(France, 1982 & 1981)
Based in Paris and co-founded by Mariabruna Fabrizi and Fosco Lucarelli, the agency MICROCITIES, in addition to their architectural practice, has developed Socks, a digital publishing platform/online magazine, in the form of a visual atlas. For the Biennale, MICROCITIES has redrawn the Frac Centre- Val de Loire’s collection by replicating sixteen of the collection’s most emblematic models: Ettore Sottsass, Aldo Rossi, Superstudio, SANAA, Hiromi Fuji, Claude Parent, etc. Each piece has been chosen for its abstract traits and capacity not to express the personality of the author, qualities the agency amplifies through simplifying the projects’ original forms. Against the notion of creation being an individual and isolated act, MICROCITIES asserts that cultural environment plays a major role in producing mental landscapes appropriated by architects. Organized around the notions of archetype, territory, nature, memory or modernity, the sixteen replicas give shape to a new field that, during the process of cataloging and then transmission, identifies the very basis for the act of creating. The project seeks to demonstrate how we integrate common knowledge as to reinvent it.
