Strategic Architecture: How To Rethink The Architecture of Bureaucracy

Join us for a lecture by Finn Williams exploring how building standards, procurement processes, or legal agreements, which may initially seem like constraints to architects’ creativity, can transform into fields for critical and creative practices. 🏛️

About Finn Williams
Finn Williams is the City Architect of Malmö. He is the co-founder and former CEO of Public Practice and has previously worked for the Office of Metropolitan Architecture.

About the Evening School
Architecture has always been less a sovereign art than a gathering of itinerant techniques: the survey drafted for empire, the map drawn for taxation, the diagram lifted from cosmology, and the projection honed in the painter’s studio, all assembled for a time in the service of building.

In the past decade, these instruments have begun to drift once more, resurfacing as evidentiary devices in courts and media (forensic architecture), as diagrammatic engines in ministries and agencies (strategic architecture), and as speculative projections in galleries and laboratories (speculative architecture). They are no longer tethered to construction but redirected toward truth, action, and imagination.

From August onwards, CAFx’ evening school will follow this migration in its strategic inflection, asking what becomes of architecture when the diagram ceases to prefigure form and instead structures deliberation, negotiates trade-offs, and scripts the conditions under which collective decisions are made. 📐