Dr Francesco Proto

Marginalized due to the deployment of both a highly specialized jargon and a novel stylistic approach meant to upset established norms and conventions, Baudrillard's thought has suffered from the lack of an accessible, consistent and comprehensive exposition able to make it relevant to diverse contemporary disciplines. As a result, its impact on architecture has always been confined to academia.

By presenting an introductory but in-depth formalization of Baudrillard's interest in architecture and related fields, this book makes intelligible his philosophical premises thus showing, through the prism of architecture, their relevance and persuasiveness today. Key concepts such as the object system, the code, simulation, hyperreality and precession, to name a few, are addressed in the light of the specially reconceptualized key construct of ambience, thus emphasizing how the mutual concerns of architecture, urban studies and cultural studies provide a fertile ground for debate.

Such an approach, which focuses on the contradictions inherent in contemporary society from the vantage point of Baudrillard's original involvement in architectural analysis, philosophy and criticism, is one which students, practitioners and scholars alike from as diverse disciplines as architecture, interior design and urban studies – but also fine art, anthropology, sociology, economics, human geography, social psychology and cultural studies to start with – will benefit from immensely.

For architecture and urban space to have relevance in the 21st Century, we cannot merely reignite the approaches of thought and design that were operative in the last century. This is despite of, or because of, the nexus between politics and space often being theorized as a representation or by-product of politics. As a symbol or an effect, the spatial dimension is depoliticized. Consequently architecture and the urban are halted from fostering any systematic change as they are secondary to the event, and therefore incapable of performing any political role. We can no longer afford to reduce space to a neutral backdrop of political realities.This project explores how architecture and urban space can unsettle the unquestioned construct of the spatial politics of governing.

Considering both ongoing and unprecedented global problems – from violence and urban warfare, the refugee crisis, borderization, detention camps, terrorist attacks to capitalist urbanization, inequity, social unrest and climate change – this handbook provides a comprehensive and multidisciplinary research focussed on the complex nexus of politics, architecture and urban space. Volume I starts by pointing out the need to explore the politics of spatialization to make sense of the operational nature of spatial oppression in contemporary times. The operative and active political reading of space is disseminated through five thematics: Violence and War Machines; Security and Borders; Race, Identity and Ideology; Spectacle and the Screen; and, Mapping Landscapes and Big Data.

This first volume of the handbook frame cutting-edge contemporary debates, and present studies of actual theories and projects that address spatial politics. This handbook provides comprehensive and multidisciplinary research focused on the complex nexus of politics, architecture and urban space.

With the notion of junk space, Rem Koolhas opens the way to a different understanding of architecture: one based on a perennial and totalizing ‘work in progress’ rather than the accomplished, coherent and ideal version we have got used to by centuries and centuries of architectural practice; hence the very question arises of what is left of architecture - there where a whole new plethora of technological devices undermines the most fundamental of its ideological assumptions.

More the description of a status quo rather than an accomplished theorization, junk space never provides a sound answer to the questions that it poses, thus leaving much to desire at least in terms of both a practical and intellectual engagement. Where does such a phenomenon stem? What is its ultimate meaning, and, most of all, where is it leading us?

Building on the combination of Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulation with Jacques Lacan’s clinic of the psychotic, the book chapter discusses the last stage of an evolution that sees an apparent but often neglected analogy between the urban environment and western subjectivity, there where the latter seems to find its most direct reflection in the built environment itself. Its development and uncontrollable growth, especially if seen as an accumulation of junk spaces, thus provides the basis for an analogy with the Lacanian unconscious as materialized and exposed through a process of hegemonization of vision Renaissance onwards. Lorens Holmes’ diagram of the psychotic field of vision is thus addressed as the most promising translation of architecture’s exacerbation of this process.

Following Lacan’s description of Baltimore in the early morning, his understanding of the repressed as a linguistic realm as well as the theorization of the capitalist discourse as the last stage of a civilization where the schizophrenia of the market is reflected into the schizophrenia of the subject and vice-versa, the paper ultimately describes the last stage of a genealogical study bringing to the fore Western ideology as translated into its artificial counterpart. The demise of God, the upsetting of social categories, the inception of contemporary commodification, the obsession for representation and, most of all, the consequences of long-time choices become here the pretext to articulate the birth of the Western city and, alongside with it, its meaning, decline and future as inevitably linked to the birth and fate of contemporary subjectivity as originally shaped by the inception of modern architecture theory and practice.

This book chapter examines the work of Mauco Cuppone, an Italian artist whose fashion "coffins" satirize the overlap between the aetheticization of death and the death of fashion. Thus, in an epochal and apocalyptic reversal, art itself resurrects in death once the latter is deflated of its original metaphysical meaning.

Spectacles have been traversing history in both the western and eastern hemispheres. Progressing from the original meaning of Roman games and pre-industrial festivals, carnivals, fairs and theaters, to that of radiophonic, televized, cinematic and/or Hollywood representations in both industrial and postindustrial societies, the meaning of spectacle has acquired such extensive recognition so as to apply potentially to each and every sphere of contemporary existence. The spectacularization of architecture and the built environment can in this respect be considered yet another ongoing and proliferating phenomenon far from full comprehension and analysis.​​​​​​​

What is unprecedented about contemporary spectacle and mega-spectacles, in fact, is its diversification and omnipresence, a tangled process of digitalization of information within which architecture is found originating even more structured models of manifestation of the spectacle. Now including such diverse configurations as tablets, mobiles and computers, the screen has by right become an overarching catalyst for the propagation of spectacle and the consumption of increasingly spectacularized forms of architecture.

By far exceeding the idea of representation, theatre or performance, and part of a broader trajectory spanning from the Roman demagogic enactment of public entertainment, to the most recent outcomes of technocapitalism, the meaning of spectacle addressed in this section of the Handbook accommodates the progressively more diversified contexts within which contemporary architecture is either examined or materialized. Charged with social, political, cultural and economic implications, spectacle and spectacularization emerge as driving forces of the newly coined notions of media-driven events and spectacle 2.0.