Before blogs, boys built buildings.

Following modernity's established obsession with sterility and pure forms, design was left naked, stripped down to the bear bones and skin of minimalist ideals. Almost 100 years later, the contemporary design community swings back to the Modern, a throwback towards a new architecture left completely impotent by theoretical blasphemy from an architecture of craft and vernacular meaning. Consistently chasing the image in an attempt to gain their own iconoclasticistic position, the architect of the early twenty first century has resorted to the techniques of pop-art, and graphic design as a preferred architectural methodology. Rather than focusing its design energies on valid attempts to create spatial configurations or meaningful moments of user dialogue, design in general is stuck in the rut of satisfying the Image. It seems to me that architecture has strayed away from serving its inhabitants as a place, a space for the human body to find refuge from a world getting smaller by the day,and now lost in a fun house of zines, blogs, and over-sized coffeetable literature. Ivy leagues have helped over zealous boys clubs run the industry bored with repetitive patterns and mundane use of materials. Constantly contorting its form and rhythm to appease the morning blogger, architecture is only now realized through the narrow channel of internet media and glossy bookstore inventory. I must ask. Who the fuck are we designing for? Are architects going to continue to fetishize over stair porn and graphic displays of premature ejaculation, or will this era of architectural masturbation finally proceed its prepubescent adolessence, an obsession with plasticity and meaningless imagery, to find itself fruitfully producing a new architecture? Is contemporary architecture almost done producing plastic shells, filled with cheap materials, shitty craft, and profit share agendas? My guess is no. If the profession continues to exploit the ideas of a dozen or so Modern men, we will only find our blogs and zines to be the pornographic evidence of an artform once built by men. While the client finds more value in hiring builders to design, and graphic artists to sell, only time will tell if the architect can survive a self-induced castration.