The Brooklyn Rail

There is a lumbering force moving its way through architecture. The last fifteen years have seen a growth in the number of collective practices, filling in the spaces between institutions that are unresponsive to conflict and difficulty. Last year alone, multiple surveys of collectives in architecture were published—indicating that the growth of these organization types is not a trend but a meaningful business practice that will continue to impact the definition and design of architecture. In this scenario—I borrow Natalie Donat-Cattin’s definition of collectives in architecture as outlined in her 2022 publication, Collective Processes, as “all those architectural practices that are based on a horizontal organizational system, and whose founding members are greater than four.”

Their work encompasses a wide range of projects, from research to exhibitions to buildings. Through collective action, organization, and gathering, there is a blossoming of a more robust and sensitive way to build and think. These “anti-institutions'' present radical and sometimes intrusive projects that pierce the mundane skin of the current built environment and its rigid systems. The quiet radicalism of collectives is essential to understanding the state of architecture today and its future.

The eruption of collective practices is not surprising in a climate that has normalized mutual aid, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. Now it is not uncommon to encounter GoFundMe campaigns initiated to cover the costs of higher education or medical bills. The social contract with governments and institutions has frayed to such an extent that normalizing alternatives is necessary. Similarly, architects are looking for other ways to make an impact on the built environment. That the traditional trajectory seems to offer frustration and failure with little chance of directly affecting design, makes collective practice even more appealing. The formation of collectives responds to the complexities of our moment.

In October of last year a client reached out to me with an undefined project that would re-imagine a historic factory which this client had acquired with the intention of repurposing into a community-oriented mixed-use space. The project is a testing ground for new spatial ideas made possible within the envelope of a factory built during the height of the Erie Canal (1850-1900). While it promised an incredible opportunity, the realities of being an early-career sole practitioner made taking on the project alone unfeasible. This led to the formation of a collective of colleagues from the university where I teach (Syracuse University), including myself, at first jokingly called the supergroup. The supergroup has allowed us to pool resources and time: it was the only logical way to tackle the project. The idea of the collective relieved the stress and eased the practical difficulties of pursuing the project while also injecting the undertaking with convivial sociability, and it occasioned a moment to reflect on collectives as a viable mode of practice.

One collective of architects, called Citygroup, and founded in 2018 in NYC, is an example of how a collective can actively bring non-traditional city planning and architectural theory into a more public conversation. Internally, they are non-hierarchically organized, hosting events, talks, exhibitions, and participating in grassroots efforts to better the city, like advocating for affordable housing in a new World Trade Center tower. The group, which is committed to a common platform of cities being able to care for their populace, is able to impact conversations around architecture outside of educational institutions which have less ambitious agendas.

WIP (Work in Progress / Women in Practice) is a feminist collective of seven individuals, founded in 2020 in NYC. Stemming from an initial intent to create a support community for young women practitioners, the women formalized their collaboration while pursuing (and winning) the Care for Hudson Square competition. I recently spoke with Elsa Ponce, one of the founding members, who offered insight into how they function. Each individual involved in WIP has their own practice. By participating in WIP Collaborative they’ve forged a support network that allows them to do bigger projects, and specifically public projects where their diverse backgrounds better equip them to respond with sensitivity. The collaborative model is nimble and flexible: allowing its participants to work as a whole team, or to partition work for smaller projects. They are able to get more work done in less time.

Collectives in architecture are not a new idea. The 1960s and 1970s saw canonical collective practices like Ant Farm, Archizoom, Archigram, and Superstudio, among many others, that presented imaginative, unbuildable, and radical projects. The boom of collectives in speculative practice made clear that there was an industry-wide distaste and disappointment in contemporary approaches to urban planning. Today collectives are similarly responding to lack of opportunity. However this current state of affairs also performs an additional service in terms of promoting radical thinking.

Practicing collectively offers more opportunities for reflexivity. The internal structures of these collectives vary considerably at offices like Lacol (Spain), Collective Architecture (Scotland), Assemble (UK), and Citygroup (USA), to name a few. If architectural projects make it into mainstream media, attention is focused on the principal or partners at offices, glorifying the individual and ignoring the varied mechanisms of labor that get projects built. Collective practices are dismantling the notion of individual and often “ego” based practice, an action that is quietly radical (an idea I'll touch on later through the political theory of agonism). The flexible, spontaneous, and almost amoeboid organization within collective practices contributes to pluralizing the way research and construction is undertaken. Projects pursued by collectives often do not follow a typical client-architect relationship, they instead use community engagement to expand the number of voices allowed into the previously-exclusive realm of design.

In the spring of 2014, French political theorist Chantal Mouffe gave a lecture at Columbia University’s GSAPP. Mouffe spoke to an auditorium of artists and architects on agonism, a term defined as actions that contest hegemonic systems and resist post-Fordist neoliberalism, while also acknowledging it. Agonism acknowledges power structures and takes advantage of the confrontation and tension between these structures, and radical action to bring about change through the recognition that the conflict will persist. Its goal is not to produce a consensus, but instead plurality and difference. Rather than being antagonistic or revolutionary, contemporary collectives are agonistic: successful in part because of, and additionally somehow sustained by, the systems they are actively defying. They are not necessarily turning the system upside down—but opening doors and windows to other ways to be.

Collectives have become fundamental in making sure our cities and spaces provide care. They are the primordial in-between, a fluid, expanding and contracting sub-system, existing interstitially: making and applying pressure on all of the systems around them.