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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.