#ArchinectMeets is a series of interviews with members of the architecture community that use Instagram as a creative medium. With the series, we ask some of Instagram’s architectural photographers, producers and curators about their relationship to the social media platform and how it has affected their practice.
Social media has undeniably affected the way we perceive, interpret and share opinions about architecture today. While we use our own account, @Archinect, as a site for image curation and news content, we wanted to ask fellow Instagram users how they navigated the platform.
We spoke to Adam Nathaniel Furman, the creator of the eponymous @adamanathanielfurman account. As an advocate of postmodern architecture, Furman's Instagram account has served many purposes towards this passion: photos, memes, illustrations, screenshots and petitions to save postmodern structures at the brink of demolition are all featured on the page with equal significance. The sentiments of the account are echoed by Furman's website, which reveals a person hard at work and unafraid of provocation.
What is your relationship to architecture?
I have been obsessed with buildings, and architecture, since I was little. I studied fine art at St Martins and then Architecture at the AA, and since then have worked in several practices including OMA, Ron Arad and Farrells, taught at the AA and Central St Martins, and now run my own studio that works internationally on projects ranging from product design to furniture, art installations, pavilions, interiors, public art and architecture.
View this post on InstagramBecause good boys are worth it...
A post shared by Adam Nathaniel Furman (@adamnathanielfurman) on
Has Instagram (or social media in general) affected your views toward the profession?
Actually yes, so far in an opposite manner to twitter. Twitter seems to bring out the worst in people. While it briefly fostered some interesting debate about five to six years ago, it has since then degenerated into an unedifying petri-dish of people who don't only disagree, but actively dislike and deride each other.
View this post on InstagramGovernment offices, Kahramanmaraş, Turkey, 1994
A post shared by Adam Nathaniel Furman (@adamnathanielfurman) on
Instagram, because of its predominantly visual nature, tends to emphasise the positive, and "criticism through positive example", which is something I very much enjoy, and many of the practitioners who use it in a personal capacity, end up sharing not only their work, but the distinct way in which they see the world, and following their feeds can often be an experience that reintroduces a sense of belief in the fundamental beauty of our profession and the life it so seductively proffers us.
View this post on InstagramThe Home of Tomorrow, Disneyland, 1957-1967
A post shared by Adam Nathaniel Furman (@adamnathanielfurman) on
How would you describe the curation of your Instagram profile?
Messy.
When I joined I was told by several people to "be consistent with a visual theme." Because of my chaotic way of operating I could not do this, and so I have several streams, or "themes" that budge up against one another.
View this post on Instagram#archiphorism
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There are architect-designed buildings from outside the canon of what is considered "high art architecture," buildings that architects are normally trained to find vile and awful, but which I think clearly have merit, and would do well with being looked at again, both to question our ingrained prejudices that are almost always without any objective substance, and because appreciating them opens up new areas of aesthetic and tectonic possibility.
There are the buildings that show how classical architecture has been, and should be, used in creative, provocative and progressive manners, and should not in any way be allowed to be owned by the reactionaries and xenophobes of the regressive right... a kind of "untasteful" history of the classical language as it were. Obviously there are buildings that are messy and complex, and celebrate expressivity and symbolism and reflexivity, and ornament and colour... these are often labelled "Postmodern", but they are just buildings aiming at evocative richness from many places, and many eras.
So there are several groups of buildings that together tend to question given historical and value-judgement narratives, and then textual posts like my Archiphorisms that effectively do the same thing, but not cumulatively and gently as the images do, but individually and with more precise and rhetorical punch... So, messy, but with a general dual theme of opening up a broader sense of appreciation, and questioning given dogmas...
How do you typically find/produce the images you post on Instagram?
Multiple origins:
Scans from books (I have a substantial library), from general research on the web, images I have made/ text-based posts I've made, posts from the facebook groups I run (The Postmodern Society, Classicism in Modernity, The Late Modern Society), emails and texts from friends and colleagues send me stuff they find fascinating wherever they are, and occasionally submissions - though these tend to be really obvious things, I think I get someone private messaging me about Freddy Mamani's buildings once a week like "omg did you know about THESE!"
View this post on InstagramMiami Metrozoo flamingos, riding out Hurricane Andrew in '92. - Via Miami Film Festival
A post shared by Adam Nathaniel Furman (@adamnathanielfurman) on
Do you post your work anywhere else online? What is your social media channel of choice?
Yes, on Tumblr, Twitter, Blogspot, Facebook...
I think Instagram is probably on balance the best at the moment.
View this post on InstagramAir balloon in the shape of St Gall - Image unknown source
A post shared by Adam Nathaniel Furman (@adamnathanielfurman) on
What are some of your favorite Instagram profiles to follow?
I would say @tmowilkinson, @uglyperuvianhouses, @baxendale_studio, @etsu_8719_, @bauzeitgeist and obviously my dog's account @moomoocockerspaniel!
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