We see architecture embarking on a worthy quest for anonymity, one that perhaps counter-intuitively, will lead the discipline back to envisioning the city as a “collective work of art”. The anonymity we imagine here is predicated upon regular rhythms, a stubborn insistence on repetitive and simple forms, and on the serene boredom produced by relentlessly recurring dimensions. Today for the most part, architectural form is put to the sorry task of buttressing a world epidemic of egocentric individualism. We don’t know why that is. Maybe it is just the logical form taken by the advanced stages of the social and economic system we live under. To escape from the architectural imagination as the instrument of selfish reasoning, we must engage with an alternative form of architectural “beauty”.
If “interesting” form is associated with individualism and a snobbish understanding of “quality”, then the tedious and the apparently uninteresting present themselves as a viable alternative to salvage architecture as a cultural form. By engaging with this strange form that is a kind of “negative dialectic” or an expression of the expressionless, perhaps “humanity” can still reflect on its prospects without naiveté or hypocrisy.
Along these lines we see Walking in Someone Else’s Dream as the embodiment of the generous expressions of a hypothesized collective unconscious, one that is unaware of overlapping ownerships and therefore anonymous in substance. In a sense, our contribution dreams of this shared anonymity in the simplicity of the structure and in the indistinct ethos of the architectural works represented.
Three pairs of five-meter tall walls separated approximately 5.5 meters from each other define a hexagonal space. From each of the walls, a slide presentation of architectural works is projected onto its opposite wall within the space. Aiming straight at each other across the interior, the projectors display images of nine 30cmx60cm frames or a 3x3 grid.
The nine frames visible on any of the walls at any given point make up one larger image as though it were the view of a landscape perceived from a nine-pane window or the embodiment of a gridded image, where a basic Cartesian logic was imposed on the given as the only hope for the layers of diversity to approach some kind of consensus.
A bench is constructed against the hexagonal perimeter, and a Catalogue raisonné presented somewhere in the room surveys the prospects of self-conscious anonymity in architecture. All physical construction is wood studs, plywood walls and projected light.
