Can Architecture Be An Emancipatory Project? Dialogues on Architecture and the Left

Can architecture be an instrument of emancipation? Can architects unchain themselves from their own instrumentalisation within capitalism? In a format as provocative as the questions Lahiji asks of his interlocutors - Andreotti, Cunningham, Deamer, Swyngedouw and Ockman - these are given a platform to ask searching questions of architecture, the Left, and each other. Their arguments and exchanges over issues of autonomy and activism, over the relationship between the political and the economic, over form and abstraction, are passionate, insightful and contentious. The critical engagement of its authors illuminates, for the theory and practice of architecture, what is at stake in the central question of Can Architecture be an Emancipatory Project? ~ Douglas Spencer, Professor of Architecture, Architectural Association, London.