Arna Mačkić
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Arna Mačkić is an architect and co-founder of Studio L A and the former head of Architectural Design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. Mačkić’s projects often relate to inclusion and exclusion mechanisms, refugees, collective identity and public domain. She aims to use architecture as a connecting voice, healing the wounds of the past without brushing away its scars which is the subject of her book, Mortal Cities & Forgotten Monument (Park Books, 2016). Mačkić is also part of Bosnian Girl, a collective which campaigns for an inclusive historiography and commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide in the Netherlands [Source: www.framerframed.nl]. For Constant 101 Arna will be part of the program “Demolition of architecture” at De Balie.
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Arna on Constant
The connection with Constant is that he also always looked for a way to go beyond the norm of building/urban planning (he saw urban planning as something that was approached practically, but where there was no vision about ‘co-habitating’). He had an autonomous way of thinking, which was actually about ways of co-habitating. And in which he did not feel compelled to be a tool for interest groups. In this day and age, the architect is increasingly a tool of different interest groups, and I think we as architects need to reflect again on our profession and how it can again be about social and sustainable values.
Art and Habitat
Arna references a passage from Constants text Kunst en leefruimte (Art and Habitat), 1955:
“The CIAM has defined habitat as an environment suitable for satisfying the material and emotional needs of man and stimulating his spiritual development. This means that art has to make a direct contribution from the first plans that are made during the construction of the habitat. The function has been arbitrarily regarded for far too long as the satisfaction of material needs only. Apparently the time has come to recognize that the psychic and emotional functions are at least as important as the material functions and that they are inextricably linked. Only in this way can habitat become a perfect unity of all aspects of life, continuing in the organizations of collective life. All plastic resources can develop and will be used to the full.”
