ABSTRACT
This paper proposes an approach to recent events taking place in urban spaces across the world that challenge the social and political frame that present-day globalization set up as a given fact. Some of this events, as different and variegated as they are, nevertheless hold in common an aim to regain for architecture its role as an operative frame, relying in its social and political agency rather than in its built aesthetical form. This paper will try to approach those events as the result of a certain performative agency of architecture, one that allows architecture to regain its original condition as the source of the political. To do so, we will discuss what performativity is and in which sense architecture is performative, to later briefly review its historical performative agency, ending with a contemporary example of this regained active condition of architecture in the city of Madrid: El Campo de Cebada.
