INTRODUCTION CAMP FOR OPPOSITIONAL ARCHITECTURE VOLUME #10
| CAMP FOR OPPOSITIONAL ARCHITECTURE AN ARCHITEKTUR |
||||
|
The dominant practice of architecture nowadays has reached an intolerable level of affirmation of the hegemonic concept of neo-liberalism and its harassing implementations. The way it is taught at universities, promulgated in magazines and rises on construction sites does not offer any adequate answers to the pressing issues of a today's society. Indeed, it is a vital part of the problem. Architects have lost touch with political reality, are caught up in reactionary role models, and place too much faith in their obsolete tools, while they are still alarmingly ignorant about the economic, political and social effects of their work. The consequences of the erosion of welfare states, the globalization of markets and diverse forms of exploitation ridicule what little remains of the ethical rhetoric in the architectural community. But if there were any serious kind of disagreement related to the status of society and the purported lack of alternatives to it, a thorough critique of the bitter logic of late capitalism and how it structures everyday life must, in particular, address the production of our built environment. There would be a need for a seriously critical architecture, conscious of the conditions within which it acts and facing up to the facts of our segregated and totally economically determined world. An oppositional architecture would be needed. Architectural acts of resistance are conceivable precisely because architecture is political both in its definition and its effects, and it is embedded in the social balance of power. The extensive involvement of architecture in economic and social aspects of society does not contradict this possibility, but is rather a fundamental precondition for a committed opposition. The small part of the built environment that is subject to planning at all is almost completely controlled by the claims of capitalist utilization. But you could also describe it as a privileged field of conflict relating to the definition of our society, the spaces it produces and the way they are used. Let us produce contested spaces and architectures of opposition against the pacifications of a false consensus which is unable to convince us as we face the condition of our global built environment. *) The 2006 'Camp for Oppositional Architecture' in Utrecht again looked for possible means of resistance within the field of architecture and planning. (The event was held in November, after this issue went into print.) Having brought together practitioners and researchers in Berlin 2004 who exchanged views and developed a common basis of discourse on the open idea of oppositional architecture, we now wanted to further explore the theoretical grounds on which such projects could spread. As part of a series of future Camps, each dealing with a specific issue, this Camp was to elaborate the concept of opposition within the field of architecture and planning. The Camp focused on analytical approaches that invent, explore and reflect on possibilities of architectural resistance that withstand the demands of a capitalist production of space and try to develop a non-affirmative attitude within this powerful contiguity. The questions asked related to ways to conceptualize the idea of opposition within the field of architecture and planning. In which context or social field, with which prerequisites and which objectives that could be imagined. What stances, strategies or coalitions needed to be formed. What kind of planning methods or design approaches could be devised that were appropriate to contemporary social reality. Which projects could be taken as a common basis in order to empower our practice. And how to resist and oppose the social order from within the profession. | ||||