STDIO.021

The Congres International d'Architecture Modern (CIAM) convened 11 times between 1929 and 1959. Its resolutions, charters, and declarations can be treated as a lens with which to regard the moderns. The doxa Latour calls the modern constitution has rarely been articulated so explicitly as in the statements of the CIAM.

An ideology of functionalism pervades the proceedings - calls for standardisation, modularity, the division of space into pure program. Society was to be viewed as a system surrendered to a progressive temporality. Modernity required a new subject - that of Universal Man - born of the bifurcation of nature and culture.

Long after the demise of the project of the moderns, despite countless exit strategies - collage, deconstruction, parametricism - cultural practice retains its categories (nature, culture, science, art, man) more or less intact.

CIAM Series is an attempt at undermining the modern — exploiting vulnerabilities in its fabric, corrupting its content.