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Aim of the paper is to situate the meaning of competence by outlining the relation between the architectural practice and the “Super Ecobonus”. This policy framework, introduced by the Italian government in 2020 and revised a number of times, provides fiscal incentives for buildings renovation aimed to energy-efficient adaptation and sustainability goals. Within such framework, a huge amount of efforts and job opportunities for many firms are converging on a national scale. The paper approaches Super Ecobonus as an indirect experiment for operationally defining competence: such peculiar contingency offers a frame of what competences are according to the actions done by architects confronted in their everyday practice with performing the tasks the norm requires.Through a series of semi-structured interviews and their graphical organisation is presented a scenario of rather complex consequences brought by the regulatory constraints, diverging or integrating previous know-hows. Finally, it concludes that, despite a context of high bureaucratic density and logistical and timing pressures, each of the practices defines its action along original paths.

Though the financial crisis in 2008 did not hit as hard in Denmark as elsewhere, its imprints make visible how fluctuating market forces take an active part in the shaping of architecture and urban spaces. Recent theoretical developments in the field of architectural anthropology stress that architecture, rather than being a static entity, is a moving project in which numerous human and nonhuman actors continuously entangle. This paper builds on and advances such an approach by focussing on the vicissitudes of the market as an actor in the complex ecology of architectural design. The analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork in what is here referred to as the place-making processes of new Danish residential architecture; that is, the ways in which architects, users, investors, branding strategies, building materials and financial fluctuations all interact in the continuous creation of places. The paper demonstrates how the contemporary architect designs places in interaction with the global market as much as in interaction with building sites and materials. Consequently, it introduces the concept of ‘unintended design’ in relation to architecture, and argues in favour of an architectural anthropology that studies place-making across the habitually distinguished phases of design and use.

The paper argues that the architectural drawing, as a technology for thinking and communicating design ideas between project stakeholders, has remained largely untouched by the advent of Actor-network theory (ANT) and the so-called ‘ethnographic turn.’ Rather than changing to reflect a distributed understanding of agency or the lived on-goingness of projects and buildings, the drawing continues to describe a simple line (from agent to patient) and to congeal into artifacts used to impart commands, increase the architect’s status or construct brands (the monologue-drawing and the brand-drawing). From the perspective of Living Architecture, an EU-funded research scheme combining architecture, bio-energy and synthetic biology, the paper proposes new modes of drawing (the medium-drawing, the exaptation-drawing and the seed-drawing) that challenge binary abstractions and demand that the architect relinquish a measure of authorship and control to engage in conversations with the other – large and small, disciplinary and non-disciplinary, human and nonhuman, alive and inert.

This paper looks critically at how design evolves through an interaction between human and non-human relations. We introduce different ways of understanding this by considering the mediating role that affect has on the design process. To do this we explore a recent work of New Zealand architect Simon Twose through an ethnographical framework. By focusing on affect we highlight the affective capacities and connections between humans and nonhumans. We argue that the affective capacities of non-human objects, matter and spaces are fundamental to the design process, and how knowledge is produced through design. Thus, this paper questions the privileging of human subjectivity – of seeing humans as radically other to matter, where human life remains special and spirited, over the brute force of matter.

Exploring new aesthetic dimensions in the sustainable transformation of the environment is one of the prerogatives of the New European Bauhaus (NEB) campaign. Design disciplines offer the ideal framework to investigate how performative requirements admitted in the construction industry provide inputs to the manifestation of contemporary urban aesthetics. Firstly, the paper introduces the discourse on architectural aesthetics recalling prominent positions sedimented since the 20th century, providing the theoretical framework to discuss how canons and codes of beauty are shifting according to current sustainable agendas. Secondly, it showcases peculiar design attitudes connecting buildings’ aesthetics and ecologies, referring to four case studies. The methodology discusses the extent of design choices driven by different declinations of sustainability, which include the production of clean energy, circular economy, and carbon capture. The results portray a horizon of new aesthetics emerging from the advocated ecological transition that contributes to renegotiating the idea of beauty as intentional senses of figuration and sensory experiences.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical perspective on the complex relationship between buzzwords associated with sustainable development and architecture. Particularly, by relying on architectural theory and discourse analysis literature, we contend that the communicative trivialization entailed by slogans and buzzwords such as “sustainable” tends to play a prescriptive role in architecture by exploiting certain tacit assumptions that characterize its discourse and, ultimately, its practice.

