. They’ve just pursued private wealth gains. But the state was massively involved in that. There is no such thing as deregulation. It’s just regulation for a different purpose.

The generation of people who were in their early adulthood during the boom and who experienced the 2008 crash have been quite rapidly and radically politicised when it comes to questions of wealth equality and social equality.

Society generally is thinking a lot more about gender, race, as well as discussions around environmentalism that were absent 15 years ago. My instinct is that the demographics in most Western societies are generally positive, and that the recent kick to the right is a temporary one. Whether or not that results in a kind of permanent shift to a new relationship between state and private enterprise, I couldn’t say. In a way in doesn’t matter, because there will never be the perfect moment to decide to engage in these types of activities.

A lot of your work is focussed around the act of critique. In particular, you seem to position your architectural work at odds with the status quo. Do you think the standing of criticism is being harmed by the expectation that critics should simply be telling people whether something is worth their time?

Whether I’m writing, designing a piece of furniture or working on a housing project, hypothetical or not, I always try to pursue the methodology of the architect, which is that the essence of ‘architecture’ is the project, and that means proposition. It’s fine to be critical, but criticality in itself is not enough to form good critique.

I think it’s important to understand why I do those hypothetical projects. For example, each of the five projects in the Derivative Architecture series has been moving towards a higher level of resolution in terms of how it deals with the pragmatics of planning systems and the reality of finance. Each of those projects is trying to rapidly test out a different type of financial model in order to see what the consequences of that would be for the built form. For me personally they’re very useful, and they represent a continuation of my education.

But I don’t think they could be built, and so there is a question about what the value of the ‘building-as-criticism’ or the ‘building-as-metaphor’ is. Because architects for the most part are not writers, we should not create a hierarchy between whether we write or whether we draw. These projects are very much intended as arguments. That’s different from an actual built work. A built work cannot be a metaphor.

To what extent should architects and designers be held responsible for the on-site conditions and the treatment of labour on their projects?

I know this is going to be a very banal response, but in part that has to do with the contract structure. In a design and construct contract, the designer sits underneath the client and is then effectively cut off at the moment the building goes into construction. By having a contract structure of this kind the architect has zero control over and zero relationship with the realisation of the building. At that point, it’s not a question of whether or not the architect can influence the labour conditions on-site, but whether or not the architect should take on the job in the first place.

Peter Eisenman has said that once you start judging a client you can’t do any work as an architect, because there is no such thing as clean money and clean conditions. That’s true to an extent, but I also have faith in the architectural community, who tend to be an extremely ethically and socially concerned group. I really do believe that architects have good intentions on the whole. Each of us must find what we think the limit for where it is we’re prepared to work will be.

Imre Solt, Burj Dubai Construction Workers, 2007. Photograph. From Wikimedia Commons, released into public domain.

But it’s complex when the architect has a marginalised role in the construction process, so therefore I think the architect should always argue for greater involvement in the construction process and in on-site conditions. We can do that by making more sophisticated arguments about the value of design and the value of an architect’s involvement in a project. The way that design tends to be valued is purely in terms of how many more dollars-per-square meter it can add to the sale price. But there are many other arguments that can be made to justify the value of design.

This is also why I’m so concerned about architects having financial knowledge and being literate in economics and models of finance, because the more you can speak to a developer or you can speak to capital in its own language, the more likely it is you are to have greater control over the types of labour conditions you’ve mentioned. REAL Review is a perfect exemplar for the way in which I approach all architectural work. It’s not architecture, I should be clear. Buildings are architecture, urbanism maybe is architecture, but writing is really not architecture. Nonetheless, one can take an architectural methodology and apply it to other things, like publications.

You’ve avoided making content for REAL Review available online, which is standard practice for most contemporary publications.

REAL Review was designed backwards from an economic model that makes it viable. We have a moral imperative to critique injustices located within everyday conditions, and we’re trying to create a media platform which can express and explore those ideas, and which can support both well-known authors and unknown authors. The physical object of REAL Review is designed around a subscription-based model, which has no advertising. Therefore, we are completely reliant on people buying the physical magazine.

The physical aspect of the magazine has been optimised for the financial conditions in which it operates. For example, its dimensions and its weight are the maximum amount that’s able to be sent by first class letter in the UK. As a result, when it appears in bookstores, it is so obviously unlike any other magazine in that store, because all of the other magazine formats have been optimised around the idea of news-stand distribution. You can see that disjunct, which hints at the system that’s behind it. You would never publish your content online because it undermines any desire that people might have to buy your magazine.