New work for the unbuilt
Every architectural work has an unbuilt side. In Robert Harbison’s classic (romantic) book on the subject of the unbuilt, he states categorically, “…the solidest architectural facts are fictional to a degree. Like much art, buildings often have a virtual or imaginary component, not that they are liable to vanish like thoughts, but that they are more precarious than they ordinarily appear, because preoccupied with meaning something.”1 Harbison seeks to locate the motivation of architectural endeavour from the material to the immaterial dimensions of every project. In his terms, what architects seek to create is always more than bricks and mortar; not just the unbuilt but also that which is “unbuildable.”
Today, to dissociate the unbuilt from the stuff of “real” practice is to ignore a huge amount of the work that architects do, and the development of one of the most significant and growing areas of disciplinary influence on the built environment. As has been pointed out many times before, architects don’t actually build;
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