The Good Life explored in the famous book of the same name by architect Iñaki Ábalos can be compared to the “good life” questioned by philosopher Judith Butler. Her question of who has a right to a good life is comparable to the question of who belongs to the “together” propagated by the New European Bauhaus.According to Butler, a “good life” cannot be separated from “togetherness”, the relationship with others, but also from resistance to a bad life. Resistance consists of opposing the differential distribution of the value of life and precariousness, trying to create conditions in which human interdependence and vulnerability become livable.The paper addresses two conditions under which vulnerability and interdependence become unbearable, depending on the role that architecture also assigns to bodies and determines their right to be present in public and private spaces. In this respect, “together” can be a tool of critical resistance for architecture.

The 2012 Internet mini-series The Beauty Inside and the 2015 Korean film based upon it, Byuti Insaideu, illustrate some crucial philosophical questions related to the body, our relationship to objects and the way we engage space. This paper discusses some of these implications in relation to the elusive concept of beauty in contemporary architectural practice.

The paper deals with the construction of architectural competency, starting from the entwinement of the terms competency and competence. Following the etymology of the two words, we define the distinction between them through the problem of time. On the one hand, competence is atemporal in nature, while on the other hand, competency is necessarily directed at the present. The bond with the present is explained by defining competency as the capacity to produce the new, understood as Deleuzian difference, which objectifies time and always puts it in the order of the present. In the discipline of architecture, the concept of competency is defined through the problem of the extensiveness of theory, which obviates the production of the new. In that sense, competency is interpreted as the ability to preserve the (conceptual) unity of the singular new, despite the impossibility of reconstructing the real as a whole.

This paper explores the connection between the spatial configuration of the UK Houses of Parliament, how the building is perceived by parliament Members, and political culture. It conceptualizes spatial competence as the knowledge that enables and limits users in employing the possibilities space offers for socio-political interaction; and spatial performance as the realization of these possibilities for the exercise of power and negotiation through rules of behaviour and spatial practice. A qualitative approach based on interviews with parliamentarians and a quantitative study of spatial morphology are combined, demonstrating the agency of space in generating a spatial culture of informal interactions akin to the political practices of negotiation and adaptation that define British politics and the institutions of its larger constitutional order. Describing and visualizing the spatial characteristics supporting these institutions is critical for understanding how the upcoming Restoration and Renewal Programme (R&R) of the UK Houses of Parliament can be about restoration as well as renewal.

Since the emergence of evidence-based design in the 1990s, much has been written about the role of systematically produced research for improving the quality of healthcare facilities. There has been comparatively little discussion, however, regarding the extent to which evidence may be seen to minimise a range of risks traditionally mitigated through the expertise of the architect. Drawing on our own fieldwork alongside relevant secondary literatures, this paper examines the effects of evidence on perceptions of architectural competency within healthcare procurement. While the availability of design-related evidence was not always observed to alter a design approach it did engender more profound forms of communication between stakeholders, enabling more meaningful interactions between the value orientations those stakeholders represent. In this way, we argue, the emergence of evidence-based design is less a challenge to the professional competency of the architect than a tool for validating this competency, couched in terms that stakeholders from other disciplines customarily recognise.

The teaching of design, the act of design itself, and its competencies are always conceived as a mystery – knowable to a certain extent yet unknowable in its totality. In studies of how design knowledge is transferred in the studio, the focus typically centers around a determinate and quantifiable pedagogical exchange between student and tutor, consistent with its etymological roots in paidagōgia, suggestive of instruction akin to the teaching of a child. Yet, we witness other kinds of exchanges and social formations in the studio that expand beyond the student-tutor exchange, more akin to the cultural transmission of a distinct set of codes, behaviors, norms, and organizations autonomous from pedagogical structures. In this paper, we shift the conversation from one solely centered around pedagogy to an orbit of the architecture studio’s culture, whose social making, we argue, produces the public body of the architecture community and is itself the competency acquired in the architecture studio.

