Contemporary architecture faces an ontological crisis. While the discipline, urgently, seeks nonextractivist futures, practice remains tethered to a static paradigm that privileges the production of autonomous objects over the stewardship of metabolic processes. This lecture argues for a radical paradigm shift: a move away from the heroic act of construction, toward a radical theory of undoing. Therein, it proposes undoing as a distinct utopian register. Rather than treating transformation as synonymous with replacement, undoing names a family of architectural operations that postpone clearance, redistribute what already exists, and make change legible as a sequence of reversible moves – incision, insertion, substitution, reprogramming and, when necessary, deliberate subtraction.
To operationalize this shift, the lecture will initiate a theoretical expansion of utopian practice. I will interrogate a lineage of twentieth-century speculative projects and reposition them as mostly dormant provocations for a non-extractivist future. Across drawings, diagrams, an urban narrative, a counter-intuition is repeatedly tested: alternative urban condition might be achieved not through the invention of unprecedented forms, but through the radical reallocation of spaces, components, and infrastructures already embedded in everyday urban life. By stripping these cases of their specific authorship and reading them as theoretical models, a hidden lineage of refusal and entropy in to be uncovered, offering a rigorous counter-narrative to the heroics of modernism.
The inquiry will traverse a spectrum of these reductive operations, examining moments where architecture is designed to inhabit its own dissolution rather than resist it, or where strategic clearance and the curation of absence replace construction as the primary urban act.
Through the lens of these critical excavations, the lecture will challenge the definition of the architect as a progenitor of new forms. In its place, the agency of a curator of the open will be advanced as a role that navigates the spatiotemporal continuum by engaging the latent potentials of the existing, volarizing the trace, the interval and the void. Consequently, undoing will be posited as an active, rigorous and utopian project of stewardship.
