Architecture of AppropriationArchitecture of Appropriation

This chapter is part of the publication Architecture of Appropriation. On Squatting as Spatial Practice.

Since 2016 Het Nieuwe Instituut has opened up the State Archive for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning through a series of archive explorations. This endeavor not only works to reframe acquisition policies to include new documents, subjects and media, but also acknowledges the thematic and methodological gaps in the official historiography. These include feminisms in architecture, queer perspectives, and the architectural legacy of former Dutch colonies with their different forms of heritage and afterlives.

Currently 97% of the collection is composed of documents authored by white male architects, with only 26 of 835 archives attributed to female architects. Yet, the architecture of the Netherlands is a result of many other agents involved in important transformations of the built environment. Het Nieuwe Instituut is bringing overlooked actors, unacknowledged agents, and forgotten stories into the discussion by examining the role that archives play in the construction of the history of cities and their inhabitants, as well as to contest institutional memory and the dominant historiography.

The Architecture of Appropriation project epitomizes this effort by conducting research into the spatial practices of the squatting movement, recognizing the contribution of informal, non-author-based, precarious, or even criminalized practices in the construction of the Dutch urban landscape. While acknowledging the precariousness of the communities involved as well as the need to carefully limit the processes of institutional appropriation, the initiative aims to open up a discussion on the inclusion of these spatial practices in architectural platforms, archives and debates. As a pilot project, it also seeks to develop a process that would allow the state archive, and others, to collect in a different manner.

One of the aims of the project, exhibition, and publication was therefore to analyze a series of squats through architectural drawings, interviews, and archival material, to build up a record of these struggles, spaces, and oral histories. This material carries the possibility and intelligence of alternative modes of domesticity and housing for current and future generations of architects, researchers, policy-makers, and the general public, both in the Netherlands and abroad.

In 2016 the institute's research department, led by Marina Otero Verzier, set up a collective to develop a methodology and carry out exploratory research to be presented in an open-ended exhibition at Het Nieuwe Instituut. The collective consisted of Katía Truijen, Marten Kuijpers, Maria Fernanda Duarte and Roos van Strien of the institute's research department, curator, researcher and activist René Boer, photographer Johannes Schwartz, and students from the MA Architecture, Urban Design and Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology.Built Environment students from TU Eindhoven.

The first phase of the project, from August to December 2016, focused on how to document the 'architecture of appropriation'. As the squatting movement is often presented as a historical social movement, there is a lack of clearly defined methodologies for researching and documenting their non-normative and criminalized architectures. This attempt, however, follows other initiatives to document informal, temporary, and precarious spaces around the world, serving as inspiration for the development of a methodology for documenting squats and their legalized counterparts across the Netherlands.

While this national focus does not align with the internationalist character and ideologies of the movement, it was maintained for the unique urban, legal and political conditions that have shaped the practice of squatting in this territory. The character and focus of the State Archive for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning, where the resulting research documents would be included, conditioned the scope of the research as well. Initially, five squats were selected and their communities approached to conduct the research collaboratively. These sites show the diversity of the architecture of appropriation in the Netherlands, in terms of typology (monumental canal houses or industrial complexes), community size (small living groups or entire micro-societies), age (squatted for a few years or a few decades) and status (still squatted or legalized in different ways).

The initial conversations with the squats' inhabitants shed light on how the evolution of the space, its origins and major social, political or legal 'life events', are crucial to understanding its current architectural arrangements. A timeline based on interviews, email correspondence, and archival research served to map the history of each location before its occupation, its often volatile developments following the first squatting action, and its plans for the near future. Historical documents from Het Nieuwe Instituut's archive, city archives, the Amsterdam-based International Institute for Social History, and the squats' own archives were all included in these time-based overviews.

