Over the past years, I've had the chance to engaged with architects and others who are leading impact-driven, cultural, and institutional initiatives, who recognize architecture's role in enhancing quality of life in the built environment and offer frameworks to achieve this. Amidst current global challenges and waning focus on the common good, such institutions are increasingly vital.
During a recent trip to Copenhagen, World Architecture Capital, I delved into the re:arc institute, a newly established nonprofit philanthropic association. Operating at the intersection of climate action and architecture philanthropy, it funds grassroots solutions serving as viable examples to tackle this, with transferable insights. With a "learning by doing" ethos, their Practice Lab conducts a global survey to identify and support practices in bringing prototypes to life. I sat down with Nicolay Boyadjiev, Practice Lab lead, to explore this innovative institutional model and its transformative impact on architectural practice.
David Basulto (ArchDaily): Thank you Nicolay for visiting us today. I am happy to meet again, because in the last months we’ve had very, very interesting conversations and I think that the work you are doing now at the re:arc institute is part of an evolution of something that you have been actively pursuing in the last years. So to introduce what you're doing today, I would like to maybe go a few steps back and ask you, how did you get here? What have you been doing during these last years that took you into this direction.
Nicolay Boyadjiev (re:arc Institute Practice Lab): Thank you for re-initiating the conversation! Essentially, in the last year I feel as if I've attempted to engage in a different mode of architectural practice, informed by first-hand experiences during the first decade of my architecture career. Graduating from a good, but relatively conservative architecture school in Canada in 2011, I spent the last 10 years or so almost perfectly divided between highly practical and normative work within the traditional construction industry across the American east coast, and highly speculative and unconventional work at a renowned design-research institute in Moscow. For the first 5 years upon graduation, I worked within a large corporate architecture firm, contributing design work to large-scale institutional buildings such as libraries, sports venues, university campuses and what I believe at the time was the largest hospital construction project in North America. This project in particular was incredibly formative for me, green and gullible straight out of university, as it provided a highly illuminating and accelerated form of schooling as to other “real forces” that shape and structure the built environment (such as contracts, ordinances, permits, insurance bonds, and good old fashion politics…), many of which extend vastly beyond the remit, influence, agency and I should probably add trained competence of the architecture discipline still ceremoniously performed and re-enacted within academies today… The experience and engagement with these lateral and indirect “design materials” that precede construction was very revelatory, and I became increasingly interested in the institutional formats that enabled these structures and relationships to formalize, genuinely appreciating their conception, transformation and evolution as a valid mode of architectural production and practice no less creative or culturally significant than their glossy built outcomes which are much more easily celebrated in architecture media.
This was also around the same time that I quit my design job to fly halfway around the world and take part in the multidisciplinary design-research program at the Strelka Institute for Media Architecture and Design in Moscow (first as a researcher at the tail end of Rem Koolhaas / AMO’s tenure, then as a Design Tutor and eventually Co-Director with Benjamin Bratton), where I believed some of the most interesting and relevant thinking about the future of architecture practice was occurring. Up until February 2022 when the program was indefinitely suspended due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I believe Strelka was an absolutely unique intellectual environment where architects and non-architects worked collaboratively to bring new perspectives within the design field, yes, but also to train so-called “non-designers” such as journalists, economists, tech developers, lawyers to perceive and practice their own work with the same speculative, projective, creative energy and interest in the impact that they have on the city. While it lasted, this hybrid program allowed multi-hyphenated projects and collaborations to occur at the edge of traditional architecture, many of which would have been difficult or impossible to test otherwise, some of which are still active to this day, but most of which couldn’t be sustained outside the structure and support of the institute.
In short, to answer your question most directly, I think these dual experiences in the last 10 years — both abruptly interrupted for very different reasons — were instrumental both in their exposure to the institutional inertia of the traditional construction sector, but also to the affordances and limitations of speculative design for speculative design’s sake, which when disconnected from reality is frankly no less normative… This sort of “speculative pragmatism” baggage was very useful when in April 2022, I was invited to contribute to the co-design and setup of a new philanthropic organization for climate action and architecture called re:arc institute. In this project, it was very clear very early on that there’s an unrecognized and unaccounted-for space of possibility at the intersection of philanthropy and architecture, which could potentially be transformative in both directions. This is the critical intersection we are currently exploring at re:arc institute’s Practice Lab, which I also happen to lead with my former Strelka collaborator Olga Tenisheva.
