If we live in a city, we are well aware of how fast a neighbourhood can change with the addition of just one development. We may even have a notion of what gentrification means, but not many of us are as well acquainted with the level of sensitivity it takes to carefully weave a new building into a city as is Jayden Ali. A British architect, artist, teacher and curator, Jayden has seen success at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, where he co-curated the British Pavilion. His work – Thunder and Simsek (2023) – featured abstracted steel pans that represent Trinidadian steel-pan playing and Cypriot cooking, symbolising rituals that belong to two colonially occupied cultures. With a decolonial approach at its core, he examines and celebrates the diversity of Britain.
His studio, JA Projects, beautifully marries art practices, architecture and urban strategy while practising architecture in one of the most dynamic cities in the world – London. JA Projects takes on work that requires a sensitivity of social tectonics within urban planning and architecture. Its approach to the built environment is an ongoing experiment in applied research and the playful design of complex, culturally laden spaces such as Old Oak West.
Alongside his endeavours as an archi-tect, he is the Mayoral’s Design Advocate for the Mayor of London, aspiring to amplify the voices of fellow Londoners. In this interview, we delve into his approach to community-oriented city-making and curatorial work.
Thunder and Simsek exterior installation, 2023. Courtesy of JA Projects and the British Council
Anna-Marie Mašková: You are a Londoner through and through. As a Bethnal Green native and a third-generation born Brit of heritage that spans two continents – Trinidadian heritage on one side, Turkish on the other – how does your positioning influence the projects you choose to work on?
Jayden Ali: There may be a couple of questions there, concerning how we select projects and what projects we choose. I think positionality is important because my practice is somewhere between art practice and applied research in terms of architecture and design.
At the core of that is the idea of inquiry. I am inherently interested in exploring what my relationship with the world is and how that translates to my practice. Through this lens I am trying to work out the current state of the world – what it’s like, what we make, how people engage, what they produce, what we produce, how we communicate. When we take on projects, we are looking for the space to contribute to a conversation. If the projects are a bit too tight and they seem like the answers are already there and there is no social commentary, then it would be difficult for us to take it on since all our projects have a strong social commentary.
In our Venice Biennale Project you can see that the artworks make an entrance and an exit. I suppose if you think of that there’s a positionality that exists in these two ginormous installations – Thunder and Simsek – which are very much about a commentary on island culture. The positionality informs how we designed the rest of the show for the other artists. It was important for us that the artists could have that conversation with the geographies of their ancestors. We designed large plinths that were each able to be filled with a certain substance in relationship to the sculptural work that sat on top of them. That allowed a commentary about geography and land and where the artists are from – it situates the work in context.
Within our research there are multiple threads we are following. I think you get that across the board in the practice and in so many different fields where we are working, whether we are talking about issues around race or representation, or women’s and girl’s safety, or how families can exist and live in the city.
…Our lives are inherently contradictory – we live in the metropolis, and we live in the age of the Anthropocene…
Anna-Marie: Speaking of the Venice Biennale, the British Pavilion was a real success – congratulations! Earlier you spoke of inhabiting spaces where we talk about race and representation. Do you find that there is a need for vulnerability in your practice of architecture and curating in these spaces of friction?
Jayden: I love the question so much! I suppose on the one hand you can describe them as spaces of friction, but on the other as spaces of tension and contradiction. Our lives are inherently contradictory – we live in the metropolis, and we live in the age of the Anthropocene. We want to be and have an ambition to be climate and socially conscious. We would always put ourselves on the side of people and communities, yet we deal with quite large-scale developments. We produce good artistic output which, I think, has an inherent benefit to the world, but you know that the Venice Biennnale is part of the old imperial infrastructure of grand fairs for which one has to ship things across the world.
I’m interested in an honest representation of where we live, and that means we exist at the juncture of these conflicting tensions; so we have to lean into that space. I think that produces interest and work. To lean into that tension and that contradiction does breed an inherent fragility because it is unstable, right? You can’t turn around and say something like ‘I’m this’ or ‘I’m that.’ I think instead you have to say ‘I try to be this and we end up being that.’ That’s honest, and that is the thing that connects with people.
