Cover ill.: Georges Malkine, Antonin Artaud's Dwelling, 60×92 cm, oil on canvas, 1968, private collection (with the kind permission of Monelle Malkine Richmond and Fern Malkine-Falvey).

Back cover:

"Surrealism without painting": thus was titled, in 1973, an exhibition by Marcel Mariën. And it is in a similar spirit that one will read the title of the present collection. For surrealist architecture, there is none, or so little that the subject would be quickly closed. Paradoxically, it is perhaps through this very absence that surrealism finds its place in architecture. Fervent promoters of imagination against the real, of revolt against edification, the surrealists will nonetheless, through their imaginary elaborations, posed a horizon which, a posteriori, appears as the perfect negative of architectural modernism. They will also, through their elective gaze, established a sort of counter-architectural tradition, which obviously passes through Gaudi and the Facteur Cheval, but also goes back much further into the past. The weight of this tradition, the momentum toward this utopia will thus have founded a true architectural exigency, which was to, from the seventies onwards, accompany the progressive exit of architecture from modernist canons.

Welcoming architects, literary figures as well as art historians, this volume – the first devoted to the subject in France – addresses both the surrealist approach to architecture proper (by Breton, Tzara, Bataille…) and the presence of architecture in literature or painting (De Chirico, Gracq, Magritte, Malkine, Mandiargues…), even in cinema, without forgetting architectural projects as such (Matta, Kiesler, Marcel Jean, Doumayrou…). Attentive to architecture as seen by the surrealists, it finally stops on the movement's heritage at the heart of architecture, up to the most contemporary perspectives (Internationale Situationniste, Tschumi, Spuybroek…).

Dossier assembled by Henri Béhar and Emmanuel Rubio

Contributions by: Anne-Marie Amiot, Henri Béhar, Pascal Billon-Grand, Jean-Claude Blachère, Lise Chapuis, Alain Chevrier, Stéphane Dawans, Guy Doumayrou, Jérôme Duwa, Fabrice Flahutez, Ramona Fotiade, Pierre Hyppolite, Marcel Jean, Agnès Lhermitte, Jean-Claude Marceau, Federico Neder, Nara Machado-Robert Ponge, Emmanuel Rubio, Georges Sebbag, Richard Spiteri, Pierre Taminiaux, Bernard Tschumi, Anthony Vidler, Frédérique Villemur, Christophe Wall-Romana.

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See:

Fabula information: Mélusine n°29: Surrealism without architecture (fabula.org)

a comment leading to extrapolations by Georges Sebbag, notably on the Mole of Turin: A Beautiful Construction Game

An architectural monthly reproaches us for not having associated architects as authors.

other extrapolation: Edward James – las pozas, Xilitla:

Extensions:

a thesis:

Architecture and Surrealism (1909-1935) in the texts and work of Emilio Terry (1890-1969), Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) and Salvador Dali (1904-1989) by Jean-Louis Gaillemin