On the night of the 29 December 1940, London was hit by one of the heaviest bombings during The Blitz¹ destroying most of the buildings around the Paternoster Row, curiously leaving the neighbouring St. Paul’s Cathedral intact. From 1961 to 1967 the Corporation of London, partially inspired on a proposal by Sir William Holford, redeveloped the destroyed area with a project that ended up being both unsuccessful and controversial due its highly contested modern architecture² and a very low occupancy rate. This led to a point when, only 20 years after its completion, a new competition to redevelop the area was organised, resulting in a winning proposal by Arup. Then, in 1990, the result of the competition was dismissed in favour of a plan by architect John Simpson championed by HRH Prince of Wales. This plan however was perceived as a “Pastiche”³ and was never executed due to the 1993 recession. Finally in 1996 a master plan by Sir William Whitfield was selected and successfully developed up until its conclusion in 2003.

The development, currently owned by The Mitsubishi Estate Co.⁴, consists of a large central square inserted in the urban fabric, with small roads cutting through the blocks around it. At the center of the square, a Portland stone corinthian column of 23 meters high stands as the main monument of the area. Clearly inspired by Christopher Wren’s Monument to the Big Fire and Inigo Jones’ west portico of the old St. Paul’s cathedral, the column designed by Whitfield, functions not only as a symbol of the square but also as a ventilation shaft for a service road under it. Half monument half technical facility, private while seeming public, corinthian but built in the early 2000s, real and fake. The column embodies a series of contradictions and accidents that surpass by far its mere physical presence and historical context, mimicking the common imaginary of what monuments should look like while performing a technical function for a public infrastructure.

The Paternoster column is definitely not the only built structure that embodies Fiction in several of its layers, but it proved to be of great help when asking ourselves where the limits between Fiction and Reality stand in built or unbuilt Architecture. In the same logic, we decided to take the case study as research and communication tool for the whole cycle. It allowed us to assure a certain degree of coherence and relatability in the outcome of both issues, while presenting a stable basis for possible further development. This relatability is in turn reinforced by the ambivalence / complementarity in the choice of format for the two issues which suggests yet another possible line of research related to the influence of the medium in current representations of Fiction and Reality.

The 29 case studies in this cycle, 12 in text and 17 in image, set Fiction free from preconceived ethical or political judgements and place it under an uncompromised light. They offer valuable, critical insights from multiple perspectives, reflecting on the question launched in our calls while expanding on it in rich and refreshing ways, drawing from the current context and relating it to historical references, to multidisciplinary traces and to fictional realms. They attempt to find the slightest possibility of a steady path up the slippery slope of the research on the Limits of Fiction in Architecture.

 

¹German bombing offensive against Britain in 1940 and 1941, during the Second World War.
²www.paternostersquare.info
³Deyan Sudjic, If only Sir Christopher Wren was alive today. The Observer 19 January 2003
⁴www.paternostersquare.info

(b. 1977, Buenos Aires) lives and works in London.

Bronstein was the recipient of the Tate Britain Commission 2016, for which he produced Historical Dances in an Antique Setting in the Duveen Galleries. In 2016 he also designed the set for The Creation produced by Rambert and reenacted at Garsington Opera, Buckinghamshire before touring to Sadler’s Wells, London. He also had a solo show entitled Wall Pomp at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. In 2015 Bronstein had solo shows at Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham and Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, as well as at the Museo Marino Marini, Florence and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Other solo exhibitions include: REDCAT, Los Angeles (2014); Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (2013); Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2011); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2011); Sculpture Court, Tate Britain, London (2010) and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009).

Recent group exhibitions include: Idea Home, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesbrough (2017); Spaces without drama or surface is an illusion, but so is depth, Graham Foundation, Chicago (2017); British Art Show 8, various venues, UK (2015-2017); Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016-2017); Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague (2016); L’Année dernière à Marienbad, Kunsthalle Bremen (2015); History is Now: 7 Artists Take on Britain, Hayward Gallery, London (2015) Folkestone Triennial, curated by Lewis Biggs, Folkestone (2014); Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing, curated by Brian Dillon, Hayward Touring exhibition (2013-2014); Ideal Standard Forms, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Turin (2013); Arkhaiologia: Archeology in Contemporary Art, Centre PasquArt, Biel (2011); Scene Shifts, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2010); MOVE: Choreographing You, Hayward Gallery Touring (2010-2011).

