Second issue of the critical journal Dixit in which the words of the architect Yony Santos from the swiss architecture practice TYPICALOFFICE and of Marina Otero Verzier, director of research at Het Nieuwe Instituut (HNI), confront each other around the theme of “A Matter of Data”.
Architecture is still a matter of space, but the understanding of this element is currently evolving by the emergence of new forms of electronic and computer-mediated realities. A Matter of Data explores this phenomenon observing the environments and installations that question our experience of space and analyzing the duality and relationships between physical and numerical interfaces of all kinds.
As the self-renewing discipline that is architecture, Caryatide editions picks up the torch of the critical magazine—which was their very first form. They wish to enrich the debate around architecture by bringing a word that confronts to the news. Architecture is at the convergence of questioning, a discipline nourished by cross-disciplinary approaches. As such, as a signature, Caryatide endeavours to keep a critical point of view, enriched by a social and political look which the architectural discipline depends on, to highlight its complexity and aspirations.
For each issue, three times a year, two contributors are invited to share their thoughts on a new theme.
Yony Santos is an architect based in Geneva and founder of the architectural practice TYPICAL OFFICE: a laboratory of art, space & technology, willing to rise a critical thinking about digital culture & built environments. From 2014 to 2019, Yony Santos taught as teaching assistant at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio and he frequently acts as an independent expert for several universities in Switzerland and abroad. Exposing at La Cité Radieuse de Briey in 2018 and lecturer at the Foundation Braillard architects in Geneva in 2016, his work was exhibited at Art Basel as nominee for the Swiss Art Awards 2018. Winner in 2015 of the international competition Europan (E13), he became member of the swiss national committee in 2019 and he is currently co-directing the next edition of the competition (E16). Alongside his professional activity, he works as journalist since 2016 for the swiss architecture editor espazium.ch in Zurich and regularly writes for magazines such as Cosa Mentale, Architectura Viva, MetisPresses or Puulehti. Working among others for Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner AG (CH) and architect Jean-Christophe Quinton in Paris, Yony Santos has studied architecture at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, the Polytechnic School of La Coruña, the Aalto University of Architecture in Helsinki and achieve the Leonardo Da Vinci European program in Belfast. Since 2017, Yony Santos has been working on an independent research project named dataroom(s): an architectural and urban exploration studying the relation between physical and electronic realities. His aim is to build new forms of interdependent, hyperconnected and multifunctional spaces.
Rotterdam-based architect Marina Otero Verzier is director of research at Het Nieuwe Instituut (HNI)—the Dutch institute for architecture, design, and digital culture and the Netherlands' national archive for architecture and urban planning. Alongside the direction of research projects and curation of several exhibitions at Het Nieuwe Instituut (since 2015), Otero has been the curator at the Shanghai Art Biennial 2021. At the 16th Venice International Architecture Biennale in 2018, Otero curated Work, Body, Leisure for the Dutch national pavilion. As part of the After Belonging Agency, she was Chief Curator of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale. Between 2013-15, while based in New York, Otero was director of Global Network Programming at Studio-X, a global network of research laboratories exploring the future of the built environment, launched by the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University.
Since September 2020, Otero has been head of the Master in Social Design at Design Academy Eindhoven. She had previously taught at the Royal College of Art in London, ETSAM, Barnard College, Columbia GSAPP, HEAD Geneva, and lectured at universities around the world. She has co-edited More-than- Human (2020), I See That I See What You Don't See (2020), Unmanned: Architecture and Security Series (2016-20), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), Work, Body, Leisure (2018), After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces, and Territories of the Ways We Stay in Transit (2016), and Promiscuous Encounters (2014). Otero received her PhD at ETSA Madrid with the thesis Evanescent Institutions, examining the emergence of new paradigms for cultural institutions, and in particular the political implications of temporal and itinerant structures. She has studied architecture at TU Delft and ETSA Madrid, and graduated in 2013 as a Fulbright Scholar from the MS in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture at Columbia University GSAPP.
