9 The Professor of Glazed Hams

I like the Professor of Glazed Hams: a Texan certainly but a man who needed not the hand-stitched boots from Bozeman nor need he indulge in spot-the-cowboy in the Land of the Brave Diner off Diner Square. After Frank Corbusier, this Professor’s favourites were Frank van der Rohe, Frank Behrens, Frank Terragni, Frank Slutzky and Frank Rowe.
Whenever visiting from Old Europe, I was always on the look out for a present for the Professor of Glazed Hams. It was one of those random acts of kindness, for I had nothing to do with this Professor at all. I knew he taught students how to put the L in Le Corbusier and the glaze back in ham thinking. Dressed in a black silk DKNY jacket of some taste, you had to hand it to him, he attempted in admirable ways to keep the dream alive.
The Professor of Glazed Hams certainly knew his Tectonics from his Tequila his Transparency from his Tonic. He also knew when to use more contemporary notions of architectural thinking and blur the boundaries between one and the other.
I liked the Professor of Glazed Hams.
Usually I bought him a half bottle of whisky. That was only after my first trip to the Big Sky country. Then I tried an alternative strategy. I tried to give him a present of a jar of Marmite. Imagining every Texan keen to understand the delights of this pulpy British foodstuff, I wedged it into the mail slot of the Professor of Glazed Hams. I didn’t know about glazed hams then, though I did imagine this might have been the type of yeasty, petroleum glue that could have been applied to a pre-glazed ham.
Pulpy certainly! But not high pulp. How could I know that Marmite was unsuitable for glazing hams? So I was somewhat taken aback when the marmite jar began to appear in different pigeon holes at the mail room of the School of Architecture. It went from The Professor of Glazed Hams to the Professor Night to the Professor of Urgent Renewal. From there it passed onto the Professor of Tumbleweed Connections to the Professor of Weak Structures and found itself wedged snug, back inside the mail slot of the Professor of Night.
The Professor of Night was aghast. Skinned alive, architecture was coming apart at the seams. The Powerbook was talking back. The jar of Marmite clearly should have been in the mail slot of the Professor of Piranesi Software. The writing was on the wall so to speak. It was time to sketch-up the future. Actually it was not on the wall at all. It was written with disappearing ink on the glazed partition.
But there was a dilemma. I liked dilemmas.
If Pulp Architecture was to be taken seriously, if those young glazed hams looking right through the eyes of their professors and the glazed partitions were to understand anything about architecture, urgent action was needed. It was only after a return from Town Talk Salvaged Foods Inc. in Fort Worth that I realised what a chance I had missed.
I had noticed a jar of ‘glazed ham sauce’.
The perfect present for the Professor of Glazed Hams!

8 Pulp Architecture & Frank Heron

Pulp Architecture was only a distant dream when it encountered Mr Frank Heron. It was one of those fine cloudless days in Barcelona when even Antonio Gaudi had been forgiven his anxieties. No aeroplane was invading space, no intention of turning the world into a video game had been thought about. The world was still on remote control. There was a decade left to get things right before the end of the 20th century.
That of course was soon to change.
Wandering around the plaza of wind, someway back from the leading pack led by one Frank or another, two smaller figures walked. One dressed in white, the other in black. Mr Frank Heron was in white, Mr Heron Frank was in black.
Mr. Heron could have been mistaken for a Tunisian tailor of some repute now living in Paris. Glancing up at a construction that looked like a needle had penetrated a doughnut, Mr Heron turned to Mr Frank: “What do we have here?”
Mr Heron usually kept all his questions to himself but this time, amongst the world’s leading architects, he could not resist himself. There was no real response, though certainly enough of a little chuckle from Mr Frank for Mr Heron to continue.
“Ground Control to Major Tom, is what I think we have here.”
“Certainly!” Mr Heron responded, and the smile stretched across the floor of the plaza of wind just as kerosene would have spread. Then up the needle tower went the smile until it reached the doughnut. And there grinning from the world’s biggest doughnut was the future of architecture.
Only no one recognised it for what it was at that time. No one thought it pulp, no one imagined the chaos of the world turned into a video game, and no one thought architects could play hardball as much as they would do when the century was out.
Just to give you a clue to the future at that moment. Frank Koolhaas and Frank Herzog were not smiling from the biggest doughnut in the world. They were at the Bernabou, watching Barca once again show the world how to play football. Led by a dutch coach, players like Bergkamp, Kohman, De Boer and De Boer showed ground control like no other.
Certainly their circuits weren’t dead and these footballers like the architects had twelve years to rule the world before the video game took over.

