Para um projeto de resistência em arquitectura. Dispositivo e profanação: projeto, uso e comum

Abstract

This thesis comes up as an opportunity of outlining something that could be described as a condition for political action in architecture. Here, the construction, the detailing and consolidation of a personal architectural project that is born from the will to discover its public relevance is reported. However, in the face of a discipline that is captured in its condition as a liberal profession, this exercise only seems possible through a project of resistance. The work is divided into two distinct parts: the first one seeks to detail the current state of the discipline and the reality in which it operates, so that in the second one the possibility of a project of resistance in architecture can be studied as an attempt to establish an alternative. In the first part - for a cartography of the present - we identify the main trends of contemporary architecture that point to an incorporation of the premises of a neoliberal social, economic and political model into the discipline. This model seems to be implicated in what could be considered the generalized tragedy of all particular spheres that make up the commons. In the second part - towards a project of resistance in architecture - we seek to detail the relevance and the possibility of carrying out this project of resistance through the concepts of apparatus and profanation in Giorgio Agamben. Through the apparatus it is sought to recognize that architecture is not only about the production of form, but also about the reproduction of power structures. Through profanation, it is sought to put out the hypothesis of an idea of project that is not only subjugation or domination, but that gives space and recognizes a possibility of emancipation to its subjects: both of the architect in relation to the structures of architectural production; and of the users in relation to the spaces they inhabit, through use. Finally, it seeks to detail and confront six architectural projects that help to problematize this project of resistance. These projects, to the extent that they seek to organize the available means to achieve disruptive ends, can be considered real profanatory strategies. From participation to asceticism, passing through friction, incompleteness and failure, we started from strategies where this emancipatory intention is more evident, to those where it is less clear, but also more interesting.