Image by June14 Meyer-Grohbrügge & Chermayeff, courtesy Carson Chan.

Although trained as an architect, Carson Chan is mostly known for his work as a curator and writer. In 2006, after working for Barkow Leibinger Architects and the Neue Nationalgalerie's architecture exhibitions department in Berlin, he founded PROGRAM, a non-commercial initiative for art and architecture collaborations. Since then, he has worked on more than thirty international exhibitions of contemporary art and architecture, notably including the 4th Marrakech Biennale in 2012 and the Biennial of the Americas in Denver in 2013. Meanwhile, Chan has written for a wide range of publications across the fields of art, architecture, and contemporary culture, and serves as the Editor-at-Large of 032c—all while pursuing his doctorate in architecture at Princeton University, researching the rise of environmentalism and aquarium architecture in postwar United States.

But while not designing buildings directly, Chan did have a hand to play in kufu142, a building on Kurfürstenstraße in Berlin. Specifically, he’s a developer—though just one of twenty. That’s because kufu142 is what’s known in Germany as a baugruppe, or building group, a legal collective of people who own and develop their own project. While access to funding remains one of the primary hurdles for young designers elsewhere, and exploitative rents plague urban residents in most major cities, this model offers a way for people of different ages and socioeconomic backgrounds to inhabit and intervene in the urban environment without access to major sources of capital. In this interview, we discuss the mechanics behind the kufu142 project, as well as how Chan understands his work as a scholar and curator intersecting with his unusual role as a developer.

As a building group, the project necessarily demanded gathering together a group of investors alongside the many agents already involved in any building project. First, who are the investors? How do you know each other? What are your relationships? Is there a manager of sorts? And who instigated the project?

The building has twenty units, and the twenty odd members of the group are all friends, or friends of friends. Through word of mouth, the group formed within months. All of us work in the cultural sector. We’re artists, architects, curators, writers, editors, publishers, gallerists, and academics. As a structure, the building group allowed us to form our own community and be homeowners in a city where the cost of living has sharply increased in the last five years. We took out twenty mortgages, basically, and as a collective, it was imminently possible to develop our own residential building from the ground up.

Our building group came about when six of us packed into a car and drove around looking at empty lots in Berlin some time in 2012. Architects Sam Chermayeff and Johanna Meyer-Grohbrügge, collectively called June14, had been looking around online and found some sites that they wanted to look at. I was interested in seeing what was out there, as was artist Oliver Laric. The site we ended up buying was the last one we saw that day. It is a corner lot, about 20 feet from an U-Bahn exit in the Potsdamer Straße gallery district. We basically decided then and there that we would start a baugruppe or building group (also called construction group). The address is Kurfürstenstraße 142, and at some point the project became kufu142.

A building group is a real estate entity particular to Germany, if I’m not mistaken. It allows a group of individuals to be their own developers, building from the ground up, and the result is often cheaper than buying comparable property outright. The group is a legal entity (GbR or civil law partnership) that buys the property, hires the architects, hires project managers, consultants, contractors, and so on. Being a part of a building group means you have a share in the company and the size of your share determines both the size of your unit and which floor its on. When the building is completed, the idea is to dissolve the company, and everyone becomes the owner of their individual units.

A building group is a real estate entity particular to Germany [...]. It allows a group of individuals to be their own developers, building from the ground up, and the result is often cheaper than buying comparable property outright.

Who’s part of the design team?

June14 designed the building. Sam and Johanna had arrived in Berlin to start their own firm in 2010, after leaving their jobs at SANAA in Tokyo. They also share a unit in the building.

What has been your role in the design? To what degree was this project collaborative? How much input does an investor have in the design and realization of the project (if they’re not also directly involved in these processes)?

I personally didn’t have a role in the design of the building—we left that to the architects. As a group, we would vote on key design decisions, and in that way, my votes helped shape the project. The project as a whole is definitely collaborative. Without the group, there would be no funding for the design. Without the architect’s design, there would have been no group. We have group meetings once every six weeks or so to discuss the design, budget, legal matters, as well as handling members who want to leave the group and new ones who want to join. It’s a big challenge to the architects though. They have to deal with twenty clients at the same time. During the meetings, we vote on all these issues so, in a sense, we don’t have “investors” per se, but everyone is meant to be an active member of bringing the building to completion. One advantage of being your own developer is the opportunity to foreground design considerations over, say, efficiency and common denominator practicality.

What were the primary programmatic demands of the project and what are some of the design strategies that were employed to meet them?

The basic idea was to create a residential complex where we can all live, and that connects to the surrounding area with commercial spaces on the ground floor. June14 wanted all the less private spaces in every apartment to have 16.5 feet (5 meter) ceilings so that even smaller units feel expansive (bathrooms and sleeping areas are only 8 feet or 2.5 meter high). We’re able to have in every unit a maisonette while adhering to the city’s height limit by intersecting adjacent units at alternate floors. Early on, there was an idea to have shared amenities at these points of overlap. Kitchens are generally the most expensive part of an apartment. If, say, two different owners don’t see themselves using the kitchen often, their units can be planned in a way so that the kitchen is shared. Not only would this be cheaper for both parties, but it would promote the communal aims of the whole project. In the ensuing years, the shared private spaces idea didn’t survive (there is shared rooftop space, and everyone has use of the backyard). What if one party decided to sell their unit? How would you sell a flat that your neighbors can access? How would this affect the resale value?