 

Kovacs was born in Chicago, Illinois. In 2012-2013 Kovacs was the inaugural UCLA Teaching fellow for which he produced GOODS USED: AN ARCHITECTURAL YARD SALE at Jai and Jai Gallery in Los Angeles. In collaboration with Laurel Broughton in 2014, the pair produced Gallery Attachment/As Builts sponsored by the LA Forum’s John Chase Memorial fund and Storefront for Art and Architecture’s World Wide Storefront program. Gallery Attachment/As Builts was a two part show: an architectural intervention in a residual space in Los Angeles’ Chinatown composed of the debris of modern civilization. Kovacs, is the creator and curator of Archive of Affinities, a website devoted to the collection and display of architectural b-sides. Kovacs’ work on architecture and urbanism has been published widely including Pidgin, Project, Perspecta, Manifest, Metropolis, Clog, Domus, and Fulcrum. His recent design work includes a proposal for a haute dog park in downtown Los Angeles and the renovation of an airstream trailer into a mobile retail store that travels the Pacific Coast Highway.

Adam Nathaniel Furman is a designer based in London. He is trained in Architecture and Fine Art, and works in those areas as well as products, interiors, writing and teaching. His work has been exhibited in London, Paris, New York, Milan, Rome, Eindhoven, Minneapolis, Portland, Vienna & Glasgow, is held in the collections of the Design Museum, the Sir John Soane’s Museum, & the Abet Museum, and has been published widely. He has lectured at the RIBA, UC Berkeley, Cardiff University, Innsbruck University and the Casa dell’Architettura Rome, amongst others.

A scenic wallpaper in four parts depicting life in and around the oversized estates of Freedomland, an imagined inhabitation of Thomas Jefferson’s great gridded game board of real estate speculation. First exhibited at the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial, The Monuments of Another America is based on Xavier Mader’s 1814 wallpaper, The Monuments of Paris.

Keith Krumwiede is the author of Atlas of Another America: An Architectural Ficiton (Park Books, 2016). He studied at the University of California, Berkeley and the Southern California Institute of Architecture and has taught at Rice University, Yale University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the New Jersey Institute of Technology (where he served as the director of graduate architecture programs from 2012-2017) and at the University of California at Berkeley, where he is currently a visiting associate professor. Krumwiede is the winner of the 2017-2018 Arnold W. Brunner / Katherine Edwards Gordon Rome Prize in Architecture. In Rome he will work on essays and projects for a new book, The New World: Architecture After the End of Work.

 

 

 

24 Point Supreme Architects was founded in Rotterdam in 2008 by Konstantinos Pantazis and Marianna Rentzou andis now based in Athens. Their work integrates research, architecture, urbanism, landscape and urban design.

Konstantinos Pantazis studied architecture at the National Technical University Athens (2002), and did a Master of Excellence in Architecture at The Berlage Institute Rotterdam (2002-2005). He has worked for a variety of offices in Athens and abroad including: MVRDV in Rotterdam (2007-08), Altoon and Porter in Amsterdam (2006), 51N4E in Brussels (2005), Farjadi Farjadi in London (2004), OΜΑ-Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam (2003-04), Yushi Uehara in Amsterdam (2003) and Jun Aoki in Tokyo (2002), He currently teaches at Patras University.

Marianna Rentzou studied architecture at the National Technical University Athens (2002), and did a Master of Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London (2003-2004) followed by further studies at the Design Academy Eindhoven with Droog Designers . Following working in Athens she worked for MVRDV in Rotterdam (2005-2006) and OMA – Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam (2005, & 2007-2008). At OMA she worked on a diverse range of large scale projects in the Middle East and led the Dubai Creek theatre and ‘Dubai Next’ in Basel.

27 Nicolò Zanatta (1990) is a Venice-based architect and photographer, having worked closely with Italian architectural photographer Alessandra Chemollo. He graduated from IUAV University of Architecture of Venice in 2017 with a master thesis on the workings of Gian Battista Piranesi, Antonio Sant’Elia and Aldo Rossi, tutored by professor Fabrizio Gay and professor Renato Bocchi. Be it via photography and/or architectural models, his research area is the exploration of alternatives to the idea of a “given” configuration of Reality. Brodsky & Utkin, Massimo Scolari, François Schuiten, Dino Buzzati, Italo Calvino, all legitimately contribute to the Discourse around Architecture and its advancement. Anything that can help us reply to the innate question of our profession, which has sometimes been forgotten, the very urgent “how could things could be instead?”.

Lütjens Padmanabhan Architects was established by Oliver Lütjens and Thomas Padmanabhan in 2007. The recent work of the practice focuses on housing in the residential districts surrounding the cities of Zürich, Basel and Munich. Despite their love for a more refined, urbane architecture, Oliver Lütjens and Thomas Padmanabhan have light-heartedly embraced the fact that most of their commissions are set in the mundane anonymity of suburbia. Their interest in complex architectural expression has distanced the practice from the craft-oriented mainstream of Swiss architecture. The current projects explore the impossible task of reconciling the autonomy of the exterior facade with the typological uncertainty of interior spaces and loose urban contexts. After teaching as assistants at ETH Zürich Oliver Lütjens and Thomas Padmanbhan were guest professors at TU Munich and EPF Lausanne.

