Dearq: In your book Open Architecture (2018) you use a structure of strolls and stops to explore areas and buildings in Berlin, taking your readers along and allowing them not only to understand many architectures and the disciplinary context that generated them, but also the experiences of the individuals that inhabit them. Based on your use of this method (including its benefits as well as its shortcomings), would you say that there is a need for a new historiography of architecture? If so, what would be its main goals, its instruments, and its methods?
Esra Akcan (EA): The book imagines a reader taking a stroll in Berlin’s Kreuzberg borough and stopping at seven locations for a closer look into the urban renewal that was implemented in the late 1980s. This structure of strolls and stops reflects my longstanding interest in the global or — the word I prefer —intertwined history of architecture. My previous book Architecture in Translation elaborated on this historiographical question, and Open Architecture builds on it by showing the possibility of a global/intertwined history, even when taking a walk in a neighbourhood. Open Architecture concentrates on Kreuzberg, but its long “stop” chapters carry ideas from around the world that culminated and translated in Germany, including architects and ideas from Belgium, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, and the USA, to name a few. By global/intertwined history I do not mean circumnavigating the entire planet, but showing the connections and interdependencies between different and distant places in the world. The book’s stroll and stop structure reflects the character of the urban renewal (IBA-1984/87) as both a microcosm of the broad international debates of its time and a collection of projects within walking distance of each other.
Open Architecture gives voice to those who inhabit these spaces. Methodologically, oral history and storytelling were essential for achieving this aspect. After ringing every bell in Berlin-Kreuzberg between 2009-2017, I came to identify and build trust with those who were willing to tell their stories at length and over a few years. I would like to emphasise the methodological distinction of oral history from other disciplines that are also employed to analyse inhabitants. In architectural research, the resident (often called the user, as an abstract and universal entity) can be and has been analysed through sociology, which involves precise and predetermined methods, collecting sufficiently large samples and encoding the results into quantifiable data and repeatable and “objective” procedures. Quantifiable sociological methods offer little scope for dealing with open-ended questions and unpredictable criteria that characterise people’s voices. Ethnography has also been a common method, and foundational in the beginnings of Art History as a discipline, which reflected Western curiosity about the alleged “primitive, other, and non-Western.” Ethnography relies on the premise of an individual’s belonging to an identity group, and it has for too long operated with a sense of ethnographic authority, where the scientist and the ethnographer write the narrative.
Oral history was my preferred method for writing Open Architecture, because an oral historian refrains from representing an entire ethnicity or group, and adds the name of the underrepresented individual into history. An oral historian does not have claims to representability, or generalizability, but may even rely on a single witness. It is always inflected by memories, and I acknowledge its contingency and partiality. And yet, oral history is one of the few ways to write residents as actors into history without ethnographic authority, especially in the absence of archival documents that could have given access to the voice of the underrepresented. In other words, oral history builds an archive; it extends the existing archives, and produces documents.
When translating oral histories into my writing, I entertained the idea of storytelling as a format for participatory architectural history. Okwui Enwezor’s and Walter Benjamin’s writings were helpful in settling on this decision. As opposed to the isolated novel or the ever-speedy information highway, Walter Benjamin characterised storytelling as the experience that is passed from mouth to mouth and the storyteller as the mediator who conveys “counsel woven into the fabric of real life.” Okwui Enwezor characterised storytelling as something between documentary and near-documentary when he was commenting on film. I came to define a storyteller of architectural history as one that alternates between the voice of the author and the quotations from the resident’s oral history documents; one that acknowledges that the fabric of everyday life unfolding in an individual’s experience of a space is also part of the history of that space.