As a structure, the building group allowed us to form our own community and be homeowners in a city where the cost of living has sharply increased in the last five years.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe this is the first time you’ve been directly involved in the realization of a building. You’ve previously argued that architecture curation should be understood as a distinct profession and field of thought from architecture in the normative professional sense. So, first of all, what did you bring to the table as, primarily, a curator/writer/scholar?

Good question, though it’s hard to define each person’s contribution since it is such a group effort. Besides an apartment, I also own the ground floor commercial spaces, and perhaps finding the right tenants exercised some curatorial thinking. Selecting tenants wasn’t only about who would offer the highest rent. Kurfürstenstraße was a fixer-upper back in 2011, and in many ways, still is. It is in the historic center of Berlin, and when the city was divided in half after the Second World War, the center of the city effectively became the edge of two different cities, and in the interim fifty years, this area was neglected by investment until quite recently. After we bought the site, all the other empty lots on the same street were bought up by developers. We have a real opportunity to direct the course of how this street would be activated on the ground level, how this street would then operate with the adjoining streets, and so on. I’m able to get loans for these ground floor properties because I was able to get long term contracts from renters as guarantees for the bank. In essence, all I needed was to show that I was able to pay the mortgage from what I would get from my renters. Asking for rent on the lower end of the price range for the area would allow me to attract, say, galleries and bookstores. Asking for something on the higher end, I would end up with insurance companies and startups. Selecting tenants to create a retail ensemble that would mature with the building and the area was a big consideration for me.

How do you see this project as relating or figuring into your broader practice?

Around the time we started this project, I had been thinking about the limited influence of people who think seriously about architecture and cities and the built world. I’m aware that thinking about architecture and building buildings are separate things, but the deep disconnect between these activities is still striking to me. In the states, something like only 10% of built structures have meaningfully passed through an architect’s hands. Developers and engineers build everything else. There are architecture historians, architecture designers, and then there are builders. Collaboration between these groups is the exception.1

Around the time we purchased the lot, I was asked to curate the 4th Marrakech Biennale. Instead of showing all the works in a building, we placed them in various public places around the city. It was exciting to think about the aesthetic encounter and the chance encounter in a city merge into one experience. In 2013, I was the executive curator of the Biennial of the Americas in Denver, and there I put newly commissioned 2D work on billboards throughout the city. Pezo von Ellrichshausen, plan:b, Alex Schweder, and June14 were invited to build site-specific outdoor architectural installations that offered a critique of Denver’s urban condition.

I’m aware that thinking about architecture and building buildings are separate things, but the deep disconnect between these activities is still striking to me.

As we were already deep in discussion in Berlin about how to occupy space in a city, June14 and I continued this conversation in Denver. Sam and Johanna chose to build something on the 16th Street Mall, a pedestrian and transit thoroughfare in downtown Denver. The city has been trying to encourage the downtown portion of this street to be a shopping and entertainment destination. Pei Cobb Freed drew up some initial planning in the early 1980s, and a free shuttle took visitors up and down the street. For many, the 16th Street Mall would be more successful if it weren’t for the homeless people that are often found there. In response to this site, Sam and Johanna designed net structures around public furniture—benches, water fountains, phone booths, bus stops—places where the homeless often congregate. The architects wanted to challenge the idea that the homeless didn’t belong there, that they weren't an endemic part of the downtown community. June14 did this by introducing another “non-native group”: inside each enclosure were butterflies. I think this project in Denver was important both for me and June14 in thinking about ways to intervene in an urban setting that needs to attend to the aims and ambitions of various publics—to find ways for your own agenda to contribute to an ongoing multi-directional narrative.

If architects shouldn’t necessarily assume they can be curators and curation is a distinct discipline, is the reverse true as well (besides the professional/legal limitations)? That is, what do you see as the borders between thinking about architecture as a designer versus as a curator?

Architecture and curating share two main things in common. One is that they both deal with space. Where I see architecture as a spatial practice that employs and defines our relationship to the material, culture, and society within our perceivable world, curating is the presentation of objects (of whatever media) in space to allow for and even encourage people to inscribe cultural meaning to them. They’re both spatial forms of knowledge production. Also, I see curators and architects essentially as mediators. Curators have to mediate the needs of the exhibiting institution, the visiting public, and the work itself. Architects mediate not only between the client, the site, and their own design, but also the historical context of the project. It’s not that I don’t think architects can be good curators, it’s that I don’t always see them invest the same criticality towards the process of making an exhibition as they do towards designing buildings. Putting an exhibition together—doing individual studio visits, discovering practices that have less exposure—is a full-time job. I think curators, or anyone else, are capable of designing a house. It really depends on how you define architect, really. For one, you don’t need a degree to design a house. Think Zumthor, Scarpa, or Ando, who was a boxer before he started reading books about architecture and opening his own firm at twenty-eight. Simply put, the financial stakes in buildings is much higher than exhibition making. There are a lot more legal hurdles to go through even before you break ground. The relative ease of putting on an exhibition fosters the misconception that it doesn’t involve particular skills. We see the same thing when architects attempt to make art. Just because it’s not as time-consuming or costly doesn’t mean it's easy to do or doesn’t require training.

1   Ellen Dunham-Jones goes further into the “missed opportunities” in the Harvard Design Magazine, No.12, see Ellen Dunham-Jones, “Seventy-Five Percent,” Harvard Design Magazine, No.12 (Fall 2000).

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