The timber treads trembles and tremors with each receding tiptoe towards the top floor. Creaking callously, it calls out in caution of congregating colluders.

Door one.

Figures flitter uncloaked under flooding fluorescence as a lighthouse would when flirting fleets.

Door two.

Hummmmmmmm(ing) murmuring mechanical humdrum heaves in half-light while hampered harassers hurry without hindrance.

Sudden sky.

Endless velvet dark blankets the horizon, tucking the city to sleep. The motorway slumbers quietly below. A chill is set by way of wind lapping over the railings, but I welcome it home.

What the concrete had shackled, shining through in slivers through the skylight, has been set free.

No more barriers.

Icarus.

Shanyu Modos Poster1 Edited — Early exploration led to the creation of these posters derived from Tschumi’s Advertisements for Architecture. It investigates the notions of events having permeated a space. Originally, they were prompted by the unspoken discussion around the self-violence at the Owen Glenn Building, questioning the guidelines and regulations around mitigating risk on the campus.

Shanyu Modos Rooftop — School of Architecture Rooftop. Author's Image

Fall, Failure, Fellowship critiques the current state of architectural education and the wider neoliberal system at the University of Auckland through advocating for the emancipation of student learning and practice. It questions the blanket approach that has reduced creative learning spaces and regulated existing ones, and the university’s obsession with economic growth that has produced stagnant and uninspired learning environments. The thesis is primarily prompted by the unspoken discussion around health and safety and the unspoken discussion around self-violence on university grounds. The thesis argues not only has the university failed to address the educational framework, but also the built pedagogy.

Shanyu Modos Toolkit — Directly referencing student events from history, these images translate student protest into a toolkit for assembling a student-made university. It encompasses not only explicit events of protest but also student-led events such as repainting the old timber studios, Maurice Smith’s Experimental Building, and the 1971 Student Architecture Congress in Warkworth. The methodology is established by translating gestures of protest such as a rooftop occupation, posters, and statues - into abstract images that represent the then-actions and motivations of the student demonstrators. These abstractions are then modelled into a speculative space that has student protest embedded into its form.

Radical short-lived pedagogies and protests are researched as methodologies for proposing a re-activated and re-invigorated conscientization (Freire, 1970) in emancipated learning to grant students agency and creative autonomy. Further, personal practice of CRIT SPACE, an online video channel for disseminating architectural information for and by students, and Michel de Certeau’s poaching theory are utilised for resisting the neoliberal institution.

Shanyu Modos Gif — This is a speculative design of a future where the students have carved and manipulated its spaces for their own. Over time the students erode it from within the walls, taking piece by piece beton brut by bites. If the university is a machine, then the spaces of the students will reflect that.

Shanyu Modos 2 — The once familiar brutalist structure is now more metabolist, and reflects the capacity for change as opposed to the once stagnant brutalism.

Shanyu Modos 3 — The School of Architecture is a shell of its former self, as left by the university, and so the students must infiltrate it with affairs and pleasures for the pedagogical.

Shanyu Modos 5 — The rooftops no longer excludes students but spills over as they are reformed for student cafes, publication and broadcasting - furthering the production for student work and camaraderie.

However, from reflection, I believe I have only proposed a more ignorant School of Architecture. Although the metabolist structure suggests the potential for change, when the speculative design only reinvents the built space - it does no more than provide a new addition for the neoliberal framework to absorb. The design is dead on arrival, and as grandiose the narrative for students to erode the spaces themselves over time, it will likely sit as a radical proposal forgotten in the annals of history. The speculation is merely an inked frustration pleading for change.

➤ There is no building consent for protest, there are only actions. I realised this as I returned to the student protests once more. The occupation of space is bold, the banners and barricades ad hoc, the chants are improved. The university of ideas is not in the built space, but in the confrontation. The energy in a protest is electric, dynamic and transient - and the metabolist proposition is not. In translating the form of protest, the nature of protest must change.

Shanyu Modos Network — Network (1976), dir. Sidney Lumet

CRIT SPACE is a personal practice created with a fellow student over the summer break of 2020. The motivation is to spread dialogue around architecture, and provide a platform of sharing student work and discussion.

CRIT SPACE is fundamental to the thesis position for cultivating an emancipated pedagogy that may curtail the neoliberal institution. The university only understands the marketplace, and so that is where the battle lies. Resisting the university’s intent to make architects by selling degrees, where the neoliberal agenda comes into play, CRIT SPACE and the thesis instead argues that it is not only the certification of architects that make architects, but the individual’s actions towards the process of practice and learning.

➤ It is not the space of dissent

➤ but the practice of dissent.

As part of the investigator role, I organised an event based around failure. This event took place on the digital communication platform of Discord.

In order to nurture the emancipation process, the OUR SPACE event was to tackle the perceptions around failure. The event consisted of a failure board for people to post and confront their worst works, and present it as a fact of experience. Proceeding from the failure board followed an open discussion where participants were asked directed questions centered around the concepts and systems of failure that came from not only internal judgment but also external factors.

The thesis position is one of reparative growth from within the system as means of breakthrough. It seeks not to replace the system, but to offer insight towards other modalities of learning and practice. CRIT SPACE is a product of the deemed valuable skills learned from the institution and re-appropriated for personal endeavours, and thus generates an artefact of creative exploration independent of the university machine.

The thesis utilises a speculative design approach, participatory live projects and the video medium in addressing the School of Architecture building as a study of wider university issues. The speculative re-appropriation of the School of Architecture sits in tension with the existing regulation of the university while the participatory live projects prove its untapped potential. The video medium provides a historical retrospective for design exploration and notation of live projects. In proposing a student-centric design and the medium of video documentation, the thesis allows an intangible, emancipated learning proposal that the institution cannot contain.

From initially utilising a speculative critique of the School of Architecture building in addressing the neoliberal institution, the thesis moved forward and instead argues for a metaphorical room for protest rather than a built environment. It questions the implications of a built pedagogy that is tied to the institutional framework and subverts it against the university by demanding new methods of establishing architectural practice aside from issuing degrees. It establishes an unorthodox bottom up effort that creates venues for change as an intangible commodity that the institution cannot regulate. CRIT SPACE initiates a new mode of education brought about through dialogue and the digital medium, and emancipates the students from the neoliberal machine.