The paper takes the New Villaggio Matteotti in Terni, a housing complex designed by Giancarlo De Carlo in the early 1970s, as an observation point from which to measure some of the competences and tools that architectural historians of late modernism have often mobilized. The analysis of the existing literature on the Villaggio brings to identify at least three recurrent ways of understanding the role of the historian. First, the historian as an intellectual exposing the contradictions behind architectural practice. Second, the historian as a philologist and a specialist in the treatment of dedicated archival sources. Third, the historian as a specialist in the study of architectural forms. The analysis suggests that, at least in this case, historians have firmly situated themselves within definitions and ways of understanding the architectural object that had been initially codified by the designer. This raises questions concerning the capacity of architectural history to contribute to radical changes in the interpretation of the built environment.

This paper argues that the architectural academy is guilty of producing architects who might be competent, but are not effective in putting their training into socially relevant use. It examines what follows then is a set of 7 nested and increasingly institutionally-scaled observations – formalism, design, analysis, curricula, pedagogy, academia, and administrative institutions – about architectural education that attempt to locate the various arenas which require re-thinking for a relevant and empowered discipline. It ends with a call to arms for architecture academics to unite to produce the radical change needed to address our current, crisis-driven world.

The aim of this paper is to explore urban racialization as a process that emerges in specific places of the city. Using the publicly accessible Google Maps and Google Street View imagery of Lisbon Metropolitan Area, I conduct a fine-grained analysis of the urban and architectural forms through which race materialises in a central historical square, in a few peripheral social housing areas and in some informal urban gardens. Inscribed in the wider Black European framework, Black Lisbon is here intended as a provocation more than a label, and the concept of blackness is adopted as a visible tracker of micro-scale mechanisms of racialization as well as resistance to them. Considering the complex spatial dynamic that results and that encompasses different forms of omissions, displacements, replacements and place-makings, I argue that certain buildings, settings, bodies presence, urban spots and gardens arise as critical elements of the (still disregarded) compilation of non-white European architectures.

This essay enters the Covid-19 pandemic activated discourse in a sympoietic manner by drawing parallels to the architectural response to the 3.11 Disaster in Tohoku, Japan as a lens to reflect on architecture’s broader response-ability towards matters of human displacement, collective trauma, loss, and memory. It explores the notion of burn-out through the scope of disaster-stricken Japan and the road towards recovery by examining three cases of architectural and curatorial projects to illustrate architectural skills and media – drawing, model-making and fieldwork. All of them were characteristically deployed and instigated community transformation through conversational platforms and trust-building. These platforms are referred to as post-disaster memoryscapes, to illustrate the result of fusing community collaboration with architectural mediums in a distinct ethnographical mode capable of reconciling past, present and future. The paper argues that such ethnographical modes of operating expand architecture’s role from a limited sense of building (re)construction, towards the Harawayian notion of sympoietic caring.

In this paper, spatial, architectural, and infrastructural solutions will be discussed as possible answers to reduce stress, nervous breakdown, and burnout risks caused by the lockdown. The pandemic has forced millions of people to share spaces and functions in the same environment leading to significant psychophysical discomfort. We propose alternative scenarios, actions, and policies declined in an inter-scalar way (territorial, urban, and domestic) through the biophilic design approach. Through the proposal and analysis of some cases – considered best practices – we show how the connection with the natural elements can become the cornerstone of a healing process, also supported by public interventions of digital infrastructure.

The process of European integration is often described in architectural terms, starting with the metaphor of a common European house. This paper weights the ubiquitous rhetoric of a supranational architecture against the largely unexplored reality of the actual architecture that has been built to house the European institutions. The focus is on the place and time that have experienced the largest production of architectural hardware: Brussels between 1958 and 1992. Most of the Quartier Européen was built in this window, while the institutions did not have a permanent status and therefore struggled to gain agency over the transformations of the city. On the one hand, the goal is to question how operating for a new and unique structure of power influenced the production of architecture. On the other hand, this is an opportunity to start discussing how architecture contributed to shaping the European Union.

Mexico City’s periphery is home to marginalized communities, and mainly constituted of autoconstructed houses built along the dried lakebed of Lake Texcoco. These settlements are subjected to amplified earthquake risk because of below-ground soil conditions in the lakebed beneath them, which makes them an ideal place to study the social production of risk. In Colonia del Mar, Tláhuac, people believe their community is built atop rubble dumped there after the 1985 earthquake. It is said the government illegally dumped debris from collapsed structures into the lakebed swamp that would be urbanized as Colonia del Mar. In 2017, another major earthquake caused structural collapses and damage along the lakebed edge, and especially in Colonia del Mar. This paper explores the factual possibility for these below-ground conditions and argues that approaches for relocation and rebuilding in Mexico City’s periphery are profoundly informed by historical processes that socially produce risk in marginalized areas.

