Collages, History or ready-mades On the politics of representation in the age of neoliberalism

Abstract

In the 2016 monographic number devoted by “El Croquis” to the work of Sergison Bates, Alejandro Zaera-Polo wrote an essay where he tried to systematise and explain contemporary trends by the means of a «global architecture political compass», in «an attempt to use a number of emergent practices as indexes of a new structuring of the field» (Zaera-Polo 2016, p. 255) and its forms of resistance to the implications of neoliberal political economy. In the Venn Diagram that illustrates the article, inspired by Charles Jencks infamous diagram in Architecture 2000, Zaera-Polo maps a series of practices (roughly) sharing the same generation. Among these stands the name of Brussels-based office Baukunst, which is listed amidst “revisionists”, “new historicists” and “constitutionalists”. Taking this scheme as a pretext to revisit Baukunst’s early collages (from within the office’s archive), this article aims not only to provide a larger intellectual frame to the office’s work, but mostly to consider its specificity as a counterpoint to some of its apparently closer peers in the international architectural scene. Departing from its Miesian roots, up to reading the works of Caruso St-John, Office KGDVS, DOGMA and Fala, this article ultimately intends to present an alternative and critical reading of Zaera-Polo’s compass.