Architecture After Politics Workshop 2014

Do we now live in an age after politics, in the sense of a post-political age of reflexive modernity, after left and right, after ideology, after history, in an end state of bio-politics, sub-politics, and techno-politics? Or, with the unleashing of new wars, with a new consciousness of unprecedented inequality, of capitalism in crisis, of the planet in crisis, are we in an age after politics, in an entirely different sense, that of the desire of the political? Architecture has always been deeply political. Yet given the rapid changes taking place all around us, what are the specific ways in which architecture is political today?

The Architecture Exchange hosted its first five-day workshop at Treignac Projet, in France to address the contemporary state of the political and the contemporary condition of architecture in the face of the political. Nine participants responded to and presented ideas on a range of political theoretic questions about: how architecture can give form to a common symbolic space for agonistic relations (Mouffe); how architecture participates in the management of populations and practices (Foucault); how architecture can form practices of dissensus (Ranciere); how architecture immunizes and explicates subjects in relation to nature (Sloterdijk); how architecture can compose a common world (Latour).