Fragile State(s)

Abstract

Fragile State(s): Lines, Walls and the Possibility of Interrupting Processes of Privatisation is an exploration into architecture as a practice of negotiation and disruption. Situated in the uncertain context of Brexit, the project is a critique of how architecture, a profession that often claims to mediate and resolve socio-political and economic issues through spatial intervention, is a vehicle that continuously drives marginalisation, embodied state violence and power. Buildings make visible conflict, control and prejudice and in the context of late-capitalism and Brexit, will continue to perform as a means through which income is produced for the wealthy. An architecture that can instead unfix, destabilise, blur lines and edges, as opposed to fix and define, acting at fragile moments uncovered within oppressive socio-political processes, is a relational practice through which collectivity and publicness can be maintained. This concerns an architecture that is not physical (static / fixed), that composes and aestheticises, but that is collectively negotiated, practiced, choreographed, enacted, evolving, adaptable, fragile (dynamic / unfixed). The thesis proposes a fragile network of infrastructural interventions that can facilitate the emergence, transformation and deterioration of social spaces, inhabiting the ongoing changing state of the quay walls of the River Clyde in Glasgow. The fragile state of the quay walls draws a parallel to the uncertain context of the Brexit vote, as a moment in which something else could happen. Emergent inhabitancies that temporarily maintain an illusion of regeneration or certainty, that fluctuate in relation to flows of water and the hydrological cycle, embrace Glasgow’s wet climate: a disruptive force that threatens privatisation. The project investigates a fragile architecture that can exploit destabilising processes as an opportunity to curate edges, choreograph surfaces and inhabit spaces within and from the wall, that in turn deter market speculation. The temporal inhabitance of the wall is a process whereby infrastructure is reactivated and extended, claiming back public land: as long as the city is kept as wet as possible, unstable edges and landscapes allow for processes of privatisation to be subverted.