JULIAN SCHUBERT
‘We want to bridge the visionary and the concrete, the tangible.’
Photo: Alberto Novelliy
Something Fantastic is critical about building, and tries to make better use of what is already there. "Our agenda aims to avoid waste, now and in the future."
ICCC – INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURE, BERLIN, GERMANY (2022) VISUALIZATION: SOMETHING FANTASTIC, ZARA PFEIFER AND LENNART WESKI
Video screens and heaps of sand in the corners: the meeting room of Something Fantastic, the Berlin architectural firm of Julian Schubert, Elena Schütz and Leonard Streich, has been transformed into a gallery space. On show is a work by the artist Alicja Rogalska, forming part of the Berlin Art Prize. This transformation was meant to be temporary. The architects were residents of the German Academy Villa Massimo for some months, but after realizing that they would never use the office space in the weekend, they now intend to share the space permanently with an art gallery.
This way of thinking is typical of Something Fantastic, and it follows logically from the manifesto that they wrote for their diploma thesis shortly after the financial crisis in 2009. "It was a time of fundamental rethinking," says Julian Schubert, "so the questions of systemic relevancy were everywhere. We thought, let’s look critically at our profession, let’s look at what we have learned and find out how we, with that knowledge and that set of tools, can engage in the current discussions. And let’s also free ourselves from what we have been through at the university, about how architects practice. This resulted in our graduation project, which was published as a book titled Something Fantastic. It was our vision on how we would like to operate as architects, a reflection on what the profession should be like."
Was it also fuelled by an awareness that there was hardly any prospect of building in the aftermath of the financial crisis?
"Even before the financial crisis, we watched with scepticism how the building boom and the construction of all those new museums and stadiums flourished around the world. All of us were born in the early eighties, and we grew up in households that were already environmentally very conscious. We were raised with the idea that something urgently had to change – the idea that not everything is there forever, that we have to deal with what is already there. Of course we started our practice ambitiously. At the same time we realized that, as architects, we could easily fall into the trap of replicating something that we are actually against. I think this is one of the fundamental issues of our time. We all have a common-sense personality and a way of acting professionally. Those mechanisms work so well that you don’t find a way out of it: once you are in, you are in. It feels the same with architecture: once you establish a practice you have to keep it running, even though you know that what you are doing fails to fulfil what you wish to do – which is, at least for us, to contribute to a healthy and beautiful environment for everyone and everything, and to make space for people and animals and plants to live in. By doing that in a conventional way, however, you often destroy more than you create."
(1) DISILLUSIONED OFFICE, BERLIN, GERMANY (2016 - 2020) PHOTOS: ZARA PFEIFER
(1) DISILLUSIONED OFFICE, BERLIN, GERMANY (2016 - 2020) PHOTOS: ZARA PFEIFER
(1) DISILLUSIONED OFFICE, BERLIN, GERMANY (2016 - 2020) PHOTOS: ZARA PFEIFER
Without building there is no architecture. So what can you do as an architect?
"It is not that I am against building per se. We cannot just not build any more. What we are trying to do is to contribute to the building process before any building takes place – which basically means to influence how others build. A lot of the things we did were exhibitions and books on projects, which we thought would communicate well, and would hence inspire others to deal differently with space and building. This kind of influencing was, and still is, important to us."
Do you think that contributing to the architectural discourse is more effective than building?
"For us, as a young office, it has definitely been economically viable. And yes, I am convinced that it is a very effective way to change the architectural practice. It is true, however, that our stance towards building is critical. We do not take part in competitions, and we don’t engage in projects that would automatically lead to building. Even when somebody comes to us with a spatial problem, we always look for alternatives, as we did for the renovation of the digital industries association, here in Berlin. We looked at the program critically, with a clear agenda that aims to avoid waste, now and in the future. We invited two futurologists to join us in developing a new concept of how the employees could work differently in the old spaces. It enabled us to cut down the amount of building to a fraction of what was initially intended. The freedom that we gained made us financially independent of building, so we could actually suggest to a client not to build."
