ABSTRACT

Academic disdain notwithstanding, the exploration of the relationships between comics and architecture has been a not quite visible yet recurring phenomenon throughout the history of the medium. Despite its low-key appearance, it has fascinated architects with its unique capacity to gather together communication, space and movement, as recent History has resolutely underlined. A look at architectural publications over the last thirty years shows a discrete but steady flow of articles, as well as an increasing number of exhibitions that cover the different overlaps between architecture and graphic narrative. Unquestionably, this growing interest takes place in the context of a general rediscovery of comics in cinema and other media, paralleled by the increasing appropriation of the products of (mass) visual culture by architecture. A discipline always hungry for new images and concepts, architecture has always been prone to absorb new modes of representation, and comics have proven useful at different points of its History, particularly since the last decades of the last century, where there has been a growing tendency to understand projects as (inter)active processes rather than objects.