Ud24_T20_"Office Policy" MOS

UNIVERSIDAD POLITÉCNICA DE MADRID ESCUELA TÉCNICA SUPERIOR DE ARQUITECTURA

udd

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federico soriano Textos 2016-2017

20 Office Policy MOS, “Office Policy”. “Lista de normas de trabajo”.

Dear Employee or Other Interested Party, Policies are put in place to serve you, the employee (hereafter called “you”), and our firm. (See Appendix 11.0 “How to Read the Policy.”) MOS (hereafter called “the Office”) is a growing and changing architectural firm that wishes to construct a progressive architectural avant-garde. This avant-garde has its own desires to exist after, and in a funny way because of, the previous “opportunistic” practice generation of architects and the exhaustion of the digital Rococo. (See Appendix 5.1 “Seven Habits of Highly Annoying Digital Rococo People” [HADRP], Appendix 2.8 “How to Talk to Members of the Practice Generation” [PG], and Flowchart 1.3 “Nineties vs. Noughties.”) While we cannot have an Office Policy (hereafter called “the Policy”) that covers every possibility, eventuality, or human need, we do have leadership (hereafter called “the Principals”) that will listen and endeavor to make appropriate decisions that are fair to you and the Office. Therefore, this Policy is not a contract, and it is not binding. It is merely a set of guidelines that may be altered at any time, without notice. More than anything, the Policy expresses the right and obligation of the Principals to interpret and modify the Policy when individual needs or the Office’s well-being are at stake—which, to be honest, happens all the time. (See General Regulations F.5 “In the Event of a Power Failure, or Too Many Interns.”)

You should subscribe to the following guidelines that constitute the Policy: 1

PART 1: Employment Status, Hiring Criteria, Termination 1.

The Office adheres to all local, state, and federal laws, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA), the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, and the ADA Amendments Act of 2008. These acts could also be said to inform a more general inclusivity that extends to the formal and organizational techniques we employ in our work. (See §§ 1–3 and Appendix 3.7 “The Exclusion of Inclusionary Models, aka Multiple Multiple Multiples [MMM]”) 2.

The Office strongly supports all disciplinary minorities. We are for the rough over the smooth, the polychromatic over the glossy white, and the primitive and awkward over the sophisticated and elegant. (See Appendix 7.2 “No Composing Colors Pictorially—Monochromatic is Polychromatic is______, etc.”)

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Termination can result from, but is not limited to, documented and undocumented cases of the following: — Poor Performance (PP) — Lack of Accountability and Thought (LACT) — Unexcused Creative Absenteeism (UCAB) — Illegal Acts (ILLACTs) — Falsification Of Facts (FOFs) — Unauthorized Destruction of Office Property (UDOP) — Demise of the Architectural Discipline (DAD) — Excessively Professional Behavior (EPB) — Improper Use or Distribution of the Office Policy (IUDOP) — Egregious Taste in Music (ETM) — Circumstances Beyond Our Control (CBOC) PART 2: Coming to and Leaving Work, Attitudes, Dress and Behavior at Work, Workplace Environment 1.

You will arrive at the Office when you are awake and ready to work. We ask that you not come to work resembling a “bad version of yourself” (or someone else for that matter; however, a good version of someone else is acceptable under § 2

2.1), and that you not enter the premises until you have successfully resolved any conditions that could be considered contagious: grumpiness, illness, or any other attitude or infection which may contaminate the rest of the Office. You will leave the Office when you are finished, except in cases of grave injury, illness, or emergency.

2.

You are asked to remember that we are in a moment after Architecture (see Illustration 0.1 “The Full Scale Map of Disciplinary Dead Ends”), and to work accordingly. This should be understood to mean that currently there is no cohesive “discipline,” and there are no shared methods of analysis or evaluation.

There is exhaustion. There is only work. There is only the multiplicity of genres, which we should playfully subvert. (See Appendix 4.3 “Generally Unacceptable Definitions [GUDs] of Multiplicity.”)

3.

We have zero tolerance for sexual harassment (including the overuse of so-called seductive and expressive forms), violence (except when directed against the professional routines of architecture itself, see § 2.2), and theft of personal and Office property (which includes copying digital materials that are the property of the Office). (See Appendix 2.7 “Generally Acceptable Definitions [GADs] of Zero Tolerance.”) Please note, however, that thefts perpetrated against other disciplines are encouraged. We do not typically invent terms; instead, we steal them from art history, criticism, engineering, science, and philosophy and rework them for an architecture audience.

