[still from Groundhog Day, dir. Harold Ramis (1993)]

The same things happen. The spray-painted tag was written on a crumbling wall in New Orleans and it immediately struck a dissonant chord in me. I kept walking, staring down at the fractured sidewalk pavement. I kept walking and when I looked up, I saw a nearly identical brick wall and the words scrawled on it: the same things happen. I kept walking. Though it’s been almost 10 years since I saw that graffiti, it’s burned into my mind. The same things happen. Perhaps it haunts me because I realized at that moment that yeah, the same things do happen. History repeats itself at global scale but also at a personal scale. Over and over. It’s a depressing epiphany. The same things happen. The repetition of this tag throughout the city only makes it worse, charging the words with the power to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, nurturing paranoia and dooming me to a Groundhog Day loop.

Speaking of Groundhog Day I’ve been thinking a lot about repetition lately and what better time to share some of these thoughts than on the day Punxsutawney Phil has doomed America to six more weeks of Winter? A larger essay on the topic is in the works, so some or all of what follows may, appropriately, repeat in a later piece. Or this post might just evolve from a nascent collection of thoughts into something more fully-formed. Anyway, back to Groundhog Day. The movie has proven so popular that it has transformed the nature of Groundhog Day from a simple human interest story about a weather-predicting rodent into a television trope describing temporal recursion; this is usually done for comedic effect. Setting aside my irrational fear of personal stagnation, what makes Groundhog Day so compelling is its expression of the comedy of repetition, which lies in the expectation that something is going to happen and the inevitable resolution: a setup and a punchline.

But what happens when that punchline doesn’t come? The notion of Repetition ad absurdum is explored in a hilarious segment in the Radiolab episode “Loops” that examines a performance by comedians Kristen Schaal and Kurt Braunohler.



After a brief setup about an old sketch they did on a kids show, Schaal starts galloping in circles around the stage while Braunohler hollers: “Kristen Schaal is a horse. Kristen Schaal is a horse. Look at her dance and look at her go. Look at her dance like a horse” (listen to the clip above, it’s funnier than it sounds). The first verse is silly and strange. But then it repeats. And then it repeats. And again. And it becomes funnier. But it repeats again. And again. And again. Until it’s just not very funny anymore. But! Then it repeats again. And suddenly, for some indeterminable reason, it becomes hysterical. Braunohler explains:

…then you get this next level that’s like ‘You can’t continue doing it.’ And then you do continue doing it….

What I love about it is that your brain is trying to make it into what you want it to be, which is a joke. but there is no joke happening. What these two people are doing is creating the expectation that the expectation is going to be broken but then breaking that expectation that the expectation is going to be broken.

So if repetition is a setup and humor comes with its disruption, then the case of “Kristen Schall is a horse” is something of a paradox. The repetition remains uninterrupted. It concludes with relatively little ceremony and no real punchline, yet the humor comes from the very lack of the expected disruption. So perhaps then there is comedic value inherent in repetition qua repetition.

But in the architectural world, repetition is anything but funny. It’s most commonly found in Classical Architecture (have you ever seen a Classicist laugh about architecture?), where it expresses man’s intellect, logic, and dominance over nature; and Modernism, where it’s typically understood as a symbol of equality and egalitarianism or efficiency in production. Modernism taught us to expect each component to be identical, the train to leave at the same time every day, and each product off the assembly line to be indistinguishable from the last. So in this world where Modernism and repetition have become inextricably associated with one another, how can the humor of repetition be communicated in built form? This is my question.

