The government of space
The relationship between architecture and politics has all too often been reduced to a direct link between rulers - and dictators in the 20th century in particular - and designers. Yet the space in which architecture, defined both as culture and as professional practice, interacts with politics is no more isotropic than it is homogeneous.
Rather, to borrow a phrase from Michel Foucault, it is shaped by the "microphysics of power", according to which political domination operates through unstable networks of action. Among these networks, urban form and architecture are unquestionably subject to the pressure of political powers, but they are no less determined by market forces and the expectations of competing social groups.
While acting as a mode of representation through its monumental productions, architecture gives shape to everyday relationships at every scale of the social fabric. The delicate adjustment between the repertoire of available forms and the expectations of the various components of society operates according to a matrix in which discourse and practice intersect, with architects sometimes acting as protagonists whose program imposes itself on politicians. A wide range of projects and buildings, from the Americas to Asia, Western and Eastern Europe and North Africa, are presented in this lecture and the accompanying symposium.