Dollywood (2005) and Grid (La Brea

a11d Olympic) (2005) from the ongoing

s ~ r i e s Utopian Debris by Bas Princen.
In a 2008 interview with Marc Pimlott,
published in Oase #76, Princen explains
that he is interested in "the ruin of the
modern": "I would almost say that these
things"-referring to the landscapes
he photographs-"are only filled with
beauty when they are portrayed,
and looked upon by a viewer from a
comfortable distance. To see the
beauty you need distance; you need
to exclude the actual context; you
need to give it an aura of it being an
unreal place."
basprincen.nl
ARCHITECTURALCONJECTURE,URBANSPECULATION 11
I STARTED BLDGBLOG in the summer of 2004, inspired more or less by
four things: I was writing a novel about surveillance, terrorism, indepen-
dent film, and the London Underground; I was auditing a course about
Archigram, the 1960s British pop-architectural supergroup that once
dreamt of bolt-on instant cities, "mobile villages," and inflatable utopias;
I was reading a lot of J. G. Ballard (Super-Cannes, Concrete Island, The
Drowned World, Crash); and I was feeling generally hemmed in by the
city in which I then lived. While my initial impulse might have been to
complain-noting every little thing about the world that bothered me-l
decided, in fact, to do the opposite: I made a conscious decision to write
only about the things that interested me.
I've often joked that BLDGBLOG is organized around one thing only:
the pleasure principle. It's not theoretically rigorous or disciplinarily
loyal or beholden to one particular style of design-even one historical
era-but that's the point. To discuss the buildings of Christopher Wren,
for instance, in the context of Restoration politics, the very beginnings
of the British Empire, the importance of Christianity, the birth of the
private patron, and so on, might be academically appropriate and occa-
sionally interesting, but to discuss the architecture of Christopher Wren
in the context of overgrown ruins in the Cambodian rain forest, or 21st-
century psychogeography-or the early writings of Rem Koolhaas-sud-
denly sounds like quite an exciting conversation. Or discuss Christopher
Wren in the context of video games-or spy thrillers, or the undersea
fate awaiting London in 3,000 years-and see what happens. Suddenly
people with no interest in architecture, and certainly no interest in
Christopher Wren, can join the conversation.
In other words, forget academic rigor. N,ever take the appropriate next
step. Talk about Chinese urban design, the European space program,
and landscape in the films of Alfred Hitchcock in the span of three
sentences-because it's fun, and the juxtapositions might take you some-
, .... 7.'"'"""''"' Most importantly, follow your lines of interest.
12
BLDGBLOG
With BLDGBLOG, the fundamental motivation has always been to
write about things-ideas, buildings, books, landscapes, cities-that
excite me, that make me want to keep writing, keep thinking, to go out
right away and talk to friends. After all, why not remind myself-and
others-of all the interesting things that actually exist in the world?
Even if those things don't exist; even if they're just speculations and
plans. Why not concentrate only on them? After all, I genuinely believe
that writing is a way Lo pull oneself out of the grime and scabs-to
excavate oneself-but, of course, the opposite can also be true. Through
writing you can bury yourself, lose yourself, push yourself not away
from but much deeper into darkness; flipping through your own
journals, or scanning your own blog at night, you see only reminders of
the things you hate, signs of the things that frustrate you.
So why not do the opposite? It's a psychological experiment in which
you're scientist, lab, and patient all in one. Before going to sleep, you pick
up the notebook beside your bed and see that it's full of only the things
that invigorate you. To be clear, there might be something there that
you don't like-but it can be exciting to think about nonetheless. I don't
"like" secret overseas detention camps run by the U. S. government, for
instance, and I don't "like" climate change-but, as facts, they are both
fascinating, and they can even be discussed in the context of architec-
ture. They can even be discussed in the context of Christopher Wren.
BLDGBLOG was born out of these circumstances, then, and from
almost literally day one it was full of archaeology, astronomy, and under-
ground cities; Gothic cathedrals and Celtic burial mounds; Mars, green
roofs, and translucent concrete. Somewhere between science fiction and
architectural theory, J. G. Ballard rubbed shoulders with H. G. Wells,
W. G. Sebald, and H. P. Lovecraft; there were London floods, earth-
quakes, William Blake, and James Bond. Ruins, climate change, and
the apocalypse. Cape Canaveral. Hadrian's Wall. Homer. Anything that
could, in however distant a way, be related back to architecture, in its
broadest and most interesting conception.