In addition to the accounts of the squats' histories and the researched archival material, the collective explicitly decided to use drawings to present these architectural practices not generally included in the histories of architecture, its operating platforms and archives, by appropriating the tools, methodologies and forms of representation generally used by the discipline. In collaboration with architecture students from TU Eindhoven and the squats' inhabitants and users, the collective developed a set of floor plans and axonometric drawings of all the squats, with an emphasis on the spatial and material strategies for the occupation of the space and its transformation into a communal space for living.

These drawings were accompanied by a photographic series of each squat, aiming to transcend the rather romanticized approach of other attempts to visualize squats, instead focusing specifically on the architecture that shapes them.

Yet representation is neither an innocent or neutral task. It forms the basis of the discipline of architecture, but it is not exclusive to it. Architectural representations such as plans and models are fundamental tools in the institutions of power - including the financial, security and scientific realms - to establish systems of governance and control over the distribution of rights, borders, and belongings. Representation, therefore, makes visible the relationships between architecture, power and politics. To represent is to select, to put emphasis on certain aspects of reality, and obviate others. With this, we build new realities and make them plausible, measurable, and of course we also determine who or what is represented, highlighting our prejudices, interests, and value judgements. With this in mind the collective questioned whether normative representation techniques should be used to represent non-normative spatial practices.

The choice of the type of architectural representations employed was motivated by forms of political representation. Using technical drawings allowed these documents to infiltrate both architectural and legal discourses, and even be used as evidence in court cases. The research collective was composed primarily of architects, designers and media theorists, yet there was a consensus around the idea that the architects and designers involved in the development of the drawings were primarily mediators, with the focus instead on the voices and positions of those who inhabit the squats.

The first phase of the research was presented at Het Nieuwe Instituut from January to August 2017 in the exhibition Architecture of Appropriation. Architects Elma van Boxel, Kristian Koreman, and Thomas Steigena (ZUS) designed an installation in which they 'appropriated' the third floor of the institute. They opened up a prominent new entrance to the side of the building allowing visitors to bypass the normal entrance and its protocols.

Inside they created a domestic environment filled with reused materials and furniture, acknowledging the themes of gathering and the exchange of ideas that prompted the preliminary research. The exhibition space was used for meetings, public events, as well as a working space. It was also 'squatted' twice by unsolicited interventions. First, artist Reinier Kranendonk moved Todopia, a semi-mobile liveing- and work-space installation promoting autarkic lifestyles, into the exhibition. Later, the art collective Architecture of Control started to build a construction next to the entrance, which developed over time.

From the end of March 2017 the installation Fight, Squat, Resist: Housing Alternatives of Social Movements by Studio-X Rio, which addressed squatting as an alternative for communal living in response to the housing problem in Brazil, joined the Netherlands-based case studies inside the exhibition space. Alongside the stories of the National Struggle for Housing mMovement, fighting for the right to the city, the project presents the objectives, strategies, victories and urban visions of the movement, illustrating the daily life of the residents of the Manuel Congo sSquat in the center of Rio de Janeiro. This squat is regarded as an example of participatory architectural design in which residents and architects collaborate to realize a community housing project with public facilities. By presenting examples of squats, the installation sheds light on how access tofor affordable housing is a pressing and ongoing struggle around the world.

Following the exhibition the research collective invited Het Nieuwe Instituut's Behrang Moussavi (General Manager, Heritage department) and Hetty Berens (Conservator, Heritage Department) to explore how the Architecture of Appropriation project could relate to the archive's ambition to challenge the policies that shaped the collection by, for instance, collecting non-author-based and temporary forms of architecture. These forms of architecture often lack the type of documents historically collected by the archive such as plans, models and drawings, and in the case of the five squats, almost no such material has ever been produced by the squatters themselves, with the exception of some sketches, meeting notes, and photographs.

The first research phase had provided a set of drawings for each squat, yet the evaluations conducted by the collective acknowledged that the architectural methodologies used to document the squats might have flattened the intricate stories, collective practices, and detailed qualities of their appropriations. The voices of those who actually designed and built these unique spaces are fundamental to describing and understanding them.

