Collective Form and Organization as
Political and Cultural Expression

We explore Plans as a product of Architecture’s design interests, in conjunction with the messiness of Politics as design’s cultural and contextual condition. As a whole, such plans and politics form our understanding of what comprises the discipline of Urban Design.

Plans and Politics appreciates the city as an ongoing experiment in freedom. Such an experiment may also fail.

Plans and Politics is about power, ideology, and their effects within a collective setting. Design skillfully subverts power for its own interests. As architects we want to be political without having to become politicians. What used to be a political job turns out to be a design opportunity. The product can be political fiction imposed on reality or vice versa.
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Within a project-based set up, we research, projectively interpret, and promote specific politics of/in architecture and urban design. To foster discourse and to produce form(-al) arguments based in reality, tangible artifacts accompany each project as polemical vehicles likely appreciable in their own right as well.

Our research/design method is characterized by the interplay of disciplinary issues (theory), empirical and phenomenological research (actual information), narrative (history, genealogy), and polemic (speculation and interpretation).
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What was once a political job has become a design opportunity. Investigations take an urban form. Events and pedagogy shift toward a different, critical urban project.
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To change the city, you must first know its rules!

As a product of society, any city naturally adheres to certain sets of rules. Some of them are officially stipulated, while others exhibit their prescriptive force more implicitly as traditions and conventions. With their capability to negotiate collective and individual interests, rules are a cultural achievement.

As we like to perceive design as an act of subversion, the task is not necessarily to work along a given set of rules, but to play with them, to use their power for other kinds of qualities, to exchange existing rules with new ones and to find projective loopholes within alleged limitations. That’s why we love rules as being complementary to plans.

We formed the Office of Urban Regulation as an urban consultancy, which is founded on our ongoing research on rules within very specific urban contexts. A constantly growing database of found rules creates the very basis of our expertise.
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Plans and Politics is a collaborative effort of...
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