Into the cosmic void. Architecture between utopia and uncertainty

«Architecture can no longer be as we had thought-imagined-constructed it»: this is what Alessandro Poli write – in a never-sent letter – to Adolfo Natalini, a year after humanity took its first steps on the Moon. In the stark, silent emptiness of space, the grand ideals of earthbound architecture crumble. There are no monuments, no imposing structures – just the fragile, tin-foil-wrapped spacecraft floating in the cosmic void. Poli’s words encapsulate a fundamental shift in a new world, where the boundaries of imagination and reality blur in a single, electrifying moment: architecture is not an act of imposing permanence on the world, but a continual engagement with the unknown. This letter, that captures a decisive transition in architectural thinking, echoes in the 1978 Venice Biennale catalogue Utopia e crisi dell'antinatura. Momenti delle intenzioni architettoniche in Italia. Topologia e morfogenesi curated by Lara Vinca Masini. The two categories emerge as a search for alternative perspectives: mental, utopian territories in which the architectural image – graphical, metaphorical or performative – become a critical tool to question form, temporality and disciplinary boundaries. Among the most striking expressions of this conceptual shift, the work of the Radical groups explore architecture not as a fixed construct, but as a process that embraces unstable conditions, contradictions and latent forces – a sensibility clearly embodied in Superstudio’s La moglie di Lot, where the act of dissolution becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of permanence in the face of transformation. Revisiting radical visions today offers tools to address a present defined not by possibility, but by limits – ecological and physical – and by the need to act critically within them, reframing the role of architecture as a practice of awareness and adaptation. This change requires what Poli described as the need of «the motion of the movie camera», a shift in gaze that navigates uncertainty.