Things That Make Us Move – Design and the New Regime of ‘Social’ and ‘Political’
How can a building, a bridge, a key, or a chair generate relational and political effects? What does an atrium do? How do material arrangements matter socially and politically? How can the design of a lecture theatre stimulate thinking? How can mundane activities as simple as climbing stairs or taking the elevator have social effects? To tackle these questions we need to embrace a dynamic view of design. There is no politics behind a bridge, no society behind an atrium; rather the ‘social’ and the ‘political’ are emergent; they are to be witnessed as we interact with, stroll through, use, and let ourselves be guided by mundane architectural artifacts or infrastructures. Exploring ethnographically a university building as a relational, social, and political site, I illustrate how its material arrangement mediates everyday relationships and makes political and social life possible. We witness how design becomes ‘social’ and ‘political’ through the connected agency of things and a variety of dwellers with different ontology.
Albena Yaneva is professor of architectural theory and director of the Manchester Architecture Research Centre (MARC) at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. She has been visiting professor at Princeton School of Architecture and Parsons. Her research is intrinsically transdisciplinary and crosses the boundaries of science studies, cognitive anthropology, architectural theory, and political philosophy. She is the author of several books, The Making of a Building (2009), Made by the OMA: An Ethnography of Design (2009), Mapping Controversies in Architecture (2012), Five Ways to Make Architecture Political: An Introduction to the Politics of Design Practice (forthcoming), and editor (with Alejandro Zaera-Polo) of What is Cosmopolitical Design? (2015). Her work has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Thai. Yaneva is a recipient of the RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding Research (2010).