From this perspective, architectural history does not end when the building leaves the hand of the architect. Instead, architectural history as storytelling extends the narrative by combining the time of the building’s design with the time of a specific occupation. The contingency and partiality of storytelling that results from this specific amalgam of the two time periods acknowledges the necessarily open, unfinished nature of architectural history. One could write several histories of the same space, based on oral histories of different occupations at different times. This history does not aim for generalisable or repeatable narratives, but it builds empathy with concrete stories. Oral history shows us how people build places rather than occupy them. I trust that the stories in my book will enable readers to understand the inexcusable inequalities, injuries, and racism, as well as the inspiring solidarities and resilience that come out of these migrant stories. I believe storytelling is how we build empathy and understand the impact of political harm on people and the ways they use to partially overcome these pains.
Dearq: Regarding your rejection of general and supposedly objective histories, why does it seem so urgent nowadays to examine and evaluate the knowledge of the built environment offered by different individuals? In what sense does that approach shift from the study of the overall image of buildings to the study of their interior and daily use? Finally, what consequences (if any) do you believe the resulting historiography of architecture would have in architectural education?
EA: It is not that the design of interior space has not been important in the architectural discipline before. However, I hope that the stories of inhabitants showing how they interpret, appropriate and comment on spaces call for a substantial change and inspire architects to become more welcoming to constituencies they rarely encounter during the design process. I hope it calls on us to acknowledge the importance of what I call open architecture.
Opening the definition of architecture to resident appropriation was also a feminist gesture through which I could write more women into architectural history. It was not my original intention, but most of the characters of the book who participated in its oral history aspect were first-generation migrant women. I refer to them as resident-architects. By honouring the stories of resident-architects as much as of the architects, it is possible to stop seeing architecture as an occupation historically practised by men alone.
What effects would this approach have on architectural education? I would hope that it calls for an education that takes social, gender, racial and global justice seriously; that trains students to take their moral compass from a commitment to the globe, rather than their immediate nation-states or governments; that stops perpetuating the myth of the genius architect as if the architect was above society or responsible to the client alone; that makes students aware of their accountability to the world at large; and that puts an end to the white male supremacy as if there was nothing to learn from the history and ideas of others. Once these conventional values are changed, we can think of much broader horizons.
Dearq: Your book calls for collective ways of working, and thus moves away from a traditional architectural education, especially in its insistence to train young architects as demiurge artists. In other words, your book suggests a pedagogical paradigm shift regarding the architectural project and the way design is taught in architecture schools. In your opinion, what should be the most relevant pedagogical perspectives regarding the architectural project and its design, nowadays?
EA: Schools can hold more community-based engaged design studios. Students can have more experience in collaborating with other architecture students, as well as students from other disciplines. But, above all, open architecture is a matter of a shift in values. Therefore, a lot depends on the history-theory-criticism courses. The shift towards an anti-racist, anti-colonial, feminist and cosmopolitan global/ intertwined architectural history has already been taking shape for some time in some schools.
Dearq: Regarding the history-theory-criticism triad just mentioned, your book has reminded us of Marina Waisman’s El Interior de la Historia (1990) whose subtitle explicitly points to an “architectural historiography for use of Latin Americans”. It is evident to us that you have made an enormous effort to develop a truly original historiography (Akcan 2018, 54 and 55). Would you consider that the instruments and methods that define your very distinct way of writing history are specific, and therefore limited to writing about open architectures?
EA: Thank you for the compliments. An open form of history writing is not intended for writing the history of open architectures alone. This is clear in the book, which analyses space through the lens of openness but does not claim that all the buildings in Kreuzberg display “open architecture.” Quite the contrary. The topic of the book is developed in its format and method. I tried to show how thinking about architecture can carry us to historiographical innovations as well. I wanted to explore an open way of writing history by giving voice not just to a handful of established but also to understudied architects who were invited to build public housing in Kreuzberg and to immigrant residents that I mentioned.
