Strategic Architecture: How to Build Coalitions for Regulatory Change
Join us for the first event of Strategic Architecture, an evening school on how to challenge, democratize, and improve our political processes and collective decision-making through architecture. A conversation between Olaf Grawert and Deane Simpson.
Join us for the first event of Strategic Architecture, an evening school on how to challenge, democratize, and improve our political processes and collective decision-making through architecture. A conversation between Olaf Grawert and Deane Simpson.
About the Evening School
Architecture has always been less a sovereign art than a gathering of itinerant techniques: the survey drafted for empire, the map drawn for taxation, the diagram lifted from cosmology, the projection honed in the painter’s studio, assembled for a time in the service of building.
Yet, in the past decade, these instruments have begun to drift once more, resurfacing as evidentiary devices in courts and media (forensic architecture), as diagrammatic engines in ministries and agencies (strategic architecture), and as speculative projections in galleries and laboratories (speculative architecture), no longer tethered to construction but redirected toward truth, action and imagination.
From August onwards CAFx’ evening school follows that migration in its strategic inflection, asking what becomes of architecture when the diagram ceases to prefigure form and instead structures deliberation, negotiates trade-offs, and scripts the conditions under which collective decisions are made.
About the Panel
Olaf Grawert: Co-founder of the policy laboratory HouseEurope!, and partner in the architecture studio b+. He is an architect, researcher, and policy advocate and focused on how political and economic systems shape the built environment and how they can change to support more social and ecological ways of living.
Deane Simpson: Architect and Professor of Architecture, Urbanism and Planning at the Royal Danish Academy, School of Architecture, Copenhagen, where he leads the masters program Urbanism and Societal Change. He is author of Young-Old (2015); and co-editor of The City between Freedom and Security (2017); Forming Welfare (2017); Atlas of the Copenhagens (2018) and Architectures of Dismantling and Restructuring (2022).
