Six Architects Ask Whether Form Follows Fiction in Buenos Aires

Six international architects will challenge one of architecture's most enduring assumptions — that form follows function — at the 20th Buenos Aires Architecture Biennial. The exhibition, titled "Form Follows Fiction: Six Inquiries," forms part of the biennial's main program and argues that buildings can emerge from narratives rather than pure utility.

The curatorial premise is direct. Each of the six projects on view treats architecture as a process of inquiry rather than resolution. Every project begins with what the exhibition calls a fiction — a hypothesis, a story, a projection, or a constructed premise. Through that fiction, concepts and forms are tested, questioned, and reinvented.

The show positions these fictions against the functionalist orthodoxy that has shaped architectural thinking for over a century. Louis Sullivan's dictum "form ever follows function," published in 1896, became a foundational creed of modernist design. "Form Follows Fiction: Six Inquiries" refuses that single explanation for architectural form. Instead, the exhibition demonstrates how buildings and projects can grow out of diverse — and often contradictory — narratives and ideas: pragmatic and artistic, collective and individual, pure and complex, restrained and expressive, structured and intuitive, logical and arbitrary.

That list of oppositions is deliberate. Together, the six positions resist any single ideology or consensus. The exhibition presents them as parallel modes of investigation, not as competing schools vying for dominance. Where functionalist thinking seeks resolution — the correct form for a given use — these architects treat each project as an open question.

The distinction matters for how visitors read the work. The six projects do not propose that function is irrelevant. Rather, they argue that form emerges as much from ideas, intentions, and imagination as from function. Storytelling, hypothesis, and projection stand alongside program and use as generative forces in design.

The setting sharpens the argument. The Buenos Aires Architecture Biennial reaches its 20th edition with this program, making it one of the longest-running platforms for architectural debate in Latin America. An exhibition that questions functionalism at this scale invites both practitioners and the public to reconsider what drives architectural form in contemporary practice.

"Form Follows Fiction: Six Inquiries" ultimately reframes architecture as investigation. The six architects on view treat each fiction as an instrument — a way to test what architecture could be rather than confirm what it already is. For the biennial's 20th edition, that open-ended stance replaces consensus with curiosity, and it suggests that the most productive architectural questions may be the ones that refuse a single answer.