MOLOFUNCTIONAL

A model of cultural production and dissemination that wouldn’t surprise anybody is that of producing knowledge in rich developed countries and then exporting it in the form of consultancies or aid to poor underdeveloped countries. This has been the cultural hegemony of the global north over the global south for some time now.
That is why the approach of TYIN tegnestue is so unusual and may hold the clue for a long-awaited necessary shift in the paradigm. Immediately after graduating, the architects decided to move to underdeveloped contexts, not to help but to learn. It seems that in the case of the built environment information and knowledge may flow, and in both directions. First World countries may have developed theoretical and abstract knowledge, but Third World countries have created an important set of empirical and practical knowledge. This knowledge seems to be more capable of producing a common ground between places and communities because of the way they are involved in the process. And community involvement seems to be more and more crucial. Skills and knowledge that were considered second-class or informal may be essential for the new scenarios that the world is dealing with right now: the ability to deal with a scarcity of time and money and dynamic, rapidly changing conditions, and to adapt means to ends—but also ends to the means, which is typical, say, of slums—is not that different from what will be needed to handle the migrant crisis.
TYIN, based in Norway, have consciously appropriated logics and strategies found in the developing world and integrated them into their work. In their own words, their approach is “hands on in a field of abstraction.” The result is precise movements, appropriate scales of intervention, a certain irreducibility of the response. They demonstrate these lessons in a project that had to deal with powerful nature. But attitude is fundamental. For the kind of challenges that we are facing, new inventive, pertinent responses will have to be developed. Who would have thought that the global south was a huge source of strategies for this?