August 30, 2015
Office for Political Innovation
Architecture for us is about making daily life political. Nowadays, politics is happening against the backdrop of ordinary life—in our kitchens, living rooms, and backyards. The domestic sphere is the new battleground. Whereas in the 1990s much of the architectural debate was focused on urbanization, geo- graphical and spatial divisions such as cities, suburbs, and […]
Architecture for us is about making daily life political. Nowadays, politics is happening against the backdrop of ordinary life—in our kitchens, living rooms, and backyards. The domestic sphere is the new battleground. Whereas in the 1990s much of the architectural debate was focused on urbanization, geo- graphical and spatial divisions such as cities, suburbs, and the countryside are not as well-defined today. Through personal and mobile technologies, we reconfigure our lives along constantly changing demarcations. The Mouride communities simultaneously live in New York and Touba, Senegal. The owners of New York’s priciest condo towers inhabit a constellation of residences around the world that are connected through their Instagram accounts.
Our work is interested in interrogating the design of daily life, so that it becomesmoreinclusivewhilestillretainingdifference.Wedonotseektocreate mere objects but hubs in which the framework of society is rearticulated. With COSMO at MoMA PS1, we proposed to redefine the way New York relates to water. At the House in Never Never Land we tried to channel Ibiza’s hedo- nistic lifestyle into a force capable of promoting environmental empowerment.
Architecture can help prompt new ways to structure our interactions with others. It can change how we relate to natural resources, to toxicity, to gender constructions, to inequality, or to transnational differentials. We defin- itively want to see our office on this side of architecture.
Office for Political Innovation
Location: Madrid and New York
Founded: 2000
Size: 10 people
Founder: AndreĢs Jaque