DB: An interesting evolution, because I think that for many Strelka set a precedent: an institute focused on architecture, media and the city. With a wide scope, and while very experimental, it aimed to deliver concrete solutions.
NB: Yes Strelka at the time I think was indeed a very inspiring and influential place, I would say not despite but rather because it was far from the hype of more conventional internationally-recognised creative hubs such as Berlin, London, New York etc. The name — institute for “Media, Architecture and Design” — implied not only a flattening but also a nested relationship of focus, where architecture and design could be seen as subsets of media or literally media disciplines. In other words, while architects and designers may have the impression that they are creating large or small objects, you can think of them as actually producing media or communication in the form of plans, drawings, presentations, models, the occasional napkin sketch if they’re a big deal… Architects therefore always produce hyperstitions, speculative design, speculative fictions to mobilize the tremendous amounts of resources, materials, capital, labor, effort etc. required to fold the planet’s crust in this shape rather than that shape… This implies dialogue by default, communication in the original meaning of “making common”. To me this is why Strelka’s approach was experimental and multidisciplinary, both in scope and in focus. In our first program’s eponymous book we expressed that our objective was not only to propose “new normal design projects'' at the intersection of software, cinema, strategy and planning, but also to prototype the “new normal design practices” that are needed to respond to the emerging forms of the city that we should now be designing for. Much like the rest of the institute’s work, we defined this approach as “para-academic”: not anti-academic, but “in parallel to'' traditional academia, allowing for different forms and formats to emerge. This spirit I believe still persists in the work of the Practice Lab, where we describe our operating model as “para-philanthropic”: not “anti-” philanthropy, not “better” or superficially striving to “fixing” philanthropy, but rather developing models and funding structures in parallel to traditional philanthropy where we can support projects and ways of working that are currently difficult or impossible to realise within the structures and funding conduits that are currently available to architecture.
DB: As you mentioned earlier, architects essentially function as media creators, playing a significant role by translating societal needs into ideas, images, and projects. However, these ideas are often novel and lack precedent; they have yet to materialize into reality. Therefore, I understand that a para-academic space can offer the time and freedom to delve into these ideas. Coupled with philanthropic support, it can provide the resources needed to bring these concepts to fruition as tangible projects.
NB: Absolutely. I would like to add and build on that, as I think what’s interesting about architecture or architects as public figures with the values you describe is that they can’t get away with talking only about the “whats” and the “whys”: they have to essentially talk about the “hows”, because this is where their credibility lies, if anywhere at all. This emphasis on the how is really critical, in particular at a time where I believe there is no shortage of “whats” and “whys” that are painfully obvious. There is a lot of scientific and social consensus about “why” we need to build differently, why it’s important, why it’s urgent, why it’s critical… And I believe there are many proven and direct “whats” that are obvious, whose existence-of is not unknown to their most immediate beneficiaries, whose expertise in implementation is not lacking… I say this because I think there’s a point where the self-serving artistic or architectural practice of multiplying “whys” and “whats” for their own sake could and perhaps should be interpreted as its own distinct form of “predatory delay”, drowning the signal with more performative noise. As such, I think that for us the actual space of innovation ought to be shifted towards new operative and institutional typologies of the “how”; this is where we want to spend the lab’s focus and creative energy, as we partner with local communities and practitioners who are much more knowledgeable about their locally relevant “whats” and “whys” than us from our perch in Copenhagen.
DB: And in a concrete way, how is the re:arc institute structured to accomplish this goal?
NB: At the heart of the organization is the design of an operating model and institutional format which allows the re:arc institute to support distinct communities of users in distinct, specific ways, which together hopefully amount to something greater than the sum of their parts. As such, we define distinct ways of working informed by a plurality of geographies, cultural perspectives… but also of professional and disciplinary backgrounds which together constitute what I perceive as some of the different types of “climate workers” that we need to activate and support. For example, we understand that we need to support the work of grassroot collectives, activists, and community leaders on the ground, which has defined our “Grantmaking” vertical where we allocate direct, flexible, often unrestricted grants to nonprofit organizations such as the CLIMA Fund, Arquitetura na Periferia, or the Climate Emergency Software Alliance. Similarly, we believe in the need of supporting the work of educators, storytellers, community builders and cultural change makers in their effort to help shift the Overton window and promote alternative paradigms for the design of the built environment. This has defined our “Public Discourse” vertical where we support cultural production activities such as public symposia, education initiatives, as well as our own editorial and podcast platform titled revisions.
