The Journal of Architecture

Space of /dis/believing | Doreen Bernath & Deljana Iossifova

The question of belonging comes always with the question of believing. In this era of big media and big data, propelling the imperatives for the all-consuming, architecture has also been instrumentalised in the production of environments of conformity and totality. These spaces persuade us to belong and let go, to possess and be possessed; the knowledge projected onto them also serves to reinforce their value. Against these tendencies to articulate motivations of space making and processes of materialisation and inhabitation as a matter of securing a ‘within’, the challenge is how we can recognise the ‘without’ in architecture, which in Diane Agrest's term ‘implies a negation of the “system of architecture” through a critical work, and the inclusion of the denied, the excluded, the hidden, the repressed’.Footnote1 This conscious yet non-oppositional act of being able to accept differences in our core beliefs, thus our capacity to accept conditions that demarcate the choice of belonging or not-belonging, is crucial to how the re-reading, re-imagining and re-working of our built environment can remain fair, just, and open. A shared thread of bravely dis-believing conformed views permeates across the collection of articles in this issue, in which provocation and lines of enquiries are propelled by the most distracting and curious sense of working from ‘without’. CONTINUE READING