Kaleidoscopic No. 16: Maya Alam & Daniele Profeta, A/P Practice
Part One - thinking about design not only as a material practice but as one that moves between physical and digital spaces.
Leonardo Bravo:
I’m here with Maya Alam and Daniele Profeta, who have a collaborative partnership as A/P Practice. As I mentioned earlier I'm very interested in your work as a collective entity in a very broad and expansive definition of architecture and design. So to start, I wanted to ask you about your interdisciplinary practice and how you work across various scales.
Maya Alam:
Well, Leonardo, first of all, thank you again for having us; we're excited to join this project. You defined our practice well, and we are excited to fit within this category of interdisciplinary collaborative approaches. I'm sure you noticed, looking a little bit at our work, that we try to expand from buildings and design within existing conditions, but also as an exploration on contemporary imaging technologies ranging from installations that happen in the public space all the way to the screen of our ever-present devices. The idea is to think about the design field not only as a material practice but as one that moves between physical and digital spaces. And in doing so, expanding the possibilities for developing a conversation around the means of communication and engagement with an audience. This idea of focusing on the means of representation aims to reflect on how the built environment and communication practices are continuously shaped by the kind of biases and tools that we use in our design practice.
Leonardo Bravo:
I like the statement on your website about “recalibrating design agency across physical and digital space” and wanted to hear more about that as I'm intrigued by what it can imply.
Maya Alam:
For one, in our pedagogical approach, it's a lot about making students aware that there is such a thing as agency, right? Nothing has to be taken for granted in that sense. Because we teach in architectural environments, much of the perspectival construction or representation is taken for granted as a canon. But, then, certain new media surveillance and imaging technologies start to fit neatly into these boxes, or seem to fit into these boxes. So the initial approach is always for ourselves, but also our students, to continuously make ourselves aware that we are, in fact, part of this larger construct, and as such, we also have agency: in the way we produce and fit into it, or choose not to fit into it. That's also the kind of learning and unlearning of certain tendencies that is important for us.
Leonardo Bravo:
It's so important to have that broader critical awareness, especially in the context of students. I'm constantly grappling with that paradox or that contradiction of engaging with that critical lens of discourse and unpacking structural systems within a foundation defined by colonialism and extractive practices and the linear Western European mode of constructing the illusion of a singular culture or perspective.
Daniele Profeta:
Absolutely. And that's one of the reasons we are particularly excited to experiment with surveying technologies while problematizing the expectations of objectivity and neutrality often embedded into these modes of vision. So the idea is to move beyond surveying as capturing "the essence" of a site, of an entity; instead, starting from that assumption of neutrality and trying to work from within the medium to unpack the asymmetric structures embedded in this sort of separation between an external viewer and an object observed at a distance. That idea of subverting that mode of visuality is what we try to do across a few scales, from digital installations to small-scale physical artifacts that maybe fit in the category of items of furniture, or the design of small-scale public installations, all the way to larger propositions for the built environment, where hopefully the loop of looking at and positioning ourself within that space can be closed a little bit.
Maya Alam:
Also, experimenting with looking with someone, right? The whole politics of seeing, the idea that architecture practices are so connected to visuality and the history of visuality, but as you said, it is so connected to Western ideologies constructing the monolithic figure of one single individual. Like the white master visuality at the center of that system, and then everything else needs to follow suit. So trying to understand how we can create an awareness that the tools, the digital, canonical, actual machinic tools, are part of that discourse: how can you start using them to create a different kind of discourse?
Leonardo Bravo:
I love that problematizing as well within the actual objects of this discourse. I want to get into the actual work, and I'm excited to talk about that, but first of all, I wanted to find out how you started this collaboration. Daniele, I believe you're originally from Italy, and Maya, you are from Germany?
Maya Alam:
Since last year was the first time I actually lived in Germany again. I haven't lived in Germany since 2007. So ideas of citizenship become blurry, especially when you become a transplant. I always feel weird about this kind of question, but yes, I was born in Germany, and my family still lives in Germany. Half of my family, really, because the other half still lives in India: we grew up in this sort of hybridity of being mixed race before that term even existed, and I think it still does not necessarily exist in the German discourse, as you probably also know. I am continuously grappling with this idea of identity within this context.
Leonardo Bravo:
And how did you come together and identify this site for collaboration?
Daniele Profeta:
We met in LA! In this particular moment when we were both grappling with a kind of European expat perspective and making sense of the West Coast. From my perspective, living and working in this vast-mega scape that is producing not a single center and this ever-expanding multimodal infrastructure was something very different from what I experienced growing up in Rome, where there is this static, overwhelming historicity embedded in the city; that same center that allowed ideologies of empire and regimes to proliferate throughout history, against an idea of periphery that grew against a threshold between countryside and the city. I was born and grew up in the periphery of Rome. So coming to Los Angeles and being embedded into this ever-expanding cultural landscape where no one center could be found was a radically different experience.