Finally, we have also recognised the importance of engaging more directly and deliberately with the professional community most intimately involved in the design of the built environment: namely architects and professional practitioners, but also landscape architects, urbanists, and other related urban designers. This was a critical but also difficult inclusion, due to the fact that most of them technically operate as “non-non-profit” commercial design studios, and are therefore rarely featured or poorly represented in the space of philanthropy despite the “all-hands-on-deck” criticality of the moment, other than perhaps the occasional token award or symbolic pavilion, neither of which takes us very far in my opinion.
We created the “Practice Lab” vertical to respond to this vacuum. What was uniquely interesting to me was the possibility of tailoring a new legal relationship and funding model that could enable the realization of built projects that are needed in response to our current climate crisis, but are difficult or impossible to realise with currently existing traditional funding structures. Arguably, there is a real and urgent need to normalize and scale alternative “self-initiated” ways of working for professional practitioners, beyond simply responding to public or private commissions, gambling on open competitions, or laboriously chasing shrinking symbolic grants from the cultural sector. Currently, there are many reasons why architects are so little represented in the philanthropic sector, despite the 40% of global CO2 emissions footprint generated by the built environment. It is very difficult to fund built projects, and very difficult to report on them. The cycles of the philanthropic sector don’t map onto the construction sector. The administrative burden from both sides is high. And there is a real lack of experience and expertise in both directions about how to work with one another. With the Practice Lab we decided to address these challenges by proposing an experimental space of “learning by doing” where we extend beyond traditional grantmaking and work directly with architects and professional practitioners to help realise site-specific, self-initiated and community led-projects that are needed in their local social and ecological contexts, but for which there is currently no traditional “client” to commission. In our first year of operation we are already working with 16 studios (among which Taller Capital, Region Austral, PAVA Architects, Material Cultures, Social Design Collaborative, and many others) and building 28 built interventions around the world.
DB: What are the key questions and challenges that the re:arc institute is currently prioritizing and addressing?
NB: This is an interesting question because there are obviously many challenges that we need to prioritize and formulate a position and response towards. I think for us, one of them is the periodic recognition that we need to refrain from “parachuting solutions” within a foreign context of which we have very little knowledge of. I’m speaking on behalf of the lab here, but I think it applies to our entire organization when I say that is clear that we have much much more to learn than to teach about any of this work, and that our role and purpose is less to serenade others about our personally-held values and beliefs than to listen, enable and empower in situ communities to respond to the social and ecological challenges they are facing through social and ecological responses that are relevant to them. Of course I wouldn’t say that we are agnostic to the projects and initiatives that they are proposing, because the re:arc institute is guided by a very clear and specific mission. But I believe that in the design of new institutional “hows”, there needs to be a degree of agnosticism and flexibility towards the ends, because this is how we build resilience within the process and how we can scale our legal protocol across more users.
Another important challenge to address is that for better or worse, architecture is actually a profession of precedents, meaning that its great tragedy or catch-22 is the reality that “in order to build, you have to have built”. Indeed the construction industry is among the most conservative and risk-averse in the world, and therefore often, in order for something to exist, you need to be able to point at it elsewhere and say: “look, this is possible”. I mean this not only in terms of structural or architectonic complexity; I mean also in terms of the institutional and administrative complexity of getting anything at all. Within the Practice Lab, we have the opportunity of co-initiating and multiplying a very specific type of precedent, interesting not because of its formal display of acrobatics but because of the self-initiated and community-led / owned process leading to its final realization. This approach is reinvigorating, but any seasoned designer knows that experimentation requires 3 times more structure not 3 times less, which in itself presents its own unique different challenge in itself as well… Nevertheless, to come back to our discussion about Strelka, I think this process is the right challenge to focus on as it results not only in new normal projects, but also in new normal typologies or fields of practice. If in the 20th century we initiated and normalized the architectural typology of the airport terminal, the megatall skyscraper, the data center… what are the new composite, site-specific, socio-ecological landscape-based “hybrid infrastructure” architectural typologies that need to be prototyped in the 21st century? And what are the institutions that need to be created in order to initiate and normalize them? I say normalize again because I truly believe that despite the internal process, the key is to de-radicalise and present our work in ways that are not “experimental”, “exceptional”, “special” but rather “common-sensical”, i.e. appearing as much more common-sensical than the common sense that animates the construction industry at present. Ironically, trying not to be perceived or branded as “radical” presents its own challenge in the given cultural climate, where the word radical is peppered and used almost as a punctuation marker.
