The editors of AR/Architecture Research are calling for papers that address the interrelational, and dialectical, constructs defining the Politics of the Line and its manifestations within architecture and related practices.
Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.1
History is viewed as a ‘production’, in all senses of the term: the production of meanings, beginning with the ‘signifying traces’ of events; an analytical construction that is never definite and always provisional; an instrument of deconstruction of ascertainable realities.2
A line is a mark that mobilises distinctions and implies direction. It is part of a founding act as well as a project. It transforms and it demonstrates. For early builders, the line was the cord (the mason’s line) used for taking measurements and for making things level. Later, in the 16th century it stood for ‘a crease of the face or palm of the hand’ and for the equator, a line notionally drawn on the earth.
A word, a concept, a practice, the line enables multiple histories, geographies and sets of problems at a variety of scales. Interested in the relationships between these words, ideas, practices, as well as their histories and visual languages, various objects of study can be constructed and methods debated.
Lines describe material and conceptual dispositions: they describe how buildings are or should be constructed. Through this they locate forms of life, administrative boundaries, land protocols, economic interests and political ambitions. While a line implies boundedness as a territory but also as epistemic framework, the geographical, legal, technical, practical and theoretical questions, historically and semantically precise, impart a challenge. Inscriptions on material soil and within forms of discourse contribute to the legitimation of social and cultural demarcations and substantiate the claim of malleable boundaries with unexpected resonances. The edge of the frame or a wide-angle lens, lines invoke poetics and micro-geographies at the expense of established institutional structures and canonical forms of evidence and can indeed help the process of thinking.
Now, more than ever, that the fundamentals of the political have lost their credibility, the line as resultant artefact or conscious action, is the site par excellence of the political; imaginary line or ‘signifying trace’, gesture and object, it provides a tool to dissect and (re)-constitute architecture as set of relational practices for knowledge and the resilience of the discipline as a whole.
– Marina Lathouri, Guest Editor AR 2020