Architecture Discoursed

While this particular blog is not about Architecture per se-I tend to discuss topics more personal, and random-I would like to mention a few blogs I have added to the Design portion of the sidebar. I am a regular reader of BLDGBLG. I think I picked up on it from a posting at Curbed SF at some stage. Anyway, I like a lot of the content: lots of musings, and discoveries from a broad range of topics, related back, even tangentially, to design and architecture. There is a particularly strong interest in the whole film & architecture genre that seems appropriate for an L.A.-based blogger. Well, the past week or so BLDBLG has been posting non-stop about this Postopolis! event in NYC, which was a recent gathering of several architecture bloggers from across the country. At first I was put off by that exclamation point, because in general I think most architects are butchers of language, treating it much like a material, and refashioning it at their whim with no regard for clarity of meaning, or tradition, and coming up with all sorts of too clever, smarmy results, e.g. (B)architecture: the topology of tippling, or some such. But then I started to read certain Suprematist leanings in the usage of the exclamation point, very Tatlin, very Malevich, very El Lissitzky. And I just love the graphic design coming out of Russia in those days, or I guess it was the U.S.S.R at that point: so collective, so optimistic, so revolutionary.

So I took a closer look, as it turns out these bloggers were actually kinda cute, immediately sparking my interest, since I love it when substance and beauty can be found together. As it turns out, I am loving Miss Representation. A reading (or deliberate "miss" reading as it were) of the name alone is hours of masturbatory, intellectual fun. Whether to refer to the writer as he or she, the complexity of gender and sex, the fluidity of gender in a medium of interaction where we can all adopt any number of identities. And I'm spinning off in a million directions. I mean, architecture after all is total porn, and there are endless ways of associating design and sex, i.e. "queer space and heterotopias". Okay, that last bit references something I wrote offline a long time ago in school, in response to that essay by what's his face; I'll get into that another time.

To the point, Miss Representation's use of prose is nothing short of orgasmic. As a lover of language(s), I can't help but get excited by an architect who really can write, and make use of metaphors, obscure references, oodles of SAT words, and complex sentence structure-I was so totally turned on by that essay on historic preservation.

Tropolism is another site I'm really getting into. His ideas resonate very closely to my own design concerns. I am looking forward to perusing the archive, as I have a lot of free time coming up.