London Calling (Other Little Magazines #04)

My latest trips to London were made on behalf of the Advisory Panel for the British Pavilion at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale.

As already announced here and there, the British Council meetings led to the choice of MUF as curators of the Pavilion, with an appeal on collaborative practice, alternative resources and direct experiences of space.

While MUF also won the 2008 European Prize for Urban Public Space, they are indeed an excellent example of a kind of British practice that has consistently produced a triggering blend of art, architecture and social concerns.

Looking forward to Venice…

Meanwhile, visiting London on a frequent basis served to confirm that, as earlier proposed in the Space Invaders 2001 exhibition, this is still the true capital of a diverse and lively urban culture – an exciting place for doers and movers.

Even if Berlin comes closer and closer in several arenas, thanks to a constant influx of young people and raw creative energy, I would say this is still the major European magnet for cultural production… and consumption.

Even if you come back to the British megalopolis after only a month, there will be already new shows in, new discussions on the air and, of course, the odd couple of new magazines out…

This time, I brought back three mags that are good representatives of a new explosion of the hybrid, not purely academic journal… In times of crisis, particularly in advanced societies, it’s no wonder that people turn to further education. And, then, so much reflexive knowledge has to spill out somewhere.

MILK, for example, stands for More Informed Lifestyle Knowledge, and is one of about ten different Milk magazines, this one addressing communication, brand marketing and “progressive culture” in a rather self-conscious and graceful way…

Defining itself in between “a journal, a book, a magazine, and a blog” (and a great website intro), MILK is also another product of the new digital middlebrow, even if its editors cleverly position themselves beyond what I’ve otherwise called the digital turn and already propose the idea of a post-digital.

In case you’re wondering, their excuse for existing offline is a wish to condensate “shared influences into a format that could easily be read in quite moments and in transit when it’s better to reflect and take onboard inspiration.”

Another beautifully designed new publication is VESTOJ, a journal on all matters sartorial… Prompting the fashion magazine to the high-end intellectual status, the 1st issue of VESTOJ conjures phrases like “textile memento mori” and “theorizing of vintage clothing” to explore the theme of “Material Memories”.

The journal kicks off with a superb article on fashion photography’s melancholic death wish and ends up with a powerful double feature: a long essay on “Postmodernism and Fashion” – subtitled à la Frederic Jameson as “Imagined Nostalgia and False Memories” and written by the cinematic editor Anja Aronowsky Cronberg herself – intercepted by the enigmatic and performative “The Dinner Club,” a photo-essay by Martina Hoogland Ivanow.

For me, the lavish first edition of VESTOJ came complete with a statement by cult singer Lydia Lunch (of whom I hereby suggest the ideal soundtrack for this post) and a bold manifesto that one may consult online, on VESTOJ’s blog.

“A Year in the Death of the British Music Press” is the symptomatic title of one of the interesting texts in LOOPS, another re-apparition of the “journal” format still in the shelves, at this stance dedicated to writing and music.

Opening with an excerpt from Nick Cave’s latest novel, the outrageous “The Death of Bunny Monroe,” and a beautiful account from one of the upcoming young British writers of recent crop, Hari Kunzru, LOOPS comes to occupy the place left empty by the decline of the music press tradition that gave us the Melody Maker, The Face and the once indie-glorious NME…

As said of the Inky Fingers blog, maybe this mag turns out to be “a repository for music journalism’s finest tradition of unfettered idealism, syntactical overload, and industrial-strength sarcasm…”

As for myself, slightly nostalgic of the music writings of my youth – my first published text ever was indeed a nearly fictional interview with Nick Cave himself – I’ve enjoyed LOOPS to the very last bit…

But then I’m partial, because in the very last LOOPS story, “Sonic Fiction… or, If This Is The Future, How Come The Music Sounds So Lame?”, author Simon Reynolds digs into the lost world of science fiction movies soundtracks just like the one from fabulous and unforgettable “Forbidden Planet”…

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My Desktop

My desktop is made out of a piece by Portuguese artist Leonor Antunes.

