Unreasonable Architectures
Wednesday 10 March 2010, 10:00am, Room SPW0-05, Spring House
Open Lecture and Debate, MA Cities Design and Urban Cultures
Ines Weizman
Architecture, Ideology, Politics. Contemporary architecture has a great stake in the relationship between these terms. Previously fixed ideologies such as China or some totalitarian states such as those in the contemporary Gulf are merging a post-ideological politics into the production of contemporary urbanity. But how can we think this relationship between ideology, politics and the built environment? If political relations are reproduced spatially – through the very organization of the city, its infrastructure, streets and houses as well as through the ‘rituals’ and behaviors they induce – how could architecture act against power? How could architecture be used as a medium of dissent? It is because of its otherwise direct and often servile association with power, dissent in architecture is not an obvious challenge. This talk aims to trace several intersections of these terms as a genealogy of past and present practices. During the Cold War architectural dissent was articulated by refusal, by subversion of the norms and language of dominant/dominating architecture, or by a retreat into the private domain of paper architecture or hidden pedagogy. In a contemporary context in which the ‘idyll of consensus’ has to a degree de-politicised society, the possibility of dissent, articulated as a spatial practice, could make political conflicts (and thus politics) not only possible, but as well visible and effective.
The idea of this talk is also to present some research questions and ideas that are currently discussed in the MA Cities Design and Urban Cultures program.
