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.