Strategic Architecture: How to Build Coalitions for Regulatory Change

This is the first event in Strategic Architecture - an evening school series exploring how architecture can challenge, democratize, and improve political processes and collective decision-making. The evening features a conversation between Olaf Grawert and Deane Simpson.

Olaf Grawert is co-founder of the policy laboratory HouseEurope! and partner at the architecture studio b+. Deane Simpson is an architect and professor of architecture, urbanism, and planning at the Royal Danish Academy, School of Architecture in Copenhagen, where he leads the master's programme Urbanism and Societal Change.

Architecture has always been less a sovereign art form than a collection of wandering techniques: the survey drawn for empire, the map produced for taxation, the diagram borrowed from cosmology, the projection refined in the painting studio - assembled for a time in service of the building. Over the past decade, these instruments have begun to wander again: they appear as evidence in courtrooms and media (forensic architecture), as diagrammatic tools in ministries and agencies (strategic architecture), and as speculative projections in galleries and laboratories (speculative architecture) - no longer anchored in construction, but directed toward truth, action, and imagination.

From August, CAFx's evening school follows this movement in its strategic form and asks what happens to architecture when the diagram stops anticipating form and instead structures deliberation, negotiates trade-offs, and writes the conditions for collective decisions.