200words: serpentine pavilion 2023

Wrangled by ideology, a putative convivial long table in a round house becomes a benighted round table for a longhouse. Here, a gloomthy lurker, your devouring mother will feed you now. Sitting at the centre of her knotty glulam web, Ghotmeh presides over a fully operational battle follie ~ weaponised soft play for infantile adults - scattered seating for a shadowy and introspective committee mulling the imposition of care. Inside, her crinkle cut brolly bundt cake bears claustrophobically low, bellying its spaceship hull with an abductive light beam from its oracular orifice. Thusly is vulvacore a womby antidote to phallic architectural hegemony.

The Serpentine’s blurb calls this “Archaeology of the Future” ~ a neat God-complex writing of our history laundering colonial nostalgia in subtractive architectonics of excavated skeletal forms. The nonagonic plan is formed in the negative space left as convex curves are cast between nine defensive spikes as the air is sucked out of the void between them. The enclosure is veiled in CNC lifestyle fretwork, a house of card ply doilies in cutesy Afrofuturism appropriated scandi with aboriginal flourishes ~ trypophobic colander-core: Etsy ethnic candle holder by night, and by day, a backdrop for Insta’s boho yolo fomos and their monstera deliciosas.

200words: outernet building

A poundshop iPhone case, glittered with the novelty charm of awkward teenage yearning long dulled by a century of exploitative supernormal stimuli. 

The Outernet building is a strained metaphor, bored of itself, knowingly: an ironic Fortnite skin of a building, merely the panelised garish avatar approximated for inconvenient embodiment, glibly adorned with languid Suicide Squad gothic drolery. 

An icon of empty iconography, gleaming cubicly as a Minecraft Kaaba for gyratory tiktokers lost in the urban showbiz facepalm that is neo Tottenham Court Road. 

The Now Building’s two squat forms huddle beneath Centre Point tower, anthracite fluting frames the black boxes as mawkish ebonised sarcophagi, hunched with bodyguard swagger flexing for the cult of RAL 7016 totalitarianism. 

Set in with gold, gilding the armsrace, upping the ante on Renzo’s neighbouring neon retinal assault. Gold in faddish space telescope chic. Gold grills and gold fins like everything is a heat sync now. 

The scalelessly BIM’ed, content-free elevations are the lorem ipsum of facade studies - wireframe webpage placeholders complete with pixel marked padding. 

Atop, a glass protuberance buds beyond the parapet. The dualised soul peeks from its prison frame, the sheathed pupa of luxury gnostic futurism emerges. We’re all meta now.

200words: fourth plinth

 

A whipped cream carnival floats beyond the parody of a teen movie in which Jeff Koons is shot by David LaChapelle as a bubblegum manga macro cherry popped pop art of post-innocence spaffed up the wall by seaside teats suckling pornified disaster capitalism’s disney-brained thirst trap. 

Modern life is a food fetish, here Heather Phillipson brings drone war to a pie fight: sploshing goop on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend for the retweets. Her Mills&Boon money shot is tawdry emoji urbanism tarting up Trafalgar with ladette girl boss nanny state flex vajazzling the fourth plinth with an anaemic turd glittered for the infantilised tourists below gawping for insta at the camp tousled kitsch turban of a grubby cholesterol cake circus. 

We live in a society of spectacle, distracting ourselves to death, where everything is synthetic and so everything-is-awesome all of the time. While the icecaps thaw, even our prophets’ protests are subsumed by a darwinian memetic race to the bottom of garish glib obscenity. 

2021’s commission is cautionary while being complicit - ambiguously platforming a paean to dribble-down economic bloatware, lionising the liquefaction of all that is solid, morbidly fascinated by our entropic Daliesque melting to grey goo, all the while watched over by machines of the surveillance state and memento mori.

https://web102.secure-secure.co.uk/theend.today/

https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/shorthand/fourth_plinth/

200words: Robert Harbison 1940-2021

“All art is perishable” - so opens the first line of that dogeared minor volume which, in 2008, a godfather pressed into the hands of a wayward godson. The Built, the Unbuilt and the Unbuildable was for me then a balm pitched perfectly at the resonant frequency of my convalescence from a built architecture that had become altogether saturated with too much sordid meaning. In I tumbled. Bob’s tone - of calm erudition and sanguine melancholy - lured a pilgrimage through Sebald and Keiller and other peripheral prophets beach combing remnant fragments in the cathedral ruins.

Ever an imposter I went up for my MA in 2011 after the party, in the Turnerian half light of higher education’s broader entropic subsummation by a bureaucratic managerialism. And I went up after Bob, a tugged Temeraire. I did not know him. Not really. Not much beyond his very present absence. But, occasionally we were visited by nostalgic happy reveries - his wiry shock-headed warmly transatlantic accordion chorded avuncular laughter creaking as a ship gesturally. 

He wrote to me exceptionally, once, wry and self-deprecating after one 200words, feeling he had "gone too far" in what he'd said about my "wild" "kaleidoscopic" V&A plywood piece ~ “why,” he asked, should he be the one to “apply the brakes” - a strangely precious email. 

Brigid Brophy had written of Deliberate Regression in 1980 that Bob’s prose had a “pile-up on the motorway manner of writing" - somewhere in that, perhaps precisely in that, touches his allure, and my affection for his earnest enquiry and the resonance I feel still now in my floundering for my own unbuildable redemptive meaning. In all intangible ways I owe some great debt to Bob for furnishing this fragment monger with the pleasure of a synecdochal praxis. 

[08.09.21]

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]