Design Line: 6 – 12 May
Do you want the good news, or the bad news? Well, this week’s Design Line has both. On the positive side, Snøhetta files to unionise in New York City, the Met appoints a crack team of provenance experts to assess its collection, and a discovery of plastic-eating microbes prompts hope for the future. In less-good-news, another Black museum director is forced to step down amid institutional tension, and a bizarre debate breaks out over the ethics of architects working on Neom.
Another architecture practice is gearing up to unionise (image: Jango Jim).
Up the Snøhetta union!
The US labour movement continues apace, with the writers strike effectively shutting down Hollywood on the west coast, while over in New York architecture firms continue their union drive. This week, the New York Snøhetta office filed to unionise. "We are architects, landscape architects, designers and operations staff who care deeply for Snøhetta, our projects, and the collaborative culture that makes our firm unique,” Snøhetta’s organisers announced on Architectural Workers United’s (AWU) Instagram. “Through unionization, we will gain a collective voice in the future of our workplace and our profession.” AWU has been working tirelessly to support offices in their organising pursuits (see ‘United by Design’ – Disegno #34), with the hope that once the first union formed others would follow. After a false start from SHoP, Bernheimer Architecture unionised last year. Snøhetta, a Norwegian-founded practice, already has employees who are part of a national design union at its Oslo offices. While the drive towards unionisation in many practices has arisen from a crisis point of low wages and long hours, combined with soaring living costs and student debts, Snøhetta’s employees report that conditions at their practice are pretty great, all things considered. But even if you have good hours and a supportive culture, a union can help set those good conditions in stone. “Why organize here?” one employee answered Curbed. “Because we can”.
Identify, evaluate, return
It is no secret that many museums in the Global North are full of artefacts that, erm, shouldn’t be there: works whose provenances are unclear, dubious or, in many cases, straight-up looted from other countries during times of war, occupation and instability. With this context in mind, New York’s Met announced this week the formation of a new four-person provenance research team. The team, museum director Max Hollein announced, will “more intensively and proactively” examine the museum's collections, as part of efforts to “broaden, expedite and intensify research into all works that came to the museum from art dealers who have been under investigation.” The results of this research, Hollein concluded, would be “more restitutions by the Met with clear findings and clear articulations” (although it is worth noting that the team’s work may conversely provide the museum with counterarguments when presented with subpoenas or seizure orders by law enforcement). It seems positive news, then, particularly as other information emerging from the world of museums this week was less uplifting. The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art is now searching for a new director, having confirmed that previous incumbent Ngaire Blankenberg left the museum at the end of March – reportedly after having been pushed to resign less than two years into the job. Blankenberg, who was influential in the museum’s October 2022 return of the Benin bronzes it held to Nigeria, has not provided details of her departure, but told The Art Newspaper that the biggest challenge she had faced in enacting change in the museum world “are individual and institutional resistance and then backlash”.
Wanted: a sense of ethics from architects (image: Pete Hauschild via Pixabay).
The sheriff of Ethics Town
Anyone with a modicum of sense knew that the Line, the vast, mirrored supertall city under construction on desert of Saudi Arabia, was an environmental and human rights scandal in the making. Just last week the UN put out a statement of concern over the scheduled execution of three members of the Howeitat tribe, and the imprisonment of three others. They’ve been charged with terrorism, but “they were reportedly arrested for resisting forced evictions in the name of the Neom project and the construction of a 170km linear city called The Line,” said the UN. It’s a source of deep disappointment and shame for the design world, then, that so many high profile names and practices – David Adjaye, Peter Cook and OMA et al – continue to attach themselves to the this project. So, it was utterly baffling this week to see architect and broadcaster Kunle Barker publish a sanctimonious piece – ‘Who made you the sheriff of Ethics Town?’ – in the Architects’ Journal, defending architects who work with despotic regimes. “We must resist the temptation to blame and cast aspirations [sic] on the motivations of architects,” he cried, labouring under the assumption that if you’re not personally welding the sword/firing squad you don’t have metaphorical blood on your hands. “Creating a museum, train station or city for a regime is not the same as condoning its political policies,” argued Kunle. Not to invoke Godwin’s Law, but condoning policies is very much what Nazi architects did when designing imposing museums and death camp train stations. Kunle’s request for debate rather than (deserved) shame and condemnation is an obfuscating tactic currently liberally employed by the modern day far right; there’s nothing to debate when people’s lives are on the line. Critics are, in fact, the sheriff of Ethics Towns, and this column is going straight to Ethics Jail.
