Architecture of/as Protest: Action, Place and the Concern for the World

Abstract

What is the relation between political action and architectural space? How do protesters and other actors transform urban spaces into stages for envisioning and enacting political change? How do architectural places in turn support, condition or even elicit public action? How are architects and designers political actors, and how can architecture, design, and art be considered to ‘act’ within the public realm? These questions were taken as points of departure for an advanced research seminar in architectural theory taught at Louisiana State University in the fall of 2020. The course explored the role that architectural spaces and practices play in different forms and modes of political protest action, not only in light of the Black Lives Matter protests that year, but also the global urban protest movements, uprisings and events of the last decades across the spectrum of concerns from human rights to climate change. In this paper I discuss how the seminar sought to examine protest action within the ‘architectural’ perspectives of space, place, inhabitation and making, as well as the capacity of architecture and art practices to ‘act’ in the mode of protest within the political perspectives of agency, speech, the common and appearance. The seminar took as a primary framework the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt, and the intrinsic relation she posits between the places of the fabricated, common world and the very possibility of political action. I then consider how place comes to be at stake in architecture as a mode of protest in students’ research on a wide range of topics, issues, events and practices. I conclude by reflecting on how such an architecture of protest would comprehend a radical place-making, acting to help establish the conditions for political action, and to nurture, support and sustain them so that protest actors may enact and embody claims for justice in their own acting and speaking.