Collective Figurations of Baukultur

Invited lecturers: representation scholar (TBC), Marc Schoonderbeek, Hannah Knox, Ignacio Farías

Architectural representation has often dissociated its production from its product, trapped in loops of identification, reproduction and mimesis which have only increased under technocapitalism. Today, our cities and environments are measured to the detail and seemingly overrepresented through proliferating digital twins, predictive models and simulations, indicators and benchmarks. These operative visualizations which reduce the world to computable data, no longer merely describe reality: they organize, mobilize, and activate matter. They function as automated, asignifying spatial infrastructures, while progressively dispensing with a symbolic mediation increasingly deemed unnecessary and, just as often, a problematic source of ambiguity.

 

Digital twins, predictive models and simulations, indicators and benchmarks are a constitutive part of an expanding culture of immediacy (Kornbluh, 2024), where the critique of mediation carried out by the likes of Theodor Adorno or Henri Lefebvre is resolved not through its impossible disappearance, but through its naturalization. Subsumed within the environmental interface of capital and technology (Hörl 2017), mediation is subsequently desocialized and depoliticized.

 

However, without collective figurations, there is no possibility of common horizons, and our capacity to bring about democratic and inclusive transformations of our cities and territories falters. In the SNSF project Infrastructural Baukultur, ALICE (Atelier de la Conception de l'Espace) is exploring ways to leverage the constructed nature of all representations in the co-design of our cities. As part of this project, the aim of this two-day course is to focus on the theoretical and historical frameworks of this question.

During the 1980s, as the cultural and literary critic Fredric Jameson developed a spatial analysis of the historical stages of capitalism, he arrived (not uncritically) at the work of MIT urban theorist Kevin Lynch, particularly The Image of the City (1960). If Lynch had suggested that urban alienation was directly proportional to the impossibility of creating an (individual) mental image of the city, Jameson went further, contending that our "incapacity to map socially (is) as crippling to political experience as the analogous incapacity to map spatially is for urban experience." From there, he went on to develop the idea of cognitive mapping as an aesthetic strategy, arguing that, even when the structural coordinates of individual and social life become unrepresentable, they can still find figures and figurations through which to express themselves in allegorical, i.e. distorted and symbolic, ways.

Later on, feminist scholars Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti described figurations as "materialistic mappings of situated, i.e., embedded and embodied, social positions" (Braidotti 2011), noting that even if "figures pertain to graphic representation and visual forms in general, (they) do not have to be representational and mimetic, (...) they do have to be tropic, performative images that can be inhabited, condensed maps of contestable worlds. (...) The chip, seed, or gene is simultaneously literal and figurative. We inhabit and are inhabited by such figures that map universes of knowledge, practice and power" (Haraway 1997).

 

Departing from these premises and mirroring Jameson's journey, this time back into architecture and urban design, this course seeks to construct, historically and theoretically, the concept of figuration as an allegorical and material practice capable of mapping contestable and individually inaccessible realities, a tropic and political instrument that short circuits equivalences and unsettles certainties. From there, it will encourage a critical debate around a series of interrelated questions at the core of architectural practice and academia today. How does design research connect with the fields of architectural history, theory and practice? What challenges are posed to collective figuration by an unrepresentable capitalism, fragmented habitats, and infrastructured perceptions? Can a critical understanding of the abstract, ideological nature of operative representations help us repoliticize urban production? Can we trace alternative genealogies of architectural, urban, and landscape representation that reveal forms of agency and collectivity capable of overcoming the traps of immediacy? Can space, both as an abstraction and as a lived, grounded experience, become a translation device within inter-, intra-, and transdisciplinary processes?

To this end, the course will begin with an introductory session that develops a common framework by articulating, both historically and conceptually, the notion of figuration and its role within design methods, in contrast to the operational visualizations of environmentality. This framework will orient the subsequent lectures and discussions with our four invited speakers:

 

• (Name to be confirmed) to offer us a critical reflection on the political consequences of our contemporary regime of aesthetic and technological immediacy.
• Marc Schoonderbeek, Associate Professor of Architecture and Head of the Borders and Territories research group at TU Delft, will discuss the multilayered role of representation within design research strategies.
• Hannah Knox, Professor of Anthropology at UCL and author of Thinking Like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change (2020), will explain how a figure of climate needs to be collectively produced for democratic and inclusive transformations to take place.
• Ignacio Farías, Professor of Urban Anthropology, Director of the Georg Simmel Center for Urban Studies and Co-Director of the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, will present his ongoing work on spatial figures within urban transformation processes.

Assessment for the course will be based on active participation in the sessions and the submission of a written essay engaging with the ideas discussed throughout it. A selection of these essays will be published, alongside contributions from the invited keynote speakers, in an edited volume produced as part of the SNSF project Infrastructural Baukultur, which forms part of the National Research Programme 81 on Baukultur.