The 20th issue of the ArchiDOCT e-journal presents papers that explore the theme of ‘aesthetics and politics’ in architecture and its connections with the built, material and conceptual environment as presuppositions of the architectural design process or as its implementation. The contemporary landscape of thought in aesthetics and politics has been enriched by significant contributions, notably the works of French philosopher Jacques Rancière. According to his work, politics has its aesthetics, its specific way of redistributing the sensible, of providing a new restructuring of the field of experience and ultimately of creating a new topography of possibilities. At the same time, we have seen the emergence of discourses with an ethical and stressed metaphysical tone such as the emphasis on the aesthetic category of the sublime and the questioning of the capacities for representation either in connection to imagination or in the irrepresentable of historical events.
Architecture is about forces, as are politics, which are not limited to ideology, committed art or even activism. In a meta-political sense, architecture has its own political function, its own way to create political content. By effectuating a re-modeling of social time and space, by establishing new relations or elaborating and interrogating the existing ones, architecture and design are already political – and they have always been.
Architecture is about forces, as is negativity: Theodor Adorno in his well-known aphoristic manner declared that “the beauty today can have no other measure except the depth to which a work resolves contradictions”. Massimo Cacciari emphasizes the importance of registering the leaps, the ruptures in history and how important is this form of negative thought for the production of innovation. Walter Benjamin as well worked on a historical project based on a dialectical aesthetic and political logic. From this standpoint it would be of importance to reflect today on the ways architecture (re)present reality along with the questioning of existing representational patters.
Architecture is about forces, as is affirmation: Felix Guattari in his late work also conjures the notion of aesthetics – albeit from a different perspective – by pointing towards a new aesthetic paradigm with clear ethico-political implications that will replace the scientific paradigm. Creation in that context becomes an affirmative action where the engagement with the new is still something disruptive though not as an alternative to tradition. Innovation in that case is not the negation of the existing but instead is always the result of a fundamentally affirmative process. Not the negation of the known, but the affirmation of the unknown.
By re-stating the relation between aesthetics and politics in a more creative manner we expect to incite an interest on the ways fiction, narrative and story-telling can be considered as structures open to re-designs, with their own architectural, spatial, material and sensual qualities.
Against this backdrop, ArchiDOCT vol 20 presents papers that embark on, or present an exploration of the various manifestations of the aesthetical and/or the political dimension within architectural theory and/or praxis, as well as design practices and tools associated with them. They contain both insights and experimentations with contemporary conceptions of the aesthetic and the political, and propositions that address the becoming of traditional aesthetic concepts that have had already seen a substantial transformation in the context of the first generations of critical theory, notably the Frankfurt School. Having said that, several of the articles reflect on the domains of architecture and design from the point of view of inter-disciplinary tool-making and more creative understandings of policy-making to the extent of experimentations with the artistic domains. In fact, we could detect three broad categories of approach that complement each other offering thus a stimulating coverage of a vast area relating to aesthetics and politics along with an in-depth analysis:
1. Aesthetics and politics of dwelling and world-making in philosophy and contemporary art
The first approach is more theoretical, investigating the concepts of dwelling and world-making in philosophy and contemporary art. Maralina Lagou locates her analysis effectively in the field of tension and considerations arising from the confrontation of critical theory with ontology. The main question that guides her approach, How dwelling is possible in the 21st century?, summarizes essentially the basic premise for the development of an aesthetic and politics of dwelling today, with reference to the contributions of Theodor Adorno and Martin Heidegger. At the same time, in her analysis Lagou explores the possibility of contemporary art to contribute to the reflection on the question of dwelling, with reference to the practices of Gordon Matta-Clark and Rirkrit Tiravanija. On the other hand, Evangelia Danadaki explores the political dimension of art by mobilizing the aesthetic dimension of Cornelius Castoriadis’ political theory in order to examine the role and function of, on the one hand, the artist as an autonomous subject and, on the other hand, the work of art as a critical spatial practice with distinct architectural figures towards the radicalization of democracy and the re-conceptualization of society. In Danadaki’s approach, the practice of Laure Prouvost serves as a paradigm for the architectural approach to art and as a model for the interlinking of art, political theory and architecture.
