I have a normal person for a friend, now as I am an architect, this is hard to fathom but it is true. I am friends with a normal person and this normal person has other normal friends and they all ask me to design normal looking buildings for them that look alot like gabled vaginas. All they want is gabled vaginas, and big boxes, and parking lots for their SUVs.
Now don't get me wrong normal people, I like you as a person and often I have to ask you guys to bum me 10 when I can't pay off my entire tab at the bar and if you can imagine making $10 an hour in NYC and funding an alcholism habit bumming money is, as you can imagine, pretty inevitable. Its just that I'm not interested in normal people things. This is a list of things I am interested in, in no particular order:
Construction details
Peter Zumthor
French Philosophy/Film
Electric cars
Organic triple non-fat, vanilla soy milk lattes with no whip
As you can see, normal people shit, like SUVs, are not on that list. Normal people shit falls somewhere between dis-urban post-suburbanistic quasi-field condition myopia and hell, who am I kidding normal people shit is on the bottom of my list.
What is normal people shit you ask? Its what you talk about all the time, I don't care how much money you saved at wal-mart buying $10 jeans made in a sweatshop. Its called Prada people, and its child labor free. I don't care which steroid injected mutant won your pathetic homoerotic sports event either, nor do I care about your son and how well he's doing in school because frankly I'm smarter than he is.
You've heard about the BAR exam right? Piece of cake, could pass it with my eyes closed, our exam is in 11 parts, one of which takes a whole day to do. What do these test concern? Life threatening shit like ADA clearance and accessability requirements that's what. If it weren't for us, your brain dead useless child wouldn't be able to enter the school building each day because the doors would be too narrow for his wide mcdonalds eating ass, nor would he even have a school to go to because we design those too. Sure, fuck you, have an engineer design the damn thing, just don't come running to us because your child has vitamin D deficiency because the asshole forgot to spec WINDOWS in the goddamn building.
Normal people, you confuse me. You work 40 hours a week at a job you hate to buy shit you don't need. I work 80 hours a week to make sure the places you live in are habitable and because I love what I do to the point I'm willing to be paid in horseshit to move mountains each day. By paying me like a total bitch, my boss also keeps me from getting into the mortgage/kids/wife/real life trap that would prevent me from providing this public service to you. This is all on your behalf mind you. You know how hard it was getting your drivers license? Try negotiating with the DOB. Thats right, I didn't think so.
About the sleep, fuck you, I'll sleep when I'm dead.
Understand though, you normal people are important to me. When I go to a barbecue with my friends I remeber what real food tastes like and what a conversation sounds like when everyone isn't bitching about autoCAD all the time. The only problem is, your talking about how you want me to make you a gabled vagina for a house. I don't do gabled vaginas, i do glass cocks. There's a difference. Then I look around and I find all my friends are stuck in their normal lives with their normal wives and their even more miserable than I am. Like they're stuck in a scene from American Beauty. They bitch to me about their wives and how boring they are and how their college girlfriends would actually, you know, do stuff for them. I don't have a wife, I have 3 different "fuck buddies" and I change girlfriends whenever I go out to a bar (read: weekly). So don't come to me complaining your wife is fat and boring, that's not my problem.
I am also sick of your lifestyle. Do you think I enjoy putting styrofoam brick on the sides of buildings? When I was in school, I designed space stations and robots. Now I get to put vinyl on the side of your house and frankly I feel cheated. I also don't like making parking lots bigger than the buildings that serve them. So you cant find parking at the after thanksgiving sale? Fuck you, its called carpooling asshole. Stop ruining my buildings with oceans of pavement. It doesn't matter how big the parking lot is, you'll still bitch when you cant find space on black wheneversday anyway. Why don't you drive a compact and stop blocking views of my buildings anyway. Did you know the Ford Focus is considered a family car in Europe? No? Do you even know where Europe is? Frankly you don't need a Chevy suburban to haul you and your two kids to Florida each Summer. That's steel I could be using to make another pretty glass cock, instead of a styrofoam shopping center. Do you even know what that shit does to you when you breath it in?
