This project explores the intersection of international law and architecture, highlighting the diverse discourses, techniques, and actors — such as architects — in the process of translation of normative knowledge. By conceptualizing architects as private actors of international law, it adopts a multidisciplinary approach to examining the material spaces that embody international law, and the plurality of actors involved in the creation of those spaces. Focusing on specific “spaces of international law” such as the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in Santiago, Chile, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UN/ECA) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva, Switzerland, the project critically examines the relationship between international law’s materialization in architecture and its discourses of authority, power, and universalization. By focusing on architects as actors, the project offers innovative perspectives and methods for bridging legal and aesthetic discourses, as well as visual and normative programs. Additionally, when focus shifts to other actors collaborating with international law, it might be possible to better understand the discursive and disputed phenomenon of making international law both “law” and “international”.
As part of the interdisciplinary Research Training Group “Organizing Architectures,” this project examines architectures as both products of and actors in collective processes, between a plethora of disciplinary actors. It understands that social and normative orders cannot be separated from those of architecture, and that architecture’s meaning depends on complex negotiation processes. At the same time, law itself can be understood as a discursive as well as performative practice that operates in a system of multiple overlapping and interactive communities. As a result, interdisciplinary research on the fields of law and architecture might contribute to a more nuanced view of law which expands its scope beyond strict, literal definitions of legal concepts and frameworks.