Leonor, who just had a solo show at the Centre d’Art Contemporain d’Ivry – …. Le Crédac, and one of the artists with whom I incidentally work, is one of those people which are keen to make quite elegant contributions to the longstanding love/hate affair between art & architecture.

I first saw and fell in love with Your Private Sky back in 2006, in Berlin, when the blue plastic ruler appeared in Leonor’s solo exhibition by the same name at the Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie.

Ever since I grabbed the image, this ruler landed on my laptop desktop and became the perfect background for my chaotic organization of the near future. … I can’t even remember how a desktop feels without this subtly displaced grid.

Now, who ever wants to have a peep at my by now crammed skytop is welcomed to do so, tonight at 9pm, at the Ordem dos Arquitectos’ headquarters in Lisbon.

I’m invited to be a guest speaker at the WAYD (What Are You Doing?) and, rather than preparing yet another dashing powerpoint presentation, I thought the best way to answer was… to browse through the contents of my desktop.

This will be a moment of pure revelation, including a very sneaky and blurred preview of my latest house-refurbishing project:

As Baltasar House exits its meteoric one year journey across the blogosphere – with one last Top Ten honorable mention… – it is almost about time to unveil my latest project, another home full of “aspirational” and “essayistic” thrills…

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Occupation/Eradication

Dear Amanda,

From where I am writing I can see the atlantic under a silvery sky. It’s a gleaming coldhouse. Small glaciers float south like moving archipelagos. The white peaks of cintra can barely be made out to the north. Enclaves of iscrapers skirt the coast from cascais to the frozen river mouth of lisbona. . I am at a tower grouping in one of the seven enclaves of cap’ricoh. Ahead, a fractal coral line protects the semi-frozen surface where the enclaves plunge. Behind me, there are groupings directly set on the cliffs. Beyond those I can only guess at the empty density of the gelid steppes, here and there dotted with enclaves of industrial multiprocessing. Against this glittering coast I juxtapose the images of my accidental digital excavation. Even if risking blackgoogling, I must tell you about these images.

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© Luís Palma

This has been a fertile season for artist books… and here comes another one.

“Occupation,” by the photographer Luís Palma, was actually launched in the Art Algarve last summer, but will now have its launch in Lisbon this coming Friday, at 10 pm, on occasion of Palma’s exhibition opening at Caroline Pagès gallery.

“Eradication,” the story with which I contributed to the photo book, is a fiction on illegal heritage and its misinterpretations 80 years into the future. Now, a fresh version of this piece was also translated for a new architectural magazine coming out in none other than Macedonia.

DOMA, the new journal in which “Eradication” will appear, is headed by Antonio Petrov from New Geographies and Sofija Grandakovska, and it will feature pieces by the likes of Ben Nicholson, Marina Abramovic, and many others.

Meanwhile, one of my other first incursions into what one could call essayistic fiction, just came out in the February edition of ICON.

In my post today was FUEL’s special cover edition of a very special issue of icon In my post today was the special cover edition of a very special issue of ICON in which, as Justin McGuirk puts it, they’ve “taken a break from journalism.”

In the midst of catastrophe, the aftermath of crisis and the cold of winter, maybe this is precisely what everybody needs: not exactly an holiday in cambodia, but taking a break from the usual way in which one grows accustomed to do things…

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A History of the Future

“The worst thing about bad habits is that they are habits.”

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Debret, an excellent exhibition and another lavish artist book launched last week in Lisbon through Assírio & Alvim, made me go back to an extraordinary and often forgotten figure, a Portuguese thinker and priest that published his “História do Futuro” as early as 1718.

Long before science fiction, urban studies or Jacques Attali, António Vieira understood that the writing of the future was not and could not be anything else but a projective fiction or actual reflection on the knowledge of past and present.

This is also what Vasco Araújo’s exhibition is about, if only projecting the past onto the present. Going back to the past’s highbrow culture, might be none but finding ways in which to re-present delicate aspects of today’s culture.

The conflation of Jean-Baptiste Debret and Vieira’s quotes in Araújo’s sculptures serves not, in such case, to reconsider slavery or sexual politics per se, but rather to re-propose a critical vision of today’s social inequalities and power games.

The artist’s work becomes political as, particularly in many sections of Portuguese contemporary society, the seemingly far past is subtly revealed as indistinguishable from the present.

As Vieira put it many centuries ago, writing both about present and future, “to deprive a few of respect is to seek, as death, the universal destruction of all.”

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Wonder Spam

Going back to the wonderful and frightening world of the Internet, I post today on what you should do with that other thing with which the internet changed our lifes: an enduring, almost liquid flow of spam.

Did you ever get a letter like the following?

Warm Greetings,

I am Monica Maxwell from Libya. I am married to Late Jamil Maxwell of blessed memory who is an oil explorer in Libya and Kuwait for twelve years before he died in the year 2000. We were married for twelve years without a child. He died after a brief illness that lasted for only four days.  Since his death I too have been battling with both Cancer and fibroid problems. When my late Husband was alive he deposited a substantial amount of  money in millions of dollars with a Finance Firm oversea. Recently, my doctor told me that I have only six months to live due to cancer problem. Though what disturbs me most is my stroke sickness. Having known my condition I decided to donate this fund to either a charity/orphanage home or devoted God fearing individual that will  utilize this money the way I am going to instruct herein. I want this organization or individual to use this money in all sincerity to fund charity homes (motherless homes), orphanages, widows. I took this decision because I don’t have any child that will inherit this money and my husband relatives are into radical organisation and I  don’t want a situation where this money will be used in an Unholy manner.  Hence the reasons for this bold decision. Please, pray for me to recover as your prayers will go a long way in uplifting my spirit. I don’t need any telephone communication in this regard because of my health, because of the presence of my husband’s relatives around me  always. I don’t want them to know about this development. As soon as I receive your reply, I shall give you further directives on what to do and how to goabout actualising this project. I will also issue a letter of authority to the Finance Company authorizing them that the said fund Have being willed to you and a copy of such authorization will be forwarded to you. I want you to always pray for me. Any delay in your reply will give room in sourcing for an organization or a devoted Individual for this same purpose. Until I hear from you by email, my dreams will rest squarely on your shoulders.

Remain Blessed.

Mrs Monica Maxwell

As a bit of webarcheology will show, this letter was actually first sent on Tuesday Apr 5, 2005, at precisely 21:08:58. Most people would just trash it, irritated by such nuisance. But not the South African poet Allan Kolski Horowitz.

He picked the letter and transformed it into a witty and delicious short story and published it in the 12^th issue of Chimurenga, a small and independent South African literary magazine.

Now, unexpectedly last November I could not attend the launch of an artist’s book that also deals with the beauty one can create out of one’s junk mail. Instead, I photocopied Horowitz story and send it in my place for a reading.

Now it is finally time to disclose a tiny bit of the intriguing images Vasco Barata produced for “Hard Coeur, Undisclosed Recipient,” the dashing book he recently produced as a limited artist edition.

There was already Andreas Gursky’s “Nudes,” a wicked book I once offered to a dear friend. Now Barata’s collages send the spam images he collected onto the sphere of the art historical sublime.

Unfortunately (or is it fortunately?), not all that glitters appears in the internet. If you want to see these images you will have to engage into the amazing collector’s quest of… finding the book’s hard couepy. Lol.

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Stranger than Fiction

As today dozens of notorious minds are having their say on “how is the internet changing the way you think” –including personal favorites like Douglas Coupland– I may as well go back to the post I was wondering about…

Lately, I started to ask myself if I was suffering from information fatigue syndrome. After a first sign of worry about my attention span, I started to seriously consider why was it that I recurrently surfed across about 1376 posts in one go and wasn’t really captured by any of the information displayed on them…

As Esther Dyson suggests, “many of us are genetically disposed to lose our capability to digest sugar if we consume too much of it. It makes us sick long-term, as well as giving us indigestion and hypoglycemic fits.”