So, normal people, I bid you adieu, for I must raise early in the morn and it is late in the eve. I hope someday you will no longer be obsessed with bullshit historicist crap made out of styrofoam because it is cheaper and looks just as good. You'd have to be brain dead to think styrofoam looks as good as real brick and you'd have to be brain dead to think brick looks better than raw concrete. God I get so pissed talking about that styrofoam shit it isn't even funny, but anyway. Maybe someday we'll laugh at the days when you wanted me to spec you a country French home when you had neither been to France nor lived in the country. Until that day arrives, I will be with my architect buddies designing beautiful things that will never get built because you all are to stupid to realize our genius.
Normal people, you confuse me. You work 40 hours a week at a job you hate to buy shit you don't need. I work 80 hours a week to make sure the places you live in are habitable and because I love what I do to the point I'm willing to be paid in horseshit to move mountains each day.
How can they not love us? After all, they all fantasize about being us, right? How often have we heard "I wanted to be an architect, but I'm no good at math."?
"I don't care which steroid injected mutant won your pathetic homoerotic sports event either, nor do I care about your son and how well he's doing in school because frankly I'm smarter than he is."
some reinforcement for some of apurimac's comments:
Architects and clients have allowed themselves to be bamboozled by two industries, construction and real estate, that are largely driven by supply-side pressures and deliver what they like to deliver, not what any human being would ever dream of wanting. – “Innovation in Dallas”, Frances Duffy, 06/2002.
Modernism is tradition – while ‘traditionalism’ is hypocrisy. “It’s just so annoying that people want to build old-fashioned houses so they can live the dream of a life that never was.” – Gwen Briggs (subject) and Marc Kristal (author), March 2003.
Form follows proforma – MUUM79, 11 nov 06 (but prob no orig)
Let us be clear about this, the forms that people used in other civilizations or in other periods of our own country’s history were intimately part of the whole structure of their life. There is no method of mechanically reproducing these forms or bringing them back to life; it is a piece of rank materialism to attempt to duplicate some earlier form, because of its delight for the eye, without realizing how empty a form is without the life that once supported it. There is no such thing as a modern colonial house any more than there is such a thing as a modern Tudor house.
If one seeks to reproduce such a building in our own day, every mark on it will betray the fact that it is a fake, and the harder the architect works to conceal that fact, the more patent the fact will be…The great lesson of history – and this applies to all the arts – is that the past cannot be recaptured except in spirit. We cannot live another person’s life; we cannot, except in the spirit of a costume ball…Our task is not to imitate the past, but to understand it, so that we may face the opportunities of our own day and deal with them in an equally creative spirit. – Lewis Mumford, The South in Architecture, 1941.
Response to Mumford: …It is a scathing and still relevant (perhaps now more than ever) comment which cuts to the heart of a common misperception that we can replicate the past in buildings we build today and, in doing so, we are achieving something worthwhile, or even paying homage to the past…By spending time, money, and other resources trying to replicate the past, we are not paying homage, but rather we are betraying the people who worked so hard in those times to provide us with an architecture that spoke of those periods. These men and women, pioneers of their time, would look at us with dismay as we fail to reinvent, redesign, and create our architecture and housing forms based on today’s environmental, social, and cultural needs. – R Sethi, Dec 2007.
Nostalgia, an irrational yearning for the return to another time, dominates American architecture today. Preservation of the past continues in the mind, in books, in photographs and films, and in the conservation of past construction but simulating the past is a travesty of the present. This return to a romanticized time avoids the existential burden of time-its angst and its joy. - Juhani Pallasmaa
Nostalgia, an irrational yearning for the return to another time, dominates American architecture today. Preservation of the past continues in the mind, in books, in photographs and films, and in the conservation of past construction but simulating the past is a travesty of the present. This return to a romanticized time avoids the existential burden of time-its angst and its joy. - ain't this what i been saying? the responses here back up the utter contempt we have for normal people.
adapted from "North American Scum" LCD Soundsystem...
oh i don't know, i don't know, oh, where to begin
we are pretentious architects
and for those of you who still think we're from the 'burbs
we're not, no.
we build our glass cocks till we think we might die,
far from walmart and target,
where the buildings are old and you might have lots of electric cars.
aha, oh, oh.