7 don't go so fast, you'll crash into jacques derrida

In December 1985 I installed an exhibition in the Helsinki Art Hall - a collaborative, Performance Art exhibition, as it was then called. I took a brown raincoat that had been part of an exhibition experiment I had called “7 Famous Raincoats and a Moygashel” and decided to end this experiment which had travelled from Helsinki to Paris; for this I chose to bury the raincoat under a catafalque of salt.
On the thick impressive wooden doors to the art hall built in the 1920s, I applied white christmas-snow 'graffiti' for the title of the exhibition. These were repeated in mirrors in both toilets in the gallery. The director, a man I knew well, came out. This is art, he said, but please let's not take it too far. I have to clean that door.
I know I said, it's christmas decoration spray, it's snow, it's fake, it's bad art. It can be scraped off.
Oh, that's ok then, please continue, he said and left me outside in the real December snow.
In the small space given me in the gallery, amongst the other art installations and performance pieces, I placed a table and two deckchairs. I decided to use the reviews of the original exhibition (which had mostly been favourable). Four of the main reviews were framed and placed as dinner plates, complete with wine glass, cutlery and serviette. One framed image
above the table was suspended like a low chandelier with salt all over it. Upon this chandelier one text had the words 'the wrong raincoat' repeated endlessly. On top of this there was a children's toy, a dinky JCB earth mover. In anyone's world; a child's, an artist's, a professor's or an anaesthetician's, the digger was pouring salt over the edge into the wound.
All words were disappearing.
Inside the gallery, laid out on an exquisitely shaped catafalque of salt, the arm of the brown raincoat was all that was left. The rest of the coat was disappearing. On the wall, white on white, there was a row of framed, photo-copied plates all similar with the word ‘Derrida’ on.
The title of the exhibition was various and interchangeable: ‘Don't go so Fast, you will crash into Jacques Derrida’, was one title. In the toilets, the title changed to ‘Don't go so Fast, You'll Crash into Jean Baudrillard’. In another part of the gallery, it changed again: ‘Don’t go so fast you’ll crash into Roland Barthes’. And so on around the gallery. There was a lot of crashing going on at the time.
I forgot to see the future though. I forgot to consult the world spinning on. I should have also put: ‘Don’t go so fast, you’ll crash into Richard Brautigan’. I didn’t. It was a mistake. My imperfection drags me back. But there on the wall, in the framed texts, Derrida's family name included the most important lesson: dERRida. In his name, the word ERR peeped out.
This was the end of 1985. This was an exciting time, though no one has much good to say about that decade now. Three years back Richard Brautigan would publish his last ‘Brautigan’, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away. A year or so back from when this raincoat lay under a catafalque of salt, when all the words were washed away, the body of Richard Brautigan would be found on October 25, 1984. This was the day I began the idea of burying the exhibition about raincoats.
It had taken over a year. It takes a long time to destroy words and ideas you distrust. It had taken several weeks before the 49-year-old body of the author was found next to a bottle of alcohol and a .44 caliber gun.
Uncanny isn’t it. But on that brown raincoat there was evidence of a gunshot wound. By the end of Christmas, all blown away, the art was finished, the gallery closed, and the raincoats returned to the people who owned them or to my own collection. The exhibition was published. The tv interview done, the houhaa over. This particular raincoat was worn until it disappeared in the flood at the Hotel Architecture a few years ago.
To 'err' is human and irrepressible. There is little trace of this exhibition now. Am I no longer an instant artist, or a bad artist. Have I been saved? Or am I a diagram of someone' else's life?

