“Voracious Feast”, De Architect #4, April 1, 2010

Now that we have entered a phase of involuntary fasting, any anxiety that the architect is destined to turn into the marginalized hunger artist of our time, soon to be replaced by an omnivorous beast—be it a construction consortium, plan-buro or engineering mammoth—seems foolish.

Never have the dominant systems been so frail. Through the downpour of hubrical debris, an abundance of opportunities emerges. As we free ourselves from the fascination with the stable, the monumental and the explicit, we can start to grasp the elastic nebula our life has become. This sudden moment of sublimation leaves us in a cloud of new ecologies, economies, energies, flows and fantasies ready to be explored. Hybridized infrastructures, bastard typologies and mutant materials form an androgynous modernity. Everything is elastic; footloose we float around in a mist of unstable, but determined, intentions.

A shaking, shrinking, and melting planet will persistently force us to cooperate in its remediation. We are doubtful that fast-tracking Modernity will offer resolution—it is not an engineering question—nor are we professing a passive, neo-Goth observance of our decaying environs. We propose to embrace the instability and the dynamic environment it creates. The architect can become the lean interface between ideas, people and places, realigning the physical and the virtual. Let us investigate the soft links, the fleeting forces and the lightness of our tread. Can we direct the cloud? Can we discern a new beauty within this?