Spatial Agency started life as a project that was interested in exploring possibilities beyond architecture as object beautiful and began by challenging what it means to do architecture: it investigated practices that approached space from a political perspective, compiled projects that were concerned with the right to the city and looked at ways of doing that were more about process and people than form. The lecture will give an overview of Spatial Agency and its initial premises and tenets but will also put into question how such approaches can continue to be relevant in today’s context.
Tatjana Schneider is Professor for History and Theory of Architecture and the City at the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany. Current work focuses on global challenges and the changing role of architects and architecture in contemporary society, (architectural) pedagogy and spatial agency. Schneider is interested in employing and implementing theoretical, methodological and practical approaches that expand the scope of contemporary debates and discourses by integrating political and economic frameworks that question normative ways of thinking, producing and consuming space. Publications include Spatial Agency. Other Ways of Doing Architecture and Agency: Working with Uncertain Architectures. Schneider was founder member of the workers cooperative G.L.A.S. (Glasgow Letters on Architecture and Space), which aimed to construct both a theoretical and practical critique of the capitalist production and use of the built environment.