Exhibition Opening/ Planning the Common: Architecture, Public Art and State (Un)Building

Planning the Common is the first student seminar on rethinking the use of the building of the Palestinian Legislative Council in Abu Dees. The idea of the project is to engage students in a discussion pertaining to an imagined reuse of the empty building as a new common and public dominion.

The project’s few crucial questions circle around the notion of political representation and the architectural form that seems to emerge under such circumstances: how the building could be re-imagined as an extraterritorial assembly that can accommodate representatives of half of the Palestinian population exiled outside the country? How a reflection on the public and the common could revive politically the abandoned building? Is this building the ultimate form of the Palestinian assembly and democracy or new political and architectural forms need to be reinvented?

Date: 
March 21, 2011 to April 22, 2011