Winners Announced: Architectural Essay Writing, 6th Cycle: ‘Architecture & Politics’
- Suneja Pappal
- Apr 14
- 8 min read
Architectural Essay Writing Contest, 6th Cycle floated by Architectural Journalism & Criticism Organisation announces the Winning Entries.
Theme described for the Competition was - ‘Architecture & Politics’
Architecture does not exist in isolation. It is produced within systems of power, governance, and social negotiation. The essay writing prompted entrants to look at how, when, and why architecture becomes political. How does the built environment influence social control, inclusion, and exclusion—especially in public spaces? When a building or space is designed, whose needs are truly addressed. Which age groups and social communities are considered, and who is left out of the process. While architectural proposals often present ideals of openness and accessibility—the lived reality of cities can reveal a very different narrative. Consider the city from the perspective of those who inhabit and consume it daily. The pedestrian, the commuter, the informal worker, the child, and the elderly—each experience space differently. How does design shape behavior, movement, and interaction? Is there a hierarchy embedded within cities that determines who can occupy space and who can belong to it? Architecture and politics are closely intertwined, often influencing our everyday routines in subtle and unacknowledged ways. This competition encourages an experiential approach. Reflect on your personal encounters with urban spaces and examine how architectural elements communicate political intent. As designers, our understanding of the city emerges from layers of memory, overlap, and personal engagement(s). Yet these interpretations are frequently projected onto a shared public realm that accommodates multiple and sometimes conflicting experiences. Public spaces such as streets, markets, plazas, places of worship, and sites of celebration become visible through collective use and quantum of footfall. Regulation, symbolism, and control give these spaces political meaning. Do designed environments speak a language of identity and power. Is this language consciously read, or is it overlooked with routine. Through pure observation, explore how architecture operates as a political act and how it shapes the ‘everyday’ life of the city.
The 'Special Mention Award' goes to Preksha Udupa
“One by One – Statue by Statue”
Making, as an act of architecture, is undeniably political. It determines who is celebrated, who is remembered, who is immortalised in bronze, whose names are deemed worthy enough to last on the streets you and I walk on. While architecture operates through making, this essay argues that unmaking is itself an act of architecture – one that is unequivocally political.
In 2026, walking down Via Laietana in Barcelona, a busy thoroughfare, one encounters a tall pedestal sitting in a plaza overlooking the sea, opening to the sky, and lined with historic facades. Pedestals are made to hold something significant such as a statue or a sculpture, an embodiment of memory – at least that is the expectation. Surprisingly, there is nothing on this pedestal, leaving one to wonder whether the void was intentional, whether something was unmade. Plausibly the absence was deliberate.
In 2018, the streets and plaza were filled with music, festivities and fireworks and the city witnessed a public spectacle. As the crowd cheered on, a crane gradually lifted the statue from the pedestal. The statue was of Antonio López y López, the celebrated “successful indiano”, the Spaniard who went to Cuba and returned to Barcelona prosperous and influential. Years of consistent activism led the Barcelona City Council to remove this statue and transfer it to the warehouse of Museu d’Historia de Barcelona (MUHBA). With the statue gone and the pedestal left behind, it is safe to say unmaking was opted. The absence was indeed deliberate.
It was in 1884; this statue was inaugurated by the Barcelona City Council with much pomp and celebration. The construction of the statue began in 1883 shortly after the death of the industrialist Antonio López y López. The statue then was facing the plaza with its back towards the sea, representing the riches and aspiration brought to the city through his seafaring endeavours. Additionally, the plaza was also renamed from Plaza of San Sebastian to Antonio López’s name; such were his contributions in economic growth, industrial growth and cultural renaissance in Barcelona.
The credit to his wealth accumulation mainly lies in him being a slave trader, a ‘negrero’. Further, he also extended to build warships leading the colonial wars in Morocco and Cuba. Creating banks, to funding arts, to building warships, the laurels of his contribution to urbanisation of Barcelona remain significant. However, the lived realities of slave trade and colonial extortion outstrip the glimmer of colonial wealth and his reputation. It was only in 1936, following the events of the Spanish Civil War, the statue was torn down on popular demand by the anarchists. What was left behind was a red and black flag along with an image of captain Maxmilian Biardeau, who lost his life defending the Catalan state in 1934.
