ABSTRACT
For many cities around the world, intervention-based redevelopment of place reveals layers of gentrification, elitist functions, sanitised spaces and or an increase in privatised areas of the city. The structural anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, developed the idea of the ‘zero-institution’ as an empty signifier with no determinate meaning. The notion of the zero-institution is adapted from Claude Levi-Strauss’s anthropological study of Amazonian tribespeople in Triste Tropique. Architectural projects often contain numerous phenomenological tools, but for the zero-institution, strategic psychoanalytic methods implicate subjects to become aware of, but also affected by the new intervention. In 2001, the completion of Caruso St John’s New Art Gallery Walsall was seen as a positive force for the town, revitalising a future desire to attract investment and tourism.
