Who we are
Fake Industries Architectural Agonism (FKAA) is an entity of variable boundaries and questionable taste that provides architectural tools to mediate between citizens and institutions, the public sphere and disciplinary knowledge. Created by Cristina Goberna and Urtzi Grau from their headquarters in New York, Sydney and Barcelona, FKAA bridges the professional world and the environments of architectural academia to reclaim the architect’s role as a public intellectual—that is, someone who earnestly risks his or her credibility to question hegemonic beliefs.

Which beliefs
The current social, political and economic irrelevance of architecture, contrasts with its radical ubiquity. Never before were architects so present in the media and so close to power; never has architecture seemed so socially awkward. Relegated to be a fundamental but helpless commodity behind the 2008 credit crisis, it has missed the revolutionary events in Northen Africa, the social movements in Southern Europe, the Occupy Wall Street and other global protests. The schizophrenic alternation between escapist claims of autonomy (the unlikely marriage of the Berlague Institute offspring and the East Coast Whites) and disciplinaryless activism (a.k.a. the Lisbon Triennial and other Adhocisms) does not help. Disciplinary discourse and social engagement, once isolated, become histrionic caricatures of the fundamental constituents of architecture, enjoyable but dysfunctional.

What we do
FKAA’s expertise emerges in the intersection of the two. It operates in a semi-autonomous and/or semi-engaged mode—between internal cultures and being-in-the-world—and its practice acknowledges how architecture’s robust disciplinary knowledge mirrors its ability to have effects in the world. Thus, they advocate for the recuperation of the architect as public intellectual which implies the conceptual redefinition as the figure of the recognized expert as someone that is not solely political but has political and ethical principles; someone able to construct an active public by providing tools to understand architectural concerns and, ultimately, contest them. In brief, FKAA’s mobilizes agency using architectural knowledge, agonistically.

This lecture is part of the initiative "The Future of the Interior" by Studio-X and Woods Bagot

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