Project: Thesis, Master Planning Paradise
In architecture, the protagonists of our narratives are most of the time buildings. We are trained to look at them and to understand them within their manifold contexts and in this project the context is most of all political. Therefore if buildings are our protagonists, then people are the extras in the grand play of a city. Without them the city would not exist, because people are the ones who built it. Hypothesis Human ideologies and political agendas shape cities, leaving their traces everywhere around us and by looking closely, one might be able to see them through the structure and organisation of buildings.
The emergence of an extensive communal housing policy, or the expansion of public transportation systems in Vienna, for example, followed the agenda of the first elected social democrat government. The ground for the articulation of an urban concept or a building is hardly ever driven by the will to beautify and is almost always compounded by a political agenda. But the “political discipline”, architecture, has changed since the first formation of democracy, because political and social forces have also changed.
