Relational Architecture: Poetics, Politics and the Transformation of Space
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article offers a critical and propositional reading of relational architecture as an emancipatory practice that integrates politics, poetics, and critical imagination in the production of space. Rejecting both technical neutrality and stylistic formalism, relational architecture is framed here as a language of transformation — one that resists dominant spatial logics and projects more just, meaningful, and cohabitable spatial relations. Through a transdisciplinary approach, the text examines historical and contemporary examples — from Haussmann’s Paris to the Findhorn Ecovillage, from SESC Pompeia to the Serpentine Pavilion — showing how architecture can reveal other forms of life and reconfigure modes of dwelling. Key concepts such as solidarity imaginaries, alternative cosmologies, and the poetics of resistance are discussed, in a structure that moves from critical diagnosis to operative propositions. The article concludes that consolidating relational architecture requires structural changes across political, disciplinary, pedagogical, and cultural domains, affirming architecture as an ethical, affective, and shared act.
Author: Sequeira, João B Meneses de
Institution: University of Beira Interior
Language: English
Subfield: Architecture
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6949650750
FWCI:
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: