Sedimented Boundaries

A distinction is never an isolated conceptual incision; it is the condensed outcome of earlier separations sedimented through language, institutions, spatial arrangements and habits of perception. What appears to divide inside from outside, evidence from noise or centre from margin is therefore an architecture of accumulated difference whose durability derives from convergent practices rather than logical purity. Such boundaries are politically consequential because they do not merely describe reality: they stabilise it by distributing movement, legitimacy, visibility and access. A zoning category, archival descriptor or legal threshold allocates possibilities, deciding which bodies may circulate, which claims become intelligible and which forms of knowledge remain excluded. 

Transdisciplinary fields emerge from dense mixtures of theory, practice and critique, where heterogeneous lineages acquire operational force.

Transdisciplinary fields are not born through linear descent, disciplinary purity or the sovereign authority of a founding figure; they emerge from the force of mixture, from the intensified contact between heterogeneous bodies of knowledge that, once brought into relation, begin to generate concepts, methods and problems that none of their parent traditions could have produced alone. Socioplastics exemplifies this mode of emergence: it does not select cybernetics, media archaeology, archive theory, architectural thought, ecology, decolonial critique and feminist theory as ornamental genealogies, but as active substances whose friction produces a new epistemic density. The field therefore arises when Turing’s computational abstraction can converse with Warburg’s mnemonic atlas, when Lefebvre’s production of space meets Haraway’s multispecies entanglements, or when Fanon, Spivak and Wynter unsettle the colonial assumptions embedded in architectural and technological systems. A specific synthesis appears in LAPIEZA-LAB, where artistic practice, spatial research, pedagogy, ecological thinking and computational culture are not simply juxtaposed, but rendered mutually operative through projects, archives, diagrams and collective experiments. This is how transdisciplinary fields are born: not by adding disciplines together, but by subjecting them to a transformative pressure that alters their internal grammar. Their legitimacy comes from the capacity to hold difference without neutralising it, to compose without homogenising, and to convert intellectual mass into methodological invention. Socioplastics thus names a field whose origin is not a point, but a turbulent convergence.

Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics. LAPIEZA-LAB.

Archizoom’s No-Stop City theorises an endless, uniform urban field where architecture dissolves into infrastructure, exposing capitalism’s spatial logic.

Archizoom Associati’s No-Stop City (1969–72) constitutes a seminal act of critical architecture, wherein the city is reconceptualised not as a composed artefact but as an infinite, isotropic field governed by the logics of production and consumption. Emerging from the Italian Radical Architecture movement, this project radicalises modernist tendencies toward standardisation by extrapolating them to their terminal condition: a continuous, climate-controlled interior where distinctions between centre and periphery, public and private, architecture and infrastructure are entirely effaced. The visual material on page 1 foregrounds this ambition through the depiction of a boundless gridded plane labelled “climatic universal system,” while subsequent pages reveal repetitive modular layouts and interior scenes populated by interchangeable objects, emphasising the seriality of space and life . Within this paradigm, architecture ceases to produce meaning through form; instead, it becomes a neutral support for consumer behaviours, mirroring the homogenising tendencies of late capitalism. The meticulous plans on pages 2 and 4 illustrate an urbanism devoid of hierarchy, where circulation, habitation, and production are subsumed into a single infrastructural matrix, while the staged interiors on page 2 ironically dramatise the absurdity of limitless flexibility and choice within a system of total uniformity . As a case study, No-Stop City does not propose a buildable utopia but rather a dystopian mirror, exposing how modern urbanism, when driven by market rationality, tends toward spatial indifference and existential monotony. Ultimately, Archizoom’s project operates as a theoretical extreme, revealing that the disappearance of architectural form is not liberation but the culmination of a system in which space itself becomes a commodity, endlessly reproducible and devoid of qualitative distinction.

Superstudio’s radical architecture dissolves built form into conceptual systems, critiquing consumer society through speculative, non-buildable urban imaginaries.

Emerging from the intellectual turbulence of late-1960s Florence, Superstudio reconstituted architecture not as a discipline of construction but as a critical epistemology, wherein design operates through paradox, negation, and speculative projection. Rejecting the modernist alignment with industrial rationality, the group reframed architecture as a tool for problem-finding rather than problem-solving, exposing the ideological substrata of consumer capitalism. Their seminal project, the Continuous Monument, exemplifies this strategy: a vast, gridded megastructure extending infinitely across landscapes, erasing distinctions between city and countryside while rendering all spatial qualities—function, sensibility, hierarchy—null. This “negative utopia” operates not as a proposal but as a demonstratio per absurdum, revealing the latent totalising tendencies of modern planning by exaggerating them to conceptual exhaustion . Parallel to this, the Supersurface project advances a more immaterial paradigm, envisioning the Earth as a continuous infrastructural grid of information and services, where architecture dissolves into networked connectivity and cognitive extension, anticipating contemporary digital environments. A compelling case emerges in their “Twelve Ideal Cities,” each isolating and intensifying a single urban principle—such as zoning or uniformity—thereby exposing its insufficiency within complex socio-spatial realities. Ultimately, Superstudio’s work culminates in a radical dematerialisation of architecture into landscape, interface, and thought-space, aligning with Fuller’s planetary systems thinking yet diverging through its insistence on critique over optimisation, and proposing that the true site of architecture lies not in construction, but in the transformation of consciousness.