Unlike Dr. Strangelove, I started to worry a little bit more about the information Unlike Dr. Strangelove, I started to worry a little bit more about the information neural bomb when I recently picked up a book that was kindly sent to me by its author – Markus Miessen, another of Beyond #02’s great contributors…

Now, this book, East Coast Europe, has a sexy idea, a classy pocketbook format, and, of course, it is supposedly filled with all these pearls of wisdom about European identity dislocating East. It should be interesting by all standards.

And yet, as if numbed by constant theoretical porn, or simply irritated by the laziness of the fashionable interview format, I found out that only three pieces of information managed to cut across the thin, yet resilient layer of my ennui.

One of these pieces was a speculation about Europe in 2050 by Can Altay – incidentally a future contributor of Beyond! Another was a multi-authored dictionary that is captivating because of its shrapnelesque conception…

And, finally, there was this news report actually taken from Wikipedia on how a statue of Bruce Lee being was erected in Mostar, Bosnia, about four years ago.

This was certainly stranger than fiction…

Like Nicholas Carr implies, maybe my difficulty came only from the fact that our reading habits are changing and we are becoming more prone to read on a screen, and online, and in “a welter of contending stimuli”, rather than enjoying to just sit back on a lonely sofa and plunge into a paper book offline.

On the other hand, we may as well be starting to get seriously bored with the stuffiness that surround us. Then, only a resilient interest in the absurd seems to survive, as if the absurd would remain the only titillating category that has some critical drive to make us wonder about reality. Like: duh.

Surrealists have used this device – they called it the paranoiac-critical method. Humour uses it to sometimes create a sort of subversive self-awareness. Like memory and the collective brain and all that, maybe our sense of humor as critical tool is also to be sharpened by the web.

The downside of the net’s information overload, besides this perilous ennui, this annoying syndrome of lively abundance, may be that, as Stephan Kosslyn puts it, “when I used to have dead periods, I often would let my thoughts drift, and sometimes would have an unexpected insight or idea.”

Because of information overload, “those opportunities are now fewer and farther between,” he concludes.

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Something

© P.G.

“I keep a diary. I don’t write anything in there except the weather, and I don’t say a lot about that. “Warm, clear” is about the extent of what I put down. And with my little watercolor kit, I paint the sky. Not all the whole thing, only about as much as could go on a playing card. I used to put more words in the diary, but when I looked back on what I wrote, I noticed I’d become like a cheap newspaperman about my life, only telling unpleasant things – when I fought with my wife, or how much money I had given my daughter, or a time I was eating at a restaurant and a woman fell off her chair from a seizure. So I stopped writing words and decided to stick with just the paintings and the weather. It’s not much of a diary, but it’s accurate, at least.”

Wells Tower, from “Door in your Eye”……………………………………… in Everything Burned, Everything Ravaged

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Yearly Balance

You know what they say about broken clocks: twice a day they tell the time correctly. I remembered this when I realized that the image on this blog’s header portrays the now unfortunately polemical architecture typology of minarets – in this case photographed in Maputo, Mozambique.

I chose the image, I guess, because I liked the stark opposition between the decay of sixties’ colonial modernism and the rise of those two minarets, portrayed as a symbol of the inevitable miscegenation of today’s growing metropolises.

Little did I know that this would end up being symptomatic of one sign ‘o’ the times of the current year, if in the worse sense: one of Europeans growing ever more fearful and letting go of their supposedly intrinsic cultural openness.

Image via Open Salon

That architecture itself was brought to the foreground as an ideological excuse for racism and cultural regression – on the argument that some architectural forms don’t “belong” in certain cultural landscapes! – was surely the architectural non-event of the year.

And as critics like Jonathan Glancey went to great efforts to make the noughties sound interesting, architectural excess also had its symbolic counterparts in 2009, somehow welcoming the definitive ideological crisis of starchitecture…

As for myself, I’ve enjoyed what can only be deemed as an excellent year. Not being a pessimist, I do think reality checks are needed for a healthy optimism to be possible – and this is even more evident in times of instability.

