Introducing the architectural values of the commons

Abstract

The recent development of an interdisciplinary field of reflection about and around the commons seems to assume a significant distance, in the field of architecture, concerning the disciplinary culture that preceded it. This article invites the protagonists of this emerging domain to explore the intensities and the reasons for such resistance. Based on a cross-reading of the main disciplinary and extra-disciplinary contributions to the subject, it intends to evaluate the controversial gap between architectural values and the renewed paradigm inspired by the commons. This new condition emerging between — or in addition to — the traditional ‘public’ and ‘private’ opposition could be considered as a bundle of alternatives but also as a source of fundamental continuities. By crossing the values of the commons with those of architecture, the aims of the proposal are twofold. First, such correspondence could bring a fertile semantic renewal in architectural language by confronting concepts and words. Second, it also could constitute a useful stage in developing critical views about this recent movement and its propagation in the humanities by clarifying several appropriations, in this case, in the field of architecture. Faced with the vitality of the theme, the attitudes of research identified within the current architectural debate appear as a prerequisite for the development of architectural thinking about what could bring together the commons, taking into account their multidirectional, ambiguous, or even contradictory nature.