Architecture After Arendt

This book brings an Arendtian lens to architectural inquiry, as the discipline confronts the legacies of material extraction, indigenous dispossession, and energy intensive design ideals. Hannah Arendt was an imminently spatial theorist. Her reflections on the space of appearance, a radical modernization of the Greek agora, have foregrounded notions of relationality, plurality, and speech in the context of contemporary political thought. As much a theorist of the ontological conditions of politics—recognition, togetherness, belonging—her work sought to interrogate the forms of material care that sustain the political realm. To this end, her work explores the meaning of living in a human world on a planetary earth, asking questions in relation to how those communities might cultivate artistic immortality and translate care for others into environmental responsibility. This work leans on Arendt at a moment in architectural discourse when the discipline is required, as Arendt once was, to “think without a banister.” Departing from the stronghold of architectural ideologies—whether that is the fiction of building from a tabula rasa, the architect as sole creator, or the staged equivalence between architecture and political solutions—this book offers an Arendtian narrative of architecture.