Strategic Architecture: How To Rethink The Architecture of Bureaucracy

Finn Williams, city architect in Malmö and co-founder of Public Practice - formerly employed at Office of Metropolitan Architecture - gives a lecture on how building standards, procurement processes and legal agreements can be limiting for architects' creativity, but can instead become spaces for critical and creative practice.

The lecture is part of CAFx's evening school, which from August follows architecture's strategic turn. The starting point is that architecture has never been a sovereign art form, but rather a collection of wandering techniques: mapping drawn for taxation, diagrams borrowed from cosmology, projection refined in the painter's studio - temporarily assembled in the service of the building.

In the past decade, these tools have begun to wander again. They appear as evidence in courtrooms and media (forensic architecture), as diagrammatic engines in ministries and agencies (strategic architecture), and as speculative projections in galleries and laboratories (speculative architecture) - no longer anchored in construction, but directed towards truth, action and imagination.

CAFx's evening school asks the question: what happens to architecture when the diagram stops predicting form and instead structures deliberation, negotiates trade-offs and sets the conditions for collective decision-making?