Savage Architecture

Savage Architecture is an exhibition at Architectural Association of London and a book published by Black Square, an effort to give form to irreducible dichotomies of mankind.

Savage Architecture
The project Savage Architecture — an exhibition at Architectural Association of London and a book published by Black Square both curated by Davide Sacconi — have been presented in a symposium at the Italian Cultural Institute of London. The exhibition “Savage Architecture” presents a journey to the root of the relationship between architecture and man in four episodes.
Savage Architecture, exhibition view
Top: Gian Piero Frassinelli and 2A+P/A, Central Archive of Human Cultures, 2015, detail. Above: Savage Architecture, exhibition view, Architectural Association, London
Departing from Frassinelli’s unpublished proposal for an Anthropology Research Center (1968), lingering on the dystopian and revealing scenarios of The Twelve Ideal Cities (1972), the trajectory culminates in the recent collaborative projects of Frassinelli and 2A+P/A for the Budapest Ethnographic Museum (2014) and the Central Archive of Human Cultures (2015).
This fifty years-long journey among different experiments unveils the foundations of a project alternative to the current blind faith in the economic and technological reason. The anthropological gaze gives form to an architecture that is savage because it refuses to impose the power of reason over the symbolic, animal, vital and therefore political dimension of man.
Savage Architecture, exhibition view, Architectural Association, London
Savage Architecture, exhibition view, Architectural Association, London

Savage Architecture rejects the domestic man and looks at the primitive without the burden of progress or development but instead with the freedom of the barbaric, the wisdom of the ancestral, and a profound awareness of the collective character of architectural knowledge.

Savage Architecture is the difficult achievement of a field of tensions between control and freedom, narrative and technology, individual expression and collective rituals. A project that, conscious of the violence inherent in human relationships, imagines mechanisms and narratives to give form and value to irreducible dichotomies of mankind.


until 23 March 2016
Savage Architecture
Gian Piero Frassinelli, Superstudio and 2A+P/A
curated by davide Sacconi
Architectural Association, London
AA Gallery, Front Members’ Room
36 Bedford Square, London

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