6 all architects called frank

If you knew who I was, how famous I am, you won’t believe what I am about to tell you, so you’ll understand why I prefer to remain anonymous. Buildings from the last century are beginning to disappear. Don’t be fooled by this. Modern architecture has always been a sham, run by the few for the many who still do not understand.
It was only when I started to get a chance to build my architecture that self-destruction offered itself. Feted for an architecture that disgusted me, I wanted to create nothing, communicate nothing, assert nothing. The more famous I became the more I felt like an endangered species. From this point onwards I decided to rectify the immense dishonesty perpetrated by modern architecture by organising a network. With great deliberation and the utmost cunning, we have decided to remove any record of our work as architects. All Franks together will do this. This not only includes the destruction of all drawings and records but a far more chilling plan of removing the actual buildings designed; even those which are still standing.
Like one of Max Frisch’s ‘fire raisers’ we, the Franks of this world, now sit in on the world of our own architecture, with our own drums of petrol, laying elaborate plans for setting them all alight. Voids will appear overnight in cities.
Deconstruction, in the literal sense of the word, will occur at the dead of night.
In the morning there will be nothing left.

5 meanwhile in New York

Meanwhile in New York, memorial architecture is running on empty and students hit Form Z faster than they did five years ago. Graduates graduate with a shaky grasp of a future the sophomores can already see but have difficulty describing. Asked if they understand why Jack Kerouac took to the road and the ‘it’ of it all, they stuttered. Asked if they knew where the beatniks were going, they paused and said: what’s a beatnik?
All that road going was never easy.
Now all that screen-going begins to choke minds.
“We need heroes,” the Professor of Glazed Hams said, ‘real heroes. Just like the one we followed last century. Even” – and no one knows why this should come into his mind – “if just for one day!”
But it seems we have one. The architect, one of those Franks, so keen on the hand-stitched and hand-crafted cowboy boots from Bozeman, Montana, is on the road, we are told, for at least 200 days in the year. Work it out. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to calculate just how much time the architect is in his office in Berlin, Toronto, Tel Aviv or New York.
Clearly the profession of architecture is changing.

4 murmurs

In Zetaville, in the College of Glazed Hams you can here murmurs all around. All architects are called Frank, after a little known Finnish film which named its 18 actors all Frank.
“Frank, what do you do when the money runs out?”
“Well, Frank replies, “I’ll probably go back to what I did at the beginning, something minimal.”
“And those shoes, Frank, are they really as comfortable as your theories suggest?”
“Oh yes, and functional too, you see the stride they offer means I can get to the other side of the lobby quicker and with more bounce.”
Interesting!
“I went to Bilbao,” one Glazed Ham said, “Got up close and the place was a studied mess. Could not see what all the fuss was about.”
“Oh no, me too,” the Vegas Ham chipped in.”
“You know, whenever I hear talk about liquid architecture,” the San Antone Ham said, “I think of Bruce Lee. Take the shape of water, go with it and alter yourself as it too takes shape. That’s how I see it.”
Interesting, Bruce Lee as the future of architecture hadn’t quite reached the curriculum at the University of Zetaville. But it was about to be taken seriously by everyone but the Professors.
“You know,” the neon-striped Professor stopped at the open door with a copy of the New York Times Style section in his hand, “look, listen to me, I wish I’d thought of wearing cowboy boots like this, I might have built more buildings.”
“Not so, Sir,” The Professor of Glazed Hams answered, not unless you happen to be able to talk about them as if trying to reach the other side of the lobby.”
At this point the murmurs ceased. The money to build the new spectacles of the new millennium was coming to a halt. The unspeakable reared its head once more. War was in the air. Legal proceedings were, well, proceeding. All around the world in universities, something was happening that would put a stop to this fame academy. But was anyone sure just what this was? Back in Zetaville there was a lawsuit in progress. Men behaving badly were being taken to court by women who seemed to have decided to behave just as badly. About time! Now there’s a stalemate.

3 Simple Language

Up at 30,000 feet it seemed there was little doubt that architecture was showing signs of operating as an interface. Instead of being detached, what we used to call architecture was offering itself up as a discipline that could start re-combining itself. Some spoke of an augmented reality. This, according to the Professor of Night, was neither a Mixed nor Virtual Reality. Instead architecture was threatening to embody space like never before. Queer as that might be to some, architecture was about to return to what it had always been, something in between.
But what did this mean? And just how was contemporary architecture beginning to operate as an interface? It was time to pulp a few of these ideas back down there to Ground Control where the new glazed ham was struggling with plan, section, elevation and those dreaded ‘partis’.
In the meantime, the JAL stewardess handed me a gin and tonic with a tasty seaweed rice roll and I opened my first edition of the long lost Richard Brautigan novel, Sombrero Fallout.
Interestingly, as media theorists and scholars see an interface as an encounter which opens up complex options; an encounter which invites multiple experiences, shifts between human constants and the constant change within machines and systems, the new pulp attitude would prefer to see architecture re-occupying its own metaphor. In simple language, I took this to mean that architecture was about to become the architecture of its own structured thinking and linkage.
Simple language, did I say?
Pulp in the high pulp sense of the word. I was caught between the Brautigan, the film and Pulp Architecture. The latter was a lecture I didn’t know I was preparing to be delivered at Yale University. I was flying back to the University of Zetaville in Texas, to the school of architecture known fondly as the College of Glazed Hams.