One year of blogging has hopefully proven that critical dissent is still a value to be cherished, if only to slightly shift the perspective to which one grows quickly accustomed amidst the hypnotic information overload of the web…

The Beyond book series was also launched this year to a discrete but decidedly growing acclaim. It proposes, somewhat similarly, that “fictional techniques” are a useful tool to provoke a necessary shift in the way we look at architecture and the city today.

Bruce Sterling in Beyond the Beyond, Léopold Lambert in Boiteaoutils, Sam Jacob in Strange Harvest, and, more recently, Pietro Valle in Arch’IT, were some of the people who wrote about it. Icon magazine and Abitare are coming up next.

The other book I edited this year leaves me equally happy.

HP 06/08 started as the catalogue for an institutional exhibition of 80 buildings finished by Portuguese architects during the last three years, but turned out to be a book to remain on its own right.

Ultimately, this was the first time in many years in which seven rather young critics were given the freedom to survey the current state of an architecture only usually known and recognised for a few of its highlights and exceptions.

While I can announce the show organized by Ordem dos Arquitectos will reappear in the London Festival of Architecture in June 2010, the book itself will be there for the years to come for anybody who may be interested in understanding what’s changin’ in Portuguese architecture after Siza Vieira.

Ready for 2010? 3,2,1… go!

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Other little magazines (and their stores)

My humble, accidental collecting of new révues certainly pales besides a truly fierce love of magazines as strange objects – like the one you can check on this video or on the related book that came out in the States a couple of years ago…

Even so, I still feel compelled to give you a glimpse of my latest acquisitions before they are definitely assigned to the library archive…

Here is an end-of-the-year list of #01 issues gathered in my recent visits to stores and places that are also to be supported for their aesthetic belief in independent publishing – particularly when, as I’ve heard recently, Amazon cities like San Francisco are already seeing their last bookshops heading for disappearance…

The first bunch of mags I brought from RAS bookshop in Barcelona. This is the place you want to be browsing near the MACBA and CCCB, if you are interested in design, architecture, fashion or, actually, any form of alternative culture.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………Here I found the first issue of the Belgian Tickl, an erotic cabinet that has a special penchant for polaroids and their intimate, blurry, peephole qualities, but also the Spanish Marikink, one of Paco & Manolo’s cult magazines (who ever they might be…) that is all about everyday nudies photographed in a sort of unglamorous post-Almodovar banality.

I would say these mags even deserve an appropriately 70’s retro soundtrack.

Also at RAS there was the Swiss Diary 16. Entirely shot in black and white, this is another photography and illustration magazine with the city and the urban world as its main inspiration.

“We couldn’t picture ourselves living in a place without bums, concrete, grafitti, department stores, banks, metros, or constant traffic and all kinds of different sirens.”

Another interesting set of magazines I found in the Concrete Hermit, a great small bookstore specialized in illustration that sits at the heart of London’s new hip-hop and graffiti zone, up from Brick Lane.

This lot includes Bonafide, an hip-hop magazine with great retrographics that is already on its second issue…

Popshot, an A5 edition that is also already at its #02 issue and gets poetry and illustration together under the banner of “the wonder of the ordinary”…

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… And Making Do, which is an yearly magazine with a first issue from 2008 focusing on “methods of creative production”.

At the same time, other magazine stores in London offered the last two titles I have here today. One was the première issue of Blown, a magazine born in Wales to the idea of cultural intelligence – which is just another way of describing art, music, fashion and photography, but with actually some distinct local feel.

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The very last item, though, it is the most delicious of them all – and one also exquisitely fit for the festive season at hand.

I just love the idea of a food journal mixed up with the bewildering notion of a “new writing for food lovers”, and Fire & Knives is definitely up to the challenge of being the most curious and beautiful answer to such a difficult riddle…

Filled with whammy archeological stories, visual essays on abandoned diners, retro kitchen ads, crunchy Victorian illustrations, Vincent Price’s secret talent for cooking, or architecture as a machine for eating, what a tasty way to finish 2009 in gourmet style.

