Extract from Pulp Architecture goes Yale

From the street up


Pulp practices, like Richard Brautigan in Trout Fishing in America, are working on the fringe of praxis itself, continually fraying the edges. Heroes are individual, dangerous and alienating. Buildings representing the sculptural outflow of such heroism are of little interest, though the technology that makes some of them possible is naturally of extreme importance. Pulp is a hunchback strategy. It takes for granted the obscenity of fame and the star architectural system.
I do not see these individuals or young pulp groups attending world conferences on architecture and swapping stories with Charles Correa or Daniel Libeskind. Nor do I see them appearing at biennales, although they may be tempted soon enough. When someone like Peter Eisenman says ‘we’ll be seeing you again’ I don’t think these pulp architects would be rude, but I fancy they would not be seeing him again. They may not even turn up at these events at all. In this way our imagined new movement-in-progress is an underclass including those whose thinking might not conventionally impact on architecture.
There is nothing visually or identifiably similar in the pulp practices that appear to be working at the edge of architecture. As yet they have not branded their work so that we can recognise their future projects or identify a common practice. In this case they are not and may never be a community at all outside these papers. They move, their work is in progress; their solutions often partial, their destinations restless. From Delhi to Tokyo, from Graz to Texas, from Terezin to Toronto, from Arlington to Yale, they are working in the seams of other disciplines.
Such a new movement would under usual circumstances come to a stop. The usual circumstances involve the critic, the world and the text. The critic organises a critical enquiry suiting the strategies. The written project becomes a tactical way of expressing larger strategies, greater agendas. There are many examples of this in the 20th century. We are familiar with this way of scripting architectural practices and work into critical groupings like Post-Modernism, Late Modernism, Neo-Modernism and more recently Liquid Architecture and Neo-Expressionism. Charles Jencks is one of the more well known critics. He demonstrated a brilliant, fluid talent at addressing change before it received critical recognition. From Post-modernism to the new paradigm, chaos, and Morphogenetic Architecture, often his own critical recognition stood in for the professional triumph.
No mean feat!
But it is the inherent ambiguity implied in the phrase a ‘movement in progress’ which naturally resists this kind of grouping. Many who can be considered Pulp Architects are architects who have left but haven’t arrived yet. Some are practitioners in other disciplines displaying a new approach and thinking that will re-shape our environments. Many desire to stay away from more conventional terminology: the city, the town, the streetscape, the road.
Even the word’ architecture’ proves too narrow for the vision-to-come.

(the full text will be soon available on www.pulparchitecture.net)