becomingarchitecture

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The Becoming Architecture blog is currently an archive of Pratt Architecture Writing course material I have used in class. Please see the splash page above  for links to other, more active blogs, created for graduate and undergraduate writing courses I have taught at Pratt, The New School, and NJIT. —Jeff T. Johnson

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Jane Jacobs, 1993 interview

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A clip from The Great Flood, a documentary collaboration between writer/director Bill Morrison and musician Bill Frisell. Notice how the decaying archival footage is edited together with the original soundtrack, and how the image montage interacts with the music.

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Christopher Wool and Felix Gonzalez-Torres

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When everything is a map, including the letter H.

UbuWeb film description:

As the camera pores over 92 mixed media pictures hung in a gallery (all painted exquisitely by Greenaway himself), a pedantic narrator describes his mysterious journey to H, using the pictures as maps. Subtitled The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist, this film seems to be concerned with the migration of a soul (to Heaven or Hell) following the migratory paths of birds (which feature prominently) - but along the way it takes in the curious provenance and interpretation of each painting, and it documents a bewildering intrigue between the narrator, his mentor Tulse Luper and his rival van Heuten (keeper of the owls at the Amsterdam Zoo).

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don’t lose the feeling

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file under Material Studies: earth crust, hair, bramble, viscera, wind, despair

Eraserhead (1977, dr. David Lynch) trailer

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A blizzard of ahhs!

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Feeling stuck? Draw a virtual card from Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies, which were developed as studio motivation. 

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Here’s a conversation between two writers (George Saunders and Jennifer Egan) known for their speculative fiction. Definitely worth a look, particularly for a couple ideas: 1) you can build a world around (and through) modes of language, and 2) trying to predict the future is a sucker's game—you're better off making another world (or remaking this one).

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Science fiction, posthumanism, cyborg theory, feminism, materiality, ontology, biotechnology, play. Here’s a good example of how to begin to recognize the new game—or transition from going through the motions of the old game to recognizing The Game, & thereby being a player/designer in future relations & ontologies. It’s also a model for thinking about how technology has redefined human & material relations, rather than dealing with man vs. machine cliches that produce non-thought.

Here are a couple choice excerpts in hopes that you’ll follow the link above.

Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.

...

I argue for a politics rooted in claims about fundamental changes in the nature of class, race, and gender in an emerging system of world order analogous in its novelty and scope to that created by industrial capitalism; we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system--from all work to all play, a deadly game.