Unearthing the Ground: Architecture and the Politics of Oil

Baku. Image © Gulustan, via Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 3.0

Beneath the ground lies a material that has quietly shaped the architecture of the modern world. Petroleum is rarely discussed within architectural discourse, yet the extraction, circulation, and consumption of oil have profoundly reorganized the spatial logic of territories. Pipelines, refineries, drilling platforms, ports, highways, and petrochemical complexes form a vast infrastructural landscape that sustains contemporary life, composing a dispersed architecture of energy.