In this sense, fragility is a really important part of the work. From that place of conflict, that tension, that moment of fragility does come strength. I think the combination of strength and fragility is where we’re trying to get to in our projects. That’s when our projects are the best.
If you think about the two sculptures in Venice, their inherent coming together exudes strength, but they have this kind of fragility because the space they own is a fragile construct. When people play the pans it’s an immaterial thing, and dissipates into the ether. The way in which they’re kind of held together is by these relatively tender structural limbs that attach themselves to the pavilion infrastructure, and the pavilion infrastructure is big and large. And then you have these really delicate clasps that hold them together. At the same time they have a scale, which also speaks to a kind of strength, because they own the portico as a space, they own that moment of entrance and they have a dialogue with the sign that says ‘Gran Bretagna.’ There is a whole host of other kinds of examples as to where that exists as well. I think it’s a big part of the work. I’m not sure we always achieve it, but that’s the ambition.
Anna-Marie: You have referenced James Baldwin’s work, which is an examination of who we are as a species and race. Does literature often inspire your work?
Jayden: Yeah, it really does, maybe in two ways. Knowing what to reference or finding good references is a critical part that comes from an academic perspective. A big part of my process is writing. In some ways it depends on what the project is, but there’s always a huge written component to any piece of work we put out there. We are not the type of practice that just puts pretty pictures on the page, sends them in and hopes for the best. We really want to articulate a position, a response, a context, because it goes back to what I was saying before. I don’t think we would be happy contributing to a project where we don’t have a position within it or we can’t add to the conversation. That conversation also needs to be articulated in written form.
I used to write a column for Elephant Magazine called ‘Notes on the City.’ It effectively looked at how a reading of artistic practice could be translated into architectural practice. That’s critical in terms of forming our ideas around an art-based practice and the things that we make. Obviously, reading other people’s constructs is helpful when it comes to making your own work. There’s a dialogue between people who make, people who write, the ideas that are embodied in their work and how we put the work together.
To give an example, before we made the work for Venice I wrote a short essay about it. Now we’re making some new sculptural work, and we’ve only just stepped into a formal exploration. I really wanted to get the bare bones, a sketch essay out so that we know the north star of what we’re heading towards before we dive into formal exploration. It’s not our process to just make … Our process is to write and have direction before we produce. That may come from an academic background as well – from teaching. I see those pieces of text as briefs for ourselves that are both concise and really open. They allow for all these different permutations to co-exist. We’re not trying to close things down formally. We’re trying to talk about ideas in the spirit of an output.
JA Projects’ new identity designed by Studio Hugo Blanzat. Courtesy of JA Projects and Studio Hugo Blanzat
Anna-Marie: In my deep dive into your work I noticed a recurring theme – the notion of a cultural home and a physical home. The first may relate to one’s own roots and future legacy, and the other relates to one’s physical and sensual form. In your view, how does the sensual body inform the cultural body?
Jayden: I think that’s a really lovely observation because I’ve never thought about it like that. Much of our practice has to do with the relationship between something inherently light and fleeting, the immaterial, and something incredibly material and present. I never made the connection to those definitions neatly summing up the idea of a physical home and a cultural home. The cultural home is passed down to you through stories or rituals, forms of lightweight transmission, conversely the home is also a physical place, where you are.
In terms of how the sensual informs the cultural – it’s a quest for knowing where you are, which I don’t think can be detached from the sentiment of trying to work out the world around us. That’s an immediate response. It feels like once you delve into that mission you realise that there’s a missing part of the story. That the picture is not full. In that sense, you understand your centrality and that moment of your being is incomplete without this other metaphysical home that exists elsewhere. And so you’re setting up a dialogue to ask where the gaps are in that feeling and how you import references from elsewhere in order to complete the setting and where you’re at. How they are translated and are distorted is dictated by how you bring them into the present.
