The topic proposed for the second edition of Critic all is the autonomy of architecture, recollecting and reframing the reflections that over architecture’s specificity have been produced within the discipline itself. If there is an approach that argues that architecture cannot be an isolated medium, that is, autonomous – not only in regard to social culture but above all, the worldly social, political and economic environment in which it is immersed, – we also have to face those visions that, conversely, consider that architecture is strictly a self-referential discipline, and therefore, it employs a self-sufficient language whose verification is determined by a collection of predefined historical forms.
However, there is a single set of facts, ideas, forms and styles, one that grows larger over time. All this knowledge belongs to us and it may and should be interpreted as an architectural event. And there is an infinite number of paths for the interpretation of those facts, ideas, forms and styles. There are those which make use of new critical tools, alien to the instruments of the architectural discipline, inherited from other intellectual and scientific fields. Others, instead, reclaim the delimitation of the discipline itself to be the main scope of the critical task.
Modernism set up the replacement of an architectural discourse for that of science and technology, therefore emptying the place of architecture. As a response, Postmodern thought reinforced its mechanisms of signification by means of difference and identity, propelling the intensification of disciplinary self-referentiality that characterizes autonomy. Today we know that any discursive contribution cannot be fully constructed from its interior, whether absent or reasserted, but rather from the surroundings of architecture.
