“We have to imagine a different future.”
We met one of the pioneers of contemporary architecture, Andrés Jaque – founder of the Office for Political Innovation and Dean at New York’s Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.
“I think architecture has a power many people cannot see. I was trained in a school of architecture that was mostly focused on style and beauty, understood as something that was autonomous. But I think now we’re seeing that architecture has the great potential to deeply intervene with the structures by which we constitute ourselves as a collective. And that, for me, it’s a very different way of doing architecture.”
“The name of our office, Office for Political Innovation, is very intentional. First, because it is claiming that architectural practices are political practices. For me, this is crucial. The type of politics we talk about is not the politics of political parties. It’s something that is divisive, that is disputed, that is distributed, that is evolving in time, and that can only be managed through political tools. So for me, claiming that architecture is a political activity is claiming that its mission is to create, let’s say, alliances between actors and entities that are very heterogeneous and that otherwise would never be able to collaborate or to gain solidarity.”
“Well, now there are two ways of imagining the future and how architects and architecture will contribute to it. One is thinking of, for instance, the culture of sustainability. Sustainability is something that is allowing us to keep doing business as usual, but changing a few things so that our emissions, our consumptions are adapted to the limits that we’re facing. I think that’s not enough. I think we have to be much more clever in understanding that the crises that we’re experiencing now are the result of intersecting paradigms, the intersecting paradigms of carbonization, colonization, racialization, anthropocentrism, technocracy, and patriarchy. We have to understand that all of them work together. So, I think we have to acknowledge that the crisis we are experiencing now and facing now is basically the evidence that all these layers of reality are cracking. They’re very thin. They’re not something that, let’s say, is even possible to imagine that will perpetuate. But what is very interesting is that in the cracks are many beautiful things that are growing.”
Andrés Jaque founded the Office for Political Innovation in 2003. He has brought a trans-sectional approach to architectural design, practicing architecture as the intervention on complex composites of relationships, where its agency is negotiated with the agency unfolded by other entities.
Andrés Jaque is a Professor and the Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. He has also been the director of the Advanced Architectural Design Program at GSAPP and a visiting professor at Princeton University and The Cooper Union.
Andrés received his PhD in architecture from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid, where he also received his M. Arch. He has been an Alfred Toepfer Stiftung’s Tessenow Stipendiat and Graham Foundation grantee. In 2018, he co-curated Manifesta 12 in Palermo and is the Chief Curator of the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water.
His books include Superpowers of Scale (2020), Mies y la gata Niebla: Ensayos sobre arquitectura y cosmopolítica (2019), More-Than-Human (with Marina Otero and Lucia Pietroiusti) (2020) and Transmaterial Politics (2017).
Office for Political Innovation (OFFPOLINN) is an international architectural practice based in New York and Madrid. The office develops projects that transition across scales and mediums, intended to bring inclusivity into the built environment.
In 2016, OFFPOLINN received the Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts from the City of Vienna. The office was also awarded the SILVER LION for Best Research Project at the 14th Venice Biennale and the Dionisio Hernández Gil Award.
OFFPOLINN’s work is part of the collections of MoMA and the Art Institute of Chicago, among many others.
Andrés Jaque was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner in April 2024. The recording took place in connection with a lecture given by Andrés Jaque at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen.
Camera: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan
Edited by: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2024
Louisiana Channel is supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond, Ny Carlsbergfondet, and C.L. Davids Fond og Samling. This film is supported by Dreyersfond and Fritz Hansen.
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