In spring 2018, I visited The Open Workshop’s exhibition ‘New Investigations in Collective Form’ at the Yuerba Buena Centre for the Arts in San Francisco, CA. I read the book in summer 2019. Both the book and exhibition have a similar structure. They are both organised around the same five thematic categories, and both populate these categories with the same projects completed by The OpenWorkshop over the last five years. By almost any measure, it’s an astonishing amount of work for such a young practice—more than enough to fill three galleries in the museum, and almost two hundred pages in the book, over twenty-five projects in total, each with corresponding texts, models, drawings, renderings, diagrams, and more (Fig. 1). The exhibition also included a lot of plants. The design, author, and editor of this project is Neeraj Bhatia, an Associate Professor at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA. He is also the principal of The Open Workshop, which he describes as ‘a multidisciplinary design workshop focused on critically re-examining the concept of an open work, first posited by Umberto Eco in 1962, [w]ith expertise ranging from architecture to urban design’. The title New Investigations in Collective Form accurately introduces the project. As Bhatia explains in the pamphlet for the exhibition and in the book, the title references a 1964 text by the Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, Investigations in Collective Form. Bhatia positions his work as an extension of Maki’s efforts, offering five new categories: living archives, rewiring states, communing, articulated surfaces, and frameworks (replacing Maki’s original three, compositional form, mega form, and group form). He then references two additional concepts that help explain what he means by a ‘collective form’. The first is Hanna Arendt’s definition of ‘pluralism’, which she describes as a tension between equality and distinction, using the analogy of people sitting around a table. The table is a kind of collective form. Second, Bhatia references Umberto Eco’s concept of an ‘open work’, which requires a degree of participation from the viewer to complete the work. Both ideas recall those of many Review by Andrew Atwood

中文翻译：

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集体形式的新调查：开放研讨会

2018 年春季，我参观了加利福尼亚州旧金山 Yuerba Buena 艺术中心举办的 The Open Workshop 展览“集体形式的新调查”。我在2019年夏天读了这本书。这本书和展览都有相似的结构。它们都围绕相同的五个主题类别组织，并且都用 OpenWorkshop 在过去五年中完成的相同项目填充这些类别。几乎以任何标准衡量，对于这样一个年轻的实践来说，这是一个惊人的工作量——足以填满博物馆的三个画廊，还有将近 200 页的书，总共超过 25 个项目，每个项目都有相应的文本，模型、图纸、效果图、图表等（图 1）。展览还展出了许多植物。该项目的设计者、作者和编辑是 Neeraj Bhatia，加州旧金山加州艺术学院副教授。他还是 The Open Workshop 的负责人，他将其描述为“一个多学科设计研讨会，专注于批判性地重新审视开放作品的概念，由 Umberto Eco 于 1962 年首次提出，具有从建筑到城市的专业知识设计'。标题为集体形式的新调查准确地介绍了该项目。正如巴蒂亚在展览小册子和书中所解释的那样，标题引用了日本建筑师槙文彦 1964 年的作品《集体调查》。Bhatia 将他的作品定位为 Maki 努力的延伸，提供五个新类别：生活档案、重新布线状态、交流、铰接表面和框架（取代 Maki 原来的三个，组合形式，巨型形式，和团体形式）。然后他引用了两个额外的概念来帮助解释他所说的“集体形式”的含义。第一个是汉娜·阿伦特 (Hanna Arendt) 对“多元主义”的定义，她将其描述为平等与区别之间的紧张关系，并使用人们围坐在桌子旁的比喻。餐桌是一种集体形式。其次，Bhatia 引用了 Umberto Eco 的“开放作品”概念，这需要观众一定程度的参与才能完成作品。这两个想法都让人想起安德鲁·阿特伍德的许多评论 其次，Bhatia 引用了 Umberto Eco 的“开放作品”概念，这需要观众一定程度的参与才能完成作品。这两个想法都让人想起安德鲁·阿特伍德的许多评论 其次，Bhatia 引用了 Umberto Eco 的“开放作品”概念，这需要观众一定程度的参与才能完成作品。这两个想法都让人想起安德鲁·阿特伍德的许多评论