A Slight Delay

A long while back, I accidentally got into architecture. Not as an architect, mind you, just as a spectator. The way some people channel surf to find a good game, I’ll scan anything from bookstores to skylines to find something interesting.

What started it was a Rem Koolhaas exhibition at MoMA, and reading the architect’s classic Delerious New York not long after. If Koolhaas’s architecture was interesting stuff, his writing on architecture is really something; you could tell that this was someone who was interested not only in pretty buildings with his firm’s name on them, but also in the architect’s broader social responsibility. The architect’s firm, OMA (the Office for Metropolitan Architecture) seems to have put out more books on building than the buildings themselves, taking on issues of context, commerce, geography, and pretty much everything else that can be thought and written about buildings.

All of this is a long-ish way of saying that I’m glad I found Studio Wikitecture. The group is a loosely-knit collective of architects and others* that applies the same open-source/crowd-sourced methodology that underpins Wikipedia to architecture. This may not sound like much on its surface, but let’s take your typical architectural project as a basis for comparison. Generally speaking, there will be a competition to draw in designs from a number of top firms, from which a winning design will be selected, and on which basis building can start; from time to time–as was the case with the Freedom Tower–the designs from the first round will be found wanting, and another round of designs will be submitted. The winning design won’t always be re-tooled to take into account the better features of other entries, and so the end result will be built with its shortcomings intact. (more…)

“Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process, even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains access to authorship.” –Walter Benjamin, from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

We’ve heard it all before. It’s the latest Megatrend, or the latest Microtrend. Some day, somewhere, somehow, computers will upend everything, right down to the way we think, and the nature of what makes us human.

According to the conventional wisdom, the linearity of words on the printed page encouraged linear, rational thought. This set down on paper–literally–ideas of narrative flow and stylistic constraints that have been with us for centuries since.

We were led to believe, early on, that hypertext would upend this model; by rearranging the printed page (and the media experience), it could (theoretically) rearrange human thought. The argument went–as it had earlier for word processing, with its ease of cut-and-paste–that this would divorce thought and narrative from convergent, linear models, in favor of divergent and wide-ranging associations. Add sound and visual elements to the mix, and you have–in theory–the perfect recipe for a medium that would result not only in truly new works of art, but a radically different approach to their creation.

(more…)