4.

Although we understand that you probably emerged from architecture school addicted to specific techniques, we do not allow smoking indoors, meaningless Rococo formmaking, using hallucinogens during office hours, excessive smoothness or slickness, and pointless contemporary pastiche—bad versions of something bad to begin with (BVERSBB)—under the guise of the parametric or so-called really-highly-advanced-digital-computation-stuff.

5.

You are encouraged to report incidents of any kind to the Principals, including any known or suspected violations of the Policy. (Especially if you’re somehow implicated. See AIA Legal Review Bulletin 5.1.2.a, February 3, 1987, “Architects, Litigation and the Rights of the Accused.”)

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6.

You are asked to remember that one aim of the Office is to get it “exactly wrong.”

(See Appendix 2.1 “Warhol’s Missing Spleen” and Appendix 2.2 “The Inclusion of Exclusionary Models.”) We believe in the counterintuitive as an important architectural device. Please note, however, that § 2.6 does not pertain to matters of dress.

7.

You will subscribe to the fact that the Office is not quoteunquote professional.

This, of course, also refers to our preferred interoffice discourse, both verbal and formal, which should involve humor, lightness, intellectual and disciplinary promiscuity, and the awkwardness of architectural pleasures.

8.

You are expected to exhibit indifference toward coherence, especially as this may pertain to matters of dress. (See Appendix 11.1 G. Bateson, “Why Do Things Have Outlines?,” from Steps to an Ecology of Mindfulness: Collected Essays in Architecture, Anthropology, and Cartoons, Chicago: University of Delaware Press, 1970.)

PART 3: Approaches to Production, Addiction, Elimination and Recycling 1.

The Office supports and is supported by narratives—in particular, narratives that go nowhere. You should know that the production of fictitious, misread, referential storylines from history, contemporary events, art criticism, and sci-fi is an important component of our work. (See Appendix 12.3 “Lost Cats and Women Who Disappear Suddenly in the Work of Haruki Murakami.”) Understanding that the gathering of new material is crucial to the success of the firm, you may be required to attend obscure and unpopular lectures in order to take notes or recordings that can be utilized in routine Office mash-ups. Collecting, on the verge of hoarding, is essential to the Office. On the other hand, see §§ 3.2 and 3.5, along with Appendix 4.5 “Terry Gilliam’s Glove Compartment.”

2.

Employees are expected to be mindful of others, clean up after themselves, and flush the toilet after each use.

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3.

While we encourage promiscuous flirtation with both of the major dead ends of contemporary architectural discourse— Functional Positivism (sustainability, socioeconomic responsibility) and Formal Positivism (scripting)—you should probably subscribe to the deep-seated suspicion that both of these dead ends, if allowed to grow into their mature forms of false positivism and expressionism, are natural enemies of an avantgarde. Positivist techniques producing gestural expressionism are to be avoided. (See Appendix 0 “General Office Protocol” [GOP], included here for reference, and Appendix 6.2 “R. Smithson’s East Coast West Coast Part 2,” concerning the second film of his trilogy.)

4.

The library (books and nonperishable materials) is a resource for the Office.

Please take advantage of it, especially in your search for various forms of repetition and rhyme (which are so central to Office production). But do try to keep it neat and orderly. Remember that books are useful for generating arcane footnotes, and the Office is interested in an architecture with footnotes. (See Appendix 3.2 “Learning How to Think like D. F. Wallace.”) Reshelf books and materials in their proper location. Please do not remove books from the Office, but feel free to add to the outdated architectural history textbook section of the library with your own materials.

5.

The Office is committed to recycling. Please do your part to separate all paper, plastic, and metal products, expired “avantgarde” practices, ink cartridges, obsolete computer equipment, “obsolete” drawing technologies, light bulbs, formal deadends, tennis shoes, tires, etc., along with organic forms that are suitable for composting. Bear in mind that even the Russian Constructivists recycled previous material to assemble a self-proclaimed avant-garde. (See Appendix 1.7 “Boym’s Off- Modern Reader” and Appendix 4.9 “Max Schier’s On Classical vs. Modern Collage.”) Make worth of waste.

PART 4: Other Employee Responsibilities 1.

You are responsible for your own dishes and for cleaning up any crumbs around workstations that, if left unattended, may cause a recurrence of the Great Ant Swarm Infestation (GASI) of 2004. These emergent swarms are still infesting many offices to this day and are to be avoided, unless deemed friendly.

