[-empyre-] Forward: resolution from Markus Meissen : Resolution for Digital Futures

[Christina McPhee]

[I think this post may have gotten lost.. apologies ...trying again. ]


From: Markus Miessen <miessen at studiomiessen.com>
Date: January 4, 2009 1:05:43 AM PST
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Cc: soft_skinned_space <empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Markus Miessen: Resolutions for Digital Futures


2009 will be the year in which the financial crisis will fully unfold,  
yet also reveal its long-term potentials. Sustainable strategies will  
be on the rise; educational institutions will re-focus their attention  
on serious research and will no longer waste time on form generating  
strategies only. As most public and private institutions will suffer  
from a decrease of their operating capital, smart practice will also  
include the design and critical introduction of alternative economies.  
While Europe has recently witnesses a drift towards the political, the  
US – under Obama – will experience a re-politicization of the vast  
majority of its population. This will heavily effect spatial production.

In 2009, it is time to undo the innocence of participation. Based on  
romantic notions of untroubled solidarity, social inclusion and  
philanthropy, participation is often understood as a means of opening  
up, empowering, and shared authorship. New Labour’s legacy (that of  
the pc-nirvana) presents us with more participatory frameworks than  
ever before, while the country is now at an historic low of people  
actually wiling to get involved. While some think of empowerment,  
elected responsibility has been outsourced.

Without mandate? One should promote a conflictual reading of  
participation, a means to impose one’s criticality onto existing  
discourses: active decision rather than passive reaction. Thus,  
participation becomes a form of self-propelled critical engagement.

Cyclical Specialisation? The future spatial practitioner will be an  
outsider who, instead of trying to set up or sustain denominators of  
consensus, enters alien fields of knowledge by deliberately  
instigating conflicts as a micro-political form of engagement. Instead  
of breading the next generation of facilitators and mediators, we  
should produce the ‘uninvited outsider’: a crossbench-practitioner  
independent of pre-requisites and existing protocols. Architecture not  
as a means to serve a community, but to produce it.




Bio: Markus Miessen is an architect, researcher and writer migrating  
between London, Berlin and Zurich. In 2002, he set up Studio Miessen,  
a platform for spatial strategy and critical cultural analysis. As an  
architect, Miessen is partner of the Berlin-based architectural firm  
nOffice. He is the author and editor of several books including Spaces  
of Uncertainty (Müller + Busmann, 2002), Did Someone Say Participate  
(MIT Press, 2006), With Without (Bidoun, 2007), The Violence of  
Participation (Sternberg Press, 2007), and East Coast Europe  
(Sternberg Press, 2008). He has been teaching at the Architectural  
Association since 2004 and is the Director of its nomadic Winter  
School Middle East, which he initiated in Dubai. He has lectured  
widely, including at Columbia, MIT and the Berlage Institute, and is  
currently a Visiting Professor in Shiraz (Iran) and a PhD candidate at  
Goldsmiths, elaborating on his thesis regarding the Uninvited  
Outsider. www.studiomiessen.com www.noffice.eu