Architecture as Gesture (Architecture Is Not The Drama)

“Architecture is a gesture. Not every purposive movement of the human body is a gesture. Just as little as every functional building is architecture” – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture & Value.

A painting of protesters performing a demonstration in a public walkway — Thomas

Off

All the principle institutions of Aristotle's polis were characterised by agon/conflict and its resolution - judging and making laws, tragic drama, religious sacrifice, games, symposia. These events were situated somewhere but ‘architecture is not the drama’, Carl insists. Rather ‘architecture is a discipline of peripheral vision, of setting the conditions and horizons of praxis."
Patrick Lynch
Civic Ground

This year the studio sought to apply the understanding of architecture as “the conditions and horizons of praxis’’ to projects in Croydon south London, through the prism of the intersection between performance and civic life, as discussed by Richard Sennett in his books ‘The Fall of Public Man (1977)’ and ‘The Performer (2025).