2. Aesthetics and politics of fragility, pollution and apophatic space
The second approach combines solid methodologies along with an applied conceptual analysis. Stefania Strouza chooses the area of Elefsina to analyze the phenomenon of pollution through a non-anthropocentric approach with reference to the theory of new materialism in the work of Manuel De Landa and Jane Bennett. Methodologically, and in conversation with this materialist theoretical framework, Strouza deploys an on-site research. What guides her approach is the questioning of the basic moral attitudes towards material entities and the new aesthetic and political possibilities provided by the recognition of an underwater architecture and the spectral dimension of pollution. Giovanni Castellanos Garzon and Sandra Marcela Bustacara Panzza propose the idea of fragility, in its aesthetic and political perspective. Their goal is to come up with an understanding of architecture as a dynamic and flexible process that carries at the same time a distinct ability to respond to emerging ethical and aesthetic issues. In fact, it is this very ability that constitutes a form of political action for the authors. Based on an extensive literature review that documents the fragile dimension of architecture, Garzon and Panzza set out subsequently the distinct steps of a methodology with reference to specific architectural examples and tensions proper to relation between ethics, politics and aesthetics. Finally, Zachariadou Ioanna – Eleftheria focuses on the idea of apophatic space in order to explore possibilities for activating space in selected areas of Athens. The aesthetic dimension of her approach emerges through the investigation of the spatial experience which she chooses to concretize via theories of the event and the specification of the typical characteristics of an apophatic space. Accordingly, the politics of apophatic space can be traced to the type, duration and qualitative characteristics of the co-habiting relations that develop in what Zacharadiou calls micro-utopias.
3. Shifting paradigms in theory and history of architecture from an aesthetic and political point of view
The third approach revolves around the aspiration for delineating shifting paradigms in theory and history of architecture from an aesthetic and political point of view. Yannis Rigas and Chloe Koliri start from Felix Guattari’s thesis that architecture is traversed by technological and industrial mutations in order to elaborate a background for deploying two interconnected questions: (a). Are postmodern aesthetic forms in built architecture perfectly subsumed to capitalist function or bear a potential to affect on their own, as actors and processes towards social functions and unconscious desires.? (b). Is it possible a reinvention of architecture via what Guattari calls architectural enunciation? The methodology for approaching these two questions is a rhizomatic one based on the relevant contributions of Gilles Deleuze and Guattari. Within this framework, architectural aesthetics emerges as the political issue par excellence. Finally, Dasara Pula and Valerio Perna base their approach to the consideration of architecture as a signifier of the ideology of the political power, embodying in itself the fundamental components of political will. Their research aims to discuss architecture’s implication with political discourses, power and ideology, within modernity. If architecture has a signifying capacity, then in Pula and Perna’s approach architecture is perceived as a metaphor that facilitates the communication between aesthetics and political power as presented in the city space. They focus on the Eastern Europe and particularly Western Balkans under the objective to trace parallels between countries that essentially shared very different ideas of architectural and aesthetics ideologies.
As an opening for this 20th issue of ArchiDOCT we have chosen a contribution by Jacques Rancière who, as always, have generously offered a text-version of his ground-breaking approach to the politics of space, aesthetics and architecture at the occasion of his conversation with the architect Farshid Moussavi, part of the ‘Aesthetics and Architecture’ series, held at the Royal Academy of Arts on 8th October 2018. In the ‘Politics of space’ Rancière summarizes concisely the basic concepts of his aesthetic and political approach to space, an approach invested with paradigms from the modern and contemporary era along with an expanded definition of architecture and a closing remark regarding the architectural design practice of Farshid Moussavi.