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Part 2 Official Badge
Machine Washable
Into an Experimental Music Scene
Potentially Recyclable
Perfect Form
Impossibly Clean Pants
Unknown Position on Things
Work Boots Ready
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Forgot Wallet Everyone Worried
Buy Sell Buy
On the Verge of Something
Microbrewer
Wanted
Part-Time Weirdo
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Part 2 Hopeless Romantic
Monumental Proportions
About to Solve a Problem Together
Possible Reason
Camp Counselor
Not So Bright
Far From Perfect
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If bravado is the internal force that amplifies self-worth toward undoing meaningful external critique, antibravado externalizes internal selfdoubt toward critical observations of meaning. If bravado results in the map-territory confusions of prebaked ideological maps projected onto presumedly docile territories, antibravado is the sober compass for navigating an irreducibly illegible territory. A kind of Canadian sprezzatura, antibravado is a fundamental characteristic of the strategic agility needed for operating in what MOS calls “an increasingly vague global milieu.” Through antibravado MOS skirts [Georg] Simmel’s Curse. Writing a century ago about the anxiety-producing effects of early metropolitan life, the German sociologist has become a crutch so leaned on in architecture writing on the city it has given urban discourse a permanent limp. Koolhaas revealed as much in Delirious New York—a text with many 120
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MOS Defiantly thinly disguised echoes in the present volume, a ‘play within the play’ for urbanism wonks to decipher as they read—in the profoundly orthogonal experiences of Le Corbusier and Salvador Dalí in 1930s New York. Trying to “solve” the “problem” of congestion with rational design, Le Corbusier missed the punch line of modernity: chaos is not only the natural condition of the metropolis, it is its animating force. Under Simmel’s spell, Le Corbusier couldn’t grok (or, at least, couldn’t stand) this post-European modern culture. Dalí couldn’t get enough of it. Through Dalí’s Paranoid-Critical Method, Koolhaas revealed Chaos Magic as the state religion of the metropolis. MOS’s diagnosis of the “always all ways” sine qua non of a contemporary urban life jockeyed behind handheld screens—“always working, always shopping, always sharing, 121
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always playing, always socializing, always searching, always watching, always receiving”— is not presented in the typical “urgentophilic” alarmism of his Le Corbusier, but with the antibravado chaos-curiosity of Dalí: “The dissolution of urbanism … does not render everything ineffectual.” Rather, it forms the “basis of a new formal and social potential.” The “non-committal” techno-urban present is not a crisis, it is the ultimate triumph of Chaos Magic at urban scale. Per MOS, “The city is everywhere.” Their proposed strategy for Detroit turns the city into a Chaos Magic playground. Koolhaas invokes Dalí’s method as a way to “destroy, or at least upset,” Corbusian attempts to tame the chaos of urban life with architectural order, “as if the world can be reshuffled like a pack of cards whose original sequence is a disappointment.”3 MOS proposes a city of tarot cards: “Apartments, Record Stores, Electric Car Showrooms, … Vegan Doughnut Shops, 122
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MOS Defiantly Police Stations, … Bikram Yoga Studios, Tattoo Parlors, … Design Collectives, Daycare Centers, … Antique Stores, Test Kitchens, … Ice Cream Parlors, and ” Their architecture is the raw material for citizens to embrace their own urban paranoia in creating a “density of possible relationships”. This isn’t architecture of bravado, it’s architecture of the 21st century.
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1 Rem Koolhaas, “Imagining Nothingness,” l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 238 (April 1985): 67. Repr. in Koolhaas, S, M, L, XL (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1995), 199–202. 2 K-Hole, “Chaos Magic,” K-Hole 05 (2015). 3 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978), 203.
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Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, John Yurchyk, Andrew Frame, Mark Acciari, Phillip Denny, Jason Bond, Steve Gertner, Mathew Staudt, Sarah Wagner, Fauzia Evanindya, Fancheng Fei, Griffin Ofiesh, Michael Abel, Paul Ruppert, Yitao Wang, Ayesha Ghosh, Jacob Comerci, Michaela Friedberg, Taylor Cornelson, Laura Salazar Book Design: Studio Lin Special Thanks: The Architectural Imagination Curators: Cynthia Davidson, Director, Anyone Corporation and Monica Ponce de Leon, Dean, Princeton University School of Architecture. Jack Self, Curator of the British Pavilion at 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale. T. Conrad Therrien, Curator of Architecture and Digital Initiatives, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum. Ana MiljaÄ?ki, critic, curator, and Associate Professor, MIT.
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The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic information is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de A Situation Constructed from Loose and Overlapping Social and Architectural Aggregates 2016 Michael Meredith & Hilary Sample, MOS Architects, New York © Copyright 2016 by Authors and Spurbuchverlag ISBN: 978-3-88778-488-1 Publication © by Spurbuchverlag 1. print run 2016 Am Eichenhügel 4, 96148 Baunach, Germany. 126
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All rights reserved. No part of this work is by any mode (print, photocopy, microfilm, CD, or any other process) to be reproduced, nor is it to be processed, manifolded, or broadcast (by application of electronic systems) without approval of the copyright holder. AADR—Art Architecture Design Research publishes research with an emphasis on the relationship between critical theory and creative practice. AADR Curatorial Editor: Dr. Rochus Urban Hinkel, Stockholm Production: pth-mediaberatung GmbH, Wßrzburg Cover Image: MOS Architects
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Cities structure our lives, resources, interactions, and identities. From Sebastiano Serlio to Rem Koolhaas, architects have used the metaphor of theater, presenting the city as stage, a comic set for comic acts, delirious city for delirious subjects, generic city for generic subjects, and so on. Today, however, we are social anywhere, actors onstage and off. So what happens when the city no longer structures us, or when basic urban elements—streets, buildings, facades, and addresses—have been augmented, superimposed, and untethered by or replaced through technology? First presented at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, A Situation Constructed from Loose and Overlapping Social and Architectural Aggregates is a playful investigation into urban alternatives. Employing neither the holistic worldview of mapping nor the isolated islands of architectural typology, MOS imagines a proposal where the city is everywhere.… With essays by Ana Miljački, Jack Self, and T. Conrad Therrien.