The crisis is evident: in Portugal there are almost no platforms — magazines or newspapers — dedicated to the critique, research and discussion of architecture. The end of the institution of architectural criticism has become a fait accompli, but this is only the most obvious symptom of the consolidation of a professional — but also academic — practice without discipline: without history, without theory, without project.

The neoliberal market’s absolute affirmation over the whole of architecture’s professional practice has rendered the possibility of disciplinary architectural knowledge meaningless: the how to know of an architecture founded on the institution — or expectation of the institution — of a public and collective world has been replaced by the mere know-how, the instrumental and purely technical know-how linked to the immediate market of private commissions. Just as the city, architecture has also ceased to be a public good, becoming nothing more than a private «financial asset».

It is precisely because architecture has been privatized, because it no longer needs to belong and be legitimized in the order of a common and shareable public sense, that criticism, history, theory, in short, the idea of «project», has become little more than a souvenir or, in the worst case, a fetish. On the other hand, neoliberal model’s affirmation over academic practice not only stripped its autonomy, but also emptied its critical and legitimizing competences. Making a school has become as distant as making critique — a chimera.

It is therefore in the articulation between architecture-critique-research-school that the possibility of this journal arises: reactivating the links between academic and professional practice, promoting access to the study of architecture (critically reading its works and discourses), but also analysing the very condition of architecture at a time when the political, economic and social conditions of its production and reproduction within neoliberal capitalism are in permanent transformation and crisis.

This means that the vocation of this journal will necessarily be to interrogate architecture in its present condition and the problems it faces, but only insofar as these problems and this condition are also historical in their nature. Thus, the discipline and its objects are not a fetish in the hands of a collector in his «garden of knowledge», but fragments and shards that reflect, on their very surface, the imprecise face of the present. And that’s why no object is just architectural. As Jacques Rancière once wrote: a discipline is always «a provisional regrouping, a provisional territorialization, of subjects and questions that, in themselves, have neither a place nor a domain of their own».

These are the functional operators that organize the thematic constellation of this journal

Stones against Diamonds

Stones against diamonds is a publication linked to the ATPH research group [Architecture: Theory, Project, History] of the Center for Studies in Architecture and Urbanism of the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto. The name recalls Lina Bo Bardi’s text «Stones against diamonds» and resumes a project with the same name, which began in 2017 and was interrupted during the Covid-19 pandemic. During this period and under the title «Ex-cursus: texts on the margins, deviations, drifts, experiments», texts by Giorgio Agamben, Pedro Levi Bismarck, Nuno Teotónio Pereira, Manfredo Tafuri, Manuel Mendes, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Anne Lacaton & Jean-Philippe Vassal were published.

Contributions

Articles for publication should be submitted by email.

CONTACT

If you have any questions, please contact us at info@stonesagainstdiamonds.com.

Support

Center for Studies in Architecture and Urbanism of the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto with financial support from the Foundation for Science and Technology.