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Blue
Monday: Stories of Absurd Realities and Natural Philosophies,
by Robert Sumrell & Kazys Varnelis.
The first book by AUDC
-- comprised of Robert Sumrell and Kazys Varnelis -- is
a small, almost pocket-sized paperback that "captures
three moments in modern culture that offer glimpses into
our increasingly perverse relationship to architecture,
culture, cities, and objects." This description is
fitting for the Architecture Urban Design Collaborative,
"a research group dedicated to using the tools of architecture
to research the role of the individual and the community
in the contemporary urban environment." In the world
of AUDC the lines separating the various disciplines are
blurred, in favor of collaboration towards "finding
ways of bringing people together."
As an alternative research practice,
AUDC's focus and methods may be difficult to understand
or grasp initially, but this book skillfully explains their
point of view. The three moments -- LA's One Wilshire Boulevard
"telecom hotel," the Muzak Corporation, and Quartzsite,
Arizona -- offer alternative urbanisms that have, in one
way or another, been incorporated into contemporary life
without our knowledge or any voluntary participation. For
example, who knew that One
Wilshire Boulevard houses enormous amounts of network
infrastructure -- like an unoccupied office building --
and that it also routes much of the digital communication
taking place, the apparent antithesis of the United States'
Cold War dispersion that helped spawn the country's suburbia.
One begins the essay thinking that the network infrastructure
required for virtual communications is evenly dispersed,
like the computers we communicate with, but by the end one
realizes not only that this isn't the case, but that those
blank facades in city centers or suburban tracts could be
housing anything. In this case, One Wilshire is
the centralized location of dispersal, an oxymoron that
might only be possible in our contemporary milieu.
Alongside this and the three other
moments, the authors include three narratives that fit the
"strange realities" of the book's title, giving
the reader the realization that truth can be stranger than
fiction. One story -- accompanying the text on Quartzsite,
an essay also included in the wonderful book Desert
America -- recounts a farmer's attachment to a
headless chicken, one he tried to slaughter but failed in
doing so. Absurd to say the least, the authors find much
of interest in the story, much bordering on the esoteric
and overly intellectual or academic, though they approach
it with a sense of wondering that is affectionately optimistic
if one agrees with the technological view of the duo. While
Sumrell and Varnelis don't try to connect the dots of the
six essays they present, the variety does illustrate, as
they contend, the perverse relationship of architecture,
cities, and objects. Most importantly they see architecture
as a uniting force -- or at least approach, if not a force,
per se -- through which they devote their unique research,
research that other architects should pay attention to now
and in the future.
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