How to architect a change?

Designing is about creating visions for different futures, building narratives, images and support for a vision. In architecture, this does not necessarily involve sketches or models, as the documentary To Build Law shows. The film follows the work of the Berlin-based architectural practice b+, as they prepare to set up Power to Renovation, a European citizens’ initiative that advocates renovation over demolition. Design work, here, means preparing assemblies with carefully curated seating orders, debating with European network partners and initiatives, seeking the help of an advertising agency to prepare the campaign, and creating films with students from the design studio.

The camera is a careful and calm observer of this process, following the involved actors and observing the spaces where action is planned and takes place. As such, the film adopts what could be described as a praxeological approach, focussing on practices, negotiations and routines, that lets the image of a discursive architectural practice emerge, one that no longer aims primarily to design physical objects such as buildings, but instead seeks to design political networks to build law and architect a change. Contrasting this discursive scenery are recurring panoramic shots of construction sites and places of demolition, where plots are emptied for new buildings, taking down existing structures and with them former homes, individual stories and fragments of the urban past. The sound of construction is a reminder of the powerful industry promoting a different vision of the city, an acoustic reminder that visions for a future are being fought over. 
 

Hannah Strothmann
Researcher, writer and architect