14 Dogbowl was Worried

Responsible and devout were not attributes immediately identifiable but the Glazed Hams began questioning the very hold architects had over their professional discipline. Saturated and standardised, emancipation was a question of activism and animation.
They would rather go by Bruce Lee or that relentless and brilliant delinquent Nadim Karam who saw the ‘hapsitus’ in all this. Pulp Architecture is not architecture in the way we know it. No built-up structure to contemplate. No performance to applaud. It is a concentrated energy, high pulp fibre juice. ‘A distribution network,’ Karam says, ‘that can never become a city.’
Under the armpits of these giants, the intense play park in architecture becomes both hobby and the purpose of life, inseparable today from the challenges on and off the street.
Dogbowl was worried.
If these glazed hams could break established orders, how would they avoid settling on the new ones that so eagerly step in their place?
It is necessary to leave this as the shortest chapter so far, if we were to keep up with what was happening.

13 Under the Armpits of Giants

Suddenly at the University of Glazed Hams, Pulp Architecture starting flying with the Z boys. Dogday became Dogtown became Dogbowl. Architecture crawled along the street. The shared excitement with those already on the street began to put, at greater risk, life itself. This did not always mean resisting the architecture that’s possible. But it did mean having the knack of altering it as it appeared.
Under the armpits of these giants, the Pulp Architects become programmers of mixed realities. Trans-programming became a manual always about to be written; a kind of pulp practice. A few attempted new names, called themselves trans-architects.
Under the armpits of these giants, no more the luxury of spectacle. Life was a garage, a VW Polo run as an office, a computer on the run, or a shack in the foothills of the Himalayas. Replace entertainment with passion and dedication. The hacker ethic was never the exclusive preserve of the hackers.
Under the armpits of these new giants, new Form-z boys fulfilled a long history of joyful intervention; an atavism always about to go too far, seduced as they were by constant upset.
There was a tendency in the 20th century to see architecture as a social service to greater mankind. Family and loved ones were neglected. Life itself suffered. Throughout the country, in all the Universities of Glazed Hams, on the shoulders of those giants, life had become far too comfortable. But no one was listening. Everyone mouthed the answers before the questions were out.
“Under the armpits, we work differently,” the San Antone student said, “we use our families, we use our close ones. We use our kitchens and other people’s kitchens. We live this upset to the extent that it replaces life with a constant re-programming.”
Getting the hang of this, Vegas chimed in: “Sure! Architecture or life is not a question asked anymore. Architecture is life. The street is all that matters. It is in constant labour. It has become a calling. We share with the monk and the fugitive spontaneity. We share ability. We share the eagerness to participate at an angle to another life.”
The applause was deafening.

12 The Professor of Tumbleweed Connections

The Professor of Tumbleweed Connections looked at the new boots on his colleague. He looked back down at his own nifty Prada slip-ons. No one could really see the little red tag and they had started to look a touch scruffy. He really wished he had bought a similar pair. He could now be sitting in the Style Section of the New York Times Sunday Supplement rather than trying to convince his graduates of an architecture he no longer really believed in.
“I agree,” he spoke quietly as if he knew there would be uproar, “I agree that CAD modelling has helped us imagine architecture from anything. And metaphorical translation of these ideas can be seen everywhere. But this does not lead to an architecture of nothing! And as for Pulp Architecture. It’s a scam! We should go back to Vitruvius.”
‘I didn’t come into architecture for any of that,’ the San Antone student said, ‘I came here because of what I couldn’t get elsewhere. I want Pulp and I want it now.’
‘Ground control to Major Tom,’ the Professor interjected hoping his wit would win over his students.
‘Yes sir! and my circuit’s dead,’ Vegas replied. ‘And you know Sir, I don’t really care.’
On the shoulders of giants, forget it. Under the armpits of the new giants lay interesting ideas. Attractive notions about an architecture refusing to take on its own convention became an attitude. There was street fighting only no one filmed it. Mediation became its own exercise. Publications continued to carnivalise the expectations of architecture as it was then known. Whilst some were pumping iron, others pulped the living daylights out of each other.
Architecture at the University of Glazed Hams had to be denied, resisted. Huge budgets could allow subversive innovation. The predictable could be altered in front of their eyes. But the seduction of the new giants lay in their vagueness. They seemed to go on slipping their works in the spaces between radical discomfort and a momentary retreat to quite another comfort zone.
This encouraged an architectural search for the blind point.
Impossible, of course, but once again something to get us beyond that plane of the feasible! Something to get us further than the script we already recognize.
Is it naïve to want more and less at the same time, to see this as an authenticity only to be shot down at the crossing for getting out of the car, approaching the other driver just to inform them that their back tyre appears flat?.
Too late! Blasted out of existence just as you turn into Main Street!
Oblivious, the Professor of Tumbleweed Connections continued buffing his new cowboy boots.

