Symposium and Capita Selecta lecture series

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The 2011 Fall Capita Selecta lecture series on Architectural Design, organized by the TU Delft’s research group ‘Border Conditions and Territories’, will attempt to frame and discuss the current developments in architectural discourse and extend the questions on the necessity of architectural agendas. The questions posed openly at the Border Conditions symposium ‘X Agendas for Architecture’ (October 2011), will be partially addressed in four sessions specifically aiming at formulating a possible point on the agenda for architecture. The four lecture sessions will present several sets of knowledge, tools and tasks for architecture and explicate how architectural knowledge can be made relevant within the current architectural debates. These issues are in need of being challenged towards our shared future of architecture, and serve to address the current prevailing atmosphere within the discipline that apparently meanders from crisis to crisis. During the last decade, the interest in the conflict of space and the space of conflict has resulted from the different moments of crisis with a global impact, ranging from economic stagnation, financial crises and environmental devastation, to name just a few. As a result, an entire array of highly specific understandings of space have been developed, influenced by social, ideological, economical and political changes and debates, and in most cases they were made evident via the altered experiences of space, either from an individual or a collective perspective. What appears to remain nowadays is the kind of operative practices that confirm the economic servitude of architecture (as design). This servitude in turn surrenders to philosophers and thinkers the difficult contemplation of the complexities and meanings of territorial occupation, and to the politicians (and their business interests), the decision of spatial demarcation.