Feature

On the pitfalls of optimism and the benefits of being angry

Charlie and Anna represented Netherlands Angry Architects (NAA!) at the 2024 LINA Conference in Sarajevo in October, presenting their project ‘Empowering labour for environmental activism’. What follows is a reflection on the power of anger and the problem of design thinking, drawing on the two authors’ experience as relative outsiders to the Dutch architecture industry, coming as they both do from outside the Netherlands.

NAA! / Netherlands Angry Architects! / 2024 LINA Conference: Community-Led Architecture / picture Urban Cerjak

2024 LINA Conference: Community-Led Architecture / picture by Urban Cerjak (Sarajevo, 2024)

A few years after moving to the Netherlands, one of us (me, Charlie) went to see Belarussian tech theorist Evgeny Morozov give the keynote lecture for the 2018 edition of Impakt Festival. Morozov gave a characteristically doom-laden talk about the regressive direction that big tech has taken since the late-aughts. From the post-talk interview and audience questions that followed, it was evident that Morozov was a tough pill to swallow for the already positivity-pilled Netherlands. After his pessimistic first answer, interviewer Eva de Valk began her second question by asking Morozov for ‘the positive interventions that we all want to hear…’ When this was met with another downbeat response, De Valk gave up ‘Ok not so much light there… let’s see if we can go to the audience to enlighten us, make us happy’. De Valk got what she wanted with three questions singing the same tune of hope, all basically asking Morozov for possible agents of change that could deliver us from his gloomy vision. But he just didn’t bite. It truly was a sight to see and it’s still well worth watching the whole exchange (and his preceding talk, not least because it remains urgent).

In the Netherlands, it’s hard to avoid the complacent belief that things will be ok, truth will out, goodness will prevail. But in the current global climate, simply trying to manifest a liberated, socially and ecologically just future is tantamount to superstition and, as such, woefully inadequate to the problems that face us. Positivity won’t see us through. To quote our fellow immigrant (albeit third-generation) Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza: ‘There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope… Hope is a joy not constant, arising from the idea of something future or past about which there is cause for doubt.’ In other words, hope is not a useful emotion to promote in people if we want to empower them to make big changes to society. Instead, we need to be angry and organize to translate that anger into power over the things making us angry. To quote cultural theorist Mark Fisher discussing Spinoza, ‘We don’t need hope; what we need is confidence and the capacity to act.’ That’s because confidence, as Spinoza writes, ‘is a joy arising from the idea of a past or future object from which cause for doubting is removed’. When you have confidence you act decisively.

2024 LINA Conference: Community-Led Architecture / picture from NAA! /Netherlands Angry Architects /Nederlandse Anonieme Architecten (Sarajevo, 2024)

A visit to Sarajevo / picture by author (Sarajevo, 2024)

One of us, Charlie, recalled all this to NAA! comrade and fellow author, Anna, as we reflected on the outcome of our recent trip to the LINA Conference in Sarajevo, where we travelled together in early October, to present our project: Empowering labour for environmental activism: Unionisation across industries from the building supply chain and structural power shifts as a climate action, which was presented along with the projects of 24 other groups from countries across Europe, all of whom comprised the 2024 cohort of LINA fellows. Following Mark Fisher’s call, our project is about giving building workers the confidence and capacity to act on the climate crisis independently of the design establishment.

As a collective of architectural workers based in the Netherlands, our objective is to improve working conditions in the architecture and design sectors. During the last years, we have brought together hundreds of architectural workers in the country and questioned the state of the architecture industry. With the help of the LINA platform, especially VI PER Gallery and Lisbon Architecture Triennale (and others) we are now spreading our outreach to a broader context, trying to unionize across related sectors and other architectural workers organizations operating internationally. Bringing our project abroad, we thought we might be able to escape this atmosphere of positivity and find some fellow angry architects. In some ways we did and in some ways we didn’t. Perhaps excessive optimism is not a Dutch thing, after all, but a design thing and perhaps it’s so pervasive in the Netherlands not because of something about the Dutch but because there are so many design-thinkers and doers in the Netherlands. Maybe, then, the problem is design thinking: the idea, to use John Patrick Leary’s definition in Keywords of Capitalism, that solutions to the world’s problems are best approached as a technical puzzle rather than through a political project to transform the structural conditions causing these problems. Design thinking is inherently positive, privileging the capacity of human ingenuity to overcome any and all obstacles to create a better world. That does sound pretty lovely. But it’s also rather naive in its ignorance of those structural conditions: uneven distribution of resources, pollution, exploitation, etc.

At LINA, our first encounter with an excess of positivity came on the first official day, with the keynote speech from Leopold Lambert, editor-in-chief of The Funambulist. Judging by previous iterations, these keynote lecturers appear to be specifically invited to strike a positive tone about the future of architecture, based on the lecturer’s review of all projects by fellows. Lambert did his job well. He was largely hopeful of the future of critical architecture, with the exception of the main standout point of the talk, that ‘architecture is inherently violent’. This momentary lapse into negativity clearly moved the speakers that followed, because it was mentioned several times, and also in the subsequent coverage in KoozArch, by which time it had become: ‘architecture can be violent but it is also generous’ (our italics), which was almost the opposite of Lambert’s original statement. The mood was unconditional: he said that architecture is violent, not that it can be violent.

After the introductions and keynote, the event featured three discussion panels, with a lunch break and a short presentation in-between. During each panel, fellows had the opportunity to respond to questions posed by moderators, focusing on the projects they had submitted. These three sessions provided insights into the scope and themes of the projects selected for this year’s open call.

