Arquitectura y Sociedad

Issue 25 of Arquitectura y Sociedad, devoted to “Manifestos of the Contemporary Project,” reconsiders what it means to manifest a position through architecture today. Drawing on Beatriz Colomina’s premises, the manifesto is understood beyond the programmatic text: buildings, cities, exhibitions, pedagogies, images, infrastructures, and media can also operate as disciplinary and ideological statements.

The editorial traces a genealogy from the Less is more associated with Mies van der Rohe, through Robert Venturi’s Less is a bore, Pier Vittorio Aureli’s Less Is Enough, Bjarke Ingels’s Yes Is More, and Jeremy Till’s Mess Is the Law. This sequence reveals a shift from the modern aspiration to establish principles of order toward a contemporary recognition of contradiction, interdependence, and contingency.

The issue’s seventeen contributions expand this discussion from both historical and contemporary perspectives. The articles address the manifesto as intellectual construction, social transformation, exhibition, city, pedagogy, simulation, territory, repetition, and infrastructure; the essays introduce speculative and critical modes of inquiry; while the projects and artworks extend the debate into practice, materiality, and public space.

Rather than constructing a linear history of the manifesto, the issue reveals its capacity for transformation. Between the past and premonition, it suggests that every architectural decision entails a way of interpreting and positioning oneself in relation to the world, and asks whether the contemporary manifesto should be sought not only in what architecture says, but also in what it decides—or chooses not—to do.