Lorenzo Lazzari is a research grant holder at the ClusterLAB LSD, Iuav University of Venice. He studied Architecture at the Iuav of Venice and at the ETSAB of Barcelona. He graduated with the thesis Species of Rooms, a research on the correlation between individual memories and the intimate space of the room, coordinated by Malvina Borgherini and Xavier Monteys. He recently collaborated with TEd’A arquitectes in Palma, Spain.

He has edited the publication Devenirs (Iuav, Venice 2017) with Gianmarco Causi, Egidio Cutillo and Elena Gianelloni. He published the work Forma della Crisi. Crisi della forma in the volume Dall’archivio: rimontaggi radicali (Iuav, Venice 2016) curated by Malvina Borgherini and Sara Marini.

He exhibited Species of Rooms in the exhibition Esemplare: il paradosso del libro in copia unica (Venice 2017), curated by Mario Lupano and Sara Marini. His research ranges from the political representation of urban festivals to the representation of the memory in the domestic space.

 

 

Sabrina graduated from the Architectural Association in 2016. She is collaborating with various magazines as illustrator and with the RIBA as curator assistant. Her projects have always been related to the idea of fragmentation, authorship and originality, enhancing the process of how things are made and assembled together. Lately, she founded Lemonot, a platform using architecture as a methodology to reach different outcomes: toys, pastry tools and storytelling.

www.sabrinamorreale.com

www.instagram.com/_lemonot/

 

Middle of the Earth: Dioramas for the Planet is a geo-architectural fiction, which positions climate change as a cultural and political idea that requires a renewed architectural imagination.

The project imagines a natural history museum, which contains large scale dioramas that each displays a specific problem brought by climate change taking place at the “middle of the earth,” i.e., around the equator, the earth’s zero-degree latitude: the melting of the icebergs, deforestation in Brazil and Indonesia, plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean, sand mining in Singapore, and the e-waste dump sites in Ghana.

Rather than limiting the role of climate change for design to a problem to solve, the project speculates on architecture as a measure against which the world might be read.

Neyran Turan is an Assistant Professor at the University of California-Berkeley and a partner at NEMESTUDIO, an architectural office that has been recognized with several awards, including the 2016 Architectural League New York Prize for Young Architects, 2016 Architects’ Newspaper Best of Design Award, Notable Award at Core 77 Design Awards 2017, and a Graham Foundation Award. NEMESTUDIO’s work, ranging from installations to buildings and landscapes, has been exhibited internationally at Storefront Art and Architecture Gallery, Parsons New School of Design Gallery in New York, Wurster Gallery in Berkeley, Chicago Architecture Biennial, SALT in Istanbul, Piazzale Donatello in Florence, Michigan University Taubman College Main Gallery and most recently, at the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial curated by Beatriz at Colomina and Mark Wigley. Turan’s work draws on the relationship between geography and design to highlight their interaction for new aesthetic and political trajectories within architecture and urbanism. Turan is the founding chief-editor of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design journal New Geographies and was the editor-in-chief of the first two volumes of the journal New Geographies 0 (2008) and New Geographies: After Zero (2009). Some of her recent writings have been published in journals and edited books including, Perspecta (MIT Press), Are We Human? (Lars Muller Publishers), Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary (Columbia University GSAAP & Lars Muller Publishers), 20/20: Editorial Takes on Architectural Discourse (AA Publications), Offramp, ARPA Journal, SAN ROCCO, Scenario Journal, Conditions, MONU, ThinkSpace, ARQA, Bidoun, Thresholds, The Superlative City, Landscapes of Development, and Mega-Cities.

Muriz Djurdjevic and Thomas Paturet graduated from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in 2016. Muriz now works for Herzog & de Meuron in Basel and Thomas for MADE IN in Geneva. They are both editors at ATLAS OF PLACES, an online journal founded in 2015, whose mission is to stand out in an increasingly uniform architectural media landscape for its critical vision/research, in-depth analysis of contemporary issues and publications that illuminate the state and relationship between architecture, technology and society.

“He Himself [Sam Regan] was a believer; He affirmed the miracle of translation, the near-sacred moment in which the miniature artifacts of the layout no longer merely represented Earth but became Earth. And he and others, joined together in the fusion of doll-inhabitation by means of the CAN-D, were trasported outside of time and local space. Many of the colonist were as yet unbelievers; to them the layouts were merely symbols of world which none of them could any longer experience. But, one by one, the believers came around.”

Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 36