Americans love their history, and they certainly love their historical architecture. Architecture has always operated in between reality and fiction; the original and the copy, a precedent and an antecedent. history and future. Architect, and architectural representation, would seem to tend towards representations of truth, representations of the time in which they were produced. Architects are engrossed by notions of truth; truth in material, truth in form, etc. But what happens when truth is relative? What if the meanings of symbols, and their associations with time and history, do not matter - in fact, it is not allowed to matter? What happens when the our digital mechanisms fold multiple readings of history into one, without a beginning or end?
Architecture and urbanism today desires to recycle, reuse and regurgitate a canon of precedent and standard; a canon or a code, (or perhaps a catalogue) is often critically suspect, and are often simply facsimiles divorced from meaning. But why? Why do Americans in particular obsess over particular styles, fetishized aesthetics or mass produced material approximations? These tend to be small-scale architectural components and details (column covers, statuettes, faux marble, screen printed wood textures, etc.) but also encompass the borrowing of whole projects and building forms, and are usually tied to some specific moment in history: Imperial Roman, Hellenistic Greece, Hindu, Judeo-Christian, Colonial American. Architecture has a long legacy of this, where resonances of projects fluidly move through time, constantly reinterpreting itself; this is essentially the critical intent of Postmodern architecture, but done ironically. One might even correlate the often-taught axiom, “Architects don’t design buildings, we design things that look like buildings.” Even further, one could say Architects design things that look like buildings, which look like other buildings.”
While Postmodern architecture is critically ironic in its resurrection of historic precedent, it reaches a point today where the mechanisms of design simply replicate what we see as historical, without critical intervention; it is Postmodernism, but taken as fact. Design operates within a new modality where architectural production forfeits itself to algorithmic thinking - the Internet, its conduit. The thesis studies the shapes, elements and materials that constitute such a catalogue, but moreover, studies who or what puts it together, and makes the claim that rather than irony, it is utilized to claim suzerainty over history, and push aesthetics in an ideological direction. Digital tools are designed to manipulate history. It is the raw material for a new narrative; the aesthetics of the past guising a sinister present. The dangers of false narratives play out when people believe successful design is one that merely manipulates the historical, the precursor, or the standard.
The thesis’ results mis-perform current production paradigms in an acritical way, cf. “to do something so wrong it's good”2. The intention is not necessarily to advocate the results as good or bad; rather, it is contemporary aesthetics "reductio ad absurdum"; its sincerity, therefore, elusive. Is this the future beyond, or is there something else, perhaps something non-referential.