i hate the feelin' when you're looking at me that way
cause we're pretentious architects
but if we cover it in dryvit, it'll make it ok
makes it go away.
oh I don't know, I don't know, oh, where to begin
when we're pretentious architects
but in the end we make the same mistakes all over again
come on pretentious architects
we are pretentious architectural scum
we're from harvard, columbia and yale.
and all the kids all the kids that want to make the scene
here on archinect
when our young kids get to read it in your El Croquis
we don't have those
so where's the love where's the love where's the love where's the love where's the love tonight?
but there's no love man there's no love and the kids are uptight
so build a glass cock til the cops come in and bust it up
let's go pretentious architects
oh you were planning it i didn't mean to interrupt
sorry
i did it once and my clients got pretty upset
freaked out in design development
but then i said the more i do it the better they get
let's rock pretentious architects
new york's the greatest if you get someone to pay the rent
wahoo pretentious architects
and it's the furthest you can live from the development un huh huh
some proud american suburbanites might disagree
driving around in their big SUV
but new york's the only place we're keepin them off the street
boo boo now we can't have glass cocks like in china where they go quite tall
shut down here at the suburban mall
or like dubai where they go twice as high, oh why?, un huh un huh
you see i love this place that i have grown to know
alright, archinect.
and yeah, I know you wouldn't touch us with a ten-foot pole
'cause we're pretentious architects
we are pretentious architectural scum
we are pretentious architects
we are pretentious architectural scum
we are pretentious architects
Bossman's right, it not about contempt, although this debate can easily devolve that way.
We have the implicit right to tell people how they should live because we know better. We're a specialized profession in a unique position between (to use the cliche) science and art, given an implicit mandate to make the built world, and we're highly trained to do that. We can always learn more from our clients and from 'the general public' (whoever the f*ck that is). But if they don't take our advice, that relationship is going to suffer, and so is the world ultimately. That sounds arrogant as hell, but there it is.
Imagine calling a doctor 'contemptuous' because she gave a patient advice that patient didn't want to hear. Imagine calling a painter 'contemptuous' because he prefers to work with some techniques better than others.
'Normal People' (again, whatever that means) come to us because they don't know what they want. We're the only people around with the knowledge of materials, methods, culture and history to be able to synthesize all those threads into a really big object that's going to be around a long time and affect the lives of thousands of people. If there's anyone out there more qualified than us to do that, then I want to meet 'em.
Last night as I was listening to the San Diego Union Tribune online radio to figure out whether my family and I need to be evacuated. They get a caller from New Jersey asking if the home prices would reduce because of the shit firestorm that has affected more than 2000 buildings and displaced more than 500k people.
how can anyone here say they know better about how people should live. did you learn that in architecture school staying up all night building blue foam models and pretending that you enjoy reading post structuralist writing? you guys kill me.
a person who pretends to have virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that he or she does not actually possess, esp. a person whose actions belie stated beliefs.
Not me! : subjected to intensive forced indoctrination resulting in the rejection of old beliefs and acceptance of new ones
I was just over reading Dan Savage, as I do daily, and realized this: while we architects may appear to view "the public" with some disdain, you know who really is bitterly contemptuous of "the public"?
Politicians. Every damn one of them. They see us as brainless sheep to use to further their own power-filled fantasies.
At least when we are telling people what is "good for them" we're doing it with a goal of furthering culture. Politicians (and TV executives, I'll add for fun) are only doing it to further their own selfish desires.
Architect's appreciation of the public
it seems that architects dont appreciate the general public's sensibilities that much...discuss
that's because they're all idiots...
buncha jackasses...
ROFLMAO!
Wow Meta, you seem to be making fun of both architects and society. Genius.
meta your letter does not support the deloosian idea of desire being productive.
*ahem*
I am sick of your shit.
I have a normal person for a friend, now as I am an architect, this is hard to fathom but it is true. I am friends with a normal person and this normal person has other normal friends and they all ask me to design normal looking buildings for them that look alot like gabled vaginas. All they want is gabled vaginas, and big boxes, and parking lots for their SUVs.
