Archinect - off-NARRATIVES:

Reflecting on Trump's Infrastructure Agendas and Cultural Projects, Part 1

2022-05-21T18:55:16-04:00

Reflecting on Trump's Infrastructure Agenda and Cultural Projects
Part 1: 'Infrastructure Weak'

As I write this, news of Trump backed US House and Senate candidates winning Republican primaries across the country has been sweeping the headlines and are leading stories on our TVs, radios, phones, and computers. As such, I thought it was worth revisiting some of the architecture and infrastructure related policies that the Trump Administration pushed during its short but impactful tenure in the White House. I think this reminder of how the architecture and construction industry was effectively co-opted by the Trump political agenda is important to keep with us as we move forward.

In the wake of the novel Coronavirus pandemic, the Trump White House announced an ‘Infrastructure Week’ with talk of combating both the pandemic and an aging infrastructure in the United States. This infrastructure media blitz never fully materialized but Trump’s supporters drafted and pushed proposals that w...

An Error has an Aura- Reading Boym's "Nostalgic Technology: Notes for an Off-Modern Manifesto"

2017-03-27T03:24:00-04:00

Technique, at its most fundamental core, is a procedure of errors. It is the conscious sacrifice of precision and accuracy in some areas to the exclusion of others and as Svetlana Boym relates, “avant-garde artists and critics used the word “technique” to mean an estranging device of art that lays bare the medium and makes us see the world anew,”(1). So technique cannot be understood as an instrument for divining the objective truth of a thing, each rendering process has its own errors and ‘out-takes’. The process of any techne is the reinterpretation of a predecessor (a source of inspiration, perhaps) insofar as it creates new meaning.

So often we think of technique in the context of reproduction; how do I produce what was in my head, manifesting that conception into some sort of physical space. We also think about what mode of reproduction will best represent the task we wish to take on. In this context technological errors can easily combine with the errors of thought and process...