Architecture's Exodus and the Role of Dissident Practitioner

Abstract

Architecture’s safety and purification embodied in Alberti’s registers of building, drawing and text is disturbed. The disturbance and pollution of architecture comes from potent life forces and changing conditions that encounter materiality of the world - occupation, site and construction. These material forms have architectural consequences and possess the agency that causes such effects. Resistance to architecture’s registers also comes from practices that engage with changing notions of materiality and create distributed effects, which resist a permanent sense of a purified home of architecture. Such practices deploy gentle strategies of resistance in order to displace the viewer, tear the sensible from the sensible and uphold the tension between the art and politics of resistance. The work of Antoni Malinowski is one such practice that challenges architecture’s materiality through shimmering and scattering strategies. Another example is an interdisciplinary installation, “A Temporary Urban Garden: Teasing Adonis,” that reinterprets ancient Greek myth in view of the exiled citizen’s position in contemporary Athens.

Keywords:

• registers
• materiality
• dissent
• gentle strategies of resistance
• architectural paradox

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ivana Wingham

Ivana Wingham is an architect and academic. She is Head of the Architecture Program at Brighton University, UK. She completed her undergraduate studies in Architecture at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, moved to the UK and then continued her postgraduate studies at the Architectural Association. She then became a registered architect and completed her Ph.D. at the Bartlett School of Architecture UCL, London. Her latest book, Mobility of the Line: Art Architecture Design, was published by Birkhauser in May 2013. The book engages with the line and its contingencies across disciplines, practices and theories.