Architectures of Politics Potentials, Images and Principles for a ‘Parliament of Things’

Abstract

This article discusses the role of parliaments in the production of modern politics and proposes that contemporary political challenges necessitate a new parliamentarian architecture. While Bruno Latour operationalizes the idea of a ‘parliament of things’ in procedural terms, this article explores its possible material expression. To this end, it relies on a sketch design seminar with architecture students at the Technical University of Munich, the proposition of which was to design a political building to put in presence of each other the human and nonhuman actors involved in a fictional socio-environmental controversy. The results include images and principles that challenge the assumptions of the modern parliamentarian form of doing and understanding politics.