While there exists an extensive volume of politically engaged architecture projects and countless architects who, particularly in their youth, practiced with explicit agendas, architecture offices have in the main been formed around a signature typology or aesthetic. Consider Zaha Hadid’s cultural icons, Christopher Wren’s churches or Santiago Calatrava’s sculptural engineering: such designers branded their careers upon a signature feature, their trademark image subsequently produced and reproduced in design journals. However, a contingent of young European architects have begun to challenge this custom to instead orient their practice around what might be referred to as the ‘political object’. These spatial activists operate from the sidelines as facilitators, utilising design not as an end in itself but as a means to pursue a specific objective.

Map poster from IBE#1 Pamphlet.
Map poster from IBE#1 Pamphlet. © InBetween Economies / Studio Atlant

This movement1 of engaged collectives most likely presents only a partial picture of a current state of affairs. Architecture, as with other professions, is diversifying as the age of connectivity blurs its former institutional and professional boundaries. Perhaps, then, spatial activism is a confluence of ‘architectural design’ and ‘the political project’, with many further potential instances of interdisciplinary overlap. Yet, if this activism is understood as the mobilisation of that which is thought into a process of doing, it could be argued that the work of the architect is in itself inherently political, however disengaged their initial aims may have been. Acting upon an identifiable yet fluid set of cultural ideologies, the designer collaboratively develops projects that appropriate their values and solidify their decision-making within material space. The impact is therefore twofold: such interventions generate a built environment of objects that, in themselves, modify a former state of affairs, so can likewise be understood to possess political agency. Perhaps the architectural process is then invariably an act of activism in a broad sense, whether or not a practice adopts a political cause as its primary objective. When asked what skill the collectives saw as essential for an architecture studio to possess in the near future, New South replied “we consider that it will be key to have a point of view”.

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