– A lecture by Albena Yaneva

Please join us this Tuesday, October 18th from 6.00pm to 8.00pm at 63 Fifth Avenue, Room 515!

Five ways to make architecture political will be discussed. Architectural presentations provide a powerful way to witness the political dimension of design and the process of formation of urban publics. I will follow three different formats of architectural presentations (in the practices of Andrés Perea in Madrid, Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam and Moshe Safdie in Singapore) to demonstrate that the political is not any longer situated on the side of the individual. Instead, power is finely distributed in the objective tendency imposed by the situation of presenting. Following the specific techniques used by architects to re-enact buildings and urban concepts, I will showcase three distinctive ontological dynamics of the formation of urban publics and will illustrate how architects make urban arguments of civic importance.

Professor Albena Yaneva is an anthropologist of architecture with a PhD from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des mines de Paris (2001). Her work spans the disciplinary boundaries of architectural theory, science and technology studies, cognitive anthropology and political philosophy. It has been translated in German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese

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