Can Architecture Begin from Equality?
Ontological Autonomy and Micropolitics
Textos de Arquitectura (Madrid), no. 2 (2025): 37–46.
Article (SP, EN)︎︎︎
This article interrogates the twentieth-century split in architectural discourse between autonomy and socio-political determination. Modernist autonomy sought purity in formal self-reference yet depended on critical judgment of the discipline to define its essence. Constructionist and postmodern approaches instead treated architecture as socially produced, but often redirected this claim into compositional maneuvers, leaving systemic inequalities insufficiently addressed. Contemporary criticism and activism confront such unresolved inequalities directly through strategies of identification and correction. While indispensable, these approaches remain anthropocentric, casting equality mainly as the outcome of repair.
Against this horizon, the article proposes that architecture can be understood as already operating in equality when reframed through a post-anthropocentric sense of autonomy. Drawing on object-oriented and posthumanist thought, the architectural project is theorized as an autonomous entity composed of heterogeneous manifestations—drawings, models, calculations, material assemblies, uses, perceptions—none of which can exhaust its reality. This “flat interior” inscribes equality ontologically rather than prescribing it epistemologically. Following Rancière’s claim that equality operates in its presupposition and Harman’s notion of zero-function, the project’s structure appears as irreducible to any of its articulations and components, always exceeding prescribed roles and remaining open to unforeseen appropriations.
On this basis, the article foregrounds the micropolitical dimension of architectural equality: the everyday, subtle, and often unrecognized ways in which space is inhabited, negotiated, and reconfigured. In contrast to macropolitical frameworks of institutional regulation and consensus, micropolitics of equality operates through difference and contestation, following the project’s ontological autonomy as a flat interior. Architecture—by virtue of its ubiquity and material persistence—is uniquely positioned to sustain such open micro-enactments when it is designed to resist foreclosure. The concluding reflections ask how macropolitical stability and micropolitical openness might be articulated in architectural terms, sustaining their tension without collapsing one into the other in the pursuit of equality.
Against this horizon, the article proposes that architecture can be understood as already operating in equality when reframed through a post-anthropocentric sense of autonomy. Drawing on object-oriented and posthumanist thought, the architectural project is theorized as an autonomous entity composed of heterogeneous manifestations—drawings, models, calculations, material assemblies, uses, perceptions—none of which can exhaust its reality. This “flat interior” inscribes equality ontologically rather than prescribing it epistemologically. Following Rancière’s claim that equality operates in its presupposition and Harman’s notion of zero-function, the project’s structure appears as irreducible to any of its articulations and components, always exceeding prescribed roles and remaining open to unforeseen appropriations.
On this basis, the article foregrounds the micropolitical dimension of architectural equality: the everyday, subtle, and often unrecognized ways in which space is inhabited, negotiated, and reconfigured. In contrast to macropolitical frameworks of institutional regulation and consensus, micropolitics of equality operates through difference and contestation, following the project’s ontological autonomy as a flat interior. Architecture—by virtue of its ubiquity and material persistence—is uniquely positioned to sustain such open micro-enactments when it is designed to resist foreclosure. The concluding reflections ask how macropolitical stability and micropolitical openness might be articulated in architectural terms, sustaining their tension without collapsing one into the other in the pursuit of equality.