Power / Architecture

Power and architecture are fundamental to the question of how contemporary society and architecture work together. Since power lacks a comprehensive logic, coherence and instrumentalization capability, the question refers both to the autonomous powers of the architectural forms and to a set of external powers represented through architecture. The presented series of projects based on current and extreme syntheses of comprehensive and complex world views enables mapping a network of powers that align, intersect, inflect and diverge from each other: collective power, ordaining power, economic power, technological power, ritual power, cultural power, media power and domestic power. The issue of counter power is then discussed against this background. Through eight essays by contributors, along with images, drawings and documents, the book renders visible a set of entities, informal conventions, stakeholders and means involved in the creation of architecture; that is, the dynamics of the collective that ceaselessly tests the architectural composition of the common world. With selected projects by Herzog & de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas, Eduardo Souto de Moura and many more.