Quaderns n. 272. Cosmetic Techniques

The confirmation of the European Union project promoted public architecture and ambitious projects during the decade of 1990. Later on, in the 2000s, some of these projects became “iconic architecture”, due to the distance between the discipline and its users. As a result of the economic crisis of the late 2000s, architecture in Europe needed a revision of its language and, at the same time, a position much closer to society. Quaderns 272 proposes to analyse European urban space and its architecture through three levels of critical perspective, corresponding to three scales of the project. Firstly, the current state of "the face of the European city", built, rebuilt and transformed, is addressed; secondly, there is a debate about the definition of the architectural object, analysing the surface and depth and, consequently, the idea of artifice from both an external view of architecture and a view of (indoor) public interior architecture; finally, cosmetic techniques (Kipnis) are analysed from the study of the architectural fragment, taking into account the identity of the whole.