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2.

You are responsible for nurturing the Office’s various self-organizing systems.

These include the mold colonies on the compost heap, the software programs on the bio-fuel server farm in the basement, the static-electrical phone system, and the sustainable solar array surrounding the Office headquarters, which may require hourly maintenance to ensure proper functioning.

3.

You are responsible for answering the phone. Especially awkward employees may be excused from this task. Please do not hang up on clients unless previously authorized to do so.

4.

You should aim to produce architecture which functions like a form of music that sounds right to some and like noise to others. The Office should be thought of as an experimental pop band. (See Appendix 7.3 “Rhythmic Dissonance as Protagonist in Contemporary Pop, Bands like Technologically Induced Personality Disorders, The Casual Data Aesthetic Cuties, Post–Moral Moral Mediums, The Sensational Lint Collectors, Scientific-Haze, Schizophrenic Lovers, etc.”)

5.

You are responsible for working within the postmedium condition of our Office.

The longstanding rupture between representation and the real (Art/Life) has generated fracturing forces that have fragmented architectural production into a myriad of genres. Multiplying and competing definitions of architectural media now run rampant with strategies based on geometry, materiality, typology, structure, program, computation, phenomenology, narrative, context, figuration, and performance, to name a few. This speciation of the discipline demonstrates architecture’s postmedium condition. Today we have neither a singular disciplinary authenticity nor a representational one. (Please refer to sections §§ 3.1 and 3.4 for specific duties related to § 4.5.)

APPENDIX 0: General Office Protocol (GOP) medium (technical support) + convention (artistic genre, typology, history) + play (!@#?) = Architecture We’re still calibrating the exact proportions before we go public with the formula. Certainly, results will vary. Our experiment logs can be found 6

somewhere on our corrupted backup drive. (See Office Manual Section 9.7 “Z:\ ReallyExhaustedData\.”) They may or may not indicate how to proceed. Please bear in mind the following operational procedures as you begin your work.

Medium is how we conceptualize a project (i.e. form, function, material, program, context, and so on). Convention is how we situate and evaluate the work within the discipline. Play is something else altogether. This, of course, remains vague and imperfect but, per usual, we will rely on you to make something of it anyway. History has proven these elements to be highly unstable. Of course, every generation is tasked to rewrite them with their own specific outcome or emphasis in mind. While convention may offer some protection against the anxiety generated by change, medium continually produces new enthusiasms and frictions that exacerbate the improvisation of play.

Medium specificity, as Clement Greenberg saw it, was a search for objective authenticity through material. Medium was Modern Art’s protagonist (see AvantGarde and Kitsch). In architecture, by contrast, authenticity through medium is inherently problematic. (Refer to Adolf Loos, Opposition Reader, Collected Essays: Irrational Positivism, The Well-Dressed Building and the Problem of Non-Aesthetic Aesthetics.) Rather than construct our work, we represent it in an already mediated form (a doubly compounded self-consciousness.) Inherently removed from its subject matter, architecture has been presented with the false choice between the humanist project of situated materiality (i.e. Life) and the posthumanist project of representation (i.e. Art).As if one could choose to be intelligent or sensitive but not both.

As of late we’ve witnessed a kind of return to the “real” in which the tangibility of the built triumphs over the speculation of the unbuilt. Right now the discourse feels trivial at best, and the representation of reality offers an irrefutable proof of concept—photographs and construction documents being the weapons of choice. The advent of software like BIM is desirable insofar as it enables an actual efficiency that can be evaluated objectively, coordinating an array of architectural contingencies and specifications. Extradisciplinary activism, which promises engagement with the world, wins out over (all-too-familiar) formal navel-gazing experimentation. Our generation of architects—the Practice Generation—has focused on engaging the “real,” avoiding anxious cultural discourse in favor of technical manuals, activism, and privileging operative techniques over fictitious narratives and quantifiable data over qualitative rhetoric. (Refer to Harold Bloom, “Weak Vision, Double Vision: the Anxiety of Influence After Macintosh SE,” in Floppy Drives and Archives: The Prehistory of Wired Magazine, 1987–1993, Kindle edition, 2007.) Meaning is somehow more relevant when it can be measured: it’s best depoliticized and matter-of-fact. The discipline has taken on statistics and polling data for lack of any other available ethic. Architecture has become a kind of social science, embracing a facile mode of technological positivism in order to escape the uneasiness of cultural production.

