chase scenes serial #7

to structure this text and how to make it lofty and critical. That word is so hollow. People at Georgia Tech used to talk about ‘critical architecture.’ I found myself as an impressionable kid beginning to feel like I could form an understanding of what that was, what architecture would have to be to be critical. I felt that I could even begin to recognize it, as if the forms and materials of someone like Thom Mayne were somehow thumbing their nose at something. What good is that? Here on that walk, and perhaps in this writing, in the Medora, ND Americinn‡, which is becoming less critical by the college ruled line, and certainly in the days I spent in LA, forgetting what architecture looked like, I can perhaps understand what those Tech guys were talking about, or what they should have been talking about. And I refuse to use the word critical. There. I will choose another adjective. I choose ‘productive,’ and it modifies ‘practice,’ not form or style. Productive practice. For what you are reading is clearly formless, see, I am writing to ‘you’ again when I should be detailing the historic center of Bismarck. But making the practice of your life productive is to turn it into something other than the
(more…)