APRIL 2015 | MA HISTORY & CRITICAL THINKING | ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION
CRITICAL COLLECTION ALEJANDRA CELEDÓN Interview by Daniela Puga
In the introduction of Jean N.L. Durand’s Precis of the Lectures on Architecture Antoine Picon argues that Durand cannot resolve the problem between social evolving needs and architecture’s total autonomy as his predecessors did by referring to nature, but through the notion of type a link could be made between the apparent opposition of socialization and autonomy of architectural production. In one of the series of Debates organized at the Architectural Association Dis – Locutions: Architecture and The Political, Alejandra Celedón presented an on-going project that related the type, which mediates between the particular, and the universal, and the collections as a finite sample of an infinite potential. This written dialogue (between Santiago and London) deepens into the possibilities of a critical action in the process of synthetizing a place by dissecting it and carefully describing the separated elements. ‘Collecting is the rudimentary way of mastering the outside
world,
manipulating.’1
of
arranging,
classifying
and