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Post-postmodernism was characterized by a disciplinary exodus from the constraints of an indexical-semiotic model of production and a way of working after language, after symbolism, and after referents. During the ’90s, architectural vocabulary was stripped down to its geometry, code, and core diagrams (the “look ma, no hands” model) in an attempt to avoid provisional imagery or pictorial composition. Architecture aspired to frustrate compositional models with the complexity and instability afforded by distortion, dismantling, twisting, looping, deletion, folding, repetition, and transformation. Computation elevated the rational authority of systems, process, and binary code to the status of protagonist. Architecture seemingly designed itself, discarding the postmodern reliance on imagery and composition while avoiding the problematic nature of authorship and taste. This appropriation of computation allowed architecture to find new modes of organization and composition, relinquishing control while simultaneously expanding our disciplinary techniques in ways that are still being defined. (See Twitter Cliff-notes for “Notes on Relativism,” from Farewell to Reason, Long Live Reason, by Paul Feyerabend Jr., London and New York: Verso. Books, 1987, p. 327.) Today the complexity project of the ’90s lingers through the parametric, permitting ever-greater coordination of information and material. Over time such digital procedures, rather than providing an escape from an architecture of semiotics, have produced crude allegories and/or symbolic languages based upon tautological, now institutionalized constructs.

At the moment our office is operating within and against two competing positivisms—Functionalism (or Performance) and Formalism: the enduring dialectical cliché that has so effectively bifurcated our discipline. The messiness of Architecture’s cultural value is being substituted by an unrelenting battery of data, facts, and figures. Today, the perception of infallibility and seemingly objective methodology surrounding scientific data, those inputs and outputs of formal and functional systems, is pervasive. Media at large has ensured that our world is both irreparably saturated and increasingly diffuse. As a result, the retreat toward this brand of medium specificity has become untenable. We encounter diffuse flatness as a fundamental condition of cultural production. We find ourselves in a moment after Architecture.

APPENDIX 1: Nineties vs. Noughties (NvN) Architecture’s absurd struggle lies within its definition as a socalled discipline that establishes an abstract ontological value system through which we produce and adjudicate work. Many attempts have been made at implementing a logical, objective value system. Eventually, however, they turn into subjectivities that constantly need to be replaced in order to construct new identities and politics.

(See Sigmund Freud, “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made from the Seemingly Inevitable Return of the Repressed within Semi-Autonomous Social and Disciplinary Models,” in Freud, Wax, and the Illusion of Happiness: An Anthology, ed. and trans. Gustav Brill III, New York: Random Home, 1978, p. 12.)

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FLOWCHART 1.3 Nineties (1990–2000)

vs.

Noughties (2000–2010)

Representation

Realism

End of History

End of Representation

Process driven methodologies to avoid postmodern semiotics

Built better than unbuilt, construction logic, performance

Internal, disciplinary

External,

engaged in the “Opportunistic”

world,

Avant-garde

Rear-garde

Theory, critical

Practice, post-critical

Geometry

Physics (i.e. there were no celebrity engineers in the ’90s)

avoid architecture referents, Complexity

avoid architecture referents, Vernacular, Diagrammatic

Formal (Systems)

Functional,

Performance, (Systems)

Sustainable

Non-Materiality (white)

Materiality (rough)

Alias (Maya), 3D Studio Max, Rhino

BIM, Revit, CATIA, Ecotect

Plans, Sections, Process Drawings, Lots of lines, Palimpsests

Diagrams (big text), Arrows, Photorealism, Working Dwgs

Aesthetic (Art)

Urban (Life)

Advanced Architects were not licensed/ academic

Advanced

Architects were professional

licensed/

Magazines that get work—Dwell, Wallpaper,Surface, Blogs…

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APPENDIX 2: Strategies Against Composition (SAC)

S.A.C. Diagram 3.2 (not to scale)

Our expanded field of Strategies Against Composition (SAC) is not an index of ideological islands or static positions. It is a dance diagram— a field where various architectures can exist simultaneously. The goal is not to occupy a singular position with this index but rather to play upon it, to make it oscillate and collapse.

APPENDIX 6: Indifference, As If Our work mumbles, if anything. We’re indifferent, maybe. The demise of the architecture discipline through the loss of a clear medium specificity has disrupted the dominating formalist/ structuralist/post structuralist narrative of the architectural avantgarde and the academy. We have gone from hegemonic resistance in Marxist critique toward totalizing immersion in the neoliberal economy akin to Pierre Bourdieu’s “field of cultural production.” The unprecedented success of the ’60s and ’70s is our ongoing oppression of liberation. The baby boomers and “postmodernism”—not the goofy pedimented buildings or the scatological piles of sticks and beams but rather the discourse that hollowed out architecture like a hand puppet—has at last exhausted its exhaustion. Those games were once a liberating escape, having produced a clear discipline, an ontology of values.