Because we're surrounded by the built envi-
literally every moment of the day; it is the
which our experiences are filtered. And if this
ist.he. . . . .. we've built for ourselves-or that someone's
btiiltforus, whether we wanted them to or not-then we should
ourselves whether it's working out as Rethinking
. architecture-rethinking landscapes, cities, and the way we've
designed _our everyday lives-is a shortcut to rethinking the
world, and a great deal of this boils down to expanding
our definition of architecture. Where architecture can be found,
what it can be, and who created it. If academia is to be believed,
architecture is something in the drawings of Vitruvius or
Corbusier; if today's architecture critics are to be believed,
architecture is just parametrics and Zaha Hadid. Either way,
it's claustrophobic.
Architecture surrounds us at all times, everywhere; we live
within shaped environments. From airports and shopping malls
to blockbuster action films, from Bios hock and prison camps to
the canopies of giant sequoias, there are structures and spatial
frameworks everywhere. Mars rovers are architectural; they
are structured explorations of landscape and space. Haunted
house novels are architectural. Mt. Everest base camps, Tokyo
storm drains, abandoned biowarfare ranges in the former Soviet
Union, and the inaudible songs of Libyan sand dunes: These are
all wide open to architectural discussion.
In fact, one of the best parts of creating BLDGBLOG has been
in setting myself constraints: Forcing myself to relate things
back to architecture has made it all feel more like a game. It's too
easy to write about anything at all, anywhere in the world-or
off of it, as the case may be-to have quick opinions about this,
that, and the other thing. Isn't that what blogging is supposed
to be? The challenge, though, is connecting all of this to the built
to landscapes, cities, and naturally shaped space.
It's Six Degrees of Separation in architectural form: Relate aer-
if!lturbulence in the Himalayas to the Woolworth Building in
:New York City in no more than six steps. Link dinosaur fossils
Jjriearthed in Arizona to the Berlin subway system-via hereti-
cal theology and the novels of Cormac McCarthy. The stories
a,nd images that you find along the way constitute something a
bit like BLDGBLOG. After all, architecture will always involve
is as much fiction as it is engineering and
materials science.
I was_ still a teenager, I flew out to visit my brother,
;.,'"'"''' two time zones away. We had a few hours to kill at the
trip, so we drove downtown to walk around; even-
ended up in the state capitol. As we walked inside,
to see that the building-a neoclassical space of
government control-extended several more
BLDGBLOG
THE ARCHITECTURE OF SPAM
The Spam Architecture series
by Alex Dragulescu, currently a
researcher at MIT's Media Lab,
was "generated by a computer
program that accepts as input,
junk e-mail. Various patterns,
keywords and rhythms found in
the text are translated into three-
dimensional modeling gestures."
It is spam in architectural form.
If you applied this to large-scale
architectural design, you could
actually live inside junk e-mails,
computer viruses, and unsolicited
ads for Viagra. You could also
turn digital photographs of your
last birthday party into elaborate
architectural structures; export
your Ph.D. thesis as a five-level
inhabitable object; transform
every bank statement you've ever
received into a small Cubist city.
Your whole DVD collection could
be informationally re-presented
as a series of large angular build-
ings: Or you could reverse the
process, and input Sketch Up dia-
grams of Notre Dame cathedral-
generating an inbox-clogging
river-of spam. E-mail the Great
Wall of China around the world in
an afternoon. Turn the collected
works of Mies van der Rohe into
junk e-mail and send it anony-
mously to the director of the
National Building Museum-who
then deletes it without knowing
what it was.
sq.ro
1' previous page
KoKoKu by Fashion Architecture Taste.
