Radical / Reform / Revolution

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.

Speakers

Marianela D’Aprile is a writer living in Chicago. Her work deals in architecture, culture, and politics. She holds a Masters in Architecture History and Theory from the University of California - Berkeley.

Grace Blakeley is a staff writer at Tribune Magazine and author of The Corona Crash: How the pandemic will change capitalism, and Stolen: How to save the world from financialisation. She features frequently on UK and international media, including appearances on Question Time, the Today Programme and MTV News, and her books have been reviewed in the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Guardian, among other outlets.

Vivek Chibber is a professor of sociology at New York University. He is the editor of Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, and the author of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013) and Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India (2003).

Jane Rendell is Professor of Critical Spatial Practice at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. She has introduced concepts of ‘critical spatial practice’ and ‘site-writing’ through her authored books: The Architecture of Psychoanalysis (2017), Silver (2016), Site-Writing (2010), Art and Architecture (2006), and The Pursuit of Pleasure (2002). She works on the Bartlett’s Ethics Commission, (with Dr. David Roberts), and ‘The Ethics of Research Practice’, for KNOW (Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality) (with Dr. Yael Padan).

Douglas Spencer is Pickard Chilton Professor and Director of Graduate Education at Architecture at Iowa State University. He is the author of The Architecture of Neoliberalism (2016), Critique of Architecture (2020), and has written for Radical Philosophy, Log, e-flux, New Geographies, Volume, Journal of Architecture, Avery Review, and contributed to collections including Architecture Against the Post-Political (2014), This Thing Called Theory (2016), Architecture and Feminisms (2017), Landscape and Agency (2017) and Architectural Affects After Deleuze and Guattari (2020).

Łukasz Stanek is an architectural historian at the Manchester School of Architecture, The University of Manchester, UK. Stanek authored Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (Minnesota, 2011) and Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton, 2020).

Eleni Axioti is a researcher and an educator. She is lecturer in contextual studies at the University of the Arts London and teaches history and theory of architecture at Architectural Association. She completed her Ph.D. at the AA on the dissolution of the architecture of the British welfare state. Her work focuses on architectural history in regard to issues of government, social policy, and political economy.

Will Orr is a British-Canadian theorist and historian based in London. In 2019, he completed a PhD at the AA, where he teaches in the history and theory programme. Using an historical materialist framework, his research examines the interplay between political and architectural theory from the 1960s to the present.

Ricardo Ruivo is a Portuguese architect, researcher, and teacher at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, where he completed his PhD. His work focuses on the tensions between architectural form and political content in architectural discourse, and on contemporary problems internal to the rising effort towards a re-politicisation of the discipline.