project by evachromosom

build the city around yourself


Unfolding Plato - by Pedro Ignacio Alonso / Ph.D AA - MSc Arch PUCCh

Like everything that strives to novelty, Cityscape resists classification. It might look like a hyper sophisticated collage, based upon digital object-trouvés taken from ready- made cities, all of them mixed up and blended together - but this is not the case. It seems close to these well known categories and practices only because they are available as an authorized visual vocabulary to approach any subject. In absence of new terms (or indeed better arguments) we unwittingly depend upon the dead conceptual bodies of extinct avant-garde movements.

Cityscape might also be seen from a Beaudrillardian idea of simulacra, whose invocation will depend upon our unconscious desire to believe in the existence of  ‘ideal’, ‘real’ and ‘original’ objects outside representation.

However, if we decide to trust representation itself, Cityscape might be getting away from Beaudrillard’s debate on reality: no more - no less -, rather than a new assembly of unrelated elements, a mix of software scripting, geometry, photography, the city, architecture and, of course, human subjectivity. Their blending and distortions open up a field of investigation in frantic search of a new vocabulary and conceptual framework. While a Deleuze approach would become another attempt to Renverser le platonisme, escaping – or perhaps city-escaping – from the endless dichotomies that emerge in the assumption that there is a world outside representation.

Again, this might not be the case because Cityscape does not just ‘reverse’ Platonism: it unfolds it by cutting across the ideal dodecahedron and then opens representation from within. Architectural objects have traditionally been shaped by using Platonic Solids as a well known story in the search of various purisms and elementarisms.

That architectural objects are to be built and seen through the Solids is novel. The dodecahedron, now fully unfolded, thus replaces the role of the window in perspectival space. Like the old two dimensional grid of renaissance artists, from the inside of the dismantled prism we now view something that - just like the very notion of perspectival ‘space’ - did not exist before setting up the window. No longer is a shape made out of ideal figures, but experience itself is now built upon dismantling Solids: this attests the final end of the puritan view of an architecture shaped by ideal forms.
They are now finally exploded from within.



Pedro Ignacio Alonso studied architecture and holds an MSc in Architecture from the Catholic University in Chile and completed his Ph.D at the Architectural Association on the modernist conceptualization of architecture as a work of assemblage. He has taught at the AA since 2005, currently as Visiting Tutor at the ‘Histories and Critical Thinking’ MA Programme, and directs the AA Visiting School to Chile. Between 2006 and 2009 Pedro worked at Arup Urban Design in London in a number of large-scale projects in the United Kingdom, Russia, Azerbaijan, China and Saudi Arabia. He currently teaches theory of architecture and design at the Catholic University in Santiago. Recent publications include A panel’s tale: KPD and the Politics of Assemblage (AA Files 59, London 2009); Acronym (AA Files 57, London 2008); and Post-Digital (MArq 04, Santiago 2008). He is also guest editor of a special issue of the Chinese Magazine New Architecture (no 129) titled Critical Fabrications (Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, April 2010). In 2008 he received a RIBA Research Trust Award for his ongoing study on the Soviet KPD system and the politics of Cold War prefabrication. More recently he has been awarded with a Research Grant from The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California (2010), and with a Fellowship as Visiting Scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal (2010- 2011).