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Xmas Gift

(or This is Portugal #02…)

In Portugal, a poor country, if all built dwellings were fully occupied, we could house a population of 15 millions inhabitants. The resident population, including immigration, remains however at 10 million. Only 70% of the existing dwellings are occupied.

As this Portuguese source claims, this is the country in Europe in which new housing construction bears more weight (90.5% against an European average of 52.5%), but also the country in which, in between 1970 and 2001, 750.000 dwellings built before 1919 were abandoned as primary residences.

This means also that this is the European country with less investment in rehabilitation, either in financial or cultural terms.

Lisbon – which with its 560.000 inhabitants is also today a shrinking city – bears a staggering potential of 930.000 inhabitants if all its existing, planned and dwellings under construction were fully occupied.

No wonder the New York Times keeps on alerting the world to Portugal’s potential as an inexpensive golden retreat. (I would say hold your bets for a while, just to check if the country is not going feral-greek in a while…)

Strangely enough these don’t seem the statistics of a poor country. Instead, they remind me of the numbers Campos Venuti used to give us about Sicily, in his Urbanistica classes at the Milan Polytechnic. These are indeed the numbers of a blooming parallel economy – one that, according to McKinsey, ascends to 25%.

In this sense, the current political scandals in Portugal – a country in which there is no philanthropy but bankers have the nerve to suggest that younger generations should emigrate because this will only get worse – remind me of Italy in the early 90s, when the Mafia and the parallel economy were being targeted by some fierce judges: there was an immediate economical crisis. Falcone was killed, Berlusconi ascended to power and now Italy is again what it is.

Was this article I kept sending to national newspapers such as Público, or i, or Diário Económico subtly silenced because of the weight of corruption and the parallel economy in Portuguese society? Or was the “oblivion” otherwise induced by the weight of the building sector in media economies?

I don’t buy it that newspapers that are thinning out by the month, and are happily sinking into the acclaimed “disappearance of print”, don’t have “space” for opinion articles other than those they pay at old skool rates…

Would it be the case that my argumentation was too feebly put or, on the contrary, rather too aggressive to established local political powers? Or was it that demanding to stop all ex-novo construction and allow to only rebuild in land already claimed by earlier construction a little bit too much for a corporate class like that of architects?

Whatever. (After all, we are indeed the strangely proud whatever, silent generation. Five years ago I wrote something on this…)

The fact is that the original unabridged text is finally coming out, just in time for Xmas, in a lavish architectural book that, even if it may look like something else, does ultimately address the necessity to make rebuilding city centers the very first priority for Portuguese architects.

Again, and as I argued somewhat differently for other architectures of need, the outward show and tabletop appearance of Living City/Habitar a Cidade are, in this case, entirely justifiable…

After all, architects themselves have to be seduced rather than convinced to display an ethical position when it comes to engage or not with the irrational, shortsighted economy that surrounds and lures them.

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Trends and Fads

Talking about trendiness, as announced in the current volume of Beyond the third short-story collection in the book-series-cum-urban-literary-bookazine will be on the theme of Trends and Fads, due to be published in May 2010.

As it says in the Call for Contributions for the next issue,

While the many happily embrace consumption as lifestyle and instantly embark in any fad that may fulfill a sense of permanent gratification, the very few that claim to resist the lure of fashion also constantly fail to understand the mechanisms by which trends and fads actually affect cultural productions at every level.

Architecture and urban creation do not escape a tendency that is pervasive in all cultural scopes, which is the inescapable impact that both long-term trends and short-notice fads have on the production and consumption of ideas, objects and sites.

From celebrity to everyday culture, from gravity to ornament, from iconology to no-branding, from affluence to asceticism, from aestheticization to ugliness, from depression to optimism, from starchitecture to emergence, from pressure groups to particular interests, which are the currents and whims that are today deeply affecting the definition of our cityscapes?

