Freedom via soft order: Architecture as a foil for social self-organisation

Abstract

Various radical thinkers have categorised architectural ordering as ‘violence’ and architecture as ‘prison’. But the built environment is an integral part of all human society. Could individual and societal freedom be enhanced by a shift from the ‘hard order’ of the past to a new, libertarian ‘soft order’? Patrik Schumacher, principal of Zaha Hadid Architects, examines the theoretical background of the subject and points to such a new order, in which intervisibility is key and physical boundaries are replaced by expressive thresholds that act as guiding orientations rather than tools of exclusion or containment.