Dearq: Let’s talk about these more or less known architects. As opposed to the design strategies you attribute to Kleihues and Krier (focused mostly on the plan as evidence of a clear geometry that can be documented and verified to be processed graphically, transparently, and objectively), your quest for an open architecture considers different qualities which are often invisible, and would therefore require other means of representation. This argument is especially clear in the second part of your book, where you unveil these qualities in Alvaro Siza’s building, as well as in John Hejduk’s Berlin Tower (especially through Yeliz Erçakmak’s testimony). How did you become interested in this more ephemeral (one could even say ineffable) aspect of open architecture? And most importantly, could you please describe to us how you have developed the instruments and methods required to apprehend and communicate its fundamentally invisible attributes?
EA: Rather than distinguishing between visible and invisible aspects of open architecture, I was thinking in terms of formal, programmatic, and procedural ways of achieving open architecture, as well as the overarching ethical and political commitment to the immigrant, to the hitherto outsider, the “other”. I was motivated by the complex relations between architecture and citizenship. This includes racism, human rights violations, inequality, self-governance, the nation-state as an international norm, and many other layers implicit in any notion of citizenship. It means a lot to me that your question suggests the formal as the visible and the others as invisible aspects. This acknowledges the unordinary gestures of the book. But of course, any architectural design involves considerations about programme, process, and political context, additionally to form. It seems that we still have the habit of prioritising form while theorising architecture, which I hope we can decentre. It was obvious to me from the very beginning that I cannot study or theorise the relation between architecture and citizenship by looking at the visible aspects of buildings alone.
Dearq: Moving towards the societal aspects of your research. In the introduction to your book, you clarify that collectivity and collaboration are essential to your definition of open architecture (Akcan 2018, 10). Further on, however, you use the term social agency suggesting closeness to Karl Popper’s notion of piecemeal social engineering as an antidote to the negative effects of large-scale central planning (20). Does this mean that besides collectivity and collaboration, your approach to open architecture also implies at least some competition among individuals in the production of the built environment?
EA: I may misunderstand your distinctions. I never thought of collaboration and collectivity as necessarily bringing centralised large-scale planning. Quite the contrary. Centralised planning implies a top-down process, whereas collaboration usually opens up space for more bottom-up, at least non-hierarchical processes. I define open architecture as a collectivity, specifically in relation to Aldo Rossi’s theory of “collective memory” and “collective will,” which influenced the IBA-Neubau leadership team. This may not embrace all the historical associations of the term collective. “Competition among individuals in the production of the built environment” is a paradigm of the capitalist world. However, I tried to think of open architecture as a position that calls for the opposite paradigm, which, I acknowledge, is not easy or realistic to achieve in the near future.
Dearq: Following up on the previous question, your claim that “collaboration is seldom endorsed except for pragmatic necessity” (Akcan 2018, 24) seems to elaborate on the work of Gramsci (via Mouffe, Laclau, and Foucault [Akcan 2018, 27 y 28]). Could you please clarify if you take this pragmatic necessity to be antithetical to collaboration? And if so, is it part of the “neo-liberal ethos” you mention on pages 10 and 11? Are you suggesting that we should dismiss rationality and efficiency as motivations for change in the built environment, and instead operate on other types of morality beyond the practical? We would be very curious to know how you think these non-pragmatic moral considerations should be defined and articulated in a diverse social setting.
EA: What I had in mind when I wrote that sentence was that architects, in their conventional profile, collaborate with specialists in other disciplines and professions, because they need to do it to implement their ideas. The myth of the architect as a genius individual creates a false sense of sufficiency and superiority, which makes collaboration undesirable. I was hoping that the concept of open architecture could shift this presumption as well and that we can conceive collaboration as an intention and aspiration on its own terms, not as a process we would have preferred to avoid if we could. I agree that this calls on another “type of morality” as you say, but I do not necessarily see it excluding rationality or efficiency. The book also imagines “collaboration” beyond its literal meaning. For example, I talk about Aldo Rossi as collaborating with dead architects. Collaboration as a concept is meant to decentre self-centred minds.
Dearq: Your plea for an architecture for the non-citizen is truly fascinating, in the sense that it recognises the limitations and unnecessary human suffering derived from the definition of nation-states and their concomitant legal systems (Akcan 2018, 32). However, it is not clear what exactly you are proposing to replace the idea of a citizen, with responsibilities and rights linked to concrete and localised laws. Are you inviting us to understand the individual human being in a different category? And if so, would that understanding demand a new, trans-national set of rules by which all human beings on the planet would abide?
EA: As you noticed, the relation between citizenship and architecture is a core concern throughout the book. By looking at the exclusions from citizenship, I discuss many related issues, including racism, inequality, human rights, the democratisation of democracy, and so on. “Guest workers” and “refugees” who are not given citizenship rights are my anchors to analyse these issues in a specific context; in this case, Germany during the 1980s. I do not propose to replace the idea of the citizen with something else, but to broaden it so that there are only “world citizens.” In other words, could we think of a world where human rights and political rights were not predicated on being a citizen of a nation-state?
I am aware that we will need to use the word “world citizen” metaphorically until, if ever, there were transformations in the legal, political, and international law spheres that currently maintain the nation-state structure as an international norm. But even so, this should not prevent architects themselves from imagining world citizenship and practising accordingly. The book asks what would have happened if architects were practising accordingly and calls this open architecture. What would have happened if architects were designing with a new ethics of welcoming toward the non-citizen? I discuss historical examples and thought experiments from the past where we can find formal, programmatic or procedural clues of practising this open architecture.
Dearq: It seems contradictory, but from global citizens we would like to move to a local or, at least, regional context. As you know, this issue of DeArq reflects on open spaces in Latin American cities. Among other coincidences, we have noted with some surprise that many of your reflections on Berlin could just as well refer to the basic template used by Spanish colonisers in the 16th century to found hundreds of cities in the American continent (Akcan 2018, 52). While the grid defined in Philip the Second’s Ordinances was violently imposed, as a structure it has undoubtedly also fostered enormous amounts of collaboration (50) which you attribute to open architecture. How should we make sense of this apparent contradiction?
EA: I am not sure if I understand where you see a contradiction. The ethics of open architecture are the exact opposite of colonialism. Colonialism forces itself on the hitherto other, which is the opposite of welcoming the other. Collaborating to colonise a land by exerting violence on who is already there is not open architecture. For those who might not have read the book yet, this chapter theorises collaboration as one way of open architecture, besides others such as participation, the multiplicity of meaning, adventure games, and designing flexible and adaptable spaces.
Dearq: Beyond that foundational gridiron plan, contemporary Latin American cities are also determined by the sort of fragmentation and discontinuity in their urban structure, which you have so beautifully documented in a very specific part of Berlin. However, unlike the post-war European city, in Latin America, these phenomena are usually the result of violent conflict, extreme forms of poverty, weak institutions, and huge internal migrations towards urban centres which are forced to grow at breakneck speed. Although formally entitled to rights, internal migrants are usually the same non-citizens you describe in your book. Have you considered these other forms of weakened citizenship caused by internal, rather than by inter-national migration, as well as their effect on the huge cities that are habitual beyond the European context?
EA: Yes, of course. Before I answer your question, let me remind you that European cities have also been shaped by extreme violence and war, as well as physical and conceptual segregation resulting from racism. Concerning your question about internal migration, the book also discusses the idea of social citizenship with rights tied to economic welfare and security, such as insurance against unemployment and rights to health care, education, housing, and a pension. When applied to the notion of social citizenship, noncitizens also include people excluded from citizenship because of socially constructed notions of class, race, gender, ethnicity, or religion. People who were once non-citizens often continue to be denied social citizenship after naturalisation, because the exclusion of former slaves, colonial subjects, or guest workers is projected onto the present as class difference and white supremacy. Arendt and Etienne Balibar helped me understand the mechanism that denies legal citizens the right to have rights. For example, Balibar explains the relation between internal and external exclusions from citizenship. An external border is mirrored by an internal border to such an extent that citizenship becomes a club to which one is admitted or not regardless of one’s legal rights. Those who are excluded from the benefits of social citizenship experience a state of “weakened citizenship,” to use your terms. This means that discussing the relation between citizenship and architecture allows us to explore similar issues for internal migrants as well.
Concerning your questions about the Latin American context, I would like to add something else: thinking about citizenship and human rights carried me to the book that I am currently writing, where I look at the new human rights conventions that came into being with the social movements against dictatorship in Latin America. For example, I am discussing the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and the Saturday Mothers in Turkey together, as social movements that built resistance through their association with specific urban spaces. I am discussing the new human rights conventions such as protection against enforced disappearance and right-to-truth by reaching out to Latin American countries. Even though Latin America did not feature much in Open Architecture, because the book focuses on Berlin’s Kreuzberg, I think there are a lot of comparative discussions to be made, as you are pointing out in your questions, and which I am trying to do in my new book.
Dearq: One of the most concrete outcomes of weakened or non-citizenship is the citizens’ inability to access and use sufficient and adequate built space, either private, public, institutional, or collective. In most Latin American cities, this lack of sufficient and adequate built space can be equally attributed to bottom-up processes of urban renewal and densification, carried out on a plot-by-plot basis; as well as to vast top-down macro-projects designed and built by powerful developers. Both expressions of what is commonly understood as neo-liberalism (a perversion of the market economy) seem to neglect the institutional layer that you so sharply bring forth in your book when discussing the role of government and formal political discussion in IBA’s success. Based on your in-depth study of the role of mayors, city councils and planning offices in the production of the city, what recommendations could we offer Latin American architects faced with the more extreme political and economic forms of neoliberalism?
EA: I have an intuition that you know the answer to this question better than I. If reading Open Architecture inspired you for this answer, I would say the book did its part. For an answer, let me come back to the book I am currently writing, for which I gained a better knowledge of the resistance and memory debates during and in the aftermath of the top-down regimes in Latin America. I have been reading a lot about the impact of neoliberalism as a force that impairs the reckoning with the wounds of this past in Latin America. Apology memorials erected after dictatorships in Argentina and Chile were co-opted to the memory market as an extension of the simultaneous neoliberalisation of the world in the 1990s. In a context where memory groups reject government support and need to survive in the market economy, trauma sites get integrated into the tourism industry, the “never again” motto turns into a logo, and memorialisation becomes a brand. For example, the Memory Park of Argentina, originally proposed by family members of the disappeared and a group of students, evolved so that it would commemorate other atrocities. Many have seen this multiplication as a necessary step to fund the park by attracting more visitors. However, the completion and management of the park periodically faced drawbacks because of the ambiguities in its funding structure. Neoliberalisation and commercialisation not only let the state evade its financial burden but also cheapens the process by turning trauma into a commodity that needs to sell well. If the state is not involved in memorials to the victims of state violence, the result is not an apology, and memorialisation is left to its own devices in a neoliberal world. But if the state is too involved, it dictates the message in its own partiality. State involvement is a message in itself. Therefore, societies need to find ways for the state to become involved in the funding of the construction and management of apology memorials, while the narrative is democratised by involving many groups horizontally.
Dearq: Speaking of conflicts, your book revisits a series of tensions inherent in the architectural discipline. On the one hand, it challenges the idea that architecture is fundamentally made by or understood through the work of a few individuals. It even suggests a broader definition of the architect to include “individuals who confirm the openness of architecture by participating in its mutation” (Akcan 2018, 76), while also suggesting that open architecture can only be achieved through a collective agency (115). On the other hand, to develop your argument you still make extensive use of the figure of the well-known (one could even say outstanding) architect or scholar (e.g., Mies, Le Corbusier, Zevi, Isozaki, Scharoun, Krier, and Rossi). Why does it seem so difficult, at times, to write histories and theories of architecture without these singular, structuring names? What does this tell us of the many theoretical and historiographical attempts that are currently challenging the idea of the architect as an individual? In what sense (if any) would the erosion of individualism in architecture be instrumental to the notion of “open architectural history” which you mention in the book? (Akcan 2018, 76).
EA: Let me clarify that my intention as a historian is not to erase, delete, or cancel names, but to add names, decentre the myth of the Author and give due acknowledgement to all makers. The “death of the author,” to use Roland Barthes’ terminology, means the birth of the reader, but not necessarily the total elimination of those who write a text. Open architectural history means the redistribution of attention for a more layered and just account. It aims to decentre the star-system and give more even-handed gratitude and criticism. The book is also about exposing a lot of mistakes and holding those individuals accountable for their mistakes. As a historian, I consider my role as giving credit and criticism to where it is due.
Dearq: Speaking of notable architects and educators, in 1972 Dutch architect John Habraken published Supports: an Alternative to Mass Housing (originally De Dragers en de Mensen, from 1961). Habraken claimed here that the architect should refrain from becoming involved in all the different layers of participation that define an architectural design process. Fast forward half a century, how do you look upon Habraken’s work, and the open building’s network that emerged from his research? What aspects of this “limited liability” approach to architectural production do you believe are still relevant nowadays, and which are obsolete, in your opinion?
EA: In the past, there have been quite a few projects and thought experiments to which we can attribute clues of open architecture. Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist movement are other good examples. While their contributions to the notion of adaptability, growth over time, and appropriation for inhabitants’ needs are still very relevant today, their idea that vehicular traffic roads are unchanging infrastructures is perhaps less so. The introduction of Open Architecture gives a very short overview of these experiments. I am not aware of Habraken’s practice 1 enough to comment on how his office responds, if at all, to issues of immigration, discrimination, human rights, and citizenship, which are central to my book.
Dearq: Among the many discoveries your book has offered us is your creative and truly inspiring re-reading of the work of three architects whose work has often been taken for reactionary (Akcan 2018, 23). For example, by clarifying Adolf Loos’ and Aldo Rossi’s stance against naïve moralism and functionalism as forms of determinism (96 – 100) you clearly attribute both architects a radically liberal posture (24). Furthermore, the popular caricature of Rob Krier as a traditionalist favoured by obsolete, un-democratic power brokers is challenged by your nuanced analysis of his designs for IBA (65). We would be very curious to know what reactions has your unusual reading of the work of these three architects generated, especially in the more progressive segments of academia?
EA: I am aware that my work disturbs some audiences. Exposing the authoritarianism of Ungers upsets many; or seeing some openness in Aldo Rossi and Rob Krier unsettles some readers. Showing the indirect collaborations and conversations between Stirling and Krier, or Eisenman and Kleihues, may seem counter-intuitive to many. So does appreciating the graffiti on Siza’s white surfaces. But to avoid a misunderstanding for the readers of this interview who might not have read the book, in the final analysis, I also expose a lot of contradictions and discriminatory premises in latent open practices of the past. Needless to say, my intention is not to categorise architects as “open” or “closed” — that list would have been a caricaturised reduction — but to discuss ideas about open architecture through these architects. In this sense, every architect featured in the book leads us to some ideas about openness, as well as lack of openness.
However, to answer your question about the reaction of architects, I must tell you about the ignorance and trivialisation that I received and keep receiving along the way. As a Turkish woman, I have the impression that few architects gave me credit that I would write something valuable. I had no difficulty in finding immigrants and tenant advisors who wanted to tell me about their stories for the oral history project. But few architects responded to my request for an interview, even though I reached out to many of them. I would like to acknowledge and thank all the IBA-Altbau architects, such as Cihan Arın, Heide Modenhauer, Bahri Düleç, Hardt-Waltherr Hämer, Wulf Eıchstädt, Uwe Böhm, and many others, as well as Neubau’s Günter Schlusche, Rob Krier, David Mackay, Hildebrand Machleidt who took part in the oral history project, Rem Koolhaas who opened his and OMA’s archives and Alvaro Siza. They all responded to my calls.