Now we try to escape their escape.

If the myth of Modernism was that it operated across multiple registers, multiple disciplines, as a search for an unprecedented unity, and if Postmodernism (not Pomo) was relinquishing the aspiration of utopian unification and instead instrumentalized fragmentation, then our current moment is something else.

(See Appendix 11.4 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History, Again, Post-Again” 10

and “Neo- Human Post-Humanism,” in Reflections on the Last Man, or How to Make Eye Contact with Historians Living in the End Times, New York: Free Press, 2002.). Today we are not lamenting the loss of the whole; part and whole are seemingly interchangeable terms. (See Miscellaneous 41.5, Audiobook International Travel Edition, Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres, vol. 1: Microspherology, trans. Wieland Hoban, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. p. 291.) We are content to occupy parallel ontologies—a simultaneity of multiple subjectivities, foams, niches, networks, perhaps due to the ubiquity of media, social media, etc. (Reference: Denise Scott Brown, Soap at All Scales: Total Design After Lever House, Chicago: Bauhaus Books, 1966, p. 73.) Today, even within the realm of disciplinary autonomy, we have devolved into an archipelago of genres and disparate posturing: the digital freaks, the nerdy geometers, the automated technoutopians, the conceptual ephemeralists, the brooding materialists, the autistic formalists, the slick programmists, humorless neo-pragmatists, DIY-ers, activist do-gooders, cartoon hipsters, sustainable opportunists, etc. Each of these niches and spheres has its own enthusiasts, vocabularies, value systems, and its own utopian desires. We’re left to grapple with a discrete politics produced through the aesthetics within each niche.

Through aesthetics, architecture is rendered political. This can be illustrated through the clichéd analogy of architecture as quoteunquote music that Goethe once wrote and has since been repeated ad nauseam. Music is the most advanced and sublimated aesthetic project. Architects, like musicians, produce momentary subjectivities. Some produce ethnic folk tunes or earnest activist work songs. Some prefer rave music; some ambient, some technical virtuosity; some need lyrics; some are inclined toward the effects of patterns; some like grandeur, some noise, etc. Each genre has its own enthusiasts who care deeply about the material and feel enfranchised or liberated by it. For these groups, a particular music feels more right or more interesting, and as a result, they momentarily believe their music to be better than another. The aesthetic quality of music produces identity and political constituencies—an example of what Jacques Rancière identifies as art’s ability to “constitute a new collective world” through the production of its own politics (see The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes). Architecture, like music, is ontological. (See Office Manual 10.5 “How to Overcome the Itchiness of Aluminum Dust.”) If someone says, “I listen to _____,” we know that it’s likely they also wear _____, they eat _____, their politics are ______, and whether we can or cannot relate to them, etc…. Aesthetics construct identity. They produce one group that says “turn it up” and another that says “that sounds terrible.” Though fleeting, such constructed subjectivities suggest that an architecture conceived of like music is momentary, produced only to be eventually replaced.

Techno is the aesthetic equivalent to the Parametric: both are totalizing dreams, aiming for an expressionism only achieved through positivist logics and repeti11

tion. In our office, we use the same techniques of the Parametric to produce noise and lose control instead of orchestrating the perfect symphony of slick geometries. We’re interested in getting it wrong. We use video-game engines to produce a world in which design and analysis are collapsed; we misuse the scientific palette toward an aesthetic regime.

The first two illustrations in Eisenman’s Notes on Conceptual Architecture are by Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt. This pair of images sets up a disciplinary space, privileging tactics of geometry in tandem with those of methodology, or “following instructions.” We imagined a rewriting whereby the text remains the same, but the illustrations change. If we replace Judd and LeWitt with Serra and Smithson, then we could instantly produce an alternate universe, an alternative disciplinary ontology in possession of new subjectivities based on material, mass, weight, and entropy. (See “On the Reconstruction of Sand Castles After High Tide,” in The Unpublished Writings of a Potentially Unimportant but Highly Marketable Designer, forthcoming, Princeton Architectural Press.)

