The PhD School of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Adelaide, AUS ------01 “Annotative Architectures: Politics, Space and the Event in Crisis-” The PhD is an examination of the Greek crisis from the discipline of Architecture. It is set to conclude in late 2016.

The most alluring stories about are those that +revolve around our relationships to space and power. On the streets of Crisis-Athens, new urgencies have given form to a particular way of organising how the political sphere coalesces within ideas of space, enabling a study of the that addresses spatial discontinuities as structuring elements by which to enlist space for political ends. As thousands take to the streets on a daily basis, it is important to think of each demonstration as part of a connected narrative, yet singular from the last; it is as Heraclitus famously said: “You cannot step twice into the same river.” AnnotativeWelcome to the flood. Architectures

______Athanasios Lazarou

Supervision Team ------Principal Supervisor: Dr. Peter Scriver Co-Supervisor’s: Dr. Amit Srivastava, Dr. Julian Worrall

Contact Details [email protected] @_athanasios @athanasios_lazarou SABE Abstract PhD: Annotative Architectures ------02 “Annotative Architectures: Politics, Space and the Event in Crisis-Athens” The creation of new physical spaces has been notably absent during the What has been discovered about the spatial practices in Athens during the crisis? ------protest movements in Athens. What has instead transpired is a layering of “Territorial claims align themselves politically; symbolic histories onto the things that are revealed are confessional.” existing spaces and social structures - or what I call: annotative architectures. These architectures don't reveal themselves in tradtitional architectural Abstract ------methods of representation, rather, they are revealed in There is no time like the present crisis. the urban through the act The PhD is formed as an inquiry into the present conditions, possibilities and of the event. limits of politics and space. At its subject lies the Greek crisis and the complex relations present at the perceived site of the crisis; , Athens. This socio-political realism is engaged in a series of exercises that collect and classify the numerous spatial actions and political stages of the demonstrations, before expanding to assess the role of periphery protest movements throughout the city. The project encompasses a discussion on how abstract political movements represent themselves within the context of architectural vocabulary. It Speak To Me interrogates the relationships present within the public square – where people ------and architecture become linked by their contextual dependency – before Why Athens? Why Space critically reflecting on the visible role of architecture in facilitating events during and Poltics? Why now? the political crisis; in essence, the story of the architectural turns of the crisis. is the word. Crisis is an instrument of power. By understanding these turns the project distinctively expands on the type of Poltical Demonstrations knowledge that can be considered architectural. are a repeateable Within the materialism of the encounter, the research questions how phenomenon that allow slow increments of change contemporary architecture operates in spaces of global capital, probing what to be measured. the architecture field offers in the context of crisis. These overlapping The shifting relations questions are approached strategically through a series of case studies between people and situated within specific events of the protest movement - ranging from the buidlings in Athens during the crisis allows a new monumental to the particular - and utilising a toolset of definitely architectural approach to how we techniques that expand upon existing PEA (protest event analysis) models. In consider what knowledge doing so, what is revealed overlaps with theories and enquiries of the event can be considered that are of a philosophical nature, before engaging with more terminological architectural. slippances and philosophical exegesis to reveal how the detailed reading of What have been the highlights of your spatial processes in a specific demonstration can become a model of thought. candidature? Specifically, the unfolding political crisis is being examined as a spatial crisis. It has to be presenting at International Conferences (Historical Materialism ______2014 in London, UK and Candide 2015 in Aachen, GER), the feedback and the exposure is welcoming. Research I was very lucky in London to have Panagiotis Sotiris moderate my panel (part of Gap the Leadership group of 1. In recent crises around the Greek anarchist party world, Marxist and ANTARSYA). and to post-Marxist analyses have encounter Stathis Kouvelakis (part of the failed to properly grasp the SYRIZA leadership group). ability of space to shape the How have you political process. researched the protest movements in Athens 2. Spatial events in Athens Simple: joining in. But in all are lacking analysis from the seriousness, i’ve been architectural discipline. lucky to have access to Journalist credentials, so I 3. PEA nominally focuses on try to hang out with the scale and content (to press pack. I also find address large social myself amongst the demonstrations. I’ve been changes), lacking a tactical at a majority of the main dimension events of the crisis including the storming of 4. Alain Badiou is to release the ERT (State a new book focusing on the broadcaster), November 17 philosophy of the event in demonstrations (marking the anniversary of the late 2016. Polytechnic uprisings) and 5. The architectural story of the January 2015 elections the crisis has yet to be told. where SYRIZA came to power. When will the PhD Finish? Late 2016. Context PhD: Annotative Architectures ------03 Context For the past five years, the social and poltical unrest in Greece has been What has been discovered about the spatial practices in Athens during the crisis? ------broadcast around the world. Clashes between political groups, the state “Just as New York City in the early 1900’s was and its citizens, and even defined by the Roquettes at Rockefeller, space itself have been witnesses from thousands Crisis-Athens is defined by the demonstration.” of perspetives. The problem with writing about cities is that what often emerges is a watered down representation acting wholly representable. In the outline that follows, the shifitng phantasmagoria has been frozen: the things that are revealed are confessional. Architectural Vocabulary Never send a Marxist to do an Architect’s job ------04 Protest Movements are Engendering Architectural Vocabulary Marxist and post-Marxist analyses have failed to properly grasp the ability What has been discovered about the spatial practices in Athens during the crisis? ------of space to shape the political process. “When we think of Egypt, we think of Tahrir Enter architecture. Square. When we think of Turkey, we think of Taksim Square. When we think of Occupy, we think of Wall Street.”

