ABSTRACT
This chapter explores possible narratives for our contemporary state of permanent crisis, and their potential for the unfolding of speculative architectural approaches to the environment, the city, and the individual. Historically, periods of crisis, be they societal, political or climatic, are characterized by the disruption of the cultural front and collective representations. They have fostered imagination, and called for the definition of new languages and procedures suited to describing the state of the world and inventing new ways to dwell in, and act upon, it. In architecture, these moments have corresponded with calls for the expansion of the field and the reinvention of its models and procedure, through the cross-pollination with other disciplinary spheres. The two decades following World War II have been characterized, especially in Europe, by the emergence of an experimental architecture. In its either joyful or more critical manifestations, such an architecture opposed a renewed conception both of the position of the individual within the city and of the city itself, as a counterweight to the hegemonic functionalism. The resistance and conception of bottom-up processes formulated throughout the visionary or radical projects of the time are being recalled by many of today’s architects operating in the post-crisis contemporary world. The chapter argues that while such programs as Yona Friedman’s Architecture Mobile or Constant’s New Babylon can inform the contemporary debate on how to rethink the city as an emergent whole through active processes of negotiation and aggregation, the utopian and totalizing stances characteristic of those projects have ceased to be operative. The very notion of crisis has evolved, shifting from a temporary state to a permanent one. Although crisis remains an incentive for the reinvention of architectural procedures, it requires a new conceptual and operational apparatus.
