Architecture is combination of the two Greek words archē and technē. Archē connotes the practice of power, sovereignty, dominion, and command but also initiation and action. Technē refers to technical knowledge that can be systematized but also something that is contrived as a skill or a practice. Though technē usually indicates a system of rules or method of making or doing it can also have the more allusive sense of an art. So architecture harbors two visions of power and knowledge. The first prioritizes an order that revolves around expert knowledge, hierarchy, and command. Architecture which prioritizes this kind of rule is perhaps most familiar. It is seen in the architecture that literally brings order to our daily experience of the world. In spite of its many benefits, however, this kind of architectural order would seem incompatible with a tradition of democratic politics that has its origins in agitation and revolution. According to this tradition of thought and practice, democratic politics is alternatively characterized by spontaneous agitation, for instance in protest politics or civil disobedience, or something like the less institutional but still widespread habits, moeurs, and customs that Tocqueville identified as the basis of democratic culture in America. In either version, democratic political knowledge appears distant from the rule that privileges technical expertise. But what of the second form of architecture suggested by the terms archē and technē? What would constitute an architecture of initiation that draws on more diffuse and experiential forms of knowledge? If this architecture were somehow more democratic, how could it avoid the fate of so many revolutionary movements which often pass out of the world as quickly as they appear? What kind of architecture might sustain the tension between stability and dynamism inherent in these two contending definitions of architecture? This paper turns to the twins concerns for stability and dynamism found in work of Hannah Arendt, along with her comments on the relationship of architecture to politics, to suggest what might constitute a 'democratic architecture.'
