Architecture is the basis of politics. It is the underground network that embodies the manifestation of power in architectural and urban space. In order to make the machine of the system work, governments put in place a set of apparatus. As Foucault and Agamben worked on, the apparatus represent a set of praxis, knowledge, institutions and administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral or philanthropic proposals, or even urban or architectural devices. A network of power relations is then created between the Politician, the Living Being and all of these apparatus. Today, the entire life of individuals is shaped, contaminated and controlled by any of these apparatus. But what about the instrumentalization of architecture in democratic spaces?
We live in the heart of territories that exert powerful attractions on us, and we influence them in return. These territories are the receptacles of our lives. These are our cities, our suburbs and our villages. The territory is qualified by these architectures which interact with our body. These envelop us and constrain us, but it is through use that we free ourselves from the physical constraints of the built environment.

The six selected territories create a common story. They are worked in 6 triptychs which evoke, for each document, a new questioning. Seen as archetypes, they form a collection of territorial samples of the representative powers and oppositions actions of France. A map, a fragment and a dreamlike proposition are the results of our research on those question about power and its opposition.

The final account describes all of the powers attributed to architecture. It is thought of as an investigation that alerts you to the most beautiful and the most monstrous it can produce. It works like an imaginary initiatory journey through territorial archetypes. These archetypes exist in the same territory, that of France. Their allegories draw the same mythology without morals. In this myth the characters are called tower, wall, enclosure, server, dome and panopticon. Together, they tell the tragic and eternal story of the fallen practitioners of architecture. They give rise to open questions which recount the sublime drama of architectural devices and question their manipulation. The question is no longer what we are, but what we want to become.

The project was developed at the National School of Architecture in Versailles.

KOOZ What prompted the project?

IJ | LN Architecture is a political act. It is a large-scale object that bears witness to the complex and intangible power relations between government and citizens. To better understand the world around us, we need to decipher power relations that govern our society. The architect’s tools seem to offer this possibility. During our studies, we thought a lot about architectural production and not about its condition. As architects of tomorrow, this project gave us time to think, to understand and to produce a thought in relation to these subjects of power and opposition actions in the architectural and urban fields.

KOOZ What questions does the project raise and which does it address?

IJ | LN The project is meant to inform and question every architect about the act of building. It can be seen also as a reminder. Are architecture and urbanism the pharmakon of power? How is architecture instrumentalized in democratic spaces? We often find ourselves thinking that politics is fiction, and that it is not tied to anything concrete. And yet it is so present: our institutions, which we pass by every day just to go to school, is an example. Peace, justice, harmony… these figures with solemn names come to life in buildings that are an integral part of our cities.

Architecture is therefore never neutral, it is an intimately political practice. In order to make the machine of the system work, governments put in place a set of devices, which they wield like toys. The devices represent a set of praxis, knowledge, institutions and measures. They direct our thoughts, limit them, capture them, control them and direct them.

Today, technologies direct individuals and invest their bodies constantly manipulated by public authorities. Our cities, which seem frightfully banal to us, are not simple exceptions but rather objects thought of as models of governance, models that apply to all of our territories and our country. Power takes life as the object of its exercise, being embodied in devices that are each more elusive than the other. And if power takes human lives as its targets, then we must determine what in them resists it.

KOOZ What informed the six selected territories and what do they stand for?

IJ | LN The six chosen territories function as territorial archetypes. The 6 of them deal with the capital city, the suburbs, rural villages, suburban towns, coastal towns or even areas in struggle (zone to defend). For each archetype, we wanted to select one case study that we could use as a testimony. We made some research and tried to work all over the country to understand it as much as possible. As we started our work in the COVID time, accessibility was one of the condition of our choices. This is how Paris, Lesigny, Nanterre, Marseille, Lavaudieu and the zone to defend of Notre Dame des Landes appeared. Learning from France.

KOOZ How do the characters shape and respond to each condition?

IJ | LN The tool of storytelling gives birth to six architectural cities. However, these six fantasized and anticipatory visions show, for each of the territories, the same observation. All tell of the complexity, compartmentalization, fragmentation and burst of our territories, phenomena found in each of the archetypes analyzed. The story describes all of the powers attributed to architecture. It is thought of as an investigation, which alerts to the most beautiful and the most monstrous things it can produce. It works like an imaginary initiatory journey through territorial archetypes. Each condition is an emphasis of all the apparatus we discovered in each city.

