From Keywords to Use: The New European Bauhaus, Language, and Ethics in Architecture

This paper examines the keywords espoused by the New European Bauhaus (NEB) to investigate the relation architectural practice entertains with language and politics. The article explores an ethical orientation that adopts Giorgio Agamben’s notion of use to advance a critical inquiry into the application of keywords in the NEB such as together, sustainable, and beautiful, and thus into the very possibility of a correct spatial form for the social policies of the European Green Deal. Agamben’s notion of use brings to the fore the fact that both language and the common (il comune) are inappropriable. It also implies an ethical orientation, departing from this very limit, for the practice of architecture through the use of language.