2024 LINA Conference: Community-Led Architecture / picture from NAA! /Netherlands Angry Architects /Nederlandse Anonieme Architecten (Sarajevo, 2024)

NAA! Netherlands Angry Architects presenting their project “Empowering labour for environmental activism” / picture by author (Sarajevo, 2024)

I, Anna, represented NAA! during the third of three panel discussions, which was really well facilitated by KoozArch editor Federica Sofia Zambeletti, who somehow managed to stitch together projects from us, to radio, to ghosts, into a coherent narrative. I gave a brief introduction to our actions to the fellows and members, addressing the question: ‘What is the power of a union in architecture to challenge the current structure of the labour force?’ The answer quickly evolved into a discussion on governmental power versus grassroots activities. However, I believe it effectively conveyed our message and provided the audience with a strong understanding of what we stand for. Alas, it seems that the main thing people remembered about us was that we’re angry, as if that was a novelty. Indeed, our name, Netherlands Angry Architects, brought enough attention that we were called ‘the angry ones’ afterwards and I was subsequently referred to as ‘The Angry Lady’.

Admittedly, our name is quite funny and we laughed each time, but then the hoo-ha about our anger did also make it sound as if anger belonged to us alone and the causes of this anger were of no concern to anyone else present at the conference. As with Lambert’s statement, the ‘Angry’ in NAA!’s name appears to trigger emotions that people have a hard time dealing with. But how can you not be angry? Just stop to think for a moment about the building industry’s role, not just in the climate crisis (the main focus of the LINA project), but also in gentrification, the prison industrial complex, Fortress Europe, high-end luxury projects in the middle of deserts, border control, apartheid in Israel-Palestine, and genocide in Gaza, to name just a few of the more significant things architecture facilitates. Unfortunately, architects still often seem to believe in their profession’s fundamental goodness, in its capacity to save the day. Like Lambert, the two of us are not so sure.

But we weren’t entirely alone in our negativity. Indeed, we had a lot of nice interaction with other LINA fellows, some of whom we could be comfortably angry with. Also, all fellows came with great projects, all deserving of the praise that Lambert gave in his keynote (if you want a rundown, we’d recommend the KoozArch article; there are too many good ones to mention here).

Indeed, while on the way back home, we looked over the booklet we were given on the first day and were happy to confirm that we had very meaningful conversations with nearly all 24 fellows who were there (and to those we didn’t get to speak to, we’re really sorry we missed you). It was a bit strange, though, that we only really spoke to fellows for a good amount of time during the course of the conference. All the while, there was another group of people in attendance: LINA members, who represented over thirty architecture and spatial culture-related institutions from across Europe, including museums, universities, research networks, foundations, triennials and biennials. The apparent goal of the conference was to connect fellows with members, with the implicit aim that fellows find a member to host their project, since the fellowship doesn’t pay us directly. Despite this stated aim, many members felt quite distant from us fellows throughout the conference, as they mostly interacted with other members. Consequently, the most frequent topic of conversation we had with fellows was how detached we were from the members. It was a pretty reliable topic to get things going if you were in doubt about what to say to someone.  This detachment seemed somewhat hardcoded into the programme. On the first day, the members were given the floor in a quickfire round of introductions and encouraged to finish the sentence ‘You can talk to us about…’. On the face of it, it’s a pretty innocuous line, though ‘You’ and ‘Can’ and ‘Talk’ felt a bit one-sided. Why couldn’t *they* talk to *us*?

2024 LINA Conference: Community-Led Architecture / picture from NAA! /Netherlands Angry Architects /Nederlandse Anonieme Architecten (Sarajevo, 2024)

View of Sarajevo / picture by author (Sarajevo, 2024)

Evidently, this kind of hierarchy needs addressing in all realms of the industry, not just the architectural office, but on the construction site, in educational institutions and, as represented here, in the case of LINA, on the exhibition and biennial circuit. We are left wondering: how can we build cross-sector networks within the whole industry when it is so difficult to overcome hierarchical set-ups between opportunity-givers and opportunity-takers within the frame of an ‘informal’ gathering?  It seems that structures as seen in ‘traditional’ studios (architecture, landscape, urban, interior, etc.) are easily reproduced beyond the perimeters of office spaces and (unfortunately) reflect themselves in explicitly well-meaning extracurricular initiatives. Unfortunately, design alone can’t save us from the big global problems now facing us. These are problems that arise not from bad design but from a grossly uneven distribution of resources and political power at local and global scale.

We caught a reminder of this on the final day. The river flowing through Sarajevo turned brown from runoff up in the surrounding mountains caused by torrential downpours that ravaged Bosnia and several other Balkan countries in the days we were there. This wasn’t a design problem. Nothing in the designer’s toolkit can begin to solve the climate breakdown that caused this to happen, nor the underdevelopment that Balkan countries have, to varying degrees, been subjected to because of their historically uneven relationship with Western Europe and, more recently, the European Union.

Apart from all the connections, friendships and experiences we gained during the LINA conference, this is what we took from it: there was a little too much optimism and, to echo Mark Fisher’s line once again, not enough confidence and capacity-building: which is to say, not enough exploitation of the huge collective potential of all these brilliant groups, people and initiatives to act on the climate crisis. We are becoming increasingly conscious of the need, not just to draw attention to office work or construction work, but also to be aware of the structure of any institutionalised initiative focused on the built environment, and reflect on spaces of interaction and conversation accordingly. Too often, such spaces are filled with excessive backslapping and self-congratulation, and not nearly enough recognition of architecture’s failures, on the one hand, and its relative insignificance on the other.

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