Critique of Architecture offers a renewed and radical theorisation of the relations between capital and architecture. It explicates the theoretical gymnastics through which architecture legitimates its services to neoliberalism, examines the discipline’s production of platforms for happily compliant consumers, and challenges its entrepreneurial self-image. Critique of Architecture also addresses the discourse of architectural autonomy, analyses the post-political turns of contemporary architecture theory, and reckons with the legacies and limitations of critical theory.
Douglas Spencer is Pickard Chilton Professor and Director of Graduate Education at Architecture at Iowa State University. He is the author of The Architecture of Neoliberalism (2016), Critique of Architecture (2020), and has written for Radical Philosophy, Log, e-flux, New Geographies, Volume, Journal of Architecture, Avery Review, and contributed to collections including Architecture Against the Post-Political (2014), This Thing Called Theory (2016), Architecture and Feminisms (2017), Landscape and Agency (2017) and Architectural Affects After Deleuze and Guattari (2020).
The author will be joined by Eleni Axioti, Marianela D’Aprile, Will Orr and Ricardo Ruivo to discuss the book, its arguments, and their own perspectives on the issues it engages with.
Eleni Axioti is a researcher and an educator. She is lecturer in contextual studies at the University of the Arts London and teaches history and theory of architecture at Architectural Association. She completed her Ph.D. at the AA on the dissolution of the architecture of the British welfare state. Her work focuses on architectural history in regard to issues of government, social policy, and political economy.
Marianela D’Aprile is a writer living in Chicago. Her work deals in architecture, culture, and politics. She holds a Masters in Architecture History and Theory from the University of California – Berkeley.
Will Orr is a British-Canadian theorist and historian based in London. In 2019, he completed a PhD at the AA, where he teaches in the history and theory programme. Using an historical materialist framework, his research examines the interplay between political and architectural theory from the 1960s to the present.
Ricardo Ruivo is a Portuguese architect, researcher, and teacher at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, where he completed his PhD. His work focuses on the tensions between architectural form and political content in architectural discourse, and on contemporary problems internal to the rising effort towards a re-politicisation of the discipline.
