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

YES IS MORE or Less [Zoom!/zzzzrrtt!/thud!/blaam! – me not] – Full text

“If the passage falls below the levels of ponderous literacy and pedantically accurate spelling… the use of imagery has a knowing exactitude which overleaps conventional architecture-magazine rhetoric of the period, by-passes the reader’s normal verbal defence [sic]mechanisms, and thus produced a distinct shift in sensibility.” (Peter Reyner Banham: Megastructure: urban futures of the recent past,

YES IS MORE or Less [Zoom!/zzzzrrtt!/thud!/blaam! – me not] – Klaus in CLOG Magazine 01

I rarely publish articles under Klaus’s name (I have a whole different personality just for that). However, when Kyle May approached me in order to collaborate with a short review (a sketch of an article rather than a long text) on BIG´s “Yes Is More”  in the debut issue of Clog Magazine, it seemed most

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

The New City Reader: Food (I). A Man for Four Seasons

Click to Read Next week’s section of The New City Reader revolves around food and (in) the city  This issue has been curated (actually, it’s still being produced as I write this) by William Prince & Krista Ninivaggi from Park, and Nicola Twilley, from Edible Geography and co-founder of the engaging Food Print Project. The

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

Iterations: SANAA get Pritzker Prize 2010

Now that’s been a couple of weeks after the Pritzker Ceremony, and following my policy of never publishing anything when it’s due, I decided to finish the month with a little recap. This is the way the cartoon was supposed to be on the first place, but I felt that the in-joke departed too much

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…