Overtaking the competition with other social platforms, Instagram has become the perfect way to communicate old and new projects in the creative field. Professionals and studios meet on the platform proposing their work, but also passive observers and collectors of image archives.
The proposition of images is heterogeneous, almost anarchic. Various formats are used, starting from themed accounts, characterized by a common aesthetic or a unique and homogeneous research topic, to increasingly bizarre collections such as google maps screens of places with sad names (@sadtopography) or... the atlas of plants reminiscent of sexual organs (@sexy.plans).

These are ten profiles to follow, chosen by Domus and listed without a precise order. They range from musts to more daring researches.

Books, exhibitions, assembly kits. Brutalism has certainly become one of the most beloved architectural styles, even by non-experts. The raw, monumental aesthetics has an immediate impact on the viewer, and perhaps that’s why it has become such a popular hashtag. Brutopolis, among others, defines itself as a “light-hearted” platform that showcases everything on the “dark, concrete spectrum.”

Atlas of places is an interdisciplinary project, dealing with architecture and cartography, as well as art and cinema, aimed at questioning the “meaning of places”. With a collection of google maps, cartographic drawings and projects, the research portrays the anthropic infrastructures that have strongly contaminated natural landscapes. Always on the same research group depend the other two accounts, Atlas of industry and Altas of rural.

“Is art made to be shared or sold?” This is how curators Bonell+Dòriga of A series of rooms began. For them social media is a “trivialization of all artistic discourse”, due to the continuous repechage by its algorithms of increasingly identical images. But, on the other hand, it is also an opportunity to share knowledge and “celebrate what is rare and bold.” Their research was born with the aim of exploring domestic space from a multidisciplinary and transversal point of view. Thus, observing the single room as an essential unit of architectural space, as well as the different possibilities of living and looking at it, the aim is to create an atlas on the construction of domesticity.

Master of clicks is 80s culture. Starting from Netflix, with the production of Stanger Things and San Junipero to name a couple, up to Dua Lipa’s latest album, pop culture is increasingly relying on nostalgia for the past. Architecture, and especially design, are certainly not immune to this fascination. For Neon Talk, “it’s all about a passion for retro and newretro aesthetics”, and between old advertisements and brightly colored interiors, the account is a dip into the past, but with smartphones in hand.

A curious experiment on how to reconcile the tools of architecture, plans and drawings, with the resources of the entertainment society, in this case Instagram. Named after the architectural library of the adventurous Tintin and Milou, the blog was born from the idea of mapping buildings and cataloguing “expire” architectural solutions. Each single post is a photograph of the related building with its main plan.

A born in 2015, Hidden Architecture is a project that aims to build a parallel narrative of acclaimed architectural historiography, creating an atlas of all that has been ignored in time by the “pro-Western, globalizing, homogenizing, unidirectional, patriarchal” culture, to fish out “the unclassifiable, the ambiguous, transverse, rebellious, uncomfortable.” It therefore presents itself as an attempt to collect and communicate everything that has been left on the periphery of architectural debates.

Curated by Carmelo Rodríguez, co-founder of the Madrid-based studio Enorme, Bizarre Columns is a platform that aims to create an abacus of all the reinterpretations, reuses, and distortions made on the column archetype. Starting from the Doric column of the Greek temple, to the red runner set in the Milan house’s column by Fabio Novembre, is a collection of photos, drawings and prototypes of the postmodern use that has been made of this element, in architecture as in design and art. The Spanish architect considers Instagram “more organic and fluent”, a platform able not only to put you in direct contact with people, but also to easily receive new ideas and new points of view about the research.

In the bombardment of images and ideas in the world of art and architecture, we also find attempts to communicate through paper. Make architecture books again is an account that catalogues with a trio of photo books from the world of architecture. “Architecture books have always been a critical part architectural practice”, the curator of the blog Joel Stewart tells us. “This account was made to promote traditional architecture media using the new medium that threatens it.”

In the artistic field, instead, Who’s who represents a bizarre experiment that works by association of images. Each post is composed of two photos of works of art side by side with common characteristics. Some are completely random similarities, others could be direct references. A copy-paste search similar to the one carried out by another account, Twin Pix. As description of each photo, only two hashtags with the names of the artists presented. No other information about the project, in fact for the anonymous curator “followers will interpret this account however they want.”

Of Houses, curated by Daniel Tudor Munteanu, is a collection of “Old Forgotten Houses”. The account is a catalogue of single-family houses, in continuous expansion also thanks to an intervall of guest curators, who contribute to themed research, with photos that portray both the exterior and the interior.