Power Architecture

Abstract

Power / Architecture presents a series of projects based on current and extreme syntheses of comprehensive and complex world-views, which enables mapping a network of powers that align, intersect, inflect and diverge from each other. Collective power, ordaining power, economic power, technological power, ritual power, cultural power, media power and domestic power are being discussed in the book. Against this backdrop the issue of counter power is examined. Power and architecture are fundamental to the question of how contemporary society and architecture work together. Since power lacks a comprehensive logic, coherence and instrumentalization capability, the question refers both to the autonomous powers of the architectural forms as well as to a set of external powers represented through architecture. Through eight essays by various contributors, along with images, drawings and documents, the book renders visible a set of entities, informal conventions, stakeholders and means involved in the creation of architecture; that is, the dynamics of the collective that ceaselessly tests the architectural composition of the common world.