Right now I’m thinking that the answer will be found in Postmodernism. It is, after all, often seen as the tonic for the spartan rigor of Modernism. And, I reluctantly admit, it’s often considered a joke. But can’t that joke be a good thing? Can’t humor be used more productively? In Log 22 architect and educator John McMorrough describes difference –the expectation of which, realized or not, creates the humor of repetition– as being precipitated by changes in either space (i.e. context) or time (i.e. history). So Postmodernism is uniquely suited to tackle this issue because what does it do best if not context and history? But now I’m reminded here of another quote about context, history, and repetition ad absurdum; this one from Sam Jacob’s article in the the Radical Postmodernism issue of AD (I seem to be quoting that issue a lot lately, but I think it’s an important text):

Marx argued that history repeats, first as tragedy, then as farce. But Marx never had cable TV or he would have watched history repeating endlessly. In the age of digital information….History repeats first as tragedy, then as farce, and then as tragi-farce-romcom-porno or slasher-drama-chic-flick-docudrama.

Jacobs goes on to identify Postmodernism as the farce to Modernism’s tragedy, but argues that with digital technologies, space and time have contracted and history no longer repeats so much as it happens all at once, splintering into “kaleidoscopic genre-Moderns”. The same things happen. Everywhen. Modified simultaneity is the new repetition. Perhaps what contemporary Postmodernism (I still can’t bring myself to say “Radical Postmodernism”) does best is context and history and tragi-farce-romcom-porno-etc. But I’m veering into some unstable ground here in trying searching for a revised understanding of Postmodernism, so let’s bring it back to something built, rather than conceptual repetition.
[Venturi Scott Brown and Associates, Sainsbury Wing, London (1991); image via VSBA]

The first real example that comes to my mind, and I hope to elaborate on this later, is the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, designed by Venturi Scott Brown and Associates. The syncopated rhythm of the pilasters on the front facade acknowledges, while undermining, the sequence of Classical columns from the original building. It’s just funny. Venturian wit at its best. Or is the humor of architectural repetition found in the commercial franchise, whose interiors are identical in Berlin and in Burbank? Or the unexpected “copy” – such as the black Villa Savoye found in ARM’s Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra. But is this truly repetition? More importantly, is it funny? I don’t know what the answers are yet. If anyone has any thoughts on the matter, I’d love to hear them in the comments or on twitter.

In lieu of any proper conclusion to these errant ponderings, I’ll leave the final word to Steve Martin, who in his 1978 album A Wild and Crazy Guy, opens his act by reflecting on the end of his multi-night run of performances in San Francisco:

I think there’s nothing better for a person than to come out and do the same thing over and over for two weeks. And this is what I enjoy, so I’m just going to do the same thing over and over and over. I think rather than do it just twice, I’m going to do it over and over. I’m going to do the same joke over and over. In the same show.

This will be a new thing.

Life Without Buildings

What does a heist reveal about bank design? What can architects learn from a prison break? What happens when we view the criminal act as an especially transgressive mode of architectural criticism? Crime has the potential to reveal new facets of architecture. It exposes unexpected spatial narratives and subverts conventional readings of the designed environment. Crime undermines the implicit formal and programmatic optimism in any architectural plan or program. It also makes for a hell of a movie.

The relationship between crime and architecture is an issue I’ve been exploring over the last year in both my personal work and as co-organizer of the 2011 Yale School of Architecture research colloquium Space, Crime, and Architecture, as well as its complementary symposium, Fugitive Geographies. While there may be countless articles and theories dating back to at least the 18th century that explore these issues, in my experience one of the most effective –and fun!– ways to discuss them is through an analysis of their depictions in popular media. So I’m really looking forward to Breaking Out and Breaking In, an architectural “distributed film festival” of Prison Break and Heist films sponsored by BLDGBLOG, Filmmaker Magazine, and Studio-X:

Watch the films at home—or anywhere you may be—and then come back to discuss the films here on BLDGBLOG. It’s a “distributed” film fest; there is no central venue, just a curated list of films and a list of days on which to watch them. There’s no set time, no geographic exclusion, and no limit to the food breaks or repeated scenes you might require. And it all leads up to a public discussion at Studio-X NYC on Tuesday, April 24.

