Architecture as construction of the SOCIAL in Alison and Peter Smithson’s drawings: From the street as figuration of the relational to the disappearance of the scale and boundaries

Abstract

Alison and Peter Smithson in their Diagram of Appreciated Unit (1954) present a drawing without scale, without location, without limits. This is the culmination of their city understood as a relational fabric. They do not draw any object but associational relationships between different environments and people. In fact, this positioning in favour of an abstract relational space as opposed to that of formal composition will generate a constant friction between generations from the 50s and 70s up to the present time. In parallel, the Smithson, by reducing the architecture to the street, claim a more active role in the construction of the social. Architecture must build the places where people can meet, celebrate the ordinariness of their lives, where they perform individually and collectively. This incorporation of the public and inclusive thinking into architecture, on the one hand, and the understanding of it as a relational machine and enabler of situations, on the other, are the two aspects that make the work of the Smithson highly relevant today. This article investigates the keys that determine the formulation of both postulates through their great epistemological tool: their drawings.