The role of the architect in contemporary society
Järfälla
© photo by järfälla
“Why am I here?”
You may have asked yourself the question, achy, numb and dazzled like a moth in front of fluorescent dwg files. In the night. After 12, 14, 16 hours of work.
Don't worry, we've all been there. And – we know – it’s not easy. And it’s not easy to understand, even vaguely, why we have to suffer all this.
Out of necessity or virtue, architects are the category that – perhaps more than others – has taken the bait of “flexibility”. Must be because of the forma mentis.
The ambiguity of the term indicating our profession doesn’t help either: in the word “architect” árche (from the Greek ἀρχή) and técton (from τέκτων) don’t reduce our field of action, but on the contrary, they require the ability to connect the invisible and the visible. It therefore becomes necessary for an architect not only to know the means of production, the techniques, the tectonics, the climatic and environmental characteristics, the administrative procedures, the urban tools but also the tastes, feelings, passions and drives of man – who must always be guided in its relationship with space and the city.
Our own project, Järfälla, is the result of this disorientation and professional ambiguity. We considered the realities around which the architect's professional activity usually moves and decided to betray the academic line and opt for a more romantic and introspective approach.
Järfälla was an instinctive and emotional answer: in the printed magazine we found the ideal medium through which we could convey our presence, our will and our hopes. We decided to work with paper and thus embrace calm, silence, the need and the possibility of using an “uncomfortable” medium and format in order to carve out some time and space for ourselves, but also to reflect and analyze the reality that surrounds us.
Järfälla is a small booklet, a parenthesis in the chaos, a world made up of folds and insights where texts and images accompany the reader in a kaleidoscopic potpourri of points of view. This kind of magazine is intended to be a tool for personal research: it offers a collective overlook, which is also inevitably made up of sharing experiences, opinions, skills and passions.
We wanted the magazine to be characterized by a collective and deliberately multidisciplinary approach. So in our pages we immediately involved the most diverse personalities and sensitivities. Artists, collagists, muralists, illustrators, photographers, architects and students... they all contributed together to our project. They are all voices – coming indeed from different fields – that often do not dialogue but which, in our opinion, help to outline a portrait as multifaceted and complete as possible on our research topics.
We have always liked to imagine our magazine as an agora, an imaginary square composed of paper, words and colors in which all these voices meet to present themselves to the reader. A place where, despite the differences, everyone could speak the same language, producing a text and an image: the first is conceived as a tool to deepen personal research, while the second should be an element of synthesis and abstraction.
The editorial project was therefore imagined and designed to convey a message: why not establish a dialogue with realities far from planning and the bizarre attempts to recover another crumbled neighborhood? Why not bring art back into our lives? Why not let artists explain the world again? And why not give architects the opportunity to redeem the project of the future?
Our magazine is an object that reflects our attitude: we believe in sharing, in the exchange of knowledge, in interaction and above all we want to encourage discussion and individual research. In accordance with this thought, we see our editorial product as a tool, a preparatory means for the involvement of other realities and projects. Take Järfälla’s second issue, Città, senza pietà, for example: we set up an en plein air exhibition on the streets of Ferrara using the rickety public notice boards as a display for the images collected in our magazine. In order to do so, we had to learn to attach giant posters and create glue, and also get used to dealing with the Municipality and the Urban Center of Ferrara. In the end, we had to coordinate several friends with whom we then set up the exhibition.
Our action therefore always becomes the pretext for involving different skills and then relating them to each other. For this reason, in our magazine, as in our life, we try to talk as little as possible about architecture, an increasingly self-referential world, made up of idolatries and tending to absurdity – to the “fuffa” as Italians say – and purged of almost every form of useful intellectualism.
Our field is perceived also by society and subsequently by politics as less and less useful and it seems to have definitively abandoned any possibility of focusing on the project of our future, of our cities and our houses. Järfälla is a magazine for those who do not believe in the myth of the architect as a demiurge. It’s a magazine for those who do believe in the myth of the intellectual.
Järfälla
Järfälla is a collective reality born in 2016 from the greyness of Ferrara’s fog. Everything starts with a magazine designed to be a collection of ideas and voices from different places and fields of architecture and art. Thanks to social media and to its multidisciplinary editorial project, the magazine born for the fellas of the University of Ferrara, had the opportunity to spread and reach people all over the world. Besides the publication of the magazine, Järfälla aims to contribute to the practice and critics in the architectural panorama through exhibitions and talks.
All the members of Järfälla studied architecture at Università degli Studi di Ferrara. We also took part in international ex- change projects.
Email: collettivojarfalla@gmail.com
Fb: www.facebook.com/collettivojarfalla
Ig: www.instagram.com/collettivo.jarfalla
Workshop:
06 – 08.09.2019
Workshop ATLAS promoted by New Generations and Itinerant Office at MACRO in Roma
Talk:
05.01.2020
Mirabilia @ Casa Cava, Casa Cava, Matera
08.09.2019
ArchiZine Review at Festival New Generations, MACRO, Roma
22.06.2019
Mirabilia @ Spazio Solido, Spazio Solido, Treviso
27.05.2018
CSU in motion, Unfolding Pavilion, isola della Giudecca, Venezia
26.09.2017
New Generations festival, Casa dell’Architettura, Roma
Exhibition:
05.01.2020 – 24.01.2020
Partecipation
Mirabilia @ Casa Cava, Casa Cava, Matera
22.06.2019
Exhibition design with ETB
Mirabilia @ Spazio Solido, Spazio Solido, Treviso
22.06.2019 – 06.07.2019
Partecipation
Mirabilia @ Spazio Solido, Spazio Solido, Treviso
01 – 15.12.2018
Partecipation
Mirabilia, Torrione Angioino, Bitonto (BA)
06 – 20.07.2018
Partecipation
Feel The City, Scuderie Aldobrandini, Frascati
19.04.2018
Exhibition design
Città, senza pietà, Ferrara
16.04.2018
Partecipation
Atmospheres 2018, Politecnico di Milano, Milano
05.04.2017
Exhibition design
Ceci n’est pas une utopie al Grattacielo di Ferrara
Publications:
20.11.2019
Minhocão meu amor, Affezioni - SCARTO 03
19.04.2018
Città, senza pietà, Järfälla, n.02
05.04.2017
UTOPIA, Järfälla, n.01
13.02.2017
105 Valentines for Architects (And Architecture Lovers), www.archdaily.com