The overall idea is to discuss breaking out and breaking in as spatial scenarios that work as mirror images of one another, each process with its own tools, techniques, and unique forms of unexpected architectural expertise.

How do prisoners and burglars reinterpret the built environments around them? Where does this more aggressive understanding of space differ from the constructive insights of an architect—and how can a building be strategically unbuilt so as to get at what lies on the other side? What particular kinds of spatial and temporal knowledge—where to tunnel, when to go—do these other users of buildings need to develop?

Breaking Out and Breaking In is currently underway but it’s not too late to follow along! I expect to be joining the conversation in the comments section over at BLDGBLOG and, in a few weeks, will hopefully have an essay or two of my own to contribute in a more official capacity. For more information on the event and examples of architectural heists see the full announcement at BLDGBLOG.

Life Without Buildings

The Maurizio Cattelan exhibition ALL ended its run at the Guggenheim last weekend and I wanted to share some quick thoughts about the show, especially in light of what seems to have been a mostly negative reception from some of our more prominent art critics. But more than that, I’m also hoping that by posting what is little more than a few ill-informed observations jotted down in a notebook about an artist whose work I had never seen before stepping into Frank Lloyd Wright’s atrium late last year, I’ll instigate a bit of a sea change for Life Without Buildings. Basically, I want it to be more fun. After years of hard work and school, writing architectural history has actually become an honest-to-god, bill-paying job and now more than ever I need a place to experiment with different forms of criticism and documentation, to work out new projects, to make mistakes, and to write about things that are little less serious. This will be that place. So that’s happening.

But back to the Cattelan show. I loved it.


I kept thinking to myself, ‘this is the ultimate Postmodern exhibition.’ Naive? Probably. An exaggeration? Definitely. But I’ve had Postmodernism on the mind a lot lately, due in no small part to both the recent Reconsidering Postmodernism exhibition and the excellent Radical Postmodernism issue of AD edited by FAT and Charles Jencks. All embodies those peculiar qualities that we have come to know and love and associate with Postmodernism. It was an autobiographic, end-of-career retrospective that was not only incredibly contextual (more on that in a second) but also de-familiarized the artists’s oeuvre –for those familiar with it, I suppose– by re-presenting and juxtaposing formerly independent, site-specific works. On paper, it looks like a terrible idea, and if the critics were to be believed, maybe it was. But it was also a hell of a lot of fun and something that anyone who walked in could enjoy.

For me, All read like an exploded novel whose pages kept rearranging themselves, revealing and concealing and re-revealing plot threads until some semblance of a narrative –or narratives– seemed to emerge as I slowly spiraled down the ramp of the Guggenheim. Cattelan’s world proved to be one where where scale is mutable and hearts are on felt sleeves and the uninitiated viewer is left to make sense of the artist’s entire life. As Robert Rauschenberg famously erased a drawing by de Kooning, Cattelan seems to tackle similar issues by hanging (twice!) what appeared to be effigies and invocations of Joseph Beuys. Perhaps that’s not entirely fair because everything was hanging – suspended from the ceiling of the Guggenheim, cluttering the museum’s atrium while the walls remained bare. By no means was this the first show to build in the atrium space, but it was surely one of the best I’ve seen (excluding those that involved climactic cinematic shootouts). It was also the first exhibition I’ve seen with an accompanying iPad app, though I’m sure that will soon become de rigueur if it’s not already.



It was a stunning use of the space. The museum turned inward and I caught myself looking at the other visitors as much as at the work and falling in love no fewer than six times and eavesdropping on conversations that went something like this: “that’s so weird! you’re looking at the same thing but it looks different!” EXACTLY. That simple comment prompted me to tweet the following:

If the Guggenheim did not exist it would be necessary to invent it. twitter.com/LifeSansBldgs/…

— Jimmy Stamp (@LifeSansBldgs) December 17, 2011

Again, this is perhaps a slight overreaction, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t mean every word of it.

