This symposium will explore the political-economic structures underlying the concept of architecture as it developed over the past 50 years. Our disciplinary self-understanding is connected to the slow collapse of welfare-state forms—our idea of ‘radical’ architecture shaped by an ideological shift away from both revolutionary socialism and social-democratic reform.
However, the history of the twentieth century shows that large-scale social, economic, and political issues have only been solved through large-scale coordinated responses. We will therefore look at the suppressed historical experience of architecture’s involvement in the vast planning processes of welfare-capitalist and socialist macro-investment efforts.
Contrasting three formations, Radical/Reform/Revolution, this symposium proposes a structural understanding of economic conditions and an engagement with real political agents as the precondition for operative commitment today.
SCHEDULE
The event will consist of three panels, each lasting one and a half hours and featuring three speakers. Each speaker will give a presentation of around 10 minutes, after which there will be a roundtable discussion. There will be an interval between panels.
15:00 - Symposium Introduction
15:15 - 16:30 The academic as split political subject
Douglas Spencer, Jane Rendell, Eleni Axioti
Politicised practices in architectural academia carry their own internal tensions. Political agency tends to be understood within the field through radical and critical practices, yet these are themselves conditioned by larger disciplinary and professional institutions. This session will explore the resulting ideological and practical contradictions, most evident when academics attempt to connect to wider political and labour struggles.
16:45 -18:15 Architectural solutions for politics or political solutions for architecture?
Marianela D’Aprile, Grace Blakeley, Ricardo Ruivo
Contemporary architectural discourse is increasingly taking note of the limitations imposed by the current crisis upon its practice, and, naturally, architects seek to use radical disciplinary strategies to address the problem. However, the political-economic terrain has already doomed them to failure—or worse, to unwittingly exacerbate the conditions. The second session will explore the structural character of the current crisis and shift the debate towards the political terrain, emphasising the role of planning and the public sector.
18:30 - 20:00 Architecture in the struggle for development
Vivek Chibber, Lukasz Stanek, Will Orr
The discipline of architecture has played a complex and ambiguous role in larger global colonial, postcolonial, and neo-colonial, dynamics. The third session will maintain the focus on political economy, examining how architecture has been and continues to be implicated in interconnected processes of political liberation, economic development, and cultural expression—as well as antagonistic processes of underdevelopment and domination.
General Info