Keep Your Frenemies Closer
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Gamuda Town Center, ALLTHATISSOLID
(Alex Chew, Max Kuo, and Danielle Wagner).
How does an architect find their way in this dizzying world whose constituent elements run the gamut from cows wearing virtual reality headsets to armed and angry mobs of far-right trolls radicalized on Twitter? Architect MAX KUO, who gave a provocative lecture titled “Architecture of the Post-Digital Frenemy” on Tuesday, March 30 as part of Syracuse’s spring lecture series, casually described the present’s disturbing incoherence as the “weird eclecticism of everyday life,” but this understates both the gravity of our predicament and the brilliance of Kuo’s argument. Let me explain.
The post-digital refers to the moment after digital technologies have become ubiquitous infrastructure; in 2021, the world—effectively and literally—is digital. For Kuo, this moment’s significance for architecture follows on its radical transformation of the sociological imaginary. Seen in this light, the advent of the digital is a grossly contradictory development: even as the digital world becomes more responsive and interconnected, it paradoxically ushers in new degrees of mass alienation. Kuo’s exceedingly original response is to reimagine design’s worldly disposition in explicitly social terms: architecture in the role of friend or foe, either predictable or not. Buildings as friendly façades and enemy edifices and everything in between. (More on that in a minute.) It’s a sincere attempt to explain what the hell is happening, and also a clever effort to chart a way of working in the interstices of the post-digital matrix.
A Lodge Three Ways, ALLTHATISSOLID (Alex Chew, Max Kuo, and Danielle Wagner).