Ugly, Useless, Unstable Architectures: Phase Spaces and Generative Domains

Ugly, Useless, Unstable traces productive intersections between architecture and the discourses of post-structuralism and new materialism. It investigates how their unique ‘ontological regimes’ can be mobilized to supersede the classical framework that still informs both the production and the evaluation of architecture.

Throughout its three main chapters, this enquiry challenges one of the most prevalent tropes of architectural assessment: beauty, utility and stability. Author Miguel Paredes Maldonado critically unpacks the spatial and operational qualities of these three axioms, before setting out an alternative framework of spatial practice that draws from Gilles Deleuze’s post-structuralist take on the production of the real and Manuel De Landa’s model-based branch of new materialism. It reads and situates a series of spatial works through the lens of this critical methodology to contest the conceptual aspects traditionally underpinning architectural ‘value’. Instead, it posits that architecture can operate as a continuous, generative spectrum encompassing a broad range of potential configurations.