Hannah Arendt in Architecture Theory

Although Hannah Arendt had preciously little to say about architecture, scholars of architecture theory have increasingly begun to adopt her philosophy of politics. This reception began already in the early 1970’s and has since grown into a multifaceted discourse. In this article, I will review some of the most important readings and positions and give an account of prevalent arguments. This will lead to a critique of the architectural project, which in turn reveals the essential nature of political discourse in architecture. The corresponding theoretical notion of political discourse in Arendt is storytelling, a key element of her philosophy of action that has largely been overlooked by architectural theorists. Storytelling points toward the perennial political processes that envelope architecture and asks us to study the political agency of architecture as it unfolds over time.