ch.2 interface and animall

Interface and animall

I had decided to work on a competition project on the theme of Deadmalls for the Los Angeles Forum of Architects. I wasn’t an architect. I was an apology for one. The project was carried out by two of us, one in Fort Worth, the groundhog, the other, me – the apology for an architect - on the move, trawling around the world in Tokyo, Nagoya, Kyoto, Stockholm, Helsinki, Lahore, Karachi, Terezin and North Wales.
I began to think of some ideas and started by emailing these to the groundhog from any available Yahoo lounge in Narita, Nagoya or Arlanda, Stockholm. Porting anywhere and everywhere to exchange jpeg files, i-movie ideas, Flash sequences and Photoshop documents, the idea to re-animate a deadspace seemed like something out of a novel. A Richard Brautigan novel. The interface offered itself up.
Our assistant back at Ground Control was a young architect, one of those Generation Xers who was taking a break from detailing foyer partitioning for a high-rise office block in Dallas. He had been educated at the University of Zetaville and was one of those fondly referred to by the professors as a ‘glazed ham’. Particularly suited for this project he was specialised in skateboarding. Long legged, he looked like those wire toys you can buy at any merchandising outlet in any art museum. I bought mine at the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth. Wind it up and it proceeds to cross surfaces in small shudders. Like an ‘animall’, I suppose.

the brautigan ch.1

The Brautigan

If you happen to turn to the blurb on the back cover of any novel by the American author Richard Brautigan, you will probably come across the following sentence. We never really know who wrote it but it seems to turn up time and time again:
“There is nothing like Richard Brautigan anywhere. Perhaps when we are very old, people will write ‘Brautigans’, just as now write novels.’ The unnameable at the San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle continues to tickle our future fancy: ‘This man has invented a genre, a whole new shot, a thing needed, delightful and right.’
It was time to have another go at this new shot. Modern architecture was becoming the architecture it had threatened for the whole of the last century. Buildings were lying around, abandoned, legs up in the air. Cathedrals were back in vogue. Rumours, of the sort that had become reality, were exchanged as fast as they could be invented.
I don’t recall arriving in Barcelona. Was there an airport recently built, a museum recently published, a star architect I was doomed to meet? I couldn’t tell. The roller-bladers bruised me, the sun hurt the sidewalk. Architecture could curtain the soul. I stepped into the Hotel Colon. Could it be, was it, why was he here? He looked up as if awaiting a foreign agent, ‘Hello!’ I greeted Frank but didn’t know him well enough - except in poetry - to call him Frank. He was on his way to Bilbao and just happened to be in Barcelona. Funny, I thought, that just as I wanted to have a new shot at unreality I should collide with the world’s most renowned architect. ‘What’s going on?’ Beats me, Frank said. There was architecture even in his smile. I got up out of the huge leather chair as Daniel rushed in. Last thing I remember I was rushing toward the door again.
From 30,000 feet up in the air it seemed appropriate to try and take revenge on all the asphalt down there in Bigtown, in Mesquite just outside Dallas. It was one of the deadmalls in urgent need of resuscitation! New exchanges for retail, community and security were necessary but unexciting. Nothing much to be done, except either let the corpse go on dying or resuscitate it in some unknown way. Outside the window, the serenity of the clouds could not fail to suggest the idea of an Airwalk. Contemporary architecture needed a new shot. It was necessary to play with a new genre, invent a new rumour: Pulp Architecture. This would be an architecture unstable but not uncomfortably so, a partial architecture. Up there in a building that had already died, snipers sat not with AK47s or Kalshnikovs but with consoles and Firewire connections.
The Brautigan was taking shape.