Stepping Out of Institutional Buildings, Telling Law Differently : A(na)rchitecture as a Visual Legal Image

In cities the complexities of different social systems are made visible, this includes law’s system. In urban space we witness contradictions and frictions between what the law is and what the law does. If, on the one hand, it is true that the city is shaped, built, and regulated by a legal architecture, on the other hand it is also true that space contains images and narratives unchained by this legal structure. These spatial images show and make visible what the law does , but they also show alternative narratives and interpretation about what the law is , in a more visual dimension when it comes to cities’ governance and urban legal theory. The paper, stepping down the stairs of institutional buildings, analyses the materiality of everyday as constitutive of the visual jurisprudence. Observing urban objects, spaces in-between, and illicit architectures, the article tells law otherwise, making legible legal paradoxes and contradictions. The architectural becomes a legal image able to narrate a law that is not always only institutional, and that might tell a different story about how laws shape space.