Radical P/revisions: Heritage Metaphors, Discourses, Becomings

Abstract

Taking Robert Smithson's unpublished typescript Two Attitudes Toward the City as its point of departure, this chapter constructs a three-act counterdiscourse on architectural heritage through the generative lens of metaphor. Against the reduction of heritage to fixed narratives of authenticity and integrity, Aquilar draws on the radical architecture movements of the 1960s and 1970s — including works by Haus-Rucker-Co., Alan Sonfist, Zziggurat, Ant Farm, Gianni Pettena, the Florentine collective 9999, and SITE — to propose heritage as a site of perpetual becoming. Structured around Smithson's tripartite schema of the old city, the new city, and the technological apparatus, the three acts reframe heritage successively as Time Landscape, Time Warp, and Time Capsule: figures that resist material stasis and open the built legacy toward entangled temporalities, counter-preservation, and speculative futures. Closing with Ettore Sottsass' photographic series Design Metaphors and Hans Hollein's MAN transFORMS exhibition at the Carnegie Mansion, the chapter proposes metaphor itself as a medium for renegotiating the boundary between permanence and change, and for envisioning a heritage that undoes and remakes itself in sequences of perpetual becoming.