Theory and History of Architecture

Since its timid first appearance in 1961, and fundamentally after their ultimate consolidation in the mid of the same decade, Archigram, both magazine and group, became a sine-qua-non of the utopian scene and of the history of architectural teams in general. The turning point in their encoding as an indispensable element in the history of XXth Century  architecture would be, however, the publication, in 1964, of Amazing Archigram!, the fourth issue of the magazine devoted to science fiction. With its mechanical and space age imagery, and its American comic book aesthetics, the “Zoom Issue” would have a prominent role in conforming the public image and the very public perception of Archigram’s ethos. On the one hand, the issue would catapult their brand to the international scene. On the other, its visual punch, and the transgressive consistency of its message, installed in the collective eye of architecture the idea of Archigram not just as a magazine, but as an architectural office with a common agenda. However, “Amazing Archigram” also established the vision of the team as a  group of “provocateurs”, and the regard of their architecture as something belonging in the world of science fiction, which was far from being the intent of their authors, whose proposals, visionary or else, certainly helped shape that “realitas ludens” that impregnated the very architectural reality of the 1960s.

Desde su tímida aparición en 1961, y fundamentalmente a partir de su consolidación definitiva a mediados de la misma década, Archigram, revista y grupo, ha pasado a ser un sine-qua-non del panorama utópico y de las historias de las agrupaciones arquitectónicas. El punto de inflexión en su consolidación como un elemento indispensable de la historia de la arquitectura del siglo XX, sería, en cualquier caso, la aparición en 1964 de Amazing Archigram!, el cuarto número de la revista, dedicado a la ciencia ficción. Con su imaginería mecánica y espacial, y su estética de comic book americano, el “Zoom Issue” tendría un papel crucial en la conformación de la imagen y el propio ethos de Archigram. Por una parte, el número catapultaría su marca hacia un panorama internacional. Por otra, su potencia visual, formal y transgresora, unida a una aparente coherencia en el mensaje, instaló en el ojo colectivo de la arquitectura la idea de Archigram no sólo como una revista, sino como un estudio de arquitectura con una agenda común. Sin embargo, “Amazing Archigram” también instauró la visión del grupo como un conjunto de “provocateurs”, y de su arquitectura como perteneciente al terreno de la ciencia ficción, algo muy alejado de la intención de sus autores, cuyas propuestas, visionarias o no, se orientaban hacia el muy real objetivo de dar forma arquitectónica a esa “realitas ludens” que impregnaba la propia realidad de los 60.

Proyecto Progreso Arquitectura #11: 'Arquitecturas en Común / Architectures in Common': https://ojs.publius.us.es/ojs/index.php/ppa/issue/view/70/showToc