DB: Regarding the curatioral component, the re:arc institute has developed a thorough global survey to identify these specific types of practices.
NB: Yes, the curatorial layer here is integral. I think it’s also a cultural remnant from Strelka Institute as well, where we unapologetically rooted our practical work in design-research, without necessarily emphasizing a strong distinction between both. In the same way that we work with “non-non-profit” practitioners and studios, we partner with individual researchers and academic / non-academic research organizations to assist us in researching and shortlisting possible relevant collaborators. We could probably limit and do this research work internally, but I think there’s value in learning from and catching up to the expertise and experience of these collaborators, also to avoid the modernist impulse of “starting from scratch” or reinventing the wheel at every turn as long as we’re the ones spinning it. I also interpret these research commissions as an added layer or modality for support, geared towards practitioners and practices whose design output clarifies the problem / opportunity space rather than formulating the built response. A good example of a research collaboration during our first year has been the compilation of a joint public Open Directory together with Non-Extractive Architecture, where we combined rolodexes and shared the profiles of the 1000 practices we reviewed and considered for funding during our first 2 inaugural funding cycles with the broader philanthropic and education community.
Another reason why we put some much effort in this curatorial process is that, as mentioned, we want to avoid replicating the competition dynamics of the architecture industry. The 16 practices that were invited to submit proposals in this first year weren’t pitted against one another, weren’t ranked etc. because each one of their proposals responds to highly site-specific conditions. We strive to fund 100% of the proposals that we initiate. For the moment, we’re not looking to publicly launch any call-for-entries or solicit applications “pitches” — these of course have their own pros and cons but would prematurely change the dynamic of the experiment we’re trying to run and learn from. I’m not opposed to more solicited requests for funding in the future, and we are developing a robust model for this very soon, but for the moment we want to prioritize a curatorial process based more on the practice and the relevance of the site / problem space than on an already-developed projects or pitches for funding.
DB: Indeed, it's a highly trusting process.
NB: Yes. “Trust-based philanthropy” is becoming somewhat of a buzzword but I think it’s applicable in this case, in particular because we’re imposing a very limited scope of requirements on proposals that are submitted: they simply need to stem from the existing expertise of the practice, co-developed with their local community of users, and respond to real clearly identified social and ecological needs in their context. Trust also implies a transparency in the budgeting and documentation process — minimizing the administrative burden of reporting through a streamlined and standardized process we are prototyping with our fantastic pro-bono legal advisors Kromann Reumert — and the explicit invitation to blueprint the project’s outcomes and learnings as a potential case-study for future replicability in other similarly relevant contexts.
DB: After a case study receives the grant, the next steps involve facilitating not only the realization of the built result but also fostering knowledge exchange.
NB: Yes, the knowledge exchange is a crucial part, which is the last part of the process. I can give an example of the process we are currently going through with the 16 practices from our first year of activity. The first phase — the “Curatorial Phase” — is the phase before we partner with them, where we work with formal and informal research partners such as Space Caviar, Pragma or Kontextur to find and identify relevant practices in response to a range of different research briefs. I would stay that there is no such thing as one type of model practice, but there are patterns in the sense that we are prioritizing mid-sized studios that are neither too established nor too emergent, and rooted in a very specific context where they’ve developed built work in the past so as to establish trusted relationships with a very specific local community of users. These are not “starchitecture” practices “awarded” with a blank check to realise their “dream project”, but neither are they recent grads assisted in realising their first project.
