Klaus Benesch: “Architecture and/as Hospitality”

As both an aesthetic and a fundamentally social space modern architecture foregrounds contemporary notions of building, dwelling, and thinking. Its social meaning, as Slavoj Žižek argued, is not merely to provide housing and infrastructure, but to offer stabilizing counter-spaces within an ever-changing and increasingly conflicted modern public space. Insofar as it lends material form to the promises but also the challenges of modernity, architecture frequently finds itself at the forefront of cultural and social debates.