We imagine a kind of distopic France where there was an explosion of inequalities and economic difficulties, linked to climate change, revealed a battery of societal symptoms, each more alarming than the next. This new government security frenzy, whose watchwords were control and surveillance, was made possible by the manipulation of new technologies but also by the implementation of innovative architectural devices. New urban and architectural achievements were born in cities, sometimes even pushing their inhabitants to invent new forms of community life. And all of this relied on the active participation of visionary architects. Each story and illustration leads the reader to question the architectural condition nowadays.

KOOZ How did you approach the research into the role that architecture plays within systems of power?

IJ | LN We wanted to consider the link that exists between political bodies and architectural discipline in order to understand the role of this one within the strategies of power. It is indeed a discipline fundamentally engaged in its interaction with the territory, which constantly influences the lives of individuals. This dialogue between architecture and power also induces a set of controversy that we found interesting to reveal.

We therefore started by defining the words “power”, “politics”, “architecture”, “biopolitics”, “necropolitics”… then we discovered the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben who searched a lot on these notions of power. They both introduced the notion of “apparatus,” which are tools that political governments put in place to make the societal system work. The apparatus have the capacity to orient, determine, intercept, shape, control and ensure the gestures, behavior, opinions and speeches of living beings.
It is through this notion that we highlight the link between architectural discipline and the dynamics of political power. We have therefore tried, through our seven case studies spread into French territory, to consider the architectural apparatus put in place by the political powers. The idea was not to denounce or point the finger at things that are anyway too complex to be clearly identified, but to take a new look at these territories.

KOOZ What case studies particularly informed and shaped your understanding of this?

IJ | LN All of the case studies were important, and none necessarily stood out from the other. This is due to the diversity of the analyzes that emerge, a diversity that can be found both in urban morphology and in the use of public space and the characteristics that stem from it. For example, when we take Lésigny, we realize that the peri-urban city is like a large theater stage. The arrangement of the pavilion clusters gives them an allure of contemporary super-panopticon. The pavilion becomes the place of interiority and allows the natural expression of the individual. The lack of infrastructure and public space make the individual house essential, like if it was the only possible appropriable place. The pavilion is therefore both the apparatus put in place by political instance at the time, but also the place of resistance to it by the very fact of its misuse.

Paris shows us a whole different use of public space, since here all the conditions required for gatherings and for the emulsion of links between individuals are met. However, we noticed that there are still possibilities today to constrain this right, as we can see with the example of the Place de la République. While the place allows gatherings, it is important to note that it also allows powers and law enforcement agencies to suppress protests. This is made possible by the morphology and the rectilinear shape of the large avenues that lead to the square. The width of these lanes does not allow the demonstrators to make barricades. Conversely, the typology of the square allows them to be massaged and surrounded. The figure of the public square then turns against individuals to better control them. Here again, controversies emerge and this is the point of our analysis. The six territories case that we chose to study produce, by their different nature, six archetypes which at the end allow us to look at the use of architectural apparatus in a same big picture.

KOOZ What is for you the power of the Architectural Imaginary?

IJ | LN Architecture is a great tool when you come to think and imagine things that are not possible in real life. It allows new worlds to emerge, cities and villages in which all societal scenarios are made possible. Depending on the sensitivities, it is possible to create architectural universes and atmospheres that ask fundamental questions about the way in which certain things are approached in society, for example. Theoretical projects in architecture make it also possible to question the systems put in place and this is true in all fields, not only in architecture. This is why they are so important for us, students, in building architectural background.

By stimulating the imagination, we convey strong messages to those who will receive them. Using the imaginary in architecture also makes it possible to alert or show people what such a world, such a city, such condition… could be. It is the same mechanism as a moralizing tale for kids. Governments have always used architecture and town planning to promote or strengthen the power they have over people. They have often used images or pictorial representations stage the space as the sovereigns imagine it to circulate their ideas. Images of architecture convey ideas, moods… as is the case with Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fresco of good and bad government, a fresco that at the time showed the people what a good or a bad government could do on the shape of the city as well as of the atmosphere of the space.

Bio

Inès Journoud and Laure Nicoud graduated from the National School of Architecture in Versailles. They both have several professional experience in various architecture studios: Inès in Italy, France and Belgium, and Laure mostly in Paris. Throughout their studies, they were particularly interested in questioning architecture and its conditions, rather than its production, through criticism and research. Their diploma project was segmented in different phases : a publication with the research about architecture and it’s political instrumentalization in France, and a curatorial work through different projects narratives.