The separation of desenho and canteiro, identified by Arquitetura Nova as the cleavage of the conflict between capital and labour, operates today in an augmented reality: the role of the architect is one of an illusionist that reduces the complexity of architectural labour to uniqueness, a process through which capital is reified and endlessly reproduced in the pervasive circulation of images. Against this condition Arquitetura Nova’s work offers a method. Not only they exercised a radically collective form of design against authorship and placed the workers’ knowledge at the centre of the design and building process, but they turned the gap between the real and the imagined subject of their theory and practice into the substance of their political project. In its very material form the archetype of the vault-house exposes and reclaims architecture as common knowledge collectively produced: architecture as praxis, rational critical action.
Davide Sacconi is an architect, founder of CAMPO and PhD candidate at the Architectural Association. He has been teaching in UK since 2012, including the MArch Urban Design program of the Bartlett UCL and at the Liverpool University, and since 2017 he is visiting lecturer at the School of Architecture of the Royal College of Art and the Director of the Syracuse University London Program. In 2019 he curated the first monographic exhibition on the Brazilian collective Arquitetura Nova, organised in the occasion of the Architecture Biennale of FRAC Centre-Orleans.
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