BUILDING ROOMS, BUILDING QUALITIES

Allegra Lockstadt's Building rooms, Building qualities  was generated while she was trying to re-acclimatise and re-adjust to American life. Her hope was that by 'building' rooms with patience and solitude, she would be able to 'glean' these traits back off her drawings.

Meanwhile, over a C-Lab, I've been getting very excited (in a thesis-related manner, as is common place these days). Here is an extract from this conversation between Inaba and Jencks.

CJ:          

The problems here are multiple, because we have the ambition on one level to shape the earth. And yet we do not have either the capacity intellectually, economically, or in terms of power, nor do the politicians. We have an earth-shaping rhetoric, but a Boy Scout ideology. And since we control only two percent of building, we get involved in this false consciousness. We have to go along with the great middle-class lie that we can do something about global warming. That’s the biggest, most unbelievable lie of our time, and everybody takes part in it, especially every architect. They have to, because it’s too unthinkable to say, look, we don’t make any difference, we can’t make a difference, and it’s an institutionalized lie to say that we can make a difference. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do all the things that we’re doing to promote an ecological or green architecture, but we should realize that these are gestures of symbolism and art, because we are artists in the end, and if we want to shape the global environment on an ecological level, we have to use our levers of power. And that means: get involved in politics. But, like the rest of the middle class we get involved in this lie that if everybody stays home and uses low-energy light bulbs we can all solve it together.

JI: 

So do you think that architects are destined to be forever Eagle Scouts? Like men dressed up as little boys acting out a role, but never getting our hands dirty?

CJ:

I would say that you have to be an Eagle Scout with irony. I’m asking for a critical irony, because the Boy Scout ideology is the worst form of self-brain washing. My feeling is that architecture culture is bigger than that, and it can stand up and fight off the lie. And we will do that because we all feel it deep down and we want it said.

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