Indisolublemente ligado a su percepción como producto destinado a un público infantil, el cómic ha evolucionado a lo largo del siglo XX desprovisto de la legitimidad intelectual rápidamente adquirida por otros medios como el cine o la fotografía, y la atención que se le ha dedicado desde la arquitectura lo ha relegado habitualmente a la categoría de mera curiosidad. Pese a ello, los cómics han suscitado y continúan suscitando el interés de la disciplina, siendo objeto, desde su introducción en el espectro cultural y académico en los primeros 60, de un flujo constante de artículos, exposiciones y estudios que lo redescubren periódicamente para su consumo por parte del público arquitectónico general. Sin embargo, este interés no es un fenómeno reciente. Las relaciones entre narrativa gráfica y arquitectura se remontan en realidad al comienzo de la modernidad, que intuyó en ella un potencial redescubierto por nuevas generaciones de arquitectos interesados en explotar sus posibilidades como herramienta de comunicación, pero también de diseño.
Le Corbusier read comic books. Notes on the interactions between architecture and graphic narrative
Tied to their early encoding as a children's' medium, comics -comic strips, funnies, comic books or, more recently, graphic novels- have made their way throughout the XX Century devoid of the intellectual legitimacy which other visual media, such as cinema, or photography, rapidly gained within the cultural scene. Consequently, comics have seldom been approached as an academic object of interest in architectural scholarship. And even when they did get featured, occasionally showing up in articles and exhibitions -especially after the 1960s, when authors such as Umberto Eco prompted their entrance into Academia-, their presence was always that of a mere curiosity. Comics are looked upon with a combination of fascination and despise, bound to be periodically rediscovered by those interested in exploring the visual production located in the periphery of the discipline and regarded as a decidedly minor, unserious by-product of popular culture and consumerism by the architectural establishment.
However, this has not always been the case. In the earlier decades of the XX century, Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso were usual readers of The Katzenjammer Kids (Rudolph Dirks, 1897), and George Grosz mentioned them as a great influence on his own work. Picasso, Joan Miró and Willem de Kooning were great fans of George Herrimann's Krazy Kat (1913-44), as well as Walt Disney or Frank Capra, and both Picasso and Dalí, René Magritte and André Breton used the language of graphic narrative at some point. But this interest in comics was also present in the early stages of modern architecture, through such a seminal figure as Le Corbusier. As Stanislaus Von Moos has noted, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret grew up fascinated by Rodolphe Töpffer, a teacher, painter, cartoonist, and caricaturist best known as the Swiss father of bande dessinée. Jeanneret had discovered Töpffer through a children's book, Voyages en Zigzag, where Von Moos locates the origins of Le Corbusier's later passion for travel. This fascination for Töpffer did not fade with time, and in the following decades Le Corbusier became more interested in the histoires en estampes that the Swiss pedagogue had started producing in the 1830s, writing the first article on comics to be found in an architecture magazine, "Toepffer, précurseur du cinema", in L'Esprit Nouveau (1921), and even expressing his interest in writing a doctoral dissertation about him. Töpffer's shadow can be found in the Swiss architect's sustained evolution towards a sort of ligne claire rendering style, and even more so, in Le Corbusier's use of the techniques of graphic narrative in his earlier years, both on different occasions in L'Ésprit Nouveau, or in his atypical, storyboarded Lettre a Madame Meyer of 1925.
Le Corbusier's early interest in the ability of graphic narrative to represent and imagine architectural space and in comics, notably absent from architectural publications until the recovery of the medium spawned by the publication of Archigram 4 (May 1964), contrasted with the fascination that architecture provoked in comic authors since the very inception of the medium. The works of Winsor McCay (Little Nemo in Slumberland, 1905) or Frank King (Gasoline Alley, 1918) illustrated, with the medium barely a couple decades old, the potentialities of the graphic sequence's spatialization of time for the rendering and reinvention of architectural space. One century later, already in the age of digital reproduction it is architecture which looks back at comics, either trying to use their -still- transgressive aura (Koolhaas) or communicative qualities (BIG), because of their ability to capture architectural essence (Neutelings), or in the work of new generations of architects such as Wes Jones Jimenez Lai, who look at comics as a tool for architectural research.

Academic disdain notwithstanding, the exploration of the relationships between comics and architecture has been a not quite visible yet recurring phenomenon throughout the history of the medium. Beyond its low key appearance, it has fascinated architects with its unique capacity to gather together communication, space and movement. A look at the architectural publications of the last thirty years points in that direction, showing a discrete but steady flow of articles, as well as an increasing number of exhibitions covering the different overlaps between architecture and graphic narrative. Along with the drift towards virtual scenarios and animation, today’s architecture, still primarily represented as lines and colors on printed paper, shows a renewed interest in, and a particular affinity toward, the techniques, strategies and aesthetics of graphic narrative.

