Call it madness, if you want… but the new world knows only resistance… when I bend in order to avoid accepting the rules and their authority, I am destroying the foundations, I am insulting their legitimacy… There is rage in the face of my madness, a ferocious rage as if they found themselves faced with an act of revolt… Cretin, don't you understand that it's exactly that?
Antonio Negri, The Bent Man: Didactics of the Rebel, (2005)
Two worlds face each other today: Davos and Porto Alegre. One represents business and the operative economy, both financial and managerial; the other, the multitudes and their potential for organization from the bottom up -- for a productive and operative resistance against the first.
How can the architect, artist, scientist, writer, and citizen absorb, swallow, and digest this Janus-like condition without favoring one over the other? How can they walk on the razor's edge, following a schizoid strategy of weaving together contradictory forces, of knitting together two genetically opposed wires? On the one hand, technology as a vector of invention in the pursuit of the "businessdom," the mix of free-enterprise and the ideology of progress that was a basis of the democracy empire, and on the other, the growing of the bottom-up, of the delegation of power's simulacrum as a highly imperfect and corruptible system that needs to be renovated by, and through, the multitudes and their creative energy and potential.
Log 25 will explore ways to navigate this antagonism, which could be negotiated in an (un)certain and ambiguous manner… nonhierarchical, nondeterministic, defining a path in which Urbanism and Architecture could fuse bottom-up and top-down, contingently, simultaneously, as if the ingredients were making recipes, and recipes were modifying the substance of the ingredients… apparatuses of exchange, [1] which transform the game of power and the knowledge diffused through that game.
The stuttering between Resilience (recognition of vitalism as a force of life and innovation) and Resistance ("Creating is resisting" [2]) will be the goal… 1+1=?
Architecture today is shifting, or drifting, in the pure logic and strategy of shaping, where fabrication, expertise, efficiency, and computation have become substitutes for the logic of the raison d'être. Like the car company producing cars, where a specific social organization has been created to manage production without diagnosing the structural and human alienation produced by that system, the discipline of architecture is going back to its own ghetto, constructing simultaneously an efficiency and legitimacy of knowledge from evaluation and expertise, which gather and target a high degree of professionalism… while raising the fences, the fortress wall of its "territory," with loneliness and detachment and a kind of absurd arrogance[3].
Paradoxically the world is being pulled and pushed in so many directions, producing contradictory tensions, new conflicts, new nationalism, new local ideologies, even new El Dorados with flickering financial firewors - mirages in the desert. In this context, it is not innocently that a group of philosophers requestions the foundation of democracy, the validity of its structure and the procedures of deliegation of power; requestions the notion of government, of governance. Yet architecture, wallowing in its comfortable post-digital affect, or afraid to lose the privileges acquired in a period when the reason of a few presided over the destiny of many, stands straight in the phantasm of control, with tooling at its origin (master planning) and substituting the green-washing expertise of "ecology," or the social meanings of "social networking," for the need to refound its own practice, and the reason for this practice, in a polis-political approach.
More: Here. And the deadline is February 15, 2012.
Log is the premier print journal of architectural writing and criticism today. Recent topics include: the necessity of the metacritique in architecture; burgeoning urbanism in Dubai; Venice and its defiance of the modern; lying with images; unanswerable questions posed by signature buildings; the vainglories of "research architecture"; cultural patrimony in Paris; the political and material expediency of the building envelope; molecular gastronomy as an analogue of the excesses of parametric architectures; the troubled, but fascinating reception of Gilles Deleuze in New York, in the 1970s, and the subsequent development of the publications Semiotext(e) and Zone; and Peter Greenaway's multi-media intervention, Wedding at Cana, at the 2009 Venice Biennale.
A carefully crafted compendium of essays, conversations (interviews), and short observations on contemporary buildings and trends, Log published thre times a year.
