The Social (Re)Production of Architecture by Doina Petrescu Kim Trogal

Author:Doina Petrescu,Kim Trogal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

NETWORKED ACTIVITIES AND THE ARCHITECTURAL

We need to place what we know within a structure, which in turn enables us to make sense of our knowledge.

(O’Neill, 2006: 12)

All social structures have spatial conditions and the making of new relationships will shape new spaces. The relationships made through the collective and productive enterprises of the projects described here weave spatial realities between the often very different places in use. They link parks to community centres, farms to a soda workshop, a training kitchen to a playground, a factory to a coffee table, a local archive to a hop-garden, slowly revealing the three new community buildings in their making, the shop, the school, the company.

These structures, or architectures, need to be more foregrounded within the general current cultural discourse of relational practices, which often focuses on the socio-geographical or socio-political rather than the actual physical spatialities and qualities. The spatialities in use are rarely confined to one place or building. They are often complicated, spreading across places and times, experienced by individuals or groups, on- and off-line. They are multiple and messy spatialities which constitute our everyday experience and which we travel through in very fluid ways, moving from private social space to public online, from intimate public to professional private, and so on. However, when it comes to describing the everyday use of space, our language seems much more limited than the realities we experience. We mainly rely on terms which refer to the static and the built, such as the square, the school, the mall, the park, the corner, the office, and so on, rather than temporary realms with often unclear boundaries.

It is this limitation in readily available language, paired with a general shift towards a global culture where mobility, connectivity and dispersed sociabilities dominate, which Lane Relyea addresses in his (2013) book, Your Everyday Art World. Here he reflects on a general loss of the architectural, which he regards as a danger to further lose control over one’s own means. For example, the shift from production to project, which characterizes the current art world also means that ‘the figure of the network begins to appear less like defiance and more like the latest answer to capitalism’s constant need to overcome and reinvent itself’ (Relyea, 2013: 9).

The question he poses is how current cultural practice and socially engaged art in particular can remain critical and engaged, without being swallowed up by what has become a general global socio-cultural phenomena, following the dynamics of digitalization, globalization and neoliberalism where everyone becomes an ever-more spread-out decentred actor (or ‘omnivore’, as Relyea puts it). A networked society where everyone can adapt supposedly active relations to production and the imposed concept of the ‘pro-sumer’ (marketer-speak for professional or ‘producerly’ consumers) dilutes any self-driven collectivity. He also points to the danger that the current project might be too determined and embedded within purely social flows and networks and shift away from the architectonic, which to a certain degree is crucial in achieving and practising collectivity.

The understanding

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