Identify powerful features of the architecture of the present time seeking to illuminate hidden knowledge and processes through a few key concepts. The image: apparently, it seems so essential to understand today’s architecture but which, on closer analysis, turns out instead to be an absence, an unsolved problem, an enigma hidden behind a culture secretly afflicted by iconoclasm. Post-production and montage: so relevant in the avant-garde and now fixed as an indispensable but often hidden creative component. The parody: the hidden but almost always present humor that corrodes the immediate message of architecture and makes it more unstable and, above all, more interesting. Ornament: a component censored by Modernism that today is once again the protagonist in new guises. The relationship with the classic: a secret affair that remains as a founding root of Western architecture.

Alessandro Rocca
Totem and taboo in architectural imagination

Available in ebook version

isbn 9788862425919
book series Pills
number 5
current edition 3 / 2022
first edition 3 / 2022
language English
size 12x16,5cm
pages 120
print b&w
copertina download
the author
Alessandro Rocca is an architect and an architectural writer, Phd in architectural design, an associate professor at Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (Dastu), he teaches architectural design and architectural theory at the School of Architecture of Politecnico di Milano....

Alessandro Rocca is an architect and an architectural writer, Phd in architectural design, an associate professor at Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (Dastu), he teaches architectural design and architectural theory at the School of Architecture of Politecnico di Milano.

Read more

by the same author


from the same book series