Memes are increasingly permeating architectural discourse, with Instagram accounts like Dank Lloyd Wright “holding models of power to account, especially when power manifests as aesthetics.”

The meme itself, in Dank Lloyd Wright’s hands, is a sophisticated visual tool, with its own codes, styles and languages that mirror the ever-shifting currents of internet culture. DLW’s critiques and the debates around them take place almost exclusively online, and in the comments section of their instagram account in particular, in an era where public life itself need not extend beyond the screen. 

Meme space, as the anonymous Instagram collective Dank Lloyd Wright explains, “has the potential to showcase what criticism could be when it is detached from the profit motives of advertising, self promotion, and clout chasing.” In this episode DLW discuss what ‘meme space’ means to them, and the kind of virtual public forums it fosters.

Power & Public Space is a co-production of Drawing Matter & the Architecture Foundation

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Since its conception in the 1960’s, the Fun Palace has circulated widely in architecture culture, and mainly through its provocative collages, characterized by giant space-frame trusses framing a flexible shed of interactive cultural events, accessible to all. These images persist as inspiring propositions for a new physical infrastructure of cultural exchange, and while they are often primarily attributed to Cedric Price, the project was actually the result of close collaboration between Price and the experimental theatre director Joan Littlewood.

Littlewood’s radically inclusive programme aimed to counteract the elitism built into British society and arts policy of the time, reflecting her ambitions for a “theatre for all”. In this episode the architect and academic Ana Bonet Miro discusses how the Fun Palace was itself conceived as a kind of theatrical project. She also explains the impact this speculative project had on public discourse and the shaping of local developments of the time, how the Fun Palace might affect the way we conceive of public space today, and the kinds of lessons architects can learn from Littlewood and Price's collaboration. 

Power & Public Space is a co-production of Drawing Matter & the Architecture Foundation

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Markus Lateenmaaki’s research explores, in part, how architecture became instrumental in the societal and cultural transformations that took place in revolutionary Russia. 

It’s worth noting this episode was recorded in early 2022, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine; in fact the discussion doesn’t focus on contemporary Russian politics and culture, but instead reflects on the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the ways in which Russian people altered and re-framed the imperialist monuments and public spaces around them as power was ceded from the monarchy and aristocracy and taken up by the Bolshevik party. Parallels are also drawn to contemporary debates on how to contend with retrograde monuments still standing in public spaces.  

Lateenmaaki also unpacks the motivations behind Lev Rudnev’s monument to the Victims of the Revolution, erected in the field of Mars in st petersburg, which eschewed the traditional gathering place and conduit for public movements across the field through the streets, recasting the city itself as a monument to collective life.

Power & Public Space is a co-production of Drawing Matter & the Architecture Foundation

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In 2020 The Memorial to Enslaved Labourers opened at the University of Virginia, designed as a collaboration between Höweler+Yoon Architecture, Mabel O. Wilson, landscape architects Gregg Bleam and Frank Dukes, and the artist Eto Otitigbe. 

As Wilson has explained, “civic buildings and monuments in the U.S. are often emblematic of a disavowal of the founding precepts of liberty, equality and justice, where they become sites to imagine and enact American whiteness.” In this episode Wilson discusses how the memorial was conceived and designed to assert its position within the campus’s Eurocentric architectural context, whilst addressing the university’s history of racism and recovering lost narratives of enslaved people in the process. 

Power & Public Space is a co-production of Drawing Matter & the Architecture Foundation

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Parc de la Villette was emblematic of the strong ties made between the disciplines of architecture and philosophy in the1980's, where “Deconstructivism” in particular became a theoretical framework through which buildings and landscapes were both designed and interpreted. 

Visual fragmentation and conceptual links to semiotic analysis characterised this period of architecture, and originating in projects such as Chora L. Works. A collaboration between Peter Eisenman and Jaques Derrida, the unrealised Chora project was intended to stand within the Parc de la Villette complex as an ode to a dialogue between architecture and philosophy. 

In light of such pressing issues as climate change, decolonisation and spatial inequality, the formal experimentation and philosophical inquiry of Chora L Works can appear abstract and disengaged; In this episode Andre Patrao reflects on this period of recent architectural history and what can we learn from it.

Power & Public Space is a co-production of Drawing Matter & the Architecture Foundation

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Much of Mark Wallinger’s art exists in public space. He’s made films and performance pieces set in tube stations and airports, and was the first artist to occupy the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in 1999. 

