Category: Hyperreal
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The Grotesque Comedy of URLs
I’m currently writing an article for start-up periodical Cities – The Magazine, and whilst doing some lazy search-engine research on Italian fascist architecture I came across the following result: Hot damn! Just look at the web address in the fourth line: «Enjoy Rome. Walking. Fascist.» What grotesque poetry! There should be an annual literary prize…
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Feminist Wormhole Geometry
Think about the spacial settings of computer games (labyrinths, factories, castles, dungeons) and you could maybe, tentatively, argue that they’ve always, at their core, been about our relationship to architecture. This reading suits SLAB just fine of course, but Valve Software’s title Portal, is undoubtably fantastic encounter with the architecture of the imagination. What makes…
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The Hyperreal, If You Please
25 Mailroom Designers.jpg – [Source: http://hdfiles.com/] The ease with which Google (an internet search engine) enables us to access photographic material, and the cryptic fuzziness of search results, plunges us into a serendipitous space lacking any kind of context. The search results page, with its bland grid of suggestions, brings us unapologetically close to answers…
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Google: Famous Architects Only Fairly Famous
Unfairly assuming that Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind and Frank Gehry represent the top four architects of our time, I decided to pit their fame against each other in a highly questionable Google Trends test: Volume of Google search-queries for each architect’s full name in all regions throughout the year 2006. Frank (in green)…