The corners of form. Politics at the boundary: the perimeters of western architecture and art, 1988–2008.

The phenomenon of architectural icons, first emerging at the end of the 1980s between the United States and Europe, can be historically situated in line with a postmodern perception of architecture as a formal and artistic means of liberation from its own past. “Architecture’s value no longer lay in its redemptive social power [...] but rather in its communicative power as a cultural object,” in its form, acquiring meaning independently from its social, political, or even physical context. Interestingly enough, the 1990s witnessed the wake of antagonistic and socially orientated artistic movements expressed through artistic practices actively questioning the architectural perimeter of museums, their spaces and their power, through the contextualization of art beyond institutions and within the social fabric, and through the formlessness of events, performances, and pieces. It could be expected that the fresh architectural discourse emphatically opposing icons would, similarly, follow a course of recontextualization and extrovercy. However, the discourse advocating for an architecture of the neutral and the rational condensed both the creative and the political responsibilities of architecture into 'form.' The claim towards the political is assessed in this research by situating the discourse of autonomy not in opposition, as proclaimed by its authors, but rather in continuity to the iconic architecture preceding it. Situating the shift of architectural discourse at the turn of the millennium, the chronology of the research spans from 1988 to 2008. Within this time-frame, the evolving relation between form and politics is examined through architectural examples and theoretical texts, as well as through artistic currents. By means of this parallel, the idea that “formal language [can] be politically [...] relevant from within its specific constraints” is dismantled, not in the scope of diminishing the relation of architecture to form, but of questioning the presumed relation of form to the political.