Fascinating short article on how architecture, which we are to a large extent blind to due to it naturalization, is bound up in social control:
“An architect that is running an office, who is in debt and pays salaries, has all the economic incentives to take it [a commission], but must resist it. The punishment is obviously not in going to a military prison, as in the case of soldier refuseniks, but on the livelihood of these people. So that’s a way of controlling people, of course. When the economy is organised in a particular way it’s very difficult not to participate in hegemony, so hegemony works. It organises the economy, it organises the structure of debt in a way that you might conform to power.”
Eyal Weizman on understanding politics through architecture, settlements and refuseniks.