What has been discovered about the spatial practices in Athens during the crisis? ------During recent crises around the world, space has adopted a markedly political agency. When we think of Egypt, we think of Tahrir Square. When we think of Turkey, we think of Taksim Square. When we think of Occupy, we think of Wall Street. And when we think of Athens, Greece, the site of the Eurozone crisis, we think of its location at the base of Parliament in Syntagma Square. The Greek crisis is defined by the “Movement of the Squares” – a series of protests that occurred in 2011 throughout the various public squares of Athens. At a world scale the theoretical and political consequences of conflicts are engendering architectural vocabulary throughout their spatial outcomes. After the recent elections in Greece that saw the ‘Coalition of the Radical Left’ party (SYRIZA) take office, it quickly acted and removed the defensive railings from outside Parliament that had been installed to prevent a storming of the government. In performing this symbolic act the party acknowledged the transformative spatial relationship the State holds in relationships between architecture and politics. Once again, the separation between parliament and Syntagma square exists solely through the assembly of bodies. The act itself – and the election of the party – signifies a definitive end to the Movement of the Squares.

Politics + Space = Demonstration DemonstrationDemonstration Space Contextual dependencies of bodies on the ground and physical space ------05 Let’s Talk About Space, Baby The shift from space as a passive medium to space as an active process. What is Space? ------“A combinatory model of physical agents and virtual mirrors.”

What does a demonstration comprise? ------Each demonstration is more than a documentation of the site of struggle, what needs to be considered are the dynamic, multi-layered agents at play. Social theorist Henri Lefebvre writes of space as “a history that must be conceived as the work of social “agents” or “actors,’’ of collective “subjects” acting in successive thrusts, discontinuously (relatively) releasing and fashioning layers of space.” It’s not about counting people as numbers, rather, it’s about hightlighting the processes which are unfolding.This appropriation adopts multiple avenues for implementation including what I classify as social agents taking two forms: actions in urban space, and representations in urban space (including media): essentially a combinatory model of physical agents and virtual mirrors. Pull Quote Space and Politics ------06 Poltical Demonstrations in Athens The action is the form.

What has been discovered about the spatial practices in Athens during the crisis? ------

“People“People becomebecome architecture,architecture, marshalledmarshalled intointo patterns,patterns, organisedorganised inin urbanurban spacespace inin alignmentalignment withwith symbolicsymbolic buildings.”buildings.” Mapping The city as unauthorised event ------07 Public Squares Mapping allows an examination of Athens to move from an ontology of What has been discovered about the spatial practices in Athens during the crisis? ------space to an epistemology of the city. “In acts of specific material configurations of protest, space can be codified as a signification of the relationship between space and power.”

Arterial protest-networks of Athens ------

Here is the city of Athens. The Red circles indicate the capacity of certain zones. The white lines indicate the main arterial networks of demonstration, from the Polytechnic School to the American Embassy. These routes feature wide, concreted roads and urban spaces; a distinct lack of cosmopolitanism that enables un-interrupted mass movement. The green lines show the point at which public transport stops operating during a demonstration. Protest movements are understood to centre on the public square – where people and architecture become linked by their contextual dependency. In analysing the contemporary and historical significance of certain spatial and social processes on the relationships present in the public square, we can find a history of a space that is itself a series of competing histories. Prevailing analysis of the public square as a typology fosters conclusive passivity. The old Marxist tropes are well known – take the square and take power – and this has proved successful to a degree in recent narratives around the world. However, ‘taking’ the square as an affirmative negation limits its transformative potential. The relationship of the square as a mediating space between the State and its pupils implores a redactive agency to any negation of spatial configuration. What ‘taking the square’ more critically implores is the active agency of space confronting the State through specific relationships. The Square acts as the symbolic agent to which the relations of the State are deployed. Its spatial configuration prefigures a repeated interaction. It retains its logical political form from the agency deployed from protestors either massing or marching at Parliament House. Critically, the narrative of how space organizes and formalizes the relations of the State is central to our understanding of both the nature of crises and the nature to how specific agencies of architecture become operative within political manifestations. Questions emerge when we begin to consider under which conditions architecture can engender political movements that are heterogeneous to an emancipatory organization of society. This claim introduces a Lefebvrian premise regarding the consideration of architecture as a projection of social forces. Architecture is social forces taking form. Methodology 11 versions of black noise ------08 Signal-to-Noise Ratio Signals can only be detected by being on the ground during events. It What has been discovered about the spatial practices in Athens during the crisis? ------takes a trained eye and what can only be “Social actions interrogated by architectural descrbed as instinct to pick up certain processes techniques to make them tangible and testable.” as they unfold.

