Political Architecture: Critical Sustainability

Political Architecture: Critical Sustainability (PA:CS) is a Master level course at Institute of Architecture and Culture (IBK). Political Architecture is our object and concern - a question and a statement in one. If politics is about the allocation of resources and the strategizing of power relations in society, then political architecture begins with architecture’s complicitous relationship with such distributions, that is, with its role in enforcing and implementing political regulations of society and social life.

Yet, what architecture can do politically reaches beyond deliberate politics and prevalent political hegemony. Specifically, we ask what architecture does and can do in regions on the planet where critical attention toward matters of societal resilience and development are urgent. Thus, Critical Sustainability recognizes an urgent task: to question the currently prevailing doctrines of architectural sustainability and to develop intellectually probing and architecturally daring alternatives.