Informal collaboration

Informal collaboration

Hans Ibelings
Back in the 1950s, the American anthropologist H.G. Barnett wrote in Innovation: the Basis of Cultural Change: 'The collapse of controls during periods of social and political upheaval opens the way to innovation. The confusion attending conquest, civil strife, and economic booms and depressions offers auspicious circumstances for the emergence of new ideas.'

A fairly recent illustration of Barnett's contention that confusion provides fertile ground for innovation can be found in Central Europe after the fall of communism twenty years ago. The emergence then of interesting new architecture was due not only to the state of upheaval, but also to economic progress. Whether a similar innovative impulse will flow from what Europe and its architecture are currently experiencing – the cumulative effect of credit, economic and euro crises – remains to be seen. If, because of the crises, there is scarcely enough money to realize anything at all, how great is the likelihood of innovative building projects getting off the ground?

But just because innovations cannot be immediately put into practice, doesn't mean we can't keep on developing new ideas that will form the basis for a post-crisis architecture. And for such ideas this period of crisis, even though it is not of our choice, is an appropriate moment.

Elsewhere in his book, Barnett wrote that innovation thrives on collaboration. As well as the value of formal collaboration – two know more than one – he also spelt out the importance of informal collaboration: 'The individuals who participate in it often do not know each other; they have never met and there is no direct communication between them. Yet they know of the work of each other; or they are familiar with what is common knowledge in the field; or their thinking is directed and circumscribed by the same conditions, such as the demands of a given problem. Informal collaboration is the explanation for numerous instances of independent and often simultaneous inventions.' A magazine like A10 may perhaps be able to play a role here by promoting informal collaboration in architecture, including in times of economic adversity.

That a book published more than 50 years ago should have prompted these cogitations on innovation and architecture is a timely reminder that the rediscovery of something old can be just as valuable as the discovery of something new.