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Architectural Class War

Abstract :

This article (and the video here, which is its filmic summary) is a parody of a Marxist manifesto that, in a provocative form, challenges the compositional principles of architecture. By seeing the building as a productive system, the architectural class war aims to reawaken the class struggle, this time architectonic, in the design of the building. By distinguishing between the +, the & and the VS, the conflict applies to architecture the theory of punctum and studium developed by Roland Barthes to analyze photography in the 1960s.
This analysis (historical materialist one would dare to say) is made through a corpus of remarkable buildings redrawn for the occasion in order to detect which ones are traversed by a class war and which have reached a balance between its components.

→ Complete text in french PDF (40 pages) :

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