An artificial reef in the Red Sea, which features in the Landscape Futures section.
Originally published in Blueprint, 19 August 2009.
Los Angeles-based Geoff Manaugh has been described by fellow futurist writer Bruce Sterling as ‘the world’s greatest practitioner of “architecture fiction”’. His online ideas factory, BLDGBLOG, attracts descriptors like ‘promiscuous’ and ‘omnivorous’. His new, beautifully designed book-of-the-blog delivers more of the same. It features cartoons of his trademark ‘urban speculation’, maybe the only medium flexible enough to capture the onslaught.
There are four components treating eclectic aspects of the built environment: subterranean worlds, music/sound/noise, ‘landscape futures’, even climate (the ’space between buildings’). The section on ‘noise’ works best, considering something many architects seem to disregard:”: the acoustic footprint of urban areas and how this might be ‘tuned’ to satisfactory ‘user’ experiences. Discussing the psychological effects of the built environment, Manaugh’s self-acknowledged debt to JG Ballard becomes most apparent. That’s the value of Manaugh’s work. At heart he’s an outsider, an enthusiast armed with a surplus of imagination and creative latitude, voicing ideas a professional insider with all the right references might miss, or wilfully ignore.
The book contains a lot of new material, and some that has been reworked from online. If you know the blog, you’ll know the style: breathless; italicised for emphasis, and exhorting ‘you’ to consider video games and spam email as architecture as much as actual buildings. Such writing might work best in the cross-linkage of the online matrix, although it doesn’t suffer on the page. Among the thoughtful features and interviews, including urban theorist Mike Davis and architect Lebbeus Woods, are numerous sidebars, allowing the reading experience to fold in on it self.
Take Manaugh’s discussion of ‘a medieval treatise on the use of mirrors’. He contemplates how a man with no soul could walk into the infinite non-space generated when two mirrors reflect each other, but then we’re suddenly aboard the International Space Station and he’s conjured up an astronaut, ‘crazed with loneliness’, who sets up two mirrors before wandering inside them, never to return, while back on Earth children sing hymns in remembrance. The hall-of-mirrors metaphor is apt: follow Manaugh, and you never know where you’ll end up – a long way from home, certainly. He should write a novel.
There’ll be protests: ‘that’s not architecture’. But surely all architecture is fantasy on the drawing board until it meets the harsh reality of governance, big business and the real world. And, as Manaugh points out, ‘If architectural critics can get people to realize the everyday spatial world of earthquake safety plans and prison-break films is worthy of architectural analysis, and that architecture is everywhere and everything, then perhaps we’ll learn to stop taking those spaces for granted’. Besides, his burgeoning popularity might help to finally break Ballard in the States. But why no index? It’s annoying: Manaugh chews through so many topics, but good luck finding them in a hurry.
The BLDG Blog book by Geoff Manaugh Chronicle Books, £16.99