Abstract
The book Programs and manifestoes on 20th century architecture [Conrads, Ulrich, MIT Press, 1973] collected manifestoes written until the late sixties. Years later, Charles Jencks and Karl Kropf [Theories and manifestoes of contemporary architecture, Academy, 1997], following the same pattern as Conrads, completes the picture of the last century collecting manifestoes written until the mid-nineties. In both books, the selected texts can be understood as parts of large clusters that, to a greater or lesser extent, have contributed or are contributing to the creation of an architectural culture of the twentieth century. Some examples of this schools of thought are Modernism, Postmodernism, the Paradigm of Thermodynamic, Phenomenology or Parametricism among others. Furthermore, the evolution of the manifesto has been growing in the second half of the century, and in the sixties surpassing the maximum number that occurred in the first half, which would be at the interwar period with the establishment of the theoretical framework of modern movement, and continuing until peaking in the late nineties. That is, far from being an outdated format, the manifest seems to be the ideal written to define the position of an architect or group of architects in contemporary language.
To understand this evolution is necessary to note that the format of the manifest suffers slight changes in tone, fitting into what kind Venturi defined as manifest [ gentle manifesto] in his book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture [The Museum of Modern Art Press, New York 1966]. This shift in style can include some writings that deal with issues that could hardly be understood within the context of radical and revolutionary manifesto of the early twentieth century, such as gender or sustainability, which are very present in contemporary society. That is why this study is to analyze the role of manifestos in the development of contemporary architectural culture has to be understood as necessarily heterogeneous and dispersed cross, from the theoretical lines that can be drawn directly from the union of several manifestos with reference to the historiography of modernism [The historiography of modern architecture, Panayotis Tournikiotis, MIT Press, 1999], and as shown, all those manifestos written since the beginning of the review of the modern movement, which could be dated to the beginning of the TEAM 10 to the present.