This series of events seeks to introduce political economic thinking from outside the architecture discipline as a crucial supplement to current architectural discussions, exploring the structural connection between the climate crisis and the crisis of capital, as both accelerate in the covid period and beyond. Caught within multiple and intersecting contradictions, architecture struggles today to find traction in a world increasingly at odds with disciplinary presuppositions. The series will consist of three open sessions discussing concepts and problems of political economy, and a symposium bringing together speakers from both within and outside architecture.
In session 3 of the series, we will transition to Marxist political economy itself, and establish its key theoretical bases. Everything is about to make a lot more sense, as we explore the core reasons for why capitalist systems are inherently expansionist—not because of human nature or cultural bias, but due to the structural dynamics of the capitalist organisation of labour and production of value. Through a Marxist prism, we will look at the historic collapse of the Keynesian consensus and the contemporary collapse of neo-liberalism, and we will debate the structural challenges that the double crisis of climate and capital pose for political action and for the architectural profession today.
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.
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.
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