Exhibition: Urban Enactments, the Work of Andrés Jaque

Starting this week,The Princeton University School of Architecture will hold until May 14 a retrospective exhibition on the work of Andrés Jaque and his architectural practice Office for Poitical Innovation. It includes their production since 2000, including several projects we’ve published in the past like the Plasencia Clergy House, Sweet Parliament Home, Escaravox and the Never Never Land House.

In the last 10 years the Office for Political Innovation has explored the question: ‘What happens to architectural practices when common notions of the urban (as something confined in cities) are replaced by others in which the urban is contained in urban enactments (ordinary interactions in which politics are produced)?’

More after the break.

Urban enacments are trans-scalar and transmedia constructions.They mobilize objects, technologies, beings, buildings, environments; making constellations of heterogeneous entities that gain continuity (as a contingent urbanism) only as they perform together as the components of a shared situation.

From this perspective the way in which the material embodiment of the political has been discussed in architecture in recent decades can be challenged. Both techno-determinism and techno-neutrality are confronted by a sense of ‘shared agendas’, that account for the political as a dispute and association between the agencies activated by numerous individual entities.The works included in this exhibition are not architectures designed to be later occupied by society, but techno-societies in which architectural design attempts to gain relevance.

Title: Exhibition: Urban Enactments, the Work of Andrés Jaque
Website: https://soa.princeton.edu/zone/exhibitions#712
Organizers: The Princeton University School of Architecture
From: Mon, 07 Apr 2014 
Until: Wed, 14 May 2014 
Venue: The Princeton University School of Architecture
Address: Architecture School, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA