What do the ideal cities of Le Corbusier, New Babylon of Constant, the first enclosed shopping mall, Brasilia, and Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York have in common? Is there a form of architecture devised to reveal the ideology hidden behind the design of buildings and entire cities? Is there a form of critical storytelling in architecture?

In the form of a Kynical Manifesto (a manifesto that bites), in Narrative Architecture Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski reconstruct six decades of the twentieth century to reveal the origins of one of the most powerful, misunderstood, and underutilized mediums of architectural critique, thinking, and representation.

Half historical storytelling, half graphic speculation, this vademecum in three parts weaves inseparable the ideological framework of Modernism, the post-war utopias of the present, and the narrative critiques post-1968. Mixing text with fifty collages (one for every year since the birth of Narrative Architecture), the book finds new relationships between the heroic, utopian, commercial, segregated, visionary, humorous, ironic and critical projects by Le Corbusier, Team 10, Constant, Yona Friedman, Salvador Dali, Victor Gruen, Lucio Costa, Minoru Yamasaki, Archizoom, Superstudio, Madelon Vriesendorp, and Rem Koolhaas.

Alluding to Diogenes of Sinope, the ancient Kynic who wandered with a lantern under plain daylight in search of an honest man, through narrative, archival, and provocative images and texts, Garcia and Frankowski lay out the groundwork in search of an honest architecture able to address the pressing challenges of our times.

Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski are architects, educators, co-directors of international studio WAI Architecture Think Tank, and authors of Pure Hardcore Icons: A Manifesto on Pure Form in Architecture.

ISBN 978-94-6208-524-4
Text and Images:
Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski / WAI Architecture Think Tank
Design: Team Thursday
English | hardcover | 24 x 31 cm | 132 pages | in conjunction with: Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Michelle Garnaut, Institute of Optimistic Architectures, Jan Sobotka