Program:
14.00 Lecture: Bio-politics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture, Sven Olov Wallenstein, Södertörn University
15.00 Roundtable discussion: Architectural politics, anyone?. Martin Braathen, (NTNU), Anders Melsom (Conditions Magazine) and Sven Olov Wallenstein (University of Södertörn, Stockholm). Moderator: Thordis Arrhenius (OCCAS/AHO)
Place: Small Auditorium, AHO
Description:
The notion of governmental architectural politics seems to be taken as an unproblematic and indisputable good in recent debates in Norway. But the relationship between politics and architecture, and the evolution of state- and religious control with and through architecture has a long and complicated history. The contemporary meetings between architecture, urbanism, trans-national power structures and spatial politics constitute a complex and manifold field of debate. The theory seminar Architectural Politics, Anyone? presented at the Oslo Centre for Critical Architectural Studies’ (OCCAS) contribution to the Oslo Triennale 2010, considers the fundamental relationship between architecture and politics through Sven Olov Wallenstein’s analysis of the work of Michel Foucault and the emergence of modern architecture.
Wallenstein proposes that for Foucault modern power should first and foremost be understood in terms of “biopower” or “biopolitics.” While Foucault connects this to an idea of the spatialization of power, it involves an irreducible dimension of freedom, which for Foucault is essentially bound up with the apparatuses of security that increasingly have come to permeate modern societies. Wallenstein suggests that in this condition questions concerning architecture are central. The trajectory of architectural modernity can be interpreted precisely as a project of subject formation, as the moulding and shaping of subjectivity understood as life—in short, as a biopolitical instrument were architecture plays a vital role.
Arranger:
The Oslo Centre for Critical Architectural Studies is an humanities based research centre for advanced studies in architecture based at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design. OCCAS cultivates a critical approach to the built environment through research that rethinks the boundaries of the architectural object and the definition of architectural authorship. With research projects ranging from the study of discreet architectural objects, to architectural processes, contexts and landscapes, OCCAS insists on the contemporary relevance of historical research, its critical potentials and its urgency for architectural discourse today. Founding members are Thordis Arrhenius (director) Mari Hvattum, Janike Larsen and Mari Lending
Contributors:
Sven-Olov Wallenstein teaches philosophy and aesthetics at Södertörn University in Stockholm, and is the editor-in-chief of Site. He is the translator of works by Baumgarten, Winckelmann, Kant, Hegel, Frege, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Rancière, and Agamben, as well as the author of numerous books on philosophy, art, and architecture. Recent publications include Essays, Lectures (2007), The Silences of Mies (2008), Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture (2009), Nihilism, Art, and Technology (2010), and Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State (co-ed. with Helena Mattsson, 2010).
Anders Melsom is an architect, editor and partner in Conditions magazine, www.conditionsmagazine.com. He received his diploma at Bergen School of Architecture in 2000. He has since then worked in several offices, among them West 8 in Rotterdam, A-lab and Lund Hagem in Oslo. In 2004 he was one of the co-founders of the international project-based ”bad-architects.network.”
Among other activities with members of the network, he has contributed with projects for the exhibition "Shrinking Cities-Interventions" in the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig 2005, and for "Culture of Risk", the architecture triennale in Oslo 2007. Anders Melsom has been a guest critic/teacher on several courses in the Oslo School of Architecture and the Bergen School of Architecture.
Mattias Braathen is an independent architect, critic and curator based in Oslo, Norway. He is currently a PhD candidate in architectural history at NTNU and is a regular contributor to the Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv/D2 Magazine. He received his curatorial training from the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York and architectural training from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim and Universität der Künste/Berlin. He has been the Exhibitions Director at Norsk Form/The Norwegian Centre for Design and Architecture in Oslo and the Architecture Curator at PROJEKT 0047 in Berlin.
Braathen has contributed essays and reviews to such magazines as Architecture Magazine (New York), Architektur Aktuell (Vienna), Byggekunst/Arkitektur N (Oslo), Deutsche Bauzeitung and Pasajes (Madrid). His book Alt er arkitektur! Institusjonskritikk og neoavantgarde i Norge 1965-1970 (Everything is Architecture! Neo-Avant-Garde and Institutional Critique in Norway 1965-1970) was released on Tapir Academic Press, april 2010.
Thordis Arrhenius is architect and professor in Architectural History and Conservation at the Institute of Form, Theory and History, Oslo School of Architecture and Design, where she teaches theory of conservation During 2010 she is head Oslo Centre for Critical Architectural Studies, arranging the centre’s lectures and seminar series.
Her current research project, Architecture on Display, investigates the role of the architectural exhibition in the reception of modern architecture in Scandinavia. Publications include ‘The Vernacular on Display’ in Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State (eds. Sven-Olov Wallenstein and Helena Mattsson, 2010) and the forthcoming The Fragile monument: On Conservation and Modernity.