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Stalker/ONCampus Rom, 2008

How might we ‘reboot’ architecture and ‘regain the critical’?American architectural critic and professor Peter Lang finds inStalker’s interactive field study of a Romany community aroundRome a trigger for a re-energised way of thinking that questionshow we might effectively live communally and economically.

Peter Lang

Organised by the Stalker/ON collective over the summer of2008, and bringing together Roma III University, TU Delft,KTH Stockholm and the Faculty of Architecture at theUniversity of Belgrade, the Campus Rom project wasdeveloped around a set of travelling workshops, the mainobjectives of which were to experience, document andinteract with a series of Rom (gypsy) nomad camps locatedaround Rome. The community dynamics and forms of thesettlements were observed, and these were then tracedback to their origins in Serbia and Macedonia. CampusRom was thus a significant instructional model forunderstanding alternative forms of collective living, offeringexamples that could be considered more informative thanthe canonic visions of architecture still prevalent today.

This begs the question as to where the emancipatoryforces of architecture have gone. Such a question seemsalmost crude today, at a time when nations govern byrealpolitik, and no society is willing to sacrifice aprivileged position for the global good. Resources arehoarded, rivers deviated, impoverished communitiesignored – all for the sake of a driving image of prosperityand glamour. Architects frequently play to this formula,selling their talent and expertise to construct dazzling yetsubstance-less monuments. They rarely recognise theobvious traps until it is too late: what can a ‘starchitect’do when he or she realises that his or her monument to anational television network is the nexus of violent politicalcensorship and repression? It is too easy to decry the factthat these practices are prevalent everywhere and skip onto the next regime’s bountiful commission.

The waning of the Modernist impulse, as Jürgen Habermas noted,may yet be countered by the increasing role of the people in reassertingtheir rights in the face of the ‘media of money and power’.1 Sociallyconscious design is not a new phenomenon – if one thinks back to theutopian projects of the 19th century – but certainly its most eclecticdissemination emerged during the 1960s ‘teach-ins’ and ‘sit-ins’ thatwere part of the mythical heyday of the communes and ‘summers oflove’ of youth movements worldwide. If somewhat narcissistic, theperiod nonetheless introduced a battery of interactive trials and errors,of living experiments and community constructs which, after somedecades of incubation, are again proving valuable resources forrenovating today’s over-glossed architectural practices.

The challenge, of course, is not to suspend architectural practiceuntil the world changes, but to find the triggers embedded deep insidethe profession that can be used to reboot the process, to regain thecritical, to recover so much of the lost contemporary meaning. This isa call not to impersonate the 1960s but for a serious consideration ofwhat is happening now, for the ground perspective, the mud on theboots and willful time to share with others. What has emerged fromStalker’s interactive field studies is a way of giving new definitions totoday’s humanity while learning how to live collectively, economicallyand strategically. Tomorrow’s monuments will be places of coexistence,community and mutual understanding. It is hard to imagine sticking toold habits any longer. 4

Text and images compiled by Anna BaldiniCaptions translated from the Italian version into English by Paul David Blackmore

Note1. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modern and Postmodern Architecture’, in K Michael Hays, ArchitectureTheory Since 1968, Columbia Books of Architecture/MIT Press (New York), 2000, p 425.

Text © 2009 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 68 © Stalker/ON; p 69 © Simona Caleo

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top left: Various initiatives, including convivial meetings with theRom communities around Rome, preceded the 2008 workshops.Lunch at the Campo Boario nomad settlement, Rome, 2006.

top right: The Campo Boario nomad settlement in Rome.

centre left: Rom camps in Castel Romano, Rome.

centre right: A lesson at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Belgrade.

bottom: A shanty town in Gazela, Belgrade.

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