Architectutre of Action
PhD Dissertation
In the current context of hypermodernity and deterritorialization, our cities grow under constant mutations and transformations, where the processes of globalization increasingly diminish the affective transactions between the individual and the built habitat. Now we are facing the need to rethink the architectural paradigm and to develop new spatiotemporal strategies and new models of action in the city that reclaim spatial justice instead of continuing the construction of materialized ideologies and empty promises of happiness. Today, the right to remain in the city must be reexamined. Based on that need, the dissertation aims to build the conceptual and operational framework of a critical socio-urban attitude, which derives from the common behaviours, detected in the landscape of discursive and practical counter-appropriations that emerge as a reaction to the crisis of the imposed social consensus of both the Modern City and the Global City. The continuities between the discourses and the practices of transgression of the status quo become a crucial area of interest of this research, since they open the possibility of outlining a phenomenology of change in the modes of representation articulated around radical temporality and direct action. These both conceptual and operational continuities raise research questions based on the possibility to implement action’s operative behaviours as a projective and propositional approach defined by processes of counter-disciplinarity, dehierarchization of the creative agency and dematerialisation of the intervention format. Consequently, the main hypothesis of this dissertation is built on the interest in evolving phenomenology of action as a proactive interventionist attitude, which structures the whole research from an interpretive and non-conclusive approach. The main objective is to articulate a body of socio-spatial strategies of critical intervention in the hypermodern city which we propose to englobe under the concept of architecture of action.