Architecture as a subject: ‘ANALOGOUS’ IMAGES

The modern movement has tried to breach the divide between design and project and is, in this sense, an unfinished and ongoing project in which techne and subjectivity, aesthetic and ethics, construction and conception try to come together. However, when disillusionment in this endeavour came to the foreground after the Second World War,‘building’ and ‘architecture’, ‘project’ and ‘design’ drifted again apart–perhaps more than ever. It is in this conjuncture that a singular attempt at making an architecture completely divorced from any form of material realization became suddenly relevant. Collectives such as Superstudio and Archizoom in Italy and Archigram in Britain put forward a practice fundamentally based on drawing and narrative; the session will focus in particular on Superstudio’s storyboards for A Voyage in the Realm of Reason and Continuous Monument to then rediscuss other narrative projects from OMA’s Exodus to Hejduk’s Victims. These storyboards relate to the material world in an indirect way, claiming architecture as a fundamentally critical and intellectual practice. They do not address themselves to an audience, neither do they try to shape their ideal user, nor are they instrumental to the intellectual growth of their authors: they are, rather, attempts at retracing the meaning and mandate of architecture itself.