AT WORK WITH: EXHIBITING ARCHITECTURE AS PRACTICE

- I hear they’re going to tear you down and put up an office building where you’re standing.

Groucho Marx

At Work With is a social lounge and a residency program during the three months of the biennale. The project "At Work With" is produced in collaboration between Economy (Tor Lindstrand) and Testbedstudio (Anders Johansson and Erik Wingquist). At Work With is conceptualized as a continuous staging of meetings between practitioners and visitors, a social meeting point that emphasizes exchange and conversations about the limitations of as well as the possibilities for architecture.

The idea for “At Work With” is to exhibit architecture as practice rather than as representation. We invite all visitors to the Architecture Biennale 2010 to come, visit and interact with a variety of Nordic offices and architecture related practices.

Office spaces frame and influence the work we produce: from the obsessive efficiency of Taylorism, over the concept of Bürolandschaft, the cubicles of the Action Office to the Virtual Office by Frank Gehry and beyond. With this project we are interested in focusing on the practise of architecture, both as activity and as organisation of space.

In a time when architecture to an increasing extent is consumed through images, architecture as a product is being pushed to the forefront, obscuring the underlying structures for the production of architecture. At the same time architecture today is an expanding field, unfolding through a multitude of trajectories where traditional boundaries are being re-negotiated and challenged.

“At Work With”, produced in collaboration between Economy (Tor Lindstrand) and Testbedstudio (Anders Johansson and Erik Wingquist), creates an intensive environment in which visitors can participate in an accumulative work process, a series of activities or just kick back at the Nordic Pavilion during this year’s Architecture Biennale in Venice. The project work as an extension and a plug-in for the main exhibition “Stay in Touch”, which display eighteen Nordic projects responding to the social dimensions and values of resilient and dynamic architecture.

“At Work With” takes form as an office consisting of a number of stations that potentiate different situations, practices, projects, displays, debates, whims, meetings, coincidences, projections, provocations, interactions, broadcasts, objects, dreams and more. Each week a young and upcoming architectural practise from Finland, Sweden and Norway are invited to work as hosts and caretakers of the Nordic Pavilion. Each group will create their own office environment. Depending on how the settings are utilised, each group and week will develop its own unique combination of work and events. The accumulation of work will be possible to follow on-site and online as it unfolds.

Economy is working in architecture, art, education and management, in order to stretch architectural practice to the horizon and beyond. Testbedstudio is an architectural office working with the urban field, founded in 2000, with offices in Stockholm and Malmö.

At Work With, August 26 – November 21, 2010

List of participants, selected by Economy/Testbedstudio, in order of appearance in the Nordic Pavilion 2010:

August 31 – September 5:
Testbedstudio www.testbedstudio.blogspot.com

September 7 – September 12:
0047 www.0047.org

September 13 – September 19:
XYM www.xym.no

September 21 – September 26:
Svensk standard www.svenskstandard.org

September 28 – October 3:
Economy www.this-is-economy.com

October 5 – October 10:
Conditions magazine www.conditionsmagazine.com

October 12 – October 17:
Uglycute www.uglycute.com

October 19 – October 24:
Meike Schalk and Apolonija Sustersic www.apartma.org

October 26 – October 31:
Byggstudio www.byggstudio.com

November 2 – November 7:
Rintala Eggertsson architects www.rintalaeggertsson.com

November 9 – November 14:
Boing Being www.boingbeing.com

November 16 – November 21:
Fantasic Norway www.fantasticnorway.no