We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Basil Schaban-Maurer. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Basil below.
Basil, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you tell us about an important lesson you learned in school and why that lesson is important to you?
My early training in Architecture began at The University of Texas at Arlington’s school of Architecture and environmental design, now known as CAPPA, where I was influenced by the humanist work of my mentor, the late professor Andrej Pinno. His design philosophy was distinguished by its emphasis on the users of Architecture and how they engaged their buildings, in contrast to elitist stylistic trends, dictated by the narcissism of rich clients and Starchitects, which were taught in other studios. I was also exposed to the lyrical expressionism of International Style Finnish architects like, Aalto and his student, Pietela, whose designs were both inspired by nature, and responsive to the local environments, out of which their buildings were formed. In those early years,
Basil, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
When I founded ARK Tectonics, I chose to reconcile the dichotomy between Practice and Academia through my own user-engaged environmental form-making approach. Early lessons learned during my work in Texas, with ENF, when I changed the direction of the Foundation’s research efforts to focus on urban and public policy initiatives, along with subsequent collaborations with Ark Tectonics’ academic and institutional partners, led to join the Citizen-Centered Design movement.
A little background on our firm: We are a citizen-centered architecture practice offering expert consulting services to communities, architecture, urban design and planning firms, municipalities, non-profits, NGO’s and academic institutions. We operate at the intercept of building design, community development and policy, by combining environmental form-making with building user engagement within the Mindful Policy Engagement field.
For our Consulting Services, we provide the following:
Environmental form-making for a project’s Schematic Design and Design Development phases only
Client relations and communication
Public outreach and engagement strategies
For our Specialty Service, we provide the following:
Planning policy, Land-use, physical, spatial and participatory planning
Land-use planning field research and community outreach
Community planning and development
Impact study reporting
Optimization of public Transport infrastructure
Sustainable city-building
Urban regeneration
ARK Tectonics harnesses a fully participatory engagement process utilizing shared, context-specific, local place knowledge of citizen practitioners through the exchange of life-experience self-narratives between ordinary citizens and design professionals to shape and inform urban policy, environmental architecture, sustainable urban planning, and community-based participatory urban design projects, combined with citizen engagement expertise. Established a professional niche and expertise in cutting-edge environmental form-making designs within the fields of architecture, urban design and planning, in contrast to the proliferation of engineering-based technical solutions for environmental, green and sustainable market needs.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
I earned a Bachelor and a Masters in Architecture, a Master of city and regional planning from CAPPA at UTA, while graduate studies in Denmark earned me another Master of Science in Architecture. I gained some insights during my internship in Denmark and upon my return to Texas, working with local Dallas firms HOK, CSI and Fugro Environmental. Later, while teaching urban design courses at Concordia University and citizen engagement workshops at McGill University, I became aware of the widening schism between how architecture is practiced, by registered architects, who were in actuality, merely building merchants, and how architecture and planning were taught, within the halls of Academia. In my Praxis at ARK Tectonics, I chose to reconcile this dichotomy through my own user-engaged environmental form-making approach. Early lessons learned during my work in Texas, with ENF, when I changed the direction of the Foundation’s research efforts to focus on urban and public policy initiatives, along with subsequent collaborations with Ark Tectonics’ academic and institutional partners, led us to join the Citizen-Centered Design movement. There were many obstacles to overcome, some of which were to be expected, for any growing firm, like logistics and networking presence. In response, we changed our organizational model from a centralized physical presence to a decentralized virtual network of experts, spanning several cities in both Canada and the US, and we are expecting more to follow in European cities, next year. Other challenges had to do with changing conventional mindsets, both of municipal government bodies, in matters of protocol and policy, and educating community members of their right to equal access to resources. At the same time, we pushed hard to legitimize agenda-less ordinary citizens as local place knowledge experts, with planning commissions and their elected representatives. Our stance on making architectural design an open source, available to all, regardless of income, was another challenge, which made us push for the inclusion of architects, like planners already were, as stakeholders in the urban and public policy debate.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
The biggest lesson I had to unlearn is that theoretical and market-driven prescriptions put forth by media, public and academic institutions, for public consumption, had little to no basis in reality. These were generalized, statistically backed and totally lacking in three important areas; context, meaning and Praxis, rendering them ineffective and misleading, at best, and wasteful of effort and resources. I realized then that I had to investigate on my own what actually works and what doesn’t, and then develop some guidelines to help others do the same.To that end, I journeyed north to Montreal, Canada to pursue doctoral studies at the School of Architecture at McGill University. My doctoral research at McGill provided a rigorously researched and historical basis for the inclusion of agenda-less ordinary citizens, as place knowledge experts, in matters of policy The impetus for this focus evolved from the daily labors of design in my architecture practice and the countless and impassioned conversations with clients and ordinary citizens, where experiential knowledge and design insights were shared from a trough of meaningful life experiences. After earning a PhD in architecture, urban design and planning policy, from McGill University, and through my research findings and doctoral dissertation, I laid down the principles of a new field of inquiry, within political science; the field of Mindful Policy Engagement. I published a book in 2013, titled, Rise of the Citizen Practitioner, and published a multitude of research papers in peer-reviewed journals, outlining the issues and challenges facing citizen engagement, in North America, and what we can all do to strengthen our deteriorating democracy. Interestingly, where it concerns my early pioneering work in Open Source Architecture, Wikipedia cited me, a few years ago, in an article on the subject.The work of Ark Tectonics and our institutional partner, the Urban Science Institute, and our affiliates, the Open Architecture Collaborative, along with other public-interest design organizations, has allowed us to reach, despite the current regressive political climate, many disadvantaged communities in North America.
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