Akil and Seth Scafe-Smith, who teach the new unit ‘Who’s On What’, discuss their teaching plans, community engagement and social institutions

Matthew Lloyd Roberts: Akil and Seth, thank you so much for taking the time to tell us a little bit about yourselves, what were you doing before you joined the AA?

Akil Scafe-Smith: We are part of RESOLVE, an interdisciplinary design collective. We explore architecture, art, engineering and technology as means to address social issues. A lot of that work is centred around a design philosophy of using the site as a resource. That means re-appraising and revaluing local material resources, but also local human resources. We like to bring local communities into the design process, especially marginalised groups, to work with their tacit knowledge and frame tacit knowledges of local area as inherently valuable. A lot of that manifests spatially, but also strategically, in research and our larger projects. We’ve been positioning these ways of working – creating temporary spaces, workshopping – as steps in a longer research process that explore community resilience, ask how we address and understand institutional space, and interrogate how we use architecture and design to change the geometry, nature, and topology of institutions in order to serve everyday people. We started 4 and a half years ago and our first project, called Rebel Space, was a temporary pavilion in St Matthew’s Church garden in Brixton. Brixton is our home turf and a lot of our early projects were in our local area, so we were negotiating between being locals and being practitioners. As we’ve grown, we’ve had the opportunity to work all over the country and in Europe as well, we’ve transplanted that dialogue between locals and practitioners into different contexts, whether we’re working in Berlin, Sheffield or London.

Matthew: So your unit is called ‘Who’s On What’, what do you want students to get out of it?

Seth Scafe-Smith: When we were originally thinking about the brief, we started by thinking in forensic detail about what we value in our practice, what has contributed to our successful projects and ideas that we want to explore a little more. This focus on local knowledge, involving local people in the design process is really important for us, and we wanted to frame it in a way that highlighted everything we’ve explored over the last four and a half years. Encouraging students to work locally, collaboratively and collectively, to really understand the local community before they make an intervention. The work starts with mapping, as an active process rather than a passive one, a way of understanding the local area. We’re pushing them to focus on what you can learn from the process rather than a focus on producing an end product, the map.

We’re interested in comparing institutional and infrastructural space. Not just thinking about how institutions operate, but how they might operate differently in order to create a more local impact, how they can institutional practice become more infrastructural? We wanted to bring those two processes together to transition into a 1:1 intervention. Now that you’ve done this research, thought really deeply about those communities, how can you make an intervention?

Akil: We started with self-reflection, we started with looking at ourselves. Rather than thinking about what aesthetic we wanted the students to pursue, we wanted to ask what kind of practitioner, human being, citizen, do we want this unit to produce? That was really important to us, moving away from a practice that is predicated on technique, but that involves ethics and craftsmanship as well as aesthetics. The unit title, ‘Who’s on What’, is something that people in London say a lot, it’s a piece of London slang, it doesn’t really mean anything, it’s barely even a question, but it really captures what we want to do in the unit.

Seth: It is always our question when we embark on projects, we tried to convey that in our unit video, which might have bamboozled some people. The video was a mashup of all of our instagram videos, but it shows that when we enter a site: whether its a gallery, community, and area, the first question is, what are people on here? What do people value here? What is important to the community that lives here? How can we be a part of that process, to connect to it, rather than saying “we have a good idea, we want to find a location that suits that idea.” That process of understanding the dynamics, meeting people, that is the most important processes that we go through, maybe in a really meta sense we’re trying to encourage people to spend a bit more time on that initial engagement, spending time to understand the site, whatever it might be.

Matthew: So the idea of the institution is clearly hugely important to the work of the unit, could you explain a little more about what you mean by ‘institution’?

Akil: The question of institutions for us is a less haughty one that it might seem. In our practice, we might look at the role of the archive in emotional and dynamic responses to the city, or the importance of urban markets as spatial and emotional centres for different ethnicities and communities, quite specific things with a locality, specific histories, they can be packaged up into very distinct projects. When we’re talking about institutions, we’re hesitant to define it too strictly, we definitely don’t just mean the manifestation of the museum or the organisation within four walls. Really we’re talking about what Michel Foucault described as the total and the social institutions: the family, relationships, traffic lights, sitting down, as well as art galleries, education, local authorities. The similarities and differences between these things will help us to define the central practices that unite institutional behaviour. What are those practices that make groups of people, human and non-human actors inherently more conservative, concentrating and consecrating resource rather than sharing those resources and making society more equitable. The questions are really large, but sharpening the questions, developing transformative ways of acting in local situations, bereft of large institutional interventions, is a really important part of how we work.

Matthew: And how do you connect those ideas to the broader politics of the built environment?

Seth: This is the beginning of our research process, we’re trying to think about our own work, and the wider systems that we’re a part of. Over the summer, we were starting to think in the long term about the local impact of our projects, but also about restructuring the relationship between organisations like RESOLVE, practitioners like ourselves and the people that lived in those communities. We were thinking about how resources are distributed in our area, how local resources are valued, how government functions in those communities. I don’t really like to use the word critique, because Akil and I both have experience in the public sector, in planning and local authority work. I don’t want to be one of those people that just bashes on councils, because I think it’s very easy. Our approach is never to say “you could do all of these things better”, but rather to draw attention towards new approaches that address these problems in different ways, using community engagement across multiple projects, asking how they feel about planning and policy. It’s a new model for working, a new way of approaching these questions.

Matthew: Lastly, has the process of teaching online been different to what you expected?

Akil: Covid has posed challenges, but there have also been amazing opportunities. We’ve been able to get people in for crits that we might not have been able to get in otherwise, you can bring people into the family of the unit seamlessly. Seeing students growing into these complex ideas and new ways of working, even in the first few weeks, has been so fantastic. So far we’re really loving it!

Seth: We were originally planning to get the students down to our studio in Custom House next year, to do a series of 1:1 interventions and projects with the local community there. We can’t reveal it yet, but we’ve got a plan B, and it’s a big plan. If the in-person project doesn’t work out, I’m almost more excited for plan B.