Concepts protect us from running the risk of engaging with form. Why should we bother with form when we have an idea? Why waste time seeking beauty when we can claim that we are solving problems? Why think when we can happily sit around a table and do some brainstorming? Why take the pains to learn something when we can shout “Eureka!” in your face? Anyhow, it is possible to escape from this selbstverschuldete Minderheit. Complexity exists, in re, in context. Cities and territories are here, and it is possible to understand them!
Contemporary architecture is generally presented with the phrase “My concept is . . . ”, in which the blank is filled in by some sort of notion: “My concept is freedom”, “My concept is the iPad”, “My concept is the Big Bang”, “My concept is democracy”, “My concept is panda bears”, “My concept is M&M’s”. This statement is then followed by a PowerPoint presentation that begins with M&M’s and ends with round, pink bungalows on paradisiacal Malaysian beaches.
According to concepts, to design is to find what buildings are: an ontology for dummies that turns banality into spectacle. Thus, the library is the books, the stadium is the muscles, the promenade is the beach, the aquarium is the fish, the swimming pool is the water and grandmother’s garage is grandmother.
Concepts protect us from running the risk of engaging with form. Why should we bother with form when we have an idea? Why waste time seeking beauty when we can claim that we are solving problems? Why think when we can happily sit around a table and do some brainstorming? Why take the pains to learn something when we can shout “Eureka!” in your face? Anyhow, it is possible to escape from this selbstverschuldete Minderheit. Complexity exists, in re, in context. Cities and territories are here, and it is possible to understand them!
Contributions:
Architecture Without Ideas?! In Defence of Concepts, Jan Bovelet
A Pathological Normality, Matteo Ghidoni
A Minatory Letter to Conceptualists Composed of Quotations from Texts by Paul Valéry, Cino Zucchi
Four Concepts and a Funeral, Diederik de Koning, Laura van Santen, Thomas Cattrysse
The Measure of Turmoil: Dürer's Monument to the Vanquished Peasants, Amir Djalali
Enclaves, Matteo Poli
Concepts and Contexts: an Analytical Point of View, Ilaria Boeddu
The Object as Idea, Adrià Carbonell
Without Irony, Kersten Geers
The Delight of the Site, Pietro Pezzani
The Possibility of Disappearing, Giovanni Piovene
Building Context: When Architecture Becomes the Background, Nicola Russi
Notes on Contextual Architecture, baukuh
Context, Enforced, Fabrizio Gallanti
Cut-up Architecture, Eric Lapierre
Argument vs. Concept: the City Is Not an Egg, Federica Pau, Sabrina Puddu and Francesco Zuddas
Liberating and Governing Mechanisms, Mark Lee
Venturi's First, Oliver Lütjens, Thomas Padmanabhan
Being In-Between: the Amsterdam Municipal Orphanage by Aldo Van Eyck, Ariadna Perich Capdeferro
Parallel Convergences, Guido Tesio
The Concept Is Me: Richard Meier at the Getty Center, Jack Burnett-Stuart
The Office and the Loggia: Giorgio Vasari's Architecture for Bureaucracy, Francesco Marullo
The Architectural Form of a Concept: J.J.P. Oud's De Kiefhoek (1925–30), Davide Sacconi
Skopje, or How Context Fucked Concepts and Vice Versa, Charlotte Malterre Barthes
Love Concepts!, Oliver Thill
The Triangle and the Eraser, Andrea Zanderigo
An Airplane Has Landed in the Desert: Myths, Shapes and Metaphors Related to Brasilia, Martino Tattara
Bagh-e Babur, Ludovico Centis
Rituals, Obstacles and Architecture (Fragments of an Essay I Will Never be Able to Write), Pier Paolo Tamburelli