My understanding of that heritage is not the same as it was communicated to me or sought to be communicated to me by my mother, or communicated to me by my grandfather, because it is entangled with the present. That’s the tension that we have to grapple with, which is quite hard to articulate. I think it’s about honesty at that moment.
…The question of gender is one of the big pertinent questions of our time…
Anna-Marie: That actually brings me to my next question. The body and culture appear in your curating work time and time again. In your Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition Fashioning Masculinities (2022) you sensitively explored the complexity and changing nature of masculinities, and you did that by grounding it in references across time. What was your personal takeaway from doing a deep dive into the representation of masculinity?
Jayden: I love that show so much because we got to explore a lot, due to its structure. My takeaway is essentially that we have a lot to do. The show nudges the dial, and I think everyone is trying to nudge the dial in their own way. However, the representation of masculinity doesn’t quite meet the lived reality.
I admire Claire Wilcox’s curation of that show and the ambition to challenge the institution, but you still end up in an introduction to a show that is predominantly male, white and Eurocentric. Even the curation of the works in that first section was all monochrome white, and then were juxtaposed with the kind of monochrome black of the suits of modernity in the final section. Once you end up in that space of bias, it is very easy to fall into the tropes of masculinity. It is very easy to say, OK, I’m going to have these two huge oversized white sculptures that reference classical antiquity. It becomes obvious that the response to that question is for us to have oversized, abstracted black bodies as this kind of counterpoint to these white Eurocentric figures.
The lens is still too limited. We got lots of questions and lots of responses from people saying ‘I was really inspired and really empowered,’ and then we got a lot of messages saying ‘Oh, it was great that you had this type of person represented, but what about this type of person and what about that sort of person.’ Until we are in a world where people see themselves represented and honoured across the board to the extent that they do not consistently have to search for an exact mirror, we will have to keep highlighting those who have been overlooked historically.
I suppose that is my takeaway, that the work is not done to reframe what that sense of masculinity is today. The question of gender is one of the big pertinent questions of our time. People are exploring the boundary of what that means through so many different mediums, ones that aren’t necessarily artistic. Oftentimes, it is just their lived reality of being able to fluctuate between what have historically been binaries. It is incredible to watch.
Anna-Marie: It’s a huge privilege to get to witness it from its beginning. It’s so beautiful.
Jayden: When you see it like that, you cannot help but say ‘Wow, we really are on the cusp.’ And you can see that in different people through the ages. It is funny that you mentioned James Baldwin before. What he was doing was just existing in that space of double consciousness. I can be this and I can be that. I can be black and I can be European. And when it comes to gender … There’s a lot of affinity there. There are so many traits that you recognise from racial discourse that can be applied to the ambition to challenge gender norms and biases. These are the kinds of spaces where we should be investing time, energy and thought, because they’re the spaces that are going to nudge society forward.
Anna-Marie: Speaking of trendsetting, what are the values behind choosing your collaborators to join you in JA Projects? Who are the people behind the curtain, so to speak?
Jayden: I was thinking about that this morning. I look for complementary individuals, with an individual inquiry going on somewhere else. Someone I think can make a valuable contribution to the conversations that we have over lunch. I think that is far better than someone being super technically proficient in a more conventional sense. I learned something in the recruitment process – that it’s OK for there to be a deficit in technical skills as long as there’s the will to probe. We don’t profess to know everything. We are always learning on the job. We enjoy that as a pursuit, as a kind of everyday occurrence.
Anna-Marie: You started working with the Mayor of London in the role of a Mayoral Design Advocate. Do you see your role as a socially informed activist architect? Could you tell me about the role of cultural creators who are of value to politicians?