Maya Alam:
And also something that we shared as European expats in LA.
Daniele Profeta:
So yeah, that's where we initially met. From there, we were both on this sort of normative architectural trajectory working from smaller speculative offices and then moving onto larger and more production-driven setups; Maya was in Shanghai working for UN Studio.
Maya Alam:
And then I joined you at Studio Fuksas.
Daniele Profeta:
So there was this kind of acceleration of always bigger projects and more deliverable-based production schedules. And we both had the opportunity, the willingness, and indeed the privilege to invest in this trajectory of mixed research for our work that was made possible by moving back to the States again to develop our research alongside our teaching activities. And we acknowledge the fact that this is an incredibly privileged position to be able to shape this kind of relationship between research and our own work.
Maya Alam:
I also think we didn't have the independent resources to do our experimental practice, so we worked 12 to 16-hour shifts in our projects with various firms, and I think the way the collaboration started was that it didn't feel enough, in terms of the potential that architectural discourse could have if you get lost in this production machine that big offices are, because the larger the project, the more people are involved, the coordination involved, and then obviously also the hierarchical practices that these big name offices are prescribed to. So in the very few free weekends that we had, that's how our practice started <laughs>.
Maya Alam:
We started thinking about how would we do it differently? How would we collaborate differently? I also believe that in terms of our education, we were coming from radically different perspectives: in my case, as I said, working in Germany, that has a very narrow idea of what architecture should be. So I got a diploma in engineering, but not in architecture, but interior architecture, so it was always clear that for me, the human scale, the idea of scenography, that working with existing conditions was crucial. And then SciArc expanded my view on how far one can go in terms of new media and different modes of representation that one is allowed to introduce into my practice. Especially when it comes to architecture and engineering, there seem to be very clearly drawn lines in the sand.
Daniele Profeta:
It's nice to think of SciArc as a kind of incubator for speculative theories. I started in Rome, where we had this hardcore focus on hand-drawn geometric problems imbued in analytical studies of analog architecture. Then, during my Erasmus studies, I moved to KTH in Sweden. There I was dropped into a radically different environment where I was suddenly asked to think about parametric modeling and generative design…
Daniele Profeta:
And for me, that was some practice shock, you know? And implementing all of these new tools to figure out what else one can produce in this shift between physical and digital production and the kind of references one can bring into the conversation between these two realms. It was exhilarating!
Maya Alam:
For me, it was really about being allowed to ask questions, and it was encouraged. Sci-Arc was the first environment I had ever been in where that was allowed. So that's where we met, which was interesting. I remember that very clearly, and the conversation started naturally from there.
Leonardo Bravo:
This notion of being a site of research is so relevant to your work, and I picked some projects that I saw on your website to discuss; Tabula non-Rasa, Landscapes of Power, Anthropocene Planets, and Casa Zwei. So let's have some highlights about those works.
Maya Alam:
You know, we had a heated discussion earlier on if we would have to pick projects and how they would tell the story of our work.
Daniele Profeta:
I think this moment of pausing and looking back at your own work and trying not to present one single project at a time or one single brief but trying to portray an idea of what we do is truly valuable: we're really appreciative of that.
Daniele Profeta:
We thought that a really productive moment to think about how we came together and how the practice developed was Maya's fellowship project at Syracuse University, “Marble-ish.”
Maya Alam:
A note to that, because we're also going to talk about the Dekoloniale residency later, is the perception that you do the fellowship or the residency by yourself, in isolation, has always been strange to me, especially in the way we're thinking about interdisciplinary work. "Marble-ish" was part of my Harry der Boghosian fellowship. Still, I worked with a fantastic group of students on this, and they followed me for the entire year through different seminars and studios. I think that's maybe part of a more extensive framing and trying to undo the singular master narrative and ideology that is faulty, to begin with, and was never true and will never be true.
Maya Alam:
But this fellowship was the first time we started thinking about ideas of materiality and machine vision. We worked with this Lidar scanner that gave us an extremely high-resolution representation of this marble exhibition room that is essentially really bad for exhibiting in the sense that you cannot put an object there; it's not a white box, it always has its own context, its own historicity. So it was really interesting to work on it as a group, it was Daniele and me and 16 or 17 students, and everyone brought in their own understanding of what they see in this scan, almost like a gestalt exercise.
Maya Alam:
And also trying to question those old perception psychologies and really working with the machine output trying to understand that those are genuinely multiple representations of the real, and never just one. So the idea that the machine sees things in a neutral way was unpacked as a fallacy. And out of that, we tried to make an installation with multiple smaller parts that incorporated many things that we are still working on in our practice today. So in terms of the different kinds of realities, how do you translate things back? How do you then take certain models or objects, image objects, back into the digital realm?
