Ethel Baron Pohl: 'Dissidence from Standards' (Oct 15)

Our turn now. To turn down the pencil, and shut down the screen. To smell the letters and lick the words. To print pleas and share revolts. The story of architects playing the alchemy of the words. We want to explore how architecture melts in the intersection with politics, technology, economy and social demur. We oppose to individualism, consumerism and accumulation. We propose to change the limited metrics that architecture is based on—sqm, budgets, investments—and pose human relations in the center of our debates. We propose complexities: to use poetry, empathy, enthusiasm as new metrics to understand the nature of our cities. We suspect charisma and do-goodism but support the ordinary. We propose to blatantly update our current architectural standards and transform them into stories. We want to do alchemy, to create new elements out of the opposites, to mix up poetry and economy, forgetfulness and mementos, building and subtraction. And build shelters, intangible architectures of nature-grids, time sequences and memories, myths and symbols anew.

ETHEL BARAONA POHL
Critic, writer and curator. Co-founder, with César Reyes, of the independent research studio and publishing house dpr-barcelona , operating on the field of architecture, political theory and the social milieu. Their [net]work is a real hub linking several publications and actors on architecture and theory. Associate Curator for "Adhocracy", first commissioned for the Istanbul Design Biennial in 2012 and exhibited at The New Museum, NYC [May 2013] and Lime Wharf, London [Summer 2013]. Curators of the third Think Space programme with the theme 'Money'; they recently curated the exhibition Adhocracy ATHENS at the Onassis Cultural Center, 2015.

Organized by Frida Rosenberg and Daniel Norell, the Stockholm Association of Architects, in collaboration with the KTH School of Architecture. 

Draw, point, talk  asks emerging architects and scholars to present their ongoing work in a public lecture and to articulate a position that charges the following response and discussion. Putting media and thought into productive dialogue, the series challenges a prevailing climate where design is presented without disciplinary argument or where criticism is presented without proposition.