Friday 31 January 2014

The State of the Art


I present the current state of the art. I love this; students designing space stations, I like it because it makes me think, it really gives me the material for that 'debate' Architectural Schools are famous for enjoying! Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't like this image above, I think it's fucking brilliant, it's just that the poor author has just, inadvertently, sent us to the next level. Sometimes that happens. 
Of course he didn't do it just by himself, his tutors did it too (and I like them for it). 
The problems this kind of diploma project set for the whole of the architectural community are relatively easy to outline in three questions:
1. Does this work exemplify an absolutely neoliberalist attitude? This might be a good thing, in making it evident in the extreme- like- so we say fuck it, we've fucked our planet, and now we'll move on.
2. Does this work epitomise a world of making images which has now nothing to do with the traditional making of marks on paper, and that in effect (with the tyranny of computer graphics -'freedom is slavery') it is simply a case of planting light in what is the equivalent of a screen of outer space, and that therefore images that would in the 1970's have been consigned to Yes/Osibissa album covers are suddenly to be taken seriously as 'real architecture' since the media suddenly fits the message. 
3. That 'the machine' as a helpful instrument is dead, and that there is no longer any interest in actual functionality (since any historically interested soul knows that space stations stink of vomit, shit and piss- like municipal toilets).
I'm really looking forward (not) to the reviews at the end of the year.
Of course this image courtesy of Simone Conti. Thanks!



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