This exhibition uses satire to tell you about architecture

There is a moment, between the gravity of ambitious constructions and the lightness of a magazine cartoon, when architecture ceases to be a monument and becomes a story; a brief opening where architectural criticism no longer relies solely on specialized registers and languages, but finds its voice through graphic satire, caricature, and wit. It is within this space that the exhibition “Archisatire. A Counter-History of Architecture”, curated by Gabriele Neri – who has also written articles on satire for Domus – at the Architecture Theater in Mendrisio, in collaboration with the Library and the Academy of Architecture of the Università della Svizzera italiana, takes shape.

Built with bricks of irony, sarcasm, and disillusionment, “Archisatire” offers a humorous yet unusual shift in perspective on architects and architecture: centuries of caricatures, cartoons, photomontages, digital memes, and film fragments are brought together to illuminate “questions and issues often overlooked by traditional historiography,” reminding us that even within satire lie sharp truths worth attending to.

Among the works on display are documents and illustrations from the Domus archive, testifying to the magazine’s enduring role in narrating architecture through irony and illustration.

Gabriele Neri 

The exhibition unfolds in four sections, tracing the shadow side of the architectural profession. “The Architect in Caricature” dismantles the heroic aura of the genius-author, from the Renaissance to contemporary cinema. “Urban Scandals” recalls how every city, from Paris to Moscow, has faced its own architectural embarrassment. “The Irrational House” revisits the modern obsession with functionality, reducing it to domestic farce, including the model of Villa Arpel, the surreal house from Mon Oncle, while “Caricatures of the Architect” reveals how even the masters — from Le Corbusier and Ugo La Pietra to Alessandro Mendini — turned to humorous drawings and cartoons as tools for communicating their ideas.

The goal, explains Gabriele Neri, is not to bury criticism beneath laughter, but to restore dimensionality to a discipline historically suspended between idealism and material contingencies: the violence of urban transformation, the symbolic power of buildings, the ambiguity born of working within that gray zone where art meets public responsibility and technical rigor.

The works on display, drawn from private collections and from the Library of the Mendrisio Academy of Architecture, form an archive of moods that reaffirm the cultural and intellectual legitimacy of satire, recounting decades of architectural and urban transformations through this original lens. Among them are pieces by Honoré Daumier, William Hogarth, George Cruikshank, Thomas Theodor Heine, William Heath Robinson, Mino Maccari, Leo Longanesi, Piero Portaluppi, Alan Dunn, Saul Steinberg, Sean Delonas, Klaustoon, and Alvar Aaltissimo.