“The X just means we don’t know what’s going to happen,” he adds. This is the spirit of experimentation behind Studio-X, an ambitious global educational initiative currently underway at GSAPP. Equal parts learning space, public forum, and international think tank, Studio-X “affords an enormous bandwidth for thinking about the future of cities,” Wigley says—a mandate that he cites as the core mission of the program, and the reason he first proposed it four years ago... With sister offices now open in Mumbai, Amman, Beijing, and Rio de Janeiro, and more in the offing in South Africa and Japan, Studio-X New York is one spoke in a wheel of architectural activity that is at once international and intensely localized. The overseas branches aren’t intended to be subordinate to either Columbia or the Manhattan pilot office—“not like Starbucks selling some sort of wisdom from New York,” as Wigley puts it. They’re idea incubators in their own right, feeding new knowledge about how cities live and change into a greater community of thought... “It’s about expanding the notion of the university beyond the institution itself,” explains Jeffrey Johnson, the director of the New York–based China Megacities Lab, who has led groups of students on semiannual visits to Studio-X Beijing since it opened in 2009... Situated, like the New York studio, in the very heart of their respective downtowns, each Studio-X satellite operates as a discrete unit, with local directors setting a specific agenda. Yet all of the outposts, following the program’s mission, look to reinvigorate the urban conversation in their particular cities by engaging not just designers but culturally omnivrous thinkers from diverse backgrounds... Gavin Browning, who preceded Twilley and Manaugh at Studio-X New York, admits that the two halves of the Studio-X population are often “operating in separate spheres.”... The space’s social character is part of its appeal. “The potential for the contact there to be informal allows for discussions to take place that don’t take place in a more official setting,” says Jeffrey Inaba, the head of C-Lab, another fixture of Studio-X New York... And then there is the question of how the overseas locales are meant to work in concert with one another, as well as with the university. When they’re not being visited by one of the American student groups (which is to say, the majority of the year), the far-flung outposts operate entirely independently of Columbia. Although that gives them considerable leeway to chart their own course, it reduces the overall coherence of the program. “We all have access to each others’ planning calendars,” says Twilley, referring to her fellow Studio-X directors, “and I check what they’re up to.
But we haven’t translated that information into a coordinated series.”... Some of Studio-X’s satellites are located in places where certain political issues, the kind of things that might be spoken about freely on the campus of Columbia University, simply cannot be addressed. Wigley, who also sees the program as a vehicle for bringing corporate figures into architectural conversations, believes there’s room for healthy debate, but he tends to downplay the potential for outright conflict.

The term “The Serving Library” came out of a conversation with Nick Relph in Los Angeles. I was talking about my interest in establishing something along the lines of what I suppose I think of as the classically English, typically Soho-based, explicitly elitist and implicitly chauvinistic men’s club. I’m interested less in the chauvinism and elitism, obviously, and more in the idea of a cellar-like hangout, open during the daytime in order to escape the sun and traffic; equal parts intellectual and social—or literate and drunk. I’m also attracted to the perversity of the idea of such an institution being situated in Los Angeles, which would seem to be about as antithetical a location as possible for such an establishment... I think that the emphasis on the “institutionality” of The Serving Library may be misplaced, or at least overemphasized. Setting up The Serving Library as a larger organization with more people involved, with an explicit mission statement, a board of directors, yearly tax audits, and all the rest of the accompanying furniture adds up to something that is an institution, not a critique of institutions, nor a model of an alternative institution. Whereas perhaps with Dexter Sinister we were attempting to model an approach, I think that here we’re trying to make it concrete. Our model has been taught us, now it is time to build the real thing... It seems that there’s a lazy tendency to file many of our projects under Institutional Critique. I’m pretty sure that’s wrong in terms of intentions and results, but most importantly in terms of spirit. In fact, Institutional Affirmation would be much more accurate. For example, projects like the True Mirror project at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Dot Dot Dot 15 produced on location at the Contemporary Art Centre in Geneva, or True Mirror Microfiche at the ICA [Institute of Contemporary Arts] in London would be impossible without close coordination, consent, and trust on behalf of the commissioning institutions.