Art and Culture 

Soft, Hairy and Editable

Is There Surrealist Architecture?

Eduardo Prieto 
31/05/2013


Surrealism is a style, but also an attitude. It is not just form, it is also ideology. And both terms, form and ideology, determine whether there is really such a thing as ‘surrealist’ architecture. The question is veiled, moreover, by the fact that nowadays, any cultural manifestation, no matter how subversive, is eventually worshipped by tourists in museum halls, and surrealism in particular, given its rapport with mass culture, which has inevitably given it a bad reputation. Even so, there is so much more to surrealism than unanimous vulvae, melting clocks or iconic upward-curving moustaches. Wasn’t Dalí himself, alias Avida Dollars, once an artist convinced that surrealism was, more than a style, a way of transforming the world, of eroticizing it to undermine social conventions and turn our environment into an at once revolutionary and playful ‘mental space’?...

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