Around the same time, a meeting with a wide range of activists and archival professionals was organized in order to discuss the research methodologies and open up a public conversation about their relevance, conflictual stances, as well as other possible approaches to documenting non-normative spatial practices. The meeting Constructing institutional memory: archiving non-author-based, precarious and criminalized urban practices was held on 12 September 2017 at Het Nieuwe Instituut, in collaboration with the Piet Zwart Institute's MA in Experimental Publishing, and explored alternative approaches to the representation and collection of precarious and often criminalized urban practices within the institutional framework of archives and museums. By comparing different methodologies and case studies, the group examined the role of museums and autonomous archives in the construction of the history of cities and their inhabitants.

The group concluded that it would be necessary to find a way to include the voices of those who created the architectures. As a response to these conversations, a series of annotation sessions with all the squats were arranged during the second phase of the project. The respective communities could annotate the architectural representations by adding their own stories, reflections and comments directly onto the drawings or by using tracing paper, illustrating layers of personal and collective narratives.

A first test-run of an annotation session was organized in collaboration with Poortgebouw in Rotterdam. After a brief discussion, all 12 participants started to add their thoughts, memories and comments. The outcome was a rich collection of notes, yet almost impossible to decipher even by the current members of the squat. The next annotation session started with an hour-long group conversation on the most important reflections, which were then added by one of the members. The resulting documents were still the outcome of a process of collective discussion, yet also comprehensible to the community and to future inhabitants and readers.

By including the voice of the communities with the architectural representations, hybrid documents emerged, which could also comply with the archive's existing policy of collecting originals rather than representations made by others. Having these documents and practices in the archive of the state that rendered them illegal is a political act, one that preserves the event of the occupation as a political message and not just as a cultural event. Archives, this project argues, could be a catalyst for activism in the present, its documents being mobilized in court cases and political decision-making.

Another relevant point of discussion centered on where and under what classification the documents would enter the archive. The aim was to include them as stand-alone architectural projects at the same level as buildings by well-known architects. The respective building dossiers would then mention the squatting community as 'authors' and the Architecture of Appropriation research collective as the 'archive former'. Every box would also get an information sheet, where the group could self-identify and describe their squat. This could also function as a 'meta archive' by referring to documents related to a specific squat in other archives, including the squatting community's personal archives, via the archive's Adlib database and its search portal.

During the conversations held at the exhibition, it was notedpointed out that only squats from the two major Dutch cities (Amsterdam and Rotterdam) were part of the project, while the squatting movement has been and still is a nationwide phenomenon. In particular, cities outside the country's major metropolitan core known as the Randstad have seen active and productive squatting movements. A conversation with the community of Landbouwbelang, a squatted grain silo in Maastricht was established, and Landbouwbelang was included as part of the research, archive and publication.

Simultaneously, the Architecture of Appropriation exhibition was updated and presented at the 11th São Paulo Architecture Biennial held in Brazil's largest city with themes related to collaborative, ongoing construction. Architecture of Appropriation was installed in the Ocupação 9 de Julho, a squatted skyscraper in the city center, which was slowly being transformed by its inhabitants.

This squat is part of a larger network organized and supported by the city's active housing movements. During the exhibition at 9 de Julho various public discussions were organized with representatives of the housing movement, community members, and international guests.

One of the outcomes of the project's second phase is also the present publication, for which Aimée Albers, Anastasia Kubrak, Flora Bello Milanez and Fiona Herrod joined the research team, while Jere Kuzmanic and Maria Fernanda Duarte worked on the architectural drawings, and Maud Vervenne on the graphic design. This publication presents the annotated drawings and photographs as they have been included in the archive. It is designed to be able to circulate freely. Therefore, in addition to the version printed at Raddraaier in Amsterdam, it is also available to download as a PDF. The revenues will be used to contribute to the legal costs of squatting communities who are threatened with eviction.

With this publication, the project comes to a provisional end. Yet it also celebrates the project's afterlives in different initiatives, actions, collaborations, and in the methodology that we hope could be appropriated, improved, and used in current and future archiving of both still-existing and legalized squats.