MAS Context #13: 'Narrative': http://www.mascontext.com/20-narrative-winter-2013/

Born in Heemstede, Netherlands, in 1947, Joost Swarte is an artists’ artist, whose klare lign style—a seminal term in comic book scholarship he coined himself—has influenced several generations of cartoonists. Starting as an industrial design student, Swarte soon moved onto comics and illustration, both as an author, whose work has been displayed in magazines such as HUMO, RAW, The New Yorker, and Abitare; as a publisher, founding the comic magazine Modern Papier and Dutch publishing house Oog & Blik; and as a cultural advocate, being one of the fathers of Stripdagen, a biennial international comic event held in Haarlem. Using comics as a platform, Swarte has built an impressive career that leaves no field unexplored, from graphic design (magazine covers, ex libris, stamps, and stained glass) to furniture design and, most interestingly, architecture. Since the late 1990s, when he was contacted to design the Toneelschuur, a new theatre for his hometown Haarlem built in collaboration with Mecanoo, Swarte has developed a parallel, growing career as a consultant in architectural design.

MAS Context #13: 'Narrative': http://www.mascontext.com/20-narrative-winter-2013/

Born in Brussels, in a family of architects, comics artist François Schuiten grew up fascinated by the Art Noveau architecture with which Victor Horta, Antoine Pompe, Paul Cauchie or Henri van de Velde had created a characteristic urban scene.
Introduced into art by his father, architect and painter Robert Schuiten, François decided to channel his interests on architecture, drawing, and the aesthetics of the XIX Century into the realms of graphic narrative. As early as 1977, François and
his brother, architect Luc Schuiten, collaborated on the fi rst short stories that would evolve into the very architectural series Les Terres Creuses, where the preference for a decimononic refinement in the graphic style, as well as for a vegetal stylization of the shapes and a concern with ecology combined with a critique of alienation in modern society. These aspects would be further developed in the parallel careers of the Schuiten brothers in the fields of architecture (Luc), and graphic narrative and scenographic design (François). In both cases, the vegetal impulse of Art Nouveau would have a major presence, being elevated to an urban scale.

Criado en una familia de arquitectos, el dibujante belga François Schuiten ha desarrollado desde la década de 1970 una obra gráfica y narrativa de creciente complejidad. En la saga
de Les cités obscures, creada junto con el escritor Benoît Peeters, ambos autores indagan en los límites de la arquitectura y el estilo, a través de metrópolis que revisan las utopías arquitectónicas y literarias desde Piranesi a Verne o Ferriss. Si en lo argumental la obra conjunta de Schuiten y Peeters bebe de Verne o Borges, en lo visual tenderá hacia un futurismo decimonónico desarrollado a partir de la estética del siglo XIX en el que Schuiten ofrece una revisión y desarrollo a escala urbana del Art Nouveau de su Bruselas natal. El artículo presenta un análisis de las ciudades Art Nouveau de Schuiten y Peeters en relación con la obra de los arquitectos de finales del siglo XIX, así como de la ciudad futura de la década de 1920 y con el trabajo de su hermano, el arquitecto Luc Schuiten.

For all its promise of unlimited connetivity, Apple´s design seems to leave almost everything out. Apple has built a style on impenetrability, providing us with sleek, polished technological gizmos that are not only a product of design, but a symbol of designed obsolescence. Looking like an alien mothership hanging gently in the middle of Arcadia, the new Cupertino campus speaks of a dream of ascetic-aesthetic plenitude that goes back to modern utopianism.

Koolhaas read The Cast of the Metabarons. Or maybe not. The overlap between OMA's Casa da Musica in Porto and the spaceship designs of the early 1990's simply underline the way in which science fiction's architectural imaginary has become part of the general imaginary of architecture. Today, the conflation of the advances in representational and building techniques fosters a parallel conflation of the modus operandi of architects and sci-fi designers. We live in a new paradigm where science fiction's architectural imagery, so crucial in the shaping of the imaginary of several generations of architects brought up in visions of white, hi-tech landscapes and dark corridors covered with lockgates and leds, is as much a part of the architectural cultural heritage as the classical orders, the Pantheon, or the Unité d’Habitation.