Life Without Buildings

Last weekend I attended Reconsidering Postmodernism, a two-day conference in New York City organized by the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art. The event was convened in an “attempt to illuminate postmodernism’s overall cultural impact.” Whether or not it achieved that goal is debatable – but unfortunately, it wasn’t often debated, as you’ll see below. I’ll be writing a couple articles on the event later, so what follows is really just an informal summary via tweets, retweets, and a little additional commentary. This is also a bit of an experiment, as I’m using storify for the first time to put everything together.

Life Without Buildings

The following post was originally written as an entry to McSweeney’s 2011 Column Contest. It didn’t win. But I had a lot of fun writing it so I thought I’d post it here. As proposed, it was an architectural criticism column written from the perspective of a somewhat emotionally dysfunctional critic who sees his own failures in the monumental structures that obsess him. In the resulting reviews, personal narratives converge with professional critique. Descriptions and opinions of the buildings emerge through seemingly inadvertent revelations of his personal crises and social conflicts. Over the course of the columns, a larger narrative is revealed in which the reader learns more about the critic – his failures, fears, aspirations, and his romantic and professional pursuits. In this introductory column, your critic experiences the five stages of grief –denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance– in his critique of the Lower Manhattan skyscraper New York by Gehry.



New York by Gehry. The building’s name says it all: built in the greatest city in America and designed by the country’s best known and most influential architect since Frank Lloyd Wright. Its unabashed moniker cements the notion of architect-as-brand more than any other building in recent memory. And Frank Gehry’s well-established brand identity is in full-effect in this, his first completed skyscraper project. His signature curvilinear forms manifest as a billowing steel facade that stretches a brazen 780 feet into the sky. It can’t be denied that the sight of the building in the Manhattan skyline is especially magnificent from Brooklyn, where it seems to hang over the city like a rippling stage curtain for a space opera or a metal sheet draped over a more conventional Financial District high-rise that recalls the silver-sequined ghost costume worn by a certain dilettante hipster ex-girlfriend to a Williamsburg Halloween party last year where she drunkenly proclaimed herself the ghost of Marc Bolan while flirting with some asshole dressed like Ziggy Stardust era David Bowie. For example.

The overall effect is quite powerful, yet many traditionalist New Yorkers are angered by the building’s stark contrast from other Financial District towers. The architect, however, believes the aesthetic disparity informs a “lively conversation” with nearby structures, including the landmark 1913 Woolworth Building, designed by Cass Gilbert. But that conversation seems to be less of an amicable discussion on the benefits and drawbacks of embracing centuries of history and finding common ground, and more of a godforsaken bitch of a building annoyingly shouting while the other is patiently trying to make a valid point about how its not fucking cool to flirt with other guys in front of your boyfriend goddammit!

Maybe that’s a bit harsh. A spectacle is sometimes welcome, and sometimes even necessary, but a good relationship is about compromise. A rich history is a strong foundation on which to build. There’s something valuable to be learned from a shared past. The building’s slogan, “never yesterday”, is intended to be progressive, but to this critic it sounds like naive bullshit that someone might use to rationalize a breakup. Of course, people can change – buildings, that is, can change. Although it often feels like only one person, one building, – it often seems like only one building is doing all the compromising and bargaining while the other remains unreasonably obstinate. New York by Gehry –also known more modestly as 8 Spruce Street– makes plenty of compromises. While its glamourous north façade will surely get the camera-phones snapping, the opposite side is a completely flat, modernist surface with nary a curve nor ripple to be seen. One side of the building seems to nod to the past while the other is a purely twenty-first century creation. The architect claims this duality is a choice, but many of the building’s detractors suspect a more practical explanation: financial and aesthetic compromise.

