Processes (Eppur si muove)

Click to enlarge (a lot)

Numerus Klausus #24: Fifty Years Inside the Bubble

Click to enlarge 2014 marked the 50th anniversary of one of those ubiquitous landmarks of the 60s visionary scene, Amazing Archigram 4: The Science Fiction Issue, which saw a truncated attempt at a big-scale celebration on my part. Again, 2015 marked another 5-decade anniversary: this time, it was the publication of Reyner Banham’s ‘A Home is Not

Full House vs. Full(er) House. Illustration for MAS Context: Ownership

Click to enlarge As some of you who have been around here for a while will remember, some time ago (years, actually) my beloved Peter Reyner Banham made his entry into this blog by means of a cartoon that sprang from a suggestion by Kazys Varnelis, who was doing his annual re-reading of  Banham’s ‘The Great Gizmo’ along

The New City Reader: Food (II). Less is More (Alienating)

Click to Read Noone’s gonna get the cinephilic reference (otherwise, prove me wrong if you dare). In any case, the Food Section of The New City Reader, curated by  William Prince, Krista Ninivaggi, and Nicola Twilley will “hit the stands” at the New Museum next Sunday. Be sure to get a free copy if you

Latour in Urbicande

Click to enlarge “Octobre 17: The physical manifestation of the actor-network theory reappeared last night. I took a couple of Glocalyne tablets, but they just seemed to worsen the effect.It seems delightfully paradoxical that this state of hyperconnectivity has confined me to the solitude of my room…” Hmm… After a couple of weeks of obscurity,

Le Grand Tour (On Being Glocal)

Click or go here Universalism used to be a rather simple affair: the more detached from local traditions, the more universal you became. If the stoics could be called ‘citizens of the world’, it’s because they accepted being part of the ‘human race’, above and beyond the narrow labels of ‘Greek’ and ‘barbarian’. A regular

A Home is not a Mouse

Click to enlarge “When your house contains such a complex of piping, flues, ducts, wires, lights, inlets, outlets, ovens, sinks, refuse disposers, hi-fi re-verberators, antennae, conduits, freezers, heaters -when it contains so many services that the hardware could stand up by itself without any assistance from the house, why have a house to hold it

But Today we collect Banham (variation)

“The purpose of technology is to make the dream a fact… The end is to make the Earth a garden, a Paradise; to make the mountain speak”. –Arthur Drexler “… it is difficult not to suspect that presented with scenes from cultures that he does not understand he hopes to gizmo them into comprehensible form…

The Great Gizmo in the Sky

“The man who changed the face of America had a gizmo, a gadget, a gimmick – in his hand, in his back pocket, across the saddle, on his hip, in the trailer, round his neck, on his head, deep in a hardened silo.” — Reyner Banham, “The Great Gizmo” (1965) As a kind of follow-up

Great Moments of Architectural Theory (II): Eisenmania (or The Corruption of the Modern)

The End of the Beginning While classical origins were thought to have their source in a divine or natural order and modern origins were held to derive their value from deductive reason, `not-classical’ origins can be strictly arbitrary, simply starting points, without value. They can be artificial and relative, as opposed to natural, divine, or