Architecture and unavowable community : architecture and community as affirmation of insufficiency and incompleteness

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.