What did you propose to the Berlin digital industries association?
"Of course everyone is influenced by the exciting work atmosphere of the start-up industry. But once you foresee all the waste materials that renovation generates, you will understand how insane it is to rip out all the current offices and turn them into new offices, only to change the trend of offices again ten years later. It is contrary to common sense and especially to environmental sense. We tried to find a way of restructuring and reconfiguring the existing work spaces, and it is this that resulted in a cluster office. Then we looked critically at some of the specific programs that they asked us to include. For example, we showed them that the idea of having a gym or a cafeteria in the office, in a central location in Berlin, doesn’t make sense. The reference is to the fancy campus architecture of Google offices in Silicon Valley, but there they lack urban infrastructure, so something had to be done to make the offices attractive for their employees.
The situation in Berlin is of course totally different. We drew a map showing all the restaurants and gyms in the vicinity and how these could be treated as part of the facilities, instead of incorporating a new cafeteria and gym into the office building itself. The facilities would remain within the programme while making it unnecessary to build an actual space for them."
"We also worked with the idea of 'disillusion' (1) – a concept that we took from Bertholt Brecht and Erwin Piscator. In their epic theatre of the 1920s, they wanted to educate and empower the audience by introducing elements that would break the illusion of theatre and would reveal the play as a play, in other words as an artificial, man-made construction. For us this strategy was meant to reveal the office as an office, and to create a moment where the office worker could gaze at the office from the outside and become aware of its interior spatial elements: dark carpets, suspended ceilings and white wallpaper."
Is creating awareness in the field of architecture what you aim at?
"Awareness is really important to us. I am not sure if the world is more complex than in the past, but we are at least much more aware of the complexity. We know nowadays that we have to tackle energy issues, the climate crisis and the extinction of species. Then there is a growing social divide that also results in a huge political urgency, which is the crisis of democracy. We worked together as a guest professorship in architectural design last year, in Düsseldorf, where we taught a course focussed on Inclusive Urbanism. It was exactly about that urgency: bringing different issues together and dealing with complexity. Usually the term 'inclusive' hints at a cultural sphere, and this is definitely one that we think is relevant – inclusive in the sense of including everyone. But when we use the term, we mean including everything, the slaughterhouses, the power plants, all those things that exist because we live how we live. Everywhere there is something. We cannot just push something aside, because it means pushing it into somebody else’s centre. We have to solve it within our own premises. That’s the idea of inclusive urbanism: that you say, we take it on and now we will have to solve it."
(2) BEVI E LASCIA BERE, ROMA, ITALY (2022) PHOTOS: ZARA PFEIFER
(2) BEVI E LASCIA BERE, ROMA, ITALY (2022) PHOTOS: ZARA PFEIFER
(2) BEVI E LASCIA BERE, ROMA, ITALY (2022) PHOTOS: ZARA PFEIFER
How do you implement such a theoretical concept in your daily practice? Did you work on it during your residency in Rome?
"Yes, last year, we developed some rituals for irrigating trees there. The saplings are planted by tree nurseries because they have a contract with the city. The contract ends after a couple of years, and then it becomes difficult for the trees to survive in an urban environment. Fortunately there are residents who water trees, usually elderly ladies. They know what is growing there. However, our generation is scattered here and there, and we no longer have an intimate relation with our direct environment. Therefore we developed a ritual of meeting friends at a nasone, a Roman drinking fountain that runs continuously with fresh water. We were together having an aperitivo, but we also brought containers to water the trees. The project was called bevi e lascia bere (2), drink and let drink. The idea was to make people aware that these trees are theirs – that they are the ones who profit from it, so they can also take care of them. To connect joyful gardening to a metropolitan cultural sphere and lifestyle, that was what we were trying to do there."
Not building is at the core of your practice. What do you propose as an alternative?
