ADS10: Savage Architecture: Building Common Knowledge

We build because we are human, we are human because we build.

While many beings live together cooperatively, the character of humans is our ability to use collective relationships for producing and exchanging knowledge. Hence Architecture is not a technical problem, creative act or economic tool, but the embodiment of a common knowledge. We conquer, frame, organise and contemplate the environment we build through knowledge production.

From this premise ADS10 explores the School as the paradigm of knowledge production. We understand the School not as a predefined institution, but as a process, form and space that celebrates what we have in common – our capability to produce by thinking, relating and making. The architecture of the School needs to recognise and represent rituals of exchange and production of knowledge, which struggle to emerge from the gelatinous spreading of urbanisation:  the protests for the democratization of Hong Kong, the conflicts between rampant hi-tech capitalism and inter-ethnic cooperation in Galil, the struggle for self-determination through weaving of native people in Ecuador, are some of the countless examples of emerging forces in need of an architecture to raise their emancipatory potential.

Theatres of knowledge that stage the savage power of being human together.

Gianfranco Bombaci, Matteo Costanzo, Francesca Romana Dell’Aglio and Davide Sacconi