BLDGBlog’s GM sez, “Ballardian.com just posted a conversation I recorded with them this past summer, about J.G. Ballard, corporate office parks, science fiction, sexual repression, the Taliban, David Cronenberg, the Paris riots, shopping malls, British fashion, right-wing militias, Rem Koolhaas, China Mieville, Max Barry, the US publishing industry, gated housing developments, Margaret Thatcher’s son, Steven Spielberg, Sigmund Freud, Archigram, etc. etc. etc.”
What I really mean is that, in any discussion of architecture, there are these inevitable holes through which you might glimpse something else, something supposedly outside the bounds of architecture entirely: gravity, say, because you’re calculating stress-loads, or plate tectonics as you design a building in an earthquake zone – Tokyo, Los Angeles, Istanbul. For that matter, you have to decide where to put the windows, and so the movement of the sun comes into play – and, thus, you’re talking about astronomy, and terrestrial rotation, solstices, the equinox, constellations. Soon you’ve got the climate, and topography, and even forestry and botany and global trade and labour law – etc. etc. Global economics. The list expands and expands until ‘everything in the fucking universe has something to do with architecture’. Good moods, bad moods; enclosure, frustration, claustrophobia, imprisonment. Freedom. The price of steel. Natural history. Military bases, oil derricks, mining camps. It’s all architectural.
(Thanks, GM!)