Again, the unmaking was opted and the absence was indeed deliberate and lasted till 1944. It was in this year, under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, Antonio López’s statue was restored by the Catalan sculptor Fredric Marès. This version of the statue was intended to match the original version with only one difference that now it stood facing the sea as opposed to the original one. Barcelona celebrated the end of Franco’s regime in 1975 but much against the will of many citizens’ groups in the neighbourhood.
From its making in 1884, to its unmaking in 1936, to its re-making in 1944, to its re unmaking in 2018, to 2026 as it remains unmade, it took years of making and unmaking as acts of architecture to unfold in public space reflecting the manifold political entanglements, historical narratives and negotiation of memory. The empty pedestal today and unmaking so far has made ruptures in inherited narratives visible. If presence was celebrated and contested, absence stood as argument and counter narrative.
Ultimately arriving at an understanding – making as an act of architecture associated with positive attributes such as representation, glorification, celebration etc… necessarily is not positive while unmaking as an act of architecture associated with absence, desecration, violence etc…deemed negative necessarily is not negative and it is in the relational dynamics between the two that politics thrives, space is authored and power negotiated. Contemporary evolution legitimised making as an act of architecture to operate from colonialism and capitalism, on the other hand unmaking as an act of architecture operates through liberative processes such as revolution and transformation.
Across the globe, similar reckonings of decolonisation and growing number of empty pedestals, renamed streets highlight time and again that unmaking is one of the most deliberated acts of architecture. Through unmaking, space is reauthored and history is renegotiated. One by one – statue by statue – the city reconsiders who is celebrated, who is remembered, who is immortalised in bronze, whose names are deemed worthy enough to last on the streets you and I walk on!
Bibliography
Bauer, C. S. (2019, August 26). Slavery and Memory": recent transformations in the Spanish public space (Article) Translated by Tira Text UK. Retrieved from Café História:
Catalan News. (2018, March 5). Barcelona removes slave trader statue. Retrieved from https://www.catalannews.com/society-science/item/barcelona-removes-slave-trader-statue
D'Angelo, I. (2023). Decolonising Space and the Self. A Post-Colonial Reading of Activism on Statues. Annali di Ca' Foscari, Serie Orientale(59), 195-230. Retrieved from
orientale/2023/2/art-10.30687-AnnOr-2385-3042-2023-02-007_SPJvjuO.pdf
Sjoberg, L. (2023). Knock it Down? Unmaking, Deconstruction, and Destruction as/in Politics Research. Global Studies Quarterly, 3 (4). Retrieved from
The New York Times. (2020, June 24). How Statues are Falling Around the World. Retrievedfrom https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/us/confederate-statues-photos.html
Tsuchiya, A. (2019). Monuments and Public Memory: Antonio Lopez y Lopez, slavery and the Cuban Catalan connection, Nineteenth-Century Contexts. 479-500.
doi:10.1080/08905495.2019.1657735
Certificate of Appreciation : S B Sanjeevan
“Architecture as Political Act: Reading Power in the Everyday Urban Landscape”
Peter Eisenman's assertion that "architecture is definitely a political act" is a visceral truth I confront daily as an architect navigating cities that reward certain bodies while punishing others. The built environment actively produces hierarchies of belonging through material form, regulatory frameworks and spatial vocabularies that determine who moves freely, who labours visibly and who must remain invisible. Architecture is the physical manifestation of political will, encoding power relations into brick, concrete and asphalt until they appear natural and unquestionable.
The morphology of arterial infrastructure exposes architecture's role in manufacturing mobility hierarchies. On major corridors, footpaths fracture into discontinuous fragments interrupted by building projections, colonized by parking or simply terminated, forcing pedestrians into carriageways designed for speeds that negate human presence. Signal phasing calculates crossing times for able-bodied adults, transforming the elderly, differently-abled and children into infrastructural obstacles. Traffic engineering manuals prioritize Level of Service for vehicles while pedestrians remain unquantified. Cities allocate 60-70% of road space to private vehicles serving 20-30% of trips while pedestrians receive infrastructural contempt. When grade-separated vehicular infrastructure proliferates, pedestrian connectivity is sacrificed, fragmenting ground plane experience into isolated islands accessible only through vertical punishment. This is ideology materialized in reinforced concrete.