Most disheartening of all is the pediment on which the already-iconic tower sits. The effect of the building at street-level is one of complete and utter banality. Sure, from a distance everything looks great – intriguing, attractive, maybe even happy. But the facade is just that. Up close, it disappears. Literally, the facade never touches the ground. It’s like trying to find the end of a rainbow. Gehry’s breathtaking sculpture instead sits on a completely banal orange brick building that looks like a converted textile mill. One compromise too far. The five-story structure will one day house retail space, doctors’ offices, underground parking, and a public school. But there’s no architecture there. There’s nothing to engage the visitor. Cracks are revealed what once seemed strong just sort of falls apart. There’s no excitement anymore. The only sign of the grand design is a literal sign highlighting the building’s impressive presence on the New York City skyline, presumably to remind potential residents that, yes this is a Frank Gehry building and though it may not look great from here, you’ll be the envy of your friends who only see a glistening steel facade from their shitty apartments uptown and imagine those living inside to be educated, funny, and brooding, instead of pretentious, neurotic, and depressed.

Somewhat surprisingly, the folding, torquing facade conceals mundane apartments in which it’s likely the young and rich Wall Street elite will live out their meaningless existence, or broken hearted architecture critics will stare at the phone for hours, willing it to ring. But there are worse places to slowly die of sadness than a building that offers such amenities as a swimming pool, spa, fitness club, private dining room, and even a screening room. Alternately, the larger units would be ideal for that young couple stupid enough to be in love when all empirical evidence suggest that their relationship will end in disappointment, resentment, and crippling depression. The apartments are beautifully crafted with oak floors and stainless steel appliances perfect for reheating takeout and eating alone, barely able to remember the last time you enjoyed a nice quiet evening with the only person that used to mean anything in your otherwise hollow life. Great views though.

Ultimately, New York by Gehry will be judged, valued, and accepted as a important contribution to the New York City skyline. Its strength comes from its assertion of a unique individuality; something to challenge and provoke, perhaps even something others can aspire imitate. It’s a building that understands the worth of an individual. While not completely free from the baggage of its historic relationships, New York by Gehry embraces the future with a pioneering design that celebrates the possibility of new digital fabrication technologies and will surely influence construction in Lower Manhattan for decades. The potential now exists for new, unexpected relationships. There’s a lesson for the rest of us too: learn from the past but embrace life on your own terms. Maybe do some traveling or learn something new or just throw yourself into your work and rekindle that passion that made you become a writer. For the first time in ages, this critic is feeling pretty good about the future. Perhaps ‘Never Yesterday’ isn’t such a naive idea after all.

Life Without Buildings

Standing in front of the concrete blocks on a warm June morning, I found myself wondering if they were the ruins of a forgotten city – or maybe a fragment of this city’s forgotten history. The fractured masonry corner before me couldn’t truly be a ruin, though. It was perfectly crafted – too perfectly crafted. Its edges were precisely stepped and though it stood in the middle of City Hall Park, no vines or weeds had broken through the flawless mortar. What kind of ruin doesn’t age or weather? Yet there it was, as if it had always been there. In fact, when I looked at it, it seemed as if I couldn’t not remember it being there. But beyond that there was another feeling; something tugging at the edges of my consciousness, challenging me to look closer, to remember something else.


I walked over to a nearby cafe to do just that. The day was getting hot but I needed a coffee. A bartender in Chicago once told me there’s nothing that can’t be figured out over a cup of coffee or a glass of whiskey. It was too early for the latter so I sat sipping at the acrid mass market brew, staring out at that strange ruin that wasn’t. It really did seem to have that ineffable power common to all ancient ruins and ex-girlfriends: the capacity to conjure a memory or a yearning for a time long past. Or, more often than not, a time that never was. Indeed, despite its uncanny correctness, this ruin was, in fact, neither of this time nor even of this place.

