Note from Martin: The Cloud and the Black Box

By Martin Gledhill

In 1990 the critic Reyner Banham wrote an article entitled The Black Box – the secret profession of architecture in which he wryly observed that the education of architects was essentially one of compression into an approved stereotype, that of the heroic visionary – The Architect. This process broadly involves learning to use language in a manner incompressible to family, friends and to those for whom they ultimately will design. A language rehearsed and refined through a process of ritual sacrifice often known as The Crit, aided or anaesthetized in no small part by sleep deprivation and microwaved food. In addition they are fermented into a concoction of effete, aesthetic sophistication that makes shopping for even the simplest item into a struggle with the forces of universal harmony. Ironic perhaps that the black box is that very device that accident investigators use to examine what went wrong.

The Black Box

I have tried to capture this model in the drawing above. This shows an array of young individuals each with their own creative uniqueness passing through a painfully narrow threshold into our black box, chaotically processed within it and eventually emerging triumphant, with an Apple icon as a head and a two digit hand perfectly evolved in order to click the mouse or to send a text; nicely anticipated by Corb. Quite a club!

Since I was asked to write something about new beginnings I wondered if we might consider a different model to the secret curriculum set out above.

The Cloud

Here that very same collection of individuals coalesces into an equally chaotic field with all its affinities and enmities within, one we might term - a Cloud. The initiation rituals are broadly the same and nonetheless challenging but the individual emerges as just that – Individual. Transformed certainly, but as my old mate Carl Jung observed – every individual is an exception to the rule.