#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. Using 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 as well as their thoughts on social media's impact on architecture.
We spoke with the curator of @terriblefloorplans, a careful collection of careless things, a repository of odd architectural content published daily on Instagram. With only 41 floor plans posted at the time of this writing, the anonymous curator has quickly gained a following among those users of Instagram seeking alternatives to the rational and the well-planned.
What is your relationship to architecture? Has Instagram (or social media in general) affected your views toward the profession?
Instagram is saturated with aspirational imagery, and I've just about had my fill. Terrible Floor Plans rejects the on-brand and on-trend in favor of the ugly, vulgar and chaotic. Because bad is good and good is so very boring.
How did you begin @terriblefloorplans, and where do you find such terrible floor plans?
I'm an architect, bound most of the day by the polite dogma of less-is-more subtlety. Terrible Floor Plans eschews the laws of beauty and good taste ingested so faithfully in architecture school to find release in the unseemly, clumsy and camp. Breaking the rules is fun - and reminds us there is both wisdom and joy in what is too quickly cast aside as lowbrow or base.
View this post on InstagramSo terrible it’s about to run away.
A post shared by Terrible Floor Plans (@terriblefloorplans) on
What have you hoped to communicate about architecture through your posts?
Just as every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way (thanks Tolstoy!), terrible floor plans tend to be terrible in all sorts of terribly interesting ways. And, in aggregate, they ask important questions about the ways we live and the ways we wish to be perceived.
View this post on InstagramA three-bedroom BB-8.
A post shared by Terrible Floor Plans (@terriblefloorplans) on
Is there a post you are particularly proud of?
The floor plans are a lot of fun to find, and lead me to some colorful corners of the web. I'm particularly fond of the account's very first post, a very unconventional floor plan for a two-bedroom apartment for sale on StreetEasy. It still makes me smile.
View this post on InstagramThis is a terrible floor plan. But a lovely poem.
A post shared by Terrible Floor Plans (@terriblefloorplans) on
Who are your favorite users to follow?
I'm drawn to accounts that find a bit of transcendence in the everyday. That's always been my goal. I'm a big fan of @strangedomesticity and @decorhardcore. They do it expertly.
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