The second phase — the “Proposal Phase” — is where we contact the selected practice, convince them that this isn’t spam, and hire them through a 3-month direct paid commission to work on a site-specific, self-initiated and community-led proposal with a specific local community in their immediate context, with the goal of presenting it back to the re:arc institute and confirm the funding for its realization. As mentioned, this isn’t framed as a competition, and we have frequent check-ins with the practices to ensure that their ongoing proposals fit within our stated mission and available funding. A key component of the approval process is also their strategy for afterlife, maintenance and transfer to their local community, which are ultimately the final owners of the projects. For example, Taller Capital’s proposal put forward the creation of a water-management infrastructure that harvests rainwater runoff for agricultural irrigation, mitigates flooding, and creates a new public space for the peripheral community of San Lucas Xolox (Mexico), which they will operate and animate with the provision of periodic social and recreational services.
After approving proposals during our bi-yearly advisory board meetings, the third “Realization Phase” begins where we allocate up to 250 000 EUR for project development, construction and delivery, which can take up to 24 months. We have made a conscious decision not to share project proposals publicly before their completion and unfortunately you won’t find them on our website, but I’m happy to say that 100% of the proposals have been approved so far and that 25% of them are already under construction. For example, our collaborators Region Austral are currently activating over 5100 m2 of public space across 4 sites in one of the 50 informal settlements in Buenos Aires (Argentina), implementing 1200 m2 of inclusive green infrastructure and 150 m2 of rain garden areas for stormwater management.
Finally, to return to your point on knowledge exchange, we see the upcoming fourth and final “Blueprinting Phase” as the phase in which together with each practice we consolidate and package their completed project’s documentation (photographs, videos, documentaries, interviews, but also timelines, budgets, construction drawings etc.) and partner with a local graphic or media design studio to public share the project’s “blueprint”. This open blueprint can be descriptive and informative, but we also see it acting as a potential ”open-call” for future practices to apply and realise a similar project, mentored by the original practice and funded by re:arc within a similar budget. This is very much still in the works as architecture is a slow discipline and we haven’t completed any built projects just yet, but I believe that we can lead by example and put our money where our mouth is by encouraging the use of our own blueprints in this way. Knowledge exchange here therefore also implies applied and amplified knowledge exchange out there in the world.
DB: Interesting, because if we go back to the first concepts that we were talking about, about architects producing media, producing ideas. And now we're going to the outcome, that is an idea that becomes tangible and visible—an idea realized. However, it's not just about the final product; it's about the process and the knowledge gained, which can be effectively transmitted through various formats such as documentation, written material, and documentaries. This ensures the effective transfer of proven knowledge.
NB: Completely. I like this quote or paraphrased statement from Carl Jung where he states that “People don’t have ideas; ideas have people.” What he means is that ideas aren’t proprietary but are held in common, transmitted and transformed and transmuted through people as they pass from one project to another in the same way that buildings evolve over time independently from this or that architects’ intent. As such I think it’s important for us not to lock down one narrative in place but actively encourage the open-ended multiplication and replication of these ideas.
DB: These aspects are interesting because, from my perspective, I'm observing global developments, particularly in terms of the processes driving architecture. This spans from public grants to clients who, at times, act as philanthropists, investing in ideas with social impact despite lacking financial return. Interestingly, this mirrors what one might envision as an architectural incubator, investing in seed stages, MVPs, and focusing on making things happen rather than solely pursuing financial gain in our hyper-capitalistic world.
NB: Yes, I think we agree that “return on investment” is ultimately an incredibly limited way of thinking about the built environment. I mean, yes, it’s undoubtedly one of the reasons why we may choose to build things, but it can’t be the only incentive or motivation, especially at this time. In this sense, I don’t really think of the Practice Lab as an incubator per se but rather as an alternative or complementary typology of design practice whose purpose is on the one hand to financially support the realization of local site-specific projects, but on the other, to compile learnings and quite literally design an alternative legal and institutional mechanism that allows projects like these to take shape within the nonprofit sector. This institutional project — the design of the lab and its standardized legal blueprint which can be open-sourced scaled across other nonprofit institutions at large — is our design project. And as mentioned early on, we take it as a creative endeavor as equally iterative, stimulating, relevant as any other more easily recognisable design project.
