This blog is set up on behalf of the D7 Thesis Unit - The Elegance of Non-Engagment. The students involved in this unit are:

Carys Fisher
Peter Jenkins
James Clayton
Rob Tadman
Zahid Khan
Paul Welch
Abu Kumshe
Riyaz Nilar
Sam Lui

We will all be posting our progress on our individual projects within this unit and hope to receive as much feedback as possible from the school blog readers.

To start off with here is our tutor's thoughts on the direction of this unit:

The Architecture of Deceit
E. McIntosh, tutor

Setting the scene
The Law of (-1)

There is sometimes a minuscule flame burning inside people who do Architecture. The feeling in the back of their brain that something is terribly wrong with the world. A “splinter in their minds”. For many this feeling of wrong-ness, dissatisfaction and helplessness can never be explained, for its nature is concealed by what we will call in this studio, The Law of (-1).

We need to understand that life is war, that we all are driven by the will to power, and that the lofty ideals of the “magnanimous human spirit”: equality, justice, freedom, etc are in practical terms absent from us, for we are not human spirits, we are flesh and bone. Quoting from Nietzsche's Beyond good and Evil: "Even the body within which individuals treat each other as equals ... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant—not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power."

We need to understand that in a war everything is permitted, and that deceit is the strongest weapon (the first deception is to convince us that there’s no war being waged) and that its power is waged against us in every aspect during every second of our everyday life...we live through a parade of constant deceit. That is how we voluntarily become slaves, how we are lazy enough to not distinguish 1 from (-1). Not acknowledging the rules of the game, not even being able to see that there’s actually a game going on (war) is what makes Revolutionary Architecture a naïve endeavor.


The danger of hope and the illusion of choice
Seen the un-see-able and becoming ourselves un-see-able

Within the studio we will not forget that the cause of Revolutionary Architecture is a lost battle. We will not covertly fight in order to have hope, we will not covertly fight trying to have a choice, for no hope or choice really exist, only the illusion of them. We will try to conceive deceitful projects because even though there’s no escape, at least this way we will be sure of our condition of slaves.

This studio is not in allegiance with the Left or the Right, the Capitalist or the Socialist, Republicans or Democrats, for these factions are within themselves neither left or right, capitalist or socialist, republican or democrat…they are always the smoke screen puppet show put in front of us to keep us from seeing the ever present invisible third parties. This studio will try to learn to see the un-see-able and to learn the art of becoming our selves un-see-able.

For this studio thinks Revolutionary Architecture is ineffective when it’s visible. It itself becomes part of the problem, for it gives hope, and hope makes the masses think: “don’t worry somebody is out there doing something about it” plunging us all into inaction.

This studio thinks a true Revolutionary Architecture should be an architecture of sedition. It should not be carpet bombing, it should be smart bombing. It should not be broad strokes, it should be surgical interventions. It shouldn’t be diluted in a building; it should be a concrete idea. For, as Aldo Rossi states “In a certain sense, there is no such thing as buildings that are politically ‘opposed’, since the ones that are realized are always those of the dominant class” (The Architecture of the City)