Building Capital IV

The 2017/18 course programme focuses on ‘Building Capital’ as part of a global development, in which decision-making about societal cohesion, about building developments and infrastructural projects has become the preserve of financial institutions and consultancies. What are the cultural references, technologies and speculations through which architectue is enrolled in this development? And which kind of culture is emerging in the transformation of the built environment from a container for the production of commodities to a capitalist commodity in itself?

Course subjects range from the development of new postcapitalist spheres of accumulation in architecture to the generation of financial, social and affective capital in urban projects, and from the philosophical dimension of pursuing gains to the question of capital impact in art and media culture.

THE PLATFORM CITY: Disruptive Technologies, Innovation Hubs and the Passion Economy.

Continuing our engagement with questions of BUILDING CAPITAL, this year we will link up the courses “Contemporary Culture”, “Urban Visual Culture”, “Regimes of the Visual” and “New Models of Culture and Art Production” to jointly investigate, both analytically and practically, the neoliberal  imperative of “city” as “platform”. Using texts, visual material and case studies, we will explore the dynamics and contradictions in today’s constellation of capitalist economy, innovation technology, artistic creativity and urban production.

As the composition of economic growth has now shifted toward knowledge-based creative ventures (cloud-based software, social media, mobile applications, etc.), cities around the world are outcompeting each other to attract a strong talent pool of young creatives and innovators in the hope that venture capital will follow in their wake, resulting in crops of fast-growing companies. Successful campaigns often include the invention of new architectural typologies evoking notions of co-working and co-living to suggest a febrile atmosphere of creativity and entrepreneurship. Revolving around “urban rooms”, communal spaces and pop-up entertainment, these new architectures focus on the creation of fluid circulation and meeting spaces so that the incoming human capital (millennials and tech professionals) can be “put to work” – interacting and exchanging with investment patrons, clients, customers and peers alike.

The coordinated exchange between the different courses will allow us to address this new form of speculative urbanism from a range of different theoretical and practical perspectives, interrogating ongoing shifts in political thinking, economic frameworks, global connectivity, communication channels, cultural aspirations, as well as building technologies and architectural practices.

To connect these different aspects, we will work across the different courses on a multi-dimensional mapping project that can make tangible the plurality of actors, forces and ideas involved in realising the “Platform City”. As a distinctive relation between governmental action and spatial aesthetics is key to this new urban paradigm, in a second step we will seek to develop analytical tools of “architectural reading”. Our objective is to develop ways of navigating the civic, social and cultural implications of this speculative approach to city-building, which champions the creation of disruptive “situations” and in which the process is deemed to be more important than the results.

Visual Culture Module
Start: 03 October 2017
Location: Seminarraum 264/1

For further details please see link below