“It’s clear that each object – each issue – generates a different pattern of emotions and disruptions, of disagreements and agreements. There might be no continuity and a hidden coherence in what we are attached to. Each object gathers around itself a different assembly of relevant parties. Each object triggers new occasions to passionately differ and dispute. Each object may also offer new ways of achieving closure without having to agree on much else. In other words, objects – taken as so many issues – bind all of us in ways that map out a public space profoundly different from what is usually recognized under the label of “the political”.
‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How To Make Things Work’, Bruno Latour
Taking its cue from the increasing marginalization of public space as one for truly democratic use, and from Bruno Latour’s assertion that an object “gathers around itself a different assembly of relevant parties,” triggering “new occasions to passionately differ and dispute,” this thesis explores common objects, architectures and infrastructures in public space as, albeit unconventionally, “political.”
The project is a study of the physical gesture involved in the informal appropriation of a common object (or architecture) as a means of individual expression. Overriding the original status or function of a form for one’s own means or exacting a process of subjective mutation on an object in a scene in order to produce an allegorical narrative.
Since 2008, Parliament Square, the symbolic locus for democratic freedom of expression in the UK, has been transformed into a roped off patch of grass, “temporarily closed” for the foreseeable future.
Simultaneously along the ‘political strip’ of Whitehall in Westminster, London, the area in which Parliament Square is situated and the institutional locus of the national Parliament and civil service, there has been a silent enlargement and increase in the number of barriers, bollards and buffer zones.
Site Analysis
Whitehall Site Plan, Political Institutions, Private Interior Courtyards,Public Roads, Public Pavement, Barriers, Bollards, Barricades, Monumnets
This project takes the form of a set of installations, their permanence undefined, posited into the existing ‘political strip’ of Whitehall. Employing allegory, parody and exaggeration in the manner of political satire cartoons. These act as a form of architectural commentary on said marginalization of public space as one for truly democratic use in the UK.
Firstly, a set of installations that run from Hans Haacke’s Fourth Plinth installation, along the ‘political strip’, down to Parliament Square and the Palace of Westminster, that act as a means of architectural parody, highlighting, referencing and exaggerating the enlarged barriers, bollards and buffer zones that alienate the public from the institution that governs them, often materially camouflaged to appear as if they have existed as long as the institution themselves.
Secondly, an assemblage of structures erected in Parliament Square, devised to reiterate its historical significance as common land, a truly democratic and public space.
These allegorical structures reference constantly developing indexes that visually document the physical gesture of subjective appropriation. These universal indexes cite many different events, time frames, locations and cultures as subject matter, similar to the global set of iconic figures already monumentalized in the square. The installation also performs as an explicit rejection of the played out rhetoric in the way we design the ideal civic plaza as flat, hard, ‘open’ space.
Both these installations manifest themselves as a set of surmountable assemblages that act as “objects of concern”, employing architectural allegory and parody, rather than the naïve and blunt notion of an architectural solution to the reactionary security tactics employed on the political strip that marginalize its public space.
Keeping in the mind the democratic principle of accumulation, these assemblages are an exploration of how an architecture can inspire a move at the scale of the individual but also anticipate the significance of that action to an entire arena. The forms interrupt existing space, calling attention to the non-specificity of the forms on one hand, while attempting to create an imbued sense of place on the other. The intention of these objects being that “one small thing can force a large one into existence."
