Two Versions of a Walled House

This paper ventures from a fascination for impacting through architecture the everyday urban reality, often taken for granted. As attested to in various fields, artefacts play profound roles in how we think the world. One might then follow Mouffe's call to Architecture to erect agnostic stages within public space, renegotiating our world (Mouffe 2012). Then, architectural artefacts are endowed with a 'political' agency, capable of inducing change. The notion impact is related to that of agency, as foregrounded by Till and Schneider: a transformative agency, empowering actors to initiate alternative spatial practices (Till & Schneider 2009). This shifts a dominant focus on aesthetical autonomy towards other conceptions of architectural aesthetics, such as an aesthetics of use (Dunne 2005) and an aesthetics of politics (Rancière 2010). Such aesthetics project different versions of a world that is considered always multiple. This implies inducing a certain degree of conflict and subsequent processes of negotiation between versions, of making sense. Lingering on the project Walled House, we distinguish between how this project was conceived and built, discussing its agencies. We then elaborate on two divergent perspectives on urban reality raising the question: is architecture a 'policing' activity or a 'political' activity?status: accepte