“Completion through removal. Abstraction of surfaces. Not-building, not-to-rebuild, not-built-space. Creating spatial complexity reading new openings against old surfaces. Light admitted into space or beyond surfaces that are cut. Breaking & entering. Approaching structural collapse, separating the parts at the point – the point of collapse. Translating the diagram into its structural context. What’s beyond the building’s surface. Rather than using language, using walls. Looking through the thing. The ambiguity, what’s there & not, as much as the whole.”
– Gordon Matta-Clark, Manifesto (1978)
“All the blocks of houses on the barricaded street must have their outer perimeter walls knocked through in such a way that combatants are able to come & go by the parallel road to the rear, out of view & range of the enemy… When a house located on the defensive front is particularly vulnerable to attack, demolish the ground floor staircase & make openings in the floors of various rooms on the first floor in order to fire on soldiers who will storm the ground floor.”
– Auguste Blanqui, Instructions for an Armed Uprising (1868)
1. FORM FOLLOWS DYSFUNCTION
2. ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL INTO FRICTIONLESS INTERSECTING PLANES
Utopia is a non-place the intellect retreats to in order to fail on its own terms & without contradiction.
3. ORDER BY ESCALATION
The dead hand of teleology: design-morality is a mirror held up to an algorithm.
4. PANOPTICISM ISN’T A STYLE
An architecture that will arise anywhere, at any time.
5. THERE IS NO ARCHITECTURAL “PROBLEM”
Free of all constraints, proliferation & detour are the touchstones of architecture.
6. CRISIS IS THE ESSENTIAL OVERPLUS
A surface is the accumulation of images & spaces around it.
7. INSPIRED BY THE LAW OF ECONOMY & GOVERNED BY MATHEMATICAL CALCULATION, THE FATAL WEAKNESS OF ARCHITECTURE IS ITS INHERENT LACK OF EVIDENCE
To plan, to build, to move in space.
8. DOMESTIC GEOSTRATEGIES FOR A MASS PSYCHOSIS OF THE BESIEGED
Like a pre-packaged frozen lunch, social democracy, having met with unheard-of humiliations, discovers no other recourse than to demand more.
9. THE ILLUSION OF NATURE EMERGES FROM ALIENATION
Biosystems of the virtual.
10. DISASTER ISN’T THE EXCEPTION, BUT THE PREMISE
Catastrophe systems.
To hysterically rebuild what has fallen apart.
“The greatest catastrophe of the 20th century has been the city, the contemporary metropolis of the disasters of progress. – Paul Virilio
11. THE SOCIAL IS THE ALGORITHMIC IMAGINARY
According to architectural logic, if there is no outside of (the) structure, building is Time.
12. ACCUMULATE / ACCELERATE / ENERVATE
Entropy (potential) = Mass x Acceleration.
13. SPATIAL ACTION IS TEMPORAL FORM
The moment architecture steps away from humanism, the questions of Being, of Thought, of Time, become technological questions.
14. THE MYTH OF DISILLUSIONMENT MASKS THE VOID OF REALISM
A façade thrown up around the absence of “social representation.”
15. “A CONCRETE ANALYSIS OF A CONCRETE SITUATION”
To abstract is to construct a plane.
There are no concrete situations.
16. DISTORTION IS THE GENERAL MODUS OPERANDUS
Function & meaning through open-endedness.
17. THE ILLUSION OF NATURE EMERGES FROM ALIENATION
Floating points, weak boundaries, isolations, breaks in continuity, ambiguities, branchings, lack of character or differentiation.
18. PLANNED AFTERSHOCK
The use of space as a weapon of mass fragmentation & the “balance of terror.”
19. THE PERCEPTION OF TIME IS SPATIAL CONCEPT
Time-travel is duration.
Dilated time, extruded space.
20. ARCHITECTURE WITHOUT ARCHITECTURE IF NECESSARY
Architecture isn’t required to define a centre of political gravity: power is maximized in distribution.
21. DISORDER INHABITS THE ENTIRE SPECTRUM
Heteronomies of systemic chaos.
“Modern versions of the extinction fables lying in the foundations of human rationality.” – Germán Sierra
22. FORM IS SIMULATED NECESSITY
An architecture that will arise anywhere, at any time.
23. THE SITUATION OF CONSTRUCTION ENTERS INTO THE SITUATION OF THE COMMODITY
Matter refracted through the medium of ideology.
“Transcendence is inscribed into the world of things as the very operation that devalues them.” – Alexei Kukulevic
24. ARCHITECTURE CAN ONLY PROFFER ITS OWN ABSTRACTION, ITS SEPARATION FROM ITSELF, ITS OWN VOID
Architecture has sought to separate existence into different conceptual planes, unaware that there are no concepts, only structures.
25. ALL STRUCTURE IS DYNAMIC
The impetus of construction is the relation between quantum & cosmos.
Architectonics: terraform, textform, technoform.
26. THE RE-EVOLUTION OF SPACE
From vertical montage to image arcology.
27. FORMALISM’S PROGRESS IS A UNIFIED WALL
What is architecture’s “constitutive self-critique”?
The aestheticisation of theory & praxis.
28. A SEDIMENT OF “IRREDUCIBLE QUALITIES”
The dialectics of active & passive disappearance.
29. MANIFESTATION: CONCEPTUALISM’S NEGRO
Creating a new “thought” for architecture.
30. CONTENT ISN’T AN AUTONOMOUS OBJECT
Abolishing the form while preserving the structure.
31. THE TOOLS OF CONFORMITY
An ideal geometric harmony.
The moral foundations of purposeful living.
32. FROM PLANNING TO EVOLUTION
“The instant is no longer the shifting reflection of a distant eternity, but the very threshold of the eternal.” – Henri Lefebvre
New architectural thresholds.
33. THE SCHIZOPOLIS
A transit so exaggerated it flips into stasis (catatonia).
34. ROOMS & FURNITURE: ALL ARE BORN EQUAL
Who are the building plan’s intended victims?
Eminent domain. Area sanitation. Slum clearance. Regeneration.
35. TOPOGRAPHICAL WALLPAPER
The law of systematised confusion.
Cognitive territories zoned for redevelopment.
36. BUILDING A FALLOUT SHELTER
The “underground” as last repository of Western history.
37. FUTURE RUINS
Production never-ending.
“All human progress is made in the outlaw area.” – Buckminster Fuller
38. LA BEAUTÉ SERA MODULARISÉ OU NE SERA PAS?
Design morality is a mirror held up to an algorithm.
39. ALL BUILDING IS ANACHRONISM
Architecture or history? Spaceship metaphysics. World future in abstract.
40. REGENERATE THE PLAN
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