2017 - Architectures of politics: Potentials, images and principles for a 'Parliament of Things' (original) (raw)

ARCHITECTURES OF POLITICS: POTENTIALS, IMAGES AND PRINCIPLES FOR A 'PARLIAMENT OF THINGS' (2017)

Este artículo discute el rol de los parlamentos en la producción de la políti-ca moderna y propone que los desafíos políticos contemporáneos requieren una nueva arquitectura parlamentaria. Mientras Bruno Latour declina la idea del " parlamento de las cosas " en términos exclusivamente procedura-les, este artículo explora su posible expresión material. Para ello, se basa en un seminario de diseño de bocetos realizado con estudiantes de arquitectura de la Universidad Técnica de Múnich, cuya consigna consistía en diseñar un edificio para poner en presencia a los actores humanos y no-humanos invo-lucrados en una controversia socio-ambiental ficticia. Los resultados nos proveen de imágenes y principios que desafían los supuestos de la forma parlamentaria moderna de hacer y entender la política. This article discusses the role of parliaments in the production of modern politics and proposes that contemporary political challenges necessitate a new parliamentarian architecture. While Bruno Latour operationalizes the idea of a 'parliament of things' in procedural terms, this article explores its possible material expression. To this end, it relies on a sketch design seminar with architecture students at the Technical University of Munich, the proposition of which was to design a political building to put in presence of each other the human and non-human actors involved in a fictional socio-environmental controversy. The results include images and principles that challenge the assumptions of the modern parliamentarian form of doing and understanding politics. Arquitectura _ política _ parlamento de las cosas _ estudios de ciencia y tecnología Architecture _ Politics_ Parliament of Things_ Science and Technology Studies «La arquitectura es una especie de elocuencia del poder expresada en formas, elocuencia que unas veces persuade e incluso acaricia y otras se limita a dictar órdenes». " Architecture is a kind of eloquence of power in forms — now persuading, even flattering, now only commanding " .

6. Design and Space in Parliament

2018

This chapter discusses the role that design and space play in the UK Parliament. The architecture and design of parliamentary buildings and chambers occupy a central place in political culture. In the case of the Palace of Westminster, three elements must be highlighted: the external projection of the building, the internal structure and the manner in which it defines and dictates the use of space, and the manner in which the internal structures affect user-interactions in more subtle ways (for example, inspiring deference, augmenting partisanship, or perpetuating and preventing forms of democratic inequality). After explaining 'how' and 'why' design and space matter, the chapter traces the history of design and space in the Palace of Westminster as well as its building and rebuilding. It also considers attempts to change the design and architecture of Parliament and the difficulties of assessing design and space.

Designing Politics: The limits of design

Designing Politics: The limits of design, 2016

What are the limits of design in addressing the political and/or when has design not been enough? This question lies at the heart of Designing Politics, an ongoing project at Theatrum Mundi. After three years of organising ideas challenges in cities around the world, Theatrum Mundi gathered a group of architects, academics, artists and activists in May 2016 to reflect on the questions it asks, and the fundamental relationship between design and politics. This collection of thought pieces stems from a workshop in May 2016 at the Villa Vassilieff in Paris, supported by the Global Cities Chair at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris.

Parliament-Buildings

Parliament Buildings: The Architecture of Politics in Europe, 2023

As political polarisation undermines confidence in the shared values and established constitutional orders of many nations, it is imperative that we explore how parliaments are to stay relevant and accessible to the citizens whom they serve. The rise of modern democracies is thought to have found physical expression in the staged unity of the parliamentary seating plan. However, the built forms alone cannot give sufficient testimony to the exercise of power in political life. Parliament Buildings brings together architecture, history, art history, history of political thought, sociology, behavioural psychology, anthropology and political science to raise a host of challenging questions. How do parliament buildings give physical form to norms and practices, to behaviours, rituals, identities and imaginaries? How are their spatial forms influenced by the political cultures they accommodate? What kinds of histories, politics and morphologies do the diverse European parliaments share, and how do their political trajectories intersect? This volume offers an eclectic exploration of the complex nexus between architecture and politics in Europe. Including contributions from architects who have designed or remodelled four parliament buildings in Europe, it provides the first comparative, multi-disciplinary study of parliament buildings across Europe and across history.

