![]() Only, this time it is not with building blocks. This is where my architectural training began, building worlds out of blocks for countless hours as a little girl. My room is both my studio and my bedroom, and its biggest surface where modelling work can be performed is the floor. At last, in a room of my own, and it all starts on the floor, as it always had been. A young student in the architecture school, eager to complete my assignment. In revisiting the life experience that my twenty-year-old self poured into the maquette and articulating what it meant, I will glean what it tells me today about the arc of designing and prefiguration – as a process inherent in designing, and as a template for desire, encapsulated by the drive to ‘be the change’, rather than to change the world.Īnd here I will begin by reminiscing about an absent photograph: At its most basic, this action consisted of synthesizing a set of disparate references – some encountered in real life, and some through the work of the mind-into a new creation. In retrospect, the action of making this maquette was at once material (creating the maquette), conceptual (reworking concepts into forms), and embodied (interwoven with lived experiences). This maquette is not only representative of an architectural space, but homologous to my twenty-year-old self and how I wanted to see the future – both my future as an architect and the future of the collective counterculture that is the maquette’s hypothetical subject. It is 1986, and I stand in front of a maquette (Figure 1). ![]() Girl with Maquette, 1987 (Courtesy of the author). The memoir contributes to the study of prefigurative politics by underscoring the assembling of matter into form as a capacitor of the prefigurative imaginary at work. The courses of action encountered in this memoir defy the entrenched dualities of collectivity/individuality, embodiment/language, users/designers, futures/presents. ![]() Yet the project also manifests a prefigurative function via its particular countercultural affiliation, even if its political goals remained elusive. The maquette performs a double prefigurative: Like every design prototype, it acts in the present tense while it also signals a future desired change. What insights does prefiguration in design(ing) hold for the politics of prefiguration? In exploring this affinity, I dive into a photograph of my twenty-year-old self that pivots around the maquette of the “Constellation.” In this memoir I delve into my experience of prefiguration as an architecture student and member of a counterculture in Greece in the mid-1980s. ![]() They enact alternative ways of being, knowing and doing in spaces of resistance and experimentation. Prefigurative politics are “world-making” events. ![]()
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