Rory Hyde (who is working for Volume) comments on the “Office for Unsolicited Architecture” from Volume 14, which Stephen and I have both tangentially touched on in the past:
[T]he role of reality in the production of an unsolicited project… is arguably what separates unsolicited architecture from so-called speculative or paper architecture. While Archigram’s visions of a walking city may have addressed a social need – for free and undetermined public event space – without financing or marketing, it comes across as entertainment. Which is of course, what it was intended to be, to the extent that it was even presented in comic book form. Which is also not to say that entertainment cannot inspire a real project, but that the strength of the unsolicited rests in its very tangible potential to be pursued through to realisation with the right political, financial and public support in place.
Read the rest of the (excellent) post, which includes several examples of unsolicited architecture.
[…] design of these ephemeral landscapes, or, at least, for that hypothetical architect to design an unsolicited project or two (a dizzyingly complex labyrinth of concrete chambers and corridors buried within a […]
[…] Note (also via Pruned) that the Office for Unsolicted Architecture, who we’ve mentioned excitedly in the past, has a tumblr; posts on a map of spatial and infrastructural projects in Tbilisi, NL […]
[…] typically features items that fall somewhere between Actions: What You Can Do With the City and unsolicited architecture. “Augmented Foraging With Boskoi”, for instance, describes an open-source urban […]