Weaponised Architecture: Towards a Revolutionary Practice of the Discipline

Architecture is the discipline that organises bodies in space. Through this definition, Léopold Lambert attempts to demonstrate that the built environment has a propensity to materialise the political programmes of the dominant order: as nothing easier than the extrusion of a line to enforce an arbitrary national border or apartheid wall. Inversely, it is much more difficult and requires much more effort to design insurrectional or resistive architectures that do not shy away from the part of violence they also embody. Through his work as editor-in-chief of the magazine The Funambulist, as well as his independent research as an author, Léopold Lambert will attempt to present how politicised architects can rethink their practice.

Léopold Lambert is a Paris-based trained architect, writer and founding editor of The Funambulist, a bimonthly magazine dedicated to spatial perspectives on anti-colonial, anti-racist, queer, feminist and anti-ableist struggles. He is the author of three books, Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence (2012), The Corporeal Politics of the Cloth, the Wall, and the Street (2015), and Bulldozer Politics: The Palestinian Ruin as an Israeli Project (2016). His next book is tentatively called States of Emergency: A Spatial History of the French Colonial Continuum.

Image: Excavated Objects from a Post-Apartheid Palestine, credit Léopold Lambert