MODERNITIES OUT OF PLACE

The Placeless Academy is a digital platform that aims to provide an international space to analyze and critique the legacy of architecture in the WANA region, and produce alternative critical knowledge beyond the Western colonial conception of modernity. The project is dedicated to supporting emerging architects in Libya, Morocco, and Austria with critical tools, mentorship, and global outreach. By linking the south (Morocco and Libya) to the north (Austria) The Placeless Academy establishes an alternative educational and critical environment to exchange knowledge and share learning, thus overcomes didactic and rigid traditional academic systems. The project consisted of a 3 months digital workshop that hosted several talks by international experts in the field such as Prof. Caroline Jäger-Klein, Assoc. Prof. Cruz Garcia, Arch. Hakim Benchekroun, Arch. Imad Dahmani, Arch. Amalie Elfalah, and Dr. Oliver Sukrow. Over the period of the workshop the 13 participants produced critical research and speculative designs for the chosen sites in Casablanca, Benghazi, and Vienna, which will be on view in the exhibition MODERNITIES OUT OF PLACE. Each group focused on certain sub-theme to study and generate critical and visual knowledge:

Casablanca, Morocco: Inhabiting the Void.  In the focus of the analysis was the architectural structure of the old poultry market in the Hay Mohammadi district, which was designed by Auguste Perret and is today abandoned. The site’s investigation raises several questions: What hidden characteristics can we find beneath the apparent banality of this building? What latent worlds are waiting to be revealed and discovered inside this empty shell? What this skeleton can inform us about the evolution of concrete? And What role can this building play in activating the urban area of Hay Mohammadi? How can we analyze the structure’s architectural characteristics, its (dis)connection to Hay Mohammadi urban area, metaphorical and (un)written stories in order to create new visual representations of the building?

Benghazi, Libya: Tactics of Reconstruction in Omar Al Mukhtar Street. Being part of downtown Benghazi, the street first built by the Italian colonial power and today carrying the name of the leader of the resistance movement, is a cultural space that persistently lived through colonization, WW2 bombing and the recent civil war, with massive destruction. In 2023 the street was subject to an erasure project by the government, neglecting problematic Imperialist and colonial histories and magnified gaps in research and archives. How can we re-think this street as a generative and critical archive? How can we decolonize the theoretical and built production of the Italian colonial legacy and redefine the concept of modernism in Libya? How can we generate a “counter” process of heritage making, through documentation, analysis, and design?

Vienna, Austria: Reconnecting with the City. The group focused on analyzing the modern social ideas in the design of the Steinhof site that was considered for curing the mentally ill patients, and providing creative solutions to re-conceptualize and re-use the site as a healing landscape. When the ‘Lower Austrian Provincial Institution for the Care and Cure of the Mentally Ill and for Nervous Disorders at Steinhof’ first opened its doors to psychiatric patients in 1907, the site was celebrated as the world’s largest and most beautiful asylum to date. The Psychiatric Hospital at Steinhof was intended to evoke comparisons with a self-contained rural colony and directly responded to  anti-psychiatric that accused asylums of warehousing patients like prisoners. So did the Steinhof’s design really fostered a utopian idea of an asylum that brought together psychiatry and modern architecture