This concept paper aims to destabilize the limits and delineations of conventional architectural thinking by disclosing its ambiguities and contingencies through the centralization of the inhabitation-displacement nexus and, by extension, the figure of the inhabitant. Building upon our January 2019 workshop at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Germany, entitled: Inside Out – Outside In: Shifting Architectures of Refugee Inhabitation, its keynote interventions by Prof. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and Prof. Romola Sanyal, together with the vast array of topics and methodologies brought to the table by our presenters, we primarily argue towards the concept of inhabitation as an epistemic shift of both the site and the subject of architectural (knowledge) production. Shifting our focus particularly to the sites and subjects of displacement (i.e., ‘the refugee’/ ‘the migrant’ and beyond) enabled us to centralize the concept of inhabitation as a modality of the architectural spatial production of an otherwise through the prime subject figure of architectural authorship: the inhabitant.

While narratives tend to show architectures as coherent results of a plot in which the abilities of involved people are far more relevant than the fate, actual projects are more like the conjuncture of various trajectories: involving actors, factors, aims, preferences, good (and bad) intentions, most of which will remain unknown. Tracing all these elements is indeed impossible but, for the architect, sailing through them all along the process is mandatory. The paper investigates how architectural design can exploit the so-called potential intrinsic to the radical contingency of all processes, instead of suffering their (apparent) haphazardness. By changing architectural design into a floating sequence of strategies and tactics, it is possible to overcome the facticity of the process, thus successfully promoting the project as an aim. Such an attitude may be enhanced in projects of all scales and in any moment of the process, for architects to gain a creative and purposeful role.

This paper refers to the birth of the recycling and domestic collection of electronic waste in Barcelona as a process of both urban innovation and social transformation. It is explained as an event that reveals the vital transformative capacity of matter in our societies and in our cities. With this goal, it makes use of Graham Harman’s critique of Sociology of Associations to advance towards the proposal of New Materialisms. Innovation is expressed as a production made by heterogeneous entities within an improvised process. In it, human and non-human entities interact and produce differential transformations, linked by a sort of “corporal commitment”. The intrinsic qualities of the material show themselves as creative resistances. These materials become intuitive actors in intra-action with elements of the social, giving rise -from 2015- to a new sensibility of the city towards electronic household waste.

In 1986, Aldo Rossi opened a satellite office in New York City to oversee his first major design commissions on the other side of the Atlantic. This moment marked a transition from traveling to establishing a permanent presence in the United States. And, more importantly, it turned Rossi’s practice into a transnational organization. It is fair to say that most of his subsequent projects were developed on the Milan - New York axis. The trait d’union was the fax machine, which allowed materials and ideas to be exchanged with an unprecedented level of immediacy. This research paper explores how faxing impacted the production of architecture within this decentralized system, intersecting multiple key topoi of the architectural discourse of the time. While the literature on Rossi tends to focus on the work and the loud theoretical apparatus that accompanied it, his (largely unexplored) American archive compels us to engage with the process of working and the silent technological apparatus that made it possible.

The following work is part of a research aimed at investigate how to involve parametric software in the design of contemporary dwelling, in a process of urban regeneration which starts from the transformation of residential buildings of the last century in order to provide new forms of living able to accommodate different categories of users and respond directly to their needs.In particular, this paper intends to present an application, developed starting from the study of Tour Bois Le Prêtre transformation project designed by Lacaton & Vassal, which aims translating the main design choices in the parameters of an algorithm able to reproduce the logics of the intervention.The objective of the research is to focus on a set of parameters to be used for the development of a software useful for dwelling design, in which the project is direct result of the analysis of specific conditions and users needs.

This paper analyses how the myth of the individual architect as a subject of innovation is an abstract machinery for capturing the work of other architects. To do that, it develops a historical regressive analysis on how innovation is actually produced, and the limits in which it is bounded. Furthermore, it analyses the role of narratives in the interpellation of architectural subjects, and how it defines a position from which subjects can act politically in the field. By doing so, it unveils the mechanisms behind the architectural black boxes (the office and the prince chronicles). In order to provide a new political role for architecture, it builds a different conception of the subject that produces these projects, exploiting the idea of trans-subjectivity in architecture.

