“…Many friends of architecture showed up simply for a weekend of schmoozing in style and swapping appraisals about how new the “new” really looked while downing cocktails and olives at Harry’s Bar or on the waterfront terraces of the outrageously luxurious Hotel Cipriani and Gritti Palace.
‘The biennale is a good predictor of the near future,’ said Terence Riley, the chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. …
This year, earnest talk of ‘fluid form’ and ‘structural solutions’ was ramped up by star sightings — Nicole Kidman! Scarlet Johansson! — since the opening overlapped with the Venice International Film Festival….”-nytimes.com
~ this intellectual decadence has recently been touched on at sisyphean.com; whilst the above absurdities serve as inspiration from some of the abstract text, the following pissy and petty invectives might not belong in the offices of the work.group. we post here, though, so you may see precisely the kind of shit we are up against. even this phrase is misleading; we don’t intend to be against this shit, we plan to step over it in disregard. we won’t fight you as you are dead to us.
also, mr riley, as the work.group was not represented at the biennale, you will soon find that it is a failure as a predictor of any future; you will learn this as we make it clear that a new century is underway, and that your merit-starved model is as much of a fossil as you are.
“…Almost every project in the show bears the look of buildings made newly possible by a sophisticated grasp of computer technology. ‘We’re all part of the post-digital age who were trained in predigital methods,’ said Lise Anne Couture of the New York firm of Asymptote, who, with her husband, Hani Rashid, designed the exhibition displays. ‘We’re on both sides of the coin, but we have learned how to use these new technologies firsthand, and we understand how to manipulate and use them at every stage in the process, from conception to construction.’…”-nytimes.com
now your hand is shown. you fail because you allow technique to engender theory; how would you fare 84 — or 216 or 500 — years ago? it appears that your goals and your work would be unrecognizable. your reliance on the alteration of technical methods to drive your practice displays the mental vacuum that resides in the brain of an automaton; like an ape, you beat whatever is before you into the same pulp that the previous ape beat. some of us live outside your prison; we hold our practice to a timeless ideal and we strive to achieve it by any means warranted, available, and necessary. the angry red planet and, by extension, work.group would always shatter the same parameters at the dawn of the perspective in italy or at the americans’ first split of the atom. you remain craftsmen whilst we serve as prophets.
'john' responds:
good thing we did not call ourselves ‘will work for kudos’
20 September 2004 _ 12h59m03 EST [link]
public response: