Associations: What Brings Architects Together?

Bauhaus

Even though a truly outstanding building also manages to create a sense of identity, beauty and usefulness for the person or group that receives it, architectural designs have habitually been interpreted as an expression of the architect’s own individual persona. This vision of architecture as a projection of individual creativity has stimulated a quest for original discourse, with architects historically coming together whenever there has been a need to address new challenges. At Bauhaus, for example, in order to combine art, craft and industrial production it was necessary to develop new education programmes orientated towards technological progress¹, while at CIAM the desire to define the city of the future brought together architects who used their own works to establish a vision of modernity and created the International style as a means of sharing their ideals.  But these gatherings of architects also fulfil another very important role. They provide a vivid snapshot of a particular moment, a zeitgeist that condenses a whole complex panorama into a short fragment of time and space.

CIAM

Looking at the present state of affairs, in which chartered architects’ associations have lost much of their corporate power and the profession itself has spawned numerous specialised offshoots, it’s interesting to look at what new issues are now causing architects to join forces.In this regard, Arquitecturas Collectivas has been a pioneering, and now international, network in support of the participative construction of the urban environment. Its origin may lie in the dearth of consolidated methodologies for participative processes and in the need to share social concerns and expertise².

The same search for references and need for intercourse are also present in Asociación Ludantia and Asociación Patios Habitables, two recently founded associations focussing on the education, space, childhood trinomial. These initiatives have a number of common features which help us to understand exactly why they came into being:

• They all appeared spontaneously in social networks. The main potential of such platforms is that they constitute a dynamic way of publicising small-scale, generally unpublished projects on a specific theme, creating a shared knowledge bank (articles or bibliographical resources) which tends to be particularly relevant due to the scarcity or originality of the information contained. The social network format itself encourages open questions and collaborative replies.
• They open the door to meetings in which the different participants are devirtualised and individual experiences are shared, thereby facilitating mutual learning. That’s how an initial geographical nexus of people and groups emerges around the subject in question.
• They are inspired by international models and facilitate interdisciplinary approaches.
• Their transformation into an association is a formal means of consolidating an already existing alliance in defence of a common cause. The first steps include raising awareness of the issue, creating spaces for sharing information, exhibiting relevant works (sometimes designed by the participants themselves), generating projects and training the association’s members and any others who may be interested in the subject.

The Asociación Ludantia, founded in November 2017, had an extensive, very interesting history before it even became a formal organisation³, one of its projects being “Argallar. Exposición para xogar coa arquitectura”, an interactive exhibition of play activities and associated workshops soon to open in Santiago de Compostela.

The Asociación Patios Habitables, founded in March 2019, is in many ways a pioneer: it’s the first time an educational space has been made an object of study experimental enough for it to be mentioned in the name of the association itself.

Returning to what we were saying at the beginning, both of the abovementioned associations, each in its own way, incapsulate a zeitgeist in which architecture has not only paused to incorporate childhood but has also opened it up to other disciplines while adhering to general pedagogical principles. In the next few years, we look forward with optimism to the development of new projects which will enable us to assess the social relevance and the progress of this very necessary process of conquering spaces for the youngest members of society.