Form Follows Fiction: Six Inquiries

Architects: Lucía Esteras and Gonzalo Perrote, Esteras Perrote, Córdoba, Argentina / Davor Mateković, Proarh, Zagreb, Croatia / Ashot and Armine Snkhchyan, snkh., Yerevan, Armenia / Gustavo Carmona, MATERIA, Mexico City, Mexico / Adam Dayem, actual / office, New York, USA / Xaveer Claerhout and Barbara Van Biervliet, Claerhout–Van Biervliet, Knokke-Heist, Belgium

Curator: Vladimir Belogolovsky, Curatorial Project, New York, USA
Exhibition Design: Esteras Perrote, Córdoba, Argentina
Graphic Design: Pablo Mandel, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Exhibition / Discussion one / Discussion two

Form Follows Fiction: Six Inquiries brings together architects from Argentina, Armenia, Belgium, Croatia, Mexico, and the USA whose projects challenge one of architecture’s most enduring assumptions: that form follows function. Presented as part of the main program of the 20th Buenos Aires Architecture Biennial, the exhibition reveals how architecture can emerge from diverse—and often contradictory—narratives and ideas: pragmatic and artistic, collective and individual, pure and complex, restrained and expressive, structured and intuitive, logical and arbitrary.

The inquiries—five dwellings and one urban complex—explore a house conceived as one object nested within another; a rural dwelling that embraces views and invites snow inside for the sheer joy of it; a retreat whose facade and roof become part of the terrain, allowing it to disappear into the landscape; an artist’s home and studio shaped by light, nature, and painting; a subterranean house whose presence is defined and transformed by a system of moving mirrors; and an evolving urban ensemble—a colonnade, a cultural center, and a bank branch with a garden—conceived as a living room for the city.

These works construct fictions—provocations, hypotheses, experiments, dreams, technological breakthroughs, and desires to enrich public space—through which concepts and forms are tested and reinterpreted. Together, these case studies approach Habitat at different scales, from the intimacy of a house to the collective life of the city. They reveal architecture as a process of inquiry in which form emerges as much through ideas, intentions, and imagination as through function.