(Plat)forms of Protest. Architecture in the Age of Re-Activism

The global revival of protest movements can be seen as the trigger for architecture to rethink its role within political dynamics. The research aims to investigate the relationship between architecture and the political starting from a contemporary context in which political intent has assumed a relevant agency within the project, to the point of subordinating to itself multiple aspects. Specifically, it aims to study the occasions in which in architecture the political takes the form of protest: a declarative act expressed firmly, collectively, publicly, always in opposition to the status quo. The metaphor between project and protest is a container to ask whether architecture has, or has ever had, a conscious political potential, to understand in what forms it manifests itself and how it has changed from the past. It becomes a way of asking whether it can be a political instrument. Several case studies have been selected, starting from 2011 - the year of the Indignados movement, the Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring - up to the present. Each example represents one category of the project, in order to understand architecture as a discipline capable of delivering different products: from the magazine to the house, from the exhibition to the demolition. The comparison of the different results, researched through a series of interviews with the authors themselves, wants to identify characteristic elements and build a systematization of them. This will generate an initial reading of the phenomenon of protest architecture, of its reasons and consequences.