Markus Miessen will present his new book, Agonistic Assemblies: On the Spatial Politics of Horizontality (MIT Press, 2024), which calls for a revised form of spatial politics through which spaces—both physical and virtual—can be envisaged to create publics. He’ll be joined afterward in conversation by Neyran Turan, partner at NEMESTUDIO, and Neeraj Bhatia, founder of THE OPEN WORKSHOP.

Markus Miessen is an architect and writer, director of Studio Miessen. In 2021 he was appointed Professor of Urban Regeneration at the University of Luxembourg, where he holds the Chair of the City of Esch. Miessen has previously taught at the Architectural Association, London, the Berlage Institute Rotterdam, has been a Harvard GSD Fellow, and has held professorships at Städelschule, Frankfurt, and the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He received his PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, London, supervised by Eyal Weizman. The initiator of the Participation tetralogy, his work revolves around questions of critical spatial practice, institution building, and spatial politics. As a spatial consultant, he currently works with The Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism. He previously worked with the European Commission, non-governmental organizations, the Republic of Slovenia during their presidency of the EU council, as well as numerous cultural and art institutions worldwide. Amongst many other books and writings, Miessen is the author of The Nightmare of Participation and Crossbenching: Towards Participation as Critical Spatial Practice. He has edited volumes such as Para-Platforms: On the Spatial Politics of Right-wing Populism, and The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict. Together with Nikolaus Hirsch, he is the editor of the book series Critical Spatial Practice.

Neyran Turan is an Associate Professor at the University of California-Berkeley and a partner at NEMESTUDIO, an architectural office that has been recognized with several awards, most recently the Architectural League New York Prize for Young Architects, seven separate citations in The Architects’ Newspaper’s annual Best of Design Awards, Best of Year Honoree Award from Interior Design Magazine, multiple citations at the Core 77 Design Awards, multiple ACSA Faculty Design Awards for outstanding work in architecture and related environmental design fields as a critical endeavor, and multiple Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts Awards. Turan’s work focuses on alternative forms of planetary imagination and their capacity for new aesthetic and political trajectories within architecture and urbanism. Turan’s book Architecture as Measure, which was supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation, was released by ACTAR Publishers in 2020. Turan was the curator of the Pavilion of Turkey in the 2021 Venice Biennale 17th International Architecture Exhibition.

Neeraj Bhatia is an architect, urban designer, and educator whose work resides at the intersection of politics, infrastructure, and urbanism. He is the founder of the design practice THE OPEN WORKSHOP and an Associate Professor at the California College of the Arts where he directs the Urban Works Agency, an urbanism research lab in the Architecture Division. Select honors include the Architectural League Young Architects Prize, Emerging Leaders Award from Design Intelligence, and the Canadian Prix de Rome. THE OPEN WORKSHOP’s design-research has been commissioned by the Seoul Biennale, Venice Biennale, Chicago Architecture Biennial, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, among other venues. Neeraj is author of the book, New Investigations in Collective Form, and co-editor of Bracket [Takes Action], Bracket [On Sharing], and The Petropolis of Tomorrow.