Conditions of Change in Architecture. Origin or Strategy through Two Texts by Rafael Moneo and Lacaton & Vassal

Abstract

The article confronts a couple of texts –The Life of the Buildings by Rafael Moneo and Structural Freedom, a Precondition for the Miracle by Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal– to propose a reflection on the contemporary conditions that allow architecture to change. Moneo’s text proposes the identification of some essential formal features and the recognition of the autonomy that the architectural project acquires once it is built, as the origin and guarantee of a certain future change. Change is part of an already written destiny and not so much a process. In the text by the French architects, however, it is the supporting structure from the process and the concept of superimposition, that result in an architecture capable of assuming change as the episode of an open destiny. If the former appeals to essential timeless values, the latter identify temporality as a permanent state of architecture and of our everyday life. The article discusses these two ways of approaching change as an inevitable condition of architecture, does not deny their validity but explains their background with some other texts.