Architecture, and the Politics of Materiality
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How can architecture be political? Until recently, the most common type of answer to this question appeared as a combination of two main lines of argument. First, buildings orient, and in several instances, even force human behavior in ways that prove clearly political. Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a prison layout, which submits inmates to the gaze of an invisible watchman located in a central surveillance room, exemplifies this type of agency of the built environment. Second and certainly not least, architecture reinforces the prevailing political order by expressing its core values through means ranging from compositional principles to ornamental vocabulary. Moving away from these classic arguments, the lecture will discuss this issue at the intersection of two fundamental dimensions of architecture: the affective and the symbolic. Using examples drawn from history as well as contemporary cases, it will argue that architecture is fundamentally political through the construction of situations and “décors” that mobilize jointly the affective and the symbolic. Materiality, the materiality of architecture, appears at this stage as key in such a construction. From this perspective, what is exactly the political agency of architecture? What can it achieve? Can one speak of a truly democratic architecture, as opposed to one, which would be totalitarian in essence? The lecture will conclude by addressing these key interrogations.
Antoine Picon is Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology and the Director of Doctoral Programs at Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is also Chairman of the Foundation Le Corbusier, and a member of the French Academy of Architecture and the French Academy of Technology. Trained as an engineer, architect, and historian, Picon works on the history of architectural and urban technologies from the eighteenth century to the present. He has published extensively on this subject. He is amongst others the author of French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (1988, English translation 1992), Claude Perrault (1613-1688) (1988), L'Invention de L'ingénieur moderne (1992), La Ville territoire des cyborgs (1998), Les Saint-Simoniens (2002), Digital Culture in Architecture (2010), Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity (2013), Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence (2015), and The Materiality of Architecture (2021).
Greet De Block is trained as engineer-architect and urban planner. In 2011 she obtained her PhD, summa cum laude with congratulations of the Board of Examiners, 'Engineering the territory. Technology, space and society in 19th and 20th century Belgium' (University of Leuven) tracing the spatial schemes inscribed in network design. During her postdoc (FWO), she invested in teaching and internationalization by research collaborations with, and lecturing and research stays at, Harvard University, University of New Hampshire, TU Eindhoven and Rijkswaterstaat. In 2015, she started at the University of Antwerp (UA), as hub between the Centre for Urban History (CSG) and the Urban Studies Institute (USI).