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The Additional Element in Architecture: On Kazimir Malevich’s Arkhitektons and Planits by Pedro Ignacio Alonso at Abbey's Bookshop,
The Additional Element in Architecture: On Kazimir Malevich’s Arkhitektons and Planits
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Pedro Ignacio Alonso Paulina Bitran

The Additional Element in Architecture

On Kazimir Malevich’s Arkhitektons and Planits

Pedro Ignacio Alonso,  Paulina Bitran

$175

Paperback

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English
MIT Press
17 June 2025
Architecture
An ingenious reconstruction-and revealing analysis through ""visual archaeology""-of avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich's lost arkhitektons.

An ingenious reconstruction-and revealing analysis through ""visual archaeology""-of avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich's lost arkhitektons.

Among the Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich's most intriguing works, the arkhitektons are also the most enigmatic, as these quasi-architectural sculptures made in the 1920s were almost entirely lost, along with many of the accompanying drawings, or planits. In The Additional Element in Architecture, Pedro Ignacio Alonso and Paulina Bitran bring Malevich's elusive arkhitektons to startling, three-dimensional life and show how these objects form a comprehensive universe that embodies the artist's Suprematism-his belief in the supremacy of pure artistic sensation in abstraction.

The book features digital reconstructions of 15 arkhitektons and planits that are lost in their original physical form. Using a method they call visual archaeology, Alonso and Bitran explore how these structures figure in Malevich's investigations of spatial form. In the authors' view, the arkhitektons and planits constitute a series of changing configurations, or ""states,"" rather than fixed or closed monolithic sculptures that can be reckoned with individually. They are provisional assemblages of prismatic volumes linked only by gravity and equilibrium-ephemeral arrangements that digital modeling exposes and opens to new analysis.

Along with its illustrations and analysis of the ingeniously recreated arkhitektons and planits, Alonso and Bitran provide historiographical notes on the different appearances of these models, as well as a critical consideration of how Malevich's own conception of the ""additional element"" might place these beguiling figures within a wider history of modern architecture.
By:   ,
Imprint:   MIT Press
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 241mm,  Width: 159mm, 
Weight:   369g
ISBN:   9780262548908
ISBN 10:   0262548909
Pages:   392
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Glossary 1 Arkhitektons 2 Numbers 3 Architects 4 Techniques 5 Archaeology 6 Forms 7 Positionings 8 Sensation Acknowledgments Notes

Pedro Ignacio Alonso is Associate Professor and the director of the PhD program in Architecture, Design, and Urban Studies at the Universidad Cat lica de Chile. He is the co-curator of Monolith Controversies, which won the 2014 Silver Lion for the Chilean Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Paulina Bitran is an architect. She has worked as an independent researcher in projects related to art, museography, and archaeology, including installation work and production of archaeological exhibitions at the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo. She is currently dedicated to landscape architecture in Mexico City.

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