LFU:online

Students gain in-depth insights into special perspectives and working techniques of the various topics within architecture and set individual focal points.

Passion and ideology

For Pier Paolo Pasolini, passion, as an existential-affective force and ideology, as a determined ideological positioning, are productive forces of literary creation. In his work Passione e Ideologia (Garzanti, 1960), he examines the extent to which social and historical developments shape literary and ultimately cultural production and how this in turn affects society. 

Applied to architecture, we find that it is used again and again to transport ideological messages and shape social narratives. There are plenty of examples of this: think of the rationalist architecture of Italian fascism, the monumental buildings of the Third Reich, socialist classicism, but also projects such as Brasília, the "Grand Projets" under Françoise Mitterand, The Line in Saudi Arabia or the US program "Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again". 

The tension between passion and ideology intensifies when we take a look at media and infrastructure networks within which communication takes place and unfolds. As Erik Davis already outlined in his book "Techgnosis" at the end of the 1990s, cyberspace is not a neutral place, but one permeated by myths, affects and ideological narratives, in which libertarianism and techno-solutionism collide with promises of salvation on growth imperatives: Silicon Valley is a future laboratory where people are busily working on the apocalypse.   

Now tell me, how do you feel about architecture? What drives us to practice architecture or to be enthusiastic about it? Which Daimon (δαίμων) speaks to us? Is it passion, or does this interest arise from a certain ideological or ideological attitude? And where is the boundary between personal expression and instrumentalization?

Over the course of the semester, we will use selected texts from philosophy and architectural theory to shed light on the relationship between passion and ideology in the broad sense. In the first part of the seminar, we analyze philosophical positions on the terms passion, affect, worldview, and ideology in order to develop a basic understanding of these concepts. In the second part, we dedicate ourselves to concrete writings in architectural theory that address the tension between passion and ideology. The aim is to investigate the complex connections between individual motivation and social structures in architecture – and thus to gain a deeper understanding of our own relationship to architecture.