Can one attempt to make a contribution to architectural discourse by relentlessly stating that there is no space without event, no architecture without program? This seems to be our mandate at a time that has witnessed the revival of historicism or, alternatively, of formalism in almost every architectural circle. Our work argues that architecture – its social relevance and formal invention – cannot be dissociated from the events that «happen» in it. Recent projects insist constantly on issues of program and notation.They stress a critical attitude that observes, analyzes, and interprets some of the most controversial positions of past and present architectural ideologies.
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Os dejamos a continuación el artículo The Future That is Now de STAN ALLEN publicado el 03.12.12 en la revista PLACES

And it’s always interesting, I think, to see how the future, or rather the forward-looking form of any discipline, always carries within it the seeds of its own triteness.

— William Gibson [1]

Among the participants in the first ANY (Architecture New York) conference, organized by Peter Eisenman and Cynthia Davidson in 1991, was the novelist William Gibson, author of the cyberpunk classic Neuromancer. Published in 1984, Neuromancer captured the anxieties of a dystopian world in which technology has penetrated all aspects of everyday life. In Gibson’s early novels, unprecedented physical mobility and the fluidity of personal identity enabled by digital technologies reshape individual subjectivity and the physical space of the city alike — which is perhaps why the author found himself in Los Angeles at the beginning of the 1990s speaking to the group of architects, philosophers, literary critics and architectural theorists assembled by Eisenman and Davidson. Like the film Blade Runner two years earlier, Neuromancer had become an early touchstone for imaginative speculation on the urban and architectural consequences of digital culture.

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Os dejamos a continuación el artículo Radical Pedagogies in Architectural Education de BEATRIZ COLOMINA publicado el 28.09.12 en la revista Architectural Review

Beatriz Colomina surveys radical strategies of architectural pedagogy, asserting that the discipline can best be changed by revolutionizing the way it is taught

Pedagogical experiments played a crucial role in shaping architectural discourse and practice in the second half of the 20th century. In fact, the key hypothesis of our Radical Pedagogy¹ research project is that these experiments can be understood as radical architectural practices in their own right. Radical in the literal meaning from the Latin radice, as something belonging or relating to the root, to its foundations. Radical pedagogies shake foundations, disturbing assumptions rather than reinforcing and disseminating them. This challenge to normative thinking was a major force in the postwar field of architecture, and has surprisingly been neglected in recent years.

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