What does a housing model have to do with Public Space? ------Much about Greece right now is obscured; it is obscured by the fog of financial diplomacy and the barking of political posturing. Looking at the recent demonstrations – there are almost an infinite number of data points that can be considered. Millions of tweets, thousands of people, countless signs and banners. So how do you locate signals amongst the noise? Think of it in terms of “11 versions of black noise” – like when you are trying to tune an old TV but you keep getting static. This is where we have to consider certain principles to look for. More often than not, it’s a case of retrospective judgement. There is a certain materialism of the encounter that can begin to classify what a demonstration involves spatially. What are the functional urban operations taking place?

Content Change Edges Movement Position Documentation Scale political organisation Urban affect and Temporary, elastic, Direction and speed Spatial arrangment of Representation Interactions with the effect mental thresholds tactics and strategies methods urban

Determining signals from noise Public Realm Urban housing model ------09 Polykatoikia Part of understanding the present political climate of Athens requires an What is the Polykatoikia? ------examination of the city’s urban morphology. “Neo-Corbusian housing model that came to prominence in the post-war period: repetitive and homogenous, hierarchy is distinctively absent.”

What does a housing model have to do with Public Space? ------The political flexibility of the public squares in Athens is partially enabled by the non-transferable modalities of the Greek housing model, the polykatoika: a neo-Corbusian housing system that came to prominence in the post-war period. The Polykatoikia is fundamentally political. Following the Greek civil war, the new “democratic” government wanted to avoid industrial concentrations of social housing and promote a small-scale private economic integration. Subsequently, what we see as the romantic view of Athens - white informal dominos stretching toward the horizon - hides one of the most politically motivated spatial projects of the past century, an urban morphology designed to tame the transformational potential of the working class in a country with an active communist tradition. All architectures repeated without change become automatic. The polykatoika is an architecture of automation, its an architecture without the need for Architects. Its distinctive urban morphology is highlighted by the constant repetition and discontinuity of a basic form at a large, seemingly infinite scale. The urban morphology of Athens is repetitive and homogenous: hierarchy is distinctively absent. It is this subsequent absence that lays the ground for the city to open up to a degree of flexibility within its rare public spaces, and a contributing condition to public space’s consistent appropriation by political forms. What remains in-between the Polykatoika are remainders within the repetition; transferrable space that is both configurable and able to be appropriated by politcal movements through the urban pracitce of demonstration. Photo Essay The Role of Architecture in Spaces of Global Capital ------10 Santiago Calatrava’s Athens Olympic Sports Complex. Completed in 2004. Photographed 2011-2014. Athens Olympic Sport Complex Photo Essay The Role of Architecture in Spaces of Global Capital ------11

= Demonstration

Clockwise from top: the main (and no home to football), the Agora, the plaza of teh Agora, the Agora again (emphasis on graffiti) and the Velodrome roof. Photo Essay The Role of Architecture in Spaces of Global Capital ------12 Bernard Tschumi’s New , Athens. Completed in 2007. Photographed 2013-2015. New Acropolis Museum Photo Essay The Role of Architecture in Spaces of Global Capital ------13

