Simulated architecture

The two essays in this e-book, “Simulated Architecture” (1988) and “Margins of Architecture” (1993), contain Otília Arantes’s first observations about the architectural production that followed the exhaustion of Modern Architecture. This production emphatically contained the trademark of the new Spirit of the Times: the ostentatious and spectacular arrival—after all, this is about architecture and its new centrality in the emerging capitalist order—of one of the most ostensible dimensions of the so-called paradigm of Communication. We witness the metamorphosis of formalism that resulted from the exhaustion of the Modern Movement (here analyzed for the first time in Arantes’s works) into a universe of self-referred images elevated to the paroxysm of immateriality of the Simulacrum. To explain this mutation in architecture after the Modern Movement, the author invokes, among other materialist writings, Walter Benjamin’s observations about the tactile discipline of looking in the origin of this dubious triumph of pure visuality, remembering that it is precisely in the architecture of the city that we find the matrix of this Simulacrum civilization—as shown by the first essay. From the facade spectacle of the self-promoting architecture shown at the 1st Venice Biennale of Architecture (1980), with its Strada Novissima that resembled the streets of Las Vegas, the high-tech fantasies of a science-fiction architecture, such as that built by the English group Archigram, or the contextual architecture (which was then called “critical contextualism” by the author and, somehow following in the footsteps of Frampton, intended, at least in that context, to assume the role of an architecture of resistance), to the self-proclaimed “frivolous” architecture, in the same sense as used by Eisenman, or “futile” architecture (to use Derrida’s concept, an explicit theoretical reference for the architect)—in other words, to the limit of an architecture reduced to an endless game of combinations and deconstructions. The analysis is resumed and expanded in the second essay—the introductory text for Peter Eisenman’s exhibition catalogue at the São Paulo Museum of Art, focusing on the paradoxical work of the most emblematic architect of the deconstructionist turn. An architecture that stands on the “margins”—another keyword of the then brand-new French philosophy.

Keywords:  Adorno, Aldo Rossi, Archigram, “frivolous” architecture, “obscene” architecture, mass art, Venice Biennale, B. Brecht, C. Lasch, CIAM, Le Corbusier, deconstruction, folding, experience and habit, F. Jameson, K. Frampton, G. Pasqualotto, Hans Hollein, high-tech, Hyperrealism, J. Baudrillard, J. Derrida, J-F Lyotard, Les Immatériaux, M. Tafuri, Modern Movement, P. Portoghesi, P. Eisenman, Post-structuralism, Postmodernism, “Presence of the Past”, R. Moore, R. Venturi, critical regionalism, simulacrum and simulation, Strada Novissima, tactile and optical, W. Benjamin.