POLITICS OF FABRICATION I: 01 Brief

In the last several years, a crisis of capitalist development has redefined our understanding of cities in terms of international policy making, political constituencies and individual and collective political expressions in the urban realm. Inter Unit 8 has been experimenting with possible new scenarios for this political readjustment at a global scale, departing from its most basic expressions in the city. As a result, students have constructed innovative political arguments by experimenting with the relationship between everyday material activities–such as waiting for a bus, dancing, chatting in the streets, or wheeling and dealing in the city squares–and a particular material organization. In these common everyday practices, students have found the materials from which to reconstruct the political experience in the city. Manifested in public and constructed as a physical material expression, these everyday practices acquire a political value — understanding the political as what Hannah Arendt described as action in public — and redefine new models of the interaction between the individual and the collective in the public arena.

4.10.09

01 Brief

REASSESSING THE IMMEDIATE
Based on AA school’s everyday life, three small workshops will reassess the relation between the individual and the collective. With a special focus on governance, the aim of these three exercises will be to dismantle previous assumptions in order to reconsider the relation between architecture and politics in everyday, seemingly banal situations. (5 weeks)