Writings

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

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

12.09.2022

Windowish Practices, Unreadable Backgrounds and Raw Semiotics. Tracing Minor Architectures and Ecologies of Signs in Women’s Writing

Covers of the two parts

Minor architectures can be defined as an open set of spatial practices and know-hows based on the agency of bodies. While these practices escape representation, codification or measurement, they have a fertile relation with literature. After framing this relationship, we analyze the work of three women writers (Carmen Martín Gaite, Ali Smith and Toni Morrison)... View Article

10.01.2022

Nothing but a few signs, like stars in an immense black night: clandestinity and night-faring practices in the Underground Railroad

Edwin Hergesheimer, Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the southern states of the United States. Compiled from the census of 1860. Washington: Henry S. Graham, 1861

The text focuses on how clandestinity, understood as the articulation of spaces of secrecy and invisibility, is traversed by a singular form of architectural knowledge centered on embodied practices. A set of minor know-hows playing with the lines of the visible world while understanding the material effects of individual and collective bodies, all founded on... View Article

10.09.2017

Exception and the Rebel Body: the Political as Generator of a Minor Architecture

Bus seating chart for Rosa Parks 04767_2000_001

Following the Iranian elections in 2009, the city of Tehran experienced a wave of protests to denounce alleged irregularities in the electoral process. As the streets were lined with police chasing protesters, they climbed to the city’s rooftops to express their disagreement. Thus, every night a chorus of voices intoned the same chants their parents’... View Article