Now don't get me wrong normal people, I like you as a person and often I have to ask you guys to bum me 10 when I can't pay off my entire tab at the bar and if you can imagine making $10 an hour in NYC and funding an alcholism habit bumming money is, as you can imagine, pretty inevitable. Its just that I'm not interested in normal people things. This is a list of things I am interested in, in no particular order:
Construction details
Peter Zumthor
French Philosophy/Film
Electric cars
Organic triple non-fat, vanilla soy milk lattes with no whip
As you can see, normal people shit, like SUVs, are not on that list. Normal people shit falls somewhere between dis-urban post-suburbanistic quasi-field condition myopia and hell, who am I kidding normal people shit is on the bottom of my list.
What is normal people shit you ask? Its what you talk about all the time, I don't care how much money you saved at wal-mart buying $10 jeans made in a sweatshop. Its called Prada people, and its child labor free. I don't care which steroid injected mutant won your pathetic homoerotic sports event either, nor do I care about your son and how well he's doing in school because frankly I'm smarter than he is.
You've heard about the BAR exam right? Piece of cake, could pass it with my eyes closed, our exam is in 11 parts, one of which takes a whole day to do. What do these test concern? Life threatening shit like ADA clearance and accessability requirements that's what. If it weren't for us, your brain dead useless child wouldn't be able to enter the school building each day because the doors would be too narrow for his wide mcdonalds eating ass, nor would he even have a school to go to because we design those too. Sure, fuck you, have an engineer design the damn thing, just don't come running to us because your child has vitamin D deficiency because the asshole forgot to spec WINDOWS in the goddamn building.
Normal people, you confuse me. You work 40 hours a week at a job you hate to buy shit you don't need. I work 80 hours a week to make sure the places you live in are habitable and because I love what I do to the point I'm willing to be paid in horseshit to move mountains each day. By paying me like a total bitch, my boss also keeps me from getting into the mortgage/kids/wife/real life trap that would prevent me from providing this public service to you. This is all on your behalf mind you. You know how hard it was getting your drivers license? Try negotiating with the DOB. Thats right, I didn't think so.
About the sleep, fuck you, I'll sleep when I'm dead.
Understand though, you normal people are important to me. When I go to a barbecue with my friends I remeber what real food tastes like and what a conversation sounds like when everyone isn't bitching about autoCAD all the time. The only problem is, your talking about how you want me to make you a gabled vagina for a house. I don't do gabled vaginas, i do glass cocks. There's a difference. Then I look around and I find all my friends are stuck in their normal lives with their normal wives and their even more miserable than I am. Like they're stuck in a scene from American Beauty. They bitch to me about their wives and how boring they are and how their college girlfriends would actually, you know, do stuff for them. I don't have a wife, I have 3 different "fuck buddies" and I change girlfriends whenever I go out to a bar (read: weekly). So don't come to me complaining your wife is fat and boring, that's not my problem.
I am also sick of your lifestyle. Do you think I enjoy putting styrofoam brick on the sides of buildings? When I was in school, I designed space stations and robots. Now I get to put vinyl on the side of your house and frankly I feel cheated. I also don't like making parking lots bigger than the buildings that serve them. So you cant find parking at the after thanksgiving sale? Fuck you, its called carpooling asshole. Stop ruining my buildings with oceans of pavement. It doesn't matter how big the parking lot is, you'll still bitch when you cant find space on black wheneversday anyway. Why don't you drive a compact and stop blocking views of my buildings anyway. Did you know the Ford Focus is considered a family car in Europe? No? Do you even know where Europe is? Frankly you don't need a Chevy suburban to haul you and your two kids to Florida each Summer. That's steel I could be using to make another pretty glass cock, instead of a styrofoam shopping center. Do you even know what that shit does to you when you breath it in?
So, normal people, I bid you adieu, for I must raise early in the morn and it is late in the eve. I hope someday you will no longer be obsessed with bullshit historicist crap made out of styrofoam because it is cheaper and looks just as good. You'd have to be brain dead to think styrofoam looks as good as real brick and you'd have to be brain dead to think brick looks better than raw concrete. God I get so pissed talking about that styrofoam shit it isn't even funny, but anyway. Maybe someday we'll laugh at the days when you wanted me to spec you a country French home when you had neither been to France nor lived in the country. Until that day arrives, I will be with my architect buddies designing beautiful things that will never get built because you all are to stupid to realize our genius.
