ON POWER IN ARCHITECTURE # 1

Architecture has served throughout history as one of the most prominent tools of power, functioning as both its representation and its manifestation, embedded as it is within the public and the private realm.

The aim of the symposium On Power in Architecture is to facilitate a critical discussion on the topic while bringing thinkers and practicioners together to propose concepts to reflect on the intertwined relation between power and architecture.

The lectures will focus mainly on philosophers and theoreticians from a materialist background and will start from a selected architectural case study.

PROGRAMME

21 September 2017, 10:00–16:00
10:00–10:15     Opening remarks On Power in Architecture, Mateja Kurir
10:15–11:15     Hilde Heynen: Architecture, Power, Embodiment
11:15–12:15     Teresa Stoppani: Manfredo Tafuri: Progetto storico (the historical project) as Political Project
12:15–12:45     Discussion with Teresa Stoppani
12:45–13:30     Break
13:30–14:30     Mladen Dolar: Power and the Architectural Unconscious
14:30–15:30     Sven-Olov Wallenstein: Foucault and the Spatialization of Power
15:30–16:00     Discussion with Mladen Dolar and Sven-Olov Wallenstein

ABSTRACTS

Hilde Heynen
ARCHITECTURE, POWER, EMBODIMENT
This lecture traces how architecture is intertwined with articulations of power and difference by reviewing the relevant literature of recent decades. Starting from the 1970s, when paradigms of neo-Marxism and critical theory informed scholars like Manfredo Tafuri and Alexander Tzonis, the paper investigates how political and social issues increasingly became central in architectural history and theory. The issue of power was analyzed in several contexts and from multiple perspectives, including those of space syntax postcolonial studies and theories of participation. These explorations led to a critical questioning of the very concept of architecture – no longer the undisputed terrain of master architects who contributed to the canon, but a contested territory that many voices claim is relevant to their cause. Part of this literature focuses on how physical spaces inscribe power constellations and differentiations onto human bodies, with consequences that directly affect everyday practices and experiences. Here the skills of architectural historians and theorists are relied upon to analyze and interpret everyday environments rather than architectural masterworks.

Discussed case studies are three parks: La Villette in Paris (architect Bernard Tschumi), High Line in New York (architects Diller Scofidio, with James Corner), and Park Spoor Noord in Antwerp (architects Secchi-Vigano).

Teresa Stoppani
MANFREDO TAFURI: PROGETTO STORICO (THE HISTORICAL PROJECT) AS POLITICAL PROJECT
Tafuri’s celebrated and often misappropriated Progetto e Utopia (Architecture and Utopia, 1973) expands upon his 1969 essay Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica. In Architecture and Utopia’s preface Tafuri dismisses the criticism that his essay had received as 'an apocalyptic prophecy', the ultimate pronouncement of the 'death of architecture', and explains that the book aims to identify 'those tasks which capitalist development has taken away from architecture'. Far from defeatist, the book looks for a form of engagement that can see beyond 'pure architecture/form without utopia/sublime uselessness' in order to return architecture to an active role in society. This paper argues that with this work Tafuri sets the grounds for his long-term project of reinventing architectural history as a necessary voice within architecture. This would redefine the role of the historian of (and in) architecture, but also expose the complex intersections of architecture with power, thus both revealing and instigating its powerful environmental agency.

Discussed case study will focus on Tafuri’s analysis and criticism of Le Corbusier’s Algiers projects.

Mladen Dolar
POWER AND THE ARCHITECTURAL UNCONSCIOUS
In the beginning of Civilization and its Discontents Freud curiously uses an architectural metaphor to present the workings of the unconscious. Nothing gets lost or obliterated in the unconscious, as the unconscious is timeless, so the image he proposes is that of Rome, ‘the eternal city’, as the saying goes – all the various layers of the past coexist in Rome. Everything coexists, but as a ruin, like an urbanistic unconscious. Yet for the image to work one must presuppose that all the stages had their heyday of full bloom before being reduced to fragmented remains, while with the unconscious one must deal with something that ‘always already’ been a ruin to start with, something fragmented and partial ‘in itself’. But couldn’t one adopt this perspective also in their approach to architecture at large, urbanism as a whole? There is the double aspect of architecture, which displays on the one hand a side of glory, attesting to the power it seeks to promote, and on the other hand the aspect of ruin, a fragment, a lack, an absence, a distortion, a haunting. Maybe the task is how to disentangle the interlacing and the interlocking of these two aspects.

