The Allegorical Architecture Project

16 - 29 October 2024

‘The Allegorical Architectural Project’ is a group installation by Wellington School of Architecture postgraduate students. It represents a collection of allegorical stories told through the voice of speculative works of architecture. To encourage lateral thinking, students begin with an allegorical provocateur ….

‘The Allegorical Architectural Project’ is a group installation by Wellington School of Architecture postgraduate students. It represents a collection of allegorical stories told through the voice of speculative works of architecture. To encourage lateral thinking, students begin with an allegorical provocateur drawn from scholarly or literary works, such as ‘The Book of the City of Ladies’ by Christine de Pizan (1403), ‘Sanctuaries’ by Thomas John de’Mazzinghi (1887), ‘The Lost World’ by Michael Crichton (1995), ‘The House at the End of Time’ by Peter Schneider (2001), ‘The Inside and the Outside’ by Cosimo Schinaia (2016), ‘Camera Noxoculo’ by Bryan Cantley (2020), and ‘The Four Winds’ by Kristin Hannah (2021).

Each student's literary or scholarly provocateur is used to incite an unexpected proposition that addresses a speculative issue relating to architecture. To further encourage lateral thinking, architectural interventions are conceived anthropomorphically as dynamic entities –living inhabitants of a site– paused in a moment of time.

These architectural interventions are then situated into cause-and-effect relationships within a contextual field. The interventions become not only the inhabitants of the site, but also the narrators of its tale.

Curated by Daniel Brown