A(n overly ambitious) manifesto for spatial politics.

We seek to understand and operate with architecture/landscapes/urbanism/territories as ‘matters of concern’, understanding impacts and relationships with resources, economies, society, politics, culture. Architecture is a complex and political act, embedded with historic bias and contemporary hegemony; the creation of spaces implies power structures and (im)material flows. Ours is an effort to conceive of architecture in this expanded field as an act of critique, but also as a directive for practice which we engage and employ in our design work. 

We understand architecture (and all components of our physical environments) as “things” rather than objects.

Contemporary globalizing and neoliberalizing systems tend to manufacture distance between objects and their origins/implications, a process philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has coined ‘adiaphorization.’ In an era where it’s increasingly difficult to know where your dinner came from or how an image will be leveraged across different media, we believe this act of disentanglement to be particularly urgent. Across the spatial disciplines, this includes a concern with material metabolisms, (re)productions of spatialized power dynamics, access and mobility, and visibility.

If all design is political (and we would hold that it is) then it is important to establish an agenda for how and why we practice. Projects that fail to acknowledge their ‘thingness’—interconnectedness—can become pawns in alternative, and often problematic, power systems (see Albert Speer, or any of today’s peons to speculative capital). Our platform for critical spatial practice is one of unpacking, tracing, and making visible this web of ‘concern’ around spatial projects. Where our work manifests in the physical world we are interested not only in the object itself, but its cascading effects. We are interested in things, but also the undersides of things, the dark twins and epigenetic landscapes of objects in the physical world. 

This manifesto for spatial practice is an attempt to re-politicize design practice, stripping away the ‘givens’ which emerge from Bauhaus-lineage educations, uncritical resiliency/ ‘sustainability narratives, and unquestioned or positivist notions of ‘progress’.

See also: Design as (Re-)Assemblage published in LA+ Journal "Design" Issue, Spring 2019.

Under this conceptual umbrella (on top of this conceptual platform), THING is organized around a series of loose and interrelated themes:

Expanded Urbanisms
Contested Territories
Critical Cartographies
Ontological Openings
Alter-modernities
Grounded Spaces
Alternative Imaginaries