Design Potentials and Deconstructed Powers

Deconstructed Architectures: Law and Power, and their Interiorities

Space is defined by human perception. By perception, human ideas are projected onto the material world. Power is especially potent in this projection as it is produced in every instant, point, and interaction. Power is omnipresent, but not as a universal law, rather it constructs itself in all things through carefully manufactured perceptions of difference.

These systems construct themselves at an inescapable scale as Interiorities, by trapping people within their personal systems of belief, forcing them to conformity with the physical constructions of these systems. Architecture is complicit to this dynamic, as all architectural space possesses a designed spatial hierarchy, that when inhabited, categorizes and organizes the inhabitants. This establishes the perceptions of difference in the inhabitants, and the inhabitants then become complicit to the further establishment of these ideas, becoming enforcers to their own entrapment, perpetuators to isolation, subjugation, and bureaucracy. Our project conforms to the inhabitants of a space, reversing the traditional relationship of built space to the inhabitant, and through this brings typical subconscious assumptions of space into conscious question. By the project’s increased visual opacity and performative aspects, traditional and subconsciously assumed power structures of architecture are subverted, empowering the user to an active force that projects itself onto the world around it, reforming the built environment at a perceptual scale and timeline.

Notable Influences:

The Trial Franz Kafka

The History of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt

Towards a Minor Architecture Jill Stoner

History of Sexuality Michel Foucault

Thousand Plateaus Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

The Principles of Morals and Legislation Jeremy Bentham

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