Walter Netsch designed the UIC architecture building. A tombstone inscribed with Art and Architecture. But we must begin at the end: after the failures of utopian projects, the loss in faith, the complete transformation of critical practice into capital one, the materials of growth becoming the toxins of decay and deferred maintenance. I keep imagining we are at the end of architecture. It feels like we're at the end of many things. But in the discourse of apocalypse, we begin at the end. There is incredible abundance in the threads of decay, failure and collapse. What is the end? Being in Chicago is testing my faith. Only reinforcing the fact that architecture with legitimacy is the past. And now we serve as not the center of growth, but a mere piece of shrapnel spun off bigger accelerating forms.
I had this realization. Rather than thinking of crisis as a matter of scale, it has shifted to a matter of density, or thinness, or absorbitive. That crisis is everywhere and it's just a product of how thickly, like smog, it settles in any given object. Where are we situated in the discipline? This is a profound shift. I think Andres Jaque’s Transcalarity was fascinating once I understood it, as are the digital physical scale games of David Eskenazi. But somehow if Crisis is a mist rather than an object, the way we operate must transition from objects to mist as well. The quality of architects that rely on poetics is to release the thickness of density by acting like it doesn't exist.
Restate the task: Architecture has lost its ability to analyze architecture. It has developed a set of alternatives to looking at it directly, rather than to reshape, digitize, circulate, and project… But ironically architecture or references themselves have become a shorthand. It looks very “Swiss,” “post-digital,” technooptimist…. I am not thinking clearly. Can illegibility be authored?