In this sense, we are interested in challenging or triangulating the established and traditionally linear client/architect relationship. In this alternative arrangement, the re:arc institute or the Practice Lab operates as a kind of client, because it provides funding but doesn’t dictate the brief of what needs to be realized. The architecture practice operates as a kind of service provider, albeit not to us, as it deploys expertise and serves its local community of users to uncover a need and formulate a collective self-initiated response. And local users operate not as passive recipients of a top-down outcome, but rather as active co-participants in the design process and ultimately as the ultimate owners and custodians of the project. This triangulated relationship is easy to verbally describe or gesticulate towards, but is much more difficult to formalize and enact contractually... This is therefore the design project we are interested in, distorting terms like “client” or “ROI” beyond recognition meaning that perhaps we now need new terms to describe these new relationships — another design project in itself.
DB: Interesting, because to put it on similar terms as what you mention, this work embodies architecture—it's just not confined to physical buildings. Its impact extends far beyond the construction of one, two, three, four, or even five buildings, with a wider impact.
NB: Personally, I would say so. At the end of the day, I was trained as an architect, I'm drawn to architecture. I'm interested in shaping the built environment in meaningful and viable ways… And if architecture is a media-based practice, the media I’m interested in extends beyond architectural drawings to include legal standards, protocols, contracts, spreadsheets, all of the “multipliers” — or active forms, to quote Keller Easterling — that transform the built environment when propagated, altering its pattern much more broadly beyond beyond one, two, three, four, five buildings.
DB: This is perhaps a very fulfilling architectural project on itself, very exciting.
NB: I think it’s very exciting. We set up the lab a little over a year ago with multiple staged and nested objectives in mind. Firstly, to fund and help establish a coherent typology of site-specific “hybrid infrastructure” projects, something which we are already doing and exemplifying through a portfolio of 16 projects under development, with 8 more on the way in the next month. Second, to prototype and share a new blueprint / institutional framework for funding in architecture, which is also something we are already circulating to other relevant organizations with the ambition of collectively pooling more resources and establishing a broader philanthropic alliance to support this kind of work. And finally and perhaps most importantly, to promote a different studio culture and ultimately normalize an alternative paradigm for architectural practice, something we will hopefully begin to do more formally over the coming year through more initiatives in education and media.
The reality is that for architects, what we call “climate change” should not only be acknowledged as an irrefutable “process” but also recognised literally as an inadvertent design “project” of the past 400 years. Independent of whichever other cultural or historical architectural narratives, at planetary scale the last 400 years could be bluntly and ruthlessly described as one huge landscape design project in one direction, literally resulting in one huge carbon conveyor belt from the ground up to the atmosphere... For me conceptually this signifies that the next 100 years will require an equally all-encompassing design project, only faster and in reverse. This doesn’t mean at all one large centralized intervention, one top-down solution, one giant carbon capture megacorp... But it does mean a significant and diverse plurality of grounded, site-specific, mitigating and adaptive interventions responding to local social and cultural needs in more viable alignment with the ecological substrates that contain them. We need to design the institutions and ways of working that will enable these interventions to emerge, even and especially if they fall outside comfortable available public/private or profit/non-profit dichotomies. Climate change is not a “puzzle” to be solved because institutionally, we currently don’t have all the pieces. So I’m personally very energized to be working as a designer and architect on this particular layer of the design project.
DB: It's fascinating because with this final aspect, I believe that amidst these challenging times, architecture has the opportunity to reinvent itself.
NB: Architecture continuously reinvents itself, it can and must continue to do so. It’s a porous, permeable, fundamentally opportunistic discipline in constant state of transformation. So I think given the moment we find ourselves in, it’s important for architecture to drop any remaining internal self-aggrandizing master narratives of “frozen music”, “labor of love” etc. and reaffirm itself quite literally and simply as “work”, i.e. an integral tranche of the tremendous scope of work required in these next 100 years for us to course correct where we’re heading. And not to get too nerdy, but “work” literally means “force” x “displacement”. It’s well known that architects work long hours with great passion and with great force, but what is the vector of displacement? I believe we have a responsibility and role to play in the design and orientation of that vector.
