EVENT 1 WEDNESDAY 30th OF MAY  Double Crossing  “This Thing Called Theory” Open Seminar Series   14:00 – 18:00 At the The Barrel Vault in The AA Organised by  AA PhD Programme & Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) This Thing Called Theory Stemming from the Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) 2015 conference, the open seminar […]

A Project for the Brazilian City

Architecture as an apparatus of governance: (British) architecture from the welfare state to the state of workfare.

This research attempts an architectural history of the present. It analyzes architecture as a dispositif operating within the practice of governance and unfolds a transversal cartography of architectural operations that problematize the relation of architectural practice to contemporary issues of political economy.

Stásis: Towards a Critique of Flexibility in Architecture

Flexibility, nowadays, constitutes the canon. Applied as a technique in order to achieve living spaces that are able to accommodate a series of different occupations, lifestyles and needs, the thesis argues that flexibility, antithetically, operates as an architectural tool towards the transformation of spaces that are becoming far from being 'free' and instead alienate and restrict their inhabitants.

Urban Nodes: Programming Intelligent Spaces for Social Interaction

We have Never been Private! The Housing Project in Neoliberal Europe

The thesis puts forward an interpretation of the management of domestic space through the transformation of the concept of the private within the socio-economic regime known as neoliberalism. In this light, the thesis proposes a critical reassessment of housing privatization not merely as a policy introduced in the 1980’s to promote new contractual relationships, but as a post-war strategy to establish a change of ethos, culture and organization of housing. The thesis argues that the state has constantly partnered the market (‘private sector’) in the promotion of a carefully designed pedagogy of domestic privacy associated with property and individualism, to the extent that ‘the private’ has hardly existed as such in the neoliberal era. The daunting failures of this housing model in terms of inaccessibility and alienation of care in the urban domestic realm, negate privacy as an affirmation of essential autonomy and are reminiscent of its classical concept of deprivation.

Rome, Before the State: Architecture and Persuasion in the Early Modern City

To reconsider the ways in which architecture has served the needs of various regimes of power by imposing a specific ethos through its grandeur, composition, typologies, and techniques.

The Invented Chinese Classical Garden

The Chinese classical garden and Chinese contemporary architecture.

Beyond Jurisdiction? The Case of the International Criminal Court

Since 1989 there are at least 24 active, restructured or new, independent international law courts - leading to speculations about the hierarchy and structural logic between the international and domestic legal spaces. The inclusion of private individuals and a public audience, in the legal operations and processes, across the developing multi-scalar ecology of international and national adjudication can be identified as a pivot for the increasing political agency of international adjudication and permits a spatial and architectural reading of this political agency. The thesis examines the ways in which architectural and spatial processes participate in the construction and composition of the project for international legal adjudication.