ARCHITECTURE: politics +  desire + form + power + scale + inclusion = a mutually supportive, fair, inclusive world

Architecture is a political inscription: construction is dependent on the economic capacity of those commissioning the construction; forms convey models of behaviour and formulate desire; power needs to make itself represented and recognise itself as being represented. Architects’ actions are also politically determined and only robust regimes are able to sustain large-scale experiments.

Any model of democratic (or democratising) architecture can originate in contexts of abundance or scarcity. Architecture is a socialising operation. Consequently, it affirms democratic ideas of a supportive, inclusive and fair world.

The conference architecture [in] ]out[ politics is emerging as an opportunity to consider and discuss architecture as a guiding instrument of democratic processes and as a temporal and spatial sign of their potentialities. Architecture and politics are, per se, argument and process, broad and open.

This conference discusses them in a cross-disciplinary, interdependent manner, in which critical reflection is circumscribed by a framework that is centred on four vectors: politics, citizenship, ambiguity, and apparatus. Through these vectors, an analysis will be carried out of the way that architectural practices operate as manifesto, place, factuality, and function.

The conference programme consists of the following names: Pier Vittorio Aureli, Pedro Bandeira, J. A. Bandeirinha, Jorge Carvalho, Ricardo Carvalho, Andrea Cavalletti, Santiago Cirugeda, Monique Eleb, Yona Friedman, Jonathan Hill, Thomas Hirschhorn, Jeffrey Inaba, Jorge M. Jáuregui, Rem Koolhaas, Reinhold Martin, Markus Miessen, Antanas Mockus, Joaquim Moreno and Sarah Whiting.