This body of research, in the context of the Architecture MA at Universidad Catolica de Chile presents a critical and operative analysis of artist Kazimir Malevich architectonic sculptures, named Architectons, produced during the 1920’s. These models use a language of modern - Suprematist - purist shapes without precedents and this research aims to develop a general law that explains their composition, based on the theory of the surface-plane created by the artist. That is, every volume that exists is conceived by an original surface-plane that travels in given orthogonal coordinates (x, y, z) to create a volume. The sum of these volumes compose an Architecton. 

The surface-plane, generator of any volume, has its genesis in Malevich painting Black Square, first exhibited in ‘The Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10’ in 1915, Petrograd, and evolving into his painting White on White, 1919 (MoMA). Suprematism, in a pictorial as well as a formal dimension, pushes the boundaries of naturalist and mimetically oriented representation, leading the way to abstraction (non-objective forms), and thus acting as key figure in the development of the avante-garde. 

Architecton A15 is the only one in the universe of Malevich models that contains a circular element. All the others are composed solely of orthogonal shapes. The artist was openly against the representational methods of the Renaissance, calling the old masters like Michelangelo ‘thieves of nature.’ To him, enlightenment and spirituality were expressed in abstract non-objective forms. This collage and these drawings show the paradoxical formal similarity of Architecton A15 and Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, jewel of the Renaissance, and analyze how non-objectivity reinterprets the Renaissance canon.

Architecton A8 was produced during the decade of the 1920s, when Kazimir Malevich was first experimenting with the sculptural dimension of Suprematism. This typology of Architecton exemplifies the concept of the surface-plane in its formal dimension, a principle that can be applied to all of his series of sculptures that follow the rule of the orthogonality of volumes.

The architecture project, the New Crystal Palace is conceived by taking the formal properties of Architecton A8, and inverting the principles of the exterior sculpture materiality to generate an interior spatial concept. The opacity o f a full volume in a modular composition becomes a transparent and continuous object. From plaster volumes to glass volumes, the aim is to generate a continuous visual and spatial relation between them. To design this transparent void and explore its constructive dimension, the project takes as a referent Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace (1851), and applies the structural system of the ‘infinite grid’, consisting in one module that repeats itself horizontally and vertically. 

The New Crystal Palace, maintaining its original programme and location (Hyde Park, London) is defined as an open and movable exhibition hangar. This mega structure is planned as a non-objective and non-utilitarian space (aiming to keep Malevich vision of architecture as an aesthetic experience) that allows continuous flow, movement and change. In this case, Paxton’s structural grid (7,3 x 7,3m) becomes the ‘tabula rasa’ of programmatic possibilities. The project aims to address the modernist paradox, evident in Paxton’s Crystal Palace ephemerality, and considering London’s Great Exhibition as the event that marked the birth of modern global capitalist consumerist culture, with its method of ‘putting the world on display’. Emphasising exchange and acquisition of cutting-edge industrial products, as well as a megastructure functioning as an ‘art supermarket’, this is a model that still prevails in our contemporary culture.