Situating Architecture Series: Political Power of the Key
20 February 2023, 7:00 pm–8:30 pm

As part of the Situating Architecture series, Léopold Lambert, Paris-based architect and the founding editor of The Funambulist, will deliver a lecture on the violent power of an ubiquitous architectural object and, through it, architects’ active complicity with the materialisation of oppressive regimes of control over bodies.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
Location
-
Room 6.0222 Gordon StreetLondonWC1H 0AJUnited Kingdom
Political Power of the Key
About
Most of us own a key. It is an object of our daily lives, but we often fail to consider its political power. In its materialisation of legal protocols of social inclusion and exclusion, however, the key enforces political regimes such as private property, settler colonialism and carceralism. This talk will attempt to demonstrate the violent power of this ubiquitous architectural object and, through it, architects’ active complicity with the materialisation of oppressive regimes of control over bodies. Only such a realisation can help envisioning architecture playing a role, however humble, in revolutionary movements.
Biography
Léopold Lambert is a Paris-based architect and the founding editor of The Funambulist, a print and online magazine dedicated to 'the politics of space and bodies', and to the cultivation of internationalist solidarities between political struggles of the world.
Image: The Key of Return, at the entrance of the Palestinian refugee camp of Aida in Bethlehem. / Photo by Emilywilder1 (2018)