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24.10.2024

Towards an Architectonics of Environmentality: Diagramming the Spatial Production of Textural and Infrastructural Semiotics

Textural and Infrastructural Semiotics - Credit: Lucía Jalón Oyarzun

In 1979, Michel Foucault defined environmentality as a form of power in which control is exerted through the design and modulation of the environment. A techno-symbiotic environment where the milieu of biology, geography, and history, and the media of communication and information technologies merge. If the role of architecture in sovereign and disciplinary devices is... View Article

13.02.2024

El paisaje como imagen afectiva

Corinne Vionnet, Photo Opportunities: Berlin, 2005-2014.

En su camino hacia una filosofía política fundada no en cómo nos gustaría que fueran las cosas, sino en cómo son, el filósofo Spinoza tuvo que dar un paso atrás y desarrollar una ética que le permitiese demostrar, more geometrico, los afectos no como vicios o defectos de la naturaleza sino como propiedades de los... View Article

13.02.2024

Tim Waterman’s The landscape of utopia: writings on everyday life, taste, democracy, and design

This collection of essays, all authored and curated by Tim Waterman, foregrounds the entangled nature of utopia(nism), landscape (aka landship), design and imagination, where ‘everything is connected, everything is inseparable, everything can have different meanings and purposes in different contexts’. Food, politics, anarchism, the commons, emancipation, idiocy, conviviality and moral economies all come together in... View Article

04.10.2023

Mapeando la escritura de mujeres para la recuperación y 
activación de prácticas arquitectónicas menores:
 Niña, mujer, otras de Bernardine Evaristo

Virginia Woolf Diaries

A lo largo de la historia, muchas mujeres han puesto en práctica saberes arquitectónicos ligados al cuerpo y el habitar. Saberes menores y contrasaberes que se alimentan de lo circunstancial y experimental, operando en los estrechos márgenes y puntos ciegos de los lenguajes, estructuras y saberes mayores, a los que a su vez transforman. Estos... View Article

14.09.2023

Minoring Architectural Research

A theoretical and practical reflection on the possibilities, positions and methodologies of a minor approach to architectural research will reveal key concepts and tools to establish a critical position, build a situated architectural investigation and produce research materials otherwise. Minor architectures are an open repertoire of spatial practices and know-hows based on the immanent differentiating... View Article

04.07.2023

Harta ya de estar harta

…Toca pasar al ataque, porque no se trata de dar esperanza, sino de transmitir urgencia y rabia, y ofrecer solidaridad. Hace unos años, en un curso como este, Alberto Santamaría nos contaba que estaba estudiando a Friedrich Hayek, uno de los ideólogos del neoliberalismo. Hay que leer al enemigo, decía. Santamaría estaba estudiando cómo Hayek... View Article

20.05.2023

Traces of almojábana(s): FOODSCAPES’ infrastructural semiotics

Foodscapes - Spanish Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Biennale

Almojábanas used to be a very popular sweet food in Al-Andalus. These fritters were made from a mixture of water, flour, and cheese, the fried in oil and coated in cinnamon and honey. In current day Spain, we can find its Colombian derivation in many cities as well as local variations in Valencia, Aragon or... View Article

10.01.2023

Digital Doubles: The Major Agency of Minor Bits

Lucía Jalón Oyarzun, A paradoxically accurate 43% of blurred uncertainty, 2022. Google’s Cloud Vision API applied to Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The tower of Babel (c. 1563) confirms that there is a building in the image with a 57% certainty.

In a world that seeks to describe, codify and quantify everything, and particularly our viscerality and its interactions with our actual and digital environments, can we find interstitial spaces, currently unseen, unobserved and unlegislated, where we might be able to create minor architectures capable of blooming? Published in Architectural Design’s Special Issue:... View Article

10.01.2023

STOÀ Journal Issue 05: Contributive Workshops

Bussigny contributive workshop, 2018. © ALICE

In his prescient 2019 work Capitalist Realism, cultural critic Mark Fisher used the film Wall-e to point out the interpassive quality of critique under capitalism, where we delegate on a work of art or a piece of technology the agency to perform our judgement on our behalf. The Pixar film shows the Earth as an... View Article

10.01.2023

The Brooklyn Rail: The Expression of a Common Touch

Fragment of the circumnutation of a carnation’s young leaf, traced from 10.15 pm June 13th to 10.35 pm June 16th, from Charles Darwin’s The power of movement in plants.

In 1880, Charles Darwin published a collection of studies on the movements of plants. One of his experiments led him to describe a circular or elliptical movement with which the plant adapts to its environment, balancing out. He called it “circumnutation,” a kind of nodding around, and to see it, he did a pre-photographic time-lapse.... View Article

02.11.2022

Seeing Like a City: el Papel de las Imágenes en Red en la Construcción de Inteligencias Urbanas

En su libro de 2016, Seeing like a city Nigel Thrift y Ash Amin consideran la ciudad como una entidad viva con capacidad de dar sentido, pensar, afectar y ser afectada. Para ello, la ciudad genera imágenes, ve y adquiere conocimiento sobre su propio funcionamiento. Trabajaremos esta idea desde los Estudios Visuales (EV) y sus... View Article

01.11.2022

Codificación Urbana en Tiempos Computacionales: la Influencia de la Digitalización en las Formas de Inteligencia Urbana

La codificación urbana ha sido una constante a lo largo de la historia, diversos códigos tácitos o explícitos han configurado sus formas materiales y prácticas socioecológicas. Hoy, más de un siglo y medio después de la revolución del control que configuró económica y técnicamente las sociedades de la información contemporáneas (James R. Beniger, 1989) y... View Article