Statement 62

‘Pop architecture’. These are not words that one hears a lot, or if so, then usually with a rolling eye-ball. But the last decade has – and I think now – finally exhausted the possibilities of modernism, so gloriously revitalized in the mid 1990s – mostly in the context of neoliberalism - and taught in the schools of architecture almost everywhere. Steel, concrete, glass and rubber the universal elements of that expression are now found in everything from luxury condos to modest ‘designer’ houses. In the 1920s that type of modernism was ‘difficult’; today it is the new banal, the new academicism, produced by a few clicks on the computer, even though architects – not even ‘real’ ones’ - have any idea where steel and concrete are made or their component elements mined. Everyone wants the effect, no one wants the consequence, despite all the empty talk about Sustainability and carbon footprint. Pop, of course, starts in a different place, not with materials – materials that disguise their exploitations in the name of architecture – or with ‘program’ [a word that identifies architecture’s self-imposed, dumbed-down, faux-contractualist obligations to power]. Pop starts with familiar things to work against the grain of familiarity. Scaling up, scaling down or re-coloring are its favorite techniques. It is happy with the shifting signifiers of the cliché, though undone, parodied or even reanimated. It is not for everyone since it demands that the designer throw out the cult of the ‘aesthetic of purity’ that has so fascinated schools of architecture in the last twenty years or so.