Architecture and Politics: Dissecting the Pretense of Political Architecture

We must repudiate the false pretense of “political” or “critical” architecture. Instead we must grasp and act upon architecture's own specific competency and related criticality. The stance of parametricism is sharply critical of current architectural and urban design outcomes, and my stance is doubly critical as I am also critical of many of the shortcomings of “real existing” parametricism. However, my stance as architectural researcher and paractitioner (as well as parametricism’s stance in general) is implicitly affirmative with respect to the general societal (social, economic and political) trends that underlie the criticized current architectural and urban outcomes. This implicit affirmation of the social order is a necessary condition of professional engagement with social reality. Those you are feeling that current socio-economic and political conditions are to be fought and overthrown and who are unwilling to fulfil architecture’s institutionally allocated role should consequently shift their activity into the political arena proper because they see the political system as the bottleneck for architecture’s (and society’s) progress. They need to test and win their arguments within and against political groups rather than within architecture. The currently fashionable concept of a “critical” or “political” architecture as a supposed form of political activism must be repudiated as an implausible phantom.

Rethinking politics from design (and design from politics)

REVISTA DISEÑA, 2017

What has design to do with politics? The usual answer would be: nothing. At first glimpse, politics would be a realm indifferent and alien to design. While politics must deal with the governing of human interests for the sake of common good, design, instead, would be focused on form, the aesthetic and functional arrangement of the things that populate the world. The realm of the political would be populated by norms and values (liberty, tolerance, etc.), founding its duties on what Weber called 'the legitimate use of force' (Weber, 1944). The field of design, on its part, would respond to the rule of the needs of the user, focusing its forces on transforming, creatively and sensitively, the materialities into useful, usable or decorative products. It is precisely the separation between politics and design, deeply rooted in the thought and action of the latter, which this dossier attempts to thematise and problematise.

Is architecture relevant for political theory

European Journal of Political Theory, 2021

Is architecture relevant for political theory? That is the key question that structures this excellent collection Political Theory and Architecture, although a number of essays fit a broader formulated theme better, namely, concerning the political relevance of the organization and design of our built environment more generally, including architecture but also spatial planning and urban design. The collection demonstrates that our build environment is not merely a passive backdrop to a political community, but actively shapes aspects of our common political life. This constitutive nature of our built environment figures in many different guises throughout this volume. In this review article, I discuss some of these and conclude that concerns about the 'common good' and hence about the discipline of political theory should take reflections on urban design, planning, and architecture into account.

The parliament as a high-political programme

Anna-Lisa Müller and Werner Reichmann (eds.): Architecture, Materiality and Society, 2015

The aim of this chapter is to disturb the division of labour between political scientists and architectural historians by outlining what can learned about parliamentary democracy if it is examined though the Hungarian parliament building. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) in general and a material-semiotic analysis of the development of a British military aircraft in particular, the chapter considers the Hungarian parliament building as the architectural expression of a high-political programme that has its roots in the late eighteenth century. By focusing on the planning and construction of the building, it argues that by the late nineteenth century the strength of this high-political programme lied not simply in the successful introduction of multiple changes into the discursive and material practices of politics, but also in the insistence on those changes working towards the constitution of a singular political reality.

The Literature of Political Things and Places: Reading and Writing Design

2014

This paper argues that literature is a fertile source of insight for design research and scholarship—in particular, those stories that explore the mutuality of the sentient and insentient, a mutuality pointing to a new kind of politics that respects the reciprocity of relations between humans and their environment. Authors such as Charles D'Ambrosio, Orhan Pamuk, Darryl Pinckney, and W.G. Sebald are discussed for the ways in which they reposition objects of design (informal and formal) as characters. Chairs, carpets, buildings, manuscripts, and sundry other objects act as protagonists and antagonists that exceed their intimate relations to individuals and become actors in the larger theater of human affairs. By situating things in the webs of human actions and beliefs, these works of literature have the capacity provoke the re-cognition of the activity and outcomes of designing in shaping the social and political.

Understanding Political Bodies in Small Spaces

Architectural Humanities Research Association 21 st International Conference, 2024

This text is an excerpt from the book "Body Matters – Architectural Humanities Research Association 21st International Conference". Body Matters aims to investigate notions of Body in contemporary architectural discourses. Always a fundamental in architecture, the body needs to be reconsidered on its own terms, as a creative, material and philosophical concern. Beyond historical materialism and phenomenological approaches in architecture, recent new materialism thought has proposed a cross-disciplinary endeavour to confront long-held assumptions about the relationship between humans, nonhumans and the world. Full book of abstract here: https://ahra2024.org/app/uploads/2024/11/Norwich-University-of-the-Arts-–-Body-Matters-Book-of-Abstracts-web.pdf