AR Reading List 069: collective practice

In this month’s issue, which is dedicated to emerging practitioners and student voices, Resolve Collective stresses the importance of ‘acknowledging the messiness of even the most ostensibly straightforward collaborative relationship and appraising the moments that leak into and draw from others we practice around’. Collective practice is sometimes presented as an antidote to the architecture’s long insistence on the supremacy of individual authorship. But architecture was always already a collaborative act, involving many forms of expertise and the input of communities – not only ‘stakeholders’. The reading list below examines the power of collective practice in relation to the built environment, whether it plays out in architecture firms that defy traditional hierarchies, properties reclaimed and repaired by squatters demanding adequate housing, or in the urban spaces occupied by multitudes of protesting bodies. 

Put into practice, AR November 2022, Resolve Collective
‘Architectural practice is not a question of individual qualification but collective imagination’

Squatting the city: on developing alternatives to mainstream forms of urban regeneration, AR July/August 2017, Alexander Vasudevan
‘It is in the lives, spaces and practices of squatters that we continue to find an alternative vision of the city and a robust defence of housing’

Portfolio: Swati Janu, Social Design Collaborative, AR March 2022, Gautam Bhan
‘The diversity of methods and tools that Swati Janu uses suggests a constant engagement with architecture as a collective practice of politics’

The collective body: choral reimaginings of social space, AR March 2022, Lola Olufemi
‘Protest and direct action transform uses of space by shifting our perception of the self and provide new ways of contending with the body’s potential’

An Indigenous university, AR September 2022, Ursula Biemann, Santiago del Hierro, Álvaro Hernández Bello, Giovanna Micarelli, Juliana Ramírez and Iván Darío Vargas Roncancio
‘Decision making is a complex collective process in the Indigenous context that requires a lot of care for the project to succeed’

How housing co-operatives built a city, AR October 2016, Emma Letizia Jones and Philip Shelley
‘The availability of affordable housing in co-operative developments is no accident, but rather the result of deliberate, sustained and controlled housing policy’

Coming together: La Comunal in Barcelona, Spain by Lacol, AR March 2021, Ethel Baraona Pohl
‘Facing the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, a collectively owned co-operative structure seemed the most appropriate for Lacol when establishing its practice’