Keep Your Frenemies Closer

Return to Articles

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).

“Infinite, crowded, and plural” is how Kuo described the current shape of architectural practice, but it’s clear that compelling design remains possible nonetheless. The architect’s work with ALLTHATISSOLID, the firm that he co-founded in 2008, is similarly diverse, including a “creaturely” cabinet with elastic handles and borderline zoomorphic legs, and a mountain lodge that is in fact a curated assemblage of gable-roofed buildings. Both projects resist categorical criticism in the old sense; neither is exactly reducible to traditional frameworks of style or design genres alone. In a word, it’s complicated.

Anyone can tell you there’s a vast middle ground between friends and enemies. The “frenemy,” Kuo’s title character, dwells in this purgatorial zone. The frenemy is a modern invention and a profoundly ambivalent figure. It is a hybrid of friend and enemy, an object of affection and rivalry; in short, a mode of disingenuous being. Here, the term is used to refer to buildings, if not to architects themselves. Modeling theory after human psychology always poses challenges, but even a figure as undecidable as the frenemy raises some urgent questions: is frenemyship a condition to embrace, or one to swear off? Can we choose sincerity over cynicism? I hope so – after all, you can never trust your frenemies.

—Phillip Denny

---

Phillip Denny, “Keep Your Frenemies Closer” New York Review of Architecture, SKYLINE (April 5, 2021).