Subversive Interventions and Productive Missteps: Failure in the Architectures of Gordon Matta-Clark and Félix Candela

An abstract submission an international conference on the topic Fruitful Failure, exploring how failure operates as a subversive and generative force in architecture. This piece examines Gordon Matta-Clark’s 'anarchitectural'
interventions and Félix Candela’s thin-shell experiments, considering how their work reframes failure—not as mere rupture, but as a catalyst for spatial and ideological transformation.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting (1974) © SFMOMA Succession of Gordon Matta-Clark and Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark

Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect (1975) © Marc Petitjean

Félix Candela, Open Chapel of Palmira (1974) © Dorothy Candela

CFP Abstract.

Failure resists framing. It slips through structures, subverts expectations, and destabilizes certainties. But failure itself is a fraught term— what fails, for whom, and why? In architecture, a field obsessed with stability and a discourse fascinated by errors, can failure ever escape the systems it seeks to undermine, or does its absorption into discourse neuter its radical edge? More than aestheticizing failure as a critique of perfection or technical misstep, two protagonists have shown how failure could become a site of negotiation, revealing structural inequities and exposing the ideological underpinnings and shortcomings of architecture.

This paper will investigate how Gordon Matta-Clark and Félix Candela have contended with failure as both conceptual rupture and material consequence, respectively. Gordon Matta-Clark’s “anarchitectural” interventions, such as Splitting (1974) and Conical Intersect (1975), expose structural vulnerabilities and inequalities of space, turning acts of destruction into moments of revelation. These works demonstrate how failure is not merely an endpoint but an active prompt to rethink space and community. Félix Candela’s experiments with thin-shell concrete similarly alter notions of failure, as his hyperbolic paraboloids relied on extreme material efficiency, teetering at the edge of collapse or actually failing (as did the first iteration of his Open Chapel of Palmira in Cuernavaca). His willingness to flirt with failure made him a pioneer, pushing the boundaries of architectural design and ultimately becoming part of the architectural canon.

Failure does not merely dismantle—it constructs. By juxtaposing Matta-Clark’s subversive deconstruction with Candela’s structural risk-taking, this paper examines failure as more than rupture, but as a generative force within architectural discourse and practice. These case studies reveal failure’s capacity to unsettle, adapt, and reconfigure—an unstable condition that both resists and propels transformation. In its most fertile form, failure is neither a collapse nor an impasse, but the mechanism through which systems evolve.