Now that the holidays are arriving, do remember to pick up your Brett Easton Ellis and, if you think you are able to produce an interesting fiction of 2000 words max about such issues, do give it a try. We are open to submissions through Beyond’s webpage until the end of January 2010.

Architecture for Humanity

As I was browsing through this year Architecture for Humanity’s very considerable output, I was wondering if there isn’t still something missing in this kind of architectural action, at least for it to be relevant not only to humanity, but also for the architectural field itself.

Why should I ask such apparently irrelevant question? Because I know only too well that any architectural movement that forgets to produce advancement in the architectural field will tend to be marginalized by the field itself. And, at this moment in time, maybe this is an indulgence we can’t afford.

Of course, all the “architectures for humanity” out there are relevant by simply bringing architectural service where this is most needed. But maybe the problem is, ultimately, that architecture should not be simply considered a service.

As I was recently musing, we should rather consider architecture as a form of creative intelligence – not to enter the old discussion of it being a form of art or not – and ask ourselves how and to what purpose should this intelligence be deployed besides its banal contribution to middlebrow culture.

The thing is: as constrained as it is by economic and logistical difficulties the output of Architecture for Humanity is highly respectable, and yet fails to trigger the imagination or any craving for architecture’s creative potential, as somehow their own publication “Design like you give a damn” or, for instance, the work of Rural Studio have done in the recent past.

And in order for a work like that of Architecture for Humanity to grow into even more significance –and thus replicate throughout the world of architecture– it has to attract and offer sheer intelligence. Not more or less traditional solutions, not more or less lame architecture, but definitely more radical answers.

As painful as it may be for many different reasons, try and imagine Bjarke “Yes Is More” Ingels employing his amazing energy and optimism onto devising solutions for African feral cities, rather than for providing jewels for the ascending, nouveau-riche crowns, and you will know what I mean.

In the strange world of architecture’s semi-autonomy there are two ways in which one may be a successful achiever: by aspiring to economical wealth or by juggling in symbolic power. As it usually happens in the “reversed economic world” of culture and art – as Bourdieu has put it – symbolic power is the one that is more difficult to obtain and maintain.

The current, declining star-system attained its status by achieving symbolical power, as it is the rule. One still remembers OMA or Nouvel going bankrupt or selling their companies because of the level of research that permeated the logic of these offices. When, on the other hand, one feels such practices have “sold-out” on another level their symbolic status immediately plunges.

When, in the spirit of an inescapable Hopenhagen, one now says that design and architecture intelligence must be applied elsewhere rather than where it has been applied for the last decade, one is also saying that the game of symbolical power must also shift around what architecture is recognized for.

Although prizes and rewards are already being readdressed to shift this balance of symbolic power, organizations like Architecture for Humanity must be made more relevant not by feebly fighting the status quo, but by addressing not only what humanity needs, but also what architecture needs.

And this is to be done by employing the architectural creativity that is being laid to waste by the “crisis”, or more precisely by the unemployment or underemployment of young architects who, ultimately, just want to follow on BIG’s footsteps but haven’t yet quite worked out the right strategy for it.

This is to be done not by simply clinging to traditional architectural thinking, not by blindly obliging to the user’s needs in terms of a very delimited sense of taste, but essentially by thinking outside the box and by constantly readdressing architecture’s sense of autonomy – that is, architecture’s inner need to progress as a field of knowledge and practice.

In this sense, like others, the world of architecture itself would certainly gain something from considering Hal Foster’s concept of semi-autonomy in art and design as an oscillating movement between art’s critical need to remain autonomous from external forces and, on the other hand, its inevitable reconnections to reality so as to reestablish priorities and issues to address.

Faced with the absurdity of maintaining the fiction of architecture’s aesthetic autonomy, but also faced with the error of demising oneself from architecture’s inner symbolic drives, one has to meet somewhere halfway so as to make architecture intelligence more relevant to as many people as possible.

At the risk of sounding cynical – and since ethical arguments are useless with a professional class that is permanently ego-tripping – I would conclude that architecture for real need has to become really trendy.

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