Enough, Already: Hey, it's a Diet Manifesto!

 

So Lacaton and Vassal have won the Prizker, huh? Well, I think that’s the bee’s knees.

 
I spent the first half of spring break moving out of my apartment, which was furnished almost entirely with the redundant stuff that Lucy and I had suddenly found ourselves with when we moved in together back in college, stuff that we barely even had time to sort through before it suddenly proved to be non-redundant when her law school and my employment proved geographically incompatible, and that had found itself either organized into near-oblivion when we moved back in together or that became the eclectic décor that filled the office that I moved out of 2 days before starting architecture school.

 

Parting shot

Between us, the concert-pianist-turned-lawyer and the mechanical-engineer-turned-architecture student, we drink an astonishing amount of coffee. Among offices and separate residences, we’d somehow managed to accumulate 6 coffee makers (if you count the pourover, which I do because it’s a great coffee maker).

Anyway, I heard the news about Lacaton and Vassal on an NPR news break while on my way to the Goodwill to donate one of these coffee makers, plus a bunch of other stuff (where did all of these whisks come from?). It was kind of a poetic moment: Lacaton and Vassal are, IRL, two of my architectural heroes, and after having spent the past several days pondering questions about what gets saved and what doesn't (as one inevitably does when faced with the reality of actually having to move all of your stuff from one place to another) it’s hard not to think about what was worth buying having (I didn't buy most of it of it but was just its most recent custodian), what’s going to happen to it when it stops being useful to somebody, and what was and wasn’t worth making at all. The question of “when do we just not build?” is one that I think that we don’t ask ourselves enough.

Blog title again

Also related, I don’t think that we’re very good as a society about carefully considering the difference between novelty and innovation; maintenance is an unromantic and unexciting proposal, but in a world where so much feels so disposable the salvation and repair of otherwise “garbage” objects feels, to me, like acts of peaceful, productive protest that those of us who care about this kind of thing need to be actively, publicly engaged in.

 
To pull this thread a little further and to reframe it in the context of this blog: this kind of work, work like what Mockbee did and what Lacaton and Vassal have done, and more specifically, this type of thinking about how to do a lot with a little so that people with almost nothing can have something that's good, or so that we can just use less stuff, to think more critically about what and how much we build, it's the thing I care about more than anything else in architecture. Really, it's one of the things I care about most, period, and I don't think there's a profession that's more equipped to contemplate this question, publicly, through prototypes and discourse, than architecture, and on a more personal note it's one of the reasons that I left my previous career for architecture school: because I wanted to talk and to think about this issue, specifically, in this context.

 
For real, though, I don’t know how yet but I really think a combination of garbage, bicycles, architecture, and new perspectives is going to help save the world. I’m just a little unsure of the specifics, that’s all, so if you’ve suggestions then please leave them in the comments.