Pedro Ignacio Alonso Livres

As the byproduct of the Cold War, the space race produced a considerable number of objects disseminated in networks, not only in the East and West but also in the global South – rockets, launching pads, satellite tracking stations, astronomical observatories, and several other pieces of design, machineries and infrastructures. As they stand today, these objects are remnants of a modernity tied to secrecy, war deterrence, and mass media associated to outer-space politics. By bringing together the work of photographer Petr Antonov, architect Philipp Meuser, designer Hugo Palmarola, and historian of science Asif Siddiqi, this book comes from a conference held at the Princeton University School of Architecture in March 2016 on technology and the Cold War, contesting the historiographical status of these objects in order to give value to the manner in which they came to construct current modes of subjectivity and social relations.

Can concrete panels fly? Though at first it sounds improbable, the answer to this question is yes, they did fly through the world, supported by other structures, both physical and mental. They flew from the factory floor to the building site, from one country to another, and through the most diverse array of from paintings to posters, cartoons, photography, film, toys, and even in the design of opera stages. During the second half of the twentieth century, concrete panels were seen soaring across the skies. With essays by Michael Abrahamson, Jimena Castillo, Adrian Forty, Boris Groys, Maria Lind, Jennifer Mack, Philipp Meuser, Natalya Solopova, Erik Stenberg, and Christine Varga-Harris, the book tells the story of concrete panels at the center of debates in the modernizing and industrializing processes of architecture. When manual labor moved to automated mass-production, and new concrete element techniques rapidly spread producing billions of square meters of housing across the globe, the flying panel became the ultimate icon. This publication accompanies the exhibition "Flying Panels" curated by Pedro Ignacio Alonso and Hugo Palmarola, presented at ArkDes in Stockholm in October 2019.

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