This paper looks at the relationship between project and rights. At first, it discusses the redefinition of housing rights in the space of the city, by observing a workers’ district of Geneva, the neighborhood of Les Grottes, that was the object of struggles and occupations in the eighties. Today it is an eco-neighborhood like many in Europe, where the right to housing, forcefully demanded during the past urban struggles, has broken down into an ensemble of superimposed fragments.Pluralization of the right to housing refers to two different perspectives. The first originates from the influence of social analysis, according to which our current condition is an expression of neo-liberal policies. In this perspective, the broken down of rights is the other side of rights retraction of its modern form. The second refers to pragmatism and its democratic individualism. Here the multiplication of subjective rights, no longer hierarchical or competitive, is an expression of what each individual considers a right way of living. The project needs to be prepared to manage any gaps arising between these dimensions.

This article conceives an urban project as a mechanism that traces rights on the ground. First, and most relevantly, a project separates public and private land and defines what can be built. At another level, design decisions involve a broad range of permissions and obligations. Thus, urban projects act as a form of regulation, like planning, albeit a specific form with its own rules and limits. The paper explores a two-step process. First, in the policy phase, some regulatory decision-making is delegated to design. Then, design challenges the value assumptions underlying decision-makers’ actions. ‘Regulation by design’ arranges material objects in space and activates those spatial mechanisms.

Traditional design tools and procedures are not always appropriate to tackle the continuous movement of buildings and contexts. Starting from such apt consideration by Latour and Yaneva, this essay reflects on the issues that the introduction of movement and of time as strategic components of a design project involves, particularly within an Italian context. The move away from the binding duality of text and context requires an overcoming of the separation between objects and subjects that is substantial to a traditional determinist and authorial approach to the project: this is only possible through the proposition of a different dialogical and argumentative process and, consequently, a fundamental change in the role of the designer. This perspective finds a few premises within Italian discourse in the course of the 20th Century as regards three fundamental points: the city and its transformations; the necessary relationship between theory and project; the central question of form. In the conclusive remarks of the paper I propose an interpretation of form not as final solution but, as tentative form, as indispensable empowerment tool for the various actors involved.

Within the architecture profession, issues of pay inequality, lack of diversity, the rising cost of architecture education, and the stagnation of wages has led to research and advocacy from the perspective of the ‘Architect as Worker’. This paper explores the complexities of the value prescribed to architecture work by considering three different value systems – economic value, professional value and personal value – to suggest practical ways that the architecture design studio teaching can be augmented to better provide students with skills in the learning environment that will help them thrive in the labor environment.

How can architecture, a discipline so tightly intertwined with money, resist neoliberalism? Is architecture inevitably consigned, with Tafuri or Aureli, to a stoic or eremitic resignation? Or, with Sorkin, to a series of disconnected tactics? This paper takes a hint from Fredric Jameson to suggest that Deleuze and Guattari’s positive transformation of Marx’s quintessentially capitalist notion of surplus value can allow us to rewrite the ontology (and epistemology) of architecture as a differential and multiple reticulation. Architecture conjugates all sorts of things (“flows”, in the terminology used here) to create a surplus value beyond (or before) the capitalist surplus value that is only one negative instance of a broader positive phenomenon. This non-essentialist and non-formalist idea of architecture allows us to respond to Spencer’s criticism of the neoliberal “architectural Deleuzism”, and shows how effective political action is entirely feasible within the broad discipline of architecture.

To access more capital, more quickly, governments seek new sources of finance to fund school-building including loans and Public Private Partnerships. The paper uses examples principally from England and Italy to argue that architecture is now central in this process through its selling of reductive, human resource-based educational futures. By colonizing imaginaries of tomorrow, school design therefore helps to secure the legitimacy of new financial demands, creating a virtuous circle (at least for financial purposes). However, with education moved beyond current experience, the present and the space it offers for contestation is deleted and only architectural-educational futures already part-defined by a technical élite are offered in its place. New forms and extents of financial and architectural tie-in energise the rate at which people can be excluded from the production of their own futures.