Since he first appeared in the world of comic books as a partner to Claude Rénard in 1980, François Schuiten has become a fundamental author to explain the evolution of European comics through the last quarter of the 20th Century. Throughout his career, Schuiten and his works have revealed an extraordinary example of both theoretical and formal coherence in the creation of a fragmentary world where his
different interests and obsessions crystallize in architectural shapes. Architecture and engineering, their logics, and their representation have been the vehicle for Schuiten to reshape this multiplicity of interests into imaginary scenarios where an exquisite heterogeneity coexists with the unbearable coherence of the surreal. Built in the style ot an interior 'veduta', the album La Tour (The Tower, 1987) offers re-reading of Giambattista Piranesi's work through a rendition of the spaces he created for the "Carceri d'invenzione" (1745-1760).

Working now from his office in Minneapolis, Tom Kaczynski has made it all the way from science fiction reader to architecture school, comics author, educator, and, finally, comic book publisher. Founder of indie publishing house Uncivilized Books, Kaczynski has put in the market a steady flow of iconoclastic comic books, both by himself, notable newcomers, and consecrated stars of the alternative scene, such as David B, James Romberger and Gabrielle Bell. In a conversation with
him, we covered his new book, Beta Testing the Apocalypse (Fantagraphics, 2013), the influence of J.G. Ballard and the appeal of dystopia, minicomics, Archigram, architecture, and architects as an audience for comic books.
Oh, and his background in architecture.

MAS Context #13: 'Narrative': http://www.mascontext.com/20-narrative-winter-2013/

“Welcome 2D Future - Comics and the transmediatic construction of the City of the Future” fits in the context of the broader research on the construction of urban utopia in comics and the mass media of the ongoing PhD Dissertation "The Dreamt Cities: The Voyage through Utopia, the Construction of the Imaginary" (School of Architecture. University of Navarra), which deals with two parallel targets: On the one hand, the mapping of the cross relationships between comics, cinema and architecture in the construction of the image of the city of the future; on the other, the development of an Atlas that groups, describes and catalogues an extensive selection of the futuropolises created in the comic books since the 1950s.
This short essay develops a narrative of the phenomenon through the description three significant moments of the transmediatic construction of the urban imaginary of the future: Winsor McCay, Metropolis and panoptic vision; Métal Hurlant, Blade Runner and the advent of Cyberpunk; and Schuiten’s and Peeters' Cités Obscures.
With this threefold narrative, the text seeks to establish, on the one hand, the fundamental role that comics have had in the visual construction of the city within the mass media and, through them, in the very conceptualization of urban space within disciplinary architecture. By ending with the alternative, ucronian universes of Les Cités Obscures, the essay will outline the role that a low-budget, low-tech (inevitably 'lowcult') and two-dimensional medium such as graphic narrative can still hold in a world ruled by the virtual reality of the digital media, and in providing alternative ways to the current widespread exclusively-high-tech vision of the future.

Durante las últimas décadas del XIX, y de manera muy especial con la llegada del nuevo siglo, los mass media dirigieron una mirada preeminente al entorno urbano que los vio nacer, mostrando imágenes de su devenir contemporáneo pero también especulando con un futuro que, en ocasiones, ilustraba más fidedignamente las particularidades de su presente. Con la aparición del cine, privilegiado ojo mecánico con el que registrar la acelerada realidad urbana, este proceso adquiriría una nueva dimensión, y pronto el medio se uniría a esta fructífera especulación, produciendo versiones propias de la ciudad del mañana dotadas de una provechosa capacidad textual. Utilizando el caso paradigmático de Nueva York, “Al otro lado del espejo” propone un análisis de esta capacidad intertextual de la ciudad futura cinematográfica, explorando los diferentes ‘dobles’ distorsionados que de Manhattan, ya sea directa o veladamente, han ofrecido diferentes filmes. Con paradas en Metrópolis, Blade Runner, El Quinto Elemento o Immortel, entre otros, el texto explora la capacidad mayéutica de estos doppelganger urbanos que, situados al otro lado de la pantalla, desvelan rasgos y relaciones de sus referentes reales, y condicionan y modifican nuestra visión de la realidad urbana.