Jayden: I don’t see myself as of value to Sadiq Khan. That is not the goal. My issue with it is that people on the margins often get labelled as activists. If you go back to this idea of tension and these kinds of contradictions, I think there is a willingness from everybody in the practice to simultaneously exist at the margins and at the centre. I don’t think it’s very useful to be on the periphery, and so to be at the centre is why I applied for the Mayor’s Design Advocate role. Lucy Musgrave said that the clue to the role is in the title – Mayor’s Design Advocate. I am not advocating for the mayor, but I am advocating with the backing of the mayor. What I choose to advocate for is down to me. The concept of advocacy is similar to activism. It encompasses this ambition to be at the centre of things so we can be nuanced about how to advocate for ideas, ways of practice or communities. This is about being vocal and having the strength of your convictions. It is also about being empowered by the title, the system and policy. Of course, it means feeling empowered by the community. If you think about it, it’s a role recruited by someone who is democratically elected by the people. So if you trace the power back, it goes back to the populace. In terms of its usefulness to politicians, I think it should give them confidence. These people, the Mayor’s Advocates, are the best and the brightest brains in the room. These are the people who are plugged in and have a perspective on something.
You do not have to listen to the worlds of commerce constantly, which is inherently the driver of how the city develops. The power base behind commerce is old, entrenched power. The Mayor’s Design Advocate role starts to form a different power base – therefore it can seek to challenge the status quo. Advocacy is democratic. I think to be vocal and to advocate is to put ideas into the world. You don’t want to put them into a room of silence. They need to come back at you. There’s a rigour, a rhetoric and a criticality to understand these are ideas and they’ve gone through the wash.
Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear examines how menswear has been fashioned and refashioned over the centuries. Inspecting how designers, artists and clients construct and perform masculinity, the exhibition emphasises the shifting social contexts that have both defined – and been defined by – masculine attire over the centuries. Courtesy of JA Projects. Photo: Thomas Adank
Anna-Marie: I wanted to ask you about the master planning projects that you have done because I admire your perspective on the way you see a community as a non-homogeneous thing. You do not approach it as a participation specialist would. There is a sort of weaving to the way you design. What are the joys and sorrows of master planning, especially projects that are as culturally laden as the Thamesmead Waterfront?
Jayden: Yeah, we are doing lots of this kind of urban strategy. We have a lot of big master planning work in the practice. We’re working on this project in Old Oak West in West London, where the high-speed rail will come into London. We are working in Uxbridge on a town centre project as well. We have also done some work for Redchurch Street, which is in Shoreditch.
At its core, I’m really interested in the life of cities. Within that, we’re interested in everything from the very small scale, like the production of objects and cultural output, through to cultural framing. We are interested in how things are framed through a cultural lens at a large scale, and essentially in cultural infrastructure. I use that term loosely when we talk about culture. By cultural infrastructure, I mean how cities operate, how people engage and the financial systems that keep those spaces together. At a master planning level we get actively engaged with that stuff.
I don’t think we’re seen as engagement specialists – which, I think, has paid dividends. We don’t get approached to do that stuff much anymore. But what we do get approached to do is to add a social lens to these larger developments. We often ask questions like: How do we stitch big bits of development into neighbouring communities? How do we support industrial back-of-house spaces to have front-house retail spaces? What is the constellation of city infrastructure, community-based infrastructure and social infrastructure that is necessary for this place to actually thrive? We live in a city where we have had different incremental generations of good new master plans. The Olympics was one generation. Kings Cross was another generation. How do we move the dial forward?
All plans have their faults. Development is here – we have to live with it. We want to be part of the solution. Master planning is often very top-down. In this respect we are trying to invert it. We have a kind of a bottom-up perspective, whether that’s about people being involved in the planning, or making sure the plans really consider peoples’ needs and desires, or we develop a strategy that allows people to be involved long term. It takes a really long time, and you don’t get the immediate satisfaction of being able to watch what you plan to be immediately delivered – as you would a building.
It’s such a technically heavy pursuit that those who often lead these master planning projects are of a bigger scale of practice and are of an older generation. But they are always willing to learn. I think what I found is that people want to enjoy their jobs. People want to be at the forefront of innovation. However, all too often you do end up in a space where you are confronted by quite entrenched historical thinking that needs to be challenged and rethought. That’s the gap we want to fill.