Architecture Against the Post-Political Essays in Reclaiming the Critical Project

Written by a team of renowned contributors and carefully edited to address the themes laid out by the editors in their introduction, the book includes theoretical issues concerning the questions of aesthetics and politics and addresses city and urban strategies within the general critique of the "post-political". By focusingon specific case studies from Warsaw, Barcelona, Dubai, Tokyo and many more the book consolidates the contributions of a diverse group of academics, architects and critics from Europe, the Middle East and America. This collection fills the gap in the existing literature on the relation between politics and aesthetics, and its implications for the theoretical discourse of architecture today. In summary, this book provides a response to the predominant de-politicization in academic discourse and is an attempt to re-claim the abandoned critical project in architecture.

List of figures Preface Acknowledgements List of Contributors Introduction: The Critical Project and the Post-Political Suspension of Politics NADIR LAHIJI Part 1: Aesthetics, Politics, and Architecture 1. Metropolitics, or, Architecture and the Contemporary Left DAVID CUNNINGHAM 2. Modern Democracy and Aesthetic Revolution in the Work of Rancière: Reflections on Historical Causality GABRIEL ROCKHILL 3. Unfaithful Reflections: Re-actualizing Benjamin’s Aestheticism Thesis LIBERO ANDREOTTI 4. Political Subjectification and the Architectural Dispositif NADIR LAHIJI Part 2: The Political and the Critique of Architecture 5. Capitalism and the Politics of Autonomy GEVORK HARTOONIAN 6. Architecture As Such: Notes on Generic(ness) and Labor Sans Phrase FRANCESCO MARULLO 7. Thoughts on Agency, Utopia and Property in Contemporary Architectural and Urban Theory GEORGE BAIRD 8. Metalepsis of the Site of Exception DONALD KUNZE Part 3: The Post-Political and Contemporary Urbanism 9. The Architecture of Managerialism: OMA, CCTV, and the Post-Political DOUGLAS SPENCER 10. Zero Points: Urban Space and the Political Subject UTA GELBKE 11. To Fill the Earth: Architecture in a Spaceless Universe ROSS EXO ADAMS 12. From Post-Political to Agonistic: Warsaw Urban Space Since 1989 LIDIA KLEIN Index.

Nadir Lahiji is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Canberra, Australia. He is the editor of Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2014). He previously edited The Political Unconscious: Re-Opening Jameson’s Narrative (Ashgate, 2011) and co-edited Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997). He teaches architecture theory, modernity, and contemporary criticism in the intersections of philosophy, radical social theory and psychoanalytical theory.