Leonardo Bravo:
So what you're talking about leads me to wonder, does the machine have its own built-in set of biases it generates? And so it's not neutral. I mean, that is profound in terms of having the intelligence to create a space like that.
Daniele Profeta:
Absolutely. I think that's at the core of that project and, more generally, of all the projects we developed through this surveying lens. The idea is that to be able to tease out those biases that are embedded into what kind of materials are sensed and what type of images they produce, the fact that movement is wholly removed both in the actual data sets that they produce but also in the kind of analysis that is developed out of this technique. So the idea is even at the scale of a room, at the scale of an installation exhibition space, was really to think of this as a context, as a material context that whatever we begin to embed into it can start to relate with it, not only as a direct relationship to the physical materiality but also through the digital traces captured by this machine. So that distance, in a sense, it's created by that lens and is then occupied by these different interventions that move from a sort of layering of the materiality of the room itself into this sort of spatial interventions, as well as the kind of image models. The idea is to turn this, some of the datasets, and some of the textures produced through this mode of vision back into material forms.
Daniele Profeta:
I think this move between 2D data sets, because ultimately what comes out of a Lidar scanner is a two-dimensional text with RGB values and XYZ coordinates, into three-dimensional figures and hierarchies. I think that's something we translated years later into this Casa Zwei project you also mentioned. That was our second single-family house where we experimented with this shift of how we can begin to think about the construction of an urban artifact, not only as a direct relationship to its physical surroundings but also as being developed and evaluated or maybe engaged with through the lens of digital media, Google Earth for example, allowing us to view it in its digital context.
Daniele Profeta:
And so if the everyday digital practice of exploring our city through Google Maps and being dropped into a site doesn't become, or is not looked at only as a passive device to look at the world, but also a means of producing that world. We wanted our design to take that as a provocation and a way of creating an open posture on the site that could engage with the complex history of Pigneto. This neighborhood was dramatically destroyed during the Second World War. This fragmentary urban fabric produced many leftover sites that are now open for densification precisely to address the urban sprawl that Rome is undergoing. Our project acknowledges this material context while extending its traces into how contemporary media allows us to visit and engage with those sites. If the LIDAR scanner in the Marble-ish exhibition was a way of problematizing the shift between digital and physical materiality, in Casa Zwei, the 3D scan that we produced on the site became an armature through which we could analyze this kind of conic vision that one is able to establish along the public space of the city through contemporary mapping platforms: a space of discovery and design for the massing of the house itself.
Leonardo Bravo:
Obviously, my training is not in architecture. But as I hear you describing these projects, I feel like what you're proposing is a problematizing of subject/object relations and how impossible it is to fix something, and that can be identity, a subject, a material form, or our own positionality itself. And how difficult it is actually to find that position because there are always biases, there's always perceptions, there's always histories built-in of how you see something, and the thing itself is constantly shifting anyways.
Maya Alam:
To us, that is the most exciting part. Like how can you, how can you exist and live in that space, right? Instead of solidifying something, in practice or a profession, that, due to its realities, but also due to its histories, is so focused on fixing one singular point of view, one single way of understanding the city.
Leonardo Bravo:
Well, that's basically the entire Enlightenment project by itself.
Maya Alam:
Exactly! <Laughs> Exactly. That is a very Western idea of progress. But I think taking that and working in a profession that wants that, but then trying to exist in a way, how would you create a house that is seen from a satellite completely different than from a Google Earth car, then when you pass by it? And how would that start shaping the way we appropriate small-scale infill projects? I think it's interesting, and then obviously in terms of the material realities and so forth, how they get translated, how they are read, and living with the realization that there's not such a thing as a single reading.
Daniele Profeta:
One of the moments that occurred at the end of the Casa Zwei project, and while opening up the research for an exhibition at Kent State, reflecting on how to exhibit this project to another audience, an architectural school. We started experimenting with ideas of materiality and prototyping elements of this house in a way that would keep some of the traces of the different sites and the shifting identity of the project. And so we got really excited about this collaboration with a 3D printing company in the northern part of Italy, close to the Po River close to Vicenza, where they developed this plastic-free, glue-free aggregate just by producing and reusing the sand that was sourced from the local territories and have all this beautiful pigmentation.
Maya Alam:
That was then layered in a way that spoke to some of the traces of the 3D scans that we did on-site. And so again, translating this two-dimensional image of the scan as a fixed reality, or the expectation of a fixed reality, into this material prototype that could occupy ambiguously both the presence of a brick but also holding within itself the digital traces of its surveying starting points. So they humored us with a prototype of a building block, a brick of this building, and a small-scale model for the house itself, almost as a testing ground for this material configuration of a larger scale.
Website:
https://www.alamprofeta.com/
Instagram: @ap_practice