School's Out! #62 with Elke Krasny

For the October's School's Out! we have invited cultural theorist and urban researcher, Elke Krasny, for a talk titled "Critical Care: A Framework for Architecture".

Starting from the premise that our existence is constituted through care, the lecture examines how “caring about” and “caring for” function as tools to analyse dissonances and alignments between architectural intent and reality. Situating critical care within historical and economic realities—including those unfolding globally today—foregrounds architecture’s essential role in everyday life and survival, while establishing critical care as a basis not only for historical analysis, but also for intervening in the conditions of architectural production, construction, maintenance, and repair, across buildings, policies, and economies.

The lecture proposes critical care as an analytical method for architecture and, at the same time, as a call to action for changing the way in which we build the world. Arguing that we lay the foundations for building with cultural values and social norms as they are intertwined with economic conditions and political realities, critical care as a framework operates both at the level of the immaterial and material, the level of words and buildings, the level of narratives and infrastructures since all of these give form to the ideas we hold—and are held by. Critical care moves across scales, from the body to the domestic, from the microbial to the planetary.

Critical care is not only useful to the analysis of how architecture cares for care, that is how architecture designs the blueprints, the comprehensive plans, that lay out the spatial conditions of everyday life and how the construction of architecture impacts on the planet’s climate and depends on economies of extraction and exploitation, but equally useful for a diagnosis of the dissonances, contradictions, and conflicts inherent in what architecture cares about and how architecture cares for the spatial and material conditions of care understood as social, ecological, and cultural reproduction.

Programme 30 October 2026

19:30 Doors open

20:00 - 20:15 Welcome by Independent School for the City .

20:15 - 21:00 Lecture by Elke Krasny

21:00 - 21:45 Conversation with the audience

21:45 - 22:00 Short film

22:00 - 00:00 Drinks at the bar and aftertalk

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About Elke Krasny

Elke Krasny is Professor the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her research and her curatorial work focuses on care, social reproduction as well as on transnational feminist activism and politics of memory in contemporary art and architecture. In recognition of her contributions to feminist research, she was awarded the Gabriele Possanner State Prize in 2023. Her major publications include Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet (with Angelika Fitz, MIT Press, 2019), Curating with Care (Routledge 2023) and Curating as Feminist Organizing (Routledge 2023) both with Lara Perry. And Feminist Infrastructural Critique (with Sophie Lingg and Claudia Lomoschitz, 2024), for further information, see FKW Journal.