The Autonomy of Theory: Ticino Architecture and Its Critical Reception, lecture by Irina Davidovici / Neighbours Vol. 4 by TPOD, THEMA, HITAM

During the late 1970s and 1980s, the architecture from the Swiss Canton of Ticino gained a wide international following that belied its remote location. Following the exhibition Tendenzen: Neuere Architektur im Tessin, shown at ETH Zurich in 1975 and EPFL shortly afterwards, the contemporaneous architecture in Ticino became the subject of fervent coverage. After the Swiss exhibitions followed international publications, including in A+U, L’architecture d’aujourd’hui, and Oppositions.  In this book, Irina Davidovici argues that this critical attention instrumentalized Ticino architecture in unpredictable ways. The production of theory emancipated architectural narratives from the actual conditions of production, a flattening that actively aided their international circulation. This extended essay examines the means of dissemination and the reception of Ticino architecture in the autonomous theoretical framings of Neo-Realism and Critical Regionalism, placing well-known external constructs, such as the notion of the School of the Ticino, against the skepticism of lesser known local architects and historians. Davidovici traces the long-term consequences of the misalignment between autonomous theory and situated knowledge in the architecture in the Ticino, and shows how it led to the paradoxical divergence of its historiography from its history. 

 

Architect and historian Irina Davidovici is the Director of the gta Archiv and Senior Scientist at ETH Zurich. Her research straddles housing history, cooperatives and alternative forms of communal living, and recent architecture in Switzerland. She is the author of Forms of Practice. German-Swiss Architecture 1980–2000 (gta 2012 and 2018) and The Autonomy of Theory: Ticino Architecture and Its Critical Reception (gta, 2024), and edited Colquhounery. Alan Colquhoun from Bricolage to Myth (AA, 2015). She is currently working on a new book Common Grounds: A Comparative History of Early Housing Estates in Europe (Triest, Zurich, 2025).