"We always say, make better use of what is already there. Of course that is too general. If it comes to housing, for example, there is a shortage in the cities. The strategy is then to look at the actual use of houses. Biographically, our spatial needs are the largest when we are planning to establish a family. People either build a house, or buy or rent an apartment with the required area of rooms. But if you look at the occupancy of the space, you realize that most of the time it is underused during the life span of the house. It is only for a relatively short time that it is well used. So a financial incentive could stimulate people to move to smaller apartments. We think this would free up a lot of family apartments."
IRRIGATION BIKE, DRESDEN/BERLIN, GERMANY (2022) PHOTOS: SOMETHING FANTASTIC
IRRIGATION BIKE, DRESDEN/BERLIN, GERMANY (2022) PHOTOS: SOMETHING FANTASTIC
(3) CONSTELLATION HOUSE WOOD, BERLIN, GERMANY (2020) RENDERING: LENNART WESKI
(3) CONSTELLATION HOUSE WOOD, BERLIN, GERMANY (2020) RENDERING: LENNART WESKI
That is a political-financial solution. Is there also a solution in terms of architecture?
"We developed the concept of the 'constellations house' (3). The nuclear family is a potential constellation, but it’s not the only one possible. The idea is that over time the constellations can change. To create the possibility of adapting to these changing constellations, we proposed a strict division between night rooms and day rooms in the design. They are not grouped into an apartment, but the apartments sort of intersect. To go from your night rooms to your day rooms, you would use a staircase that other members of the community would also use. It would allow for a closer community, because the resistance to entering someone else’s day rooms, which are used more sociably according to their nature, would become more porous. Since every bedroom would have its own bathroom and at least in our case also a coffee machine, almost like a hotel room – you would also have more privacy in the individual bedrooms."
"This is all linked to our idea of density. If you want to have a higher density in physics, you shrink the volume. In architecture we tend to think that if we build big buildings close to each other, we create density. But if those big buildings are empty after office hours, that is not dense at all. On the other hand, you could heighten the urban density by putting more things into existing buildings, even into smaller ones. It would be a space that can be used at different times for different functions. That would definitely increase the density. For an urban design project in the vicinity of Geneva, we adopted the slogan 'Density without Bigness’. And sometimes we have even considered using the term 'richness' instead of density: rich in life, instead of dense with buildings."
TODAY THIS TOMORROW THAT, BRUSSELS, BELGIUM (2021) PHOTO: ROBERT HAMACHER
Fundamental to Something Fantastic is the notion that there is no longer any distinction between culture and nature. What do you mean by that?
"We think that we remained in the cultural space for too long. We felt too safe, too independent from nature. We took it for granted, as something that others take care of. In the cultural sphere we became almost snobbish towards nature. Now we think that this shouldn’t have been the case. We should have changed that attitude and oriented ourselves towards nature, merging the spheres of culture and nature."
Something Fantastic advocates simple interventions that speak for themselves, as if anybody could do it. Yet Julian Schubert says it is still important that he is trained as an architect. "You have some knowledge, or at least an idea of sociology, history, natural science and biology, but you also have knowledge about structure and construction. The idea of a generalist is very dear to me. I feel that it is exactly what I am. I have no specific knowledge, but I have an idea of it somehow. As an architect, however, you should always ask yourself the question for whom you design.
When you start an office, you become part of a community of professionals. The respect and appreciation of your colleagues tends to become important. For sure, the bubble in which you are moving can lead to excellence, but it is also risky, especially in architecture, because everybody will be confronted with what you design, not just your peers."
"Of course I enjoy the fascinating examples, such as the buildings by the Belgian architect Juliaan Lampens, who never finished the walls but always stopped at a certain point. If your ambition is an extravagance, or a wish to distinguish yourself from other professionals, I have a sympathy for that. But it doesn’t lead to anything. It doesn’t solve the problems we are facing. I am afraid that architecture is no longer the right territory for diving into an extravaganza."
"Our approach could not be more different. It is recognizable in the name of our office. Something Fantastic is of course 'fantastic', but it could also be a mere something, perhaps something very small. We want to bridge the visionary and the concrete, the tangible. We want to connect the super-complicated problems to very specific things in daily life."