THE CITY AS A CRITICAL PROJECT

"The critical reasons for the project...simultaneously construct critique of the present and of the horizon of its reorganization."

Vittorio Gregotti, Inside Architecture

The City as a Critical Project begins by analysing city plans that have acquired paradigmatic status in architecture. Those investigated include; Nolli's Plan of Rome (1748), Lucio Costa's Pilot Plan for Brasilia (1957), Andrea Branzi's (1994), and contemporary Hong Kong.

The plans accumulate formal knowledge and lessons on architecture, cities and architecture’s relation to society and our built, natural or imagined environment.

There is a continuous line of architectural thought from the Enlightenment to the contemporary avant-garde that recognises how architecture imagines new forms of city and collective life and which have proposed critical projects – a collective discourse across history that perform reflective acts of close-reading upon architecture and the city as a way to generate new thought and transform reality.

The projects exhibited in this digital archive raise questions related to representation, analysis and projective discourses, critique, drawing and reading the city. Collectively, we develop a grammar of the city as a critical project.