The Additional Element in Architecture: On Kazimir Malevichs Arkhitektons and Planits

(Paperback)

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An ingenious reconstruction-and revealing analysis through "visual archaeology"-of avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich's lost arkhitektons. An ingenious reconstruction-and revealing analysis through "visual archaeology"-of avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich's lost arkhitektons. Among the Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich's most intriguing works, the arkhitektons are also the most enigmatic, as these quasi-architectural sculptures made between 1920 and 1930 were almost entirely lost, along with many of the accompanying drawings, or planits. In The Additional Element in Architecture, Pedro Ignacio Alonso and Paulina Bitra n bring Malevich's elusive arkhitektons to startling, three-dimensional life and show how these objects form a comprehensive universe that embodies the artist's Suprematism-his belief in the supremacy of pure artistic sensation in abstraction. The book features digital reconstructions of 15 arkhitektons and planits that are lost in their original physical form. Using a method they call visual archaeology, Alonso and Bitra n explore how these structures figure in Malevich's investigations of spatial form. In the authors' view, the arkhitektons and planits constitute a series of changing configurations, or "states," rather than fixed or closed monolithic sculptures that can be reckoned with individually. They are provisional assemblages of prismatic volumes linked only by gravity and equilibrium-ephemeral arrangements that digital modeling exposes and opens to new analysis. Along with its illustrations and analysis of the ingeniously recreated arkhitektons and planits, Alonso and Bitran provide historiographical notes on the different appearances of these models, as well as a critical consideration of how Malevich's own conception of the "additional element" might place these beguiling figures within a wider history of modern architecture.

Author Bio

Pedro Ignacio Alonso is Associate Professor at the Universidad Cato lica de Chile and Program Director of the AA Visiting School to Santiago at the Architectural Association, London. He is the author of Panel and Monolith Controversies, which won the 2015 Deutsches Architekturmuseum Award. Paulina Bitra n is an architect. She has worked as an independent researcher in projects related to art, museography, and archaeology, with a focus on installation work and production of archaeological exhibitions at the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Egypt.