Destroy All Monsters!

Published in Grand Dessein du Rationalisme as part of the Accattone Magazine serie (pp. 35-38, 2021). More info here

Destruction is hard to deal with, as it tends to expose the crises and contradictions occurring everywhere without concealing the violence of their transformative processes. Although conflictual, divisive, and allegedly more controversial than its counterpart, destruction is a constituent trait of the human-animal, which capitalism progressively turned into a driving force. Lacking a specific environment, humans spread across the planet as an invasive and endangering species, extracting resources, colonizing lands, and drastically altering ecosystems to survive, forcing them to the brink of collapse, as clearly manifested by the tragedies of the past months.

At the same time, destruction uses negation to widen the possibility for developing other ways to expend energy, improve connections, and grow potential. It is both historical and generative, as it never occurs in a vacuum but operates with precedents and contexts to be analyzed, dismantled, modified, overturned, or reframed, preparing the ground for something to happen. In this sense, perhaps, it would be possible to rethink destruction as a method for questioning and undoing what has been done so far, conjecturing another rationalism for unmasking the wicked logic of production and consumption, retooling the instruments of profit for different purposes, and killing the ‘live monster that is fruitful and multiplies’.

This essay is part of Grand Dessein du Rationalisme: a hybrid publication that gathers 18 architecture projects from the student collectives of Roberto Gargiani’s Superstudio at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, 2020–2021, and a series of 13 theoretical, practical and historical reflections on (antagonistic) rationalism in architecture by Marco Assennato, Jean-Louis Cohen, Massimo De Angelis, Natalie Donat-Cattin, Roberto Gargiani, Silvia Groaz, Boris Hamzeian, Marson Korbi, André Kempe & Oliver Thill, Éric Lapierre, Francesco Marullo, Point Supreme, Ten Studio, Christophe Van Gerrewey, and Adrien Verschuere. Published by Accattone, the volume is edited by Roberto Gargiani and Marson Korbi.