Relational architecture: dense voids and violent laughters

Starting from an analysis of Georges Bataille’s text ‘The Labyrinth’ (1935-6), this paper addresses the always changing relationship between architecture and the city, considering in particular the architectural ‘void’, as both a physical space and a disciplinary domain. In the city, architecture operates in a ‘void’ that is dense of tensions, unevenness, singularities, stratifications and movements, and must devise strategies for addressing and inhabiting these networks of relations. Focusing in particular on Peter Eisenman’s definition of the ‘interstitial’ as a spacing condition of form-form relation, and on Rem Koolhaas’s ‘strategy of the void’ and its congestion with architectural ‘junk’, this text argues that different postmodern positions on architecture in the city have addressed the ‘void’ as a space that is not feared – and therefore ‘designed’ by the architectural project – but tensioned with the potentiality of Bataille’s convulsive laughter: that destabilizing and de-compositional force that transverses relations of structured organizational contiguity, and challenges them with a force that travels across the (architectural) ‘void’

Antípodas: proyectos para una nueva cartografía

Sobre el rol de la cartografía en los desarrollos de la arquitectura contemporánea; referencias a un workshop dirigido por la autora del artículo en la Universidad de Greenwich en 2006.Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanism

Delirium and historical project

Wissenschaftliches Kolloquium vom 24. bis 27. April 2003 in Weimar an der Bauhaus-Universität zum Thema: ‚MediumArchitektur - Zur Krise der Vermittlung

Not a Schema: Notes on the Anxiety of Mapping

A collective consideration of schema across the different fields and disciplines that intersect philosophy and architecture comes, inevitably it seems, to address also “map” and its making, as if an overlap and identity of “schema” and “map” might be not only possible but indeed obvious. Map and schema normally coincide. But do they? And if they do, how and when? And what are the tensions at stake in this supposed coincidence? The purpose of this text is to undo this presupposition, by exposing – through undoing – the complexity of the map, its ambiguous relation with becoming, and its state of intentional and necessary imperfection, to argue that the map is not a schema..

Piranesi in Ghent

Piranesi in Ghent is an exhibition, a catalogue and a symposium. It is also a telling story in the recent scholarship and recurring ‘fashionable’ re-discoveries of Piranesi’s work. It is a funny story, a serious cultural enterprise that begins, like all good love stories, by chance. But there’s more here: scholarly passion, intellectual curiosity, design and experimentations: as well as reproductions, plates and debates, and a lot of challenging hypotheses and development possibilities. This is indeed a very Piranesian story and, as in Piranesi’s work, here the less visibly obvious is worthy of the greatest attention, because it reveals more, much more indeed, than what appears at first

Venetian time and the meander

Argues that the past is necessary to architectural modernity for its self-definition. Goes on to look at Le Corbusier and the past in relation to his revolutionary architectural manifesto, 'Vers une architecture' (1923), and his and Tafuri's views on Venice. Also considers Le Corbusier's 'law of meander' as a strategy for urbanism and his Venice Hospital projec