A Unique Approach to Creating Public Spaces: In Conversation with Alejandro Haiek
Architecture practices usually start their design process with a client, who provides a program and a site. Alejandro Haiek, founder of The Public Machinery, approaches things differently. The Public Machinery describes itself as a network of architects and designers working collectively, actively observing, imagining, and proposing public urban interventions themselves. Their proposals are at the intersection of art, architecture, and engineering and weave community engagement, ecology, and new technologies into innovative forms of social infrastructure. They secure funding through research and public grants, enabling them to create public spaces that defy expectations in both their design process and in the form their projects take.
Originally from Venezuela, Haiek currently teaches at Umeå School of Architecture in Sweden. Two of The Public Machinery’s recent projects showcasing his innovative design approach are the Winter Garden and Pallet Parliament, both exploring new types of social infrastructure in Sweden. The Winter Garden is a dome-like installation responding to a need for enclosed winter infrastructure in Nordic climates. Using a multi-disciplinary team, it studies how these enclosed spaces could be both socially and ecologically responsive environments. On the other hand, Pallet Parliament is a repurposed, fast-deployable cultural infrastructure on an abandoned parking lot. It uses recycled pallets parametrically to create a multi-purpose platform for collective encounters and activities.
The Public Machinery’s work outside of Sweden includes “Chicoco Radio Station,” an ongoing flexible community structure in Nigeria, and “Industries of Nature,” a winning art installation in Spain. In a conversation with Archdaily, Alejandro Haiek shares thoughts about The Public Machinery’s design process and the evolution of their work.
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CB: How would you summarize your approach to design?
AH: Our interest has focused on how to create spaces of hospitality and experimentation through science, ecology, craft, media, and technologies. After experiencing the evolution of autonomous community infrastructure from the early 2000s until today, we conceive design as a form of mediation capable of hosting critical and imaginative investigations toward future social and environmental scenarios. The design projects come from research-based and practice-based actions, creating cooperative spaces and a sense of collectivity. This improves creative performance and social interaction, informing new learning and pedagogical processes. Design is an instrument of empowerment and a tool for collaboration.
The projects promote political consciousness and civic response. They are embodiments of public demand. The project gets agency by generating new social dynamics through community infrastructure. Our design intends to support local cultural effervescences through autonomous infrastructure and network governance.
The approach to design expands from physical construction to the building of processes.
CB: Interestingly, you work without a client; most architects’ design process starts with a prompt. When and how does your design process begin?
AH: Our projects are political geo-laboratories. Social and environmental constraints have remained at the center of our practice for the last three decades. We aim to work by constructing possible imaginaries outside the standard practices, closer to affected communities, on the ground, and engaging in the negotiation. We envision future forms of labor that make possible breakdown with practices commercially driven but by research or teaching. Not limited by client prompts, the projects are transitional experiments that seek to test more than to solve. The locus of design has migrated from programmed action to creative investigation. Dismantling disciplinary standards was the strategy to overcome moments of political and economic crisis, ultimately detaching our possibilities to have agency beyond commission or even competition but permanently placing it in active processes of participation.
Our collaborative practice is not a mega-corporation but a transcontinental network of cooperation and exchange. The office, as a centralized place of operation, has shifted to operational meshes.
The projects search for transitional scenarios, exploring long-term processes that help human and non-human communities perform while experiencing new forms of pluralism.
The design process never starts but nevertheless has a beginning—an encounter that triggers agency in a particular situation. The critical observation of our surroundings is the engine where our practice emerges.
CB: How do you think your work has evolved from Latin America to Europe? How has your work in Venezuela influenced your work in Sweden?
AH: Our practice keeps evolving around living laboratories with a pedagogical and formative component. The laboratories operate without physical restrictions; remote, collaborative, and decentralized, promoting inter-institutional collaborations with other branches of knowledge. The laboratories use research funding to remain active beyond the forces of the market. They are spaces of opportunity based on open participation and collaboration, spaces for trying new models, embracing abstract thinking and creativity, and testing material, constructive, and organizational hypotheses.
The projects create spaces to test research through practice and teaching, linking academia with civic society and developing spaces for experimentation, collectivism, and cross-fertilization.
The laboratories are spaces for experimentation that seek to develop transversal design approaches that move from planetary to molecular dimensions.
The social action learning projects we are developing in collaboration with community groups and organizations are still embedded in the idea of experimentation through practice. The community-based projects experienced new protocols and alternative ways to exchange knowledge and participate at the same time in retrofitting institutional policies and protocols.
The series of fast-deployable cultural infrastructures are acts of provocation in public spaces. These political installations and devices provide an operative platform to empower every form of collectivity.
The future Haiek envisions radically shakes traditional design and building processes. In it, architects, designers, artists, engineers, and communities can come together to imagine, design, and build social infrastructure. The Public Machinery’s projects show that these types of collaborations are possible and can create evocative new types of public activations. In a world increasingly disconnected from ideas of community, their work is relevant in instigating new and engaging forms of collectivity while also triggering much-needed conversations about the collective, political, cultural, and ecological.