fa sh iona rch itectu retaste.co m
ARCHITECTURAL CONJECTURE, URBAN SPECULATION 15
16
BLDGBLOG
The Jellyfish House by San
Francisco-based architects Lisa
Iwamoto and Craig Scott is "mod-
eled on the idea that, like the
sea creature, it coexists with its
environment." The house has thus
been designed with "a mutable
layered skin, or 'deep surface,'
that mediates internal and exter-
nal environments." The external
environment in this particular
case is rather interesting, as the
Jellyfish House has been pro-
posed for construction on an arti-
ficial island in the San Francisco
Bay that once served as a military
base. There, the house would be
part of a much larger landscape
proposal involving soil remedia-
tion, replenished wetlands, and a
complex "water filtration system"
that operates within the walls of
the house itself. "Phase change
materials" and even a UV-steril-
ized "water jacket" complete the
technical specs of the project.
iwamotoscott.com
ARCHITECTURAL CONJECTURE, URBAN SPECULATION 17
ARCHITECTURE PARLANTE
Architecture par/ante is "archi-
tecture that speaks." Perhaps the
most famous example of this is
18th-century architect Claude-
Nicolas Ledoux's unrealized
scheme for the salt-mining town
of Arc-et-Senans. Ledoux's plans
included buildings that were
shaped, often absurdly, after
their function: The barrel maker's
house was shaped like a barrel,
and so on. This was christened
architecture par/ante because
the architecture revealed its own
function: it "spoke" its purpose
for all to see. An impressively
ridiculous modern-day example
comes to us from South Korea. In
2007, the Internet briefly flared up
around the sight of Sim Jae-Duk's
new toilet-shaped home; Sim
had made his career "beautifying
public restrooms," according to
the Associated Press, and so one
could argue that this was a classic
case, of architecture par/ante. It
was a toilet-beautifier's house
in the shape of a toilet. On the
other hand, architecture par/ante
can be more subtle than this. For
instance, the FBI headquarters
in Washington, DC, heavier
and wider at the top,
outward through cantilevers;
It looms over you and shadows
you from above as you pass by.
ltdoes what the FBI does-if
you'll excuse this rather libertar-
im interpretation-it just does
in architectural form. It is
itecture par/ante.
levels above us. Standing there on terraced marble walkways
that criss-crossed the domed interior were other tourists look-
ing down into the space where my brother and I stood. Higher
above them were offices and closed doors and hallways-yet
there was no visible means of ascent. I was aware that I could
be watched from above, in other words, and that it was possible
to go much higher-to become one of the watchers-but I didn't
see how it could be done. The architecture embodied a political
message: There are people higher than you, and they can watch
you,follow you-and, theoretically, you can join them, become one
of them. Unfortunately you don't know how. This might have been
my first real experience of architecture's interpretability-the
fact that it can say something, or embody a message. Buildings
can physically represent certain story lines as strongly, and far
more viscerally, than a written text. Architecture encodes mes-
sages; call it my own belated discovery of architectureparlante.
One of the first things I thought of, in fact, standing there
with my brother, was The Trial by Franz Kafka, an unacknowl-
edged architectural masterpiece in which all the buildings
are confused, self-connected, and inconsistent with them-
selves. Architectural space, in Kafka's novels, is always some-
how impossible, made up of surprising overlaps between law,
religion, and "civil society. I'd even say that The Trial is actu-
ally a book about topology, with Kafka more of an architectural
guide, his work a handbook to the outermost limits of politi-
cal spatialization. JosefK., the book's main character, wanders
through courtyards that open onto further courtyards. Stair-
ways lead to more stairways, and attic spaces open onto hidden
law offices-which stand beside government courtrooms that
double as apartments for the building's evening cleaning crew.
"There are law court offices in practically every attic," JosefK.
is told, and never before has the confusion between the limits of
state power and the spatialization of personal privacy been so
well explored. Kafka's architecture is like a text through which
the state explains itself-or deliberateiy does not-to its people.
Telling stories through architecture is nothing new or even
necessarily interesting. It's actually become something of a
formula for science fiction and fantasy: whole books are often
little more than extremely detailed descriptions of space. They
are "cityscapes." There are no real characters to speak of, and
there is no real plot; there are just loads of overwrought bal-
conies, amazing castles, and a few underground mazes or two.
The architecture itself is the story. It is the literature of urban
speculation.
THE
~ bldgblog.blogspot.com
BOOK
GEOFF MANAUGH
CHRONICLE BOOKS
SAN FRANCISCO
An "urban district above the water," proposed for an island site in Seoul, South Korea, by Minsuk Cho and Jeffrey lnaba.
massstudies.com
inabaprojects.com
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