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.