One Typology for a Big Word: Office of Diversity

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Issue Vol. 4 No. 1 (2021)
Published Jan 29, 2021
Section Articles
Article downloads 737
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7454/in.v4i1.111
Submitted : Sep 30, 2020 | Accepted : Jan 24, 2021
Sergio Lopez-Pineiro
Harvard Graduate School of Design
lopezpineiro@gsd.harvard.edu

Abstract

Architecture’s original project was the invention of interiority, an enclosed area delimited from its context and made available for a narrowly defined public, function, and meaning. This original project was expanded during the Enlightenment with the concept of type as a method for producing architecture and establishing social institutions for molding subjectivities. This quest for interiority has reached its completion with world capitalism and its associated complexes, which, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have argued, are an interior without any possible or imaginable outside. In response to this condition, this essay argues that the original project of architecture—the conception and design of interiority—needs to be replaced by a new one: the conception and design of openings. To demonstrate this, I have assembled Typologies for Big Words, a series of projects that redefines the concept of type through a selection of building and landscape types proposed as openings within this global interior. Using Byung Chul-Han’s portrayal of contemporary society as an achievement society occupied by achievement-subjects, I present one of these projects as an example, Office of Diversity, as an opening for the production of non-paradigmatic subjectivities.

Keywords: interiority, type, office, diversity, achievement society

Article Details

How to Cite
Lopez-Pineiro, S. (2021). One Typology for a Big Word: Office of Diversity. Interiority, 4(1), 95–116. https://doi.org/10.7454/in.v4i1.111
Author Biography

Sergio Lopez-Pineiro, Harvard Graduate School of Design

Sergio Lopez-Pineiro is an interdisciplinary architect whose work explores voids as socio-spatial phenomena of freedom, diversity, and spontaneity. He is the author of the volume A Glossary of Urban Voids (2020). Lopez-Pineiro is the director of Holes of Matter, a design studio whose mission is to imagine voids in patterns to redefine relations between individual and collective forms of life. He is a lecturer in landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he teaches design studios and theory seminars on architecture and landscape with a focus on the public nature of the built environment. Lopez-Pineiro is a licensed architect in Spain. He trained at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM) and received his Master of Architecture degree from Princeton University, where he was awarded the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Prize.

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