Regulations of private and public space from the 20th to the 21st century. From the resident to the citizen. Architectural and artistic interventions.
In the course, we examine the transformations and regulations that take place in the views and arrangements regarding the private and public space, the transition from the resident to the citizen, from the 20th to the 21st century. The unity attempts to look into the epistemological and theoretical ground upon which new analytical possibilities in tune to the current political aspects of architecture can be developed in the direction of a radical social formation. Emphasis is given to the understanding of the complexity of the globalized architectural practices by examining critically the issues of local and global, North and South, gender and identity politics, private and public and the various dichotomies that shape our perception of the politics of space. The transition from physical to digital, from human to post-human condition, is also an axis of reflection in relation to transformations and spatial arrangements of the private and public life and space. Issues, of gender, artistic and architectural claims, conventions and practices defining the concept of public space and various technologies, such as the archive, the statistics, the medical technology etc. are tools to look at architectural theory and the issues of the private and public in the expanded political field, as it is shaped in modern and post-modern condition. The course is based on the study of architectural and artistic examples. The approach of the course does not give precedence to the public versus the private space, the large versus the small scale, but it examines various and diverse aspects of architectural and artistic thought and action looking, also, beyond the Eurocentric approaches and western examples. It examines the permutations of architecture, urban planning and the art of public space to the interdisciplinary fields of critical geography and anthropology, publicity and digital media (and social networking).
The examples examined in this course go through the history of architecture and artistic practice in the private and public space from the 20th to the 21st century. The iconic figures of Le Corbusier, Adolf Loos, Philip Johnson and Alvaro Alto are followed by those of De_Colonizing Architecture, Creative Ecologies, the Roads Houses Project, the Sans Papiers Movement, Ala Plastica, the Dialogue at Kopaweda. The art of Situationists and George Perec meets with Critical Art Ensemble, the Atlas Group and Park Fiction. The texts of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault are contrasted with those of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Judith Butler with those of Donna Haraway and Beatrice Colomina, find their connections with the texts of Nicolas Bouriaud, Rosalynd Deutsche, Claire Bishop, e.a.