Pyramid (Münster), is a Sol LeWitt “structure” created in 1987. Those mysterious memories being conjured? They’re anchored in the year that brought us Dirty Dancing and George Michael’s solo career. This lost piece of apocryphal archaeology belongs to the decade of the music video. Pyramid was originally installed in a botanical garden for the decennial exhibition Skulptur Projekte Münster. Münster, largely destroyed during World War II, seems like it must have been an especially appropriate home for LeWitt’s ambiguous piece. Does it represent construction or destruction? Is it a monument or a memorial?

Strangely, despite these foreign origins, it struck me as the only piece in the exhibition that truly fits the city. This piece resonates with the Lower Manhattan in a way the others don’t. Maybe it was the same way in Münster. Maybe more so. Or perhaps this piece is attuned to some universal notion of city. Though I may have reveled in the romance of a lost metropolis, such a notion fell apart as soon as I saw the piece from the other side. What was once the corner of forgotten skyscraper becomes a quarter of a mini-Ziggurat. What was once a ruin becomes a tomb or ancient marker. Viewed in the round, the scale and evocations change with every step. In an exhibit named “Structures,” this seems to be one of very few pieces that deserves the name. The text accompanying the piece offers the limited explanation that these alternate perspectives “reveal the structure as a stepped pyramid or half-cube, suggesting the convergence of architecture and sculpture in Lewitt’s work.” But that doesn’t really mean anything. It reduces the work to seemingly little more than a didactic exercise. When, among the many structures of the outdoor exhibition, Pyramid (Münster) is one of very few pieces in the exhibition that is truly complemented by the brick and stone buildings surrounding New York’s City Hall Park. It opens itself to an urban reading that’s about more than seriality or materiality, or suggesting a connection between building and art. Even without knowing anything about architecture or history, Pyramid serves an a visceral reminder of the origin, and ultimate fate, of those surrounding buildings. Of every building in every city. It’s about about reality and time. It’s about what was, what is, what will be, and maybe even what could have been.

Sol Lewitt: Structures, 1965-2006 is on view until December 2, 2011.

[image: Sol Lewitt, Pyramid (Münster) (1987), currently installed Manhattan's City Hall Park.]

Life Without Buildings

The iron tracery of the library windows outline stained glass depictions of campus heraldry beside scenes of history’s most famous writers and scholars. As the summer haze seeped into the reading room, its dark wood-paneled walls somehow grew more oppressive. The haze was once much thicker though, and had carried with it the scents of Connecticut tobacco, back when the room room was used as the library’s smoking parlor. But those halcyon days are long gone. The reading room has long since been scrubbed clean and its walls are now lined with travel writings and medieval texts. Whether it’s into descriptions of distant cities or into the records of another time, people now come here to escape. At that moment, Walter Field felt more like a prisoner.


A glowing depiction of St. Mark writing his Gospel was the only ecclesial image in the entire library and though its light fell singularly on the small desk at which Walter worked, the hope for divine inspiration was the farthest thing from his mind. He was captivated by another illuminated image – the computer screen in front of him was showing a photo taken only a few days ago in a small chapel in Venice. June was a slow month in University library and as he stared into the screen, Walter was grateful for the small luxury of working alone in the huge reading room. It had taken more than six hours of searching through the dusty, leather-bound manuscripts that now lay piled around his desk but he had found what he needed. The object of his search was propped open next to his computer, displaying the same image – or rather, what should have been the same image. Something was off though; something was different. Where is it? As he scrolled through the image, it seemed that something was tugging at the fringes of his awareness, waiting to be discovered. Wait. There. He nervously kicked at one of the stacks at his feet with each with enlargement of the digital photograph. There [click] it [click] is [clickclickclick]. The books toppled over. The discrepancy was small but once seen, couldn’t be ignored. How could this possibly be? It just doesn’t make any sense.

Confused, frustrated and tired, Walter rubbed his eyes and as he looked up from the screen they refocused onto the words inscribed into the stone fireplace: haec studia adulescentiam alunt, senectutem oblectant. A common enough inscription in university libraries, the words of Cicero were meant to encourage young scholars. Resting his chin on his fists in a gesture more consternation than prayer, Walter sighed and recited aloud, “‘These studies nourish youth and delight old age.’ If only that was the case this time.”