For an office that’s been closed for 200 years it looks vert tidy (image: Sir John Soane’s Museum).
Once in a bicentennial
The Sir John Soane’s Museum in London is a splendid thing: originally home to the neoclassical architect John Soane (1753-1837), the museum has been preserved as it was at the time of Soane’s death, providing a compelling space for accessing its founder’s collections, design, and legacy in relation to contemporary practice. Delightfully, the house is now to open up further, with the museum having recently completed a year-long renovation of Soane’s original Drawing Office – a space that has not been publicly accessible in the museum's close to 200-year history. The office was the room from which Soane’s draftsmen and apprentices work, and the museum bills it as the oldest surviving space of its kind. There are obvious pleasures to be gained from poking around a famous architect’s space, but it is also nice to learn that the Drawing Office will remain a working studio (after a fashion): it is to host a new residency programme that will host two artists for three months in spring and autumn, with the first residencies falling to cartoonist Ella Baron and contemporary artist Sam Belinfante. Both residents plan to draw on Soane’s collections and archives (Baron to inform a graphic novel that draws upon architectural drawings and techniques; Belinfante for research around connections to theatre within Soane’s archive) and this seems a compelling raison d’être for the Drawing Office moving forward: a 19th-century space, immersion in which is intended to prompt 21st-century work.
Norman Foster designed by Norman Foster (image: Foster + Partners).
Pomp and ceremony at Centre Pompidou
This week, the French Minister of Culture and the President of the Centre Pompidou oversaw the opening of Norman Foster, a sweeping retrospective of the venerable British architect’s 60-year career. Supported by Foster + Partners and the Norman Foster Foundation, the exhibition spans 2,200sqm and includes scale models, prototypes, workbooks and drawings related to 130 of the architects’ projects. Foster himself designed the exhibition, with curation from deputy director of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre de Création Industrielle, Frédéric Migayrou. The Centre Pompidou, designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, is one of Paris’ most famous High Tech buildings – making it a fitting venue for Fosters, who is also regarded as a leading member of the architectural movement. It will be the first time that Gallery 1, which runs across the top level of the centre, will be given entirely over to the work of one architect. Arranged non-chronologically, the exhibition opens with sketches and includes a range of supplementary objects that have influence Foster’s practice: books by Le Corbusier, Buckminster Fuller and Bernard Rudofsky; art by Umberto Boccioni, Constantin Brancusi, and Ai WeiWei; and several cars including one of Fuller’s Dymaxion’s – Foster’s love for wheels and gadgets being well-documented. Given the Centre Pompidou is due to close in 2025 for five years of renovations, now is as good a time as any to give Paris – and Norman Foster – a visit.
Let them eat plastic?
This week, Frontiers in Microbiology published a report from scientists in the Alps and Arctic who have found a series of microbes that are able to break down polyester-polyurethane (PUR) and mixtures of polybutylene adipate terephthalate (PBAT) and polylactic acid (PLA). In short, they’ve dug up some plastic-eating bacteria and fungi. This in itself is nothing new, but the report is notable for the fact that the strains discovered are able to do so at temperatures of 15°C, whereas previously discovered plastic-eating microbes typically required elevated temperatures of 30°C. The discovery is fascinating and exciting – with potential future uses in combatting waste plastic – but a word of caution is still advisable. The prospect of any microbial fix for plastic waste is years away (and that’s assuming that the process is even feasible at any scale, which is far from a given), and regardless of its outcome, urgent action is still required to address our relationship with consumption, waste, and current applications for plastics (a long-lasting, non-biodegradable material is not the smartest poster child for throwaway culture). Microbes may, one day, be part of the way in which we deal with plastic, but it’s no silver bullet – the discovery of new, plastic-bustin’ microbes should not distract from the need for fundamental redress of our present material culture.