Michael Meredith

Misreading Misreading
From: <info@mos-office.net> To: *** Subject: FW: FW: FW: RE: FW: Misreading Misreading
In fact, what characterizes the neo-avantgarde is the relentless twisting of the boundaries of the architectural - in terms of its medium, location, processes, thematics, and materials - by transforming its modes ofproduction and reception as well as its institutional settings. Improbable as this goal may seem, these practices aimed at once to establish and to undermine a disciplinary identity, as opposed to simply confirming a commercial or professional one. Informed by the events of May 68, this second generation of neoavantgarde animated a consideration ofpost-liberal social and institutional models through a misreading of the discipline's classical (and modernist) terms: the informe (in place of ideal form, beauty or delight), falling or instability (for firmness), and fiction (for commodity or the empirical facts of function).

- R.E. Somol's unpublished phD Dear ***, As you are aware, the current situation, it can't go on (the last few times we've hung out J. has reminded me of that Marx quote, you know the one - History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. After he says it, all I can think of is what happens after that, the third or fourth time). Architectural production appears listless, caught in a frictionless ever-twisting of boundaries to such a degree that no technique or idea dies. After the quote-unquote end ('90s Decon) we no longer had clear historical narratives of progress, only a shifting topography of production. For a while it was all good, but while everyone was partying like it was 1999, the so-called discipline must have atrophied because I don't even know if we can still call it that - maybe there's a discipline, but nowadays there are no clear methods of evaluation or
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analysis . In place of the discipline, all that's left is history. I suppose it is liberating for some. This postapocalyptic condition has been elaborated by our friend (John MCMorrough] in his article "Ru(m)ination" - you know, the one about architectural ruins and zombies, which I would say, for better or worse, defines the current generation. (I'm never sure how generations are defined, but I think I'm in a group after yours, because you were part of my education - a sort of drug of choice for me and many of my classmates, one that made our world more focused and stranger. It's how I imagine those As-Seen-on-TV, High-Def-Vision sunglasses must feel.) So, if the neo-avantgarde that has been illustrated so concisely is a parade of well-known avatars for individual architectural mediums - Hejduk the symbolic, Venturi the iconic, and Eisenman the indexical - followed by the generational reaction against it from Koolhaas (program) and Tschumi (event), then what about the possibility of a new zombie avant-garde (the neo-neo-neo-neo?-avantgarde)j is it even possible? Would you see yourself as some idealized disciplinary holdout, like Charlton Heston in The Omega Man, or could it be the case instead that individual mediums, techniques, or genres are no longer related to any specific architectural avatar - that theY're all available for use, all the time? It might even be the best way to produce a repetition of misreadings, combinations, and superimpositions that becomes instrumental in the production of new effects for architecture - the rampant and promiscuous collapse of informe, instability, and fiction with their predecessors form, firmness, and facts/commodity, etc. Yes, caffeinated repetition pushed toward collapse is instrumental to our methodologies of production. Our "gray" is no longer the "low" vernacular realism of Venturi, but the polychromatic spectral vomit of rainbows that constantly shift between psychedelic effect and scientific code - where architecture is neither hardcore realism nor a critical dialectic. It oscillates within the space between unstable and firm, fact and fiction, semantics and syntax, representation and the real. Facts are great, but theY're not enough. If anything, this ambiguous space between states is the constructed representational space of narrative and stories. (Architectural narratives provide a counterpoint to the dull contemporary architectural discourse, which has retreated into the technical - both a pedantic-technical formalism and the seemingly all-powerful, moral-pedantic-technical discourse of function, performance, and sustainability. I'm
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not sure what's worse, zombies or hippies, but zombiehippies have got to be even worse.) If anything, it is both positivisms - formal and functional - that we are working against. Ultimately, we're interested in the representational and imaginary project of architecture, which can be as important as any built project, if not more. As an aside: Am I the only one who thinks Tafuri got the "social" completely wrong? The representational project of architecture is the more social project, especially considering our media environment.

* Message truncated due to size *

In terms of "what's next" (if we assume that imagining the near future of "next," as opposed to the far future, is inevitably a personal act), our approach toward architecture is becoming more and more explicitly post-medium - like art, where painters produce videos or make objects, sculptors make T-shirts or food, etc. - a constructed representational space where institutionalized and dialectical readings of art/ life, real/fake, fact/fiction become intentionally exacerbated, frustrated, and problematized. This shifting temporal space between production and reception is where we locate the architectural project. Our generational crisis is not how to engage the real world but how to operate within the equivocating world of genres - the commodification of the socio-political (disciplinary) world of architecture to the point where it is all good. Familiar methods of going toward a degree-zero architecture are no longer possible because it is just another genre. (For instance, the grid is no longer a metaor non-figural a priori nothing; it is iconography, just another sign among signs.) Our proposal, for the time being, is to play both within the world and the archive, to exacerbate a multiplicity of genres and referents simultaneously in order to produce something that's easy and difficult to classify through multiple ontologies. It's an avant-garde practice that we are trying to maintain - a playful and productive gap between production and reception that's key to all avantgarde work. Frankly, it requires at least twice as much effort. As you know, it isn't the architectural rhetoric, nor the drawings, nor the house itself that makes Eisenman's Hou se II ultimately interesting or relevant, but the relationship between them. It is not the poetry of Hejduk, but the unsettling superimposition of the poetry and the constru:::::r: The irresolvable collapse of subject and object relation: :;.::.: of fact and fiction) into strange architectural ub:e::::>:.:.=
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that misread, rewrite, erase, and repeat history - and I know it might be fleeting, utterly futile, irreconcilable, and temporary - is what we're working on, at least for the near future. Hope you're doing well. Best,

xxxx
PS - Here's a link to our latest video, tell me what you think.

MICHAEL MEREDITH IS A PRINCIPAL IN MOS (ALONG WITH HILARY SAMPLE) AND AN ASSOCIATE PROFES SOR AT THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN.

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