Outsider Architecture

Outsider Architecture: "

Guerrilla Lighting Southwark Whites Grounds, image (c) Nadine Stewart.

Street artists have a tenuous relationship with the media. While it’s essential that they maintain a mysterious image as outsider artists, it’s also seemingly essential that they get their names in the news. British artist Banksy has been toeing that line for years, sometimes landing more on the side of a global brand (friend-to-the-Jolie-Pitts) than masked Robin Hood of social commentary.

Architects aren’t quite so conflicted over the notion of mainstream success, but the recession was a catalyst for a similarly client-less phenomenon in the profession.

A recent piece in the New York Times made the conflicted nature of street art culture clear: The article is an account by a journalist who was lucky enough to travel to a secret ‘gallery‘ featuring the work of more than a hundred well-known artists in an unfinished, never-used subway station at an undisclosed location in New York. (It’s actually the abandoned, in fact never even used, South Fourth Street subway station adjacent to the Broadway G stop in Brooklyn.)



Image (c) the New York Times.



Work by Revok x Ceaze for the Underbelly Project, photo (c) Luna Park.

Similarly self-led design interventions have been popping up more often in the last few years. In an economy where there isn’t always a client to commission a project, there’s a small and vibrant set of designers working off the grid. In other words, there are urban and architectural interventions happening all over your city, secret and sometimes illegal, that are redefining what it means to be a successful designer.





Brooklyn Dumpster Pools (summer ’09), Macro-Sea, Brooklyn, NY.

Call it the next generation of Paper Architects. The era of ‘paper architecture,’ where out-of-work architects create vibrant dialogs out of entirely theoretical, surrealist proposals, was largely stifled by the boom of the 90s. But in the face of sustained economic sluggishness, projects that intervene in the public realm without a client or commission are increasingly popular.



Guerrilla Lighting Southwark The Tanneries (c) Martin Lupton. Guerilla Lighting is an ongoing project led by architects, designers, and artists that describes itself as a “war on bad lighting, guerrilla lighting is a protest against wasteful use of light”

Many architects working on projects without clients or briefs are practicing in cities stricken by problems much larger than a little urban intervention. For example, Detroit and New Orleans are two major points of interest, while Brooklyn and Chicago also have active populations as well.



Hypothetical Development Organization, New Orleans, images (c) The Hypothetical Development Organization. The group takes abandoned buildings around New Orleans and illustrates theoretical futures for them in the form of 3′x5′ “Coming Soon!” signs.





Agent Orange project, Detroit, Michigan – which draws attention to the massive number of abandoned homes in Detroit by painting entire structures tiger orange (the color the city uses to mark the homes for demolition).

Obviously, there is another conversation to be had about whether or not these projects fall on the side of architecture, art, or urban intervention. But we’re mostly interested in seeing what happens when a client isn’t there to provide a brief, rather than categorically excluding certain types of built project due to their content. What do you think?

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