Instrumentalizing indifference requires cultural maps and discursive narratives in order to locate a space in which to work. We use these to form some other frequency, collapsing aesthetic and ontological niches into something that is not a smooth and easy relationship. We’re looking for an architecture that operates indifferent to medium. (See Appendix 12.9 “Password to the Collection of HowTo Videos.”) We are not trying to eradicate difference or turn everything into an emergent swarm. Architecture exists in an objectnarrative relationship, through a sort of ontological flatness. The products of history—techniques, representation, technology—can be mixed, producing new associations, identities, audiences, and constituencies. We believe in an architecture that is in conversation with other architectures. Unification would only depoliticize architecture altogether.

When we say something is beautiful or elegant, we are referring to a kind of coherence—a recognizable value, an attempt at stabilizing and unifying value to avoid the risk of discordance. If anything, we hope our work will not be unifying or simply illustrate a project/text. We’re okay with being a momentary reprieve for a small group.

APPENDIX 4: Replacing the “Urban” with the “Social” Once upon a time, the city was the premise for and context of the architectural object. Perceived failures of Modernist planning, followed by the destructive tendencies of postwar suburbanization and urban renewal, encouraged many to reconsider architecture’s utopian desires. To reconceptualize both architecture and the city, architects followed what Craig Owens has referred to as an “allegorical impulse.” Aldo Rossi’s theory of “collective memory,” Colin Rowe’s collage 12

city, Peter Eisenman’s superimposed grids, Rem Koolhaas’s delirious cosmopolitanism, the Smithsons’ consumer city of Pop, Kevin Lynch’s mental images, and the dialectical model of Ungers’s archipelago are but a few of the narratives that architects produced to explain the city’s operations and to derive conceptual strategies of architectural invention.

Nowadays, the notion of the “city” can no longer be precisely calibrated against an increasingly vague urban milieu. We seem to be at once confronted with the seeming precision of data alongside the increasingly temporal vagueness of everything. (See Aldo Rossi, “On the Collective Memory of File Servers in the Age of Post-Urban Artifacts,” revised edition, in The Architecture of the City and its Computers, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996, p. 127.) As such, we think of, experience, and map cities differently. The city previously represented architecture’s Other and served as a primary medium for the Postmodern Avant-Garde dialectic of Art and Life. The omnipresence of media and what used to be referred to as the “virtual” has led to a deeper questioning of whether this strict bifurcation— which the postmodern allegories further exaggerated—still holds sway. The physical form of the city has been replaced by a set of diffuse and temporal organizational networks. While the Internet can be seen as both a microcosm of and metaphor for the city, one could argue that the elusive digital realm has, in many ways, eclipsed the city itself. Like the city, the digital domain operates through its own infrastructural, organizational, sociopolitical, economic, and aesthetic logics.

The problems of architecture are no longer the larger urban collective or the city; today we focus on “domains,” small groups or individuals. (For all urban and/or social problems, refer to chapter 18: “Architecture, HTML5, and You! Maximizing User Experience With CSS3,” in Web Design for the 21st Century: A Primer, Cupertino, CA: O’Really Media, 2014, p. 418.) Previous problems of the construction of a shared infrastructure, language, common experience, etc., have shifted toward the problems of constructing identity. Architecture is in service of the construction of multiple identities and new forms of collectivity. In this architecture of identity, the corporate brand and the individual are almost indistinguishable.

APPENDIX 5: Representations of Representations, A Possibly Newer Collectivity Those cartoon avatars of iconic willpower couldn’t care less about what you think, as long as you’re paying attention. They’re busy expressing their individualism, a kind of commercialized expressionism that treasures novelty, but only so long as it makes sense. Meanwhile, the generic (which is not to be confused with “average,” something we consume, together, on Tuesdays in the form of pizza) quietly repeats itself in the background without language or much notice.

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It doesn’t need to make sense. It operates within the vaguely familiar, a vernacular without the baggage of authenticity.

The generic is always referencing something else, pointing away from itself, constructing images constructed from images. The generic and the iconographic no longer require those longgone linguistic and metaobsessed disciplinary models. Nowadays we have no clear index to follow or subvert. There’s no definitive memory, no absolute spirit, only repetition. History has become a diffuse narrative of contingencies. Our current state is a sort of postmodernism without semiotics, postmodernism without language. What’s left is both whole and fragmented, bits and pieces of a flattened ontology where matter, data, and images are made inextricable.

Today we value things that are both repeated and singular. We are constructing our worlds through representations of representations. The generic is our new contemporary collectivity.

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