BETWEEN MANIFESTATIONS OF POWER AND INFORMALITY: Speculations on Contemporary Life in Institutional Spaces

Abstract

This thesis investigates how power is embedded in built space. Although these spatial structures of power are not always immediately visible, they shape how bodies move, pause, gather, and behave. While all architecture influences behaviour, this thesis focuses on buildings in which power is deliberately expressed and articulated. Institutions such as churches, parliaments, and banks have long used architecture to portray authority, stability, and trust. Power is not expressed only through monumental façades or formal architectural elements. It also operates through spatial organisation, including sequences of thresholds, controlled access, hierarchical arrangements, and the regulation of visibility. Through these elements, architecture structures how space is entered, perceived, and used. In this way, architecture does not simply represent authority, but actively stages and reinforces it. The thesis examines the Postsparkasse in Vienna, a former bank building that still carries the institutional logic of its original function. Beyond its monumental façade lies a carefully organised interior designed for efficiency, control, and hierarchy. Its spatial order determines, for example, what is visible and what remains hidden, where bodies may pause, where they must move, and even how they are expected to sit. Originally, the building projected the values of banking: efficiency, profitability, trust, and the smooth circulation of both bodies and money. Today, however, its function has changed. Most of the Postsparkasse is used by university institutions in Vienna, while the central cashier hall is open to the public and contains a café. Through this shift into a more informal and public programme, a tension emerges: A tension between the old and the new use. A tension between an institutional spatial order and the less structured rhythms of contemporary public life. This tension leads to the central research question: How can an institutional building shaped by highly articulated architectural manifestations of power be spatially realigned to support contemporary needs, while preserving its historical identity? Through on-site mapping, desk research, modelling and photography, the initial phase of the thesis investigates the building and analyses the experience within it. To further identify and examine the power structures, the thesis uses design as a method of inquiry. Rather than imposing a new programme, the project strengthens the building’s ongoing transformation towards public and informal use. It imagines the cashier hall as an urban living room: a shared extension of the home, accessible to everyone and filled with everyday activities. Following this investigation of power, thresholds are identified as key sites where preservation and contemporary use collide. The design develops across different scales: from the overall spatial order of the cashier hall, to thresholds and circulation, to adaptable modules and reconfigured details. At the larger scale, the intervention introduces a second spatial layer that emerges from the building’s existing axes and thresholds. At the smaller scales, this layer introduces modules and reconfigured architectural details that invite users to appropriate and inhabit the space in ways that differ from the building’s original intent. Through interventions that are respectful, yet radical and playful, the project realigns the Postsparkasse with contemporary needs while keeping its historical identity visible and active.