Defensive architecture operates as biopolitical control through hostile formal languages. Public seating incorporates armrests at precise intervals, preventing horizontal occupation and ensuring exhausted labourers or the homeless cannot claim prolonged rest. Benches become disciplinary devices enforcing what geographer Don Mitchell termed the "annihilation of space by law" through design specification. Skatestoppers, angled surfaces and eliminated alcoves constitute a vocabulary of exclusion replicated across cities. The materiality itself like imported granite, stainless steel signals that space serves those who consume, not those who merely exist. As architects, we participate in this violence when specifying seating with anti-homeless features or designing plazas optimized for surveillance rather than habitation.
Temporal regulation reveals how architecture's political function operates through enforcement regimes choreographing occupation. Business districts transform through diurnal cycles: daylight hours accommodate formal commerce under surveillance, while post-evening, as enforcement weakens, street vendors reclaim thresholds for alternate economies. The architecture itself often proves more accommodating to informal appropriation than regulatory frameworks permit. Heritage conservation aestheticizes facades while criminalizing street commerce, creating sanitized tourist vernaculars emptied of lived complexity. Gated leisure spaces employ entrance fees to transform ostensibly public waterfronts into private realms, proving architectural openness can coexist with absolute social closure.
Age-based spatial apartheid exposes whose mobility matters in infrastructure investment. Children are confined to fenced play areas while streets operate at design speeds rendering them kill zones. For the elderly, seating is absent at transit stops, grade-separated infrastructure requires stair-climbing and footpaths function as obstacle courses. When pedestrian specifications default to able-bodied adult standards, they codify exclusion as technical neutrality. Development plans allocate resources toward automotive infrastructure while pedestrian networks remain residual. This is political choice crystallized in zoning codes and engineering standards that architecture implements without question.
Monumental architecture articulates state power through formal languages of distance and inaccessibility. Government complexes sit elevated behind security barriers, performing authority through material hierarchies and neoclassical vocabularies that induce bodily subjugation through proportion. Citizens approach as supplicants across empty lawns, diminished by architectural geometry. In contrast, malls perform accessibility through transparent facades and environmental comfort, though private security enforces absolute exclusion. Architecture functions as ideological apparatus, teaching citizens where they consume and where they remain governed subjects.
The most insidious dimension is architecture's capacity to naturalize violence through formal normalization. Commuters experience degradation by standing in exhaust fumes without shelter as inevitable rather than designed choice. Pedestrian overbridges forcing vertical circulation while vehicles flow below constitute spatial apartheid in structural steel. The technical vocabulary architects deploy FAR calculations, setback regulations, parking norms that masks profoundly political decisions about resource distribution. When site plans prioritize parking over public space, when specifications default to vehicular performance over pedestrian dignity, we enforce hierarchies and design violence into built form.
As architects, we cannot claim technical neutrality when every decision participates in spatial politics determining whose lives are valued. Professional discourse often reproduces inequality while deploying progressive vocabulary: transit stations achieve certification while surrounding areas remain hostile; smart city proposals integrate sensors while displacing informal settlements. Architecture's political responsibility extends beyond individual buildings to urban conditions buildings collectively produce. Peter Eisenman's provocation demands we recognize architecture is always already political. The question is whose power it serves and what forms of life it enables or forecloses. Until we confront this in every drawing, we remain architects of systemic violence, building inequality into the permanent landscape one detail at a time.
Jury Panel for the Competition were
Jaya Kanoria, Course Director of Indian Aesthetics at Jnanapravaha, Mumbai.
Aliaksandr Shuba, Ph.D. Scholar, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany
Fiona Evangeline, Architect at Habitus Research Studio, researcher and architectural historian.
Anubhav Malhotra, Architect & Program Ambassador at CEPT University.
Roshni Udyavar, CEO at RUA Ecospaces LLP, & Academician
Pappal Suneja, Ph.D. Scholar, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany
Competition Curator: Twinkle Kataria, Architect & Artist, Mumbai, India
Note: No entry was found worthy of the ‘Citation Award’.
Head Image © Preksha Udupa
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