Alessandro Rocca Totem and taboo in architectural imagination Cover image: Alessandro Rocca, ‘Freud unlimited’, 2020. Alessandro Rocca Identify powerful features of the architecture of the present time seeking to illuminate hidden knowledge and processes through a few key concepts. Te image: apparently, it seems so essential to understand today’s architecture but which, on closer analysis, turns out instead to be an absence, an unsolved problem, an enigma hidden behind a culture secretly aficted by iconoclasm. Post-production and montage: so relevant in the avant-garde and now fxed as an indispensable but often hidden creative component. Te parody: the hidden but almost always present humor that corrodes the immediate message of architecture and makes it more unstable and, above all, more interesting. Ornament: a component censored by Modernism that today is once again the protagonist in new guises. Te relationship with the classic: a secret afair that remains as a founding root of Western architecture. Alessandro Rocca is an architect and a professor at the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (Dastu); he teaches architectural design and architectural theory at the School of Architecture and the Ph.D. Program of Architectural, Urban, Interior Design, of Politecnico di Milano. Totem and taboo in architectural imagination