11 The First Pulp Architecture Book

If I am not mistaken, the first Pulp Architecture book was written by Frankie Muschamp. I call him Frankie as if I know him. Of course I don’t know the architectural critic for the New York Times called Muschamp, but I imagine I know this Frank.
Frankie Muschamp was responsible in 1974 for lines which I think rightly fit the title of the First Pulp Architecture book. Take this example:
“My buildings wear Mona Lisa cufflinks. I don’t know any laws about what a window wants to be, I know nothing about the greater reality of the doorknob. Most of what I know of the reflective qualities of glass come from watching my reflection in shop windows as I walk up fancy streets.’
Now there are doubtless some out there who think Frankie M. should just have thrown his pen away and got right back to architecture school and learnt the greater reality of the doorknob. Actually that would not have done Frankie much good. But waiting at least twenty years before another New Yorker appeared, and Frankie would have had his perfect mentor. Nicholson Baker would have taught Frankie more than the greater reality of the doorknob.
In fact in the future, sometime later, if there is ever likely to be a new dean search at the College of Glazed Hams, I think it worthy of recommending Nicholson Baker. I really don’t know why I didn’t think about this earlier. But just in case you don’t believe me take a look at Baker’s book The Mezzanine whilst a few more sentences from Bertie’s book called ‘File under Architecture’ should convince you:
‘The serious architect has spent many years in training and feels entitled to his traditional aura. He borrows images and slogans from technology, politics, and fashion but is appalled at the notion of having to equate his work with these sources.”
I think you can see where Frankie was going with this.
“Thus it is fortunate that relatively few buildings are built by serious architects and that we have a large number of props other than buildings to choose from in articulating the space we inhabit.”
With that phrase Frankie capped it. Pulp Architecture surely is that number of props other than buildings we have to choose from. But Frankie didn’t leave it there. In the year 2003, people in New York would look back and wonder why architecture suddenly took its turn. Two years earlier somebody had come up with a rather unusual way of altering the skyline. They would do well reading these lines: ‘The experience of architecture requires no training, no special knowledge, no trips to galleries, no admission tickets…..in a system designed to answer the wants of millions of separately evolving people, the emphasis is not on permanent solutions but on the routes of access to potential realities and the means with which to shape them.’
And if you haven’t got enough, go google Frankie at bookfinder.com or halfpricebooks.com and sniff out an original, a rare copy, of the first pulp architecture book.
You might enjoy it.

10 Flying the Contemporary Minds

Outside on the street, the feeling is cold. All architecture was not about all other architecture. Architecture out there on the street no longer mattered, unless it was wearable, spectacular and grand.
“The most important influence on us as schoolboys in the 1980s,” the San Antone Ham said, “was the film ‘War Games’. Ever since then we knew the world was alterable.”
“And forget the Flying Dutchmen and Ground Zero,” the Vegas Ham said, “I remember Pnom Penh as a child.”
The sale of hand-stitched cowboy boots suddenly shot through the glass ceiling. Shards fell across the new outlet village, designed much like the old outlet village, only distorted.
“These boots are really going to do some walking,” The Neon-striped Professor said. He’d just bought his own pair and was trying to walk them in.
The Professor had a tough time herding his students. Ranching didn’t come easy. The rodeo was not part of his bio-data.
“There are many fine studies of new architecture,” he said, “and many of them suggest ways of understanding how architecture is attempting to incorporate change.”
“Speak English,” the Hams said, “we do nothing else but incorporate change in our lives today.”
“Isn’t that what we’ve always done? Longing to find an architectural expression in step with our time?”
“Imagine living with advanced developments of the epoch and see what you’d come up with!”
No one was listening. Aerodynamic form and nature theory were the last things in their heads as they began to fly the contemporary mind.
This is what they called it: flying the contemporary mind. What was it to them that they could be responsible for a representation of contemporary fascination?