New buildings extract and solidify liquid capital, converting it into tangible assets the capital value of which is subject more to the dynamics of real estate and financial markets than it is to architectural fashions. Architecture, however, remains actively engaged in the circulation of capital by enabling pecuniary relationships. This paper is concerned specifically with the relationship between bioscience research organizations and funding bodies and the ways in which architecture functions to attract and influence niche circles of investors and philanthropists. Architecture’s role is revealed in the recent architectural commitments and financial activities of two biosciences research institutions: The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York and the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, California. The nostalgic architecture of the CSHL’s Hillside Campus mirrors the taste culture and lifestyles of the old money East Coast families who sit on the CSHL’s Board and fund its operations. The JCVI’s exploitation of an architecture of environmental sustainability, on the other hand, successfully targets a new breed of biotech entrepreneur.

Focusing on the relationship among architectural form, global market, and digital technologies, this essay investigates the controversial nature of the corporation, between real and virtual, local and global space. The writing contains two intersecting paths of reading. On the one hand, it focuses on the latest building of the Apple enterprise, which is analyzed through a formal as well as metaphorical comparison with some previous architectural experiences, including both the Stanford academic campus and the Royal Saltworks of Chaux. On the other hand, the paper focuses on the strategies used by Apple Computers in the construction of its competitive image, and passing through a reading of primary data, such as early experiences, products, commercials, and buildings, it analyzes the proper company’s style, that we can define as “Apple Architecture”.

The paper aims at providing an understanding of sustainable architectural design through an ethnographic study of Masdar City. Following how design travels from the practice of an architect in London (Foster and Partners (F+P)) and is translated, implemented and used by embracing the inherent dynamism and unpredictability embedded in the process. Focus is on the designs and technologies of Masdar City as the main case study; a project that is designed by F+P and developed in the United Arab Emirates. This has been followed through a two-part ethnographic study that was conducted through fieldwork taking place from January to September 2014. The first part was carried out in F+P office in London, UK, where the designs and technologies were initiated. The second part was completed in F+P office in Abu Dhabi, UAE, where the designs and technologies were implemented and put to use.

What does it take to describe the design of an object from the point of view of the object itself? What are the implications of writing on its behalf, in the first person and in the active voice? Through the partial and biased description of a single scene of observation, this paper explores the way ethnographies of architecture and their accompanying theories, such as the actor-network theory, are able to widen our conceptions of the design participants’ agency. Undertaken as a writing experiment, the chosen mode of description aims at expanding our ability – as observer and as designer – to account for, and work with, multiple gradients of existence. By amplifying and specifying the various ways in which the object-in-the-making is participating in the design decisions, the text does not only push the limits of our usual accounts of design, it also insists on the active attention that all participants of the design process, human and non human, require.

By the advent of the Bauhaus, the notion of design did engage in a two-track operation. Without dissociating itself from themes central to the formation of the architectural discipline, the concept of design, on the one hand, had to recode and at times delete thematic that had attained visibility in the context of labour and skills that were not sustainable under the rising regime of mechanical reproducibility. On the other hand, design became interactive in a web of communication and consumption systems that were informed by the exigencies of a culture that in less than fifty years would be coined the culture-industry. The nemesis of design in contemporary situation marked by the globalization of capital and information, I will argue, demands a radical departure from design recipes, past and present, that do not engage critically with the present production and consumption conditions of architecture. Discussing the collective implicitly involved in tectonics, this paper highlights the paradox in the contemporary theorization of design. This involves a different praxis, one that would surpass the prevailing rapport between academia (history/theory) and profession (practice).

The classic and traditional source on actor-network theory and architecture is a co-authored and well-know 2008 piece by Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva («Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move»: An Ant’s View of Architecture). They argue, based on dynamic-ontology, against viewing buildings as static objects or entity and in favor of treating them as dynamic flux or trajectory that can be broken into fully-formed individuals only through the abstractive sickness of the human mind, however necessary abstraction may be for the practical necessities of life. In this paper, arguing from the standpoint of my OOO (object-oriented ontology), I note some problems and paradoxes of Latour and Yaneva’s approach and I propose a possible solution focused on “relation”: every form of knowledge amounts to telling us either what a thing is made of or what it does, the world is not just the correlate of knowledge.