Whipped Cream Bikinis: On Materiality

I don’t feel like writing a post that’s either long or serious this week. Don’t worry: it’s still loosely related to the concept of critical regionalism. That’s because the thing that I find most interesting about critical regionalism is the conversation about local materials, building techniques, and skilled workmanship. We’ve spent the past couple of lectures looking at some awesome examples that demonstrate architects and artisans who are masters of their own language, in which materials are the vocabulary, the technique is the grammar, the architecture is the prose, and all of these people are Hemmingways. I love this stuff but I can’t really think of anything to say about it that David or Kenneth Frampton haven’t already said better and shown using better examples, so I’m going to go in the opposite direction and talk about two of my favorite questionable moments in materiality and workmanship.

I’m always on the hunt for new tunes, and one of my go-to sources for music news and reviews is Pitchfork, who recently republished a listicle of their “200 best songs of the 2000s” (here’s the Spotify playlist if you’re into it). According to it, the 193rd -best song of this era is Twista’s Slow Jamz (ft. Kanye West and Jamie Foxx), in which Kanye has a bit that goes

 
I told her to drive over in yo new whip
bring some friends you cool wit
I'ma bring the Cool Whip
then I want you to strip

Presumably, this is a whipped-cream-bikini-type situation a-la Ali Larter’s scene in Varsity Blues a few years prior.

Precedent

If you want to do it then do it, I’m not here to judge. What I am here to do it to talk about materiality (which is a word I hate using except for when absolutely necessary) and to point out that the materiality of Cool Whip is really different than whipped cream: Cool Whip comes in a tub and is kind of hard and you have to spread it on with a knife or a spatula or something and I just don’t feel like it’s the right material for the implied purpose. Is it a failure to critically contemplate the realities of working with a specified material? Maybe. It’s the kind of thing we need to think about when we think about what we want to build, because knowing what materials do and don’t do and how to work with them is so critical to a successful project.

 
Or maybe Kanye and I just don’t share the same opinion of which dessert toppings might be suitable for edible garments and his choice of Cool Whip is very intentional, and if Ye’s comin' at you with a container of non-dairy whipped topping and a putty knife then you’d better be ready for romance.

The other example I wanted to discuss, briefly, is a detail that exists in the family restroom in the upstairs of Lee 1. There’s a hole in the wall from where they had to move a pipe for a plumbing fixture, and it’s full of caulk that somebody’s painted to match the glazed masonry around it.

Now that's a detail.

 
There are a lot of great architectural moments in Clemson’s SoA, but few can match the joy that this thing brings me over and over again. It’s like the architectural equivalent of those fake glasses with the built-in nose and mustache. It’s so sublimely dumb, so shamelessly dishonest, and it’s in the bathroom that services the core studios where budding architecture students are, when not relieving themselves or locking themselves in that bathroom to cry, being drilled on the fundamentals of craftsmanship. It’s a bad joke that’s told so, so well, and I hope that nobody ever “fixes” it.