“Secundas res ornant, adversis perfugium ac solacium praebent, delectant domi, non impediunt foris, pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticator.” The voice startled Walter from his brief reverie. He quickly stood up from his chair and turned around to find himself facing the strangest looking man he had ever seen.

“Sorry, I didn’t hear you come in,” Walter mumbled, “I’m kind of used to having the room to myself.”

“Hm.” Tilting his head to one side, the stranger seemed to consider him briefly before speaking again. “You are taller than I expected, Walter Field.”

[image: Linonia & Brothers Reading Room in Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University (2011)]

Life Without Buildings

-

Along with my fellow members of the M.E.D class of 2011, I’ve been working hard to organize Fugitive Geographies, a graduate student symposium that investigates the built environment as both accomplice and obstacle to the criminal fugitive; as a protean landscape that offers concealment one moment and prevents escape the next. Fugitive Geographies gathers speakers from philosophy, history, art, media theory, and architecture to discuss the elusive and transitory condition where both subject and context exist in a precariously unstable state, where boundaries and borders are unclear, and where the criminal takes new agency over the environment. Paper topics include border investigations, drug dealers & urban depredation, War Prisons & Military Detention, detectives, a taxonomy of escape, crime & herman melville, and other explorations of the fugitive condition.

The symposium will open on March 24th with the David W. Roth and Robert H. Symonds Memorial Lecture, “Topographies of Elusion,” a keynote address by Thomas Y. Levin, Associate Professor at Princeton University. Levin teaches media and cultural theory and serves on the executive committee of Princeton’s Program in Media and Modernity. His areas of enquiry include philosophy, aesthetic theory, technology, and the politics of surveillance.

Fugitive Geographies is organized by the Yale School of Architecture Master of Environmental Design class of 2011 to complement the M.E.D. research colloquium Space, Crime, & Architecture, in which students explore how the criminal act degrades conventional readings of designed environments to expose the sinister latencies of architecture.

For more information, or to register for the symposium, please visit fugitivegeographies.com

Life Without Buildings

[Harold Lime, Walter Gropius, and others look on as the Static Engine is activated for the first time.]

French playwright Alfred Jarry invented practical time travel in 1899. In an essay that shattered the scientific community, he theorized that a time machine “is no more difficult to conceive of than a Space Machine,” and continued to describes his design for an an ebony and ivory apparatus of levers, springs, and flywheels that isolates its occupant from the passing of time. This pivotal discovery was almost lost to ahistory when, just moments moment before he completed the famous equation that would make time travel possible, the Father of Pataphysics was murdered by an splinter group of non-practicing Ghostmodernists. Thankfully, the Established Lobbyists simultaneously traveled back in time to prevent the murder of Alfred Jarry from taking place. Yet this was not the end of that particular story. The rogue Ghostmodernists persevere with their efforts to destroy chrono-liminality – and so continues the atemporal crusade that will eventually never be documented as “The Perpetual Lobby.”

The above is an excerpt from my contribution to Junk Jet no4. Check out the full issue to learn more about Static Engines, Paradox Designers, and the Alt-Bauhaus.

see also:
- The Reading Room

Life Without Buildings

Seemingly oblivious to the city around her, the young woman takes the mobile phone from her ear and presses a button. Suddenly, floating in the ether directly in front of her a message appears: “New Dress code: FUNKY.” With a smirk and a wave of her hand, she’s suddenly surrounded by three new translucent windows, enveloping her in the heads-up-display of the Fifth Avenue fighter pilot. A growing smile is evidence that some urban attack pattern has been implemented and with a final wave of the hand, the virtual displays fall away – replaced with the advertising message: “Life moves fast. Don’t miss a thing.”

Life Without Buildings