Conceptual Architecture
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Conceptual Architecture
Architecture has three ways of advancing as a discipline: through theory, through practice, or through concepts. Theory and practice are intimately linked since both are operative and seek direction for ways of making. Theory and practice seek solutions and answers to questions. They are projects of closure. Conceptual architecture, on the other hand, is a project of opening. Conceptual architecture is a technique of analysis, posing philosophical questions rather than seeking to answer them. By abrogating any goal of building or of making change in the built domain or the discipline, conceptual architecture is able to free itself to pursue radical investigations into the relationships of architecture and society. Conceptual architecture does not attempt to represent concepts through architecture but rather uses the tools of the architect as instruments of research.
Architecture, being the most heavily capitalized of all the arts and the slowest to construct, is also the last to react to changes in the socioeconomic regime. When the operative capacity of architecture is outpaced by external forces, conceptual architecture emerges naturally. The last time this happened was in the late 1960s when the transition from Fordism to Post-Fordism gave rise to groups like Archizoom and Superstudio. During the 1980s and 1990s, conceptual architecture was absorbed back into theory as architects sought to find an ontology for architecture, even if that ground would be based on absence and void. By the late 1990s, once theory exhausted its capacity for moving the discipline in a new direction, its very protagonists declared it dead and urged their followers to turn to practice.
Once again, architecture is outpaced by reality: the collapse of dot.com culture and the consequent the implosion of the post-Fordist economy and the cataclysmic events of 9/11 and mark an epochal shift in culture leading to a new, as yet unnamed order. In this milieu AUDC seeks not to direct the role of architecture but to understand it, to take on research in sociology, not in ontology.
AUDC does not set out to make objects or buildings. We do not practice architecture, but strive to uncover the world, as it is, in its most radical form.