SYMPOSIUM: UNBUILT PERMANENCE

The Enduring Weight of Paper, Text, and Idea

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Symposium Thesis

Architecture is traditionally measured by its physical endurance—by the lifespan of concrete, steel, and timber. However, "Unbuilt Permanence" challenges this foundational assumption. At the Surjan Super School, we posit that the most structurally sound and historically enduring artifacts are often those that were never physically constructed.

The unbuilt—the theoretical manifesto, the un-executable megastructure, the speculative drawing, the woven abstraction, and the literary city—casts a longer, more permanent shadow than physical buildings. Buildings decay, face demolition, or suffer alteration; the unbuilt remains pure, immortalized in the collective consciousness of the discipline. This symposium explores how paper architecture, urban literature, textile geometries, and critical utopias build the definitive, indestructible frameworks upon which all future spatial practices are constructed. We will examine how the "unbuilt" is not a failure of realization, but the ultimate state of architectural permanence.

 

Session 1: Narrative Geometries & The Imagined City

Focus: The construction of indestructible worlds through literature, observation, and poetic architectural drawing. This session explores how words and lines on a page create cities more permanent than those made of stone.

• Jorge Luis Borges: The architecture of the infinite, the labyrinth, and the library as a universal model.

• Fernando Pessoa: The internal, psychological city and the architecture of the fragmented self.

• John Hejduk: The architect as storyteller; masques, nomadic structures, and the emotional weight of the paper project.

• Jane Jacobs: The unbuilt choreography of the street; the invisible, enduring systems of human urban interaction.

Session 2: Archetypes & The Shadow of the Monument

Focus: The pursuit of essential forms and the memory of architecture. This panel discusses how typologies and historical archetypes create a permanent theoretical foundation, even when the projects themselves remain on the drawing board.

• Louis Kahn: Unbuilt volume, the metaphysical presence of light, and the enduring nature of "what a building wants to be."

• Aldo Rossi: The architecture of the city, collective memory, and the permanence of the monument in the urban theater.

• James Stirling: The monumental ruin, historical quotation, and the unbuilt as an ongoing dialogue with the past.

• Stanley Tigerman: The architectural critique, irony, and the dismantling of modernism's perceived permanence.

Session 3: Radical Utopias & Megastructural Manifestos

Focus: The unbuilt as a tool for extreme critique and systemic provocation. This session examines movements that used visionary, un-buildable concepts to permanently alter the trajectory of global design thinking.

• Archizoom: "No-Stop City," the ultimate unbuilt critique of capitalism, consumerism, and the infinite grid.

• Metabolist Movement: Biological paradigms, organic growth, and the permanent concept of the impermanent, plug-in city.

• Buckminster Fuller: The ephemeralization of architecture; global systems, tensegrity, and doing "more with less" as a permanent philosophy.

• Hans Hollein: "Everything is Architecture"; the expansion of the discipline into environments, pills, and media.

Session 4: Woven Dimensions & Spatial Illusions

Focus: How two-dimensional surfaces—textiles, canvases, and color theories—construct rigorous, permanent spatial realities that predate and outlast physical buildings.

• Anni Albers: The woven grid as the original architecture; thread as a structural and spatial element.

• Josef Albers: The interaction of color; the permanence of optical illusion and the shifting nature of visual reality.

• Paul Klee: The pedagogical line; how point, line, and plane construct the underlying logic of all form.

• Lucienne Day: The democratization of modernism through pattern; organic geometries as a permanent cultural backdrop.

Session 5: Earth, Atmosphere, and the Tectonic Spirit

Focus: The translation of regional spirit, raw materiality, and topography into enduring architectural languages. This session bridges the gap between the deeply rooted physical world and the unbuilt poetics of atmosphere.

• Lina Bo Bardi: The social condenser; the permanence of human activity over the permanence of the shell.

• Luis Barragán: The emotional architecture of color, water, and silence; the unbuilt atmosphere as the primary structure.

• Roberto Burle Marx: The living plan; landscape as a permanent, yet ever-changing, architectural medium.

• Eladio Dieste: The structural poetry of reinforced ceramics; defying gravity to create enduring, seemingly impossible forms.

• Clorinda Testa: Brutalism as an organic language; the sculptural, unyielding permanence of expressive concrete.

Session 6: Semiotics, Systems, and the Ephemeral Spectacle

Focus: The architecture of communication, information, and joy. How signs, symbols, and multimedia environments create a lasting cultural impact that transcends physical boundaries.

• Robert Venturi: The decorated shed; the permanence of the signifier and the complexity of contradiction.

• Charles Moore: The architecture of joy, theatricality, and the populist monument.

• Charles & Ray Eames: Information as architecture; the enduring legacy of systemic design, film, and the multi-screen exhibition.

• Eero Saarinen: The expressive structural gesture; capturing the spirit of an era in forms that defy the standard grid.

 

Opening Address Speaker: Surjan

"Welcome, colleagues, students, and visionaries, to the Surjan Super School.

We are gathered here today to confront a paradox that sits at the very heart of our discipline. As architects and designers, we are conditioned to measure our success by the pouring of concrete, the framing of steel, and the eventual occupation of physical space. We are taught that to build is to succeed, and to remain on paper is to fall short.

Over the course of this symposium, we are going to dismantle that assumption entirely.

The theme of our gathering is Unbuilt Permanence. We are proposing that the most structurally sound, enduring, and indestructible architectures are often those that were never subjected to the compromises of gravity, budget, or client. Physical buildings are surprisingly fragile. They weather, they are renovated beyond recognition, and eventually, they face the wrecking ball. But the unbuilt—the theoretical megastructure, the woven grid, the narrative city, the pure geometric archetype—these exist in a state of immortality.

My own experiences, particularly the years I spent working alongside Stanley Tigerman, taught me early on that a sharp architectural critique, an ironic sketch, or a deeply felt paper provocation often holds far more historical weight than a conventional concrete foundation.

Over the next few days, we will explore this indestructible architecture of the mind. We will walk through the psychological labyrinths of Jorge Luis Borges and Fernando Pessoa. We will study the emotional gravity of John Hejduk’s masques and the radical urban critiques of Archizoom. We will look at how Anni Albers built entire spatial realities not with bricks, but with thread; and how Louis Kahn sought the essential, unbuilt volume before a single stone was laid.

These figures did not fail to build; they succeeded in constructing the very frameworks upon which all of our current spatial practices rest. They built the permanent foundations of our discourse.

We are not here to romanticize failure. We are here to recognize the ultimate architectural achievement: the realization of an idea so powerful that it does not need physical form to change the world.

Welcome to Unbuilt Permanence. Let us begin."