15 Flight Paths

Pulp architecture took a break and decided to lie out on the thick St Augustine grass.
It was approaching summer, the Glazed Hams were juggling with just about everything in order to convince themselves that they had completed something. And just as I dozed with the New York Times Sunday edition under the pecan tree, so Pulp Architecture dozed.
A F14 fighter plane passed overhead.
That’s not usual, the neighbour said from his wraparound-barbecue-Jacuzzi veranda, they don’t usually take that flight path.
He knew. His father, decorated in Korea, had flown supply missions into Pnom Penh.
So were they on their way back, or had they not even started the war?
Pulp Architecture lay there discarded. It began to suffer. Nothing much had happened in the last few months. And months had a habit of turning into years. The fear of litigation ruled everyone’s mind here in Texas. Few wanted to leave their own comfort zone.
The New York Times spoke about the French artist Pierre Huyghe, pronounced Hew-ig, they explained. A script, ‘scenario in French,’ Huyghe said, is just another way of designating not the finished object, not the finished film, but the state just before. It is the idea that things are still potential, still possible; scenarios are structures with which we can speculate. Things can be crossed out, changed, reinterpreted. They are not fixed representations.’
As I lay back with a particularly salty blue sports energy drink at my side, I thought about taking Pulp Architecture back to North Wales and the Hotel Architecture where it all started. The hotel would greet its old friend. It would be good to be back in a 300 year old cottage, so recently pulped by the flood. Everything could be crossed out, changed, reinterpreted. The fighter planes, the Hurricanes, would pass over the Clwyd Hills in training on their usual path.
We could then fire up the barbecue and, without any sentimentality, throw the manuscript of Pulp Architecture on the flames, before grilling the lamb.
That would be the end of Pulp Architecture. Or one of them.

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?

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.