The PhD adopts a synthetic approach

“Built as a series of stacked horizontal boxes located atop an existing research dig, the New Acropolis Museum is a mirror of the history of the Acropolis. As the visitor moves higher and higher through the building’s circulation pattern they simultaneously move through the various historical era’s of the Acropolis itself.” Event The Eventualities of Anomalies ------14 The Event We must first pass from architecture to space, and then from space to event. What type of history us being produced? ------“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. – Marx Why look at the event from a philosophical and archtiectural perspective, and is this compatible? ------The significance of the idea of event within philosophy is its lack of predictability. It does not conform to a syllogistic extension of the domain of the truth. An event is the effect that seems to exceed its causes – and the space of an event is the gap that separates an effect from its causes. The philosophical pretension of the event centres on an exegesis that involves a logical extension of propositions towards its purest state. The event is an interruption to the usual order of things. It is an appearance without solid being as its foundation. Despite this, events are necessary within philosophy. The idea that the event cannot be predicted within a syllogistic extension of the domain of the truth leads it towards a debatable framework and yet, for transformations to happen within intellectual constructions of a set of situations – from how one thing leads to another – events are necessary. This is a basic notion within philosophy; events play a fundamental role in the creation of knowledge, yet cannot be transmitted as forms of knowledge, nor reductively identified as distinctive forms of knowledge themselves. Despite this, events are necessary for new knowledge to occur. “The event is an interruption to the usual order of things. It is an appearance without solid being as its With this approximate definition, we find ourselves at the very centre of foundation.” philosophy, where causality is one of the basic problems. In architecture, causality is directive of the designed programme of spaces. Here, the shift from a Cartesian to a Materialist dogma can be revealed to allow an understanding of historical relations: the Cartesian perceives space as a set of static relations or forms, whereby the reality of perceived experience designated by a more analogue interpretation of representational limits. Conversely, the Materialist perceives space through a historical reality of revolutions, or in an architectural context, a dynamic reading of space through the interplay of relational forces. Thus, historical materialism gives ideology annexation by declaring place in the production of space. We are therefore viewing space in a relational manner dominated by transferrals and assemblages of power structures and translating this conflict to find another disposition within the present political crisis in Greece. We must first pass from architecture to space, and then from space to event; the representational limit of a series of actions in space. The radical posturing of space coincides with its legitimation. We can refer to Habermas regarding the nature of space in a crisis: “The symbolic legitimation of state authority may be linked to the periodic legitimation ‘crises’ which Habermas (1975) suggests afflict the capitalist state on a periodic basis. Such crises occur when subjects of authority lose faith in its fairness. The system then tends to correct itself, reorganizing power at one level to preserve it at another ... the capacity of buildings and urban forms to stabilize identity and symbolize a ‘grounding’ of authority in landscape, nature and ‘time-less imagery means that architecture is regularly called on to legitimate power in a crisis.” Operating on a multi formal plane of theory and ideology, the classic revolutionary re-composition of the political field becomes vulnerable to ideas of event. Facilitated by architecture, the event exists in the moment of transgression. It redefines boundaries and therefore allows us to view certain objects – both virtual and architectural – from a new framework and altered perception that once again open allow for a re-interpretation of space itself. The city becomes the unauthorised event, with the object playing the role of the introduced event. In a philosophical sense of the term, its use was expanded by Foucault from a logical sequence of actions into “the moment of erosion, collapse, questioning, or problematisation of the very assumptions of the setting within which drama might take place – occasioning the chance or possibility of another different setting”, or in a mutually distancing phrase; an event of thought as much of an event itself. Regardless, this is the event viewed as both a sequencing of conflicts and as a shift in the discourse of what consitutes architectural knowledge. Spatial Episodes ------15 The following pages give a snapshot on areas of research focus. 03

Spatial

Episodes (4 case studies) Notes from the field A sample that is part of a broader analysis where collect and classify becomes explain and understand.

Protest Noun A statement or action expressing disapproval of or objection to something.

Demonstration Noun a public meeting or march protesting against something or expressing views on a political issue.

A protest march is a type of protest or demonstration that generally involves a group of people walking from an assembly point to a predetermined destination, usually culminating in a political rally, and often evoking a military march or parade.

In Athens, Protest movements nominally operate on two distinct modes of demonstration: power seeking and immanent critique.

Athenian student politics is said to be one of the best training grounds in the world. Determining signals from noise Spatial Episodes Constitution Square ------16 Syntagma Square

Where is the site of the crisis? ------“When we think of Athens, Greece, the site of the Eurozone crisis, we think of its location at 01 the base of Parliament in Syntagma Square.”

Syntagma Square Spatial Episodes Shopping Malls ------17 “The Mall” in Athens

t ------“Since the Olympics, Athens has seen a dramatic increase in Western-styled shopping 02 malls, going from zero to seven, and counting...”

Shopping Mall Spatial Episodes Elections ------18 January 2015 Elections

Why examine elections? ------“Embedded within democracy are certain 03 representations of spatial organisation.” 02

Election Spatial Episodes Acropolis ------19 Protest on the Acropolis

How do we write about a historical objecf that gains new meaning? ------“Events on the acropolis no longer relegate it as historical monument, but re-engage it towards a 04 dynamic modality of space once again.” 01

Acropolis full stop

______

“I’m a Prize-fighter with my Brain”

Contact Details [email protected] @_athanasios @athanasios_lazarou