This week our guest lecturer Marcelo Spina, invited as part of the Winter Lecture Series 2016, inspired the audience with his lecture: Mute Icons.

The lecture Mute Icons challenged fixed aesthetic notions of beauty in architecture as both, disciplinary discourse and a spatial practice within the public realm, by intersecting historic antecedents and present instances within contemporary projects wherein indeterminacy, monolithicity and defamiliarization play a speculative role in constructing withdrawn, irritant and yet engaging architectural images.

No longer concerned with narrative excesses or with the “shock and awe” of sensation making; the mute icon becomes intriguing in its deceptive indifference towards context and perplexing in its unmitigated apathy towards the body. Object and building, absolute and unstable, anticipated and strange, manifest and withdrawn, such is the dichotomy of mute icons. 

Intersecting historical antecedents and polemic theoretical speculations with original concepts and provocative representations from P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S most recent projects, the lecture stimulated authentic speculations on the real.