Title: Testify! The Consequences of Architecture; Venue: Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI), Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Date: 01.07.2011–13.11.2011; Curator: Lukas Feireiss; Curatorial assistant:Elvia Pyburn-Wilk; Supervisior: Ole Bouman, Linda Vlassenrood; Exhibition design: nOffice / Miessen Pflugfelder Nilsson; Graphic design: De Designpolitie;
Participants: 2A+P, iAN+ and ma0/emmeazero with Mario Cutuli, Arup Foresight, at103/Francisco Pardo and Julio Amezcua, atelier d'architecture autogérée (aaa), Cinema Jenin e.V., Decolonizing Art/Architecture Residency (DAAR)/Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, Eyal Weizman, dhk architects with towthink architects, Alejandro Echeverri Arquitectos, EcoLogicStudio / Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto, KARO* with Architektur+Netzwerk, Haas & Hahn /Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn, Li Xiaodong Atelier, Antanas Mockus, NAI Matchmaking, Noero Wolff Architects, Patrizia di Monte and Ignacio Grávalos Lacambra, Enrique Peñalosa, Project Row Houses / Rick Lowe, raumlaborberlin / Matthias Rick and Jan Liesegang, Hiroshi Sambuichi Architects, Senseable City Laboratory, Skateistan/Oliver Percovich and Sharna Nolan, Studio Gang, The Winter School Middle East / Markus Miessen and Zahra Ali Baba, TYIN tegnestue, Zecc Architekten
consequence: late 14c., from O.Fr. consequence "result," from L. consequentia , from consequentem (nom. consequens ), prp. of consequi "to follow after," from com- "with" + sequi "to follow". Sense of "importance" (c.1600) is from notion of being "pregnant with consequences."
Testify! The Consequences of Architecture, originally conceived for the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam by Lukas Feireiss, intentionally challenges the cross-examination of our built environment as the sole provenance of the architect and attempts to interweave architectural discourse into the very fabric of society. The exhibition gathers 25 projects from around the globe that have taken the chance to open themselves up to critical self-reflection, submitting to a non-biased evaluation of their work from a lived-in perspective. The selected projects range from seemingly-straightforward architectural structures to highly experimental and interdisciplinary think tanks and research groups. Despite their manifold practical and conceptual differences, these projects are all united in an overall attentiveness towards the complex relationships between context and spatial intervention, and a thorough understanding of the transformational power of architecture over time. Pinpointing novel and pro-active approaches that draw their conceptual strength from envisioning a combination of multidisciplinary design and its consequences in the built environment, Testify! questions the numerous, current adaptive systems of social, political, ecological, and economic challenges and responsibilities that we are facing today. All of the featured contributions come together in an inspiring international bandwidth to create a new picture of architectural thinking that considers its own consequences, and that takes our built environment across urban as well as rural landscapes as an example of how to make a problem into a concrete possibility – not only for a solution, but an opportunity to highlight the complex set of factors from which the situation has arisen.
