Vorwort

We know that architecture depends. But as soon as the description of the relations of dependency (heteronomy) and the freedom of their actors (autonomy) is made more concrete, the subject, architecture, seems to be almost dissolved between the established patterns of disciplinary views and interests. Which relations of dependency do we actually speak of? How do they materialise? What happens to our conception of architecture, if we not only consider ideas, designs, and their representations, but also material and labour, building technologies and the construction industry, and indeed the power of capital and its role in the creation of the built environment? In our opinion general theories about the question of autonomy in architecture should be replaced by specific investigations of concrete examples. With this book, we resume a discussion at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s in Germany, the analysis of urban and architectural planning by Klaus Brake, Helga Fassbinder, and Renate Petzinger, the critique of the bourgeois category of autonomy by Michael Müller, and the designation of architecture as the planning of building by Jörn Janssen. The two last authors have written central contributions to a more precise determination of the field of aesthetic and economic autonomy for this volume, which are also linked to this debate. However, for us these questions need to be asked new again today, especially as new methodological tools such as actor-network theory, science and technology studies, media and cultural studies, or New Materialism expand and enrich our field of research