The SPACESHIP SERIES constitutes a long-term curatorial and critical project that reframes canonical and non-canonical architectures as active socioplastic agents rather than inert historical objects. Each “spaceship” is treated not as a neutral container of function or style, but as a didactic artefact operating at the intersection of form, ideology, material intelligence, and collective memory. By mobilising architecture as a ready-made of urban culture, the series departs from orthodox historiography and aligns itself with expanded-field practices in contemporary art criticism. Buildings are read as autonomous yet relational entities—objects that condense political ambition, technical experimentation, and symbolic projection into legible spatial constructs. This curatorial logic echoes the legacy of Duchampian readymades while extending it into an architectural scale, where the city itself becomes an archive of sculptural decisions. The seriality of the project is crucial: repetition across geographies and epochs generates a comparative field where differences in tectonics, ritual, and social ambition emerge with clarity.
The SPACESHIP SERIES thus functions as an epistemic device, enabling architecture students and artists to read buildings as critical texts rather than passive precedents. Architecture here is not illustrated; it is activated, reframed as a living index of cultural intelligence. Central to the project is the notion of “architecture high class,” not as an elitist category, but as a measure of conceptual density, spatial risk, and cultural ambition. From the Pantheon to Archigram, from Palladio to Zumthor, from the Alhambra to the Barbican, the series traverses temporal and ideological regimes while maintaining a consistent analytical lens. What unites these heterogeneous works is their capacity to exceed mere utility and operate symbolically, almost cosmologically, within their contexts. Many entries foreground moments where architecture flirts with excess, flight, suspension, or monumental withdrawal—conditions that justify the metaphor of the spaceship. These buildings appear as vehicles launched into history, carrying within them visions of society, power, or intimacy. The series is particularly attentive to structural audacity and material experimentation: Torroja’s impossible shells, Frei Otto’s tensile dreams, Aalto’s intimate tectonics, or SANAA’s ethereal neutrality are read as spatial hypotheses rather than finished answers. In this sense, the project resists linear narratives of progress and instead proposes a constellation model, where architectures resonate across time through shared obsessions with light, gravity, ritual, and control.
The pedagogical dimension of the SPACESHIP SERIES is explicit and rigorous. Conceived as an open research tool, it operates simultaneously as archive, syllabus, and speculative atlas. Its accumulation of references—ranging from imperial temples to modernist housing, from avant-garde paper architecture to contemporary cultural infrastructures—invites non-hierarchical navigation. This methodology aligns with contemporary pedagogical theories that privilege transversal learning and critical juxtaposition over chronological mastery. By presenting architecture through short, pointed textual fragments rather than exhaustive monographs, the series encourages interpretative agency. Students are invited to read between entries, to detect latent continuities and productive contradictions. The recurring themes of extrusion, section, ritual, enclosure, and exposure form an implicit grammar through which architectural knowledge is transmitted. Importantly, the project does not separate architecture from art, politics, or anthropology; instead, it situates buildings within broader cultural ecologies.
Architecture becomes a medium of thought, a way of organising reality and projecting desire. The series thus performs a subtle but radical shift: it treats architectural literacy as a form of cultural literacy. Ultimately, the SPACESHIP SERIES articulates a contemporary critical position on architecture’s role in an era of saturation and accelerated consumption of images. By slowing down the gaze and insisting on the singularity of each building as a socioplastic event, the project resists the flattening tendencies of digital platforms. At the same time, its serial and open-ended structure acknowledges the impossibility of closure. The archive remains porous, expandable, and provisional—qualities that mirror the condition of contemporary urban culture itself. In this sense, the series is less a catalogue than a living organism, continually reactivated through teaching, research, and curatorial practice. Its strength lies in its ability to hold together rigor and intuition, scholarship and poetics, discipline and drift. Architecture is neither fetishised nor reduced; it is treated as a complex cultural instrument capable of shaping bodies, behaviours, and imaginaries. The SPACESHIP SERIES thus stands as a high-level critical contribution, positioning architecture as an art of thinking in space and time.
SPACESHIP SERIES and the Epistemology of Architectural Artefacts: a Transhistoric Curriculum” and “Master Index of Monumentality and Matter” — (Anto Lloveras, SPACESHIP SERIES, 2019) https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2019/03/spaceship-seriesarchitecture-high-class.html
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