You’re walking down the street and you come across a building whose architecture seems special and catches your attention. You might call it “designer” without a second thought, and yet, when you investigate a little more, you discover that it is difficult to put a face or name to the person responsible for its design. Instead, you find groups that talk about shared constructions, with signatures that don’t directly target a specific person. These are the works of groups of architects who seek to shift the emphasis from the individual to the project. Here are some examples:
1. Espace Aygo
It is an exploratory living laboratory and a comprehensive domestic project where everything is built collaboratively and by hand. Its distinctive hallmark is completely replaced by strict material limitations, such as building only with objects and components found or recovered after leaving their common space. You can find out more about Espace Aygo in this interview we did with them at Connections by Finsa.
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2. Zuloark
“A distributed practice specialising in architecture, urban planning and culture”. That is how Zuloark describes itself, a collective of architects with offices spread across Madrid, Berlin, A Coruña, Bologna, Amsterdam, Athens and La Palma, which, for more than twenty years, has worked with the philosophy of trying to end the traditional concept of authorship. They met while studying Architecture at the end of the 20th century, during the era known as the architecture of the stars. “The school pressured us to become influential architects, so we thought about creating an entity that had its own power”, they explained in an interview for the publication Collective. Processes: Counterpractices in European Architecture.
Over the years, what began as a project among students who started signing their work collectively (understanding that, in reality, architecture is itself a discipline based on collaboration) has left important marks: competitions won, the deputy direction of the Spanish Architecture Biennial in 2010, projects such as the experimental house Casa Tejida (Colombia) or the online research platform Collective Intelligences, on informal knowledge and autonomous urban processes.
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3. BAST (Bureau Architectures Sans Titre) (France)
This firm, founded in Toulouse in 2013, also wants to leave behind individualism and authorship. They are a horizontal cooperative in which they share all administrative tasks and always work in pairs or groups, making all decisions collectively.
Winners of awards such as the Prix Architecture Occitane 2023 or the Archinovo 2019, among others, their most outstanding projects include the L33 Narrow House offices or M15, the extension of a traditional house in Toulouse. The names, formed from a letter and a number, are not accidental: as a collective, they shun poetic or commercial titles.
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4. Raumlaborberlin (Germany)
This experimental collective works at the intersection of architecture, urban planning, art, and education. Founded a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, they are currently a group of about 20 people (nine of whom are partners) who make decisions together and also avoid the individualism and ego of big names.
Some of their most notable projects include the Common Ground learning laboratory, housed in a former brickworks in Kosovo, and the Allamänna Badet public sauna in the port of Gothenburg (Sweden), winner of the 2015 SAVG Architecture Award.
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