Dearq: You have certainly succeeded in identifying how some of the architectures you analysed preceded current approaches to open architecture, especially regarding a condition that you describe as latent or unstated, and which opposes the quest for formal and performative clarity in architecture. However, other examples in your book, such as Rem Koolhaas’s project for the Kochstrasse / Friedrichstrasse, appear to deal straightforwardly with the more obvious aspects of context. In your words: “OMA imagined that a section through the building would represent a section through West Berlin: Allies at the base, followed at the middle levels by larger units to be taken up by Turkish guest workers and their families, with Germans living in small units at the top.” Alvaro Siza’s project for Block 121, on the contrary, appropriates evident manifestations of formal and functional discontinuity and irregularity while preserving the existing perimeter. In the face of your case for openness as latency, how do you interpret these other design strategies, which deal with the more evident aspects of the context with equally evident formalising strategies?
EA: I use the word latent open architecture for all these practices, without signalling out Koolhaas or Siza. We can find different clues of openness and lack of openness in almost all the different architects discussed in the book. I also disclose how policymakers used architecture as a mechanism of immigration control and displacement, and analyse how different architects responded to the discriminatory housing laws and regulations (such as the moving ban and immigrant quota) that were in effect during the urban renewal. Some architects were complicit, others politically naïve; some of them were ironic, but some were indeed subversive. The quotations in your question represent an ironic and subversive approach to discrimination against immigrants.
Dearq: While most approaches to open architecture have foregrounded such issues as flexibility and adaptability in rather generic terms, to such an extent that these concepts would be applicable anywhere, your book is quite site-specific. Could you please elaborate on your perspective regarding this seeming paradox of openness versus specificity?
EA: As a historian, I focus on researching my subject well and bringing it alive on the page, while theorising so that the book would be relevant for broader contexts. The ideas in this book may not translate perfectly everywhere else in the world, and that is all right. But I believe they are relevant for many other places than Berlin Kreuzberg alone. Writing this book meant ringing every bell in Kreuzberg and spending hours every day in interviews. Oral history depends on long-term commitment, building trust, knowing the language and all its contextual codes to foster a conversation. After publishing my book, people asked me why I did not interview Italian or Yugoslav migrants, but only Turkish ones. Such questions may reflect the expectations created by contemporary discourses of representation, as well as habits of comparative analysis in social and political sciences. But they miss the specific methods and contributions of oral history. Imagining that the same person can and should foster the same level and depth of dialogue in all languages is a very dangerous illusion. But we can translate what is researched in one context to others. I do not see this as a paradox.
Dearq: A final question: although it may seem odd, especially against the wealth of positions that support your meticulous investigation into open architecture, could you please tell us in a few words what you take to be the distinct properties of its opposite? In other words, is there such a thing as a closed architecture, and if so, what would be its most salient features?
EA: You probably noticed that I do not use the word closed architecture. Nonetheless, we can speak about a lack of openness, for which there are also ample examples in the book. Examples for the lack of openness would include dismissing immigrant inhabitants, turning a blind eye to discrimination, denying the right to have rights, eroding citizenship and participation, designing a finished space that allows for no change, looking down on resident appropriations, trying to prohibit alterations, upholding the myth of the genius self-centred architect, and the like.
Thank you very much for reading my book so carefully and for asking these engaging, intelligent questions. I really appreciate the opportunity to have this feedback, and to clarify and elaborate on several aspects in more depth. I am so honoured that Open Architecture touches DeArq’s readers and is potentially relevant for open spaces in Latin American cities.