A Dance to the Music of Architecture

Abstract

In this article, I want to draw together a number of considerations that, in combination, cast light upon the way we appreciate The first of these concerns what is called architecture. Such is the name given to work comprising speculative drawing, film, collage, text, computer imagery, and model. Paper architecture is produced as work that is not necessarily intended to be built. Most architects produce paper architecture at some stage in the development of their ideas. Concept and images are used to think into and around a project, without the commitment that the models and images will have any direct counterpart in the final project. Sometimes paper architecture is produced to be submitted to competitions, and there may be little relationship between the submission and the completed project, if there is one. Some architects work in paper architecture without any ambition to build. The work they produce is, therefore, intended as a finished product, the purpose of which is to present, clarify, or criticize architectural ideas. For example, the group Archigram produced a broadsheet of the same name in the 1960s, as a continuous manifesto, to be used in the same way that artists' manifestoes are used to develop polemical thought. The polemical broadsheet, Archigram , became hugely influential in architecture, and the unbuilt work of the group has continued to exert its hold upon generations of architecture students. Now this first strand of thought leads us naturally to a second. If we can judge an unbuilt work by looking at a drawing (and sometimes we do), what is the proper relationship holding between the work and the spectator? Answering this question turns us back toward the first consideration-so that we now learn something about what the correct response to paper architecture ought to beand what it tells us about architecture more generally. It is appropriate here to look at the nature of function in architecture and to