Proyecto Progreso Arquitectura #14: 'Ciudades Paralelas / Parallel Cities': https://proyectoprogresoarquitectura.wordpress.com/numeros-publicados/no14_ciudades-paralelas/

In the last decades of the XIX century and especially in the subsequent turn of the century, the mass media turned a prominent gaze on the urban environment that witnessed its birth, showcasing images of its everyday life, and also speculating about a future that, sometimes, depicted more vividly the particularities of its present. With the advent of cinema, a privileged mechanical eye with which to record the accelerated urban reality, this process would rise to a new level, and soon the medium would contribute to this productive speculation, producing its own versions of the city of tomorrow, which showed a useful textual ability. Using theparadigmatic case of New York, “Through the Looking-Glass” proposes an analysis of the inter-textual ability of future film cities, exploring the distorted ‘doppelgangers’ of Manhattan shown, either directly or in a veiled way, by different films. With reflections on Metrópolis, Blade Runner, The Fifth Element, or Immortel, among others, the text explores the maieutic ability displayed by these urban doppelgangers which, located on the other side of the film screen, unveil features and relationships of their real life referents, and condition and modify our own perception of urban reality. 

Proyecto Progreso Arquitectura #14: 'Ciudades Paralelas / Parallel Cities': https://proyectoprogresoarquitectura.wordpress.com/numeros-publicados/no14_ciudades-paralelas/

El temor por un futuro hiperurbano, conformado por ciudades hipertrofiadas y congestionadas, en las que el espacio ciudadano
se transforma en un interior y la ciudad en una suerte de máquina que
somete al ser humano, son tan antiguas como la (moderna) ciencia ficción, desde When the Sleeper Wakes, de H.G. Wells a The Machine Stops de E.M. Forster o la inevitable Metrópolis de Lang. 'CompaCity' presenta un brevísimo recorrido por algunas de estas visiones, con cortas paradas en aquellas aportadas por los relatos de J.G. Ballard o Robert Silverberg, así como sus traducciones en otros medios.

En 1995, Marie-Claire Regniers escribió observaba cómo “en el paisaje contemporáneo de la arquitectura belga Luc Schuiten es una figura aparte”, que supera “las líneas de construcción rígidas y tradicionales [y] dibuja incansablementenumerosos proyectos guiados por la búsqueda de otros estilos de vida. Una manera de pensar que ha dado forma a una nueva arquitectura basada en una visión poética, donde dominan la invención y la relación con la naturaleza”. Veinte años después, en un contexto en que el calentamiento global, el cambio climático, las emisiones de carbono y el Protocolo de Kioto están férreamente instalados en nuestra mente colectiva,  Luc Schuiten (Bruselas, 1944) continúa produciendo desde su posición en la periferia de la disciplina. Enfrascado desde finales de los años sesenta en la búsqueda de una fusión entre ciudad y paisaje, arquitectura y naturaleza, e instalado en una posición que aúna el hiperrealismo de la construcción a la utopía militante, Schuiten resulta totalmente ajeno a clasificaciones LEED o certificaciones energéticas. Sus propuestas, que suman el espíritu megaestructural y visionario de los sesenta y setenta con una cierta sensibilidad biomórfica educada en el art nouveau de su Bélgica natal, adquieren un particular atractivo al sugerir una alternativa de desarrollo tecnológico divergente, que se sitúa simultáneamente adelante y a un
lado de las corrientes oficiales, y que dota a su obra, diseminada a lo largo de cuatro décadas, de una coherencia interna estructural más allá de su evidente eclecticismo.

