25 EUR

TRANSformacije, book no. 47
Colection and editing: Mateja Kurir
Editor: Gregor Moder
© Maska, Ljubljana, 2022

Published: Maska, zavod za založniško, kulturno in producentsko dejavnost in Društvo Igor Zabel za kulturo in teorijo

Thanks to: Univerza v Ljubljani – Filozofska fakulteta, Javna agencija za raziskovalno dejavnost (ARRS) in Riko d.o.o.a

This book was published in Slovenian.

The TRANSformacije Collection

On Power in Architecture

25 EUR

Architecture has always been a decisive manifestation of power. On Power in Architecture brings essays and interviews critically analysing the relationships between architecture and power from three philosophical perspectives: materialism, phenomenology, and post-structuralism. Perceptive philosophers, theorists of architecture, and historians have reflected on the intersection of power and architecture – also based on specific architectural cases with which they have analysed the topicality of the established theoretical concepts in the time of contemporary neo-liberalism.

The featured articles were first presented between 2017 and 2019 in a series of symposia On Power in Architecture in the Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana, supported by the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory and other partners. In this collection, they offer a coherent yet multi-layered insight into one of the key contemporary architectural questions.

TRANSformacije, book no. 47
Colection and editing: Mateja Kurir
Editor: Gregor Moder
© Maska, Ljubljana, 2022

Published: Maska, zavod za založniško, kulturno in producentsko dejavnost in Društvo Igor Zabel za kulturo in teorijo

Thanks to: Univerza v Ljubljani – Filozofska fakulteta, Javna agencija za raziskovalno dejavnost (ARRS) in Riko d.o.o.a

This book was published in Slovenian.

On Power in Architecture, Quotes

»Architecture has the power to isolate or integrate us. It possesses powers of affect too, potentially shaping our feelings, moods and dispositions. It can elicit absorption, concentration or distraction. Architecture can destroy and create, it can be iconic and iconoclastic, sometimes all at once. «
-Douglas Spencer, On Power, Capitalism and Architecture

»At first, the obvious thing is of course that in architecture, in order to get built, you need money, so that means that a lot of important buildings are being built by powerful people and they are powerful either because they have money or because they have political power. But then there are more also more subtle things that come into play that we are far less aware of in general. One can say, that the built environment kind of sets our societal expectations, societal standards, societal norms; sets that into stone. The whole construction of what we expect men to be and to behave like and what we expect women to be and to behave like, the construction of gender, of masculinity and femininity, is bound up with the built environment. «
-Hilde Heynen, Architecture, Power, Embodiment

»No city without a trauma. Each city has a history of devastation that defines it, be it in the shape of natural catastrophes, earthquakes, floods, or in the shape of enemy armies, the invaders conquering and ruining cities or their parts, or else the most devastating of all, the inexorable march of progress, the biggest enemy of the old. «
-Mladen Dolar, Power and the architectural unconscious

»That system is as natural as the logic of the market. This is Schumacher’s position insofar as he argues that, ‘parametricism offers a new, complex order via the principles of ‘differentiation and correlation’; these must be understood as organising space and thus forms of territorialization. The response is the counter-measure that reterritorializes. «
-Andrew Benjamin in Gerard Reinmuth, The Architecture of the Counter-Measure

 

About the Editor

Mateja Kurir is a philosopher, author, and project leader. With a doctoral thesis on the architecture in modernity, she obtained a PhD from the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. In non-specialist and scientific journals, she publishes articles focusing on the intersection between architecture and philosophy; as a member of the Radio Študent editorial office, she prepared radio shows Arhitektura govori (Architecture Talks) and Misliti arhitekturo (Thinking Architecture). She was visiting professor at the Department of Architecture, KU Leuven University, Belgium (2015), and postdoc researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies, University of Rijeka (2017). She published Arhitektura moderne in das Unheimiche: Heidegger, Freud in Le Corbusier (INR 2018) and edited Vrt in prispodoba (MAO and BF UL 2021) with Ana Kučan.

Photo: Domen Grögl

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