An assembly space is not only about its architectural and material manifestation, it is about the people within it. To think of an assembly space as an infrastructure for daily activities, turns it into a reliable and recurrent gathering point —like a coffee corner or a newsstand. Why are those typologies relevant as assembly spaces? The system of assembly in those spaces does not operate in an institutional manner, but rather on its capacity to be part of a routine.

The project is an opportunity for intervention in public space that is rarely offered to architects, designers and artists, whose role as an outsider to these spaces allows for the introduction of formats and programs that would otherwise never be enacted by the usual protagonists in city planning.

The conceptual structure of the project is highly critical of the transformation of public space into a ‘post-public’ category, in which the citizen is replaced by the customer. Our proposal explores the idea of bastardizing the programmatic contents of such privatized, post-public spaces of immaterial labor with an autonomous forum referencing typological symbols of power in Western architecture (the Roman Senate, Colosseum, Victorian operating theatre, (inverted) Panopticon, 19th century lecture theatre). By hijacking a spatial template that is associated with multiple forms of control, institutional settings and Western hegemony, we are attempting to corrupt its role and serve as a real polis, antagonizing the status of public space as a form of private enterprise within the urban context of a cultural institution. The project would therefore be underlined by the concept of agonism as a tool for the construction of public spaces and discourses. Read full piece in the printed edition of “What Makes an Assembly? Stories, Experiments, and Inquiries: Spaces of Negociation.”