COLECTIVO WAREHOUSE: DECENTRALISE!

FRANCESCA GOTTI: There is a consistent relationship between your practice and the others working with this critical approach, and projects become pretexts of encounter and exchange. What was the occasion that threw Collective Warehouse in the network?

COLECTIVO WAREHOUSE: It all started with Casa do Vapor, a project that showed us how the flow of energy and projects can generate other projects. The wood used to build Casa do Vapor originally came from an intervention by Exyzt, the collective from Paris, realised in Guimarães – at the time the Capital of Culture (2012). The wood from Guimarães travelled to Lisbon with Alex (Römer, from ConstructLab) and we all met in Cova do Vapor (a neighbourhood in Costa da Caparica). For us, it was the discovery of a different way of doing architecture: we were just graduating and we were exploring what we could do. One of us went to Cova and met the teams and they introduced us to this new dimension. It was the starting point of Colectivo Warehouse. We are really thankful to all the people who worked on Casa do Vapor, and somehow this was the initiating element not just for us but also for Lisbon: it was a sort of bomb that showed to the city the potential of collaborative practices, and how we can possibly change things together. When Casa do Vapor was over – because there was no license to turn it into something permanent – the team decided to give us and Atelier Mob the wood to kick off the Community Kitchen project in Terras de Costa. The wood travelling from one place to another and from project to project attracted the interest of Gulbenkian Foundation, which chose to support us in Terra de Costa. This was also the occasion when we learned how to organise the work and how to manage a construction site and it showed us the power of designing and then building our own projects. It felt like the Universe was synchronising all the steps showing us how to practise architecture in a non-conventional way.
After the Kitchen project, we structured ourselves and started looking for opportunities and by networking, it was also possible to do more collaborations later on.

FG: You learned to measure your work by practising and to develop your instruments by facing limitations in the field.

CW: It’s a hard game to play! I guess the difficulty for everyone working on these kinds of projects is the absence of a legal framework, especially concerning the participatory process. We think that municipalities and institutions want to absorb these types of practices politically, but at the same time, legislation is still oriented to conventional ways of working. There are public competitions for big architectural projects with urban planning and there is no space yet to pay for the participatory process, because it’s not a common practice. It is hard sometimes to explain how important it is to validate the engagement component: it’s what creates the framework to have an architectural project which will be connected with people’s needs and to make more sense for the community. We work in proximity with people and it’s a richer process, but municipalities often don’t know how to contract these situations. Every time, there is a need for external funding, European funding or municipality special programmes. The BIP/ZIP programme is a good case: it was created in Lisbon in 2011 when they set a participatory budget and created a map identifying neighbourhoods with difficulties – they found 60 sites in total. It works with an open application (and there are approximately 150 applications each time). Every year, around 1.5 million euros are invested in this programme creating 30-40 projects with up to 50,000 euros each. What is interesting is that usually these types of projects require the involvement of local communities, creating a team of architects and non-architects, creating triangles of entities working in the field for a common good. Participatory processes need to be absorbed by these programmes to create a base for developing projects with a higher complexity. In the Northern Europe it is different, it is common practice to have participatory processes: it is mandatory for practices to take care of this aspect, they are prepared for it, they have the right information. In southern European countries, we still need to create mechanisms to contract technicians, experts and mediators: local authorities have to be prepared to make proper contracts, but instead they often expect us to already have funding. In our case, sometimes the projects come from other colleagues, who are able to unlock funding and then invite us to collaborate as designers or just as builders. On other occasions, we are involved directly by the municipality in a European programme. But on one occasion, for example, we asked for a one-year license to construct a building – a temporary container – and it was not possible to get the license, because they didn’t know how to resolve the situation.

FG: To join other professionals and act as a macro-team, as a movement, could be a way to formalise a shared vision and propose a formula to stabilise this process. And you already collaborate with colleagues from other disciplines. Which specific role does design play for you in this?

CW: Yes, I think a group of designers, with experience and credibility, could show the whole spectrum of possibilities. But then design is what helps, especially in the definition of the programme and the needs. After six years of practice, we understand that obviously the design will be mainly done by designers in the office, the technical part of it. But the richness is in the programme, which is discussed with the community and then digested in the studio to understand needs and develop solutions: this is where designers can work between people and needs.

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Extract from the interview "A talk with Colectivo Warehouse: Decentralise!" Full text available in the book "The Design of Tactics: Critical Practices for Public Space Re-Activation," forthcoming.