Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

In this paper I develop the concept of the architectural effect. This term encapsulates a genre of theory that examines buildings’ ontological capacities and argues that theorists should take architecture as a frame of reference for thinking through the relation of materiality, ethics, and the human future. I examine three key figures in this genre: the Philosopher-architect duo Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, and anthropologist AbdouMaliq Simone. Each of these figures claims ontological and political territory for built environments along various axes of normativity, including gender, class, race, and anthropocentrism. The architectural effect is to unpack the ways built environments and ethical futures wrap ever tighter around each other in political and analytical synergy. The architectural effect, as a concept, embodies the possibility of architecture’s conceptual purchase across humanistic and social-scientific discussions of global politics in the contemporary world. It is the task of this paper to clarify the stakes of this term, and to make it a useful device for future inquiry.