Our paper addresses how building design elucidates the connection between two definitions of politics: ‘Big Politics’ and micropolitics. We will seek to examine how these two versions of politics are imbricated; how, in other words, codified ideologies and political institutions circulate within the everyday practices by which new actors and sites of contestation enter the social collective. The conceptual space for this argument has already been mapped out by various authors, including Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Bruno Latour and Michel Foucault. These authors have variously proposed how powerful totalities always travel along small, fragile conduits. Or, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, ‘the boss's office is as much at the end of the hall as on top of the tower’.

The common lawyer's understanding of land still hovers between a purely material conception of the physical stuff of land and a more cerebral image of land as comprising a co-ordinated set of abstract entitlements. This underlying tension between the physical and the conceptual has imparted a multi-dimensional complexity to the term […]. Kevin Gray and Susan Gray

What is a building? To begin to extrapolate our reasons for posing this question, consider the context of ‘Further Reading’, and the supplementary documents this supposes. To those whose profession is dedicated to the design of buildings, and whose professional life is, all too often, beleaguered by impediments threatening the actualisation, the construction, of their design, supplementary documents are not simply footnotes to design but evidence of struggles over design control. Within this trajectory, law is, most frequently, figured as yet another problematic. But consider a rather different trope – one which uses aspects of legal thinking, or rather thinking through law, to re-engage with the idea of ‘a building’ and of ‘design’. Supplementary documents, in this sense, become a ‘supplement’ which we could characterise as an ‘excess’. Documents which before might have been marginalised now become reconstituted as artefacts, evidencing other accounts of the processes of architecture. Legal artefacts related to design and building, which evidence a series of techniques and strategies for diagramming rights and responsibilities, may be deployed to open new perspectives on the question of ‘What is a building?’

Permitted Development (PD) is the set of laws that determine what can be built in the UK without needing planning permission. These laws, which have existed since 1947, typically cover smallscale developments that have a minor impact on their surroundings. In 2008 the laws covering household developments were radically revised in an effort to free up planning departments to focus on larger applications. But the rewritten laws, while inherently more ‘liberal’ than their predecessors, are also confusing, impractical, and obscured by legalese.

Since 2009, we have produced a series of projects with a number of collaborators that explore PD. These projects all involve engaging with the laws in order to make public their potential for development. We see this work as a form of spatial practice.

This article presents an edited selection of spreads from our 2009 book-pamphlet SUB-PLAN: A Guide to Permitted Development, which was produced with the graphic design studio Europa and a group of students at the Architectural Association Summer School.

The story goes that when the twenty-year old Brahms visited Liszt in Weimar in 1853, Liszt effortlessly sight-read the younger man's piano Sonata in C major (a work of considerable technical difficulty). Brahms was astounded by this feat of consummate musicianship. However, when Liszt then played his own, as yet unpublished, B minor Sonata, Brahms fell asleep. Liszt probably understood that the young composer was tired after his long journey, and of course the story may be apocryphal, but nevertheless the fact that they never met again may be read as a metaphor for a divergence of musical tendencies that came to characterise nineteenth-century high art music. Some describe this as ‘the war of the Romantics’, a bitter dispute between the New German School (principal figures, Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner) and traditionalists, such as Brahms, whose work was deemed oldfashioned. It was a spat that embroiled the whole of musical Europe.

It is not often that a generation of people are offered the opportunity to decide the future course of a nation. In a little over a year around four million people living across Scotland will be afforded the monumental chance to decide whether the place they call home should be an independent country. As both ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns debate with claim and counterclaim over a wide range of emotive issues neither side can definitively answer, the grassroots campaigns of the pro-independence side are offering imaginative visions of a different Scotland building upon the cultural gains of devolution.

Ridgeway Street sounds like something out of an Ealing comedy - all charm, Englishness and deft touch. This Belfast street is a continuing surprise - a sudden fall from Stranmillis Road in a city that one images as a flat apron laid out under Black Mountain and Divis; houses that have enough in common to establish a loose coherence, but with odd dormers and narrow stepping plots that give a whimsical twist; a line of folded roof planes dropping precariously towards the Lagan, their angles spiking the skyline. The Lyric accounts for the last set of these spiky roofs at the end of the terrace at the bottom of Ridgeway Street.