Positions on Emancipation: Architecture between Aesthetics and Politics

While our era of constant crisis demands stronger social and political engagement, architecture has been largely characterized by a lack of strong positions during the last decades. But more recently, one can again observe attitudes that claim to address architecture and urbanism as more engaged with the social and political effects of global capitalism. Against the liberal 'anything goes' and the revival of architectural autonomy, these attitudes believe less in the possibility for even the most experimental architectural object to have a changing effect on society. Their approaches instead vary from activism to the construction of new critical narratives. But how do these attitudes emancipate themselves from capitalism and to what extent are they able to take into account the complexities of the sociopolitical, economical, ecological, and cultural aspects of the production of space? This book relays a passionate debate between some of the most outstanding theoreticians and eloquent protagonists of this new attitude, leaving us with an overview of such postulated ambitions. A debate with Anne-Julchen Bernhardt, Arno Brandlhuber, Gilles Delalex, Manuel Gausa, Rania Ghosn &vEl Hadi Jazairy, Adrian Lahoud, Bart Lootsma, Markus Miessen, Can Onaner, Laurent Stalder, Peter Swinnen, Pelin Tan, Milica Topalovic, Stephan Truby, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, and Paola Vigano.