Lex Communis: The Commonality of the Discipline and the Discipline of the Common Place

Lecture_2. 07.11.2016
Lex Communis: The Commonality of the Discipline and the Discipline of the Common Place

In his inaugural lecture at the College de France the French philosopher Michel Foucault, positioned the organization of a discipline as opposed to the notion of authorship. Foucault claims that a discipline goes beyond the single authorship and is based on a commons; ?a discipline is defined by a domain of objects, a set of methods, a corpus of propositions considered to be true, a play of rules and definitions, of techniques and instruments: all of this constitutes a sort of anonymous system at the disposal of anyone who wants to or is able to use it, without their meaning being linked to the one who happened to be their inventor.?

In this lecture we will probe into this anonymous, common system in the discipline of architecture. Are architecture and urbanism still based on a commons? What constituted the commons of the discipline historically? And does a commons still exist today? and how would we imagine and describe such a commons?

In a second part of the lecture we will look into the various attempts to introduce the elements and rationales of the ?common place? into the disciplines of architecture and urbanism. We will see how common knowledge concerning the built environment was intentionally incorporated to widen the notion of the discipline from a knowledge field that was exclusively accessible for highly trained experts to a matter that could be discussed and accessed by a wider group of citizens.