The Speculative Pause
I began my Garofalo proposal by understanding Collapse as the force animating the future of Chicago architecture. I was wrong. Something else: a plateau, a pause, a held breath, potential energy, a void. I was entranced by the notion of capturing flows of crisis and understanding its gravity as material for architecture. Despite being poisoned by glass fiberglass deterioration and mold induced by condensation issues in Mies’ glass towers, I see now there is an object of architecture produced by unfinished space rather than the decay of heroic projects. There are voids-objects in the city that are misunderstood as speculative-voids. The famous heroics of Chicago architecture have gone silent, not failed. Leftover potential has congealed into invisible architectural objects, superimposed by potential futures. But at this moment, between speculation and object, we position ourselves.
Modernism understood that events are objects. A smooth symbiosis between potential actions and objects. But once the temporality changed, so did the object. The unperformed action also becomes an object, but not on a stage like modernism’s event space. Instead it's situated within the formless spaces of potential (plateau, pause, held breath, void…).