« Building Refuge Within the Grey Areas of Regulation » Lecture with Spanish Architect Santiago Cirugeda

Announcement :

“Building Refuge Within the Grey Areas of Regulation
A Conference with Architect Santiago Cirugeda
Presented by the Office of Rules and Norms

Oct 30th, 2019
6pm (doors open 5:30pm)

At the D.B. Clarke Theatre
Henry F. Hall Building
1455 De Maisonneuve Blvd. West
Concordia University

Santiago Cirugeda’s architectural studio, Recetas Urbanas pursues the development of subversive projects in different areas of the urban reality, empowering citizens to act in their own locality by showing how to subvert laws, regulations, and conventions. His antidotes to capitalist and commodified space are available for anyone to replicate, from the occupation of public spaces with containers to the construction of prosthetics for facades, backyards, roofs and empty lots. All of these achieved through a negotiation process between the legality and illegality, as a reminder of the enormous control we are subjected to.

The Office of Rules and Norms (ORN) is an arts-based transdisciplinary studio headquartered in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University. The Office engages with regulations, the rule of law, cultural norms and market standards. These engagements reveal, comprehend, play with, subvert, and transcend current ways of understanding and acting in relation to regulatory forces in order to make room for more equitable alternatives.

……………………………………………………………….

Santiago Cirugeda’s practice is born of the frustration that as an artist or an architect it is quite easy to transform the space of the city through obtaining permits for installations and temporary interventions, yet as a citizen it is almost impossible to take action to improve your own environment. His work therefore questions what it is to be an architect in this context and he tries to empower citizens to act in their own locality by showing how it is possible to subvert laws, regulations, and conventions. In this, his work is about the possibility for action, appropriation, occupation and use, where the citizen can act as initiator, using the guidelines and instructions set out by Cirugeda to build, display or create space. At the same time, Cirugeda’s practice questions the notion of the architect as sole author-designer. His is an open-source architecture conceived as a tool kit or a user guide, distributed freely through his website Recetas Urbanas or ‘Urban Prescriptions’. His antidotes to capitalist and commodified space are available here for anyone to replicate. Cirugeda describes his practice as ‘an urban and social renovation’, making an architecture that is cheap and available to all.

A substantial part of the studio’s work so far has tackled those sites in cities that have been left over by demolition, lying empty or walled in-unusable for reasons of active neglect, lack of care or abandonment. One suggested action gives specific advice on how to apply to the local council for a permit to install something temporarily. This ‘something’ is, however, never to be taken literally, but acts as a mask for alternative actions. In the project ‘Public Domain Occupation with Skips’, the structure merely resembles a skip but is in fact a vehicle for citizens to occupy the urban realm through ‘taking the street’. Another proposal applies for a permit to erect scaffolding for re-painting the façade of a building, but instead creates an enclosed space in a scaffold-type structure that can be used as a temporary extension or simply as a semi outdoor space; Cirugeda calls these pockets, ‘urban reserves’.”

To read the article “How Spain’s ‘guerrilla architect’ is building new hope out of financial crisis” published in The Guardian…

---

To visit Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts website…