In this episode, Wallinger discusses the installation “State Britain”, which reconstructs a protest encampment originally erected in Parliament Square by the peace activist Brian Haw (in opposition to UK foreign policy in Iraq). The encampment was dismantled in 2006 under a new decree called “The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act”, effectively drawing a 1km radius around parliament within which unauthorised protests are prohibited. 

This protest exclusion zone happens to run right through the middle of Tate Britain, where Wallinger faithfully reconstructed Haw’s encampment, placing it literally half in and half out of this threshold of controlled expression, with the line itself clearly marked on the floor. The installation was both a continuation of Haw’s protest, as well as an artwork about it, and the line it traced became a kind of territorial drawing, marking a disputed boundary around what can be said in opposition to political authority, as well where, and in what context, we can say it.

Power & Public Space is a co-production of Drawing Matter & the Architecture Foundation

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When we think about public space, we tend to consider the street, the plaza, the park or the square - urban spaces for people to engage in civic life. In this episode Jonas Žukauskas discusses his consideration of the forest as a space of social engagement, in relation to the project “Forest Parts”. 

Initiated in 2019 in collaboration with Jurga Daubaraitė, Forest Parts is ongoing project that, as Žukauskas and Daubaraitė explain, “offers to perceive the forest as an infrastructure formed by civic consensus. The unique cultural landscape of the Curonian Spit and the forestation process initiated in the 19th century serve as a case study of forest management works in this complex space to interrelate a series of ecological, recreational, representational, and industrial narratives.”

In this episode Žukauskas discusses architecture as a cultural practice, which, in the case of the Forest Parts project, is deemed capable of “enhancing the optics through which society senses a forest.” He also expands on the novel forms of drawing and representation deployed to bring the public to a more intimate understanding of the forest itself. 

Power & Public Space is a co-production of Drawing Matter & the Architecture Foundation

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Last year the Swiss practice Manuel Herz Architects completed a wooden synagogue West of Kyiv at Babyn Yar, the site of one of the bloodiest massacres of the Second World War.

In March 2022, as Russian forces attempted to take Kyiv, missiles once again struck the land near the mass grave. The attack was likely an attempt to destroy Kyiv’s largest TV tower, and five civilians were killed. While not the deadliest missile strike to hit Kyiv, it was perhaps the most symbolic. 

In this episode Manuel Herz discusses the historic implications of the Russian attack. He also explains the approach his practice took to memorializing the Babyn Yar atrocity, which in place of the heavy, fixed structures associated with holocaust memorials, proposes a light and transformative place of worship and public exchange.  

Power & Public Space is a co-production of Drawing Matter & the Architecture Foundation

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The concrete-lined LA River was built on top of a sprawling floodplain, which the land artist Lauren Bon seeks to reveal through a large-scale infrastructural project called “Bending the River Back to the City”. By diverting a small amount of water from the river, lifting it, cleansing it, and spreading it to a network of public parks, (its former floodplain), she renders the utilitarian water management system as an accessory of public delight and education, and begins the long process of restoring the floodplain to its natural state. 

Much of Bon’s artwork is focused on closing the gap between the natural world and public life, and in this conversation she discusses the role of the artist in translating the abstraction of both natural systems and human infrastructure into experiences that are tangible and culturally meaningful. Bon also discusses her earlier work “Not a Cornfield” - in many ways a precursor to Bending the River - which aimed to transform a derelict industrial site “back into a public space — a commons — creat[ing] the possibility for a deeper public consciousness and a sense of shared ownership of LA’s historic floodplain.”

Power & Public Space is a co-production of Drawing Matter & the Architecture Foundation

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The Dalston Eastern Curve garden began as a meanwhile scheme, but over the past decade has embedded itself at the centre of one of London’s most rapidly gentrifying neighbourhoods; over time the garden has become an act of resistance against commercially-driven development, reimagining the site instead as a communal oasis.

In this episode Liza Fior tells the story of how the curve garden, which was a project designed in collaboration between muf architecture / art and J&L Gibbons, evolved from a temporary scheme into significant and enduring public space. Fior has revisited the garden with students in recent years to analyse and draw the ways the garden is being used, and discusses how drawing has affected her understanding of the curve garden today, as well as how this landmark project could help inform more conventional briefs for public space.

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Life is more virtual than ever, but in this intensely divided moment, it's arguably our streets, squares, plazas and monuments where power remains most contested.

How does a garden become an act of resistance against gentrification? How can an urban park expose a pre-colonial landscape? What are the boundaries of protest in public space? And what role does architecture play in the the stories we tell ourselves about our collective histories, hopes and dreams?

Coming soon from Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation: a new series on Power & Public Space.

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