Between Before and After: Architecture in a Time of Crisis

At the height of the Greek crisis in 2010, protestors scaled the Acropolis to place a banner against the Greek government’s austerity policies. The banner read “Peoples of Europe, Rise up” and was presented in full view to Greece’s most prominent Eurozone project: Bernard Tschumi’s New Acropolis Museum (NAM). The large horizontal banner foregrounded the famous facade of the Parthenon and was theatrically hung on the South-west ramparts of the ancient Citadel. The demonstration highlighted the visible role of architecture in facilitating events during the political crisis. As such, this thesis investigates how architecture becomes political from an examination of the Greek economic crisis; what the thesis articulates as architecture faced with the event. The crisis’s shared territory of politics and space is consequently and originally developed into a reading of ‘politics by space’. Thus, the constitutive role of politics in relation to space is explored through three case studies of architecture faced with the event: a shopping mall targeted by a domestic terrorist attack, countertactics of political assembly in a public square during a referendum, and as introduce above, a museum facing a protest. Such transformations of architecture are used to rethink the types of evidence available in the context of an architectural history. The aim of the thesis, therefore, is to interrogate the constitutive role of politics in relation to space and research how architecture is transformed during moments of political change. Each case study explores a moment of change unfolding across place (both territorial and symbolic), space (material and conceptual), and time (events and histories). Though the thesis arises from and focuses on architectures faced with the recent (hence “Architecture in a Time of Crisis”), it extends beyond these contemporary activities to also investigate ‘the between’: a problem of change concerned with ‘the turning point’ where one thing becomes another. Comparatively interrogating theories of the ‘event’ in philosophy, history, and architecture as a moment of change in spatial and temporal process, the thesis articulates the novel development of an ‘evental’ conception of temporality that looks for narrative change in sites of conflict to conceptualise the political dimension of buildings. Specifically, what the thesis explicitly addresses runs parallel to the crisis itself, telling the story of how architecture produces turns of crisis more broadly, probing how architecture operates in spaces of global capital, and demonstrating how architecture becomes distinctively wed to the political subject. The thesis applies Alain Badiou’s theory of event to the political context of the Greek crisis, utilising a projective method of history/theory that privileges the present in a hybrid construction of historical time. Badiou’s theory is then compared to Bernard Tschumi’s distinct architectural theory of the event. In comparing these theories, architectural and philosophical understandings of the event are developed within detailed readings of spatial productions in a site-specific political demonstration, including an original analysis of Tschumi’s own project in Athens, the New Acropolis Museum. Consequently, the Greek crisis provides Athens as a portrait of architecture faced with the event, to which the thesis thinks ‘politics by space’ to propose a framework to better conceptualise the political dimensions of buildings.

Author dc:creator

• Lazarou, Athanasios

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Srivastava, Amit
• Worrall, Julian (University of Tasmania)

• Athens
• architecture
• crisis
• event
• Tschumi
• Badiou

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/2440/140386

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digital.library.adelaide.edu.au:2440/140386