Moving architecture and flattening politics: examining adaptability through a narrative of design

Extract

Our paper addresses how building design elucidates the connection between two definitions of politics: ‘Big Politics’ and micropolitics. We will seek to examine how these two versions of politics are imbricated; how, in other words, codified ideologies and political institutions circulate within the everyday practices by which new actors and sites of contestation enter the social collective. The conceptual space for this argument has already been mapped out by various authors, including Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Bruno Latour and Michel Foucault. These authors have variously proposed how powerful totalities always travel along small, fragile conduits. Or, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, ‘the boss's office is as much at the end of the hall as on top of the tower’.