Evénements
ABSTRACT Architecture organizes life, anthropology interprets practices, meanings, and social relations. The work of Gian Piero Frassinelli is emblematic of an anthropological perspective on architecture, understood as a cultural practice shaped by everyday life, labor, rituals, and modes of inhabitation. Emerging within the radical context of Superstudio, Frassinelli’s work helped redefine architecture not primarily as the production of buildings, but as a critical framework for understanding how human life is organized, represented, and imagined. Beginning with his thesis project, the Centre for Anthropological Studies in Florence, and continuing through subsequent research developed within Superstudio, such as The Twelve Ideal Cities …
Who develops, finances, and commissions architecture—and in whose interest? This lecture series examines the often-invisible forces that shape architectural production—the clients who commission, the contractors who build, and the capital flows that determine what gets realized. While architects are trained to focus on design, the political economy of construction is largely absent from architectural education—sustaining a disciplinary insularity that obscures architecture's deep entanglement with capital, labor, and power. Yet building is fundamentally contingent: dependent on forces beyond the designer's reach, shaped by actors whose decisions constrain and enable architecture far more than design intentions. The series invites scholars and practitioners …
