Architecture and unavowable community : architecture and community as affirmation of insufficiency and incompleteness
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Date
29/06/2010Item status
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Wiszniewski, Dorian Stephen
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Abstract
My thesis concerns how architecture can actively participate in processes of community-formation
without reducing its creative processes to the oppositional tensions,
prejudices and instrumentality of conventional left/right or bottom-up/top-down
politics, “two poles of the same governmental machine.” By elaborating the architect
as craftsman-author, my thesis explores Community and processes of political and
poetic Representation. It is critical towards the biopolitics of governance. Theorisation
is drawn principally from the political philosophy of critical theory, phenomenology and
hermeneutics.
My thesis promotes the architecture of “unavowable community.” Rather than forming
communities by grouping likenesses together, and architecture forming their limits to
either secure self-sufficiency or protect against insufficiency, architecture is tasked with
finding methodologies for delimiting community-formation based on affirmative views
of incompleteness and insufficiency.
It is arranged in three Sections: Section I sets out the political and representational
ground from which the investigation into community begins – it is a brief investigation
into historical processes of forming community; Section II sets out possibilities for
rethinking community – it is an investigation that shifts questions of craftsmanship,
authorship, politics and representation from the search for appropriate community form
to processes for becoming community; Section III is an investigation into the processes of craftsmanship and authorship directed towards the unpredictable but nonetheless
“coming community” – it sets out a methodology for how an architect might go about
proposing community.