Postermania. Taller de Arquitectura and the Poster as Manifiesto

Abstract

The poster has historically been means of communication of culture, that has used this support to reach society with its content. Supported by the plastic arts and the evolution of printing techniques, the poster would come to generate a common imaginary, helped by the formal and technical refinement of its artists. But, during the effervescent sixties the plastic arts influenced how advertising communicated and expressed itself to the new society. At the same time, trends such as the ready-made flooded society through a merge of the plastic arts and the technical revolution that allowed mass communication in the underground. In architecture teams such as Archigram, Archizoom or Superstudio were pioneers in this trend, to bring their new ideas closer to the community. Supported by the common imaginary and this countercultural revolution, they were able to transmit their way of doing architecture through their posters. In Spain, the reference of the architectural panorama of the sixties was Taller de Arquitectura. Continuing with the European trends, the poster will be a mean to show the team’s ideas, but also to make an acid political and social criticism about the architecture and the city of the moment. They will work, as we will see in this text, with fragments collected from pop culture, drawings and cuttings of the models of their buildings’s photographs. As they manage to create in their collage-manifestos a lysergic relationship between the dreamlike and the satirical, in order to provoke a change in the society of that moment.