Since the presentation is supposed to relate to a particular example, I would take the strange case of KSEVT, the Cultural Center of European Space Technologies, a most remarkable building erected in a Slovene village by some of the most prestigious Slovene architectural offices, presenting an intersection of culture and cosmos, art and nature, natural sciences and humanities, the local and the global – a building that has been placed, over the last years, at the heart of an iconic power struggle.

Sven Olov Wallenstein
FOUCAULT AND THE SPATIALIZATION OF POWER
The lecture will attempt to bring together Foucault’s many and varied – sometimes even contradictory – statements about architecture into a systematic account of how power relations are spatialized. Important here will be to avoid a unilateral reading that focuses uniquely on forms of enclosure, incarceration, and discipline, and instead highlight that all spatialization also entails modes of resistance and possibilities for counter-movements, i.e. forms of subjectivity that, while conditioned by external forces, can never be reduced to them. Here, the interpretation of Foucault provided by Deleuze will be crucial, which will also, as I will suggest, show that many of the current interpretations of Deleuze in architectural theory are misleading.

The contribution of Wallenstein’s presentation to 'critical theory', then, will be a rethinking of how works of architecture are unavoidably implicated in structures of power, but that this on another level always calls forth ways of inhabiting and using them that bring out their latent tension – all of which may be understood as a twist on Adorno’s claim that works interiorize social contradictions as contradiction in their own form.

AUTHORS
 

Hilde Heynen is a professor of architectural theory at the University of Leuven, Belgium. Her research focuses on issues of modernity, modernism, and gender in architecture. She authored Architecture and Modernity: A Critique (MIT Press, 1999) and co-edited Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial productions of gender in modern architecture (Routledge, 2005), Sage Handbook of Architectural Theory (2012), and regularly publishes in journals such as Home Cultures, The Journal of Architecture, Interiors, etc. Hilde Heynen studied architecture and philosophy at the University of Leuven, where she also received her PhD. She was a research fellow at the Radcliffe Institute (Harvard University) and held visiting positions at MIT (Cambridge, Mass.), at the AA-school (London), at RMIT (Melbourne), and at Harvard. She is currently president of the European Architectural History Network (EAHN).

Teresa Stoppani is Professor of Research in Architecture at London South Bank University, where she directs the Centre for Research in Architecture, Urbanism and Digital Construction. Her research interests are the relationship between architecture theory and the design process in the urban environment, as well as the influence of other spatial and critical practices on the specifically architectural. She is the author of Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice (Routledge, 2010) and of the forthcoming Unorthodox Ways to Rethink Architecture and the City (Routledge, 2018), and co-editor of This Thing Called Theory (Routledge, 2016).

Mladen Dolar is a professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana. His principal areas of research are psychoanalysis, modern French philosophy, German idealism, and art theory. Apart from a dozen books in Slovene and some hundred papers in English published in journals and collected volumes his book publications include most notably A Voice and Nothing More (MIT, 2006, translated into six languages) and Opera’s Second Death (with Slavoj Žižek, Routledge, 2001, also translated into several languages). He is one of the founders of the so-called Ljubljana Lacanian School. His new book The Riskiest Moment is forthcoming with Duke University Press.

Sven-Olov Wallenstein is Professor of Philosophy at Södertörn University, Stockholm. His recent publications include Architecture, Critique, Ideology: Writings on Architecture and Theory (2016), Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality (co-editor, 2013), Nihilism, Art, Technology (2011), Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State (co-editor, 2010), Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture (2009). He is currently completing Swedish translations of Adorno’s Negative Dialektik and Ästhetische Theorie, together with a book on Adorno. Wallenstein has translated works by Baumgarten, Winckelmann, Lessing, Kant, Hegel, Frege, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Rancière, and Agamben, and has authored numerous books on philosophy, contemporary art, and architecture.

This symposium is held in English. Entry is free of charge.

Conceived and organized by: Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory in collaboration with Mateja Kurir
Media support by: Radio Študent; Architectuul
Supported by: ERSTE Foundation; Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO), Ljubljana; CAS SEE, University of Rijeka