200words: “..that all new architecture is always already out of date..”

Yes. 

Rather, we should kick back, crack a beer, with old timers @seeking_Trad, @wrathofgnon, @Western_Trad, @Arch_Revival_, @Trad_West_Art.  The future belongs to Twitter’s Architectural Dark Web - the ugly underbelly of culture-war clickbait and scammy fringe skirmishes vying for influencer status, purveying divisive nostalgia, political pearl-clutching, weird nearly-nazi manosphere memes, weaponised heritage assets unironically shit-posted to garner subs for their drop-shipping promotions.

Architecture has always been a Ponzi scheme, its journalism a mere handmaiden to privilege ~ why not go all in: monetise your outrage, flog a dog whistle, pimp your dead cat. We build after the end of history. There is no timeless way of building now.

Long story short. Capitalism hemmed us in. A vampire economy stranded new architecture on a temporal arête: algorithmically constrained to the past’s machine-learnt data sets, chronically indebted to a future already sold. New architecture was dead on arrival: conceived with a (Sebaldian) eye to its future existence as ruins. New architecture is an airless tyranny of vacuous amnesiac novelty charaded in the speculative conditional. New architecture is an ouroboric zombie apocalypse inside the hell of a simulacrum’s eternal regress. 

Palliative to new architecture: 200words! Convening a sordid self-righteous undertaker class of commentariat late modern miserablists.

 [24.11.20]

200words: Face masks

“Philosophy dies without air.. ..using up the air for telling without ever telling of air itself..” 

Luce Irigaray 

We were self-made men: anaerobic asteroids hurtling through an airless infinity, conquering space, vanquishing the void and being unflinchingly toward death. But now, air resurges, as a masked marauder.

A face mask gives closure to the inner topology of the human frame. Crudely, a face mask is a lid to the lungs, a seal of interiority, a capstone to the arch of my being - pointing both to the existence of air-to-be-contained and to the universal ubiquity of all things as-containers-of-air and likewise as containers of unseen potential.

Being-as-containing in a non-airless universe is not tautological, not semantic, and is non-trivial. This consciousness is a baptism-by and filling-with holy spirit, it is the beginning of realist magic and a re-enchanted cosmos. By breathing consciously we engage an ontology that wars against notions of persons as mere wireframes, point nodes, flat images or lumpen biology.

If face masks, then air. If air, then vessels. And, if vessels then we are tasked to be filled and fill others. Face masks make dependence visible.

[05.05.20] 

[Beyond 200 words here: https://sacredtexting.substack.com/p/-coronavirusbible-01-face-masks-the ]

200words - Covid

In 2020, the western world’s Forgetting of Air returned to haunt it. 

In 2020, column-free coworking spaces lubricated the spread of a novel cellularity.

In 2020, the path through Kennington Park was scrawled with Metric Handbook Fan Fiction

In 2020, an infodemic burnt down the very 5G masts that had misinformed its vandals.

In 2020, a rogue piece of RNA became the MacGuffin of every moral crusade.

In 2020, there were three types of people: those who could Work-from-Home, and Key Workers, and.

In 2020, every public surface clung as contact with the fomites of a global pandemic, while every contact from my global family became reduced to a surface experience on 13 inch screen.

In 2020, work was augmented, meetings were potemkin exercises in facadist ideal home showing.

In 2020, face masks became virtue signals, surveillance burqas and memento-moris - establishing defensible faciality as the precondition for civic felicity. 

In 2020, the austerity architecture of NHS Nightingale decisively flattened the curves of parametricism.

In 2020, super-density was found to be less than the sum of its juliet balconies, shallow pantries and un-sound insulation

In 2020, the city sounded prehistoric and prehistrionic, redounding an old time religion of birdsung matins and NHS vespers.

[23.04.20]

[Tweets here: https://twitter.com/ppawlettjackson/status/1253578274841808896]