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In 1995, Marie-Claire Regniers observed how “in the contemporary architecture scene in Belgium, Luc Schuiten stands out from the rest,” as someone who goes beyond “the rigid and traditional lines of construction” and “tirelessly draws numerous projects guided by a quest for other lifestyles.” Twenty years later, in a context in which global warming, climate change, carbon emissions and the Kyoto Protocol
are firmly lodged in our collective consciousness, and now that terms such
as “bioclimatic” and “sustainable” have long since passed into common parlance, the position of Luc Schuiten (Brussels, 1944) in the periphery of architecture has not changed that much. Immersed in his search for a fusion between city and landscape, architecture and nature, ever since the end of the 1960s, Schuiten occupies a place in which he combines the hyper-realism of construction with a militant utopia; his work is most definitely not about LEED classifications or energy performance certificates. Schuiten’s proposals—which combine the mega-structural and visionary spirit of the 1960s and 1970s with a certain biomorphic sensibility born of the art nouveau of his native Belgium hold a particular appeal as an alternative form of technological development, which is placed both ahead of, and to one side of, official initiatives, and this gives his work, carried out over a period of forty years, a structural internal coherence that goes beyond its evident eclecticism.

In 1921, issue 11-12 of L'Esprit Nouveau featured an article entitled " Toepffer, précurseur du cinema " where Le Corbusier, signing as 'De Fayet', vindicated the figure of Rodolphe Töpffer (1799-1846), a Swiss a pioneer of comics, as a key element in the development of cinema. Marginal as it may seem, this reference unveils a deeper relationship between Jeanneret and Töpffer's work which started in his childhood, and would have a key role in the development of some of Le Corbusier's trademark obsessions: travel, drawing, and cinematic narratives. In this context, " La Ligne Claire de Le Corbusier " proposes a close examination of the presence of graphic narrative and its aesthetics in Le Corbusier's early work in relation to its evolution from a sequential promenade architecturale to multispatial enjambment. The paper explores themes such as narrative and the inclusion of time in le Corbusier's Purist paintings, or his evolution from a painterly approach to drawing to an idealized, linear and synthetic rendering style.

When the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum opened its doors back in a now surprisingly distant 1997, it had a series of immediate effects. By becoming the built and published equivalent to Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven," allegedly the most played song by radio stations around the world, it catapulted Frank Gehry into the top of architectural stardom. It spawned an innumerable amount of copycats who tried to replicate its success and the effect it had on the economic regeneration of the city where it was located. It even went as far as appropriating the brand, replacing, in the collective mind, that which had been "the real" Guggenheim Museum for almost 40 years: Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic New York counter-ziggurat.

MAS Context #30-31: 'Bilbao': http://www.mascontext.com/issues/30-31-bilbao/the-many-effects-of-the-guggenheim-effect/

Built when I was still a rookie architecture student, the Guggenheim Museum was a building we were thoroughly taught to despise, because of all its arbitrariness and extravagance. However, as I saw it growing in my regular trips back to Bilbao, evolving from a sort of constructivist vision á la Tatlin into an ethereal compound of reflecting titanium veils, it always struck me as a building firmly anchored in Bilbao's urban tissue. Tightly framed by the severe buildings of Iparraguirre Street and the green color of the mountain behind it, slowly revealing the mountains of containers at its back, the building certainly—and quite unexpectedly—did not feel out of place
within its context. Some even claimed Frank Gehry had produced a strangely contextual piece. The problem would arrive when that very context was drastically changed.

MAS Context #30-31: 'Bilbao': http://www.mascontext.com/issues/30-31-bilbao/the-many-effects-of-the-guggenheim-effect/

El hormigón, parece, está de moda. O al menos lo está el que forma parte de aquellas estructuras construidas entre los años cincuenta y setenta que, tras un inevitable ostracismo de alrededor de nuevo siglo, vuelven a ser reivindicadas por una generación que se formó al albur de
la eclosión de la arquitectura, espectáculo de la primera década del año 2000. Porque es el brutalismo el que está de moda. Parece. En efecto, basta dar un rápido paseo por las redes sociales —Twitter es un buen lugar por donde empezar— para encontrarse con toda una serie de perfi-
les, desde la inequívoca Brutalism, a la decana This Brutal House, British Brutalism, Brutalust, British Brutalism, @BrutalBoncrete, cuyo propietario, Simon Phipps, publica periódicamente sus propias fotos —en riguroso y heroico blanco y negro— de iconos del brutalismo británico, o Something Concrete, de donde he extraído impunemente el título de este artículo.