Conflating Coherent Discontinuous Models of Morphologicality

In the course of my duties as Direktor of the Shovel Repair Institute, I engage in periodic reviews of the curriculum to correct inefficiencies and find ways to make our conscripts cadets better and more complete mindless automatons productive worker units members of society. As such, I was made aware of the following description of a training course for a diploma offered by the Architectural Association's School of Architecture. I present it in full so that my fellow Cubists may appreciate the full monstrous absurdity pure genius of it:

Meta-Elements and Integrated Morphologies
Maria Fedorchenko

The unit will continue its disciplinary project on the city, engaging with the interdependencies between disparate domains—imagination and reality, concept and form, text and image. We assert the urgency of the evolved visionary project that is rooted in a deep knowledge of the contemporary European city and architectural history. This year we will conflate several scales and levels of work on new models for "dis-continuity and coherence", tackling urban "meta-elements" as architectural diagrams and morphologies.

Building upon our previous cities of multiplied utopias and artefacts, ruptured transfers, systems and frameworks and, ultimately, conceptual and spatial playgrounds in space-time, we will allow our pursuit of emerging urban models to inform new phases in the breakdown and re-integration of an architectural object itself. Our search will go beyond straightforward augmentation—of Hyper-Buildings, Super-Blocks and Meta-Streets—as we try to circumscribe and categorise architectural segments of the city. And we will also question previous shortcuts in scale and complexity—from containing diffused fields of architectural particles within mega-frameworks or variations on Arks, Babels and Arcologies, to enforcing and indexing systemic models of accumulation and growth—seeking internally coherent objects-devices that can also tackle fraught issues of monumentality and identity, agency and resilience.

To do so, we will need to short-circuit current contextual demands with long-standing disciplinary pursuits—utopias and ideal plans, figure/ground and typology, diagrammatic system and formal assemblage—by exploring unlikely "friendships" and mediations within the streams of precedents (from Filarete to Soleri and Koolhaas; from Boullée to Ungers and Krier). Combining creative methods and processes, we will "cycle" between analysis and synthesis, creative withdrawal and critical re-engagement with the exchange platforms of the unit and the architectural culture beyond it. Emphasising aesthetic achievement and theoretical coherence (as seen in trademark "meta-drawings" and final books), these catalogues of architectural "morphs and monsters" will be embedded within robust Projects on the City—works that reaffirm architecture's unique capacity to evolve and grow from within, and to effect profound change in the cities and the minds of the future.

Comrade Fedorchenko's stupendous mediocrity brilliance is just astounding! Do you even know what an "internally coherent object-device that can tackle fraught issues of monumentality and identity, agency and resilience" is? Can you honestly say you could recognize one if beaten confronted with it during an interrogation interview by your local kommissar? I don't, and I couldn't, which is why I've already signed up for this course and scheduled a Jiffy-Lobo™ in preparation. You are all required encouraged to do the same so that we might ourselves become objects-devices better able to multiply our utopia and continue to evolve our own visionary disciplinary project upon manpeoplekind.

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Oh my! That is some serious wordplay! Forget for the moment that it is impossible to glean any coherent meaning from any of that rambling discourse . . ."imagination and reality, concept and form, text and image," . . . "but imagine if you will that you are crossing over into another dimension." (If one of the comrades could please insert an audio file of the soundtrack from the Twilight Zone ™ while we are reading this contrived, pedantic tripe, then you will begin to see how IT ALL MAKES SENSE!

What this sounds like is something from Central Liberal Arts Planning - and NOT Central Planning ™ ! You know, you've got to keep a close eye on these Planner types. They are always trying to dictate where and how the proletariat should live and how high they are to be stacked, forgetting that that is OUR job! They have co-opted our beloved and revered term 'sustainability' with which we can engage in the Marxist redistribution of wealth, the equality of outcome and the erosion of sovereignty. Only then can we reduce inequality here in the Motherland.

And NO, I don't know what an . . ."internally coherent object-device that can tackle fraught issues of monumentality and identity, agency and resilience," is! (Are batteries included or will I need an extension cord?) But I must learn!

Imperatorskiy Pingvin, please correct my inefficiencies and sign me up and we'll all carpool, bike, walk, ride the bus, take the "IT" or hitch the flatbed up behind the tractors and travel together to reduce congestion, conserve energy, and reduce pollution - like good planners!
 

 

Maria Fedorchenko has recently arrived on Earth from the planet Heranus. After centuries of extremely deep thought by others of her kind she was diagnosed as suffering a particularly nasty spell of hebephrenic schizophrenia. She/zer/it/whatever, is vacationing and prefers to be alone till the moonbeam express arrives to carry her back to old Heranus.