With Love,
An Architect
hmmm...
the former ms. holz.box preferred pyrex over glass for it's ability to retain heat.
How can they not love us? After all, they all fantasize about being us, right? How often have we heard "I wanted to be an architect, but I'm no good at math."?
Fabulous, Apu.
thanks lb!
you never see documentaries on the assholes who design the vinyl sided gabled vaginas do you?
Fucking brilliant, Apurimac!
"I don't care which steroid injected mutant won your pathetic homoerotic sports event either, nor do I care about your son and how well he's doing in school because frankly I'm smarter than he is."
that is easily the post of the year...
some reinforcement for some of apurimac's comments:
Architects and clients have allowed themselves to be bamboozled by two industries, construction and real estate, that are largely driven by supply-side pressures and deliver what they like to deliver, not what any human being would ever dream of wanting. – “Innovation in Dallas”, Frances Duffy, 06/2002.
Modernism is tradition – while ‘traditionalism’ is hypocrisy. “It’s just so annoying that people want to build old-fashioned houses so they can live the dream of a life that never was.” – Gwen Briggs (subject) and Marc Kristal (author), March 2003.
Form follows proforma – MUUM79, 11 nov 06 (but prob no orig)
Let us be clear about this, the forms that people used in other civilizations or in other periods of our own country’s history were intimately part of the whole structure of their life. There is no method of mechanically reproducing these forms or bringing them back to life; it is a piece of rank materialism to attempt to duplicate some earlier form, because of its delight for the eye, without realizing how empty a form is without the life that once supported it. There is no such thing as a modern colonial house any more than there is such a thing as a modern Tudor house.
If one seeks to reproduce such a building in our own day, every mark on it will betray the fact that it is a fake, and the harder the architect works to conceal that fact, the more patent the fact will be…The great lesson of history – and this applies to all the arts – is that the past cannot be recaptured except in spirit. We cannot live another person’s life; we cannot, except in the spirit of a costume ball…Our task is not to imitate the past, but to understand it, so that we may face the opportunities of our own day and deal with them in an equally creative spirit. – Lewis Mumford, The South in Architecture, 1941.
Response to Mumford: …It is a scathing and still relevant (perhaps now more than ever) comment which cuts to the heart of a common misperception that we can replicate the past in buildings we build today and, in doing so, we are achieving something worthwhile, or even paying homage to the past…By spending time, money, and other resources trying to replicate the past, we are not paying homage, but rather we are betraying the people who worked so hard in those times to provide us with an architecture that spoke of those periods. These men and women, pioneers of their time, would look at us with dismay as we fail to reinvent, redesign, and create our architecture and housing forms based on today’s environmental, social, and cultural needs. – R Sethi, Dec 2007.
Nostalgia, an irrational yearning for the return to another time, dominates American architecture today. Preservation of the past continues in the mind, in books, in photographs and films, and in the conservation of past construction but simulating the past is a travesty of the present. This return to a romanticized time avoids the existential burden of time-its angst and its joy. - Juhani Pallasmaa
Nostalgia, an irrational yearning for the return to another time, dominates American architecture today. Preservation of the past continues in the mind, in books, in photographs and films, and in the conservation of past construction but simulating the past is a travesty of the present. This return to a romanticized time avoids the existential burden of time-its angst and its joy. - ain't this what i been saying? the responses here back up the utter contempt we have for normal people.
adapted from "North American Scum" LCD Soundsystem...
oh i don't know, i don't know, oh, where to begin
we are pretentious architects
and for those of you who still think we're from the 'burbs
we're not, no.
we build our glass cocks till we think we might die,
far from walmart and target,
where the buildings are old and you might have lots of electric cars.
aha, oh, oh.
i hate the feelin' when you're looking at me that way
cause we're pretentious architects
but if we cover it in dryvit, it'll make it ok
makes it go away.
oh I don't know, I don't know, oh, where to begin
when we're pretentious architects
but in the end we make the same mistakes all over again
come on pretentious architects
we are pretentious architectural scum
we're from harvard, columbia and yale.
