A worthy addition to your RSS list: 765.blogspot.com
Carefully crafted thoughts formalized by the act of writing for an audience. Exactly the justification for blogging that I was explaining to my students last week.
A quote from the latest entry:
The forms of the Industriosphere have not pulled themselves into being, they have been put together by human beings through trial and error. They are not innocent, and it serves us to be as skeptical of their claims to functional autonomy as we are about claims to formal autonomy that set the terms of the discipline’s other discourses*.
Bonus: by crikey, the guy can really draw too
(*Rod: that last link is for you re. our recent e-mailing!)
Yeah, 765’s writing looks great. I see, also in the most recent post, that he’s reading Hayes’s Infrastructure – it’s a really good book if you haven’t got it yet. No doubt you have.
Someone should write supplements for Hayes for places outside of the US. I’d like to see London’s occasional forlorn Rabbit phone signs photographed and explained, something on the archaeology of our cities’ constant street (re)excavations, something about borders that have to handle a switch between driving on the right and the left, and so on. Like a Pevsner’s but for industrial form and systems…
As to the emails… I remain warier of the architectural, literary and critical uses and misuses “deconstruction” got put to and the acts done in its name than I am of deconstruction itself (if indeed it can be said to be an “it” with a “self”. And we might want to say that its susceptibility to misreading was always its greatest weakness, but – as JD and Bennington often reminded us – “deconstruction” was not an -ism, a movement, a tool, an approach, or a philosophy with a programme).
(Have I tied myself in knots yet? No doubt.)