and all the kids all the kids that want to make the scene
here on archinect
when our young kids get to read it in your El Croquis
we don't have those
so where's the love where's the love where's the love where's the love where's the love tonight?
but there's no love man there's no love and the kids are uptight
so build a glass cock til the cops come in and bust it up
let's go pretentious architects
oh you were planning it i didn't mean to interrupt
sorry
i did it once and my clients got pretty upset
freaked out in design development
but then i said the more i do it the better they get
let's rock pretentious architects
new york's the greatest if you get someone to pay the rent
wahoo pretentious architects
and it's the furthest you can live from the development un huh huh
some proud american suburbanites might disagree
driving around in their big SUV
but new york's the only place we're keepin them off the street
boo boo now we can't have glass cocks like in china where they go quite tall
shut down here at the suburban mall
or like dubai where they go twice as high, oh why?, un huh un huh
you see i love this place that i have grown to know
alright, archinect.
and yeah, I know you wouldn't touch us with a ten-foot pole
'cause we're pretentious architects
we are pretentious architectural scum
we are pretentious architects
we are pretentious architectural scum
we are pretentious architects
what is with you guys? are you that bad at convincing people that your architecture is good?
my god, no wonder clients don't like working with our kind, much less paying a fair rate for our work.
Bossman's right, it not about contempt, although this debate can easily devolve that way.
We have the implicit right to tell people how they should live because we know better. We're a specialized profession in a unique position between (to use the cliche) science and art, given an implicit mandate to make the built world, and we're highly trained to do that. We can always learn more from our clients and from 'the general public' (whoever the f*ck that is). But if they don't take our advice, that relationship is going to suffer, and so is the world ultimately. That sounds arrogant as hell, but there it is.
Imagine calling a doctor 'contemptuous' because she gave a patient advice that patient didn't want to hear. Imagine calling a painter 'contemptuous' because he prefers to work with some techniques better than others.
'Normal People' (again, whatever that means) come to us because they don't know what they want. We're the only people around with the knowledge of materials, methods, culture and history to be able to synthesize all those threads into a really big object that's going to be around a long time and affect the lives of thousands of people. If there's anyone out there more qualified than us to do that, then I want to meet 'em.
by the way folks i posted that as a joke. But i really really do hate EIFS and mega parking-lots with a passion.
Hell, I drink my coffee black and i like to watch football.
oh, and i hate faux historicist bullshit too, but hey.
nooooo, you were serious apurimac. c'mon, don't be a douchebag.
HAHA, lol, no dude I'm actually alot more down to earth than the character i used to post that. But i really do hate historicist plastic bullshit.
actually, yes it is!
meta, you high?
If so, please take your second puff already and pass.
Last night as I was listening to the San Diego Union Tribune online radio to figure out whether my family and I need to be evacuated. They get a caller from New Jersey asking if the home prices would reduce because of the shit firestorm that has affected more than 2000 buildings and displaced more than 500k people.
It's America ain't it?
how can anyone here say they know better about how people should live. did you learn that in architecture school staying up all night building blue foam models and pretending that you enjoy reading post structuralist writing? you guys kill me.
Yeah, but vado, these poor people should know better than to put EIFS on their homes!
why should they know better?
Because it a garbage product and their house will probably leak.
Apu
wanna buy my Zumthor works?
personally i like the way vaginas look
I like vaginas too, but not with gables on them.
a person who pretends to have virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that he or she does not actually possess, esp. a person whose actions belie stated beliefs.
Not me! : subjected to intensive forced indoctrination resulting in the rejection of old beliefs and acceptance of new ones
i think thazz called a flitch beam you drunk.
<over-generalized rant>
I was just over reading Dan Savage, as I do daily, and realized this: while we architects may appear to view "the public" with some disdain, you know who really is bitterly contemptuous of "the public"?
Politicians. Every damn one of them. They see us as brainless sheep to use to further their own power-filled fantasies.
At least when we are telling people what is "good for them" we're doing it with a goal of furthering culture. Politicians (and TV executives, I'll add for fun) are only doing it to further their own selfish desires.
</over-generalized rant>
yeah, except they are so much better at selling bullshit than we are.
but liberty, i am not the public.
Vado, are you a man for the people and not of them?
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